The Verdun Affair

by Nick Dybek

  “Please, the point, Mr. Fairbanks,” Bianchi said. The man’s eyes slid to it. “Can you see the point?” Bianchi’s voice was almost narcotically kind. The light from the high window roared in. Fairbanks bridged his hand over his eyes.

  “You are on stairs,” Bianchi said. “The stairs lead into water. Please walk down the stairs into the water.”

  “I am,” Fairbanks said.

  “The water is unlike any you know. You can breathe and still feel the warmth of the sun, no matter how deep you go. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Fairbanks said. And I understood too. I thought of the newly literate mother from Jura who had come to Verdun with stories of magic boulders and mountain lakes.

  “Let yourself sink into the water. Down. Now farther down. Now farther. Say my name if you can still hear my voice.”

  “Bianchi,” Fairbanks said. His eyes were closed. The tremor was in his voice as well as on his cheek.

  “Bravo. To begin, might you tell me about a time in your past when you were happy?”

  Fairbanks said nothing. His face showed nothing, and I’m not sure I’d ever watched a man’s face so intently. Bianchi’s pen scratched in the silence.

  “You must not worry, Mr. Fairbanks,” he said. “I am not disappointed. Just tell me what you see now. What is before your eyes?”

  “The lock is high up,” Fairbanks said after a moment. “I have to reach with the key.” Was his accent American? Perhaps, but the voice wavered and shook. The window light blasted across his mouth. He was missing most of his lower teeth.

  “The lock to what?” Bianchi asked.

  “The front door,” he said.

  “Why do you say the front door?”

  “There’s a back door too. I have to lock it too.”

  “Naturally, if you must,” Bianchi said.

  Outside the hospital room, nurses crossed in white flashes. The flowers smelled like a trap, honeyed bread in the heat. The living are not meant to be surrounded by so many flowers. Fairbanks locked the back door; he had to reach up for the lock again.

  “Do you see anything else in the room?” Bianchi asked.

  “There are jacks on the floor.”

  “A ball?”

  “It rolled away. But I don’t have time to find it.”

  “No? Why is that?”

  “I need to lock the windows.”

  “If you want, please. Where are the windows?”

  “Upstairs.”

  Fairbanks’s voice warbled up the stairs, and I thought of a night during the war when I’d sat down beside a French girl at a bar. Everyone else had gone home, the waiters were stacking the striped wicker chairs, and I thought perhaps she’d stayed for a reason. But when I introduced myself she answered only by wetting the tip of her finger with her tongue. Then she circled the rim of her glass—the wine inside was so pale that perhaps it was only water—until the glass began to emit a warbling, shrill tone.

  In Fairbanks’s hospital room, that memory was suddenly so vivid I could smell the grease of the girl’s lipstick, and I had to scribble in my notebook to return the feeling to my hands. Meanwhile, Fairbanks described the room he saw. Naked windows, closed but unlocked.

  “What is outside the windows?” Bianchi asked.

  “Night,” he said.

  He locked the windows one by one, five in all. It was difficult because he had to climb onto the sill to reach. Then he continued upstairs.

  Bianchi’s pen scratched, the dry sound of it more unnerving in its way than the image of the black windows in the empty house. Bianchi’s face was unreadable. Paul had pushed his chair back into a corner, and he was blinking as if into the light. Three faces, and I didn’t know what to make of a single one.

  The tremor in Fairbanks’s cheek traveled to the lines around his eyes, and across his forehead. His shaking voice was picking up speed, his breathing coming faster and heavier—I could almost hear his footsteps on the stairs, faster, heavier; I could almost hear those footsteps moving through the blank rooms, past blank doors. I glanced once more at Paul. He was shaking his head, slashing his pen at his notebook.

  “I have to climb onto the sill,” Fairbanks said. “I lock the first window.”

  “How many windows this time?” Bianchi asked.

  The patient’s mouth spasmed, his shoulders collapsed. He made a terrible sound—part gasp, part shriek.

  “What did you see?” Bianchi said, his voice not quite alarmed. “Something at the window. An explosion?”

