The Verdun Affair

by Nick Dybek

  The cook walked out into the courtyard, shading his eyes. He accepted a cigarette, as the truck continued to idle. If I could have met Sarah in a hotel in Aix-les-Bains or in a train station in Chicago, I would have. But I would not have changed anything else.

  “You’re saying she may not love me,” I said. “But I didn’t say she did.”

  “Am I still managing to overestimate you? Didn’t you at least do this because you thought you were in love?”

  He lit a cigarette and smoked it in three draws. The cook, Michel, laughed over the grind of the truck and said, “Too true, too true.” The room reeked of smoke and exhaust. Father Perrin’s eyes were red and didn’t seem to see me. My eyes burned.

  “I have pity for her, for Mrs. Hagen, for all of them—all those that come here, you know that. But I have to admit to you: pity is difficult to maintain all of the time. Especially when I can see in each face the same wish: if only it could be someone else. What I mean is that the grieving are just as selfish as the rest of us, perhaps more.”

  “You’re saying that . . .”

  “That, in my experience, suffering does not bring sanctity. What I mean to say is that you don’t believe in God, I suspect, though I know you wouldn’t tell me. So, if the world is all atoms and void, who could begrudge you a few unclaimed atoms that might lend some comfort? Who could begrudge her? Only I don’t believe this will bring any comfort to you, Tom. Not in the end. Perhaps that is why I’m so upset.”

  “Too true, too true,” Michel shouted again; this time, Father Perrin tapped the window. The two men threw down their cigarettes and set to work.

  “No, that’s not entirely true, Tom. I’m upset because you were wrong. Very wrong. And it was a mistake from the beginning to put you in such a position. It was my mistake. Just explain to me what you were thinking. How you justified this—what can I call it?—a romance, a dirty weekend? Just tell me that?”

  I don’t think he expected an answer, though he certainly deserved one. He’d shared wine grown in vineyards around his village in Languedoc, and admitted to me he was once so poor that he stole those same grapes for food. He told me he hadn’t heard piano music until he was seventeen and had just arrived at the seminary in Toulouse. At first he mistook the sound for rain.

  “I’ve never understood why he doesn’t turn off the engine,” Father Perrin said. “I hate to have to talk to him about it, but I suppose I will.” He waved his hand through the cigarette smoke, as if to say that was all.

  “At least she wasn’t French,” he said, and smiled sadly. “No. I shouldn’t joke. I won’t tell Father Gaillard. Rather, I’ll tell His Grace you decided it was finally time. I’ll say we decided. And, once you are gone, no one will remember what you’ve done. I will. But only because you’re my friend.”

  He rose from the desk. I looked up to see Michel carrying a box of mirabelles past the windows. One fell, and Clarence picked it up and pretended to throw it at the back of Michel’s head, laughing to himself.

  “Do you know,” I said, “do you know that I found Mrs. Hagen sitting on the edge of the pond? Somehow she’d caught one of the fish in her purse. It was the strangest thing.”

  Father Perrin opened the door to the hall.

  “Why do you tell me that now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Because I promised her I wouldn’t.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  * * *

  In Paris, I took a room on Rue du Temple, next to a building being gutted at double-time. The work began each morning at seven, hydraulic drills and hammers smashing away at the bricks and beams. On weekend mornings when the work ceased, I’d wake to the sound of a tambourine. From my window I could see a dark-haired child, perhaps a year old, standing up in her crib, dancing to the jangle.

  The room itself smelled like cat spray but got good light; if the windows were open, there was nothing to complain about. Of course there were bugs in the wallpaper that came out at night. As my neighbor pounded on his wall, they would migrate in ripples down mine. Or perhaps I only dreamed that. In Paris, I mostly slept well.

  There was hammering—typewriters all morning, the press in the back room all evening—in the small office I shared with seven other men at the weekly newspaper, La Voix du Soldat. Father Perrin had made one call, and the job was mine. In certain circles, it seemed, he was almost a celebrity. Marcel, La Voix’s publisher, asked me timid questions about him, and from the first day treated me with a deference I certainly hadn’t earned.

