Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

by Richard Powers

  Thirty million other fellows—three in particular—acting out and writing one another’s biographies, violently forcing the old text into a new edition, moved Ford to captain the Peace Ship. He sailed his personal diplomatic mission to Europe for the express purpose of linking his destiny to theirs, theirs to his through some inconsequential, personal transaction. If there were no such transactions documented in the existing biographies, I would have to create them.

  Plainly, I could learn nothing by tracing the photograph back to its material origin alone. I had also to descend into that shifting, ambiguous place of possible meaning, find why I recognized these farmers without ever having seen them. (They stand in empty countryside, proud, posing in Sunday clothes, just the barest hint of terror, of trapped animals.) To look anywhere beyond my own daily routine was to go too far afield.

  Busy at our own biographies, anxious to uncover how the lives of all others touch ours, we one day find that by sheer number—billions now—they, the other fellows, have a much more persuasive argument for making us do the conforming. They wait for a peace envoy, wait in surprised, posed stillness, beyond them the vacant, blurred nothingness of country out of the depth of the lens. Along a muddy road, just beyond a white, right-hand border, out of the frame, they head toward either a dance, complete with young woman—call her Alicia—or that unmitigated act of violence called the twentieth century.

  Chapter Seventeen

  A Country Under Occupation

  Every decision is like a murder, and our march forward is over the stillborn bodies of all our possible selves that will never be.

  —René Dubos, Louis Pasteur

  Adolphe was still recalling how he had argued with his half brother Peter over the distant brass-band music, and how Peter had teased him about Alicia being at the May dance, when the command went up to arm and turn out on the street. Adolphe did not grasp at first what was happening, and he continued to look at the photo the Belgian girl had given him—Jack’s Mother Is Not Pleased with the Beans—demanding of it the reason he couldn’t talk to his brother just a little longer.

  The shouting and shots cleared his head, and he knew, at least as much as the other soldiers, what was afoot. He threw on his uniform, trying to press out the wrinkles. He found the gun he always carried while inspecting the Belgian houses and headed for the barracks door. Waiting for Adolphe outside was a vision of total confusion: who was on which side? Why was everyone running? Adolphe had always preferred physical pain to disorder; here things had blown well past disorder, and Adolphe, pushed along on a sea of nervous boys in uniform, offered bribes to God—his eyes, his money, his letters from Alicia—to return the town to its state of logical peace.

  In the darkness to the right, a clump of Germans trotted after their leader, a fat man in his fifties who panted and said “Shit” in rhythm each time his right foot hit pavement. As the gang passed, a young boy broke ranks and turned to Adolphe, his face drained of color, croaking above the gunfire:

  —Franc-tireurs!

  Coined in 1870, the expression, meaning civilian snipers, sounded, on the lips of this boy, the worst of juvenile terrors, a sort of surprise exam gone wild. The soldiers had talked of nothing else since occupying Petit Roi, and now it seemed they had created the situation out of their own fear. At once it occurred to Adolphe that if the Belgians had indeed used a secret cache of weapons to arm an uprising, then he, as Contraband Council, was responsible.

  He tried to determine where the front was forming, but could find no clear-cut line. Rather, civilians and soldiers mixed freely, interpenetrating each other’s forces. Nothing in his rushed boot camp or weekly lectures on The War So Far prepared him for the chaos around him. Behind and to his left, a dozen soldiers fumbled with buckets to put out a torch fire in the troop quarters. Five yards off, a girl of eight threw dish shards at an officer, who ducked and threatened with his weapon, repeating in unintelligible French:

  —This is le bayonet. It est sharp.

  Shots rained from second and third stories all up and down the street, although the darkness prevented anyone from actually aiming at anything. The air filled with projectiles—stones, brick, pieces of metal tool. Pain seared Adolphe’s ankle, and he thought for a moment that he had been bitten by a dog: one of those big bulldogs, he thought, with pushed-in faces. But looking down at the road next to his foot, he saw a plain piece of broken picket fence, with nails protruding from it. He lifted his cuff and examined the holes where the nails had entered his flesh. He trickled saliva onto his fingertips and rubbed the wound. Then he pulled up his sock and pressed it into his ankle to stanch the bleeding.

  He stood up, ashamed at his uselessness in the fight so far. If he could find the French Belgian who had wounded him, he could retaliate. But he had no training in restoring order. A melee formed in front of him. As he threw himself into the fray, the fighters were just discovering that they were all Germans. When Adolphe reached them, they were deciding that the best way to avoid future misunderstandings was to spread out and deal with the enemy separately, manfully. Again Adolphe was alone, unable to attach himself to calamity.

  Soon he came across a pair of undeniable townspeople. An old couple, man and wife, they looked to be at least centenarians. They struggled with each other, the man trying to restrain his wife, who brandished a crucifix chained to her neck that she had sharpened in a point almost all the way up to the Savior’s feet. She called out:

  —A judgment! A visitation! Isaiah forty-two, Psalms thirty, Romans eleven. . . .

