The Verdun Affair

by Nick Dybek

  It was easier to hum, certainly, than to decide what needed to be done, to accept that perhaps nothing could be done. And I hummed because there was music in the streets I preferred not to hear. Blackshirts singing “Giovinezza.” Singing “All’armi.” Singing about fighting until the last drop of blood had dripped from their hearts. It seemed obvious, looking at the callow faces of these boys, that most of them would not actually fight until the last drop. I’d seen the last drop of blood fall from several men. I wondered how many Blackshirts would fight after the first drop.

  Still, they sang to the slap of boots on parade. Sometimes, more menacingly, their songs seemed to well up from nowhere, to reverberate from window to window, to flood the arcades, faceless, fearless. Over the music rose the sound of speeches, delivered from balconies, from benches in the parks. Every morning there was news of fires in the countryside. A paper plant near Cremona had burned down. The house of the socialist mayor of Ponticella had burned down. And I passed the café in Piazza Maggiore where I had once lingered with Sarah to find Paul sitting across from her, in my old chair. I hurried past, using every last drop of my own blood to stay on my feet, to keep walking, but not before they saw me.

  I found myself increasingly desperate for Bianchi’s company. Still, I was surprised when he invited me to dinner at his apartment. There, he cooked pasta he’d rolled himself, some of which he fried in a pan and tossed with chickpeas and oil. A Puglian dish, he explained, closing his eyes as he tasted at the stove, chewing slowly, giving me time to look at the paintings on the walls. A woman in a green dress and black beret at a café table, dark circles under her eyes. A man in a deep-sea diver’s suit, helmetless on a pier. His hair was wet, his brow furrowed as if he had no idea what to do now that he’d surfaced.

  After dinner Bianchi served iced coffee sweetened with almond milk. We switched back to the wine, which made him sentimental. I was happy to let him talk. He described his hometown of Lecce, its baroque cathedrals carved from the local soft stone, Roman ruins preserved in the main square. His father, he explained, was a clerk for the prefect, a lawyer by training who spoke beautiful French and German. But he touched his testicles whenever death or disease was mentioned, and refused to smile at strangers so as not to expose his teeth to black magic. He had good reason to rely on irrational precautions, Bianchi explained, because the irrational ills were legion.

  Puglia was a land of earthquakes and shipwrecks. Of wildfires and tidal waves. Of one-square towns so poor the churches were carved into caves in the hillsides, Peter and Paul painted on the rock like prehistoric horses.

  His father thought it important that Bianchi and his brothers—Mauro and Gabriele—understand all of this, Bianchi explained. So they often traveled with him in a horse-drawn carriage through scrub fields partitioned by low limestone walls, the air thick with the smell of burning olive wood. They watched as their father struggled to explain the tax laws to peasant families in his administrative charge, many of whom spoke dialects barely intelligible to their neighbors one town over. Many of whom, when informed in 1915 that their sons would be drafted into the Royal Italian Army in order to redeem Trentino and Trieste, confessed that they had never heard of these places.

  The government in Rome had hoped Italy’s entry into the war might complete the Risorgimento, not just by reclaiming the so-called ancestral lands in Istria, Dalmatia, and Alto Adige, but by finally unifying all the peoples of the peninsula as Italians. But Bianchi’s middle brother—Mauro, who fought with distinction on the Isonzo—came home not as an Italian but as a Marxist.

  He set about organizing workers’ councils in Nardò, a town just south of Lecce where Puglia’s only socialist mayor presided. And in early 1920, Mauro was at the vanguard of a nationwide Marxist revolt, helping the day laborers and peasants occupy Nardò. They put snipers in the campanile, built barricades of oxcarts, and held the frontier for nearly three weeks as they waited for word that the revolution had spread. Word never came, but eventually the carabinieri did, shelling the town to pieces. Mauro died in the assault.

  “Is he the diver in the painting?” I asked.

