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  For M. H. and for “entirely different” idlers everywhere

  Though I fall ninety-nine times, the hundredth time I shall stand.

  —Vincent van Gogh, November 19, 1881

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part I

  1880

  1879

  1880

  1879

  Part II

  1880

  1879

  1880

  1880

  Part III

  1880

  1880

  1880

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Nellie Hermann

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  Prologue

  September 3, 1879

  Petit Wasmes, the Borinage mining district, Belgium

  Dear Theo,

  It was quite a long time ago that we saw each other or wrote to each other as we used to. All the same, it’s better that we feel something for each other rather than behave like corpses toward each other, so I am putting my hand to paper to reach out to you.

  It’s mainly to tell you that I’m grateful for your visit that I’m writing to you. The hours we spent together those weeks ago have at least assured us that we’re both still in the land of the living. When I saw you again and took a walk with you, I felt more cheerful and alive than I have for a long time, because in spite of myself life has gradually become or has seemed much less precious to me, much more unimportant and indifferent. When one lives with others and is bound by a feeling of affection one is aware that one has a reason for being, that one might not be entirely worthless and superfluous but perhaps good for one thing or another. It has been a quite a while since I have felt this way. A prisoner who is kept in isolation, who is prevented from working, would in the long run suffer the consequences just as surely as one who went hungry for too long. Like everyone else, I have need of relationships of friendship or affection or trusting companionship, and am not like a street pump or lamppost, whether of stone or iron.

  Since my dismissal as lay preacher in July, yes, you are right, I have been waiting for something, and I don’t know what. You call this idling; I do not. You say I am not the same any longer; I say perhaps, but what man is? This time I am trying to do things right.

  I have been wandering through mining country, a man in exile, a castaway, a snake wriggling out of its skin. I move between my room in Cuesmes at the evangelist Frank’s house—with a bed and a desk and a worn carpet on the floor—and the room where I write from now, the abandoned salon in Petit Wasmes, a few miles away, where the floor is dirty and the few chairs are strewn across the space. I prefer the salon to the furnished room; it suits me better, and I appreciate the notion that no one can see me. I walk the landscape, I sit by the mine, in the cemetery, in the open fields covered with soot, unaware of the time, guiding myself only by the movement of the sun. I carry stacks of paper and occasionally sketch on my knees, quick strokes of what I see. Often, after I have done so, I tear up the paper and let the wind carry the strips away.

  Yes, this is what I have been doing, Theo, but it is not idling. I have been trying to be patient, to be calm, to make no sudden moves. I am trying to do things right this time, to listen, to hear, to see. Great forces are shifting in me; I must let them take their time. I have been riding the waves of these forces as if I were in the ocean: some nights, they cast me to the floor, where I weep into the dirt; other nights, they are calm, and I feel I can see the land ahead.

  As I think back on your visit with thankfulness, our talks naturally come to mind. I’ve heard such talks before, many, in fact, and often. You said, “Do you not wish for improvement in your life?” Plans for improvement and change and raising the spirits—don’t let it anger you, but I’m a little afraid of them, because I have acted upon them before and ended up rather disappointed. How much in the past has been well thought out that is, however, impracticable!

  Improvement in my life—should I not desire it or should I not be in need of improvement? I really want to improve. But it’s precisely because I yearn for it that I’m afraid of remedies that are worse than the disease. Can you blame a sick person if he looks the doctor straight in the eye and prefers not to be treated wrongly or by a quack?

  And if you should now assume from what I’ve said that I intended to say that you were a quack because of your advice then you will have completely misunderstood me, since I have no such idea or opinion of you. If, on the other hand, you think that I would do well to take your advice literally and become a lithographer of invoice headings and visiting cards, or a bookkeeper or carpenter’s apprentice, you would also be mistaken. Supposing it were possible for us to assume the guise of a baker or a hair-cutter or librarian with lightning speed, it would still be a foolish answer, rather like the way the man acted who, when accused of heartlessness because he was sitting on a donkey, immediately dismounted and continued on his way with the donkey on his shoulders.

  But, you say, I’m not giving you this advice for you to follow to the letter, but because I thought you had a taste for idling and because I was of the opinion that you should put an end to it.

  Might I be allowed to point out to you that such idling is really a rather strange sort of idling? It is rather difficult for me to defend myself on this score, but I will be sorry if you can’t eventually see this in a different light. Idling? The word makes me crazy; I wish it were a tangible thing so I could light it on fire.

  I went to visit our parents after you left here, just as you suggested I do. They were surprised to see me, Pa answering the door in his suit, Ma standing behind him in her apron, as if they were expecting a visit from a holy angel. I was a disappointment, as usual. It was oppressive to be there, everything in that house reminding me of earlier times, when we were brothers in all the senses of the word, and I kept thinking of you turning your back on me to get on the train to Paris. I left there after only a few days. Our parents handed me an envelope containing money, and they said it was from you, though there was no note. I have not touched the money—it sits in the desk in my room in Cuesmes—but I wonder about it. After a visit like we had, what could you mean by such a gift, and without so much as an acknowledgment of what has passed between us?

