by David Mellon
Adi knew from the servants that many of the sadhus were not to be trusted. “No better than beggars,” Gita would say.
“Well,” said Adi. “I certainly know more than a . . . person who owns nothing but a bowl and a stick!” Blushing, she took her grandmother’s hand and marched her away. Tillie kept asking, “What was it? What did he say?”
For years after, Adi thought about the young man. The look in his eyes. The gold ring in his hand.
She knew she’d behaved badly. Truth was, Gita would have spanked her if she heard her talk to anyone that way. And she thought about every tale, told to her in the cradle, about Shiva walking in disguise among men. She should have asked the man something. Perhaps he did know all of the dark and mysterious secrets of the universe.
Because lately she wasn’t sure she knew anything at all about this creation.
• • •
The first time Adi woke, she heard the sound of rain on a roof. A cough, a groan, voices conversing. A pillow beneath her head. Cotton sheet under her fingertips. Her ribs ached on the right and there was a pain in the back of her head like a rusty nail. She tried to open her eyes, but drifted off again before she managed it.
The next time she woke, she heard distant thunder accompanied by the sound of a woman screaming. She worked hard to open her eyes. When she did, she saw a nurse with a fresh-born babe in her arms. The woman glanced over at Adi as she went past. “The Indian girl’s awake.”
Sometime later—an hour? a week?—Adi opened her eyes in a fright. Where was the watch? She tried to move her arms; it was as if she was under water. A cool hand touched her forehead. “Shush. It’s right here.” She picked up Adi’s hand and placed it on the watch tethered to its chain around her neck. “It’s wound every morning,” the woman said. “Not that that keeps you from yelling about it at night.”
This was distressing to Adi, though she couldn’t remember why. Drifting off, she dreamed of boxes containing thumbs and toes and children’s ears.
• • •
In the long, high-ceilinged room, the days passed one after another, for the most part quiet and gray.
Madame Bernard, their captain and queen, who snipped the babies’ cords and closed the eyes of the departed, read to them in the evenings, medieval romances and eighteenth-century French authors. Or she would have one of the women play the piano or the cello, or recite verse. There was squabbling among the women about whether the windows should be opened at night, but before long, the rain turned to sleet and it got too cold to have them open at all.
• • •
The first time she climbed out of bed, Adi wobbled for a moment and then fell to the floor like a rag doll. Madame Bernard picked her up and put her back under the covers. The next morning the woman appeared at Adi’s bedside carrying two canes. She asked Adi to go to the window at the end of the long room and let her know how many sailboats there were on the lake today. It took two hours and many bruises for Adi to find Madame and tell her that there was no lake, only a wheat field rolling away over the hill.
She used both canes for a time, then one, then none. The chores she could accomplish progressed accordingly.
• • •
She’d been brought to the hospital by a paleontologist nephew of Madame Bernard. He had found the girl wandering the ring road above Lake Kore with no voice and a ghastly amount of blood running down the back of her head. With a war looming, it might have been safer to take her somewhere to the south. But where? He knew she would be welcomed and cared for by his aunt.
In Madame Bernard’s hospital, talk of the war was kept to a minimum. There were only women here, and many of them were elderly or with child or damaged in some way. Her doctors had all been taken by the war, as had much of her equipment and supplies. Were it not for her devoted and resourceful nephews and her dwindling cache of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, she would have had to cease. But the “discord,” as she called it, was still beyond the village of Sampigny to the north and as long as it was, Madame intended to keep it outside of these doors. When the sound of shelling got too strident she played Italian opera on the phonograph in the middle of the room.
None of this mattered much to Adi. After her long sleep, she climbed out of her bed, but still spent most of her days in some small space in the back of her mind. She did her chores, whatever needed to be done: sweeping and sewing, brushing hair, washing pots, mashing turnips.