  She reeled off several more random passages, and if her husband had not forcibly restrained her she would have stabbed the totally surprised Adolphe. For as he drew close enough to see them, he had frozen in place: they were the old couple from one of the bicyclist’s photographs, spread out by the side of the road that May Day. Or were they? There had been a photo of an old couple, he felt sure. He very much wanted to compare memories with Peter or Hubert, to get to the bottom of this odd likeness.

  He woke from his reverie when the old man, stooped in the back from scoliosis, yelled at him to take no notice of his wife: she was upset by the whole war, he explained, and by the death of a prize milk cow earlier that day. These two were as little accustomed to their roles of franc-tireurs as Adolphe was to his of suppressor. Still, as he lowered his rifle to the horizontal, Adolphe realized his edge of superiority over them.

  —Go home, opa. This is no place for the two of you.

  —A judgment! A visitation! Did God cast off his people? God forbid.

  —Ignore her, sir. She’s touched. She only sharped up the cross this evening when she heard there was plans. I’d of turned it in as a weapon otherwise. I swear it.

  —Get along. Go home, close your door, and get in bed. You don’t know what is happening out here. This is history.

  When Adolphe pronounced this last word, the old couple looked about them in horror. That something so abstract could happen here on the streets of Petit Roi scared them more than Adolphe’s rifle or the projectiles falling all about them. They thanked Adolphe humbly and withdrew, each preventing the other from looking back. He kept his eye on them until sure they were not doubling back. This, then, was civilian control.

  Adolphe resumed searching for the commotion. He came across a fat gentleman in nightshirt who had hoisted his great bulk onto the reviewing stand the Germans had built in the square, commanding:

  —Listen, everyone. This is your Mayor, Kruger. I’m ordering everyone home this instant. The situation is hopeless and can only lead to further unpleasantries.

  The occupation force, finding in the tradesman Kruger the only town resident of undeniably German extract, had installed him as puppet head of government. Adolphe watched him strut on the stand; here was a man almost universally hated for being both a collaborator and a joke. If Kruger told the townspeople to go home, they would stay out and riot all night just to spite him. Adolphe would have to silence him.

  —Go home
yourself, you. Take your own advice.

  —Please sir, I’m trying to control my constituency.

  —Now, Herr Mayor. While you can.

  —Thank you, sir.

  Again Adolphe welled up with accomplishment. He would hear from his C.O. about this, his first action of the war. Already three Belgians had thanked him, proof that even the irrational nationalities could see the necessity of the German cause. Soon the French and Russians would feel the same necessity. And Adolphe no longer felt anxiety over the imminent end of the war; he had contributed.

  But where had they gotten weapons? It had to be from the house he had checked that morning, the Després’s. He had been thorough everywhere else, confiscating everything sharp—metal tins, chisels, even empty wine bottles that could be broken and used as daggers. Only at the Després’s had he gone easy, because of the girl. He recalled the girl, how he had wanted her, how she had ruined it all with her belligerence. The print of Jack and his mother came back to him vividly: the familiar but unplaceable actress sinking her face into cupped hands.

  A pointed stick grazed his shoulder, bringing back the present urgency. He struck his thigh with his rifle as punishment for forgetting himself. He was getting worse than Hubert, strangely unable to concentrate on what was at hand. He trotted briskly for the Després home.

  Several soldiers, including the third-ranking officer of the town force, had beaten him there. They stood in a spacious front court, shooting out windows as if at a clay-pigeon competition. They took turns rotating shots until something flew out of a second-story window. The Germans hit the earth in unison, but there was no retort. The ranking officer sent Adolphe up to investigate. Proudly, without fear, the boy walked up to the object, a white linen table napkin, smeared with gravy. The house occupants were giving themselves up. One by one, men with high collars, dark coats, and soft hats came out the front door with their hands on their heads.

  Adolphe grew uncomfortable. He did not want to be standing there when the girl, Comelia, came out. He, as Contraband Council, was responsible for the cache of weapons—from chicken wire to lead pipe—the house had produced. He edged away slowly from both soldiers and captives, trying not to call attention to himself. As he did so, a sublieutenant cantered up on horseback, addressing the ranking officer.

  —The church burns pretty steadily, and we’ve struck up a spark at the library for good measure, sir. If I may say so, sir, it seems to have turned the trick.

  This speech raised a collective hurrah from the soldiers. In the distraction, Adolphe slipped off. He would double back to the square along the town edge. If anyone stopped him, he would say he was headed for the common stables, to secure the horses and deny the townfolk mounts. The excuse would pass in the general excitement.

