fbpx

Belgium

Silhouettes crépusculaires (Twilight Silhouettes), by Carola Ernst (1921)

Cover of Silhouettes crepuscluaires by Carola Ernst

I stumbled across a brief item about this book some months ago that so intrigued me that I tracked down and read it, despite the fact that it’s in French and my reading ability in French is passable at best. Silhouettes crépusculaires is a memoir of a remarkable journey that Carola Ernst undertook in the fall of 1914. Working as a volunteer in a Belgian hospital in Charleroi whose wards were filled with wounded French, Belgian, and English soldiers, she came to know André Sinclair, a French artillery captain blinded in combat. She was able to convince the city’s German garrison commander that Sinclair’s condition effectively made him a noncombatant and therefore that he ought to be exempt from being treated as a prisoner of war. Even more astonishing, she got him to agree to issue an order directing other German units to allow Ernst and Sinclair to make their way back to France so that he could rejoin his family.

The journey recounted in Silhouettes crépusculaires took place at an exceptional moment, as the two sides were just beginning to dig themselves — literally as well as psychologically — into the 500-mile line of trenches that came to be the Western Front for the next four years. Having raced through Belgium, pushing the Allies nearly to the gates of Paris, the German Army was still organizing itself to serve as an occupying power. Policies and procedures were still being put in place, and Ernst benefited from the fact that no one had yet declared that what she was proposing was prohibited.

Within a few months, perhaps weeks, the restrictions would be set in place to make movement of just about any sort by Belgian civilians, let alone enemy soldiers, fit or not, just about impossible. At several points along their way, in fact, the German officer in charge of the garrison controlling a town they had to pass through calls a halt to their travel out of sheer dismay that there wasn’t a rule for or against what they were doing. To avoid extending their authority too far into unknown territory, however, each commander only goes so far as to sign an order allowing them to go on to the next garrison down the road. Even without official restrictions, however, their journey wasn’t easy. There were almost no automobiles that hadn’t been confiscated for military use, let alone fuel. Several legs of their route through Belgium involve riding for hours in the back of a horse-drawn wagon.

Once they arrived in Germany, the situation changed dramatically. Although Germany was by then effectively under military government, the attitudes of the military authorities responsible hadn’t had time to set in their prejudices. As Ernst, who was fluent in German, and Sinclair, who spoke none, made their way from Aachen to Cologne and then down along the Rhine to the border with Switzerland, the German officers they encountered were mostly amused by the novelty of the pair’s venture and treated Sinclair with full military courtesies.

And they were still willing to look the other way rather than attempt to seek direction on how to deal with a situation no one had yet anticipated [the translations are mine]:

“I am only saying that a French officer in Germany now is a prisoner of war, and that there is no exception to the rule.”
“Here is one though.”
“Get to the point: what do you want?”
“That you allow us to leave Cologne tomorrow, without going through the police.”
“I allow nothing at all, nothing at all. Allow! But, see! … Is he in uniform, your Frenchman?”
“No, in civilian clothes. There were German officers who advised us to cover the uniform so as not to not attract attention.”
“Has your case been submitted to the Kommandantur in Aachen?”
“Yes; and here is a note addressed to the Commandant of Fribourg, to facilitate our proceedings at the Swiss frontier. If you want to see it?”
“It’s useless.”
“So you give me your permission?”
“Well! … Let’s say I haven’t seen you. Otherwise, I should arrest you.”
A pause.
“No, it’s good,” he declared gruffly. “We shall say that I am unaware of your presence here. Now, take advantage of it!”

They make their way from Cologne to a German town across the Rhine from Basel in the course of a single day. There, a garrison sergeant sets them up in a hotel room while he arranges for a car to take them into Switzerland. The hotel’s chef exclaims in dismay when he encounters Sinclair: “‘Good Lord!’ he shouted, raising his arms excitedly. ‘What happened! You are not going to tell me that it was the war that did this!’ and he pointed to the blindfold.” The reality of the war’s cost in dead and wounded had not set in.