  Fairbanks was crying, strange sobs falling from his half-ruined mouth.

  “No. No,” he said. “A lion. A lion’s face at the window.”

  * * *

  I hadn’t thought of the French girl with the wineglass in years. I was on a repair detail in her village near Reims for weeks afterward, and I thought I might see her again in the café, but I never did.

  Once, after I had moved to Los Angeles, I saw a woman on Montana Boulevard dragging burned curtains across an intersection. Knowing full well how she might interpret my offer, I asked if she needed a ride. We drove to a professional cleaners that she thought—wrongly, I imagine—could help her. She offered polite responses to my observations about the weather.

  “Obviously, I set them on fire,” she said eventually. “But I didn’t mean to. I only wanted to burn her letters, especially her stupid poems.”

  My car smelled of kerosene for days, but I never saw her again either.

  On the afternoon that Fairbanks saw the lion at the window, Paul raced from the hospital to type and file his story. But I walked from Dr. Bianchi’s office at a pace that seemed right—a slow pace—thinking of the lion’s face; and the face of the woman in the bar; Bianchi’s face, full of something resembling love as he calmed Fairbanks, as he congratulated him on a job well done.

  Outside, the fountain burbled, and an issue of Avanti crackled in the breeze, and Sarah was standing in the courtyard. I saw her in three-quarter profile. I saw her wearing an appropriate black dress. I saw her raise her left hand, touch her ear. I saw her a moment before she saw me, and another moment passed before she recognized me, which gave me the chance to arrange my face into a look of surprise.

  She looked the same as she had in Verdun, exactly the same, which, I suppose, did surprise me. I thought her hair might fall past her shoulders instead of just to her shoulders. I thought her eye shadow might be a tick more blue. I thought there would be some tiny change, visible only to me.

  I crossed to her, passing the mothers and the mental patients. She looked at me just as she had when I’d last seen her. It seemed a long time ago, and yet, there it was: that same wooden expression, still but not serene; trapped.

  “Don’t explain why you’re here,” she said. “Not yet.” She took my arm, and we walked into the old city.

  * * *

  We found a café near Piazza Maggiore: red brick, gray birds. She put her hat on an empty chair. We looked out at the square in the throes of midday desertion. The big doors of the cathedral swung shut. A fruit cart rolled away. A young girl crept after it, storing dropped grapes in the hem of her dress.

  “I didn’t think it was actually possible to be speechless,” she said. “But truly, I’m finding words hard to come by.”

  “Why don’t we try something simple? To talk about, I mean.”

  She took a breath. “This is a nice enough city. But it needs a river.”

  “Dr. Bianchi told me there were once canals from the Po, but they were built over. Apparently you can still see them in a few places.”

  “That might be something to do one day,” she said. “If we’re bored.”

  I studied her face, afraid I’d misunderstood. She sipped her coffee and looked at the birds. I could almost see her trying to believe in me. A very pleasant feeling, as it happens. “All right,” she said. “Now I think it’s safe to tell me what’s become of you.”

  It was easy to tell her. In Paris, I had often imagined she would even
tually ask such a question: my quartier was in the Marais, my office near the Palais-Royal. The city, though far bigger than Verdun, was still oriented on a river; there was still a right bank, still a left.

  Most days, I told her, I’d eat lunch on a bench in a little courtyard off Rue Sainte-Anne. There, I’d always find cigar butts between the cobblestones. I always wondered who the man was, how he sat where I sat nearly every day without my ever seeing him, how city life meant sharing space with the unseen.

  “What I like most about the story,” she said, “is that it could have been a woman. In almost every other city in the world you’d assume it was a man, but not Paris.”

  “What was your brand?”

  “I don’t happen to smoke cigars,” she said. “Did that miserable paper really send you here?”

  “So you do know why.”

  “It took me a moment to put it together. You remember that I wrote you there.”

  “I haven’t forgotten that. But I don’t think it’s so miserable. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised you know it.”

  “At one point I likely even knew the editor’s name.”

  “Marcel certainly knows your name. I spoke of you often.”