  Bianchi refilled his glass and looked out the window into the empty street. “You could tell I was the artist? Is the work so bad? No. The truth is that I don’t recall Mauro’s face well enough. I hadn’t seen him since before the war, and we were forced to burn all our photographs of him when he became a revolutionary. I refuse to paint my brother with the wrong face. The painting is of Gabriele, whom you saw in the café. Before he took the foolish iodine cure. He talked of being a diver before he too became a revolutionary. It is useful, I think, to introduce our wishes to our senses, if only in paint.” He shrugged and drank as if he didn’t fully believe his own theory. “Gabriele followed me to Emilia-Romagna. I should have taken better care of him. His troubles are my fault.”

  “How is he?”

  “Safe, for the moment. As long as he avoids the Fascists. No more beatings, no more castor oil. They’ll kill him if they find him. But I have said too much and am ruining my own dinner. I hoped we’d talk about you. I should tell you,” he said, taking up my plate and bringing it into the kitchen, “Paul has accompanied Mrs. Hagen to the hospital these last several days.”

  “He’s told you why?”

  “Drummond Green.” Bianchi looked over his shoulder, then turned back to the sink. “You already know this, I think.”

  “Does his story have credibility?”

  “As much as hers.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That it will become a legal matter soon.”

  “Couldn’t that take years to resolve?” I could hear the panic in my voice.

  “I would think so.”

  “Who will that help?”

  “I hope that it will help Mr. Fairbanks.”

  “I wish that you would do more,” I said.

  Bianchi returned to the table with two little glasses and a bottle with a homemade label. “More of what, exactly?” He put a hand to his mouth, perhaps to hide his disappointment. “It was nice not to talk about the hospital for a few moments, wasn’t it? The mistake is mine, not yours, Tom.”

  I knew exactly what he meant. He’d invited me into his home—had shared his past, his fears, his guilt—and he was warning me, pleading with me, really, not to use this vulnerability against him. But I had to.

  “You’ve been hoping all along that your treatment of Fairbanks might give you enough fame to work in America or another country. Isn’t that true?”

  He sipped his amaro and looked out the window. “Perhaps. But I’ve come to realize there are too many famous people already. I don’t think anyone can help me.”

  “I have a friend who can help both of you in France.”

  What friend? Help how? The more pressing question was why such a look of dismay had settled on Bianchi’s face.

  “Tom,” he said eventually, “do you really think Mrs. Hagen will return to you, no matter what we find?”

  “No, but she may return to herself someday,” I said. The lie was obvious to us both.

  “I see. Then it is noble to offer, Tom,” Bianchi said. “You would like me to use more coercion?” His smile was still intact, but I could tell he felt betrayed. And I cared very much about that, just not quite enough. “Tell me what you’d like me to try. Electrodes to his temples? To his throat? Strip him naked? Castration? It is true that I have invited your friendship, and it is also true that I have bent ethical rules. I have also decided to treat one man, one single man, as if he were a human being, not a . . . a . . . lavagna. I can’t think of the English word. What the teacher writes on in school.”

  “A chalkboard,” I said. “I’m sorry. Don’t be angry.”

  Bianchi shut his eyes and took a drink. “What right do I have to be angry?”

  * * *

  So, I waited. Carried by crowds flooding from church doors. Past bunches of garlic hanging in market stalls like little clouds, and whole pi
nk pigs’ heads laughing at the narrow streets from butcher shop windows. I waited as a new general strike was called, as the streets filled with uncollected garbage, as the porters at the train station waited and the cab drivers waited.

  But not everyone was waiting. I watched a boy fire a rifle at an owl on a balcony. I watched the red banners in the square cut to ribbons, watched the wedding dress shop window smashed by cobblestones pried from the streets.

  * * *

  I passed them again at the café, bent into the sunlight, napkins sticking from their cups. Talking close. Sharing a cigarette? I sat down at their table. No one spoke—not until the waiter came, and I said, “Campari and soda.”

  “We’ve seen you walk by. I suppose you know that,” Paul said.

  “We wondered why you hadn’t stopped,” Sarah said. There was no malice in her voice, only exhaustion.