Their passage through Switzerland goes even more quickly, despite the delay from the desire of the Swiss Army regiment in Basel to take in the spectacle of an actual casualty of the war they would take no part in.

“Captain,” said one of the officers who had received us on arrival, as he entered, “our colonel will be happy to greet you; he’s downstairs, by the car; when you allow it, I will lead you to him.”
“Whenever you want, sir.”
There was a coming and going of uniforms and a clanking of weapons: our departure set everyone in motion. On both sides of the staircase, the people had massed. Everyone was trying to see; they jostled each other, stretched their necks to see us.

Within another day, Ernst and Sinclair have made their way to Normandy, where Sinclair is reunited with his family.

Then the most difficult part of the journey begins. As a Belgian with parents in Brussels, Ernst does not want to linger in France. Retracing her steps, however, is not an option: she has no letters of passage, no reason why any German authority would allow her to even set foot across the border again. She is forced to take a circuitous route, from France to England and then, via the Netherlands, back to Belgium. Now there is no longer novelty or the bewilderment of bureaucrats to provide comic relief. She is merely a civilian attempting to do something for which almost all enabling mechanisms have been dismantled. Over the course of several weeks, she manages to get back to the hospital in Charleroi, but it is a journey marked by frequent unexpected stops and endless hours of waiting for transportation whose existence is often only speculative.

If there is one predominant mood to Silhouettes crépusculaires, it is one that has become all too rare in today’s world: courtesy. Ernst wrote the book soon after her return to Belgium in 1915, but she chose not to publish it until 1921, when, as she writes in her introduction, it had become a “sketch of an autumn twilight, of an end of civilization”: “It evokes the smile of the isolated individual, of the simply good man who holds out his hand to the passing stranger, without ostentation, without pay.” Ernst offers to take Captain Sinclair back to his family as a simple act of one human helping another. No matter how pleasantly or unpleasantly disconcerted are the various officials of different nations she encountered, Ernst was treated with respect and deferment. It was a mood that would not survive the war.

Silhouettes crépusculaires, by Carola Ernst
Brussels: Maurice Lamertin, 1921

The Penalty of Exile, by Edith de Born (1964)

Cover of The Penalty of Exile by Edith de Born

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.”

The Penalty of Exile, by Edith de Born
London: Chapman & Hall, Ltd., 1964

State of Possession, by Edith de Born (1963)

Cover of first UK edition of State of Possession

State of Possession represents Edith de Born at mid-career. Her first novel, Gaëtan, was published in 1950; her last (of 18), The Negligent Daughter, in 1978. And yet, having read all three books, I have to say that de Born seems to have reached a high level of maturity with her very first book and maintained it with remarkable consistency throughout. One of her strongest advocates, the novelist and critic Francis King, once called Edith de Born “a literary sport.” But if she is a sport, it would be more appropriate to compare her with Roger Federer or Cal Ripken: she never played to the point of burn-out, always held something back for the next contest. If you’re looking for flash and high drama, keep looking: you won’t find them here.

The story in State of Possession is really the least important aspect of the book. Elisabeth Vandernoot, a Flemish nurse, is contacted by a lawyer. Another Belgian woman, now married to an Englishman and living in London, believes that Lionel, Elisabeth’s son, is actually the child she lost in the chaos of the evacuation from the German invasion of May 1940. Elisabeth is compelled to prove that she did, in fact, give birth to Lionel.

One might think this is a simple matter of producing a birth certificate. But birth certificates are comparatively recent innovations. In many countries and for many years, there were no birth certificates; instead, the parents reported the birth to local town hall or mairie, where it was recorded in a register, often days later. That’s not really the issue in this case, however. Here, neither party can produce definitive evidence — and in Elisabeth’s case, it’s for reasons that are best left to be discovered by reading the book.

A single mother and never married, Elisabeth works as a masseuse. She prefers to call herself an aesthetician because of the seamy connotations of the word masseuse. De Born illustrates the problems Elisabeth faced when she first set up practice:

One man had strutted in and looked her up and down, his face clearly proclaiming that she was not to his taste. “Are you the only woman working here?” he had inquired. “Yes, Monsieur.” For a moment he had hesitated; then, with a shrug, pushing back the hat he had not removed, “O.K. A massage,” unbuttoning his greatcoat. As he began to fumble with more buttons, she had quickly asked, “Have you a doctor’s recommendation” “A what — ?”