Now and again, when the curtains were open and the shadows from the clouds drifted over the fields, Adi would remember herself and think that there were things she should be doing. Soon, she would go. But there was always a new baby or another gray-haired woman who needed care, another bed to be made, a potato to be peeled. So, as long as the watch was wound and the bedpans were shining, Adi wandered the quiet rooms like a beautiful ghost.
• • •
Then one day, it began to snow.
• • •
Crown Prince Wilhelm, the eldest son of the German emperor, was put in command of the 5th Army. Only thirty-two, he had never commanded anything larger than a regiment. He determined that the only thing keeping the 5th Army from enlarging the salient, southeast of Verdun, was the river Meuse and the French soldiers in the village of Sampigny. Though not a superstitious man, he took the uncommon snowfall in the first week of November as a sign from God. Before sunrise, the attack began.
• • •
As the bombs fell, Madame Bernard curled up on the floor between the beds with the old women. She told them everything was going to be fine. The Marriage of Figaro played as loud as it could on the Victrola in the middle of the room.
But when Mozart could no longer be heard above the artillery and the great windows in the front of the chateau began to explode in the morning sun, Madame called to Adi, “Take the duvet from your bed and run!” Adi, in her nightgown, turned to get clothes. “No, girl! Run, now! To the other end of the lake!”
Chapter 22
Bright white. Burning cold.
Adi pulled herself up out of a snowdrift only to be dusted in powder by a man on a horse leaping over her head. There was shouting and the crack of gunfire, though most of the sound was swallowed by the snow.
A soldier stopped in his tracks at the sight of the young woman in a nightgown, sitting waist deep in the snow. He stared for half a second, before a bullet left a nick on his forehead and dropped him beside her.
She tried to stand, only to be slammed back into the snowdrift by another horse and rider, oblivious to the girl beneath them. With steam billowing from the horses’ nostrils, the men, spikes on their helmets and great fur collars on their coats, swept the other soldiers before them over the crest of the hill.
Then it was quiet, with just the sound of her teeth chattering and her heart beating, like a mouse shivering in its hollow. She lay buried, too cold to weep, for Madame Bernard or for the old women. She had seen the chateau and the village of Sampigny burning against the white landscape. There would be no more sweeping, no more bedpans. She’d be frozen and gone in the time it would take her to recite her favorite poem all the way through.
I’m afraid of a kiss
Like the kiss of a bee.
I suffer like this
And wake endlessly.
I’m afraid of a—
She heard a sigh. Without thinking about it any more, she woke from her long dream and lifted her head.
In front of her, staring calmly up into the sky, the soldier was lying on his back, his helmet cradled in the snow.
Adi climbed out of her hollow.
He was small, and didn’t look much older than Adi. Hardly old enough to have a proper beard. A piece of the back of his head was gone. He said something about Paulette, then died.
She watched him for a moment, rubbing her arms, the thin cotton gown worthless against the wind. She may as well have been naked. She put her hands on the young man’s chest. He was still warm.
Pushing him up onto his sid
e, she managed to pull the pack from his shoulders. With stiff fingers, she undid the buckles.
There were a few useful items in the pack: biscuits, chocolate, a sewing kit. But with the exception of a handkerchief and a sock, there wasn’t a single article of clothing.
A gust of wind swirled snow into her eyes. She had the boy’s coat halfway off of him. She stopped and touched the buttons on his tunic, the knife on his belt. The sky to the north started drumming with artillery again. Madness, madness.
• • •
There was likely no one else coming up this hill today. The Germans had killed more French soldiers than the French had killed Germans. The hornets’ nest would swarm for a while and then they’d dig in once again.
But if you were coming over the rise a half hour on, you would have seen what appeared to be a young soldier pulling on his greatcoat. If you were observant you might notice that his belt was cinched tighter than usual and his leggings wrapped high up the knee, to disguise trousers that were too large.
If you were quick, you might see what seemed to be long locks of fresh-cut auburn hair blowing away over the hill.