  If I must seriously feel that I’m annoying or burdensome to you or those at home, useful for neither one thing nor another, and were to go on being forced to feel like an intruder or a fifth wheel in your presence, so that it would be better if I weren’t there—if I think that indeed it will be so and cannot be otherwise, then I’m overcome by a feeling of sorrow and I must struggle against despair. It’s difficult for me to bear these thoughts and more difficult still to bear the thought that so much discord, misery and sorrow, in our midst and in our family, has been caused by me.

  If it were indeed so, then I’d truly wish that it be granted me not to have to go on living too long. Yet whenever this depresses me beyond measure, after a long time the thought also occurs to me: it’s perhaps only a bad, terrible dream, and later we’ll perhaps learn to understand and comprehend it better. But is it not, after all, reality, and won’t it one day become better rather than worse? Sometimes in winter it’s so bitterly cold that one
says, it’s simply too cold, what do I care whether summer comes, the bad outweighs the good. But whether we like it or not, an end finally comes to the hard frost, and one fine morning the wind has turned and we have a thaw. Comparing the natural state of the weather with our state of mind and our circumstances, subject to variableness and change, I still have some hope that it can improve.

  There is so much that you don’t know. This may be what hurts me most. It takes a person to explain, but it takes another person to hear the explanation. If I have changed, it is because of what I have been through here, and you make no effort to understand what that has been. In all the hours that we spent together, how could you not have asked me about this place? How could you not have asked for the story of what might have changed me?

  I want to tell you the story of what I have been through here. I am tired already of the silence, but you are not here to talk to, so I pick up my pen. It will take me a long time to tell you, and I am not sure if I will be able to tell all of it properly, or if I will ever actually send this letter or any other to you again, but tonight I am calling out: Theo! I am here! I am your brother, always, and despite how you have hurt me, I want to reach you.

  I feel a sun beginning to burn in my hands—something is growing in me that I must coax and tame.

  Your loving brother,

  Vincent

  PART I

  1880

  May 12, 12:00 p.m.

  He walks. Cold water is pouring from the sky, and he tries to hear the rain falling around him, onto him, trickling off the brim of his hat, over his eyes, through the hair of his beard, over his lips. He listens for each drop of water cascading against his skin, into the streams along the side of the road, onto the crows sitting on the thin, bare branches of the trees. The knapsack that he carries is thick canvas, but it must be soaked through. He thinks of the letters tucked inside, tied together with a length of twine, and imagines the words on them turning to water and washing away. He knows he should worry about this, but he cannot muster the strength.

  What is the sound of the rain? It is too overwhelming to be a symphony; it is a whoosh, a swallowing, a leviathan with open mouth and lifted tongue. He is inside the cold body of a devil made of water.

  His hands are growing numb. He touches the sprig of ivy that he keeps in his pocket, and its contours are blurry to his fingers. They cannot see it, he thinks, his fingers are growing blind with cold. The shape of the ivy emerges in his mind; he sees it rise behind his closed eyes, but his fingers fumble against it clumsily. My mind is not yet numb, he thinks vaguely, and trudges on.

  He is going to Paris to see his brother Theo. Theo, at long last, Theo who abandoned him, whom he hasn’t heard from in nine months, since Theo visited him in August. Is that right? Is that where he is going? Suddenly he is confused. His feet are carrying him somewhere, but his mind does not know where. Who will be there at the end of this road; who will greet him when he arrives at his destination? Theo, Father, Angeline? He sees his father’s top hat, resting on the table inside the parsonage door; Angeline’s delicate hand, her long, slender fingers topped by nails blunted and dirtied by too many shifts in the mine.

  He is walking through the rain; he will walk on until it stops. This is all he knows. He is somewhere near the border of France; he knows this because for a long time he was walking along the train tracks. Did he reach France today? Was that yesterday? He is walking. His life is collected in his footsteps; there is no past or future, only one step and then the next. He feels as if he has been walking on this road his whole life. The water has reached his feet through his boots; he wears a suit of ice water under his clothes.

  He fights the temptation to lie down in the road. He walks on, a man made of water.

  * * *

  He wakes up in a bale of hay. A blanket that smells like a horse is pulled up to his chin. When he opens his eyes, he is first aware of the warmth. His body is shining heat; the center of him is a sun.

  He looks around him: He is lying on a hay bale in the corner of a barn. A floor strewn with hay strands, a rectangle of bright light cast from a dirty window on the wall opposite, a pitchfork leaning against a pile of bales, a scythe cast onto a bale nearby. And in the corner, a stall with a cracked wooden door, through which he can hear the sound of a bull chewing calmly.

