by Heather Webb
But now, it seemed, God had arranged his own atonement. A life for a life, wasn’t that right, since they were all God’s children, and equal in His eyes? But it was a shame that poor young Johnson was now forced to pay Octavian’s indemnity. Johnson wasn’t present on that verdant May afternoon in the French barn. Hardly fair that he should die for it.
Octavian shut his eyes. Tested his left arm, tested his fingers wrapped around the pistol. The muscles of his abdomen, contracting in agony against his broken rib.
The leaves stuck to his wet cheek. He licked his lips and tasted blood, and he realized he’d been tasting it all along: that the bright, metallic flavor in his mouth was his own human blood.
“Zeig dich!” a man called out. “Zeig dich! Oder ich scheisse!”
Octavian fastened on the word scheisse. He knew what that meant.
Shoot.
He snarled his lips, flung off the leather jacket, lifted his left arm, and fired.
The first man, struck in the chest at a range of perhaps five yards, yelled a strangled “Ach!” as he flew backward and hit the soft, leaf-strewn ground.
The second man fired his own frantic pistol—once, twice—and Octavian, feeling nothing, coolly adjusted his aim and fired again.
The pistol jammed.
“Halt! Halt!”
Octavian sat with his arm outstretched, holding the pistol, hoping the man opposite didn’t realize what had just happened. That Octavian was impotent.
“Stop!” This time in English. A female voice. “Please stop!”
“Gertrude! Zurückbekommen!” said the German, his pistol trained on Octavian.
He was old, Octavian realized in shock. Not a soldier at all. Just an old man in a threadbare wool suit, his face white and grizzled, his arm quivering. Both shots had missed—at least, Octavian hadn’t noticed the impact—and the gun he held in his hand must have been at least as old and rusted as the man himself.
The girl. Gertrude. Octavian couldn’t see her, but her voice had come from the right, young and frightened. She made a noise like a sob, and her footsteps squished against the ground.
“Nein, Gertrude!” cried the old man.
“Papa,” she said, in a broken voice, and she came into view, bundled in a worn brown coat, her head covered by her hood. She bent over the fallen man and cried out. “Mein Vater! Mein Vater!” she said, gripping the man by his shoulders.
“Ist er tot?” demanded the old man.
“Ich weisse nicht, Ich weisse nicht!”
The old man’s lips curled around his teeth, and Octavian knew he was going to shoot. He was going to shoot Octavian, and that was perfectly fair, wasn’t it, perfectly fair and just, because Octavian had just killed Gertrude’s father. Octavian had killed this poor old German man, lying among the rotting leaves; moreover, he’d pursued and shot down at least eleven additional Germans (possibly more) and a couple of observation balloons besides; he’d stood by in the springtime and allowed a German prisoner to be shot like a dog, and he hadn’t once objected to any of this slaughter. So these particular Germans had every right to shoot him, just like he’d had every right to shoot them. Around and around it went, forever and ever, until nobody was left alive. C’est la guerre.
He dropped the pistol into the earth.
The old man’s eyes narrowed into an angry squint, taking aim.
“Nein!” the girl cried. “Onkel! Nein!”
“Er sollte sterben, den Hund!”
“Nein! Der Krieg ist vorbei! Es is genung! Bitte!” She was sobbing now, rising up, grasping the old man’s arm. “Es is genung! Haben Sie nicht genung Männer starb? Der Krieg ist vorbei!”
Octavian’s hand went to his pocket, where he kept Sophie’s photograph.
“Just kill me,” he muttered. “Go ahead.”
The girl turned to him. She tossed the old man’s pistol onto the ground, next to Octavian’s. Her hood had fallen back from her head, exposing a long flaxen braid to the damp air. Octavian thought she was perhaps fifteen or sixteen, for while her cheeks were concave and incurably hungry, the skin that covered them was still tender. Her eyes were flat and hopeless, the color of November. “No, soldier,” she said, in English. “You did not know? The war is over.”