  Obviously the notion of the two of them—the sudden “we”—had forced me to keep walking. But now, despite the fact that she’d used that word, it was clear there was no “we”—not in the way I had feared. There was, in fact, a stiffness about both of them; if they shared anything it seemed to be a deepening chill. Paul tried to smile but the chill stilled his face.

  “It was just a surprise to see the two of you together,” I said.

  Sarah nodded. “Not least for me. Paul informed Dr. Bianchi about his claim, about Drummond Green. So now we’re waiting together.”

  “You deserve what comfort you can find, I suppose.”

  “I wouldn’t have guessed it would be a comfort, but you’re right, it is.” She said the last two words in Paul’s accent. And they both laughed.

  “Mrs. Hagen wastes no opportunity to mock,” Paul said. Though he didn’t seem to mind. “Occasionally we even talk about matters aside from the hospital.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, we haven’t written it all down, Tom,” Sarah said coldly.

  “Try it. You might not forget things so easily,” I said, realizing, at first with real surprise, and then with real relief, just how angry I was at her. Suddenly it was obvious that the only thing to do was to walk back to the hotel, pack my bag, and get on a train. In truth, that had been obvious for weeks, but for the first time I could picture myself actually doing it. I began to get up, but before I could she brushed my knee with her fingers and the picture dissolved.

  How many more times could her touch have kept me bolted to a chair, a city, a country, in which I had no business? There must be a limit, I thought, a moment when sense ceased to yield to desire. And, though I clearly hadn’t reached such a moment, I felt that perhaps I could see it somewhere in the distance, and it occurred to me then just how terrifying it might be to fall out of love.

  “I’m just exhausted,” she said. “And someone in my position can only be cruel to the people that deserve it least. I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t think I deserve it least,” I said. “There are many children in this town.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. Perhaps we should look for some.” She smiled, briefly. “In the meantime, let me catch you up, Tom, if you’d like. What was I saying, Paul? Just now?”

  “About the funeral procession?”

  “I’m only joking,” Sarah said. “I remember.”

  * * *

  In late March of 1918, Sarah awoke in her old bedroom in Maud’s apartment to an explosion up the street. The smell of cordite drifted in through an open window, but she wasn’t afraid. The streets below were deserted in the gray drizzle, but she wasn’t afraid. In fact, the girl who had arrived in France afraid of trombones in Le Havre and headless mannequins along the Champs-Élysées was no longer afraid of much of anything. Her worst fears had already come to pass.

  “Lee was missing by then?” I asked, feeling it would be easier if I said his name first.

  Yes. He’d made it through service in France with only an occasional stammer, the usual thinning of hair. But something had changed once he was sent to Italy. What? She never knew, most likely she never would know, but his letters were written in a shivering new hand. Rats had stolen his father’s pocket watch, he wrote. There were parasites in the blankets. Insects in the engine of the ambulance. His hands were infected. The river—what river did he mean? the Isonzo probably—had been electrified by the Austrians, and rippled with blue sparks.

  His clothes always smelled of smoke, he wrote. He watched three Italians hung for insubordination, their bodies tossed into a bonfire in the main square. What town? Could that possibly be true?

  “Like effigies,” Paul said.

  “Like witches,” Sarah said.

  They said it would taste like berries, but it doesn’t, Lee wrote.

  Don’t worry so much, he’d said to Sarah on his last night of permission, just before Christmas 1917, the last time she saw him before he disappeared in Italy. His hands were red and infected, that much was true. You think I’m going to die, but I can’t die.

  Why not?

  The world would no longer exist if I died. He looked at her. It was impossible to tell if he was joking.

  But it wasn’t all like that, even at the end. There were still glimmers. On their last night together they drank two bottles of Pol Roger 1910. A friend of Lee’s had confiscated them from a maison in Épernay. It was shocking that there was still champagne to steal. Lee had heard that the head of Pol Roger had been the mayor of Épernay in 1914, that he’d met the Germans in the middle of the street when they invaded, that he’d threatened to destroy all his stock if they went a meter further. Lee and Sarah laughed, as people had begun to then, at the quaint ideas of the old century. “Still,” Lee said, “it will be a long time before there’s much good champagne again.” Sarah was surprised at the observation—his taste was too Protestant for champagne—but she was pleased he still thought in terms of long times.

