The Verdun Affair

by Nick Dybek

  Though it was still early in the day, his pomaded black hair was already sliding out of place, and sweat blistered his nose. He gave a nervous laugh, as if there was some impression he feared he were failing to make. In fact, I’d begun to notice that his English—when he was on the subject of Fairbanks, anyway—seemed more fluid, more sophisticated, as if he’d written the words out beforehand. “One thousand readers? Five thousand? Ten thousand? I am only curious.”

  “I honestly don’t know the number,” I said. “And we’ve taken too much of your time, haven’t we?” I meant it in the way it’s usually meant: too much of my time had been taken.

  “Just a minute, Tom,” Paul said. “We were hearing about his dreams, and then I interrupted. The doctor might like to finish.”

  “If you want,” Bianchi said, but cautiously now. “When we began, all he saw was fire. To say it another way, there was nothing within reach but faceless, inhuman torment.”

  “How can one confront fire and darkness?” Paul asked.

  The fan continued to chink. Paul continued to blot his forehead.

  “Naturally, you are right,” Bianchi said. “A man can neither relate to nor influence a void. And for months a void was all Fairbanks would describe. But one day he found himself in a burning room. Then, slowly, the flames extinguished. And yesterday was a masterpiece.”

  “Of what exactly?”

  “You must understand that the dream always ends with a return to terror. He reaches the last window to find the fire and darkness that was once his entire world. Then, later, he finds explosions at the windows—grenades, artillery. But, yesterday, the lion.”

  “The lion can be confronted,” Paul said.

  “Exactly that,” Bianchi said.

  “Has he always had to reach for the lock, to climb onto the windowsills?”

  “No,” Bianchi said. “And this is also encouraging.”

  “He’s a child, isn’t he?” I said. “The height of the windows, the toy in the corner, the lion. It’s a child’s terror, not a man’s.”

  Bianchi nodded, almost proud. Paul leaned forward and fumbled with the fan until he found the switch. “Enough now,” he said. “What can you tell me about him?”

  Bianchi’s face changed; all at once he was so alert as to seem almost clairvoyant. “I am telling you what I can tell you,” he said. “But tell me, what is the matter, Paul?”

  “What sort of uniform was he in when he arrived in Udine?”

  “Rags, naturally.”

  “Can he drive?”

  “An automobile? He can walk on his own only a little. You members of the international press ask very strange questions.”

  “How do you know he’s American?”

  Bianchi hesitated, twisted his lip in thought. “He dreams of America. The room is in America. Two or three times he has said that.”

  Quite unexpectedly, Paul began to laugh.

  “The Italian amnesiac dreams of America,” he said. “I’m sorry. It sounds like the title of a bad poem.”

  * * *

  When I returned to the hotel I found my bag packed on the bed. Sarah sat at the window, smoking. She crushed her cigarette and put her arms around my neck.

  “We’ll take the overnight,” she said. “I’ve spent the day planning it.”

  “To where?”

  “La Morra. They grow grapes there, for wine.”

  “And?”

  “And? I asked the agent where he would go—within limits, obviously. In fact, I thought the less we knew about the place the better? Because of what we said yesterday.” Her eyes dimmed, and she took a step back. “I wasn’t joking,” she said, “if you were. If . . .”

  “Not an if,” I said. “Not a single if.” I was pleasantly surprised that she was at all unsure I’d go.

  “Good. But if you need to work . . .”

  I could hold on to the story I’d just typed up until the following day, and then write something to file as soon as I returned, and Marcel wouldn’t even know I’d left Bologna. I’d need Paul to file my story for me, however.

  “I’ll need to ask a favor of another reporter,” I said.

  “Do that,” she said, “and, if you’d like, invite him to dinner to say thank you. If we eat with him tonight, we’ll feel that much more alone when we leave. Don’t you think?”

  “Alone?” I asked.

  “Alone together. But there isn’t a word for that, is there?”

  * * *

  Paul dressed for dinner in an English tweed jacket. The temperature had dropped, and he’d accepted my invitation without asking any questions.

