The Destiny of Nathalie X

by William Boyd

  “It’s your civic duty,” he said, his voice strong and unslurred. “Have a cigar.”

  He offered me a trabuco, those ones that have a straw mouthpiece because they are so strong. I declined—at that time I did not smoke. When the wine arrived he insisted on paying for it.

  “I’m a rich man,” he said as he filled our glasses. “Where’re you posted?”

  “Galicia.”

  “Ah, the Russians are coming.” He paused. “I want to go somewhere cold and dark. I detest this sun, and this city. Why aren’t we fighting the Eskimos? I hate daylight. Maybe I could declare war on the Lapps. One-man army.”

  “Bit lonely, no?”

  “I want to be lonely. All I do is pollute my mind talking to people … I want a dark cold lonely war. Please.”

  “People will think you’re mad.”

  He raised his glass. “God preserve me from sanity.”

  I thought of something Nietzsche had said: “Our life, our happiness, is beyond the north, beyond ice, beyond death.” I looked into Georg’s ugly face, his thin eyes and glossy lips, and felt a kind of love for him and his honesty. I clinked my glass against his and asked God to preserve me from sanity as well.

  Tagebuch: 15 August. Cracow.

  … If your wife, for example, continually puts too much sugar in your tea it is not because she has too much sugar in her cupboard, it is because she is not educated in the ways of handling sweetness. Similarly, the problem of how to live a good life cannot ever be solved by continually assaulting it with the intellect. Certain things can only be shown, not stated …

  THE SEARCHLIGHT

  I enlisted in the artillery to fire howitzers but instead found myself manning a searchlight on a small, heavily armed paddle steamer called the Goplana. We cruised up and down the Vistula, ostensibly looking for Russians but also to provide support for any river crossings by our own forces.

  I enjoyed my role in charge of the searchlight. I took its mounting apart and oiled and greased its bearings. Reassembled, it moved effortlessly under the touch of my fingers. Its strong beam shone straight and true in the blurry semidarkness of those late summer nights. However, I soon found the living conditions on the Goplana intolerable because of the stink, the proximity and the vulgarity of my fellow soldiers. And because we were constantly in motion, life belowdecks was dominated by the thrum and grind of the Goplana’s churning paddles. I spent long hours in my corner of the bridge house needlessly overhauling the mechanism of the searchlight—anything to escape the torrent of filth and viciousness that poured from the men. But despite these periods of solitude and isolation I found that my old despair began to creep through me again, like a stain.

  One day we disembarked at Sandomierz and were sent to a bathhouse. As we washed I looked at my naked companions, their brown faces and forearms, their gray-white bodies and dark, dripping genitals as they soaped and sluiced themselves with garrulous ostentation. I felt only loathing for them, my fellow men. It was impossible both to work with them and to have nothing to do with them. I was glad that I felt no stirrings of sensuality as I contemplated their naked bodies. I saw that they were men but I could not see they were human beings.

  Tagebuch: 8 September. Sawichost.

  … The news is worse. All the talk is of Cracow being besieged. Last night there was an alarm. I ran up on deck to man the searchlight. It was raining and I wore only a shirt and trousers. I played the beam of the searchlight to and fro on the opposite bank of the river for hours, my feet and hands slowly becoming numb. Then we heard the sound of gunfire and I at once became convinced I was going to die that night. The beam of the searchlight was a lucent arrow pointing directly at me. And for the first time I felt, being face-to-face with my own death, with possibly only an hour or two of life remaining to me, that I had in those few hours the chance to be a good man, if only because of this uniquely potent consciousness of myself. And, as ever, my attempts to articulate my experience as I understood and felt it, and to seize intellectually its profound implications, slipped beyond the power of language. “I did my duty and stayed at my post.” That is all I can say about that tremendous night.

  THE AMPUTEE

  Of course I did not die and of course I fell back into more abject moods of self-disgust and loathing. Perhaps the only consolation was that my enormous fatigue made it impossible for me to think about my work.