  No, Lee didn’t want to talk much, but there were glimmers. His puttees hung from the shutters, drying after she’d washed them in the sink. He hadn’t wanted to go to a restaurant and she didn’t press. The wine had affected her. It was difficult to see him—well, not difficult, exactly, but exhausting, and she fell asleep sooner than she would have liked. Well, no, she only pretended to sleep. She was awake to hear his watch ticking on the bedside table, to notice him turning on the light every hour to check the time. But there were glimmers, still. He kissed her on the mouth when he turned the light out. She pretended to be asleep, afraid that he would freeze—as he often did—at the sight of her open eyes.

  * * *

  Three months later the notice from the American War Department arrived just as Sarah was choosing a coat for a charity event where a gas-blind pianist was to play nocturnes. Missing, believed dead. She read the notice twice to make sure she understood it, chose the lighter coat, and ran to catch the metro to Passy.

  She didn’t tell anyone about Lee that night or the following day. She didn’t cable her parents or Lee’s parents, whom she still had not met as an adult, still had not met as his wife.

  “Do you remember what it felt like to pretend?” she asked Paul and me. “When you were a child. To pretend that your stuffed bear had a personality, or that your family was in the circus. You must have. Everyone does.”

  Sarah had given herself two days to pretend. At the end of those two days she would cable her parents and tell them. She would cable Lee’s parents. She would tell Maud and the friends she had made in Paris, of which there were surprisingly many. Two days to pretend that he was still alive somewhere in the northeast of Italy. To imagine the pressure of his hand holding her ring finger and pinky. To imagine she might feel that pressure again. That she might wake in the night to find him reading under the green desk lamp.

  What she was really trying to do was put her memories of Lee in order. Because these memories were now among the most precious things she possessed, and the most deadly. Surprising, wasn’t it, what mattered? The first time they’d bathed together after they were married, watching h
is ankles warp in the water, feeling someone else’s skin prune. The heat rash on Lee’s forehead in summer, the one summer, anyway.

  * * *

  Pigeons had descended on the square in Bologna, preening in the golden evening. In that kind of light even a pigeon can preen. Sarah sighed.

  “Well, I only meant to tell you about the funeral. Let me go back to that. It was complicated, because of the barrage.”

  “Operation Michael,” Paul said. “That was the German name for it.”

  “Oh, we were already on a first-name basis,” Sarah said.

  On the twenty-second of March—two days after the notice from the War Department arrived—a shell struck the Place de la République in the early morning, after the prostitutes had gone to bed and before the men selling tip sheets for the races at Longchamp had arrived to take their places. No one was hurt. But more explosions followed. Near Place Clichy, a dentist and his patient were killed when the office crumbled around them. In the Marais, not far from where I would later live, three Jews died during services when the temple was grazed with a shell. In Montparnasse, a cinema collapsed, killing ten.

  The barrage came in spurts lasting approximately two hours, between three and five times a day, a shell falling every five to fifteen minutes. The papers were exact in their numbers, so as to underscore that the odds of being hit were not especially high. Still, many left the city altogether, and even the government made plans to evacuate to Bordeaux. For those who stayed, Paris became a place of lonely statues and empty trams. Those who stayed rose early, in the cover of half-light, to search out a day’s worth of butter and news.

  Sarah was one of those who stayed, though she did let Maud persuade her to move from the apartment she’d shared with Lee in the 2nd arrondissement back to her old room in Montmartre. When the air-raid sirens screamed and the artillery rumbled overhead, Sarah and Maud spent their evenings together in the cellar. Two days became eight and Sarah still hadn’t told Maud about Lee. Sarah still hadn’t told her parents. Or Lee’s. Or anyone. But on the ninth day after the notice arrived, Maud handed her a black dress.