The Verdun Affair

by Nick Dybek

  Five years later the old tables with the shallow bowls were ash. And over the years I found only a few things that might have been familiar to the mayor or the schoolteacher. A tooth of a plow. Half a spoon. Once I found a green-gold button with a glint of mother-of-pearl. I left it on a burned stump in case anyone ever came back to look.

  * * *

  I returned to the Episcopal palace in the late afternoon to find a woman in a bright blue dress. She was young. Her hair was black, or almost black. As I stood in the archway, she trailed one finger through the koi pond. I could feel the dirt beneath my nails, the sour layer on my neck. I knew, without having to look, that there was a line of sweat across my shirt like a marshal’s sash.

  “Hello,” I said in English.

  “My French is fine,” she said, looking up, frowning. “You’re Mr. Combs?”

  “I am. And you must be Mrs. . . .” I knew the name. Hagen. All day I’d imagined asking this woman to sit in the haze of the old office, to lay bare the uncomfortable facts of her life, but I couldn’t seem to get the name out of my mouth. Perhaps my tongue already understood something the rest of me had yet to realize.

  She scraped a heel, drawing a slash in the gravel—something playfully boyish in the gesture. But her face was too tense to read. “I’m almost sure I’ve mentioned my name in my letters. Five at least.”

  She smiled, not especially genuinely, and her eyes went somewhere beyond me, as if she’d passed a test and now Father Perrin would arrive.

  “How far have you come?” I asked. “Far?”

  “It feels like I did. Up from Udine—I live there, which I’ve also mentioned in several letters—through Metz. That’s France now, apparently. The railway signs are still in German, but they have a Marshal Foch Boulevard. You’re American,” she said. “You sound like it, but you don’t seem like it. Americans are generally punctual.”

  I didn’t wear a watch, and had no idea what time she had expected me. She was right, such questions were seldom asked in Verdun. Father Perrin used to say that our sense of time had been warped by proximity to the afterlife.

  “Have I kept you waiting?”

  “Long enough, yes.”

  “Long enough for what?”

  “Let me show you,” she said. “You’ll have to sit beside me, though.”

  I took a seat at the edge of the pond, the blue-gray flagstone pleasantly warm, as she undid the gold clasp on her purse. Inside, in an inch or two of water, was one of the goldfish.

  “I didn’t imagine I’d be able to catch one, but it was easy.” She laughed, as if she’d truly surprised herself. “How long do you think he’ll survive?”

  The fish flicked his tail, bulging eyes blank, mouth working on the rim of the water.

  “I’d rather not know.”

  I took the purse from her lap and dipped it into the pond, releasing the fish. I knew how she must be feeling, the long journey on the train. The confusion of the station, the arrival in such a place. And, after all, it was just a fish. All the same, I felt something close to anger. At her disrespect, and at myself for finding her disrespect even a little charming.

  “Please don’t do that again, all right?”

  “I’m not sure I could do it again. That’s why I needed to show someone.” She caught my eyes, then dropped hers, but her look was more of triumph than disappointment. As if whatever she wanted had already been denied her, just as she had expected.

  “I won’t tell Father Perrin,” I said. “He’d be upset. He’s been trying to catch one of those fish for a year now.”

  She didn’t smile. We remained side by side on the lip of the pond, the sun softening as afternoon began to wane.

  “You’re supposed to ask me questions, aren’t you?” she said. “My name is Mrs. Lee Hagen. My husband went missing in the spring of 1918.”

  * * *

  In Father Gaillard’s office, she kept glancing at the inside of her wrist, as if there were a watch to check.

  “You’ve tried all the other channels already?” It was a question Father Perrin always asked.

  She took a breath to prepare. “I’ve written the Ministry of War, the Red Cross, News of the Soldier, Search for the Missing, and many others. Last month there was a woman from an organization called Help for Families who said she had lists no one else had. Where did she find these lists? How could they know more than the army or the Red Cross? I didn’t ask until it was too late. Are you satisfied?”

