The Verdun Affair

by Nick Dybek

  “No one else is doing such work, I have to admit,” he said eventually. And then he smiled in a way he never smiled. It was a cynical smile, even a little mean. Seeing that expression on Marcel’s face reminded me that I knew nothing of what Father Perrin had told him about me, about why I had left Verdun, about Sarah. “And perhaps it will be good for me to go to Rodez,” he said. “Perhaps I’ll meet a beautiful widow.”

  * * *

  At Dijon, my train compartment emptied. I moved to the window. A white-haired man slid open the glass door as we left the station.

  “May we?” he asked, in a thick English accent. “No. No. Peut . . . nous?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “I speak English.”

  He saluted this happy coincidence with a lift of his white brows, then led his wife into the compartment. He was a small man, and she was nearly twice his size. He lifted their suitcases onto the rack with shaky arms and smoothed a wool blanket over his wife’s knees.

  “Ah, now that’s done,” he said, turning to me. “For a few hours, anyway. Not enough hours, but a few.”

  The train shook across flat fields and gentle hills. The man’s wife pulled what appeared to be a wedge of cotton from one ear and fished a brass horn from her bag.

  “My name is Edna,” she said. “And you are?”

  “Tom,” I said.

  “That’s it, young man,” her husband said. “I’m Derrick. She won’t say very much more, young man. But it’s not personal. You see, her hearing is going. She can hear some with the horn, but you can’t walk the streets of Dijon, let’s say, Tom, with a horn in your ear now, can you?”

  His face told me I should laugh, so I did.

  “That’s it, Tom. It’s not all gloomy, is it? Even in France. You must be hungry, young man. When I was your age I was always hungry.”

  I hadn’t brought a thing to eat and admitted I was hungry. He set to work emptying a basket of food, cans of pâté de canard, brown bread, soft cheese.

  I told him I was on my way to write a newspaper story in Bologna, and he insisted that Edna put in her ear horn so I could explain to her as well.

  “We’re traveling for the pure pleasure of it,” he said. “Geneva next. Might as well, shouldn’t we?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “We live in Essex, have you been to Essex? Beautiful country. The ocean is always gray, but that’s the real ocean, isn’t it, young man?”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  As we finished the canard, as Edna’s eyes closed, as her mouth dropped open, Derrick described the famous trees and bloodlines of Essex. I could have almost predicted what he would say next.

  “Yes, well, that’s always been our home. And if home becomes a gloomy place, let’s even say a sad place, you can’t just change it, can you, young man? And you wouldn’t want to, not really. But you might want to get away if you could, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes, I think I would.”

  “Oh, but put that aside. When you’re my age, you’ll want to take the waters like we do. Geneva is for that. Have you ever taken the waters? Even at your young age you’d like it.”

  “Just once,” I said, “in Aix-les-Bains.”

  I almost hoped that the son he’d obviously lost had been there too. I imagined saying, Yes, I did remember an Englishman from Essex. A wonderful fellow.

  “Now, I’ve heard it’s nice there. I have heard that.” He turned to Edna and gestured for the horn, only to realize she was deeply asleep.

  “Go ahead and lie on your side if you’re tired,” he said. “Edna will have me for a pillow over here, and I’ll manage with this blanket.”

  “All right,” I said, and I lay down. The temperature had dropped, and I fumbled with my coat and bunched my knees and tried to do as he said.

  “That’s it, get comfortable, young man.” He leaned across the compartment and smoothed the coat around my legs. “Are you comfortable? That’s it.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Now, really comfortable, young man. I mean it.”

  * * *

  Dr. Bianchi was expecting me; even so, I carried a credential and a letter of introduction from Marcel, feeling very much like an imposter. It was warm and dry enough to go by foot, and from Bologna Centrale it was only a short walk into the old city, the dull red of the stone like rust on the afternoon. As it was a Sunday, the wide Via dell’Indipendenza was closed to all but pedestrian traffic. The arcaded sidewalks along the boulevard were so crowded that within steps I’d swung my suitcase into the backs of three separate pairs of legs. I cut out into the street, but there was hardly any more room there, the crowd flowing at a languid pace no one would have dared walk in Paris.