  “Mrs. Hagen,” he said, as we took our seats, “I acted like a fool today. Such a fool that I must apologize not only to Tom but to you as well.”

  “I accept your apology,” she said, “and, in my experience, Tom’s very forgiving.”

  “I am,” I said. “You were harsh with Dr. Bianchi, though. Is there something he did?”

  “Hardly. Purely my own frustration. I had to promise my editor quite a lot to come here. No one in Austria wants to read about the methods of an Italian psychologist. That sounds arrogant, perhaps, but we have little else to take pride in these days. My own methods were clumsy, I admit. Of course, he is the one to whom I must apologize.”

  “What did you say?” Sarah asked.

  “I was rude. It seems one has to be careful in those places that you don’t catch the madness.”

  “I disagree,” she said. “The real danger is catching it at one of those rallies in the piazza. Did you know yesterday I heard a man say that the Soviet flag was the color of menstrual blood?”

  Paul blushed, just as, I imagine, Sarah had hoped. I liked that she was testing him. I liked that side of her.

  “The Fascists aren’t courting the woman’s vote, I suppose,” he said.

  “I also saw a boy’s teeth knocked out for passing around pamphlets,” Sarah said. “Tell me, whose vote are they courting?”

  Da Poeti was an old restaurant, famous for its version of the meat sauce the city was known for—but it was early, and the dining room was only half-full, the front windows shaded, most of the candles yet to be lit. Every time the waiter left the kitchen, a welcome fringe of light brushed the table. While we waited for the food to arrive we tried to talk about pleasant things, but that never lasted. Paul’s studies before the war. Bonnard. The Princesse de Polignac’s salon. Paris.

  “And what did you do there, in Paris, Mrs. Hagen?” Paul asked.

  “After my husband left I worked for my aunt with the CFFD.”

  “Did you? The artists’ charity?”

  “Painters and musicians mostly. I’m not certain that they were the most deserving, but everyone said we were fighting to preserve our culture. Someone had to keep the painters drunk. My aunt’s joke, not mine.”

  “Your aunt must be Maud Monroe?”

  “You know her?” Sarah didn’t seem the least surprised.

  “I certainly admire her writing.”

  “She’d be pleased to know she’s won the esteem of a real live Hussar. Quite impressive, isn’t it?”

  Paul laughed and blushed again. “Not at all. I spent most of the war requisitioning horses. I was bored and lonely far more often than I was in danger.”

  “How awful,” Sarah teased. “How did you pass your time?”

  “Of course I looked for love, Mrs. Hagen. It was very instructive for me.”

  “In what way?”

  “In all ways.”

  The pasta arrived, white and red in the shadows. Did I feel a twinge of jealousy? No. Not then. In fact, it was a pleasure to listen to them talk, to see that Sarah and I liked the same people. And Paul’s manner was simply too earnest to seem flirtatious.

  “I didn’t realize anyone could know all the ways,” Sarah said. “You must at least tell us one of them.”

  “I could,” he said, “but the minute I try to talk about love I’ll use conventions that may cheapen and dilute it.
That is the danger, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so,” Sarah said. “But we can stand a little risk.”

  “You’ll find this to be the case too,” he said, “when you try to tell the story of the three of us here in the future.”

  “And how do you know we’ll want to tell this story?” she said, laughing.

  “Tom will,” he said, smiling at me, “because you are in it.”

  Sarah and I shared a glance, and shook our heads at his old-world manners.

  * * *

  But here is what he told us.

  He saw footprints in midwinter, in a Silesian town called Radun near the Prussian border. It was a town of good horses and streets of frozen mud, smoke leaking from the doorways of chimneyless huts. In the single tavern a single game of Taroki had been played nightly between four brothers for thirty years.

  Paul did not play Taroki, and, so far as he knew, was not related to any of the players, so after dinner there was nothing to do but walk. But he liked the blank snow, the strange things he noticed etched there. Once he’d seen hundreds of black birds—crows, he assumed—asleep on the ground, wings folded, pressed shoulder to shoulder as if for warmth.

