The last lavender fields have been harvested, and Haute-Provence is preparing for autumn. The white mists come earlier and start to rise later. As the village of Monieux basks in the sun, which still shines warm and bright, the tree-lined river Nesque meanders through the valley stretching out at our feet. Sanctifying silence.
Stefan Hertmans (65) points to the ridge that rises beyond, glistening in the bright morning light - from there his characters Hamoutal and David came on their flight to this village in Provence. 'From the window where I look out over the valley, I see two people approaching in the distance,' he writes in the opening scene of his new novel The convert, as if he can actually see his characters walking by. As if there is no time difference with the world he describes in the book, 11th-century Moniou, and twenty-first-century Monieux, where Hertmans has had a house for more than two decades.
At The convert Hertmans reconstructs the life of a young 11th-century refugee, in a way that has much in common with his worldwide and critically acclaimed bestseller War and turpentine. That novel was based on his grandfather's diaries about World War I, which had been lying in a desk drawer with Stefan Hertmans for 30 years. The story of The convert is based on a true story and, in the form of an article, was up for grabs in Hertmans' drawer for years. Hertmans travels after his protagonist to kick history on its tail, and as in War and turpentine he thus weaves his own story into the novel.
Hamoutal
Using just two documents, a lot of research and an incredibly rich imagination, Stefan Hertmans sketches the life of Vigdis Adelaïs. Born in Rouen to a well-to-do Christian family, she falls in love with the Jewish David Todros, son of the chief rabbi of Narbonne. Unable to give up her love, Vigdis leaves her family and follows David to Narbonne. She converts to Judaism and is given a new name: Hamoutal. However, her father is not content with her disobedience and sends knights after them to bring his daughter home, where the stake probably awaits her.
Hamoutal and David flee to the Jewish community in the village of Moniou in the Vaucluse. The rabbi there, Joshua Obadiah, captures them, and for a while they seem safe. But then Pope Urban II calls for a crusade, promising indulgences to those who kill "the enemies of Christ". Picking berries and herbs in the mountains one afternoon, Hamoutal sees a huge silver snake of knights and horsemen approaching in the valley and halting at the southern gateway, the Portail Meunier. The crusaders claim the food and houses; the Jews retreat to the synagogue for the night. But soon the flame catches fire. The soldiers set fire to the synagogue, Jews and all. Others, including David, are slaughtered in the streets like animals. Hamoutal manages to escape with her baby, but her other two children are kidnapped. The traumatised Hamoutal decides to search for her children, all the way to Cairo - the beginning of a life on the dole, as an outcast.
The Jewish Quarter
Agile as a klipgeat, Stefan Hertmans leads us up the slope behind his house, where the Moniou from his novel was once located, and where the footsteps of Hamoutal and David have been left behind in time. Today's Monieux is a lot lower than the Moniou of that time; the street where Hertmans lives, now one of the highest in the village, was pretty much the lowest, dark alley at the time. Only the foundations still give an idea of what the Moniou once looked like, with the Jewish part on one side, and the Christian part next to it. A narrow medieval stairway leads up, to a plot that, given its size, must probably have been the synagogue - so this is where David was killed.
That this here, on this hill, was once a Jewish quarter, Hertmans only discovered a few years ago, when he finally pulled that particular article out of the drawer and started reading. He saw that an extraordinary history had taken place here. Through two years of intensive research, the story slowly began to form in his mind. 'By comparison, this was War and turpentine but an exercise,' laughs Hertmans. After all, back then he had those diaries; now he had only two historical documents that mention a proselyte who became a victim of a pogrom. Nevertheless, Hertmans manages to bring this woman to life, and you believe every word of the fictional story the Flemish writer has penned. 'I have made historically based assumptions; for each there is a book to back them up. I have read a lot, from books on Jews in Provence to a PhD on Nile shipping in the 11th century. I have wandered through France, driven from Rouen to Narbonne on the smallest roads, in monasteries I have delved into the herbs people ate in eleventh-century times, the clothes they wore then. I travelled through the Nile Valley and visited the synagogue in Cairo where the manuscript about her was found. I named this woman, named her father, mother and brother. I literally raised her from the dead.'
Faith disputes
We come to a stone-lined field where potatoes are grown, a place where Stefan Hertmans sat unsuspectingly reading for summers. He points to a kind of eight-shaped well. 'It took twenty years before I took a good look at that well there. There was always a dirty corrugated sheet over it. It was only when I started writing this book that I stood here and realised: hell, that well has a seat! People turned it into a well in the 20th century, but it must have been a mikveh, the bath into which a Jewish woman must descend after her period and into which converts immerse to be reborn as Jews. I was blind until I had read, studied and understood enough to dare to think what I needed to think: this here was the synagogue.'
Hamoutal also descends into the bath. But despite her conversion to Judaism, she finds herself increasingly torn inside between her old and new faith. In moments of despair, she does not know which God she should actually call upon. The battle of faith taking place inside her is also taking place in the outside world, where tolerance between Christians, Muslims and Jews is crumbling into grit.
As the novel progressed, Hertmans began to realise that he was describing a piece of history that is eerily similar to our present day. 'When I started writing about the unrest that arose in the 11th century, sentences slipped from my fingers like, "Unrest grows every day and with it intolerance." I knew that from historical books, but still I thought: what am I writing now? I read that in the newspaper today! As the book progressed, I realised: I am writing about now, about today's political problems. That took me by surprise. Historians to whom I presented that thought agreed that the parallels between the 11th and 21st centuries are disturbing. Just as now media and politicians pit people against each other, it was then with sermons and hetzes, the most important being Urban II's fatal sermon in Clermont-Ferrand, which said, "Those of you who want indulgences, undertake this noble journey, go and liberate Jerusalem and defeat the enemies of Christ, but you don't have to wait until you get there." In short: kill a few Jews along the way, and you may go to heaven. With that, he set the pogroms in motion.'
But, Hertmans stresses, The convert is a literary work, not a pamphlet or a political book. 'A novel does not defend a point of view, but shows that a story, the truth, has several sides. For instance, it is simultaneously true that IS fighters came with the refugees as it is true that there are outstanding lawyers and doctors among refugees. Many people choose one or the other and start swearing at anyone who disagrees with them. That is where intolerance begins, that is the recipe for catastrophe, for war. In essence, that is the core of my book. That is why it is good to delve into that past of a thousand years ago. So that maybe we can avoid the mistake of that time.'
The convert by Stefan Hertmans was published by De Bezige Bij.
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