  It was a relief to find that the job for which I’d been hired—assistant classified editor—required little more than cleaning out a mailbox, writing up a bill of sale, and typing up a notice. Anyone could have done it, but I appreciated the continuity with my old work; at least I never began to feel that the world was a decent place where people weren’t suffering.

  Looking for any news about Pierre Barcolle. Disappeared in the Champagne sector, in February 1917. Last seen on patrol on the night of the 17th during a gas attack. Please write with any information.

  Or:

  Please! Does anyone know the whereabouts of Michel de Parne? Taken prisoner in the Konstanz camp in 1916. Caught typhus but was later said to have recovered. Loved Arsène Lupin. Loved still by wife and young son.

  We charged little for the ads, but—since so few had money to spare, or had already spared what they could on less desperate methods—their writers tried to work in every possible detail with every centime. “Lved B. brds,” one said. But what was B? Blue? Baby?

  The irony was that we charged by the word, not the letter, so the abbreviations saved no money at all. Sometimes, I tried to change abbreviations to words, though I was always afraid of getting something wrong. It was difficult to think of the men and women who had written these notices deciding on the detail that would best represent an entire person. All the more so because, by late 1921, those details were almost certainly useless. The mass graves were all exhumed, the last prisoners repatriated, the names already chiseled on memorials. And the memories of the living—compromised from the start—were fading by the day.

  Otherwise, our weekly covered whatever news might be of interest to veterans. And Marcel was smart enough to know that there were many voices of the soldier—some hopeful, some bitter. We published updates on the innumerable memorial projects in Toulouse, Nantes, and every other corner of the country. We published stories about masons rebuilding Amiens; hoisting stone blocks, too heavy for shaking hands. We published stories about the splinters in the hands of boatmen returning to work in Brittany, their palms actually softened by the war. We wrote of women in the Rhône valley, returning to the home after years in munitions factories—the yellow of the nitric acid having faded from their skin and hair, but not their taste for independence. We wrote of men who’d never be able to work again—missing hands, missing half their minds—who scraped by on disability pensions that were hardly enough to support a family.

  But no matter what else we published in the fall of 1921, we always made space for the story of Anthelme Mangin, the amnesiac of Rodez. The same man Father Perrin had gone to visit the day after Sarah arrived in Verdun. The amnesiac, as he was known, had become a sensation in France that fall. The doctors at Rodez, against Father Perrin’s advice, had asked that his picture be published in the major newspapers. The story had stunned the nation and delighted editorialists. Was this the luckiest man in Europe? they asked. The only man free of the chains of history? Or was he the inevitable omega of Europe’s most shameful moment?

  More importantly, who was he, really? The doctors at the asylum in Rodez were flooded with letters—from wives and parents who hoped against hope, and against reason too. By the fall of 1921, three women had put in legal claims on Mangin, and the claims of countless others had already been discredited. There were many times I wanted to write to Father Perrin, to ask his opinion on Mangin, to ask his opinion on many questions.

  Instead, I worked. I typed up the advertisements,
set them, calculated the price, and moved on to the next until evening came and I left for the Chevalier Vert, a café with Sir Gawain painted on the window glass.

  Marcel had introduced me to everyone at the Chevalier Vert and welcomed me to his tab. I shouldn’t have taken advantage as much as I did, but I got the impression he’d been waiting for a friend to drink with for years. And, like many people just starting out, I felt the world owed me more than I’d received.

  Marcel must have been in his mid-forties, but he had that childlike quality of men who never marry. He could talk articulately about a great many subjects in both English and French. But around women he became deathly shy and drank too much.

  “I’ve done many things to make myself a better match,” he said. “Before, I had a terrible flat. I had a terrible tobacco habit. I had terrible manners. I changed all that. But still, no luck. And then, miraculously, my odds improved. It was as if all Europe got together and said, Isn’t it time that we got Marcel Sirac married? But what can we do to improve his chances? Aha, I’ve got it, the kaiser said. But still here I am with you. Not that you’re bad company.”

