The Electric Hotel: A Novel

by Dominic Smith

  23

  The Belgian Woods

  When the moon set it was so black he could barely see his own trembling hands. He’d once been nimble in the darkroom, had learned to plumb hidden spaces under Albert Londe’s direction at the hospital, so he settled at the base of a tree and dragged the suitcase across his lap, opened its latches, and let his fingertips probe the compartments. In the first aid kit, he found two fresh bandages, some gauze, a bottle of rubbing alcohol; in the mess kit there were four tins of preserved meat, some crackers, half a canteen of water.

  * * *

  He lifted his bloodied shirt and began to unpeel the soaked bandage. As the air made contact with his wounds, he heard his own howling voice and closed his eyes. For an instant he saw his dead mother and sister, Ada and Odette, sitting at the kitchen table in his childhood home. They stared up at him as he took a seat.

  * * *

  All day he’d thought he was going to collapse and die, but instead he’d merely fainted half a dozen times, no more than a blink, the flick of a light switch. When he pressed the rubbing alcohol back into his wounds, into the dozen welts studded across his chest and stomach, he knew he’d fainted again because he came to with his hands limp in the dirt. He breathed through his mouth, looked into the darkness, unrolled a fresh bandage over the squares of gauze. For added pressure, he tore strips of muslin from the wrappings of the film canisters and tied them around his ribs.

  * * *

  He leaned back against the tree and felt inside the suitcase again. The Belgian Red Cross had given each of them a vial of morphine, a token of wartime thanks for their efforts, and it gave him some measure of comfort, rubbing the edges of the wooden case with his fingertips, imagining the moment when he would allow himself to swim into an ocean of morphine. He’d resolved not to use any of it for the pain so that he could escape it all at once if the time came.

  * * *

  Above the treetops, somewhere far-off, searchlights panned the night sky and he could hear distant ordinance. It was the sound of surf detonating on a reef. Inside his fever, there were moments when he felt himself receding, where he became nothing but the erratic pulse of his own thoughts. This was faintly familiar to him, a distant memory of his convalescence in the attic. In the woods, as he staggered along with the suitcase, he’d found himself unpacking his mind as if to spread his life out on a table, assembling his childhood, his mother’s death, his years in Paris, Odette’s hospitalization, the Lumières, his obsession with Sabine, the rise and fall of the film company, one event after the next, arranged in a row, because the chronology seemed important but also tenuous. On the night of The Electric Hotel’s premiere he’d imagined that the cascading events of his life had led him to a cinematic cathedral, to a thousand people waiting to be immersed in his visions, but those same events had, in fact, also conspired to place him in these woods with his insides seeping against cotton bandages.

  * * *

  During the night, he slept in short fevered bursts, waking to stare into the darkened wood, sometimes wondering where and who he was. He could feel his heart beating in the serrated edges of his shrapnel wounds. The same impartial stranger who’d stared up into the quaking leaves right after the explosion on the hillside was still there, puzzling it all out, the way that pain slowed time, the countless inventory of hours and seconds. Our bodies are made of time, the stranger said to Claude.

  * * *

  In the dawning light, there was smoke rising through the trees, no more than a mile away. Claude tried to eat a handful of mushrooms he’d foraged the day before, but he couldn’t get past their fungal reek. He smoked a Chesterfield to calm his shaking hands and surveyed his torso. His wounds were beginning to turn. He knew it from the malty, acrid smell and the blooms of verdigris and yellow in the gauze bandages. He packed up the suitcase, fastened the latches and straps, slung the Graflex and tripod on his back, got to his feet by first rolling into a crawl and then forcing himself into a kneel. It was clear to him by now that he was unwilling to die in the woods without his equipment, that not a single camera or canister could be left behind to lighten his load. With both hands against a tree trunk, he supported his weight and pushed himself gradually upright.

  * * *

  When he was standing, he leaned his head against the tree to throw up several times. His eyes felt bruised and tender and they kept flooding with tears. But either he was going to get back down on the forest floor and empty the vial of morphine into his arm, or he was going to find the source of the smoke. A burning village, fleeing refugees, a German outpost, or a Belgian sortie, it didn’t much matter. Staying in the woods meant the certainty of death. He crouched slowly, keeping his torso stiff, and reached for the suitcase handle. He walked toward the smoke, picked a line through the trees.

  * * *

  In a quarter mile he came onto an exposed meadow down below the ridgeline. A few sheep grazed in the drowsy, early light. He skirted the edge of the clearing and looked out from a stone ledge. He could see a macadam road and a blackened church steeple jutting above the tree crowns. The exact source of the smoke was unclear. It drifted up in broad sheets and ribbons, thinned out into an acre of sun-streaked fog. Suitcase in hand, he hobbled downhill along a narrow footpath. He limped out of the trees, shambling into the broadening daylight.

