The Verdun Affair

by Nick Dybek

  “I can speak many languages,” Madame Goyas said. “It’s all the same to me. Which do you prefer?”

  “What language do the spirits speak?” I asked.

  “It’s all the same on the other side too.” Even as she narrowed her eyes they seemed huge. “I know who you are. You’ve come to discredit me, no?”

  She may have been a fraud, but she certainly wasn’t a fool. She looked from me to Sarah, those eyes asking what kind of friend I was supposed to be.

  It was a fair question. Sarah and I had eaten lunch, poking fun at acquaintances who’d buried fingernails in flowerpots and slept with photographs under their pillows. She asked me to accompany her to the séance, and only after I agreed did I realize she was serious. No matter. I’d already decided to give myself over to her wishes, whatever they might be. But now I didn’t know what I was supposed to do or say, let alone what I was supposed to feel. Madame Goyas needn’t have worried. I was a fool but not a fraud.

  “It’s right to be cautious,” Madame Goyas continued. “There are many charlatans. The dead don’t want to talk to the living. It isn’t easy to make them.”

  She gestured to the table. Window light slashed toward a basin filled with an inch or two of water. Madame Goyas stepped toward the mantel of a collapsed fireplace and lit white candles with a long match. Sarah unwrapped her candle—the duplicate of the half-burned others—and placed it in the center of the table.

  “Why don’t they like to talk to the living?” Sarah asked—skeptically? Sincerely? I couldn’t tell.

  Madame Goyas smiled and dropped the match into the basin.

  “They’re happy,” she said, “and we upset them.”

  “Heaven, you mean?”

  “There’s no heaven,” she said. “Only the other side.”

  It was obviously a show, but a good show. The show was in the poverty of the room, in its disdain for the luxuries of this side. The show was in the absence of heavy drapes, or silver bells, or crystal balls, or iconography of any kind.

  The show was in Madame Goyas’s parochial dress, modestly covering her from ankles to neck, but too small and cut for a girl, so one’s eyes adjusted to the rounds of her shoulders and hips, the swell of her breasts, as if to the dark. The show was in her body, hidden in plain sight, emanating aliveness more than sexuality. And the show was in her face, in that expression some people—powerful people—can summon. The expression that says, Yes, I understand. Father Perrin’s expression. I began to grow nervous because I feared that she did understand; I feared she understood what was happening between Sarah and me far better than I did.

  “Where are you from?” I asked.

  “France, of course. Aas,” she said. “In the Pyrenees. And you?”

  “Shouldn’t you know?”

  “Should I? Are you dead?”

  “He’s also American,” Sarah said.

  “American? I had no idea, you see?” She smiled.

  The slash of light fell from the table. Madame Goyas peered into the basin and nodded her approval.

  “The match is pointing toward Mrs. Hagen,” she said. “We should begin.”

  The match was pointing toward Sarah, directly at her, in fact. It floated, unwavering, its head splintering bits of black sulfur.

  “I ask you to close your eyes, and to put your foreheads to the table. Don’t think that I have left you. That is the one thing that will not happen.”

  “All right,” Sarah said, her voice snagging on something. This was no lark. She was nervous, perhaps even afraid.

  “But first light the candle you brought, Mrs. Hagen.”

  Sarah’s face flared yellow above the match. She put her damp hand in mine and I reached to take Madame Goyas’s hand, wide rings on every finger.

  I closed my eyes. It was too late to get away. The tabletop was surprisingly cold.

  Silence. Then Madame Goyas began to whistle. Or not quite. She began to speak. But the words, vaguely French, would phase in and out like wind whipping through branches, like the breathing of a man shot through the throat.

  “There,” she said in English. “There. Now don’t move.”

  “What was that?” Sarah asked.

  “The dialect from my village. No one speaks it now.”

  “But the dead do?” I asked.

  “I asked if you had a preference. This is my preference,” she said. “But now I must explain, Mrs. Hagen. Ask questions. Ask what you want to know of Lee. Do not speak of anything other than the questions you want him to answer. That is important. Do you understand?”