  I tried to help, but when I invited women to sit down at our table, when I began to boast about Marcel and the important work he was doing for France, he went almost catatonic. Once, he even pretended he’d fallen asleep.

  * * *

  Other nights, Marcel took me to the cinema. Though I’d been to the nickelodeons in Chicago before the war, with their sticky chairs and signs saying “Stay All Day,” I never much wanted to stay. But, in Paris, for the cost of a drink, you could take a seat in the Gaumont-Palace near Place Clichy, with its blazing marquee and velvet seats, and listen to the orchestra tuning up. And then the lights would go down and you would be somewhere else entirely, in Spanish California with Zorro, in the lair of Dr. Mabuse. And nothing that happened on the screen mattered unless you wanted it to.

  After I’d known Marcel for a few months, after I’d shown him that his small secrets would be safe with me, he said, “I’ll show you what cinema truly is.”

  I followed him to the café in the Latin Quarter that had been his Chevalier Vert before the war. He bought me a coup de rouge and ushered me to a back room smelling of bicycle grease and scattered with kitchen chairs. They’d fancied the place up with old cognac ads in which a cat in a suit and tie holds up a snifter. On the far wall a bedsheet hung from a clothesline, and, on the other end, a man with the shoulders and beard of a Viking smoked a pipe and prepared the film on a hand-crank Cinématographe from the early years of the century.

  “That’s Loti,” Marcel said, pointing to the man, pointing me to a seat. “Watch him. I want you to watch how fast he cranks the film. Pay very close attention.”

  The back room filled with a small and run-down crowd. A man sat down to a half-tuned piano and began to plink. The film started. A series of reels starring Max Linder. I’d seen one or two before in the citadel, the screen glimpsed through kepis, the soldiers mostly too tired or frightened to laugh.

  Now the prints were scratched and faded, bearing the scars of a thousand performances. And the frames flew by: Linder lying down by the fire to find his shoes smoking, attempting to clean his bedroom window and finding himself hanging from the ledge. All in a herky-jerk, out of step with the ragtime piano. When the lights went up and we walked out, Marcel asked me what I thought.

  “Too fast,” I said.

  He nodded. “I thought so too. But I never know if it’s my imagination. It means that Loti is back together with Marie. It means he’s eager to get home. She is the most beautiful woman in the world.”

  “She used to be yours?” I asked.

  “Almost. Very nearly. Not quite. Now you tell me. Who is it you dream about?”

  * * *

  On the morning Sarah was to leave Verdun, I’d slipped from her room while she was still asleep. I’d had coffee on a silver tray in the lobby; the waiter charged it to her account without asking. I’d returned to the Episcopal palace to work, sorting correspondence for Father Perrin’s return. Her train left at noon. Verdun to Metz, Metz to Zurich, Zurich to Milan, Milan to Udine. I’d never watched a woman other than my mother pack a bag.

  At 9:30 I washed my face, wishing for colder water. I went to the kitchen looking for someone to talk to. I ate a chunk of stale bread. I watched the fish in the pond. So this is life So this is life. The sky looked like a sponge poised to wipe out the earth. The flat stones laid along the walk whorled, fossil-like. I’d never noticed.

  I started back toward the hotel, hoping it wasn’t too late. It started to rain, then stopped. There were Italians along the river, but they didn’t look up. My nerve had dissolved. Once I arrived I was too embarrassed to ask the clerk to let me up to her room.

  I had another coffee and paid for it myself. Her luggage came downstairs at eleven. She followed five minutes later. When she saw me, leaning in the doorway, she didn’t quite smile.

  “Will you come to the station?” she asked.

  The same car that had taken us to Bar-le-Duc, the same driver. The light outside was hard, and the car’s shadow reached halfway across the street. Doors slammed. She touched my hand while watching the ruins through her window.

  “Would you come with me to Udine?” she said. “I’d buy your ticket right now.”

  “Would you like me to?”

