The Verdun Affair

by Nick Dybek

  For several days I managed to disappear into my work, interviewing the women in black who came to see Fairbanks, writing up their deluded hopes. I sent Marcel a profile of Marisa Donati, our kind host in La Morra. Her son, I wrote, had gone missing during the Fifth Battle of the Isonzo. Marisa had been in the family chapel, lighting a candle for him when the wick and flame flew off as if shot by a rifle. A nub of white wax lay at her feet, the flame still flickering in the half-dark of the church. She heard droplets, as if from snowmelt in the mountains. She scooped the flame into her palm, and still it burned. She knew then that her son was wounded, but alive.

  Later I changed the battle from the Fifth to the Sixth, for reasons of sibilance. In truth, Marisa Donati’s only son was twelve years old. He juggled pickle jars to entertain the guests. I felt more than entitled to my cynicism.

  * * *

  I saw Sarah crossing the hospital courtyard, but we never spoke. I did not see Paul for the next several days. The key to Room #9 dangled in the hutch behind the desk, but the clerk informed me that he had not checked out.

  I might have begun to lose my sanity, but somehow Bianchi found time to walk the hospital grounds, to drink caffè correttos with me in Piazza Maggiore. From under the big umbrellas we watched pigeons scatter across the bricks and teenage revolutionaries shake their fists. We watched squads of Blackshirts march into the square—as they did most afternoons—goose-stepping and drilling in formation. The tight salutes and solemn turns seemed harmless, even ridiculous.

  “Do not be fooled,” Bianchi said. “The theater is in the cities. The violence is in the countryside.”

  He tried to explain the real violence, the riot in that very square the previous year when the socialists had swept the City Council elections and the Fascists opened fire on the inauguration with revolvers and homemade bombs. He explained that a Fascist leader had been killed in the fight, and described the reprisals at Workers’ Clubs in the countryside, communists dragged behind trucks while Blackshirts urinated on them from the roadside. Kangaroo trials and quick stabbings, while the police looked on impassively.

  Needless to say, all I really wanted to discuss was Sarah, which Bianchi was not able to do. Though he was willing to describe what generally happened in such a case.

  An identification had been made. How would the case proceed? The attending doctor would offer the claimant an opportunity to prove her identification. What did that mean? It meant the doctor would ask the claimant to present keepsakes, photographs, letters. It meant the doctor would look for hints of recognition, of agitation, shades of attention or inattention relative to the patient’s typical state. Then he would write to the war office for—hypothetically, let’s say, Lee Hagen’s—military records, moles, scars, the date he went missing, to put against all that was known about Fairbanks. He might, in time, ask for a handwriting sample, even though Fairbanks had yet to write.

  It was up to the attending doctor then—hypothetically, let’s say, Bianchi himself—to decide if there was enough evidence to put the claimant’s case forward in court. An especially complicated matter, as the very facts of the case determined its jurisdiction.

  What a vision this all was: Sarah’s eyes pleading with Fairbanks’s, her mouth trembling as his tremored. Bianchi impassively jotting it all down. What did the doctor know of her now that I didn’t? I was afraid to imagine. Already I had every story she had ever told me about Lee to cast with Fairbanks’s face. Fairbanks touching her elbow in just such a way in the Tuileries. A teenage Fairbanks dressed as the Pauper in purple tights, his shaking hand offering her a Linzer heart. Fairbanks with his trembling mouth at her mouth in a banker’s apartment in the 2nd arrondissement. His trembling tongue on her tongue in a banker’s bed, her left arm flung back behind her head, as she always flung it back during sex.

  How was it possible to feel jealous of a man with half his mind—most of his mind—gone? Yet there were times—when the light came through the shutter slats and I recalled the shape of her body on the bed; the violet of her perfume, now nowhere in the room—when I would have traded places with Fairbanks.

  * * *

  On Sunday, I hoped Bianchi would be at the café with the opera singer, but I didn’t expect to be able to find it again on my own. Likely, he didn’t expect me to either. Certainly his face suggested as much when I came in, but he welcomed me over. His hair was uncombed, a slick of beer shaped like the Baltic Sea spilled on the table.

