The Verdun Affair
Page 9
“That’s right. He was a pitcher who gave up a promising career to go to Europe to fight the Nazis. He hurt his elbow and was never able to go back. That’s part of the trauma.”
“Yes! Yes. Now how does it go? Is it something like this?” He began to play a rather mournful riff on “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
“But I think it should go back even further. He went to college at the University of Missouri. Do you happen to know their fight song?”
“I certainly do not!” Steiner shouted. And we both laughed, and drank more. I had just made up the part about the University of Missouri. I was enjoying myself. We moved back through Bradley’s past, recounting details—some alluded to in the script, some made up on the spot—and Steiner turned each detail into a line of melody. He could play anything without seeming to think at all—Tin Pan Alley, jazz, Second Viennese school dissonance—but none of the melodies were quite right for the picture, in his opinion. I had no opinion. I’d stopped thinking about the picture. The drink had worked its way behind my eyes, had made everything soft and unthreatening. I felt in that wonderful state when life seems wholly inconsequential. Pity that there are such dire consequences if one lives like that too often.
“It goes all the way back to his mother,” I said.
“Ah yes, his mother sang it. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“So a lullaby, then?” He played something soft, soothing but minor, and it was close enough. I began to sing.
I fled to the sea, the sea was too small
But I still had a ball, I still had a ball
I drove into town, the girls cried in the hall
But I still had a ball, yes, I still had a ball
I kissed my girl out in the park
There’s better light, now that it’s dark
And stumbled home at the end of the night
There’s better dark, now that it’s light
Steiner followed me the whole way on the piano, knowing just where the changes would go. I can’t say quite what I felt, or what I thought I was doing. I suppose a sense of loss often accompanies a sense of relief.
“Well,” he said, once we’d finished. “I don’t know. It is interesting, but it sounds very lonely to me. And if there is one thing a lullaby would not emphasize, it is loneliness. Do you not think? But let us play it again.”
CHAPTER FIVE
* * *
In 1918—more than two years after I’d come to France, and almost a year after I’d joined the Field Service—the United Sates Army arrived, marching past the base at Souilly in clean uniforms, laughing gleefully at their own bad French, boasting about the Boche heads that would roll.
“Hallo?” I heard a voice call one morning from the top of the stairs of my abri, the French-style underground bunker. I’d been sleeping the sleep of the dead. The man must have called and called. “Any English spoken down there?”
I’d driven all night and, as I took the stairs to the entrance, I could still feel the running board vibrating in the soles of my feet, could still hear the grind of the clutch, like the sound of a man retching. The Americans, three of them, stood in their comical helmets, dressed up as soldiers. “Sorry to bother you, friend,” one of them said.
He looked like a baby. I don’t mean that he looked merely young. I mean that he appeared to be an adult-size, rattle-and-pacifier baby. “It’s just that we haven’t glimpsed the front. We’re not sure where it is exactly,” the baby said, his English quite intelligible despite the fact his teeth hadn’t come in yet. His companions, who seemed older, but whom I couldn’t quite get to come into focus, grunted their assent.
“It seems quiet today,” I said, which was true. “I’ll take you up to Tunnel Kronprinz, if you like.”
We single-filed through communication trenches. The whole while, the baby went on about breasts, which he contended were like snowflakes, like fingerprints. Could the eyes tell the difference? Sometimes, obviously. But the mouth always could tell. Then he switched to nipples. Just in color there were endless variations: brown nipples, rose-pink, sunburn red. An 808 whistled overhead and exploded half a mile off. The two men and the baby dove onto their stomachs.
I felt disconnected from the earth and the air, from my own body—it wasn’t an unpleasant state, actually—and I didn’t understand why I’d volunteered to take these men, whether these men were even real at all. The Kronprinz was real enough, though. The Germans had dug the network of timbered tunnels and galleries when they’d held Mort Homme—an ancient and presciently named ridge east of the city—in the spring of 1916; it was a bunker so elaborate that whispers of German ingenuity even reached us in the citadel.