  He thinks of getting up, but the sun inside him is a weight holding him down. He thinks he must have a fever, and closes his eyes instead. When he opens them, there is a man standing above him. The man looks down at him through a shaft of light coming from the dirty window. He blinks up at the man, the outline of whom, against the light, is bright and fuzzy, particles of dust lifting off like the gentlest insects, floating away into nothing. For a moment, Vincent thinks he must be dead, and that the man is an angel.

  “I found you in the road in front of my farm,” the man says. He does not look angry; he is only stating the facts. “You were wet all the way through. You can’t be feeling good now.” The man pauses, looking down. His face is dark and blurry, an image from a dream. He speaks again: “Who are you? Where are you going? How did you get here?”

  Vincent opens his mouth and then shuts it again. He looks up at the man with what he feels sure is a dumb expression. It is safer than uttering a word.

  “Okay,” the man says, and nods. “You can tell me later. Rest now.” He turns around and leaves the barn, easing the creaking door shut behind him.

  Who am I? Where am I going? How did I get here? The questions swirl in his head. Who am I where am I going how did I get here who am I how did I get here where am I going who am I? These are questions he should know the answers to, words that should carry weight, carry meaning. He thinks of his knapsack, the stack of letters inside, probably destroyed from the rain. He raises his head to look around him and sees the bag, resting against the bale of hay across which his coat is draped. The sight of it makes him think of mining country, where he has come from, and he feels in his chest the burden of all that those letters contain. He has given an account of himself, there in those pages; he has already explained himself once. Having written the story, he thought that the memories would disappear from his mind.

  He lays his head back and closes his eyes. He is feverish and uncomfortable, cold waves traveling up and down his skin. Images flood him and he squeezes his eyes tight against them: Madame Denis in the doorway in her apron with a broom; Cricket, the three-legged bird, hopping on the windowsill; Alard laughing by a bird’s nest at his feet; a pair of men in dark suits and top hats, looking down at him with stern expressions; Angeline, the outline of her dissolving into darkness; then blood, strewn across the field in front of the mine, bodies wriggling, severed limbs, Madame Denis with a dark red streak down her cheek.

  He sleeps, and when he wakes, it is to the smell of coffee. On the bale beside him there is a tray: a porcelain mug, a roll, a bowl of some kind of stew. He is not sure of the last time he ate—was it yesterday that he started to walk? He sits up weakly and rests his back against the stack of hay behind him; the barn spins a bit and then settles. The coffee is perfect; he holds the mug in both his hands and breathes in its smell. The stew is cold but hearty, with large chunks of tomatoes and chewy meat. He devours it, using the bread to scoop out every last drop. When he is done, his stomach rumbles with confusion at the sudden work. He thinks he will probably be sick for eating this much this fast, but he doesn’t slow down.

  The bull in the stall across from him is quiet now; the sun still shines outside the dirty window, but there is no longer a rectangle across the floor. He feels like he has swallowed a whole bag of flour. He turns onto his side and caresses his belly.

  When he next looks around, the whole barn is cast in a thin pink hue. Through the dirty window the sun is setting—a line of deep pink on the horizon. He looks around him with amazement: How the most ordinary things can be transformed by the whim of nature! The saddles and horseshoes that hang by the window have been softened and look like disem
bodied shapes, strange sculptures with no earthly purpose. He hears the beast breathing again behind the stall door.

  What can he do to express his gratitude? He has nothing. In the pocket of his damp coat, which is draped on the bale that held the food, he finds a piece of paper still sodden with rain. He sits back on the hay bale and, lightly touching the paper with his pen so as not to tear it, he draws a quick sketch of the window, the saddles and the horseshoes surrounding it. It is an image, he thinks, of how man speaks to nature: how man has gone out to meet the world, how man has conspired to keep the world at bay. With quick, light strokes he sketches the outlines of what he sees, barely looking down at the page.

  But when he finishes and inspects the drawing, he feels dismay that he has not captured it: Everything is flat to him, the window merely a square with six smaller squares within, the saddles and horseshoes simply abstract shapes with strange smudges of black. In his rendering there is no relation between the objects, as he wanted. They are not in conversation; they are only sharing space—window in center, horseshoes on right, saddle on left. He looks from the drawing to the wall before him and then back again: He has been faithful to what he sees; he has even tried to capture the waning light on the leather of the saddle, the angle of fading sun on the edge of the horseshoe. Why doesn’t it please him?

  He is embarrassed by the drawing’s crudeness, but it is all he has to give. Perhaps the man will see something in it that he cannot see; he hopes that it might be enough for the man to remember him with something other than the effort he has cost him.

  On the paper, beneath the sketch, he writes, Thank you for your hospitality and generosity. It was more than I deserve. Vincent van Gogh.

  * * *

  His name is Vincent Wilhem, but he is not the first. His brother, who had his name, was born dead on the same day that, one year later, the second Vincent was born alive.