The Electric Hotel: A Novel

by Dominic Smith

  26

  Antwerp

  Chip couldn’t shake the feeling that Claude Ballard had stolen his fate. He thought about the way he’d cheated a fiery death a thousand times and then here was the Frenchman, haplessly wandering into the blaze with a suitcase full of silver nitrate film stock, an incendiary device that would have blown him asunder. They’d scrambled up the hillside while the Germans continued to bombard the wood, calling his name, but there was no sign of him, and then the mortar fire threatened to close off the road below. The Belgians retreated and they fled to the Berline, driving north through a hailstorm of shrapnel.

  * * *

  In Antwerp, a month later, as the Germans encircled the city with heavy artillery, Chip found himself imagining Claude’s bones, undiscovered for years, bleaching on a Belgian hillside. Or they would silver and scale with all those nitrates. His mind had always flowed this way, toward the morbid resting point of a scenario. In preparation for the attack, the Belgians had cleared the sight lines around the city, leveling chestnut trees and châteaux walls, sowing the potato and beet fields with electrified entanglements. At night, when the army tested the electrifications, the wires sometimes picked up radio signals and crosstalk—flurries of advertisements for laundry soap and Bavarian folk music drifting in from the hinterland. Chip listened to it when he couldn’t sleep, and he was sure it was death’s faint crackling anthem.

  * * *

  He imagined his old life in Tamarama, clambering up tree ropes and falling from the wire, forever slicked with fire gel. Claude Ballard had appeared like some Gallic philosopher, screening his titillations in the musk and brine of the sideshow tent for gypsy acrobats and the foremen alike, then shambling up to Chip’s lean-to that dusk, big-knuckled hands butterflying behind his back. Say he’d never wandered up that day. Would Chip have lost an arm by now to a tiger shark, or would he have skulked home to his mother and her vellum-paged bible? Would he be breaking horses on some droughty fringe of land out west? He was submerged at night, pressed under the surf of his own thoughts.

  * * *

  He had an inkling to go volunteer with the Munro Ambulance Corps after he and Hal were done filming the German advance on Antwerp. Since he was too short to enlist with the Australian Imperial Force, he could make himself useful hauling the wounded from the trenches to the field hospitals. He would be calm and calculating in a crisis, giving well-annunciated orders to those around him. Hadn’t he always been the one with the clear head and eyes when everyone around him went squiffy with fright? He’d seen graziers and actors and showmen faint at the sight of blood, or wobble when a situation turned flinty. In fact, when everyone stood like wax figurines during the tiger attack on the set of The Electric Hotel, he’d been the one to bound up the stairs, seize Rex Lander’s revolver, and fire two bullets into the side of the big jungle cat’s brindled neck.

  * * *

  They’d been able to buy equipment and film stock from a Pathé agent fleeing Antwerp. When the reels were finished, Hal was going to take them to England and tour for the Red Cross, donating the profits to their cause. While they waited for the siege, they lived in a three-story redbrick row house full of expats, journalists, and photographers in the southeastern quarter of the city. They lived on the top floor, Collier’s Weekly and the Chicago Tribune were on the second floor, and the Dutch vice-consul had the first floor all to himself. Rents were cheap, the neighborhoods thinning out by the hour and the day. The war tourists had all fled the city after a zeppelin night raid dropped a dozen bombs on the Place Verte in late August.

  * * *

  Because nobody seemed to know when or how the advance would happen, Chip traded cigarettes and brandy for information from the garrisoned soldiers. The Germans were hauling Big Berthas and Škodas from Essen by train, then using teams of circus horses to move them into a wide perimeter around the city. Each thousand-pound shell had a range of nearly eight miles, so it was clear the attack was never going to come by road or field, that the city had felled its trees and hedgerows for nothing. A game of shuttlecock was the unofficial phrase in the garrisons, an eight-mile lob over the net of fortifications and electrified entanglements.