Now she attends patiently exclusively in their homes. They are all several cuts above her own station: a retired ambassador; a Vicomtesse. They respect her professionalism and discretion — but they also see her as a non-entity, “describing their ailments at the greatest possible length as though the fact of lying naked before her compelled them to go further and turn themselves inside out.” On the other hand seeing them intimately, in their lavish houses and apartments, she in turn is provided with “a glimpse of worlds beyond her reach, with the result that she felt suspended in mid-air, with no solid ground left under her feet.”

Elisabeth has aspirations for her son Lionel. Having lost its colony, Belgium no longer has the Congo to serve as “a springboard for the lower classes.” The only options for Lionel hinge upon his exam results: with honors, he might get a lifelong government job; otherwise, he will have to go elsewhere — to South America or Africa — and work his way up through some multinational firm. Yet without property of her own — aside from Lionel himself — Elisabeth is also looked down upon by the Peeters, the brusque Flemish family she rents her flat from. One of the pleasures of this book is de Born’s deft and subtle depiction of the intricate dances of social positioning that go on in a small and crowded country like Belgium.

State of Possession is set in Brussels, where de Born and her husband lived for over forty years after the end of World War Two. De Born was a perfect example of the kind of meta-European one finds in Brussels, where the European Commission, NATO, SWIFT, EUROCONTROL and other international organizations bring together people with strongly cosmopolitan sensibilities. Born in Vienna, which she left after the Anschluss, de Born moved to Paris, where she married Jacques Bisch, a French banker and worked with him in the Resistance during the war.

One of her jobs in the Resistance was translating messages to and from British intelligence services, and she credited that experience with teaching her how to write clearly and precisely in English while still managing to preserve essential nuances that didn’t have simple equivalents in the vocabulary and syntax of the other language. She learned well, as many critics like King noted that, “as with Conrad and Nabokov, one receives an impression of infinitely meticulous care in the shaping of every paragraph and even of every sentence.” King wrote,”It is in English that all her seventeen novels have been composed. I use the word ‘composed,’ rather than ‘written,’ advisedly, since, as with Conrad and Nabokov, one receives an impression of infinitely meticulous care in the shaping of every paragraph and even of every sentence.”

Many of the Brussels-based institutions operate on the basis of consensus, where different positions and interests have to be balanced and integrated through a careful, time-consuming and often frustrating process of negotiation. This fosters environments where extremes are actively discouraged and moderation is considered an essential quality for both success and survival. What matters most is not the outcome of any one deal but preserving the ability to make another deal tomorrow. The same spirit can be found in de Born’s work. Her books never find easy answers to the questions they raise. They also display an acute sense of history. As Francis King wrote of another de Born novel, State of Possession “gives the impression of the pasts of its characters receding in a long perspective.”

Despite the comparisons to Conrad and Nabokov, however, Edith de Born’s closest equivalent is probably a native English writer: Anita Brookner. Like Brookner, de Born wrote slight novels that seem to have the substance of tissue paper yet managed to cut like razors. Brookner herself tended to ward of the association. In 2007, she told The Spectator she had been rereading de Born, whom she considered “a completely forgotten precursor, both in style and subject matter” not of herself but of Sybille Bedford. “Of cosmopolitan background — her books are set in Austria, France and Belgium — she demonstrates an intriguing combination of rootlessness and good manners.” Brookner added dismissively, “These novels are long out of print and perhaps need not be revived.” In her 1987 Paris Review interview, however, Brookner said she very much enjoyed de Born, finding her “much more stoical and less sentimental than English writers.”

All of Edith de Born’s novels have been out of print for over forty years, but many of them can be purchased from used book shops for under $15. I note, though, that prices on Amazon are creeping into the stratosphere, so try searching on AddAll.com instead.

State of Possession, by Edith de Born
London: Chapman & Hall Ltd., 1963