• • •
Adi, in the young soldier’s uniform—a humble second lieutenant, as far as she could decipher the French insignia on her sleeve—ran her hand up the back of her raggedly shorn head and put the knife back in its scabbard on her belt.
She was not quite as cold as she had been. But just as important, she no longer appeared to be a young woman in the middle of a war. At least, so she hoped. In addition to hacking off her beautiful hair, she’d torn strips of her nightgown and wrapped them tightly around her chest, grateful that she was as small-breasted as she was.
She was still in great danger, and not sure where it might be safe to go. Living in Madame’s world, she’d had only the vaguest notion of where she was and what was going on outside the walls. She assumed the Germans were on French territory, but it was just a guess. If she tried to get away, would she be considered a deserter? She knew they would not look kindly upon that.
His name was Jean Joseph Goux, number 3233.
Adi stood beside the grave—nothing more than a pile of rocks covering the young man, the best that could be done with the frozen ground. Silently, she repeated a prayer her father had taught her as a child. She felt terrible about taking the boy’s clothes and leaving him alone in this cold place. But there was nothing else to do.
She hung his little aluminium identification tag on a branch of the tree next to the grave. She had considered holding on to the ID tag, but had decided it would be safer to say she’d lost it than to risk running into someone who knew the young man. It would have been safer still to simply bury the tag; sooner or later someone would find him and that could cause complications. But she couldn’t bear the idea of leaving him here in an unmarked grave.
Didn’t matter. She would be out of this uniform and away long before that could happen. She put on her helmet and pulled the strap tight under her chin.
Chapter 23
My God! How do they do it?
Adi trudged down the side of the hill. She’d had no idea soldiers’ packs were so heavy.
She’d tried to get rid of anything in the backpack that seemed unnecessary. She threw away the shaving kit. The extra pair of boots. A small shovel. But it didn’t seem prudent to lose things such as the cooking pot or the lice powder or the “housewife” containing needle and thread, buttons and soap and such.
She didn’t know what to make of the strange mask device, with the tube dangling from the front, like an elephant’s trunk. She reckoned she’d keep it, though, until she could figure out what it was.
The young man had a book, Le Mystère de la Chambre Jaune by a Gaston Leroux. Adi held it in her hands, feeling the most terrible craving. More than anything, she longed to curl up somewhere and fall into a book. She put it next to the boots. No more time for stories.
She was about to do the same with a dog-eared copy of a magazine called Union Jack (which was odd, as the young man was French). Then Adi spotted the date on the cover: August 1915. She sat back on her heels, her hands over her mouth.
It’s not even a new magazine! she thought. Could she have been there so long in Madame Bernard’s? Sweeping and dreaming?
She popped the lid on the watch and flipped the face around to the row of tiny numerals. There were millions of seconds gone! She fumbled again and again with the sum in her head. Almost a year and a half! The faces of the boys stared at her.
Were they still alive? She shuddered at the possibility of missing pieces.
You will quit whining about your pack, and crying over your hair! She stomped her new boot heel. There’s a war on.
After some consideration, she also left behind the young man’s rifle. She could hear her father yelling at her all the way from India. But it was heavy and she felt, right or wrong, that it was more likely somebody would try to shoot her if she was holding a rifle than if she was not. As a concession, she kept the clever little pistol on her hip, so she was not without protection.
With all that, it still seemed as if she were carrying a load of bricks. The first time she tried to stand with it she tottered in circles and ended up on her back like a hapless turtle.
• • •
She stumbled down the hill through what must have been a small woods, nothing left of it now but shattered, blackened tree trunks. Even under the blanket of snow, she could make out the ground torn and pitted with huge craters. Growing up, her father had told her a thousand battle stories. There was nothing like this. After seeing Sampigny, though, she was beginning to grasp what could cause this much ruin.