  It was about this time—in September or October—that I heard the news about my brother Paul. He was a quite different personality from me—fierce and somewhat dominating—and he had tackled his vocation as concert pianist with uncompromising dedication. Since his debut his future seemed assured, an avenue of bright tomorrows. To receive the news, then, that he had been captured by the Russians and had had his right arm amputated at the elbow, as the result of wounds he had sustained, was devastating. For days my thoughts were of Paul and of what I would do in his situation. Poor Paul, I thought, if only there were some solution other than suicide. What philosophy it will take to get over this!

  Tagebuch: 13 October. Nadbrzesze.

  … We have sailed here, waited for twelve hours and have now been ordered to return to Sawichost. All day we can hear the mumble of artillery in the east. I find myself drawn down into dark depression again, remorselessly. Why? What is the real basis of this malaise?… I see one of my fellow soldiers pissing over the side of the boat in full view of the few citizens of Nadbrzesze who have gathered on the quayside to stare at us. The long pale arc of his urine sparkles in the thin autumn sunshine. Another soldier leans on his elbows staring candidly at the man’s flaccid white penis, held daintily between two fingers like a titbit. This is shaken, its tip squeezed and then tucked away in the coarse serge of his trousers. I think if I were standing at a machine gun rather than at a searchlight I could kill them both without a qualm … Why do I detest these simple foolish men so? Why can I not be impassive? I despise my own weakness, my inability to distance myself from the commonplace.

  THE BATTLE OF GRÓDEK

  On our return from Sawichost I received mail. A long letter from David—I wonder if he thinks of me half as much as I think of him?—and a most distressing communication from Ficker, to whom I had written asking for some books to be sent to me. I quote:

  … I see from your letter that you are not far from Cracow. I wonder if you get the opportunity you could attempt to find and visit [Georg]. You may have heard of the heavy fighting at Gródek some two weeks ago. Georg was there and, owing to the chaos and disorganization that prevailed at the time, was mistakenly placed in charge of a field hospital not far behind our lines. Apparently he protested vigorously that he was merely a dispensing chemist and not a doctor, but resources were so stretched he was told to do the best he could.

  Thus Georg found himself with two orderlies (Czechs, who spoke little German) in charge of a fifty-bed field hospital. As the battle wore on more than ninety severely wounded casualties were delivered during the day. Repeatedly, Georg signaled for a doctor to be sent as he could do nothing for these men except inject them with morphine and attempt to dress their wounds. In fact it became clear that through some oversight these casualties had been sent to the wrong hospital. The ambulance crews that transported them had been erroneously informed that there was a field surgery and a team of surgeons operating there.

  By nine in the evening all of Georg’s supplies of morphine were exhausted. Shortly thereafter men began to scream from the resurgent pain. Finally, one officer who had lost his left leg at the hip shot himself in the head.

  At this point Georg ran away. Two kilometers from the field hospital was a small wood that, at the start of the battle, had been a battalion headquarters. Georg went there for help, or at least to report the ghastly condition of the wounded in his charge. When he arrived there he found that an impromptu military tribunal had just executed twenty deserters by hanging.

  I do not know exactly what happened next. I believe that at the sight of these fresh cor
pses Georg tried to seize a revolver from an officer and shoot himself. Whatever happened, he behaved in a demented manner, was subdued and himself arrested for desertion in the face of the enemy. I managed to visit him briefly in the mental hospital at Cracow ten days ago. He is in a very bad way, but at least, thank God, the charges of desertion have been dropped and he is being treated for dementia praecox. For some reason Georg is convinced he will be prosecuted for cowardice. He is sure he is going to hang.

  THE ASYLUM AT CRACOW

  Georg’s cell was very cold, and dark, the only illumination coming from an oil lamp in the corridor. Georg needed a shave but otherwise he looked much the same as he had on my two previous encounters with him. He was wearing a curious oatmeal canvas uniform, the jacket secured with strings instead of buttons. With his big head and thin eyes he looked strangely Chinese. There was one other patient in his cell with him, a major in the cavalry who was suffering from delirium tremens. This man remained hunched on a truckle bed in the corner of the room, sobbing quietly to himself while Georg and I spoke. He did not recognize me. I merely introduced myself as a friend of Ficker’s.