  * * *

  In late September, Hal and Chip stood on a hillside filming the first bombardment. A balloonist sent radio signals back to the Germans to improve their aim against the fortifications while the artillery fire riffled against the sheer blue sky. A Bertha shell began as a distant, throaty recoil, then it became a thrashing copper wire in the air. It continued to thrash and keen for a second after impact, a sonic afterimage as it gouged a house-sized divot into the beehives of concrete and men. Chip felt the shock waves a quarter mile away, felt it chatter into his teeth and testicles.

  * * *

  By early October, the Belgian king had fled to the coast and the British evacuated the city with London double-decker buses. Along the Scheldt, thousands of refugees crammed into skiffs, barges, and ferryboats bound for Holland. The mayor of Antwerp surrendered on October 10 and the first German soldiers entered the city—a battalion of cyclists, rifles slung over their shoulders, singing “Die Wacht am Rhein” in two-part harmony.

  * * *

  Hal and Chip filmed the advance from the balcony of the American consulate: thousands of soldiers on a torrent of kettledrums, uhlan lancers on feathered horses, the infantry in knee-high boots with green sprigs in their lapels and thin cigars clenched between their teeth. When the field artillery rumbled across the cobblestone, the city’s few remaining windowpanes rattled, the cannoneers sitting inscrutable and Buddha-like atop their caissons.

  * * *

  The city had been without municipal water or services for a week, so it reeked of garbage, unflushed drains, and sewers. The sanitation and signal corps detached and fanned out singing into the empty, putrid streets and boulevards, already at work to make the city habitable again. A column of cyclists unrolled telephone wires and began to attach them to street lamps and electric posts. Fire hoses were uncoiled and opened out against the grime.

  * * *

  Hal aimed the Pathé at an open lorry bed that was carrying dozens of violins in their slender, curved black cases. An entire division of serenaders, he said to Chip. Then came a fleet of Opel staff cars, their gray hoods raked and winking in the sunshine, the officers holding stiff salutes against their hat brims for an imaginary audience.

  * * *

  In one touring car, Hal could see a cameraman hand-cranking footage, perched across the luggage mount from the backseat. He seemed to be filming the sanitation and signal corps as they wended through the streets. Through the viewfinder, Hal could see only a sliver of the man’s face behind the camera, darkened by the shadow of his peaked forage cap, but he noticed he was overcranking the film, which would slow and dull the march when it was eventually projected.

  * * *

  A month later, when Hal developed the reels for the Red Cross tour, he would see Claude Ballard’s face flicker into view above the luggage mount of the Opel staff car. He would make telephone calls and write letters to the American Legation, send a telegram to Chip declaring Claude Ballard officially resurrected. But for now he was oblivious, side-mouthing a comment to Chip about the amateurishness of German propaganda. He panned elsewhere, got caught up in the Škodas arriving like hundreds of telescopes craned up at the stars.

  * * *

  The road to the coast was so clogged with refugees that Hal and Chip eventually decided to leave the Berline and travel on foot. They loaded their equipment into a wheelbarrow and fell in with Flemish peasants and factory workers. The potato fields were trampled and trimmed in barbed wire, the roadsides dotted with wooden crosses. Farmers let their livestock wander across the landscape, sheep and cattle and pigs, set their houses and barns on fire as a departing gift for the Germans.

  * * *

  After two days of walking and then riding on a London double-decker bus, they arrived in Ostend, where Taube airplanes whinnied overh
ead. The pilots dropped hand-bombs from their open-air cockpits, fired their pistols at refugees as they loaded onto steamers. Hal and Chip waited for the steamer to Dover among the hordes of people at the docks. To avoid inspection on the other side of the English Channel, Hal would leave the cameras with Chip and travel with the celluloid sewn into the lining of his heavy overcoat. From Dover, he would travel to the Red Cross headquarters in London.

  * * *

  They stood saying goodbye as the steamer filled with panicked crowds. British soldiers were forcing families to leave behind their household effects to make more room on the ship, so the docks were littered with china, farm implements, chairs, wheelbarrows, carpets. Donkey carts laden with mattresses and bundles of clothes wandered along the sand dunes, unattended.