  And then he’d seen footprints beyond a broken fence that surrounded a white garden; the steps traced a pattern that gleamed in the moonlight. After studying the yard for some time, he saw that it wasn’t just a pattern but a crudely drawn picture: to his eye, a vase of flowers. He tried to recall the last time he’d seen a real vase of flowers and couldn’t.

  Paul returned to the fence the next night to find that the vase had blown away in the wind. Strangely disappointed, he was just about to turn back toward his billet when a woman in a fur hood—a girl, really—stepped from the garden door and began to cross the snow.

  “Hello, Lieutenant,” she said in French. “I saw you through the window. I wondered how you liked our little town.”

  Paul said it was charming.

  “Please,” she said, “there’s no need to be polite.”

  She explained that she had been home from boarding school in France when the war broke out; her parents felt it was too dangerous for her to return, and she had been shut up with her mother without anyone to talk to for more than a year. Her name was Ilona. She took down the hood to show her gleaming brown hair.

  “What I really wondered,” she said, “is why you paused at this house, of all places?”

  “Were those your footsteps? Was it a vase of flowers you drew in the snow? Or was that my imagination?”

  “Those were my footsteps,” she said, softly, “but I was just dancing.”

  For ten nights they met that way, speaking of the friends she had left behind at school; her father, called away on business in Opava; her mother, who had become forgetful of late, confused.

  “She collects things,” Ilona explained. “We all do now, we must, but she collects things she shouldn’t. Disgusting things—I can’t even tell you. And last week she seemed to think I’d put some drug or poison in her milk. She didn’t quite accuse me, but . . .”

  “A doctor could help,” Paul said.

  “Yes, but medicine in this town is medieval. If I could somehow get her to Prague.”

  “Would she permit a military doctor? Would you?” Paul felt excited, almost elated, at the fairy-tale simplicity of the solution. “Once we’ve gathered the horses—a few days from now—they’ll send an officer to check them.”

  “A horse doctor? Those we have.”

  “In normal life he’s a medical doctor, a good one. I could ask him to look in on your mother.”

  She squeezed his hand; he could feel the strength in her fingers through his fur-lined gloves. She opened the gate and led him through the garden. He stepped in her footprints, trying not to leave a trail. Her mother was in the front parlor, lost in her needlework. It was safe enough, she said. And they sat, shivering together on a hard sofa in an unheated back room, breath puffing white as they talked, white as the words trickled away.

  “My mother can’t know we’ve already met,” she said later, at the fence. “She’d tell my father. And if he knew . . .”

  “What’s he so afraid of?” Paul asked.

  “Of exactly what has happened,” she said, smiling. “We must find a way to make it seem as if you and your doctor friend have met us by chance. Can you come to Saturday tea at the hotel? It’s practically the only time she leaves the house now, other than for mass. Introduce yourselves? Flatter her? I’ll make sure you are both invited to the house.” She kissed him on the cheek with freezing lips. “And perhaps then she will be well again, and perhaps after that . . .”

  He walked home, imagining Ilona’s face in daylight, imagining the words he’d use to charm her mother, imagining the words he’d use in the future to tell his own mother he was engaged to a Silesian girl. But the orders were waiting for him when he returned to his billet. He was expected to report in Lemberg—for god knew what reason, practically no reason at all, as it turned out—by eleven the following day. He’d already missed the night train and his only option was another that left at five in the morning. There was no way to tell her, no way even to send a note. There was no way to sleep or eat for days after. All he could do was imagine her eyes looking for his amid the crowd outside the hotel, distracting her mother, giving him time to find her. All he could do was imagine the moment she put up her hood, her slow walk home, and, later, the cruel image of him she would dance into the snow.

  * * *

  In Da Poeti the plates were cleared, the restaurant had filled, and we could see a family in the foyer that had likely been promised our table.

  “Well,” Paul said, “have I risked enough?”