  “When?” Sarah asked.

  “I hope you’ll know.”

  For a time there was nothing to do but listen to Sarah’s breath. Then I heard footsteps. I thought someone had come into the room from behind the curtain opposite the window, but the picture of the room in my mind had broken into shards. Madame Goyas whistled again, and the sound now seemed to carry a chill. I felt drops of sweat on my neck.

  “Lee?” Sarah said.

  Madame Goyas’s fingers were stiff as the bands of her rings. Though I knew I was still holding Sarah’s hand, I couldn’t feel it. The footsteps circled the table. More drops on my neck, on the backs of my ears, in my hair.

  “Lee?” Sarah said again. “Lee. Lee. Lee.”

  Silence.

  “Lee,” she said.

  “What is that?” I whispered.

  “Rain,” Madame Goyas whispered. “Don’t talk.”

  Rain? Yes. The entire room seemed to rustle with the sound of falling water. It smelled like rain too, warm and light. My eyes were still closed, but I could see it all around us. Cloudless, wolf’s-wedding rain, with the sun shining through. The steps squeaked and slid across the floor, nimble, insouciant, a child’s. Lee. Lee. Lee. The darting tongue of the name lashed like brambles along naked legs. Lee. Lee. Lee.

  The steps were running now, not over floorboards but through wheat; there was the crush and swish of a field giving way. Birds startled in the underbrush and fluttered past my face. I could smell the ashes of an old fire, could hear the tolling of a church bell, faint and far. The footsteps skidded through a brook. The ringing fell away. But where was the question? Lee. Lee. Lee. Madame Goyas’s hand had started to shake.

  I tried to rise, and felt Madame Goyas’s grip tighten, her arm going rigid to hold me in place. I didn’t move again. The specter, the actor, the illusion—whatever it actually was—had reached a road.

  “Say something, Mrs. Hagen,” Madame Goyas said.

  “Lee,” Sarah said. “Lee, what was it that tasted like berries?” The words came out all at once. My stomach clenched. The rain shut off. Someone was coughing. Madame Goyas’s hand jerked away and I opened my eyes. The sun had faded entirely and the room was lit only by candlelight. She was the one coughing, and pink-tinged slime poured out of her mouth and down the front of her dress.

  She coughed as if she had been pulled from the bottom of the river; the slime came out in spurts on the table. I pushed my chair back. Finally, she released me from her grip and put up the hand to cover her mouth as fresh slime slid through her fingers.

  Madame Goyas shook her head as if to say there was nothing to worry about. She ducked behind the curtain and returned with a glass of water and a rag.

  “I’m sorry,” Sarah said, as Madame Goyas wiped her mouth. “I couldn’t think.”

  “No. I’m sorry, Mrs. Hagen,” she said. “You must have known. That wasn’t him.”

  * * *

  We walked back to the hotel. We undressed. We made love. Well, no, I wouldn’t have put it that way even then, but I don’t know what else to call it. The married couples I write about sleep in separate beds, after all. I take that as a good bit of fortune actually, as sex is difficult to aestheticize. It becomes funny so quickly, and there was nothing funny—or even pleasurable, in the typical way—between us that afternoon. Perhaps it’s enough to say that there was confusion in it, not the confusion of pain and pleasure you see in
dirty books, but the confusion of comfort and fear.

  Afterward, I searched for something to say beyond the obvious, but in my mind there was only blankness, and outside was her bed and her body.

  “What did the question about the berries mean?” I asked.

  “It was in one of the last letters he wrote me,” she said. “They said it would taste like berries. It doesn’t taste like berries. It doesn’t make a difference. I know it’s absurd.”

  Madame Goyas had returned half of Sarah’s money. She’d apologized. She’d said all the signs were right, but signs were only approximations, trickles of light from a buried fire. We hadn’t talked about the rain, the footsteps, the slime in her mouth. Once we left, it didn’t seem to matter whether any of that had really happened.

