The Season of Migration (21 page)

Then I understood: She wanted images. She wanted visions to replace the ones in her head, visions of joy rather than of suffering, visions of a wider world than the one that confronted her here. My heart broke open for her then.

That night, a ritual began that continued in the evenings for a few weeks. I started slowly and haltingly; that first night I showed her the prints on my walls, and one of them was
The Road to Rijswijk
, by Weissenbruch, which you gave to me, and so I told her about the day that we had walked along that canal in The Hague and drank milk at the old mill. “The sails,” I said to her, realizing only as I spoke how difficult it was to describe them to someone who had never seen anything like them, “well, they were huge, probably each one the size of one of your smaller slag mountains, and they were slowly revolving, turning around and around one another in a beautiful slow white dance.” She sat cross-legged in front of me, holding the print in her hands, her eyes wide and attentive, as if she were a child and I were reading her a storybook full of magical details. I imagined shrinking down that print, Theo, so I could place it on her tongue, so she could swallow the image like the sacrament that it was.

Nearly every night after that, she arrived at my door, terribly shy at first, as of course I was, too, for what was it exactly that we were doing there together? But we always soon forgot ourselves. I told Angeline about Zundert, about you and me in our bed in the room where the flag flew from the window, about the garden in the back with the magpie nest, all greens and purples and blues, about the fields and heath and rivers that we explored as boys. I told her about London, about the parks and ginger beer and the women with parasols of a thousand colors and hundreds of people on horseback; I told her about Amsterdam and its canals, all the little side paths that I walked along, linden trees, interwoven and Gothic. I told her about Paris, the houseboats parked on the quays, the books and prints for sale along the riverbanks, and how you could walk and walk and walk forever and never reach the end. I told her about walking along the ocean in England, watching the fisherman trawling with their nets, the waves washing up beautiful shells and smooth rocks that I then tossed back, the heads of seals poking up from the depths, the way that the sound of the surf calmed my heart. So many images, everything I had ever seen was transformed into beauty in that hut with Angeline. She was hungry for color, Theo; she was hungry to live. She was hungry for detail, for reality, for this world, not for any other.

“If only one can remember what one has seen,” I said one night, “one is never without food for thought or truly lonely, never alone.” I said this, and then I thought perhaps it was wrong, for Angeline had seen almost nothing outside her tiny village. “I'm sorry,” I said, “that was insensitive, wasn't it.”

She looked surprised, her eyebrows raised, and then she smiled. “Was it?” she asked.

“You asked me to share with you things I have seen, but not to brag, and not to proclaim that I am a happier person because I have seen these things. I am sorry; I get carried away.”

She was amused, looking at me almost as if I were a child. It was a look I often saw on her face when I knew I was becoming too animated in my description of a particular place or thing—a look of patience, of bemusement. “Thank you for your sensitivity,” she said, “but really there's no need for it. I feel that way about what few beautiful things I have seen in my life, too, and I am not sorry you said it.”

I nodded. “Good,” I said. “Well then, I don't take it back.”

She laughed. “Monsieur Vincent,” she said, shaking her head, “there is so much more to you than the people here know.” She said it not with judgment or even with wonder; it was just a simple statement, as if she had looked out the window and said it had begun to rain.

Yes, Theo, I was confused about my behavior. Never before had a woman been so interested in me, so attentive and quizzical, so present, and Angeline was not just any woman, but a wounded and sensitive young beauty. Angeline had a sweet and thoughtful soul, and questioned everything she encountered, so that whenever we stumbled upon the subject of theology, she probed me with well-articulated queries that I could not always answer. “But why?” she often asked. “But why?” And
why
, I soon learned, is not a word easily answered by Scripture.