  * * *

  From the roadside ditch he saw roofless stone houses and the hulk of the church. Fragments of stained glass—blue and vermillion—clung to gothic portals in triangles of lead. A German tricolor had been draped over a fountain in the square, and furniture lay in piles on the cobblestone, battlements of armoires and kitchen tables. A pyramid of chairs and clothing burned nearby but there were no villagers to be seen. A gray-green field car stood parked at the head of the square.

  * * *

  Then he noticed there was a soldier in a spiked helmet crouched against the hood, his Mauser raised and aimed at this bookish traveling gypsy, some Belgian peasant or refugee wandering in from the woods with a suitcase of stale bread and family heirlooms. But there might also be dynamite in the suitcase, or a stolen civic guard revolver, and the getup on his back could have been a rifle attached to a tripod. In his delirium, Claude felt connected to the wire of the soldier’s thoughts, felt it uncoiling from the barrel of his gun.

  * * *

  The soldier yelled indecipherably. Claude set the suitcase on the ground and raised his arms into the air. Two other soldiers appeared. They came toward him, three of them, weapons raised, including a rifle with its bayonet attached. He had imagined this moment of contact many times, pictured the way he would approach a German checkpoint with a sense of friendly caution. Now that it was here, the probability of being shot seemed overwhelming. Claude reached very slowly into his pocket for the handkerchief-sized silk American flag. He didn’t have the strength to wave it, so he just held it in front of his chest and said Hoch der Kaiser! half-heartedly. He tried to remember the storyline of working for a German consortium of newspapers back in the United States. He had been separated from his journalist colleagues during the bombardment beyond the woods.

  * * *

  The first word he understood from the Germans was spion. Before her death, his Austrian mother had rarely spoken German around the house, and her native tongue was often a source of embarrassment to her. But it always crept into her French pronunciation, a bony hand inside a satin glove. They were calling him a spy, gesturing for him to open his suitcase. In the gap between his Franco-American English and their Prussian or Bavarian or Austrian style of German there was bound to be confusion. It was a linguistic canyon where he might be shot for a botched vowel or unnatural pause.

  * * *

  Then one of them, a fresh-faced enlistee, said in perfect English:

  —We would like you to open the suitcase or we’ll have to shoot.

  Claude put the American flag back in his pocket, removed the Graflex and tripod from his back, kneeled beside the briefcase, laid it flat, u
nlatched the lid. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse and thin.

  —American, journalist camera operator. I am covering the war for some German newspapers in America.

  —Which papers?

  Two names came to him.

  —Der Deutsche Correpondent … Scranton Wochenblatt.

  —Open the suitcase.

  Claude breathed and steadied his hands. He lifted the lid to reveal the film canisters and equipment, the rations and first aid kit. There was a flurry of indignant German among the men.

  —What are you filming with the cameras?

  —My colleagues and I were on the other side of the hills. I was separated from them during the battle.

  —Bring the suitcase and stand up.

  Claude latched the suitcase lid and got to his feet, one hand clutching his stomach where blood was again seeping through his shirt. The soldiers pointed with their rifles, this time toward the village square. He walked along the road, the three of them a few feet behind.

  * * *

  As if to explain his flawless accent, the English speaker said:

  —I am Lance Corporal Marcus Kaufer. I lived in the Bronx before the war. Almost American, I was. Played baseball in a church league championship … keep walking toward the fountain. My sister still lives in Schenectady. Do you know it?

  —Yes. I live in New York most of the year.

  —But your accent is different. You were not born there.

  —No, he said, staggering along. I’ve lived in many places.

  * * *

  They led him into the square, where facades were missing from houses and inns, exposing a cross-section of rooms and copper plumbing. A bathtub in a decimated attic still had a white towel laid across its rim. A black lacquered piano had been dropped into a cobblestone courtyard, its innards sprawled in all directions.

  * * *

  Around a bend: two German officers, pistols holstered, sitting at an ornate mahogany dining room table out in the street. The table was spread with empty wineglasses, bread and jam, a jewelry box, a field telephone, battlefield maps. Kaufer gave a brief summary of what had transpired out on the road. The officers looked at Claude the whole time. He was holding the tiny American flag again, clutching it over his bleeding middle. One of the officers stood up from the table and approached, Marcus Kaufer retained as translator.

  —The commandant would like to review your documents and possessions. Please put all your things on the table. Empty your pockets out as well.

  * * *

  Claude struggled to lift the suitcase but he managed to set it on the table. He opened the lid and went through the compartments. He laid out his American passport, the letter from the Belgian Red Cross, and the laissez-passer. The commanding officer had a distracted, theoretical air, and he studied the documents closely, holding one letter up into the pale smoky sunshine. He murmured something to himself, spoke a few words of German to his underling, before turning his attention to the suitcase.