  “It wasn’t a test.”

  “Perhaps everything just feels like a test.”

  “Those swindlers are the worst on earth.”

  “We can agree on that,” she said. Then she was silent. Usually there was too much to say. Each word we exchanged, though perfectly correct, felt more false than the one before. It was her voice: tired, disinterested, almost bored.

  “Do you mind if I ask why you didn’t say any of that in your letters to Father Perrin?”

  “I suppose I didn’t want to have to tell the same story again, over again, over again. It’s unavoidable, obviously. I suppose I’m tired of feeling vetted.”

  “That you deserve help, you mean?”

  “That I’ve suffered enough to deserve it.”

  More silence, sun on the back of my neck. I rose to open one of the windows. The latch was stuck, and I had to give up.

  “Have you been to France before?” I asked.

  She looked up from her wrist and smiled weakly. “It’s different than I pictured it.”

  “It’s not all like this,” I said.

  “I should hope not.”

  “Actually,” I said, “other than Paris, I haven’t seen much beyond Lorraine. Maybe it is all like this. I don’t know.”

  “Did you see much of the war?”

  “Not much, no. I worked in the citadel during the battle. After that I drove an ambulance for a year or so.”

  Her eyes darted up, and for a moment I saw something in them other than disappointment.

  “With who? The American Field Service?”

  “For a year, yes.”

  “Lee was with the AFS.”

  “Not in the French Army?”

  “No, he was attached to the 22nd Division, then he joined with the Americans when they took over the service. His name was Lee Hagen,” she said. “He was attached with other Princeton men. Did you—?” She paused. She didn’t want to appear foolish, to appear not to understand that most things in the world had absolutely nothing to do with her. All the same, she had to ask. “By any chance, did you know him?”

  “Lee Hagen,” I said. The name with its hard Germanic syllables felt strange in my mouth. She smiled at the sound of it, and, though she sat only a few feet from me, she looked like something shimmering in the heat at the end of a road. She was a beautiful woman, but to say that I was conscious of attraction or desire would be misleading. It’s better to say that I was simply very aware of her. Aware of the slashes of her gaze, the impatience of her posture. Aware most of all of her anger, which I assumed—as one often wrongly does—was directed toward me. Was it that simple? That I did not want her to be angry with me?

  “Lee Hagen,” I said. “Yes. Yes. I did know him. I think I did.”

  “Well,” she said softly.

  “Well?”

  “Did you know him well?”

  “No,” I said. “Not well.”

  * * *

  There were ripples of light on the desk, beams in the dust. Evening, the sun setting over the rubble along the river. She didn’t speak.

  “We met,” I said, “in Aix-les-Bains. On permission.” The words were already out of my mouth before I realized what a good lie it was. For a year nearly every permission had been mandated for Aix-les-Bains, near the Swiss border. It was a fifty-fifty chance that Lee Hagen had gone, and if he hadn’t the whole business would have been over. But as I spoke it appeared someone had stolen the bones from her face.

  Hardly anyone wrote to their wives about Aix-le
s-Bains because there were nice American girls there, girls who worked for the YMCA or the Red Cross, who had steamed across the Atlantic, often with their mothers beside them, to do their bit. To share news from home, to dance at the American bar, to smell of familiar soap and speak of familiar things.

  It wasn’t as if most men reported home about French prostitutes either, but they were easy to write out of the story. While days walking the lake or nights dancing with the American girls at Aix-les-Bains became the story for many. Better to say nothing to the wife still loved but unimaginably far away.

  I got off easier than most, since I had no one to tell, no one from whom to keep a secret. Still, I thought of her afterward from time to time—the girl, not older than seventeen, who’d approached me in the casino. When I arrived at the hotel I had to cut the mud off my feet with a knife. I’d been exhausted beyond words, drinking whiskey-sodas and playing cards. We talked for hours by the lake. She was from Ohio and came over on a ship called the Esmeralda. I felt soft from the whiskey. I leaned against her on a stone bench in the dark.