I did not tell her of my failures; instead of telling her that I had dropped out of my theological studies, I let her think that the study I had done in Amsterdam was what led me to the Borinage. The change from art dealer to preacher was a natural one, I told her, a choice I had made because my soul was not fulfilled by the selling of prints to the public. I did not tell her of my dismissal from Goupil's, nor of my brief stint at the school in Ramsgate or my job in that wretched bookshop in Dordrecht.

I was aware of a certain molding of my story so that it sounded crafted and planned, a series of forward steps along a road rather than a series of stumbles. My conscience pulled at me as I watched her accept my tale without question; why wouldn't she believe me? But of course what I was telling her were terribly close to lies. Yes, I wondered whether I was falling in love with her. If so, what could happen then? I thought of Father shaking his head, and I wondered what you would say; if this were true, if I loved her, I would lose my appointment for sure. But there were times when I looked at her in the dim light and knew I did not care. After she left, ducking out of the hut with a shy bow, I would punish myself, pacing back and forth across my dusty floor and castigating myself, furiously shaking my head to shake free the part of myself that needed her to see me as other than I was. It was confusing, to be so utterly yourself with someone—I shared more of myself with her than I had ever shared with anyone else, except you—and at the same time to feel you were hiding who you really were. Some nights, I felt no torture about this; other nights, I made myself go out and lie down in the snow until I nearly froze. Yes, I thought of writing you, but I did not know what to say.

You will no doubt be thinking of Eugénie Loyer, remembering how tortured that whole affair was. I thought of her, too, very frequently in those weeks with Angeline, worried that I was making a similar mistake, thinking that Angeline might have any interest in me when in fact she had none. I knew that if you were there, you would remind me of Eugénie, remind me of those nights in London after she told me she was engaged, and to the man who had slept in my room before me; I had to sleep in that bed for a few ugly weeks before I could leave to come home, imagining his body in those sheets next to mine; how could I forget it? It was enough, remembering that time, to encourage me not to get too close to Angeline.

Charles Dubois slowly recovered and began going out again, walking some distance just for exercise; his hands were still weak and it would be some time before he could use them for his work, but he was out of danger. There was an outbreak of typhoid and malignant fever, which gave the villagers nightmares and made them delirious. My days were filled with visits to the sick—I gave them my money and my clothes, all but the one set that I wore on my back. I moved from bed to bed, attempting to comfort and bring warmth, but I was growing weaker; I was not eating much and my nights were filled with vivid and terrible dreams. I was sick, too, but with something other than what ailed the villagers. One day, one of the miner women, whose husband and three children lay feverish in two beds pushed together in the back of her hut, placed her hand on my shoulder and turned her eyes on me with pity. She, Theo, she pitied me! “You don't look well, Monsieur Vincent,” she said. “Perhaps you ought to go home and rest.” She offered me a coffee and a crust of bread, neither of which she had to spare. I nearly fell to my knees right there in her hut; I wanted to crawl under those beds and die there.

My evenings with Angeline were what I gave to myself. I allowed myself them as if they were nourishment, as if she were food. Often, I sketched while I was with her, for there were so many images from the day that I wanted to capture. A few nights, I tried to draw her, sitting cross-legged before the hearth; the drawings were never right—in one she looked anonymous, as if she could be any woman at all; in another she was leaning back on her hands and so her front looked like an animal, as if it were unconnected to her arms. None of them captured her. I had to ask her permission, with some humiliation, to try again.

*   *   *

I was still doing the evangelical work as best I could, despite my own growing fever, brought on by overwork and lack of food and the cold in my hut. The outbreak of sickness in the village had put an end to our Bible meetings, and I was presiding over far too many funerals. I stopped giving sermons, too, for I felt my time was better spent with the ill miners and their families.

The miners were still mostly kind to me, despite the increasing frequency of strange looks cast my way and the children who hid behind their mothers' skirts when I came near. I was still trying to hold our school lessons, though fewer children were attending; no one told me why, but I suspect it was the parents who kept them away. One day, I arrived at the salon and found only Alard there, sitting alone on one of the chairs and looking out the window. “I think it is only me today,” he said sheepishly when I stepped into the room.