  It seemed all of Bologna was out on the street: swarms of students in red scarves, prams shivering over the black cobblestones, men taking their jackets off in the sunlight, women donning sweaters as they strode into the shade. Later I realized no one was going anywhere in particular, having learned that the secret of Italians—their greatest strength and weakness—is that they like each other in a way the French, and especially the Americans, don’t.

  A few remaining medieval towers leaned over the red-tiled roofs. I turned onto Via Ugo Bassi, where shop windows were full of wedding dresses, yellow rolls of noodles, and big books written in Latin. I turned into Piazza Maggiore at the foot of an enormous brick cathedral without a façade. Half the old town hall’s balcony was missing—from a Fascist bomb, I later learned. Its clock face bore huge Roman numerals, and, above the entrance, a sneering copper pope blessed the Marxists at the café tables. A man in a black field coat made a speech to no one in particular from a wooden platform, asking who had brought culture to all of Europe. The Romans. Noi. Asking what thanks they had gotten for it. Niente.

  The hospital was on the opposite edge of the old town, through the university district on Via Zamboni. There, young men spilled out of cafés, chatting, or bent over books, or smoking alone. Broken glass glittered down the narrow street. In some windows, every pane was broken; other windows leered like fanged mouths; some had been boarded up, the boards pasted with posters on which Lenin and Trotsky stared into the middle distance.

  Eventually, the old walls dropped away, and the street opened into a boulevard lined with newsstands shuttered for Sunday. The hospital sat on the other side of a honeycombed terra-cotta wall. Beyond that I could see a gravel path through a courtyard lined with trees, and beyond that I could hear an invisible fountain burbling.

  * * *

  Dr. Bianchi was at least a day unshaven. His hair, graying slightly at the temples, was uncombed. He had an almost Algerian complexion and was much younger than I had expected. His few age lines danced when he smiled.

  It was late on a Sunday, and the courtyard was empty and quiet, but for the little table set with a bottle of white wine and two glasses. A strange welcome, I thought, all things considered. Bianchi handed me a glass and gestured to a chair.

  “You’ve come at just the right time,” he said. “There is no strike at the moment. And very little violence, at least in the city.”

  “I saw the broken windows.”

  “Most have been replaced, but around the university they refuse in protest.” He sipped his wine in a way that made me wonder how many he’d already had. “You are from a French paper, but you aren’t French, are you?”

  “I’m American,” I admitted.

  This seemed to make him genuinely happy. “Then I must congratulate you,” he said. “You have inherited the world. Be careful what you do with it.” We laughed. “That is why you’re interested in Douglas Fairbanks?”

  “The actor?”

  “The amnesiac. Our amnesiac.”

  * * *

  “Why do you call him Douglas Fairbanks?” I asked after he had ordered our dinner at a small restaurant a few blocks from the hospital. The tables around us were crowded with generations of Bolognese. We sat under a ceiling of kitchen smoke as old men and young boys poured wine from straw
-covered jugs. Bianchi’s eyes followed mine. It had been years since I had spoken to a psychiatrist. What would he make of my eyes? Could he have guessed that I half-expected to find a woman I knew seated at one of these tables?

  “The Sunday meal is for the family,” he said.

  “I hope I’m not keeping you from yours.”

  “No. I have a brother near, but it is difficult to see him. My parents are far away, in the south. Eating together, better food. Soon the waiter will put a bowl of tortellini in broth before me, and I will try, for you, not to burst into tears of disappointment. But I have not answered your question. It is very simple. A nurse named him. Robin Hood, you know?” He drew back an invisible arrow.

  “Does he look like Douglas Fairbanks?”

  He laughed. “He was the only American she could name. Fairbanks and Woodrow Wilson. But Wilson is not so popular now. I have to tell you, it is a pleasure to sit here like this, talking.”