  “Tell me about America,” he said. “Do you think I’d be happy in America?”

  “Some people seem to be,” I said.

  “But could I be a doctor there? I would not slice meat or sell fruit.”

  “You’re a doctor here,” I said.

  “For now, yes. But if the Fascists come to power, my career will be finished. And then there’s my brother. I wonder if we could do better in America.”

  “I don’t know how popular communists are in America.”

  “But you have no Mussolini yet, do you? Perhaps I could be a doctor still?”

  “You must know more about that than I do.”

  “I do. There is very little hope, in fact. The truth is, Tom, I know if I emigrate my brother will go with me. And I know that he may die if we do not emigrate. But I have worked hard to be a doctor here. I cannot go somewhere else. I don’t want to. Unless I was famous . . . and then . . . Have you been writing? Have you been filing your stories? How have they been received?”

  I had my opening, and I only realized later that he must have planned it for me. “Perhaps you can help me with all of that. How has Fairbanks reacted?” I asked.

  He waved his hand and finished his glass before answering in a low voice. “Fairbanks is a negativist, in psychological terms. If you want, he reacts adversely to almost any kind of stimulus. He doesn’t want to be found. He is terrified of being identified, of being asked to remember.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Perhaps because he is smarter than the rest of us. But this is not what you really want to know.”

  “Not entirely,” I said.

  “Oh, I’ll tell you. Why not? He’s had no response to Signora Hagen. No response under hypnosis. No interest in her gifts.”

  “What gifts?”

  “French chocolates. The sports pages from a Boston newspaper. Novels by Mark Twain.”

  Where had these items come from? She couldn’t have bought them in Bologna. She must have carried them wherever she went. Had her suitcase in Verdun been packed with Tom Sawyer and the Globe? On the off chance?

  “What does she say?” I asked.

  “She holds his hand and whispers.”

  “And what else?”

  “She weeps. Sometimes with frustration, I fear. She sings to him. She sings well. She feeds him chocolates. He eats the chocolates. But that means very little.”

  “But what does she say, to you?” His eyes met mine again, and he wiped the foam from his lip.

  “She is undeterred.” Bianchi rubbed his hand over his face. And just then, to our mutual relief, the barman began his aria.

  * * *

  When I returned to the hotel that night, Paul was just rising from one of the shabby chairs in the lobby, crushing a cigarette. We shook hands.

  “It’s quite late,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “I’ve been waiting for you. Have you been in town?”

  “Not for a few days. Just up to Cortina. I was there some years ago.”

  “Happy memories?”

  “Hardly. But that doesn’t matter.”

  “And what does?”

  “That tomorrow, if you’re free, I’d like to take you and Mrs. Hagen to dinner.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  * * *

  The osteria Paul had chosen was already crowded when I arrived, a storefront with tall windows left open in the heat, brown butcher paper on the tabletops, white candles in round glasses. I was drinking a second Campari when Paul arrived. She arrived lat
er in a familiar blue dress. I stood when she came to the table but didn’t trust my voice to hide how stupidly pleased I was to see her.

  “Thank you for accepting my invitation, Mrs. Hagen,” Paul said.

  “Well, they won’t let me stay on at the hospital in the evenings. And I was curious. I wonder if I should also be worried?”

  “Not at all. I’ve been told this is an excellent restaurant for game,” Paul said.

  She gave a weak smile in reply. Paul refolded his napkin and commented on the heat, rain finally expected that night. The waiter came and went with our order. Words were hard to pick out in the din. Outside, dusk slipped over the street. She still hadn’t so much as looked in my direction. But I knew what to say if I wanted her attention.

  “How is he? Is there any progress?”

  Sarah hesitated, likely wondering if it was safe to answer.

  “There’s progress. Slow, but it means a great deal to me.”

  She didn’t sound very much like a woman in love, but I knew better. She was only hoarding the details.

  “He’s said something?” I asked.