  “Ficker asked me to visit you,” I said. “How are you?”

  “Well, I’m …” He stopped and gestured at the major. “I used to think I was a heavy drinker.” He smiled. “Actually, he’s being quite good now.” Georg rubbed his short hair with both hands.

  “I heard about what happened,” I said. “It must have been terrible.”

  He looked at me intently, and then seemed to think for a while.

  “Yes,” he said, “yes, yes, yes. All that sort of thing.”

  “I completely understand.”

  He shrugged uselessly. Certain things can only be shown, not stated.

  He smiled. “You don’t have any cigars on you, by any chance? They haven’t brought me my kit. One longs for a decent cigar.”

  “Let me get some for you.”

  “I smoke trabucos—the ones with the straw holder.”

  “They’re very strong, I believe. I don’t smoke, but I heard they can burn your throat.”

  “It’s a small price to pay.”

  We sat in silence for a moment, listening to the major’s snufflings.

  “It’s very cold here,” Georg began slowly, “and very dark, and if they got rid of the major the conditions would be perfect.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Actually, I have several boxes of trabucos in my kit,” he went on. “If you could get a message to my orderly, perhaps he could bring me a couple.”

  “Of course.”

  “Oh, and would you ask him to bring me my green leather case.”

  “Green leather case.”

  “Yes,” he paused. “That is essential …” He rubbed his face, as if his features were tired of being eternally composed. “I think with a good cigar I could even tolerate the major.”

  I found Georg’s orderly in the Medical Corps’ billet in a small village on the outskirts of Cracow. The city was clearly visible across the flat cropped meadows where a few piebald ponies grazed: a low attenuated silhouette punctuated by a few domes and spires and the odd factory chimney. In the indistinct grainy light of the late afternoon the bulk of the Marienkirche had the look of a vast warehouse. I passed on Georg’s instructions: two boxes of trabuco cigars and his green leather case.

  “How is the lieutenant?” the orderly asked.

  “He’s very well,” I said. “Considering … Very well indeed.”

  Georg died that night from a heart seizure brought on by a massive intravenous injection of cocaine. According to his orderly, who was the last person to speak to him, he was “in a state of acute distress” and must have misjudged the dose.

  Tagebuch: 10 November. Sawichost.

  … The simplest way to describe the book of moral philosophy that I am writing is that it concerns what can and cannot be said. In fact it will be only half a book. The most interesting half will be the one that I cannot write. That half will be the most eloquent.

  TEA AT NEUWALDEGG

  It is springtime. After a shower of rain we take tea on the terrace of the big house at Neuwaldegg. Me, my mother, my sisters Helen and Hermine—and Paul. I am on leave; Paul has just been returned from captivity as part of an exchange of wounded prisoners. He sits with his right sleeve neatly pinned up, awkwardly squeezing lemon into his tea with his left hand. I think of Georg and I look at Paul. His hair is graying, his clothes are immaculate.

  Quite suddenly he announces that he is going to continue with his career as a concert pianist and teach himself to play with the left hand only. He proposes to commission pieces for the left hand from Richard Strauss and Ravel. There is silence, and then I say, “Bravo, Paul. Bravo.” And, spontaneously, we all clap for him.

  The modest sound of our applause carries out over the huge garden. A faint breeze shifts the new spring foliage of the chestnut trees, glistening after the rain, and the gardener, who has just planted a bed of geraniums, looks up from his work for a moment, smiles bemusedly at us, clambers to his feet and bows.

  Hôtel des Voyageurs

  Hôtel de la Louisiane.

  Me for good talk, wet evenings, intimacy, vins rouges en carafe, reading, relative solitude, street worship … shop gazing, alley sloping, café crawling … I am for the intricacy of Europe, the discreet and many-folded strata of the Old World, the past, the North, the world of ideas. I am for the Hôtel de la Louisiane.

