by Lars Mytting
“But you do know more.”
“No, I told you! And I don’t want to know more either.”
It struck me that, before the summer, Hanne had said something similar. On this very spot. And I had left her because of it.
7
A FEW DAYS LATER WE CROSSED THE FRENCH BORDER. It had not been an especially cheerful journey; it felt as though there were two strangers sitting quietly in the back seat listening to what we said.
But Gwen had climbed in with her worn leather suitcases after the Bristol had gone for two days to the workshop at the Mobil garage in the neighbouring village, where it was treated like an old friend, oiled and tuned up, and given new tyres to replace the cracked Dunlops Einar had been driving on. The rattling and roaring of the Bristol had disappeared, and our chatter became more audible.
Then we raced down the country, took the ferry to Kiel and stopped overnight at a hotel in Belgium.
I had not brought the Leica, but the prints from 1971 were hidden in my suitcase, along with the war map. Perhaps she had something similar up her sleeve. A key to a holiday house, for example.
That night we slept together, and in the morning we chatted like before, but bitter words were beginning to creep in at the slightest disagreement.
Towards late morning we were there. The flat, rolling terrain around the Somme river. The road passed endless acres where power lines curtsied between the high-voltage pylons. It was the landscape of oblivion, a landscape to drive past, the same in every direction, a dusty haze of heat with no fixed point for memories.
A French radio station screeched through the car speakers. They spoke too quickly for me to be able to follow, but Gwen chuckled at their jokes, hummed along to the showy pop music even though we agreed it was terrible.
The radio talk unsettled me. I was on my way to my family domain. To my mother’s country. I began to sense an expectation that I should belong, that I should feel at home. We stopped at a kiosk but I lost the conviction I had had when I spoke to Jocelyne Berlet, and I began to stammer. Everything sounded wrong now that I stood on French soil.
I pulled myself together and bought some Gauloises, the blue soft-pack with its Gallic helmet. The French, it seemed, did not make packs of twenty but of nineteen, so the three rows of cigarettes rested in each other’s arches. I found the distinction pleasing.
Have a cigarette, Edouard Daireaux, I said to myself.
Some miles later Gwen placed the Michelin map on her lap and said, “Take the next turn.”
From there on it was serious. A sign pointed towards Albert, the town nearest to Authuille. We had not booked a hotel, had no plan. A haze shrouded the autumn sun, the landscape was flat, the tractors were ants on the horizon.
Then the war took over.
Not Einar and Isabelle’s war, but Duncan Winterfinch’s. We passed a small cemetery with white gravestones. They were dense and symmetrical, like a troop of soldiers on parade. I said this to Gwen.
“They are soldiers,” she answered quietly.
Further on there was another burial ground, then one more. There were no cars behind us and I braked on the crest of a hill. From there we could see four large cemeteries at once.
At the same time it was as though the noise of battle from my own history had begun to rumble. We were approaching the front, the place from which I had disappeared, the gas shells waiting to go off, the pool in which they drowned. The Bristol hummed quietly and faithfully, ready to lead me there. But I could not do it, I needed something in which to hide my own past. So I stopped at a cemetery and told Gwen that I wanted to look around.
A few hundred gravestones. They still had visitors after so many years. In several places there were letters amongst the flowers and I crouched by one that was laminated in plastic. Written recently by the granddaughter of a private who died on July 1, 1916, she told the soldier that her grandmother missed you terribly, never remarried and took great delight in bringing up her only child.
Gwen sat in the car, staring blankly forward. I walked in a wide loop, came back towards her, but then turned and headed for the cemetery a couple of hundred metres away. It was twice as large, and almost all those buried there had died on July 1, the first day of the battle.
We drove on, and to escape the silence I stopped at a burial ground on the outskirts of Albert and once more walked alone within the metal enclosure.
I felt dizzy. It was like standing at the foot of a tower and looking up, or on a ferry looking down. The crosses stretched as far as the eye could see. The names were French. I walked to the far end and tried to estimate the number. I got to three thousand, and when I turned, three thousand new names faced me. The graves were back to back. The French graves were rarely decorated. Half of my blood is that of a people who allow the past to be the past, I said to myself. The Brits, on the other hand, adorn their graves; the Brits are the ones who refuse to forget.
*
“In the whole of France,” Gwen said when we got going again, “there are 930 hectares of cemeteries from this war. Are we going to visit them all?”
Just then, as though we had been pulled there by the current, there was a sign for Authuille.
“You’ve driven past,” she said flatly.
“It’s too . . . heavy,” I said. “I almost feel as though I want to go home.”
“Look at that,” she said, nodding towards the highest point in the landscape, at the head of a gentle valley.
There stood a strange colossus, its colours blending into the mist. A large arch which broke with the surrounding landscape, an immense statement.
“Thiepval,” she said. “The memorial to the missing.”
I stared at her.
“That’s enough!” she snapped. “I have not been here before. But I paid attention in history lessons.”
“Don’t get so worked up! The gunmaker told us about Thiepval. It’s just that it’s so enormous.”
“Do you know why it’s so enormous?”
I put the car into neutral. “Tell me,” I said.