  We crossed the river and turned on Rue des Capucins. A man in the middle of the street was bandaging his sheepdog’s paw. The driver honked, and the man looked up from the greasy fur, startled.

  “We don’t have long to decide,” Sarah said. “If this were a few years ago I’d have asked if you loved me.”

  I would have told her I did love her if she’d asked. It had only been two days, but I knew something had changed because I’d never felt so desperately alone and I didn’t know what else to call that. But she meant that love was beside the point. Maybe it was the point once, the way that salvation was once, but not anymore.

  “I’ll write to you,” she said.

  The train station was new, rebuilt from scratch and painted a dull brown. The lobby was empty, the ticket window shuttered for lunch. And under the low ceiling already bearing smoke swirls, I was reminded how little Verdun actually mattered. They build beautiful monuments for concepts, but beautiful stations for places. And here there were no trains running west, not even to Paris, and the trains to the east terminated in the new French city of Metz.

  * * *

  At first, I hoped Marcel might hand me a perfume-scented letter. I imagined I might find an envelope addressed in her hand among all the other envelopes in the morning’s post. I imagined that she might arrive at the office purely by chance, having come to post an ad in person. Or that she might arrive having given up on Lee, having returned to Paris to find me. I imagined her eyes snapping open in the middle of the night, certain of her mistake.

  If she’d written to me care of Father Perrin—and perhaps she had—he’d forwarded nothing. I couldn’t bring myself to write him to ask. The shame had time to gather. I dreaded his letter almost as much as I desired hers. At the same time, I thought of him often; I thought especially of what he’d said that final day in the office. The language of suffering is seldom literal. Certainly I wasn’t the first person caught between desire and shame, but that knowledge was of no help.

  I could only imagine how Sarah and I might meet again: at a bookstall by the river as we both reached for a copy of Le Matin. As the only two people crossing an empty square at midday or midnight. The Eiffel Tower was involved, as were the Luxembourg Gardens and Les Halles, and many times I thought, Imagining the blooms in the Tuileries is the only thing that will get me through the fall.

  One should probably not trust feelings in need of landmarks. Or perhaps the problem was that, in Paris, dreams that might have felt particular seemed only reiterations of someone else’s. Verdun—now there was a place to fall in love in the twentieth century.

  * * *
<
br />   And then she did write. The letter did arrive with the mail at La Voix, in a light blue envelope that was somehow exactly as I’d pictured it. I ripped it open, which was wise because, as it turned out, there was little to savor.

  After turning the piece of hotel stationery—the Unita in Trieste—over in my hands several times, I did my best to forget everything I’d read. Within a day I knew it almost word for word. The letter opened with pleasantries—she was human after all—and then:

  I’m glad, very glad, that you didn’t come with me. To have allowed that would have meant to lose all hope. That’s no way to begin with someone. And, frankly, I fear it was only hopelessness that made my feelings for you possible. Quite honestly, there have been times when I have felt ill used by you. But I know that’s only my own guilt, and that you did nothing I didn’t invite. I don’t claim to know the future, and, sometimes, I imagine one in which you take part. I do indeed care for you. I would indeed like to see you again. The truth is, though, that I would need to be another person entirely to ever fully be with you. And, given how we met, I believe you might need to be a different person in order to fully be with me. Nevertheless, know that I’m not sorry about anything. Stay my friend. I owe you a great deal, I really do.

  Also, I would not have had the happy news I’ve just received, which I owe at least in part to you. And to Father Perrin, especially. He wrote to me soon after I returned to Udine to put me in contact with a priest here in Trieste who has put me in contact with a new group—that is, a new organization looking for the missing. There are Austrian archives on prisoners of war that have only just been discovered. This is a very real thing, Tom! And there is a Hagen who showed up in one of the camps near Graz in the summer of 1918, just months before the armistice! That’s all I know for now. But the world is completely different. You can tell, probably, how hopeful and stupid I am, but I’d rather be humiliated than hopeless. I know how it sounds: facile, clichéd, foolish. But I wonder if it’s fair that we associate those words with the things we say when we are happy. I wonder if I care.