He never asked me why I had moved out of his parents' house, though I could tell he didn't understand. He often looked at me with a puzzled expression, as if he was trying to make out just who I was. I didn't mind; he was trying to understand me, which is more than most people have tried to do. That day in the salon, I didn't read to him from the Bible, but instead began to read him Dickens's
Hard Times
from the beginning—I had just finished it, and was pleased to share it with him. I have spoken to you about Dickens before, I think, and so perhaps you know how I feel about him—he is one of the clearest writers there are. Alard, while he listened, was enwrapped in the story, and I loved to see him so.

I thought of all those nights with Gladwell in Paris, up late reading the Bible to each other. How lucky he is, Alard, that he will never have to go down inside that growling beast, the mine.

There was a miner who was notorious in the village for being an unbeliever; his name was Louis Desmet and he was a blasphemer, one of these sorts of men that spoke in torrents against God as a way to prove that He did not exist; why, his argument went, if He was so powerful, didn't He strike him down when he disobeyed His commandments? He was a terrible drunk, a burly, reckless man, who had once been married but whose wife had run away from him and from the Borinage in the middle of the night. He had a mustache that curled down off of his lip and just touched the base of his chin; he must have worked hard to keep the rest of his jaw clean. I avoided contact with him for a long time, not only because of the looks he gave me when I was near him, the way he spat on the ground close to my feet and muttered pointed words, but because I had no need to occupy myself with people who had no interest in me when there were plenty of other villagers who were welcoming. But recently I had heard he was sick, and I knew the time had come for us to encounter each other. I had visited every other sick person in the village; why should he be an exception?

He must have been tipped off that I was coming, for as soon as I approached the doorway to his house, I was greeted by a volley of abuse, he didn't want me in his house spreading God, he hadn't invited me, no rosary chewer was welcome in his house. His words were mixed with coughing and spitting and accompanying groans. This man was no one to fear in his present condition.

“Monsieur Desmet,” I said, ducking into the darkness, “I assure you that I am no ‘rosary chewer.' I don't even own a rosary, and never have.”

There was something about the force of his disbelief that gave me confidence. I don't know exactly what his experiences had been before this with religion, but clearly they had undone him, and it took some time before he would even lie still in my presence. His infirmity helped, unfortunate as it was, for if he had had his full strength, I'm sure he never would have allowed me in his house in the first place.

I sat on a wooden chair near to his bed and let him exhaust himself. A few candles were burning; his hut was tiny, just the one room with the bed and a wooden chair, and along the wall a sink, a basin for bathing, and a small stove. “Throw all you want at me, Monsieur Desmet,” I told him; “I will still be here. I'm not here for any reason except to be with you, to listen and talk with you, that's all.”

For hours, he abused me, he abused the Church, and he abused himself. He hated the world, he hated himself, he hated the bed he lay on, and he hated me. He rolled and writhed and spat into the bucket next to his bed with furious force. I sat next to him and said nothing. His abuse was infectious; I could sense its poison entering me. The dark of the hut was thick with it, it was as potent as the smell of liquor that bled out through his skin. The hatred swirled and swam through the air; the longer I sat there, the more sure I was that I could see it, the tail of it dancing and taunting me, approaching my mouth, my nostrils, my eyes, entering my body through any available way.

This was it, I told myself, this was my test; here it was. My own hatred was easily reached. I saw it there, in Desmet's hut: my own anger, my own disbelief. We were in the dark together, he and I, with all of our demons and all of our doubt, all of our misdeeds, all of our regrets and shame and fury.

In a moment of quiet, Desmet turned on his side, away from me. I heard my own voice whisper, “Fire proves gold, and temptation proves the righteous man.” It was a quote from Thomas à Kempis's
The Imitation of Christ
, that book you know I love, and I heard it hiss out into the air as if it were coming from someone other than me.