  * * *

  A cold breeze came off the North Sea. Chip blew into his hands, craned up at a droning Taube.

  —When will you go back to America?

  —Once the reels have toured England. I’d like to show them in New York and Chicago and San Francisco next.

  They stared over at the gangplank, where a crate of chickens was being passed overhead, back down to the docks.

  —I’ll make enquiries about Claude’s family, make sure they’re notified, said Hal.

  A silence settled in below the wind off the dunes. Chip saw the image of Claude’s unclaimed bones silvering and bleaching on a hillside again.

  —When Claude and I traveled out into the bush, and he was trying to get me to come to America … you know what he said about you?

  —What?

  —That he’d received a letter of interest from a gifted moving picture salesman, a Brooklyn kid who sounded like he could sell lace undergarments to a nun. He called you a salesman extraordinaire.

  Hal laughed at this.

  —Hasn’t done me much good up to this point. But who knows, this could be a fresh start. Maybe I’ll see you in Hollywood when all this is over. A burning man is always in high demand.

  Chip grinned, shook his head.

  —That last burn just about killed me.

  They both surveyed the smoking line of warships against the darkening horizon.

  —Well, do me a favor and don’t get yourself killed hauling stretchers for the ambulance corps.

  —At this point, I consider the grim reaper a little hanky I carry around in my back pocket. Pressed and folded like a church lady’s tear blotter …

  They shook hands, then Chip bundled Hal into a two-armed embrace. He could smell the celluloid and feel the heaviness of Hal’s gabardine trench coat.

  * * *

  Chip watched Hal merge into the welter of moving people and baggage. He remembered the stories of Hal hustling along Flatbush Avenue as a teenager, drawing in the noonday crowd with his banter and sandwich board signs, and he could see him clearly, this streetwise kid rocking on his heels and looking into the depths of a moviegoer’s want. Somehow he’d known the medium’s real power before Edison or the Lumières, understood that it was a silver mirror more than a big blue window. People wanted escape, sure, but first they wanted the shock of recognition.

  * * *

  Turning from the docks, Chip conjured a future for Hal in California. He settled on a new life with Hal as impresario and studio boss, camelhair collar up, double-breasted suit lapels shining under a chandelier. He saw the big sloping maw of an American automobile, the beachside house with the view, the wife from the art department or typing pool, because Hal never did have the stomach for actresses. He’d choose a girl who seemed like she could have grown up on Flatbush Avenue. When Chip imagined himself in California all he could see was the tin and cobalt of the Pacific, a return to the ocean, a meeting with Tamarama’s distant, northern cousin.

  * * *

  In the town of Furnes, twenty miles south, Chip volunteered as a driver for the Munro Ambulance Corps. He lived with a group of British nurses and doctors, but also aristocrats and novelists and painters who’d volunteered for the cause. They slept in the dormitories of a Catholic college where the classrooms were converted into wards, the cellars into operating theaters. The college professors worked as orderlies, Keats scholars and chemists cleaning grates and sweeping floors and writing letters for the wounded.

  * * *

  Chip drove into Dunkirk for the mail and to buy provisions each day before joining the twenty ambulances that left for the front at night. They gathered the wounded along the Yser River, from dressing-stations near the trenches, and brought them to the waiting ambulance trains. At midnight, the trains shunted back into Furnes with the evacuated soldiers. Red Cross orderlies unloaded the men—studded with shrapnel, gaping with wounds—and took them to the college. By the light of guttering candles, the nurses triaged head wounds, tended the shell-shocked and the frostbitten, while down in the wine cellar the surgeons removed limbs and sutured the dying.