  I signaled the waiter for the check with a swirling pantomime she laughed at and imitated. We drifted through the shuttered arcades near the square. Newsstands closed, butcher shops closed, fishmongers closed, the streets still a wet pink below the cleaning tables.

  The group she had met in Trieste—the group she’d mentioned in her letter—had turned out to be something more than swindlers, but something less than the miracle workers for which she’d hoped. The records they’d found for a considerable sum were incomplete, and, though Lee’s name had appeared on an intake list in the summer of 1918, the corresponding identification number didn’t match.

  Far more troubling was the fact that, for the first time, she found herself too exhausted to contemplate the possibilities. She’d been on the verge of leaving Italy many times. On the verge of returning to Paris. On the verge of returning to America. On the verge of missionary work in the South Seas. On the verge of giving up.

  We seemed to be wandering aimlessly, though I already had a sense of the streets. To this day, there isn’t a city I know that feels more desolate than Bologna when the shops are shuttered.

  “My imagination,” she said, “is destroying my life. I can imagine anything, and I can do nothing.” Well, not quite nothing. She still followed all the papers and bulletins. She still wrote patient letters of inquiry to the few prisoners in the Austrian camp whose names she’d been able to learn. But was that pure inertia? Would she know Lee now to pass him on the street? Of course she would, but the very fact that she could ask the question terrified her.

  “Then you heard the amnesiac here might be an American?” I asked it like a question, but how many times had I imagined her coming across the item in the bulletins, her face flushing with hope?

  “I did. And I was excited. But only because—for a few days, anyway—there would be something I knew to be the right thing to do.”

  “How many days?” I asked.

  “Well, I arrived this morning to find that he isn’t even allowed visitors. The nurse I spoke to said it may be weeks before I can see him. But perhaps that’s for the best. Fate or not-fate, as it were.” She took my arm at the elbow with gloved fingers. “When I asked you before what’s become of you, I thought you’d know what I meant. And perhaps you did, you just don’t want to say. Did you fall in love?”

  I thought of the Americans in the Chevalier Vert, Rose’s long hair, the bright river at night, the darkness of narrow streets in the afternoon. The answer was: almost, but not quite.

  I pointed up at the dark green shutters on the second floor of the hotel.

  “This is my room,” I said.

  * * *

  We kept the shutters closed. In the dim light she lay on her stomach and I watched her shoulder blades as she breathed.

  “It’s hard to believe,” she said.

  “I know,” I said, but really everything that had occurred that day—finding her in the courtyard within the sound of rushing water; our walk through the empty city and the near wordless way we’d gone up to my room and undressed—was so like I had imagined it, as to take on a sheen of déjà vu. Getting what you want, however improbable, is almost never a surprise.

  “What I’m surprised by is how I feel seeing you.” She flipped over and sat up in bed. There was sweat on her forehead and around her mouth. I’d never been with her, or with any woman, in the daytime, and I wanted to open the shutter, to see what she looked like in natural light. Under the sheet I could see her legs crossed at the ankles. She placed a pillow in her lap, resting her elbows. “I’m going to embarrass myself, but what’s the difference? I tried to convince myself not to come to Bologna at all. It’s not possible—no, it’s possible, but it’s certainly not healthy—to keep hoping to find Lee like I have. I know that. I mean to stop. I’ve meant to for a long time. But do you know what I felt when I recognized you? Joy. Honestly, joy. I came here looking for that feeling, and there it was in your face. Isn’t that a surprise?”

  The poorly lit room seemed unbalanced, asymmetrical. It felt as if the desk and the bed and the woman in it could all slide away.

  “I should have gone with you to Udine, even if you didn’t want me to,” I said.

  “Perhaps, but this is better. It’s hard for people like us to talk seriously about how we feel, isn’t it? Perhaps in order to do it properly we need to be somewhere unfamiliar, somewhere neutral.”

  “Are we there now?”

  “I don’t think so. Someplace neither of us has ever been.”

  “And change our names.”

  “Yes, that. I’d love an alias. I have one for you: Tom Morrow. How does that sound?”