She turned back to her father, loosening his clothes, and Octavian slumped forward. Then he remembered Johnson, and he looked back to see if the kid was still breathing, or whether he’d choked to death during the course of that little incomprehensible exchange. The war is over. What did she mean by that?
The crisis now past, his brain was beginning to lose its moorings and drift. There were now two Johnsons lying on the ground before him, and each of them had a new wound, a fresh piece of skull missing from the top of his head, a small mound of pink matter oozing forth from within, and Octavian thought, So the old bastard didn’t miss, after all.
The war is over. Well, she was right about that. The war was over for him and Johnson, anyway. Johnson was dead, and Octavian was a prisoner. Lucky to be alive, maybe, and even luckier if he didn’t die in a prison hospital. All of Germany was living on rats and acorns, people said, and an American prisoner would be fed last of all. His war was over. Everything was over.
He touched his pocket again with his stiff hand, but when his fingers slipped inside, seeking reassurance or maybe absolution, they found nothing.
The photograph was gone.
Paris. Mid-April 1920, just after midnight
OCTAVIAN FOUND HIS pair of rooms in the Montparnasse attic a little over a year ago, not because he wanted to write or paint or compose music or any darned thing, but because a few of his buddies lived there, and it was cheap.
By then his bones had knit back together, and so had the skin on his arms that had burned in the fire, though he hadn’t noticed at the time. His face remained strangely unscathed, like a baby’s, so you wouldn’t know how many scars he bore underneath his clothes. The doctors all said he was lucky, fabulously lucky.
He thinks about this now, as the taxi nears the crumbling Second Empire building where he lives, No. 33. Not about luck, but about his scars, and whether they will charm or repel la belle Hélène, or whether she’s too drunk to notice. (Is it taking advantage of a girl, if you’re a virgin and she is surely not, if you’re both drunk and she’s the one who first suggested a liaison? He’s not sure. The lines are all so blurry, in this bright modern age.) He thinks about poor old Johnson and his widow, a subject to which his mind turns with sordid frequency. Tits like this—he glances at Hélène’s chest, and he realizes that he’s well within his rights, for the first time in his life, to touch a woman’s breasts. He lifts his stiff right hand, plunges it inside her dress, and does just that, like he’s changing the oil of a Model T, and Hélène gasps obligingly and tilts her head back, and between that—the sight of Hélène’s vulnerable dusky throat, the feel of her soft breast in his palm, the warmth of her hand on his crotch (so good, so good, so good)—and the whisky and the smoke and the darkness, he nearly disgraces himself, the same way that poor hayseed Johnson disgraced himself his first time. Except Johnson actually got his thing inside the widow first, according to his own account, and by God (here Octavian gulps for air, and the self-control that comes with oxygen), by God, a cool customer like J.C. can do as much. Can’t he?
The taxi stops suddenly, throwing them apart in the nick of time. Hélène makes a panting little heap on the seat, her bobbed hair just shading her eyes, her dark lips smiling dreamily, while Octavian reaches in his pocket for the fare. The driver accepts his money without expression. Octavian opens the door and reaches for Hélène’s hand; she lifts her head and asks him if he’s got a cigarette.
“I guess so,” he says. He pulls her forth from the taxi and sets her upright. She slings one arm around his neck while he hunts for his cigarettes in various pockets. The rain’s stoppe
d, the sky’s clearing. Springtime in Paris. The cool, damp air clears his head a little, so that he’s able to enjoy his drunkenness from the outside, as it were: to savor the smell and feel of the woman pressed against his groin, the dirty, disrespectful knowledge of what he’s about to do with her. To exult in his freedom from self-restraint. (He finds the cigarettes and pulls two of them from the lips of the crushed packet, sticking one inside Hélène’s mouth and one inside his own.) Why, heck, it’s about time he throws off the shackles! God only knows why he waited so long—why, for so many years, he allowed the specter of a girl he doesn’t know to cast her disapproval over the perfectly natural urges of a perfectly virile red-blooded American ace pilot. (He finds a match and lights the end of Hélène’s cigarette, and then his own.) Why, goddammit, he’s a war hero, isn’t he? He’s got a right to screw a pretty girl. He’s got a right to fornication, after all that hell and sacrifice. He made the world safe for democracy! He ended all wars! So he’s got a right. To the victor go the spoils. Only the brave deserve the fair. See? You can’t argue with the wisdom of proverbs.