  “I wonder if you would have asked something else if I hadn’t been there.”

  “I don’t believe in any of it, Tom. That’s why I invited you.”

  “To prove that you don’t believe in it?”

  “Yes. But I shouldn’t have.”

  “You think I kept him away?”

  “No, but I’ll tell you what I do believe, if you really want to know.”

  “That he’s still alive?” I hadn’t realized I knew until the words were out of my mouth. I couldn’t even wish to take them back. She would have told me as much in the next instant.

  She sat up in bed. “I suppose you’ve seen this a hundred times?”

  “Actually,” I said, “if you want to know the truth, I’ve never seen anything like you.”

  She rubbed her face with the heels of her hands, looked at me from the corner of her eye, smiled with the corner of her mouth. I started to laugh. At her expression, or at what I’d said. Or perhaps at neither. I always laugh hardest when I’m not quite sure what’s funny. And she laughed too, though not as much. She understood the joke better than I did.

  “This—with you—it isn’t common for me. Suddenly I was afraid you might not realize that.”

  I touched her arm to no effect. “I couldn’t think that, not unless I was completely blind.”

  She nodded. “I suppose that’s why I bring it up.”

  The room still felt like the inside of a jewelry box. The city outside was the same dusty black. Her back curved against my palm as it had before. And yet.

  “You don’t have to go on searching,” I said. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t. But you don’t have to.”

  “You’re right, of course. But my train leaves tomorrow morning.”

  * * *

  I saw Madame Goyas once more before I left Verdun. She wore the same black dress, but I almost didn’t recognize her. Her mouth was different, her eyes different, and her bearing suggested someone younger, someone who had seen far less of the world. Her voice was different too, shy and a little wild, as she invited me to share her café table along the river.

  “You usually sit alone,” I said.

  “Since you already doubt me, what’s the harm? And I have a question that I’d like to ask you.”

  I nodded.

  “You lied to her about something. What was it?”

  “I thought you were out of character,” I said.

  “Can’t you tell a liar?”

  “Yes, I suppose.”

  “Will she forgive you?”

  “I may never see her again, anyway,” I said.

  “Really?” She showed a face unlike any I’d seen her make. It must require enormous discipline to never appear surprised. “You’d disgrace yourself for a woman you don’t hope to see again?”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t hope.”

  She poured me a glass from a carafe of red wine. I put my hand up to block the sun so I could look her in the eyes.

  “How much longer will you stay in Verdun, do you think?” I asked.

  “Until there is a better place for my work. Forever? I take great pleasure in not having to decide.”

  “I don’t understand that,” I said.

  “No. I don’t think someone like you could understand, but if I had stayed in Aas, I’d have married years ago, and then my future would be quite certain. At least for the women there every day has been identical for hundreds of years. Certainly, I wouldn’t be able to sit out at a café and share a drink with you.” She finished her glass and poured another, as if to prove the point. “Shouldn’t I make the most of the few advantages my life has offered me?”

  The river glittered in the late afternoon. A waiter whistled past. I think I wanted to hurt her feelings, to see if I could.

  “Perhaps if you’d married, your husband would have died in the war. Wouldn’t that change things?”

  She looked at me, laughter sparkling in her light eyes. “Who’s to say that’s not exactly what did happen? And who’s to say that my husband and I don’t get along better now than we ever did when he was alive?”

  “That’s right. What did you say? The dead are truly happy?”

  “No, that was a lie.” Her expression darkened, and she lowered her voice. “It used to be true, but now the dead are desperate to talk.”

  “Why is that?”

  “They don’t recognize the world they left and they come to ask us why.”

  She was a fine actress. Had she met the right person on an ocean liner she might have been famous for a little while. Once I arrived in California I looked for her sometimes in nightclubs and on soundstages. Somehow, it seemed wholly possible that I would see her.

