by Nick Dybek
“I’m afraid that doesn’t pass for wickedness anymore,” Paul said.
* * *
Trolley wheels squealed in the hall. Sometime later the thumps of a shoeless runner. The taps of a nurse in pursuit. A metal tray or bowl falling to the floor. Insistent knocks on doors up and down the hall. The hours passed that way.
There was much I could and should have said to Sarah, but I didn’t imagine I’d have to. I know that was foolish, I knew it then. But I imagined only feverish Fairbanks saying his true name, any name but Lee Hagen. And afterward: the collecting of the Boston newspapers and the frame with her picture from his room. Or why collect the newspapers? He could keep them, whoever he was, if they brought him any comfort.
“I’ll confess something,” Paul said. “I had never heard of Douglas Fairbanks.”
“I wouldn’t call that a damning admission,” I said.
“No, but I was thinking the real Fairbanks might be interested in knowing about all of this. I was considering writing him a letter.”
“Do you realize how many letters that man receives?” Sarah asked.
Paul did not realize.
“I’m not sure how much you’d like his work,” I said.
“I’ve never understood why anyone likes him,” Sarah said.
“You don’t watch his films then either, Mrs. Hagen?” Paul asked.
“No, I’ve seen them all, I think,” she said. “But I go to the American movies, no matter what.”
In fact, she explained, she’d seen Douglas Fairbanks in The Mark of Zorro in Paris, just a few weeks before she came to Bologna. She and Maud had left, disgusted. She began to explain why, but I couldn’t follow. All I could think about was the fact that I’d also seen The Mark of Zorro in Paris at the theater in Place Clichy. So, she’d been in Paris and made no effort to see me. Sarah didn’t seem aware of her admission, and I felt only a little sting.
* * *
“Paul,” Sarah said, “the girl in Silesia you told us about? Now that I know what you’ve truly been obsessed with, I have to tell you I think you’ve chosen wrong. Was she real?”
He laughed. “Real? Yes, but exaggerated. I doubt she’d remember me.”
“It doesn’t seem like Drummond Green does either,” I said.
* * *
A man cried out from down the hall. He seemed to be in a great deal of pain, but it was impossible to know what kind. Somehow, I didn’t think the voice was Fairbanks’s, but it might have been.
* * *
“What will you do?” Paul asked. “What will you do if it’s not him?” It was nearly dawn. We’d turned the lights out sometime before, agreeing we should at least try to sleep. But no one tried. We just sat in the oily darkness. “I know I shouldn’t ask. It seems we have too much time for our own good, don’t we?”
She lay with her face turned to the wall, but she wasn’t even pretending to sleep.
“I don’t mind telling you,” Paul continued. “I intend to leave tomorrow no matter what. For Vienna. Can I say something else? I never should have told you about Drummond Green. I thought it might help. That was a mistake.”
Slowly, she sat up in bed.
“Are you saying there is no Drummond Green?”
“Of course not. He’s in the next room. But I should not have told you.”
“In that case, why would you leave?” Sarah asked.
“Everything is easier with two eyes, you know. I like my chances better in Vienna. And Bologna is not safe now, for you or Tom either.”
This was true. The communists had promised another general strike. Mussolini had promised that the Blackshirts would retaliate by storming the city, ten thousand strong this time. Some of the papers were already calling it civil war.
“You’re being disingenuous,” she said. “Isn’t it a little late for that?”
“All right, Mrs. Hagen,” Paul said. “Let me not be disingenuous. Once, I intended to kill Drummond Green, but I gave that up a long time ago, truly I did. It was easy to give that up, but I thought that if I ever actually found him I’d feel . . .” He didn’t finish. I heard the paper rustling in his hands. A car engine, the first in many hours, turned over somewhere outside the window. “I do not know. Perhaps it is just easier to accept that there is no meaning when one’s face and ribs hurt so much.”
“Perhaps I should try it,” Sarah said.
“I hope you don’t,” he said. “Anyway, that was disingenuous too. I have a better reason to leave. But that, I’d like to keep to myself.”