Hélène blows out a paper-thin stream of smoke and says she’s getting a little cold, down here on the pavement.
“All right,” says Octavian, and he takes her hand and leads her to the door of the apartment building.
The lock is stiff and doesn’t want to turn, but Octavian coaxes it open while Hélène fumbles from behind at the buttons of his shirt. The door opens to a small and tatty courtyard, pots overgrown with brown winter weeds. There’s a tree in the middle that Octavian knows to be a linden, though you can’t tell at the moment because the leaves have stubbornly refused to unfurl this spring. Underneath the tree is a wrought-iron bench of tremendous age and decoration, the kind of bench your Victorian parents might have sat on while conducting a perfectly respectable courtship, and for some reason Octavian thinks it’s a splendid idea to lead Hélène to this bench and pull her down with him.
She makes a fevered little gasp and puts one hand at his nape, while the other plucks at his shirt. “Ah, my love,” she says, kissing his neck and jaw, “ah, Claude!”
“Octavian,” he mutters. “It’s Octavian.”
Either she doesn’t hear him, or she doesn’t care. She goes on calling him Claude as she tears at his buttons, and Octavian, trying to find a way to uncover her breasts again in the middle of all this frantic activity, figures it doesn’t matter. Hélène and Claude, fine. He gives up on her breasts and finds the edge of her dress instead, which has ridden up her legs to expose the tops of her stockings, the elastic of her garters, the slippery skin of her thighs. “Mon Dieu!” she cries, tilting back her head again, taking a quick and hissing draft of her cigarette, Claude, fuck me, please, now! And it sounds so inviting in French, so sinful and yet naturally elegant, that Octavian thinks, Fine, we’ll do it right here, I’m going to screw a woman for the first time on a bench in a courtyard, why not, and he says, in her ear, “How?”
She laughs. “However you like, Claude. You know how I like it.”
“But I’m not Claude.”
“Shh!” She lays the first two fingers of her right hand across his lips, and that’s when he realizes that she hasn’t actually kissed him yet: properly, on the lips, the way other lovers kiss.
He nibbles her fingers. It seems the right thing to do. “Who’s Claude?”
“Mon amant.” She sways a little, right there on his lap, atop the bulge in his trousers, and finishes her cigarette. “Mon ciel sur la terre.”
Octavian sucks in his breath, holds it, counts to five. Exhales with great precision. My heaven on earth. “When did he die?”
“Verdun.”
The word is a sob. That word is always a sob. Hélène’s small French body, made of tiny angular bones and hollowness, sharp and frantic an instant ago, has begun to melt in sorrow against his clothes. He doesn’t ask more about Claude. He doesn’t need to. Verdun is a time and a place and a manner of death, all rolled into one. Poor Claude. Poor dumb sucker. At least he got to fuck his sweetheart before he left, to fuck his dear little bird, his Hélène. Does he mind that other men have taken over that duty? That Octavian is about to fuck his dear little bird? Or, when you are blasted into minute chunks of fresh-blackened flesh by the proximate explosion of a Krupps artillery shell, are you released from your enslavement to petty human jealousies? Is Claude hovering in the courtyard right this second, cheering them on in their mutual pursuit of relief? Offering a much-needed hint or two to that dumb virgin J.C.?