She was down the road about ten yards past the trees when she heard the sound of the engine behind her. A motorcar! She turned to run back for the trifling cover of what was left of the trees. Never going to make it, she threw off her pack and dropped herself into the snow filling the shallow ditch. Praying they hadn’t seen her, she closed her eyes and dug in as the vehicle careened past.
She heard a shout. With a spray of ice and gravel, the car’s brakes locked up and the thing skidded to a halt. Gears grinding, it lurched into reverse and came to a stop—right in front of her. She peeked up to see a wreck of an ambulance, boggy green with a red cross fresh-painted on the side.
She was about to make a run for it, when a voice shouted, “God’s sakes, boy! Do you want to walk? Get your ass in here!”
She raised her head a bit more, snow sliding off the front edge of her helmet.
He wasn’t speaking German. Seemed like a good sign.
Scrambling to her feet, she managed to get her pack up onto her shoulder and start toward the front of the car. The driver, a little man with huge ears, was looking anxiously up at the skies. As if on cue a high-pitched whistling came from the northeast.
“Not up there!” the voice croaked from the back.
Hustling to the rear of the car, she was lifting up the canvas flap covering the rear when a hand reached out, grabbed her arm, and pulled her into the ambulance—just as the hillside exploded not 20 meters above them.
Adi fell over the back gate. Struggling to rise, she cracked her helmet against one of several shelves on the left side. Each one was heavy with wounded soldiers, some of them crying and moaning.
The man let go of Adi’s arm and banged his fist against the side wall. “He’s in, Gershom. Go!” He pulled Adi down onto a little stool, as the car backfired and lurched forward. The shriek of artillery filled the air. Through the back flap, Adi saw the road erupt in smoke and flame. The ambulance was pelted by debris as it sped away.
“Put your pack down!” barked the man, his voice low and coarse as a gravel road. Adi complied. She shoved her pack under the cot, keeping her eyes on the doctor, to avoid looking at the broken bodies all around her.
The man was older—fifties maybe—and a doctor, judging by the red cross on his arm band. Stubbled gray hair on a head like a cinder block. He grabbed A
di’s hand and pressed it hard against a twisted tourniquet tied around a soldier’s neck. It was soaked through with blood.
“Keep the pressure on that,” said the doctor. This freed up both his hands to cut the trousers off a soldier’s leg. The limb was bent the wrong way at the knee.
“What’s your name, boy? What company you with?”
Adi tore her eyes away from the sight of the man’s leg and stared at the doctor helplessly, until he looked up from the splint he was applying.
“Not a hard question, son.”
Adi gestured to her mouth and shook her head to indicate she couldn’t talk. He glared at her for a moment, more artillery exploded to their left.
He jutted his chin at the tourniquet she was pressing on. “You can let go of that.” Adi looked down. The soldier had died.
Without a beat, the doctor said, “Grab that roll of bandage there.”
Adi was still staring at the dead soldier. She looked up, choking back tears. The doctor gave her a second. She took a deep breath and then nodded. He handed her a pair of scissors, pointed to the soldier on the top cot. “Cut that sleeve away.”
Adi stood up steadying herself against the bunk. A fair-haired lad, like a schoolboy playing dress-up, opened his eyes and stared at Adi for a few seconds. She snipped at the cloth and tore the rest of the sleeve away. Skin came off with it. The young man cried once and his head fell to the side.
“He passed out,” Doc said. “Easier that way.”
The boy’s arm was horribly burned, the smell indescribable. She unrolled a length of bandage while trying to keep her stomach from rolling over.
Focus! Basic field dressing. Like Mother used to do. Which reminded Adi of how much she had hated and avoided her mother’s work.
Doc covered a soldier’s eyes with pads of cotton and wrapped gauze around his head. The man’s face and neck were spotted with frightful blisters. When he was done Doc took a flask from his pocket, held it to the soldier’s mouth and let him drink. He took a long pull himself, then offered it to Adi. She shook her head and turned to get the scissors.