It was not until years later when Paul’s wife told me the story of their meeting that I finally realized what he’d meant.
“Tell me at least one thing,” he said. “Have you considered it? If it isn’t him. Do you know what you will do?”
“Yes, I know.”
There were footsteps in the corridor. The door opened, and light from the hall caught Sarah’s arm in a slash. A nurse’s solemn face filled the door.
“Mi scusi, occupata,” Sarah said. The words sounded strangely affectionate. There was just enough light to see the nurse frown and squint.
“I know that,” she said in English. “The doctor is waiting for you.”
* * *
It was just past four A.M.—earlier than I’d thought—when Fairbanks’s eyes met mine in the doorway. He lay on his side, breath whistling through his teeth. But the eyes were angry and alert, resulting in a face that looked suddenly intelligent, even clever. It’s tempting to say that it looked like there was a person inside him again, though perhaps it only seemed that way because he was so clearly suffering.
Bianchi, for his part, looked like a sleepy boy on his way to school. He’d tried to smooth his hair, but it stuck up in birdy spikes. Even so, he touched Fairbanks’s brow with impressive tenderness, asking, “Can you sit up?”
Fairbanks’s head lolled back, but then he did sit up, and then he did stand, and point to a chair—my chair, as it happened. He was much taller than I had expected. Bianchi nodded, and pulled another chair in from the hall, and Fairbanks fell into it, pressing his knees together, folding his hands in his lap.
Bianchi wet a pen on his tongue. He sipped coffee. I would have liked some, if only to distract myself from what I now realized would be awful, no matter the result.
“As I have many times before,” Bianchi said, “I would like to ask you questions, Mr. Fairbanks. But, this time, because I know you do not feel well, I will not use hypnosis. Naturally, I hope you will do your best to answer these questions. You understand?”
“Yes,” Fairbanks said. “No harm in that.” The stiff bark was mostly gone from his voice. He refolded his hands.
“I am glad you think so.” Bianchi looked back at us, offering one final opportunity to stop him. “What is your name?” he asked.
“I like Fairbanks,” the man said slowly. “Can you call me that?”
“If you want,” Bianchi said. “Do you recognize anyone here? From before you came to be in this hospital?”
Fairbanks glanced up, then shyly turned his eyes away.
“I don’t know. I may.”
“Who?”
“Well, it was a long time ago.” He didn’t look anyone in the eyes. In fact, he appeared to be speaking to his own naked right foot.
“What was your name then?”
He licked his lips several times, as if he might find the answer there. “I’d like a glass of water,” he said.
“Why don’t I get it?” I said.
“In my office,” Bianchi said. “There’s a pitcher.”
* * *
I filled then almost dropped the glass. Perhaps I was thinking of all of the times I’d stood behind Father Perrin with a pitcher just like this one for the families who had crossed the Meuse to speak with him. Perhaps I was thinking of all the other rivers: the Marne, the Somme, the Isonzo. And that even the afterlife was no escape: the Styx, the Lethe. Charon. Well, I think of these things now, but I doubt I did then.
“I don’t know,” Fairbanks was saying, when I returned to the room and handed him the glass. “Pine trees. Shoveling snow.”
He drank the water greedily. Paul whispered, “Nothing yet.”
Fairbanks already seemed less lucid than he had before. He was sweating, occasionally clawing at the collar of his shirt. His tongue continued to flicker across his lips.
“Would you rather talk about the war?” Bianchi asked, his voice still smooth as the sky.
“I wasn’t really in the war very much,” Fairbanks said.
“What do you recall about the war?”
“Lice.”
It continued like that, Bianchi calmly asking questions, Fairbanks answering in fragments.
Could he tell us if he’d gone to college? What his parents did for a living? Did he have siblings?
He could not tell us.
“Are you married?”
“I had a girl.”
“What was her name?”
“I’m not at all sure,” he said to his foot.