  “You look much too young for this,” she said.

  I tried to kiss her, and felt her lips smile against my lips.

  The particular lie came to mind, I think, because Mrs. Hagen reminded me of her. They looked nothing alike. It was a demeanor, a delicacy that seemed to suggest life was not such hard work.

  “Yes,” Sarah said. “He was in Aix-les-Bains in early 1917, I think.”

  “He seemed happy there,” I said.

  “You could tell that?”

  “I thought I could.”

  “He was already losing his mind then,” she said.

  CHAPTER TWO

  * * *

  “You won’t be too lonely, will you?” Father Perrin asked the following morning, as the car wound up the ridge on the way back to Fleury. “I leave again this afternoon.” There was thunder in the distance and a thin fog above the river, but no rain.

  “Oh yes. For Rodez?”

  “You can’t have forgotten.”

  I hadn’t forgotten, exactly, but I’d been able to consider little else besides Sarah and Lee Hagen. I had no reason to think I would ever see her again. Even so, several times in the night I’d sat down at my desk to write her a note backing away from the lie. I claimed I’d gone through my old correspondence only to discover I was mistaken: I hadn’t visited Aix-les-Bains until early 1918. It likely wasn’t her husband I’d met there after all. I was terribly sorry if I’d given her false comfort or hope.

  Had I found a way to make the words sound right, I would have sent them, but on three separate attempts the note came out awkward and cold. It was her derision I imagined, not her disappointment.

  “I have forgotten why you’re going,” I said.

  “It’s something of a secret actually. There’s a man in the asylum there, repatriated from a German camp. They found him wandering the platform at Gare de Lyon last year, almost catatonic.”

  “Do you have to go all the way to Rodez to find a man like that?”

  I expected him to laugh, but he didn’t. After almost two years at his side, I still didn’t understand what was permissible to joke about and what wasn’t.

  “This man doesn’t know who he is, and no one else seems to either. He hardly talks, apparently, but claims his name is Anthelme Mangin. Only there is no such person. There’s a similar case in Milan or perhaps Sienna, I’ve heard, but that’s the Italians’ problem.”

  “What do they want with you?”

  “Oh, these days everyone thinks someone else has the answer. Fenayrou, the doctor there, wants to publish the man’s picture in the papers. I probably don’t need to go all the way to Rodez to offer my opinion on that, but I said I would. It will rain on the way. The train will break down. I’ll sit next to a man who will want to confess all the terrible things he’s done. Maybe you’d like to go in my place?”

  I had to study his profile carefully to take in his meaning. I knew enough to suspect what he was getting at, though I wasn’t certain. “You seemed to do well yesterday,” he continued. And then I knew.

  “With Mrs. Hagen?”

  “Indeed. She sent a note last night. If only she had told me before about her husband. Now I have no time to see her before I go.”

  “It turns out I knew him vaguely.”

  “So she said. A surprising coincidence, I thought.” His eye twitched, but his eye always twitched. The rain had begun, and through the scrim on the windshield the rolling fields looked even more like waves. Father Perrin pumped the lever to wipe away the mist. “As it is, she’s asked to see the provisional ossuary. Since I won’t have time to speak with her, I have a mind to say yes.”

  “I could show her, if you like,” I said.

  “She’s the one that would like. But perhaps you have other responsibilities today.”

  “Always. But I’ll be in Fleury anyway.”

  “Fine. She must be used to getting her way no matter what she says or how she acts. Probably she comes from some money, which is a curse in a case like this.”

  “What else do you know about her?”

  “Her French is very good.” He sighed and brushed his hand across my shoulder. “And I’ll see you in five days, my friend.” I could tell he wanted to rest his hand there for a moment longer, but the windshield turned opaque, and he had to pull the lever on the wipers again.

  “I’m so tired of all the rain,” he said. “If only this Mangin could have found himself an asylum by the ocean.”