  “For me as well.”

  “No. You are working. You don’t need to say that. You see, it is difficult for me here in Bologna.”

  “Is it? I’d think you could leave tomorrow if you wanted. Someone with your reputation?”

  “You’re confusing me, I’m afraid. Our hospital has a famous reputation, and there was a famous doctor who ran this hospital, Dr. Consiglio. But he was replaced. And they chose a man from as far away as possible to replace him. If you want, I’ll tell you why sometime. But that place was the Salento, and that man, as you see, was me.”

  He smiled, and indeed it was the smile of a man with too much responsibility. His eyes were bright, but the flesh around them had a bruised-fruit quality.

  “You must forgive me. Sunday is my day to drink wine. I don’t permit myself otherwise. In Leccese we’d say, la Domenica sta bau fortissimo. I go loud, or I go strong, something like this.” He pounded the table, but meekly, and smiled sadly to himself.

  The waiter put down our bowls of tortellini in clear shining broth. And huge pink slices of mortadella. I thought the food among the best I’d ever tasted. Bianchi waited patiently for me to finish.

  “You’re not too tired? I’ll take you to my favorite place to drink,” he said. “We can meet someone, if you want.”

  “Of course. Who?”

  “Another journalist,” he said. “I should have invited him to dinner, but, as you see, it is hard for me to eat this food even without an Austrian across the table.”

  * * *

  I followed Bianchi through tunnels of sidewalk, past gated storefronts and tall doors with brass nameplates and buzzers. Lampposts breaking apart the darkness, corner by corner. Graffiti slashing down the stucco walls.

  “Every street in the city center is arcaded,” Bianchi explained. “Here, you could walk for an entire day without standing in the sun. A truly stupid idea.”

  Considering how far we’d traveled, considering how many cafés we’d passed with small tables outside, I was somewhat surprised when Bianchi ducked into a narrow storefront lit well enough to see brown grease stains on the walls and spiderwebs shattered in the pane above the door.

  The mirror behind the bar was cracked, as was the glass in several shelves. In fact, there was still broken glass on the floor, and a tangle of splintered chairs pushed into one corner. Several of the remaining tables were taken by young men sitting alone, looking bitter and bored.

  “Do you like it?” Bianchi asked.

  “The décor isn’t what I expected.”

  “Décor? Yes, funny. This was once a workers’ club. Two months ago the squadristi—the Blackshirts, if you want—came to confront the men who gathered here. You understand, the Blackshirts came to intimidate their socialist enemies, but only a few of the men here were actually socialists. The others only liked to play cards. It did not matter. They were all confronted. Do you know what political confrontation today means, Tom? It means castor oil and cudgels to the little of the back. The broken chairs and glass were an afterthought.”

  “Who are these boys? What are they doing here?”

  “They wait,” he said, “for rapture.”

  “And us?”

  “We wait for the Austrian. And for the man behind the bar to sing.”

  “I don’t think I quite understand,” I said.

  “Some of the boys at the tables are communist lookouts. If the Blackshirts should return, it will not be so easy for them this time. I hope you don’t mind that I’ve taken you to quite a dangerous place.”

  His eyes and voice suggested he wasn’t serious, but I’d given up trying to tell. One of the boys did, in fact, seem to take note of us and left the café while Bianchi ordered drinks.

  “In truth, all of Bologna is dangerous right now,” he said. “One way or another I believe a revolution will begin here. What kind of revolution is the only question.”

  “What kind would you expect?”

  “The problem is that the socialists can never agree on anything. But there is no ideology to Fascism, so it is easy to get people to agree. In that way, I must admit, it is a very modern political party. Anyway, we wait.”

  We didn’t have to wait long. The Austrian came in as we finished our first round of drinks, apologizing for his lateness in perfect English. “It’s a bit hard to know where you are on these streets, isn’t it?”

  “I told Tom,” Bianchi said, “who would want to cover all of their sidewalks, to never see the sun?”

  “Aside from Germans, you mean?” the Austrian said.