  * * *

  He methodically removed each item and placed it on the table, forming several neat rows. To handle the bloodied gauze, he first put on his leather field gloves. When everything was removed, he studied each item—craning up into the viewfinder of the Aeroscope, or examining the backs of the lewd postcards, perhaps for signs of cryptic marks or handwriting. When he came to the notebook, the pages scribbled with annotations about shooting reels and locations and times of day, Claude realized everything was written in French. The kid from the Bronx was already onto his accent anyway. But the officer seemed unfazed as he turned the pages of the notebook. Then Claude remembered that he’d sealed his French passport behind the silk lining in the suitcase, in an envelope just below the cowhide exterior. That could be the linchpin for his undoing.

  * * *

  The officer said a few words in German and the private relayed them to Claude.

  —We will take you to see a medic. And the commander will retain your possessions in the meantime. For safekeeping. He would also like to make a detailed inventory.

  Claude breathed through a flare-up of pain.

  —As an American, I’m a neutral party. You’ve got no right to detain me.

  —Everything will be all right.

  * * *

  Claude watched as two soldiers began to make an inventory of his possessions, one of them writing down the items in a field book as the other called out the German name for the object. As the soldier led him toward the gray Mercedes he heard the words from behind him—pornographie, kamera, zigarette, film … Then he recognized the word Morphium and it struck him with its beauty and power. It sounded like the name of a battleship, H.M.S. Morphium, empress of the opioid oceans, guardian of sleep. He realized his ears had been ringing ever since the explosion in the woods, the world shunting and soughing, but now everything slackened and fell loose about him. As he collapsed into the dirt, this beautiful German word kept breaking over him like a wave … Mor-ph-ium, Moor-ph-iuuuum. Moor-ph-iuuuuuuuum.

  24

  The Château

  Claude woke propped with feather pillows, the sound of piano music rippling along a stone passageway outside his door. For a moment, without his glasses, he sensed that he’d died in the Belgian woods and this was the afterworld—a stony concerto in the fog of eternity. He blinked and swallowed, turned his head slowly. He reached out a hand next to the bed, an old habit, made a sortie for his spectacles along the wood-grained nightstand, brought the wire frames to his face. The fissure in the right lens brought everything back, the woods, his capture. Through the doorway he could see the top of a broad stairwell, a wall of sconces and baroque tapestries. And there was a man sitting in a chair at his bedside. It was the English speaker from the roadside, the kid from the Bronx.

  * * *

  The German looked at him over the rim of a field manual, nodding to the gravitas of the music. Pulling the bedsheet back, Claude saw that there were fresh bandages wrapped around his stomach, sections of taped gauze on his chest. When he lifted the edge of a bandage he could see a miniature railway of sutures, the skin pinched and blue-gray along the seams.

  —They sewed you up at the Feldlazarett.

  Claude looked up at the raftered ceiling.

  —I am Lance Corporal Marcus Kaufer. We met in the village. Do you remember?

  Claude nodded, winced. His head had been replaced with an anvil.

  —Where are my things?

  —Downstairs. The Oberstleutnant is eager to meet you. Can you hear him at the piano? He’s quite well known for his Brahms. As a youngster, he performed in Berlin concert halls. I will fetch you something to put on.

  Kaufer dug through an armoire and produced a gingham nightshirt. He came over to the bed, lifted Claude’s arms one by one, and slipped his head through the collar.

  —There is food and company downstairs. You must be famished.

  Kaufer extended his elbow and Claude grimaced as he turned his upper body for the first time.

  * * *

  The lance corporal led him out into the stone passageway and down the stairwell, one careful step at a time. Hanging from the walls were gold-threaded tapestries—visitations and saints—and a series of brooding portraits, Flemish ancestors with their mastiffs and blowzy wives. The oriental strip of rug felt warm against Claude’s bare feet all the way down the stairs, but there was a chilling smell of moss and wet slate to the air.

  * * *

  On the bottom landing, Kaufer led him gingerly into a sun parlor, where a group of officers were standing around a white grand piano in their full regalia—gray-green tunics, polished boots, spurs, dress swords, walnut-colored leather holsters. Claude suddenly became conscious of his bare knees and the flimsy gingham nightshirt.

  * * *

  The white piano and the Oberstleutnant were directly beneath a skylight. The officer looked up, nodded, and finished playing his passage. He had a brash, Hindenburg-style mustache but feminine, patrician features—small blue eyes and a no
se that was narrow and delicate. One hand perched on his scabbard, he came forward and held his other hand out for Claude to shake.

  —You will forgive my English in advance, yes? I am Oberstleutnant Graf Bessler, head of the new photographic and information unit in Belgium. We’re all very pleased you’re arriving here.

  He said something to Kaufer while gesturing back out into the hallway. There was a clicking of heels and the clinking of spurs on the stone floor as the officers followed Bessler out of the sun parlor.

  —The Oberstleutnant would like to offer you some refreshments in the dining room, said Kaufer.

  They came into a long room with an enormous fireplace and a wall of lead-framed windows that overlooked a garden in high, white bloom. The table could seat twenty in ladder-backed chairs, but Bessler gestured to one end, where a half-eaten smorgasbord was laid out.