  CYRIL CONNOLLY,

  Journal, 1928–1937

  Thursday, 26 July 1928

  PARIS. Boat train from London strangely quiet. I had a whole compartment to myself. Fine drizzle at the Gare du Nord. After breakfast I spent two hours trying to telephone Louise in London. I finally got through and a man’s voice answered. “Who’s calling?” he said, very abruptly. “Tell Louise it’s Logan Mountstewart,” I said, equally brusquely. Longish silence. Then the man said Louise was in Hampshire. I kept telling him that Louise was never in Hampshire during the week. Eventually I realized it was Robbie. He refused to admit it so I called him every foul name I could think of and hung up.

  Lonely bitter evening, drank too much. A protracted street prowl through the Marais. The thought of Louise with Robbie made me want to vomit. Robbie: faux bonhomme and fascist shit.

  Friday

  More rain. I cabled Douglas and Sylvia in Bayonne and told them I was driving down. I then hired the biggest car I could find in Paris, a vast American thing called a Packard, a great beast of a vehicle, with huge bulbous headlamps. I set off after lunch in a thunderstorm, resolved to drive through the night. The south, the south, at last. That’s where I will find my peace. Intense disgust at the banality of my English life. How I detest London and all my friends. Except Sholto, perhaps. And Hermione. And Sophie.

  Saturday

  Crossed the Loire and everything changed. Blue skies, a mineral flinty sun hammering down. Beau ciel, vrai ciel, regarde moi qui change. Opened every window in the Packard and drove in a warm buffeting breeze.

  Lunch in Angoulême. Ham and Moselle. I had a sudden urge to take Douglas and Sylvia some sweet Monbazillac as a present. Drove on to Libourne and then up the river to Saint-Foy. I turned off the main road, trying to remember the little château we had visited before, in ’26, near a place called Pomport.

  I must have missed a sign because I found myself in a part of the countryside I did not recognize, in a narrow valley with dark woods at its rim. Blond wind-combed wheat fields stirred silently on either side, the road no longer metaled. And that was when the clanking started in the Packard’s engine.

  I stopped and raised the bonnet. A hot oily smell, a wisp of something. Smoke? Steam? I stood there in the gathered, broiling heat of the afternoon wondering what to do.

  A goatish farmer in a pony and trap understood my request for a “garage” and directed me up a dusty lane.

  There was a village, he said, Saint-Barthélemy.

  Saint-Bar
thélemy: one street of ancient shuttered houses, with pocked honey-colored walls. A church with a hideous new spire, quite out of proportion. I found the garage by a bridge over the torpid stream that wound around the village. The garagiste, a genial young man in horn-rimmed spectacles, looked at the Packard in frank amazement and said he would have to send to Bergerac for the part he needed. How long would that take, I asked. He shrugged. A day, two days, who knows? And besides, he said, pointing to a glossy limousine up on blocks, he had to finish Monsieur le Comte’s car first. There was a hotel I could stay in, he said, at the other end of the village. The Hôtel des Voyageurs.

  Sunday

  Dinner in the hotel last night. Stringy roast chicken and a rough red wine. I was alone in the dining room, served by an ancient wheezing man, when the hotel’s other guest arrived. A woman. She was tall and slim, her dark brown hair cut in a fashionable bob. She wore a dress of cobalt blue crêpe de chine, with a short skirt gathered at the hips. She barely glanced at me and treated the old waiter with brutal abruptness. She was French, or else completely bilingual, and everything about her was redolent of wealth and prestige. At first glance her face seemed not pretty, a little hard, with a slightly hooked nose, but as I covertly gazed at her across the dining room, studying her features as she picked at her meal, her face’s shadowed planes and angles, the slight pout of the upper lip, the perfect plucked arcs of her eyebrows, began to assume a fascinating worldly beauty. She ordered a coffee and smoked a cigarette, never once looking in my direction. I was about to invite her to join me for a digestif when she stood up and left the room. As she passed the table she looked at me for the first time, squarely, with a casual candid curiosity.