The Penalty of Exile demonstrates that although Edith de Born had a reputation for writing books that, in Peter Ackroyd’s words, “one can recommend to one’s grandmother,” she didn’t always stick to grandmotherly topics. Within the first 30 pages of the book, we find that its focus is a 14-year-old child prostitute whose mother — also a prostitute — has been stabbed to death. In an interview she gave about a year after publishing The Penalty of Exile, de Born expressed tremendous admiration for Nabokov’s Lolita, calling it one of the finest novels of the century and also characterising it as a love story. Knowing this, I found it hard not to read de Born’s novel as her own attempt to deal with the taboo subject of pedophilia.
Unfortunately, her sensibilities led her to take an indirect approach, telling the story of young Helga Vankammen primarily as seen by the two adults who become personally involved in her case after her mother’s murder. The first is Edgar Kermans, a wealthy Belgian businessman who encounters Helga on the streets around the Gare du Midi in Brussels. Helga is crouched on the sidewalk, gently caring for a ragged mutt of a dog. Struck by Helga’s beauty, despite her tattered clothes and dirty face, Kermans ends up buying the dog and getting some food for the girl.
He leaves her his business card, which is how he’s then contacted by the police after Helga’s mother is murdered. Kermans’ motivations are never quite clear. They seem to be part Good Samaritan, part infatuation, and part a belief that money can solve all problems. De Born sums up an entire slice of bourgeois society in her characterization of Kermans and his kind: “The distinctive trait they possessed in common was the firm belief that the only sure and efficient method of protection for themselves and their families against all potential risks and dangers was the acquisition and preservation of wealth.” (For more, viz. Capital by Thomas Piketty).
The other is Wilhelmina van Hemmen, a Dutch sociologist from a noble family, who takes Helga to live at her kasteel in the Netherlands and undertakes her rehabilitation. An erect, elegant, and iron-willed woman, Madame van Hemmen provides a safe and sheltered environment in which she begins to teach Helga about manners, culture, and trust. A bit like de Born herself, her attempts to work with Helga are awkward and unfamiliar. But de Born is at least capable of recognizing the limitations inherent in this kind of situation. Helga says to Wilhelmina at one point,
“You don’t really know whatmy life was. There’s no chance at all of my ever being happy like you say — through love.”
The last word was pronounced with an effort.
“You’re wrong, dear. I do know what your life was like and I know, and you do, that now it lies behind you. It is definitely past and over.”
Helga shook her head.
“You’ve never been in the middle of it. You’ve only seen it from above.”
Wilhelmina was at a loss to reply. It was a shaming truth that she had seen only from “above” the poverty, stupidity, vice and crime, protected as she was by money and her name; she was totally unaware of her innocence and goodness, an even greater protection than her position.
De Born’s story of Helga’s rescue and redemption is never fully convincing. Like Kermans and Madame van Hemmen, she recognizes the pain and violence that lies at the core of Helga’s experience but is at a loss for how to deal with it except through politeness and a diffident kind of empathy. The ingenue Helga grows up into a stunning beauty who becomes a top model in Paris, but she never sees that success as anything more than a matter of economics: “Once I was treated as a thing, and I’m still a thing, though a different kind put to a different use. Now I am a point of intersection for all sorts of commercial interests: textiles, dress-making, cosmetics, jewelry. I often represent a huge fortune; I never represent myself.”
To give de Born and Helga’s rescuers credit, kindness, comfort, and empathy can go a long way as substitutes for understanding. If The Penalty of Exile never descends into the belly of its beast, de Born once again proves a keen observer, particularly of the better sort of European — even if she does allow herself a very Belgian dig at the Netherlands, whose “insipid, badly-cooked food bore little resemblance to the cuisine on the other side of the border.”