  “He reached out for my hand.”

  “Did you know that he took my hand too, Mrs. Hagen?” Paul asked. “A few days ago.”

  “Did he?” No smile, not even a pretense of politeness.

  “I wonder, what has Tom told you about me?” Paul asked the question as if I weren’t sitting beside him. “I imagine he has already realized that I did not come to Bologna only to report for a newspaper.”

  She glanced at me. I tried to seize her eyes, but her expression was too smooth to hold. “Tom and I have not had much reason to speak of late.”

  Paul took a breath, and for a moment I thought he might be able to explain just how wrong she was. Just how crucial it was that she listen to me. But he didn’t. He said: “Like you, Mrs. Hagen, I have been looking for someone. For a very long time now.”

  Sarah nodded. She turned to the windows as if plotting an escape. Then she looked at Paul again, with much softer eyes. She seemed to feel no need to respond, not until she was absolutely ready.

  “Someone you cared for?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard him. “And I think I can say I even understand, if that doesn’t sound patronizing. It’s no comfort to see others’ good fortune, I realize, but you may still find him.”

  Paul took a sip of water. “Mrs. Hagen,” he tried again, “it’s difficult to explain, but I don’t especially want to find him now.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “I don’t really understand what this has to do with me.”

  “If you heard my story I believe you’d understand.”

  “I’d rather not, honestly.”

  “Wasn’t there a time, Mrs. Hagen, when all you wanted was for someone to listen?”

  She glanced at me once more. I wondered what she actually saw. I tried not to look disappointed. I tried to look like her friend. The waiter returned with wine, with a plate of meats and brown bread. The door was propped open on account of the heat. A few steps and she could have been outside.

  “Yes,” Sarah said, finally. “Actually it was a very long time.”

  * * *

  Well, Paul said, there was no single place to start, but he could begin with the day he lost his horse, the day the emperor’s army finally accepted that the cavalry was just a pageant, the age of pageantry passed. As a rule, officers who grew sentimental over their horses died early. Yet he could begin with how angry and careless he became, how he made powerful enemies. How his enemies sent him to Italy, how he made additional enemies on the Isonzo—over what he could no longer even recall—who sent him into the Dolomites.

  But truthfully—did we already know this?—if he were to tell it from the very beginning he would have to start some years earlier. He would have to begin with the night that Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, the Austrian supreme commander, met a beautiful Italian woman at a ball in Trieste. She touched him with her fan. They bowed and waltzed and Conrad fell dangerously in love. How dangerous can love be? Very. In 1914, it was Conrad who pushed for a decisive and immediate response to the archduke’s assassination, Conrad who demanded an invasion of Serbia, hoping that glory in the Balkans would sweep away the obstacles that stood between him and his true love.

  “What obstacles?” Sarah asked.

  “One husband. Five children. And one thousand years of Habsburg tradition,” Paul said. “But he knew that if he couldn’t have her he would be unhappy for the rest of his life.”

  “Why her in particular?” I asked in a voice that might have sounded comically bitter had anyone been listening closely. Paul shook his head. So began the World War.

  * * *

  But perhaps it would be better to begin when the Italians broke out of the Falzarego valley to the west of Cortina and occupied the summit of Mount Tofana. The Austrians withdrew to a promontory of rock to the west, a second peak, separated by a narrow screed ridge of approximately five hundred meters. They called it the Kinderhaus.

  “The children’s house?” I asked.

  Paul snorted. “It was called that, yes.” But imagine, he said, one of the red towers of medieval Bologna. Imagine if this tower were approachable by a single bridge hundreds of meters in the air. Imagine trying to slither over this bridge, looking for cover among pebbles and sharp limestone. Imagine scaling the face, toehold to toehold, hacking the stone for purchase. Even by Italian standards such an attack would be insane, though the Italians did try—several times, actually, in the last months of 1916—and were slaughtered.