  Bianchi laughed—impressed, I think—and introduced us.

  * * *

  I suppose my first impression of Paul was that he looked very German. I couldn’t have said how exactly, but I remember thinking that faces like his broadcast a terroir in the way a good wine is supposed to. At the time, not such a strange thought, as many people believed that on certain hillsides, in certain valleys, the essential German, French, or Russian character grew like grapes. A war had been fought over those hillsides and valleys, after all. Of course, the awful consequences of such thinking were only too apparent in the next several years.

  So Paul looked German. And he had a calm cheerfulness about him that is hard to fake. He said his name and we shook hands. He insisted on another round. He said that he had come from Vienna, that he wrote for a newspaper there; I didn’t recognize the name.

  “What interest do the Austrians have in our amnesiac?” Bianchi asked.

  “Well, we did it to him, didn’t we?”

  * * *

  In 1922 it was still all but impossible to have a third round of drinks without the war coming up. I bought us the third round and tried to answer their questions about Verdun but, as usual, found I couldn’t say very much without portraying my experience as something that it wasn’t.

  “I was just an ambulance driver,” I said finally.

  “As was Douglas Foulbanks,” Paul said.

  “Fairbanks,” Bianchi said.

  “He’s making a joke, I think,” I said.

  “Yes, isn’t Foulbanks a better name for a man in his position?” Paul asked.

  “Now I see,” Bianchi said. “Yes, you’re right.” But he obviously didn’t see the humor. It might have only been the drink. He hadn’t needed the second round and certainly not the third.

  “Was he an ambulance driver?” I asked.

  Paul answered instead of Bianchi. “How many other Americans served in Italy? Not many, I don’t believe.”

  “There were many Austrians, though, weren’t there, Paul?” Bianchi asked.

  Paul looked at Bianchi cautiously. “Are you asking if I served here? I did,” he said. “I was almost everywhere.”

  “Galicia?” Bianchi asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Serbia?”

  “And Montenegro.”

  “Russia?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I must ask you a question,” Bianchi said. “Where were the most beautiful women?”

  We all laughed.
r />   “If forced, I might choose Poland.”

  “Perhaps because they were the most frightened,” I said. I was channeling Sarah, but they couldn’t have known that, and the words sounded ridiculous, even alarming, as they left my mouth. Paul only smiled. He had a pleasant face, a resting expression that exuded well-being. People must either like him immediately or find him insufferable, I thought.

  “I’m afraid I disagree,” Paul said. “A happy woman is always more beautiful, at least to my eyes.” He touched my shoulder as if to show there were no hard feelings.

  * * *

  “You ask at the right time. I only talk about the war on Sundays,” Bianchi said.

  In fact, neither Paul nor I had asked about the war. Obviously, it was only a matter of time before the doctor turned sour or sullen, and neither of us wanted to give him a push.

  “On the subject of fear, everyone was frightened on the Isonzo River. My job was—I don’t know how to say it—to un-frighten them. Is that how?”

  “I don’t think there is a word for that, exactly,” I said. “Not in English.”

  “Whatever the name, it sounds like more ethical work than most did,” Paul said.

  “Yes, ethical work that I pay penance for now. Is there a word for that? There was a word for me. A name, if you want. They gave it to me in the field hospital in Caporetto. Caronte. That one I know in English: Charon. Do you know him?”

  He pronounced it Sharon. I’d learned my Greek myths from Father Gaillard. The boatman on the River Styx was named Charon in French too.

  “You couldn’t have deserved that,” I said.

  “What did you actually do?” Paul asked quietly.

  “Do you know how few psychiatrists we have in Italy? Not even two hundred. So you see, I was very important. I treated men who were compromised, suffering from hysteria and neurasthenia—shell shock—and got them back to the lines.”

  “How?”

  “Easily. I was a wonderful hypnotist, but both of you could have done my job. Truly, you could have. A man who hasn’t eaten or slept in three days, who has feared for his life for months, is very susceptible to suggestion.”