Perhaps they’d built it too well. When the inevitable French counterattack came, the Germans refused to give up the Kronprinz, even after they were surrounded and presented with terms. The French responded by gassing every last man inside. Later, they blasted the doors to find a labyrinth complete with lamps and fans on electric generators, gleaming surgical wards, officers’ quarters with wing-backed chairs and Persian rugs looted from fine maisons in Laon, all buried a hundred feet under the earth. A neat and useful spoil of war, but for the fact that the tunnels were also crowded with hundreds of German corpses.
Americans loved the Kronprinz, loved the idea that they were fighting on the side that would beat these ingenious engineers, that they, in fact, would be the ones to tip the balance. Even the baby drooled happily as I led him and his friends to the doors of the auxiliary tunnel.
“Should it smell like that?” he asked.
“No. But everything does.” I shrugged. “Try to get used to it. The electric lights still work. There’s a switch at the end of the chamber.”
I waited by a hunk of burned chassis as the two men and the baby dissolved into the tunnel’s mouth, leaving me to imagine their slow, stupid walk, a hundred meters through the dark, the smell thickening with each step. Leaving me to imagine them feeling along the walls for balance, suspecting that they were being had but too afraid of looking weak to turn around. The light switch really was a hundred meters or so back. I saw it flicker on. What must they have seen in that instant? Empty eye sockets. Flesh deserting bones. The image gave me no pleasure, at least I can say that. One of them screamed, then I saw them moving toward me—I say moving because I couldn’t describe exactly how—they seemed to have been spit more than anything else. And when they came out they breathed in fast and long. The baby looked at me with angry, natal betrayal, but I knew he would say nothing, lest he begin to cry.
It’s hard to keep a sense of right and wrong when you’ve lost your sense of what is real and what isn’t. But that’s no excuse. My madness was small. Small enough that I usually recognized it, and it was obvious to me even then that those boys from Kansas City and Cleveland were guilty of nothing but arriving in France a bit too late for my taste.
The morning I left the Hotel de Guise I could scarcely imagine why I had done such a cruel thing. And, as I washed, I wondered if, in the years to follow, I’d feel the same shame, the same sense of a very different type of temporary madness, for having spent the night with Sarah.
It all came to mind because I was scheduled to drive up to Mort Homme that very morning. But I’d found no bones there in months. I didn’t want to be reminded of any of it, not when I could still smell the sheets of her hotel room, her violet perfume on my skin. I realized that what I wanted most was to spend the day at a café. There was nobody to tell me not to.
* * *
I passed the old opera, where two men were hoisting a new door. I walked through the old town gates, across the drawbridge, then north along Rue Mazel, turning when I saw a pair of bright red shutters on an aching brown hinge, a cat licking its tail on the splintered sill.
On Rue Saint-Pierre the windows were polished, the woodwork stained dark. Signs had been painted on the glass in looping gold letters: a tailor, a fromagerie, a hardware store with a movie projector in the window.
“Tom,” she called. And I spun to see her standing, half-turned up the street. I waited as she hurried toward me.
“I was just surprised,” she said. “And I didn’t want you to see.”
“To see your candle?” I asked, gesturing to the parcel.
“I suppose you know what it’s for. My aunt’s a firm believer. I imagine you aren’t.”
“Well, no. Because they’re all frauds,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “Actually, I don’t know. What makes you so sure? Have you ever been?”
I knew only the names—the Madame Misteriosos, the Madame Houdinis—the mere mention of which would send Father Perrin into a rage. It was funny how skeptical he could be, except when it came to the subject of God’s word made flesh on earth.
“You must be going somewhere,” she said.
“I suppose I am,” I said.
“I want to come with you, wherever it is. Can I take your arm?”