  Paul reported to his post on the Kinderhaus in late January, 1917. He found rock trenches ringing its summit, an officers’ dugout chiseled into the stone where a predecessor had hung a portrait of Franz Joseph in red robes and ermine. Under the emperor’s bemused gaze the wind lashed white ice across the lower Dolomites. Paul’s cold feet and fingers moved as if by levitation. And even two thousand meters above the sea there was always something to dig. Pockets in the rock to be chipped into dugouts and field kitchens, where thin potato soup would simmer. Snow to be cleared from the narrow paths, from which mules fell to their deaths routinely.

  They dug tiers in the mountain, already white as wedding cake, and climbed iron ladders bolted into the rock. They climbed through the wind with sandbags strapped to their backs; or belts of ammunition for the Schwarzlose machine guns; or explosive shells; or packages from Zagreb, Bolzano, and Vienna containing thick socks, cured ham, and news from home.

  Paul commanded twenty men, not including his valet, many of whom had grown up in Bozen or Tyrol, natural mountaineers. A good bunch, on the whole. They showed Paul how to avoid snow blindness by making slatted goggles from old shell casings. The nights were long and quiet enough for slivovitz and grappa. He was easy on their letters and did his best to learn their songs in Ladin and Friulian.

  Nevertheless, each man was alone in the snow. Snow, invisible and visible, pink snow in the dusk, black snow during night watch. Snow that smelled of cordite, that tasted of limestone. Snow that fluttered from the swaying clouds, through the daylight, through the moonlight and wind. Through their boots and greatcoats, through the bent legs of a dead sergeant who lay frozen to the eastern face of the summit. I am alive, Paul wrote to his mother, but alive inside a ghost.

  In the osteria, Sarah lit a cigarette and watched the smoke drift to the windows. Evening waited for her, the rest of her life waited. Paul waited too, politely.

  “Tom loves ghost stories, if that’s what this is,” she said. “I myself . . .”

  I’d said that, yes. Another dinner where I had no business.

  “Believe me, in this story the dead are dead,” Paul said.

  Sarah flicked her eyes up in apology.

  Still, Paul continued, the Kinderhaus was very much a haunted place. The creak of old rock, old ice. Wind so unrelenting it seemed to carry a grudge. And if in France they joked—h
ow hilarious—that the trenches were merely graves already dug, in the mountains it seemed as if the shroud had already been laid.

  The only relief was that the war had frozen over too. In the autumn the Italians had attacked the Kinderhaus with artillery, and there were still powder burns like black flowers on the cracked rock. But the Italian guns were never able to properly target the Austrian positions, and by January the two sides exchanged only half-hearted fire. Paul watched for spring through field glasses, the Italian field glasses glinting back from the opposite peak.

  * * *

  But here was the real beginning: mid-March, the snow melting in rills, Paul censoring letters. The work was dull, the men reticent to a fault. He felt the first tremors in the soles of his boots. His imagination? An avalanche on another peak? He swept his field glasses across the valley. Nothing. But the buzz continued, a mild churning, almost possible to ignore.

  “Do you feel that?” he asked his sergeant, a man named Tretta who came from a valley in Badia and whose first language was Ladin.

  “A drill, I’d think, Lieutenant,” he said.

  “Drilling what? A tunnel?”

  “What else?”

  The previous year a peak on the Asiago Plateau had disappeared in a shower of rock, the emperor’s soldiers garrisoned there along with it. Turned to dust by an Italian mine.

  “My god, anything else,” Paul said.

  That night Paul sent Tretta across the saddle to listen. Tretta reported the grind and whine of the drill, twenty minutes on, then ten off while the bit cooled. He reported clinking shovels scraping away the rock. The tunnel was roughly a third of the way across the saddle separating the two peaks, Tretta reported. They should be very worried, Tretta reported.

  * * *

  The major at the Fifth Division headquarters didn’t look nearly as healthy as most officers of his rank, and this led Paul to trust him. He offered coffee and asked Paul to join him on a walk through the gardens of the requisitioned villa outside Cherz. There were freshly trimmed topiary dogs at the crest of a sloping green lawn, still wet with the melt and fringed by bright yellow laburnum.