“Please,” Hélène says, nudging her hips, tossing away the stub of her cigarette into the paving stones. The courtyard is unlit, except for the glow of a couple of windows somewhere above them, but Octavian has always been able to see well at night. Hélène’s eyes are half-closed and enormous, and the kohl has smudged underneath the bottom lids, so that she looks frail and somewhat bruised as she undulates impatiently on his lap. Her neck is long and slender, quite smooth, and the transparent fabric of her dress has come askew over her breasts, exposing one—small, young, bearing a tiny dark nipple—and disguising the other. Octavian’s hands are presently resting at her waist, underneath her dress, and she’s not wearing a corset or camisole anything like that, obviously, so there’s nothing but bare skin under his fingers, warm and springy, musky-sweet, or is that the smell of her privates? Making him dizzy. Her thighs squeeze his, one on each side. Her humid cigarette breath comes in bursts. Octavian is so aroused, he’s afraid of himself. Afraid of what he might do to her. Afraid of what he might not do to her.
All right. All right. You can do this. It’s just anatomy, right? Just a matter of getting the parts in the right place. The world is populated, it can’t be that difficult. But how the hell does he unbutton his trousers, when she’s squirming on his lap like that? He lifts her up by the waist, but it’s not enough space, he’s too hard, so he sort of hauls her off his lap to the bench and stands up to unfasten the damned trousers and get on with it, release himself to the open air and—God have mercy—Hélène’s waiting body, and that’s when he realizes there is someone else in the courtyard.
Octavian holds himself still, hands frozen at his waist. His senses, dulled by whisky and sexual arousal, sharpen back to their habitual points.
He hears the breathing first: soft, shallow, rapid. Trying not to make itself known, and yet so obvious that he cannot believe he didn’t notice the sound before. And then the smell. Damp wool. Greenness, almost floral but not quite. The vibration of a startled heartbeat.
“Who’s there?” he calls out, in French.
“What’s the matter?” Hélène says.
“Someone’s here.”
She makes a derisive noise. “Claude. Come back here. I have such a fever.”
He doesn’t move. He listens for more sound, in between the beats of his heart, and then he hears it: a tiny rustle, like the movement of a squirrel in a tree. He turns his head to the right and sees her, huddled in the corner, a dark feminine shadow outlined against the stone.
Octavian’s hands fall in shame from his trouser buttons.
“Can I help you?” he calls gently.
The figure shakes its head.
“Have you somewhere to go?”
A small voice replies, in hesitant words: “Je ne parle pas français.”
“English?”
She darts from the corner.
“Wait!”
Octavian moves after her, but she’s so quick, he only just manages to grasp her fingertips. But it’s enough. She stills in his hand. His heart thuds in panic. His cheeks are hot. What now?
Behind him, Hélène calls out, “Claude! What are you doing? Who is she?”
Who is she.
He reaches for the girl’s hood. Fingers shaking. Eyes blurry. Brain spilling from his head. He pulls back the hood—so tender, as if plucking a tiny bird
from its nest—and whispers, “Sophie?”
A smooth head of hair slips free, and then a braid, long and flaxen. She ducks her head and reaches for the hood.
“No! I have make mistake.”
“But I know you!”
“Not anymore.”
She pulls away and breaks for the door, but the sticky latch confounds her, and Octavian catches her and turns her to the light from one of the windows. Her face is hungry and familiar and pink with humiliation.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“Let me go.”
“It’s Gertrude, isn’t it?”
“I have make mistake. Please, let me go.”
“Why are you here? You found me here. Don’t be afraid.”
“I am not afraid.” She tilts her chin a little. “I am sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too. I—this—it’s not what—”
She turns away and reaches into her pocket. “I bring you something, see. That is all. Here. If you want.”
All at once, Octavian is cold, so cold he can’t move. There are footsteps behind him, Hélène rising from the bench and approaching them in curiosity, the heels of her shoes clicking uncertainly on the paving stones, but Octavian is powerless to turn his head, powerless to lift his hand and accept the small yellow envelope that Gertrude holds in the space between them.
“Here,” she says again. She’s stronger now, and defiant. Her eyes widen fearlessly. There’s nothing like moral superiority, is there? When you have caught a man almost in the act of sin, and he stands before you, degraded, frozen in shame. “You wanted this very much once, yes? Your photograph that you lose.”