“To have enough space for all the names. They’re carved into the pillars. Seventy-three thousand soldiers. And these are just the British soldiers who were never found or couldn’t be identified. That’s where you’ll find most of the soldiers from Grandfather’s company. And no, I don’t want to go there.”
A tourist bus came up behind us and I drove the Bristol onto the grass verge to let it pass. I looked at her expectantly, but she said nothing more.
*
We drove into a gentle river valley and followed the road to a viewing point, where we got out. Through the mist I could see yellow autumnal woods at the bottom of the slope.
So here I was. I had formed so many pictures, imagined the crystal-clear Ancre flowing over rounded stones, that the woods were a dark nightmare of thickets and black stumps that stretched for kilometres. But in reality this was a broad quagmire, even the river was no larger than a flooded creek. Small groves of trees. The bottom of the valley a mass of stagnant pools and channels of greyish-brown water. And I saw the war as it was. Hundreds of thousands fighting in a wide-open landscape. No mountains, no hills, the advances visible from afar.
Finding the Daireaux woods ought to be easy enough. It was just a matter of finding a moment alone, pulling out Winterfinch’s map and matching it with the surrounding terrain. Their machine guns had been where the walnut trees stood. Not far from Speyside Avenue, the supply line where he was found with his arm torn off.
Gwen eventually got out of the car and leaned against the bonnet, her hands on the warmth from the radiator.
“Are you yourself again?” she said.
I shook my head. “Not really, no. Somewhere down there are the woods.” I pointed down the slope.
“And the farm, where might that be?” she said.
I had imagined it being in the vicinity of the forest grove, but the bottom of the valley was so boggy that it could not have been farmed. Dotted about were
some caravans, though I could not grasp how people could live in this waterlogged area.
“It’s hard to say,” I said. “It must be up on one of the hillsides where the soil is better.”
Gwen wore a light-blue, short-sleeved shirt. On her wrist ticked her grandfather’s watch.
“Do you want to see the woods?” I said. “The place where he lost his arm?”
She straightened her clothes. “Yes. I’ve decided that I do. Anyway, we’d only see them from a distance.”
My silence gave me away. I knew I would have to force myself to relive everything, place by place and at the right time of day, and see what came to me.
“You’re not intending to go into the woods?” she said.
“I don’t know yet. But I have to be there early in the morning. At the same time it happened.”
“There’s no way you’re going into those woods,” she said. “If you do, I’m going home.”
I looked down into the landscape in the hope of recognising some sign from nature, a series of déjà vus which might make the events of 1971 come to life. But there was only Gwen.
We did not have to drive far before coming to a sign with the place name that had followed me through life like a troubled spirit.
Authuille.
“Come on, let’s just to do it,” I said. “But we’ll go on foot.”
We got out of the Bristol near a graveyard and wandered down towards a cluster of houses. A Renault 4 passed us at full speed, my lapels flapped in the slipstream. Some mutts were barking nearby. Many times I had visualised how Authuille would look, a bustling town full of life, with clothes lines and people looking out of their windows, but it was a quiet village with no shops, just rust-red, dusty brick houses and little old cars. Two boys played football on a gravel drive. We walked past a small garden, a woman was pulling up weeds but did not notice us.
Gwen took my hand. Her grip was not firm, but it was as though every nerve fibre ran into mine. And yet everything that was pure and genuine seemed to flow in only one direction, nothing flowed from me to her. I hated feeling so suspicious, while she squeezed my hand as though we were walking down the aisle.
Then she let go and suddenly we were out of Authuille. Another infinity of fields sprawled before us. We walked back to the graveyard and searched amongst the headstones for the name Daireaux, but found nothing. It was as though my parents’ story was not true. And yet I was the living proof.
“There’s a river down there. Should we follow this?” Gwen said and pointed to a road which went steeply downhill.
Now it was as if another Authuille appeared, the Authuille from my memories. Because a hundred metres further down was a building I was certain I had seen before. Auberge de la Vallée d’ Ancre. A beautiful restaurant, reddish-brown brick walls with latitudinal white stripes.
Out of the haze of my memory, something was emerging.
“Why are we stopping?” Gwen said.
“It’s here.”
The feeling I had hoped for, it was right here. Like something subterranean had moved and was crudely digging around, searching for a point of exit.
“What’s here?”
“I’ve been here before.”
“Do you mean that? Do you actually remember?”
They came in a flash, a few frozen images seconds apart. Pappa holding me under the arms and lifting me up, Mamma saying something to us. They were speaking excitedly, a word was constantly repeated.
And then I made contact, Pappa’s voice was clear and pure in my memory.
“Perch,” I said.
“What?”
“Perch. Down there, Mamma and Pappa said something about perch.”
Gwen set off down the hill.
“Wait,” I said. Another image was forming, but it was woolly and strange. “I remember something brown and white,” I muttered, “and maybe some letters.”
We were still a little way from the restaurant. As if in a trance I stood and stared at the brick building below us. At the grass along the wall. At the narrow staircase.
“So you remember perch and something brown and white?” Gwen said.
“I do,” I said. I do, as if I were standing in front of a priest.