  “The story’s compelling, but I don’t know that I fully believe it,” Sarah said.

  “Too romantic, is it?” Paul asked.

  “I’d say it feels a hundred years old.”

  “Perhaps,” he said, “but you must remember that in Europe progress always comes slower in the east.” We laughed at that. And drank and didn’t worry that we’d overstayed our time at the table. In the end, I didn’t care if anything he’d said was true or not, even though it felt imperfect in the perfect way that true stories often don’t.

  “You could look for her now, couldn’t you?” I asked.

  “Perhaps I could,” Paul said, “but there are many wrongs one might want to set right, and, unfortunately, one must be very selective about which he chooses.”

  “That sounds rather ominous, Paul,” Sarah said.

  Paul smiled and began to laugh at himself. “It is ominous,” he said, after a time. “Of course it is.”

  Santa Monica, 1950

  Paul’s address on Rockingham Drive was only a few streets from the first house I’d slept in when I arrived in California in 1927. I had been working as a bank teller in Chicago—my third job in as many years since returning to the United States—when I decided there would be no harm in writing a letter to my grandparents, my father’s parents. For years I’d been curious as to what the response to such a letter might be, but I expected little—certainly not the first-class train ticket to Los Angeles folded in with their ecstatic reply.

  Once I arrived, they bought me clothes and gifts, and presented me with my father’s tattered boyhood copy of Tom Brown’s School Days. Several times they apologized tearfully for the fact that it had taken us so long to meet, and, once, at the end of a long dinner drowned in better French wine than I’d ever had in France, they shyly told me they loved me.

  They were kind, confused people who had clearly saved the sentimental phase of their lives for their twilight years. In short, they were the fulfillment of every child-orphan’s dreams. But I was almost twenty-eight by then, and, no matter how kind they were, it was hard to forget that only my parents’ deaths had washed the shame from my existence.

  My grandfather, who went by Duke, had been an investor in a film company in Chicago that had followed the free light to Southern Cali
fornia. But by 1927 he was retired, and both he and my grandmother, who went by Tina, devoted themselves to what they called “the causes.” They seemed thoroughly pleased to have an actual cause by blood relation. When I told them I’d done some work as a reporter, it was all but settled on the spot that they’d arrange a trial as a script and scenario writer. Was there a particular studio I liked?

  Where does Douglas Fairbanks work? I asked.

  In those first years, I arrived at my desk in the Writers’ Building at Columbia by nine every morning; most of the other writers came in after ten, complaining. I tried not to make enemies. I tried to make sense of what people wanted in a picture.

  Hollywood, then, as now, was in the pleasing business, and the great secret was that the dictators who ran the studios—Mayer, Zanuck, Jack Warner, and the rest—were slaves to the whims of preview audiences in places like Santa Ana, to people who came straight from the laundries or machine shops, exhausted but emboldened by the fact that they had a say.

  And what did they say? What did they want to see magnified in light and nitrate? Strangely enough: anguish. But anguish disguised by humor or brawn, by wit or wisdom. By guns and ships and speeches and speed. By song and dance too, but all the better if the disguise was a bit more fragile. Naturally, anguish is best disguised by beauty—in faces and bodies, above all else. But beauty that is purely happy will never play in Santa Ana. Many people still don’t realize that.

  Once one knows the formula it’s not difficult to follow, and I have earned a comfortable living doing so. Only, somewhere along the way, I ran out of ambition. Perhaps the copious sunlight bleached it out of me. I don’t know exactly, but I never made any secret of this—least of all to Faye when we married. Nevertheless, ambition was one of the many things we fought about. She was a writer too. She started out as a script girl and, as a woman, had a far harder time of it than I did—I realize that, of course. She never felt that ambition was a luxury.

  A number of ugly things occurred before it was clear that it was better for us to part, but the decision, once it came, was surprisingly easy. It wasn’t that I didn’t care for her—quite the contrary. It’s just that the sentimental phase of my life came early rather than late.