  And a few years ago I thought I heard her on the radio in a Paris hotel. My wife was angry with me, and rightfully so. We’d taken a trip. The first time I’d been to Paris in twenty-five years, the first time she’d ever been, and I found myself desperate not to leave the hotel room.

  Faye gave up and went out to meet the Mona Lisa, leaving me alone to listen to a program about the smuggling of Jews and dissidents into Spain during the Nazi occupation. The host described the language that locals used to help the smugglers, a whistling dialect that could carry from mountaintop to mountaintop. Imagine, listener, he said in a grave and gravelly voice, that you are one such refugee, that you have been traveling for weeks. You are tired and terrified. Imagine what you see across the mountains: a peaceful valley, a huddle of buildings, and a slender church tower amid the shadows of peaks. This is Spain, this is freedom, and this is the sound that guides you to it . . .

  “What do you intend to do now?” Madame Goyas asked from her seat at the café by the river. It was the last day I ever sat in one of those cafés, I think, my last evening on the Meuse. I never went back to Verdun. I saw the completed ossuary only in pictures. An ugly thing, rising from the ridge just past Fleury near Fort Douaumont. A cold cement box with a bell tower like the hilt of a sword. According to Life magazine, the bones we’d collected had been interred finally in a basement vault, visible only through knee-level windows.

  * * *

  The end is in the beginning. Comedians have always said so, and, more recently, physicists. When Father Perrin arrived in Verdun in the spring of 1919, he called me into the office and paced in front of the big windows above the courtyard.

  “I must admit, Tom, I find it strange that you’d want to stay on here,” he said. “Brave, perhaps, but it’s a nasty effect of war that bravery—so-called bravery—is valued so highly. So let me admit to you that I’m terrified that I’ll fail at what I set out to accomplish here. You’re not French. You’re hardly Catholic, I think. Are you telling me you’re not afraid you might not be able to help?”

  He took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and tapped at the foil with one finger, frowning.

  “Father Gaillard has asked me not to smoke in his office,” he said. “You see, I’m learning my limitations. Just when I think I’ve met them all, a knock on the door.”

  “Sometimes a friend knocks,” I said.

  He nodded skeptically, as if to say that a turn of phrase was worth nothing. He sat down on the edge of the desk and arranged his face, practicing, I th
ink, for the job ahead. “My mother died when I was eleven, Tom. And this was seen as a great stroke of fortune for my family. My father saw hellfire in her eyes. Don’t misunderstand. That isn’t an expression. He saw hellfire, and dumped the water from every pot and pan in the house so she’d have no way to put it out. And also don’t misunderstand, my father was an exhaustingly ordinary man.” His expression softened, as it always did eventually. “I understand your mother is also dead. Can you tell me how?”

  I told him what I remembered. The public ward. Her yellow lips, her yellow tongue. How she had died with open eyes, how the nurse who closed them had been her high school classmate, as it happened. She smoothed my mother’s dry hair on the yellow pillow. “You know what a looker she was when I knew her?” She smiled at me. “Now she will be again.” My dead mother, the looker.

  Father Perrin touched my shoulder. “You see? You see?”

  I never fully understood what I was supposed to see, but he agreed to let me stay. And, two days after Sarah boarded the train for Udine, a day after he returned from Rodez, he invited me in and waited patiently while I poured myself a glass of water from the tray on the Second Empire desk. He poured himself a glass of wine.

  He already knew about Sarah—our affair—obviously. Still, he let me tell him in my own words. A truck pulled into the courtyard, the engine idling. A door slamming, the driver—his name was Clarence—calling to the cook with whom he often played cards to come out and take delivery of the week’s vegetables.

  Father Perrin closed the window. His right eye was fitful. He was worn out, and not just from the trip. In the two years I’d known him he’d aged ten.

  “Perhaps you think I’m partially to blame,” he said.

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “Perhaps you think you shouldn’t feel ashamed.” He swallowed some wine. “You may be right. But you should be careful. Suffering speaks a language all its own. And that language is seldom literal. Do you understand me? Do you feel ashamed?”