We bounded down the hill. “Look!” she said. “On the wall there’s a menu.”
It was in a glass frame with a rust-brown metal edge, the word MENU in white letters. A child would have to be lifted up to see it.
“There you go,” Gwen said. “Perche en sauce safrandée. Perch in saffron.”
*
Pappa, who hardly knew any French, must have held me up to see the menu. Then Mamma must have joined us and translated.
A recognition, a hazy memory which left a churning in my gut. I crouched down to the height of a child, noticed the smell of the grass in my nostrils, heard the rippling of the river change tone at this height, and my memory fell into place. The grass was different here, flowers we did not have back home, and deep in the mist of the past I thought I could hear the echoing voices of Mamma and Pappa.
Perch.
The word ricocheted in my memory, bouncing off the walls of a mildewed cellar, and I heard Pappa’s voice again. Not clearly, just the ring of it.
And then I had it at last, a perpetual gift, a genuine memory of Pappa.
We stood in the cottage in Hirifjell looking at the names of fish on a wallchart. The memory solidified, and then we drifted away from the farm, back here again, where I felt his hands holding me under the armpits and together we said perch.
“It’s still on the menu,” Gwen said. “It must be their speciality.”
*
The door was locked. I stood outside trembling. Before long a small lady in her fifties appeared and opened the door a crack.
“Nous n’avons pas encore ouvert. Avez-vous réservé?”
She was so brisk that I did not grasp what she said, and only a few seconds passed before her patience ran out and she closed the door.
“They’ve stopped taking lunch reservations,” Gwen translated and looked at her watch. “Asked if we had reserved a table for this evening.”
I said nothing, just held on to the image in my memory.
“What’s going on?” Gwen said. “You seem so . . . happy?”
“It’s the first time I’ve remembered anything proper about my father. His voice in my ear. He was unshaven and scratched my cheek so much that it hurt. My mother was excited about something. They seemed so . . . complete.”
She took a step towards me and smiled. She must have hoped that this would be enough for me.
“One thing,” I said. “The lady said something about reserving a table. They’d write that in a book, wouldn’t they?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Maybe they keep the books?”
*
In a gallant demonstration of charm and public-school French, and with a few francs slipped under a crocheted tablecloth, Gwen managed to persuade the lady to fetch a worn, light-blue book. She wrinkled her nose and blew the dust from the cover out of a window.
“Perch in saffron,” Gwen said. “Have you had it on the menu for a long time?”
“Ever since we opened,” she said, placing the book in front of us.
On the page dated September 22, 1971, we found it. A reservation in the name of Nicole Daireaux, for three adults and a child.
Pale-yellow tablecloths, the clatter of cutlery being set out. I tried to evoke memories from these sounds, but nothing came.
“Here she is again,” Gwen said, dragging me from my thoughts. She had turned the page to the next day. “They’d booked for the following day too. But only for three adults.”
I looked at Mamma’s name.
“Hm,” I said.
“Yes. Who would they have eaten with?”
“It could have been your grandfather. Maybe Einar was going to look after me. But they never came. By then they were already dead.”
*
That ev
ening I ate Mamma and Pappa’s last meal.
Perch in saffron. A spice as new to me as it must have been for them. Hints of aroma from the yellow-orange threads which bled into a subtle, light sauce. The scent of the food seeped deep inside me, the flavours like memories themselves, demanding surrender, no intense spices to overpower the senses, just an incomparable, delicate flavour which vibrated in my brain and tuned it to a frequency from 1971.
An indistinct shadow play, diffuse dreams, but I was closer to Mamma and Pappa than ever. I could even feel how lost Mamma must have been that first time in Authuille, when she asked for directions to the farm and was sent away. I sensed what she must have thought when she returned to settle the matter.
I knew that I had to continue, retrace our steps, and go out in the morning light to relive their death.
But I did not let the finality of that thought overwhelm me. Because everything until that moment had been peaceful, and comforting. It had not been a risky, reckless trip. They had been here to conclude something, put something to rest.
A person who is sad does not order perch with saffron.
I hardly noticed how Gwen was slipping away from me. She ate quietly, and halfway through the meal she said something that I would reflect on in the days to come. It was a rebuke, but it didn’t sound like one at the time, more like friendly advice. She had looked at my water glass.
“Edward,” she said. “When you eat food like this, and when you’re given polished glasses like these, you use your napkin to wipe your lips before you drink. That way you don’t leave a mark.”
It was as though she had a premonition that this dinner would be the last we ate together.
*
We did not make love that night. She pulled the duvet over her and turned her back to me.
Sleep would not come. The rumbling from the trip reverberated in my head, and I got dressed and strolled through the corridors. We had checked in at Hôtel de la Basilique, but it did not feel right to tell Gwen that my parents and I had probably stayed overnight here in 1971.
The hotel had only ten rooms, and as I passed the white-painted doors I wondered which had been ours. They might have a twenty-year-old guestbook here too. I stepped into the cool night air and wandered over to the church. A couple of night-birds sang in a neighbouring street. A pale-grey Citroën with yellow headlamps rounded a curve and disappeared.