  * * *

  We’d been over Fleury and almost every other inch of battlefield many times already, but it seemed each time I returned, there were more bones. Father Gaillard had said my grandchildren would still find bones in Verdun—we just needed to ensure that they find as few as possible.

  It was lonely work, certainly, but I wasn’t always alone. Tourists began to arrive before the war was even over, filing through the streets in solemn groups. Soldiers in wheelchairs waited under melted streetlamps, pointing the way to the next site of mourning and triumph. Here was Vauban’s citadel, where Pétain and Neville strategized the first creeping barrage. Here was the Voie Sacrée—the sacred road—from which poured the matériel that would save the city, the war, the nation. After the armistice, the tours leapt into the battlefields. To Father Gaillard and Father Perrin, visiting Verdun or Artois or Chemin des Dames was something near to a civic duty. The battlefields would be gone soon enough, overgrown, cleaned up, and then what? Were we to expect people just to remember?

  The previous spring, boys from a Catholic school in Tourcoing had spent their vacation on bicycles, helping to collect the bones. The young priest who accompanied them spent much of the time drunk in his tent. In his absence, I helped the boys gather bones in baskets. I walked them to the provisional ossuary like a crossing guard, though they weren’t many years younger than I.

  Some of these boys worked like the devil, keeping their eyes on the ground, holding the bones as if they were fragile things still in need of protection. These boys knew not to smile or laugh much. To turn away at the jokes of their friends. Some of the others sang songs to pass the time, and talked about schoolwork and the Sainte Roseline girls on the other side of their town.

  Once, one of the boys picked up a leg bone from the mud, and stroked it as if it were his penis. It took the others a moment to laugh, and a less determined comedian might have given up. But when he began to moan, to lick his lips, the crowd that had gathered broke into chuckles. They laughed hard when the bone broke apart in his hands and he said, in mock horror, “My god, Father Soucy warned me this might happen.”

  Some of the boys looked to me as if I might punish him. But punish him how?

  Of course, many of them were scared out of their minds. They refused to ride the bicycles unless the asphalt was new. And, though it was safe enough as long as you knew what you were doing, they had reason to be cautious. If you did something foolish like pick up a grenade,
then perhaps you deserved what you got.

  * * *

  I headed east past the site of Fleury’s old train station, the only remaining section of track curled up at one end like a sneering lip. There were small yellow bones in the dirt. I put them in my bag.

  I walked another forty steps before finding much else, all the while feeling Mrs. Hagen’s gaze on my face as I said her husband’s name. Then, in a shell hole flooded from the rain, I found half a skeleton, mud clinging to the ribs. I knew that I should scoop up the bones and push them into the sack, to dismantle the image of the buried man. It was possible to forget a few pieces of white-yellow carbon. But the skeleton had a face.

  I began to wonder—as I often did—if I would have recognized the man’s real face. Had this man taken permission in Aix-les-Bains, as I had, as Lee Hagen had? Surely, whoever he was, he had stumbled down the corridors of the citadel at least once. Perhaps he had died with some of the bread I’d baked in his pocket.

  Perhaps he was the man who’d kicked me in the hip in the canteen when I didn’t understand his French, the man who swore at me in wine-scented shouts as I lay there, too ashamed to move. Or perhaps he was another man, the one who pushed that first fellow away and helped me to my feet.

  Let’s say he was the second man. Let’s say his name was not Lee, but Martin. Let’s say he grew up in Jura, became a stonemason. Let’s say he had a mother and three sisters but no wife. And let’s say that his mother had come down from the mountains in black, begging Father Perrin to explain what had happened to her son.

  There really had been such a woman. She’d arrived at the Episcopal palace in October of 1919 without writing first and apologized to Father Perrin, explaining that it was difficult for her to write, that she’d only just learned. She explained that during the war, she’d begged the postman in their village to teach her, because she’d been ashamed that she wasn’t able to send mail to Martin. It had taken her months, even though she stayed up half the night practicing. Too long. Because when she finally had a letter to send to her son the only response was a notice from the Ministry of War.