  * * *

  When he was off duty, Chip wandered the wards to read aloud or write letters for the convalescing soldiers. The French had called up the entire empire, so that the beds were full of Senegalese and Algerian fighters, Zouaves in mud-covered red trousers and cutaway jackets. They slept on mattresses filled with straw and wood shavings, groaned from the cold in the jaundiced light of tallow candles. Chip also found his way to an orphanage where the children were cared for by nuns and a few volunteers. There was an American woman named Alice Cartwright, a teacher from Santa Barbara. After he finished playing soccer and cards with the boys, she made him cups of tea and offered him milk biscuits she’d kept aside. He brought her nosegays and cowslips, whatever still grew along the roadside ditches, bought her white cotton handkerchiefs at the bazaar.

  * * *

  He sometimes filmed images along the trenches at dawn, after he’d driven the last of the wounded from the dressing stations to the ambulance trains. He’d never had an eye for composition, but he remembered the kinds of things Claude had captured and arranged inside the viewfinder. So he filmed the Christmas Day truce, the impromptu soccer matches out in no-man’s-land, the pyramid of spiked German helmets the Belgians kept as war trophies, the fox terrier guarding the stoop of a burned-out house in a ransacked village. He adopted the dog and brought it along, to the delight of Alice and the children at the orphanage.

  * * *

  Death had always been lurking in the folds of Chip’s life—in the bearing of a stunt, in the undertow of a blunder or bad luck—but now it was something that fouled up the air. Gangrenous damp wool and cinders and trench foot. The pestilence was so potent that he often found himself smelling the hem of a laundered hand towel, or the leaves of a redwood, as a reprieve from the carnage. He would never see the human body the same way again, the heart like a big fleshy plum sitting inside a man’s chest, the ribs flimsy as a wire birdcage. Mid-morning, when he woke from his few hours of sleep after hauling the wounded all night, his first thought was of his own death. Best-case scenario, at thirty-four, he suspected he was halfway there.

  * * *

  By April 1915, the field hospital had been moved to Hooge, and Chip was all out of film. So there was no way to capture Madame Curie and her daughter walking through the X-ray department, or the miasma of the first German chlorine gas attacks, the green-white brume above the trenches. He carried a respirator soaked in hyposulphate, heard his own breathing chug when his ears and throat bloated with fear. When he proposed to Alice Cartwright at the orphanage one spring afternoon he could still taste sulfur in the back of his throat. He was swallowing and blinking back tears when Alice’s eyes came up quick and blue and hopeful from the fox terrier in her lap. War seemed to heighten and flatten romance at precisely the same time.

  * * *

  They were married the next day in a Catholic chapel in Hoogestadt, a dozen people in attendance, nurses, doctors, novelists and painters and ambulance drivers. Alice Cartwright, daughter of an elementary school principal, was married in a lilac day dress borrowed from Madame Curie. This would become the glimme
ring detail they would offer up in the many years of their marriage, the inventor of radium standing that wartime morning in the cloister.

  27

  Exile

  Sabine often thought that she had been preparing for exile her whole life. For years she’d imagined the endless white days in a stone cottage along the Brittany coast, saw herself as an old woman eating solitary meals, moving from room to room in her robe, a dog-eared novel by the bathtub. Her eventual banishment, whenever she’d conjured it, was listless, sun-bleached, and aloof. But after five years of living under an assumed name, she also understood that exile was a kind of devotion. The Catalan herder she employed to tend her sheep and orchards, in his bright sash and floppy red barrettino, lived in a cave and burned votive candles on his ancestral shrine to the Virgin Mary. In her mind, the vigils of exile—the discretion, the banking arrangements, the winter house in Barcelona—were no less devout. In order to maintain the faith, she had to uphold a body of esoteric rules and observances.

  * * *

  Claude Ballard appeared nightly in her dreams and regrets. Often, he was standing at the edge of a mountain lake, pants rolled up, his pale silvery feet immersed in the frigid water, a few trout moping through the stony green shallows nearby. Or he was standing behind his tripod on the suspended stage below the Palisades, hand-cranking his camera while a burning man dangled below a zeppelin. Her visions were animated with tigers and trains, with envelopes addressed to her in menacing cursive.