Reality felt loose. She slid her arm into mine and we continued up Rue Lemper. The citadel was only two streets away, so there wasn’t time to say much before we turned a corner and stood before its gray stone walls.
“Did Lee ever come here? To the Vauban Citadel?”
“There was a lot he never mentioned, but I don’t think so.”
I was glad. I wanted to show her something that was mine. The citadel had been the headquarters for the general staff, and the center of life in the city during the battle. I’d spent my seventeenth birthday in its galleries, a dungeon of twisting alleys and vague green walls. The light so dim that I always felt like my eyes were just on the edge of adjusting.
The rumors in such a place were lethal. I often woke in the night to whispers running through the barracks: The Germans had taken Fort Souville. They were one ridge away, the city was lost. The roof was finally ready to collapse.
But for three years the roof held, and Fort Souville held, and, after September of 1916, the Germans never came particularly close to the city. The shelling tapered off. It must be admitted: the citadel felt safe. Something that could not be said of many places in eastern France.
The place bustled with a kind of begrudging, melancholy life. A narrow-gauge railroad clattered through the galleries, delivering flour and bullets. In the canteens, scratchy music skipped on overworked gramophones. The men had no one to dance with, but sometimes would stagger to their feet and sway as if holding some invisible love.
It was part of my job to serve these men in whose desolate eyes, in whose scraps of conversation, I found dim and horrifying hints of life outside the walls. Once, I brought glasses of water to a table of three men—fresh water was at a far higher premium than the thin wine they called pinard. Their uniforms were splattered, their lips scabbed. One of them waved me over. “Smell this cup for me, would you?” He held it out with a blistered, trembling hand, though his voice was steady. I did as he said. The water was fetid, smelling of the particular kind of decay that was all too common in Verdun, probably from a barrel contaminated by groundwater seeping in.
“I’ll get you another,” I said, “from a different barrel.”
There was a mark just below his right eye, as if from the press of a scalding thumb. He took back the cup, and sipped, and licked his lips.
“You should try this,” he said to the other two. Their blue caps were pulled low over their eyes. “I said you should try this.” He pushed the cup across the table with his knuckles. “Go ahead. It tastes just like Jean. Go ahead, tell me I’m wrong.”
The other two men exchanged a glance. One adjusted his cap, pulling it lower, as if the best answer was just to go to sleep.
“Go ahead, go ahead, it’s Jean, it tastes just like him.”
Eventually, the second of the two men took out a pack of cigarettes.
“Have one,” he said to me. “And leave us alone.”
“Should I take the water away?” I asked.
“For god’s sake, yes!” he shouted.
Those were difficult months for me, and I thought often of Chicago, of the games of ring-a-levio I’d played with neighborhood boys whose names I’d already begun to forget. I thought often of my mother. She couldn’t afford a salon, but on Sundays her friend Helene always dolled her hair. We’d ride miles down to Oak Street Beach on the trolley even though we could have walked to the beach off Sheridan Road.
Her typical answer to my complaints about the ride was that she wanted me to meet nicer children. Though, one afternoon not long before she died, she raised her round sunglasses and said, “The truth is that I met your father here.” After that I didn’t complain. I thought she meant that Oak Street was a place of special significance, that returning to the beach in the summers was a way to feel closer to my father.
But one night, when I was trying to sleep with a hundred orphans snoring around me, I realized she hadn’t meant that at all. She’d been looking for a new husband. Even though they were both dead by then, I felt as if something had been taken from me, just an impression of affection, I suppose.
Even so, compared to life in the citadel, the past felt like safe harbor, at least at first. The soldiers glowered in passageways and spat at my feet when I helped to serve the meals of crusty bread and weak wine. My French improved month by month but I never got the accent right. I worked as hard as anyone, and, eventually, the glances and jabs began to be replaced by offers to sit and talk at the end of mess. But then those soldiers would go up to the line, many never to return, and new soldiers would come cycling in, mocking my accent, pushing past me in the dim halls.