I watched Sarah’s face as he answered that question. I watched her face the entire time. I saw her beginning to doubt—I feel fairly sure of that even at such distance, even through clearer eyes. It wasn’t that he’d said anything that proved he was not Lee Hagen, but something in his manner of speaking, in the faint outlines of lost mannerisms, betrayed him—perhaps the way his tongue just kept flicking and flicking. I saw the desolation on her face, and, yes, I was happy to see it.
Bianchi asked about a trade, skills. Had he been to Paris? Yes, he had. Verdun? He wasn’t sure. Had he been in the mountains of Italy? He wasn’t sure about that either, but he thought, yes, perhaps.
“How are you feeling, Mr. Fairbanks?” Bianchi asked. “Should we test your temperature?”
“If you want,” Fairbanks said. But his voice was growing quieter, his gaze drawing back.
Even so, Bianchi smiled. “If you want, I will ask more questions. Describe what you remember of your home.”
“I’m afraid it burned down.”
“Your house?”
“The entire city. I was afraid it would burn. I checked the newspaper whenever I could.”
“What newspaper was that, Mr. Fairbanks?”
“The newspaper was run by cruel people. I remember playing the word search.”
“The word search?”
“You know the word search.” His voice surged. “You must.”
“You circle words hidden in a grid of letters, don’t you?” I said.
“I knew you’d know it,” Fairbanks said, nodding. “All the words they’d chosen were horrible. Mustard. Flame. Explosion. Lice. Froth. Buried. I began to scream. And my mother put a blanket around me.”
“Your mother?” Bianchi asked. “Where?”
“Not my actual mother.”
Soon after, Fairbanks began to tremble; Bianchi draped a blanket around his shoulders. “I hope you are feeling well enough to go on, Mr. Fairbanks.”
“I don’t. I don’t feel well.”
Bianchi drew in a breath and turned to us, his face apologetic. “You see that I’ve done all I can. Mrs. Hagen, would you like to ask him anything?”
Sarah seemed startled by the question. She must have thought nothing would be required of her. She began to say something, and then shook her head. Likely, it was too late, anyway. Fairbanks had curled the blanket tighter around his stooped shoulders. He shifted on the chair, trying to find a better position in which to shiver, receding into his fever.
“Will he be all right?” Paul asked.
“It looks like this when you poison a man,” Bianchi answered.
It looked awful. His mouth seemed too weak to work. His lips had gone white, which made the teeth appear all the more broken. Sarah would leave him now. Paul had already said as much. Whoever he was, he would wake from this fever completely alone. Even Bianchi would leave. I would leave too, but now that he no longer posed a threat it was impossible not to feel for him. I told him silently—that is, I told myself—that I’d find some way to help him. At the moment, though, I was too tired even to look at him. I did not want to look at him. As Bianchi finished off his notes, as Sarah and Paul looked on, I only heard the grinding sound he made in the back of his throat. I only heard his heavy breath humming almost musically. And I heard him begin to sing.
I still had a ball, I still had a ball.
I went to the city, but I still had a ball, I still had a ball.
The melody—such as it was—came more from his throat than his mouth, and the words whistled through the gaps in his teeth. Still, there was no mistaking them. And yet I did mistake them. That is to say: though I recognized them at once, I did not fully understand what the words might mean, how Fairbanks might know them, what they might say about who he was.
But, whoever he was, he sang to the white foot, to the ceiling and the window. His eyes flickered open and closed. Bianchi was scribbling in his notebook, completely unaware of what was happening in the rubble of the voice.
I still had a ball, I still had a ball. A ball, ball, ball.
A perfect end, a perfect year.
“What is that, Mr. Fairbanks?” Bianchi finally asked, polite but not quite interested. A ball, a ball, I still had a ball. Then Bianchi looked at me and his manner changed. “What is it, Tom? Mrs. Hagen? Tom?”
I simply could not answer. Every word Fairbanks sang felt like a chisel to what remained of the truth, a ball, a ball, a ball.