  “Tomorrow? We could make you Esther Day.”

  “At the hotel I’d have to be Esther Morrow.”

  “What hotel?”

  She made a face and fell back on the pillow. Suddenly I was grateful the shades were closed, the murkiness protecting us from the other’s eyes.

  “It’s a nice thing to think about anyway,” I said. “Would you like to come to the hospital tomorrow?”

  “You haven’t been listening, Tom. Or perhaps you just don’t believe me.” She sounded almost angry. “I don’t need to go to that hospital at all. Not anymore.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  * * *

  “When he arrived, Fairbanks saw only fire,” Bianchi explained.

  Paul and I dutifully scribbled in our notebooks as Bianchi roamed his office, banging open windows already warped in the morning’s heat.

  “And now, with your help, I suppose he sees ice too,” Paul said.

  He’d been that way all morning, impatient with my questions, dismissive of Bianchi’s answers. It was as if there were somewhere else he’d rather be, and yet he also couldn’t seem to stop talking, to stop arguing. A day before, it might have bothered me, but I felt, at best, half-present.

  “I do not understand,” Bianchi said mildly. “Again, please.”

  “I mean that one hears so many theories about war neurosis,” Paul said. “Microscopic lesions in the brain. Unmetabolized adrenaline in the blood. They all begin to sound ridiculous, don’t they?”

  “And you are forgetting pure group suggestion.” Bianchi, unfazed, returned to his desk, which was strewn with case histories detailing the madness of at least a hundred men.

  Paul blotted his brow with a handkerchief. “And I suppose I can’t help but mention Freud.”

  “That is stamped in your passport, I think.” Bianchi laughed a little too loud. He switched on an asthmatic desk fan and pointed it in Paul’s direction. “But certainly you do not believe sexual conflict is the only cause of neurosis. Could it not be true that the sexual instinct, if you want, is only a biological imperative?”

  “Reproduction, you mean?”

  �
�Naturally, and when the instinct is frustrated, the mind must cope, in dreams, violence, hysteria. If you want, the Viennese—I use them only as my example—have been more repressive of the instincts of women than men. This is why hysteria has been seen as a woman’s disorder.”

  “What of Italian women?” I asked.

  “An interesting case. In Italy, most women—especially in the south—do not have the freedom to be ill. But during the war they did not have husbands to care for and finally they could go out to the squares and cafés at night. The war was a great crime against the men, but the women, actually, did well. Maybe illness cannot be far behind.”

  “Are you teasing me?” Paul asked. Bianchi made an apologetic, almost ashamed, face. Still, Paul’s ill temper didn’t bother me. The heat didn’t bother me. I’d left Sarah asleep at my hotel. Despite what she had said, I wasn’t entirely sure if she would be there when I returned, or how to find her again if she wasn’t.

  “I only mean to say,” Bianchi continued, “that the need to reproduce is descriptive of a more basic need: to live. If repression of the sexual instinct leads to hysteria, imagine what might happen when you are told that your duty is to lie in a trench under a barrage or advance into machine-gun fire.”

  “Or drive an ambulance through a barrage, I suppose?”

  “Naturally. Men like Fairbanks were asked to repress the very desire to live. I myself helped them to do it. This, I think, is the true meaning of trauma.”

  “And you think someone like Fairbanks can be . . . I don’t even know the word. Healed? Cured?” Paul asked.

  Bianchi raised his eyebrows in sincere surprise. “Have we not witnessed trauma on a scale once thought impossible? Perhaps we must consider recovery on such a scale too.”

  I pictured Fairbanks sitting on his bed, hands under his chin, frozen and hollow. On the other hand, hadn’t I led a baby into a tunnel of corpses? Somehow, hadn’t I recovered? I imagined taking Fairbanks to Paris, helping him find his own hotel with bugs in the wallpaper, his own café with arsenic dye smeared on the bar. His own Rose. His own Sarah.

  “In any case, it is everyone’s right to believe or disbelieve.” Bianchi shrugged. “Perhaps you can allow your readers to make up their own minds? How many readers do you have, may I ask?”