The rest of the orphans distrusted me too, but they had nowhere to go. In March, a boy named Alain whose parents had died in Fleury arrived with a shoulder wound. He refused to talk to anyone, even Father Gaillard. For days he lay in his bunk in our dormitory. The surgery on his arm was clean and he’d avoided infection, yet his eyes remained a sickly, scornful yellow.
“I have a fever,” he kept saying. “I have a fever.”
He said this for five straight days and thrashed on the bed in a strange sort of rage. He put up such a fight that Father Gaillard himself came to kneel next to him and read from The Count of Monte Cristo.
“Alain,” he said gently, “you can see what is happening here. I know you can. You can see how important it is that you live?”
“I don’t have to do anything. I can’t do anything. I’m on fire.”
“You are fine,” Father Gaillard said. “Many others aren’t, but you are.”
“I’m on fire.”
I sat with him one night, picking up the book and beginning to read—as much to prove to myself that I could as for any other reason. “How’s your fever?” I asked when I finished the chapter.
“Very bad. I don’t care if you say it’s not.”
“You might want a cold towel,” I said. “It might help you.”
He glared up at me with the yellow eyes, as if I were trying to trick him. But eventually he nodded, and I dipped a piece of a field coat we’d shredded for rags in water, and pressed it to his cool brow.
“Thank you. Why doesn’t anyone else believe me?” he asked.
The better question is why did he insist on the fever? I thought I understood. His village had been destroyed, his parents had been killed. He couldn’t possibly be fine. That would make no sense at all.
I kept the rag to his forehead until he fell asleep. And a few days later I taught him how to knead dough for the bread. How to gauge the big ovens, and set the crust, and pull the wooden peel back from the heat at just the right moment.
“Can you tell me about Chicago?” he asked one night.
I could hear the other boys shifting in the dark on their bunks, could hear the murmured conversations die. I described the elevated trains. The
downtown streets. The cold lake. They asked me about American girls, American food. Were most American men really two meters tall? Had I ever killed an Indian? Would the Americans ever come into the war?
Somehow a ritual was born. There was no one watching over us. If we wanted to talk in the electric light of our dormitory, there was no reason we couldn’t. Yet many nights we’d turn the lights off and wait until the rumble and din of the corridors and galleries had died. We would slip into our coats—old field coats, far too big for most of us—and light the kerosene lanterns stolen from the kitchen where most of us worked. We would put the lanterns against our chests and button up the coats so that only a glimpse of light bled onto our chins and mouths. We would talk.
Why go to all the trouble? Perhaps there was a reason in the beginning, but it was quickly forgotten. It was a means of granting permission, really, of confirming that we weren’t just talking. Alain described the evacuation of Fleury, Serge the fall of Ornes. Franck described his village on the edge of Lorraine, the prehistoric rock there, once a site of pagan worship. He told us how the parish priest had stuck an iron cross into the rock and how, despite the devout nature of his village, the cross was ripped down in a matter of days. Why? Because the rock was and always had been a place for bodies, not spirits. Franck himself had been pushed behind the rock with a girl from the village, and in the darkness they had found their mouths pressed together.
“And who did you tell them about?” Sarah asked me as we turned back toward the river.
* * *
In a different time and place, the medium might have been famous just for her eyes, large and shallow-water blue. She met us in the street below her flat. I’d seen her before, I realized, at a table by the river, drinking alone. I never learned her real name, but she went by Madame Goyas.
“The address is hard to find,” she said in perfect English, “so I always come down.”
She led us up a narrow staircase to a door with a glazed bowl hanging upon it, painted like an eye. Inside was the room of a pauper: a sagging table and three unmatched chairs, a cloudy oil lamp on a windowsill. The walls were bare except for a row of telegrams of condolence in French, German, Italian, and Russian. One was addressed to Mr. and Mrs. John Fields of St. Louis, Missouri.