It was difficult, of course, to look at Sarah in such a moment. But I had to. Thank god, her hands were covering her face, so I couldn’t see the expression, though she had already risen from her chair.
“Tom,” Sarah said. “Do you hear? You have to tell them. You have to tell them.”
“What is it, Tom?” Bianchi asked.
Paul had risen from his chair too, though he didn’t seem to know what he should do. “What is this?” Paul asked. “Can someone explain?”
What a question. Of all the things I had seen in my life, this was the one I could explain least. And yet I could also explain it perfectly. I could explain that I had met Lee Hagen in Aix-les-Bains, that I had heard him sing this song, that he, in fact, had written it, that he was one of the only people in the world who could possibly know it. And so I did. I explained everything as I recalled saying it to Sarah in the restaurant in Verdun with Michaud the waiter and Michaud the duck. Afterward, I watched her kiss Fairbanks’s fingers and help him into bed. And after that I walked out through the ward past the other patients, some awake and shaving their faces in bed, some still turning over mid-dream.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
* * *
Bologna Centrale was mobbed; the trains had only just started running again after another strike. Paul and I waded past families picnicking amid ranges of stacked trunks, past women fanning the sweat from their children with paper tickets, past heads jerking to the snap of flipping numbers as departures and delays were announced on the great black timetable.
Once we boarded the train to Zurich, Paul and I had to scusa and push through the crowded corridor. Only his bandaged face secured us seats in a compartment picked clean by strikers. In fact, the train had the look of the trains of 1918, when the upholstery had been bayoneted to patch shoes and coats, ashtrays scavenged for copper, luggage straps stolen for leather, and windows smashed for no reason at all.
We shared the compartment with a family of light-eyed northern Italians with the luggage and look of people leaving a place for good. They were traveling with two children, the younger of whom looked to be about three, a little girl who sat up on her knees and pressed her hands to the window as the train lurched from the station. Addio, stazione, she said. Addio, città. Addio, alberi. Addio, ponti.
&nb
sp; In the countryside it was already fall. The late afternoon sun came in at an ugly angle. The bandage on Paul’s eye needed a change. The girl’s brother, perhaps nine or ten, clutched a football in his lap. He seemed to want badly to bounce it on his knee but had clearly been warned.
I thought I’d drifted off to sleep, but I must have been speaking, because Paul said, “Don’t say that. Take some time before you say that.”
There was a young woman crying in the corridor. There seemed something illicit in the way a man was trying to console her. Paul touched his temple where the light hit, and scratched under the bandage. He put his fingers to his nose and winced at the smell.
Goodbye, motorcars. Goodbye, town. The parents were charmed by their little girl, though they kept checking with their eyes to make sure we were charmed too. Goodbye, trees. Goodbye, other trees. Goodbye, church.
The little girl left palm prints on the glass through which low hills fell away one by one.
“Goodbye, hills,” I said. The girl turned away from me, afraid. The mother apologized. I didn’t like to think of myself as a man who frightened children, though at the time I did rather feel that way.
“It’s my fault,” Paul said. “Children don’t trust a bandaged face. But I have to tell you, Tom, I don’t trust the way you look right now.”
“I’m too tired to talk, Paul, please,” I said.
“But wouldn’t I be wrong if I didn’t tell you that you’re destroying yourself for no reason? That there is a more likely explanation to all of that.”
I had no doubt what that meant. It had been two days since Fairbanks’s fever, two days since we’d left San Lorenzo. Neither of us had been back.
“I’m aware likely doesn’t always matter. But listen to me, if you can. You told her about the song? You sang it to her?”
“Yes.”
“She knew it then. Enough to recognize it from a fragment.”
“Apparently so.”
“And she used to sing to Fairbanks. Bianchi said that, didn’t he?”
“You don’t think I’ve thought of all that?” I spat those words. Apologized.
The little girl’s brother had joined her in the game. Goodbye, river. Goodbye, sheep. Goodbye, farm. I wondered how I might signal to the parents. Perhaps it was time to put a stop to it.