  In the back streets, dark except for a gas lamp or two, he came across a Belgian boy of ten fighting with a German twice his age. The boy had gotten hold of an antique fowling piece and been sitting on his haunches in the gutter, propping the gun between his knees and trying to figure out how to use it, if such were still possible. The soldier came by and snatched the iron away. He now used it to whip the boy about the shoulders and ribs. He did not try to kill or knock out the child. He struck him repeatedly, as one hits a dog with a newspaper. On each blow, he called out, “No” or “Never.” The child emitted animal sounds of pain.

  Habit took Adolphe, and he did what he would have done on coming across the same scene in the Westerwald: he pulled the two apart, meaning to slug the bigger one. No sooner did he put hand to uniform than he recalled that hitting this fellow would be attacking the Kaiser’s foreign arm. He stopped, confused.

  —For God’s sake, mind the commandments.

  Adolphe said these words more wildly than he meant to, because the soldier’s face took him by surprise. It was pretty, beardless, and without trace of malice, pity, or excitement. It was a blank summer’s breeze, showing no emotion apart from slight shock at being yanked from its duty.

  —What . . . commandment . . . do you mean?

  Adolphe froze, staring at him. He tried to remember which commandment he had meant. He enumerated them, with the explications from Luther’s Small Catechism, and was surprised to find that none expressly forbade pistol-whipping a small boy if it were done in good faith, for a reason. He released the soldier and ran from earshot before the next installment began.

  The sky now shone a light, unnatural rose that made Adolphe think he was about to witness his second aurora. His first, four years ago, a spectacular curtain of light gliding over the heavens, made his stepfather declare it a sign that Frederick Barbarossa was about to wake from his long sleep in the Kyffhäuser. But as Adolphe closed on the town square, he found the light to be no proclamation of the old king at all, but flames from the library and church, as the sublieutenant had claimed. All fighting had stopped, the Belgians giving up their resistance to save their burning buildings. The Germans capitalized on the truce that they could not force by manpower and modern weapons. Ordering their ranks, they circled the fire-fighting townspeople, guns drawn.

  Because the church and library occupied opposite ends of the square and because of the difficulty in transporting water to the blaze, the villagers had to choose between saving one structure or the other. All but a few elected the church, although their numbers gave them less than even odds of saving the foundation. A dozen others addressed themselves stoically and bitterly to the library, confined to such ineffectual measures as beating the flames with topcoats, succeeding only in fanning the pyre. Yet they stuck with the hopeless gesture, the act of voting the opposition outweighing the small chance of success.

  The churchists formed themselves into teams. One group commandeered several horses and milk drays, riding a shuttle between church and reservoir, slowed somewhat by two armed Germans riding in each cart. A second team formed a bucket brigade, unloading milk cans and passing them hand over hand into the sacristy. A third group routed them to the most needed parts of the church. The fourth group remained in the nave, keeping open a direct intercession with God until the heat drove them out.

  Watching the blaze, Adolphe wondered if it were right of the sublieutenant to use such drastic measures to end the resistance. He knew there was some theological debate whether church buildings themselves were holy or only symbolic, but either way, razing one seemed close to insulting God. Of course, the Belgian sniping, which had started the terror, had not been moral either. The German attack had to cleanse these sins, fire for fire. One could not be both effective and pious at the same time. Efficacy now made way for piety later.

  When the Belgians at last doused the fires, the library had been leveled, taking with it a rare, multivolume work on the area’s flora and fauna. All that remained of the only church in Petit Roi, renamed Königen, were two and a third walls and a carbon outline of a steeple. A bell cable had burned through, crashing the counterweight and releasing a brace of chimes. Those picking through the rubble found some ecclesiastical paraphernalia of only nostalgic value and a melted-down silver chalice.

  Under the influence of the released chimes, the chalice finders claimed the lines of melted silver formed a small image of Christ on the cross. The chalice passed from native to native, polarizing the town: on the one hand, those who saw the image of Christ and found in it a promise of redemption in the aftermath of tragedy, and on the other, those who saw only melted silver, the handiwork of the Germans. Yet when the Germans rounded them up for the night’s internment, miraclists and skeptics alike broke into spontaneous singing of “O Sacred Head Now Wounded,” the Passion Chorale.

  Adolphe’s fear over his personal guilt in overlooking the Després household during the weapons search was groundless. The fact never came out in investigation; there was no investigation. The troika of commanding officers concurred that unidentified Belgians must have opened fire treacherously on Germans, leaving no need to investigate the matter of guilt or culpability. Germans had been fired on; the whole to
wn had turned out for the fray. Each individual was accountable for the behavior of the group. The objective truth—that loose masonry falling on the helmet of a jittery Prussian boy had caused him to fire on a knot of shopkeepers, who in turn had sent word to the stockpilers to bring out the pointed sticks—was of no importance now to either side, a detail lost to the past.

  The final casualty count had eight Germans injured, one with tetanus and one with broken ribs and hemorrhaging. Four Belgians lay dead; many more had gun wounds. The nightmare’s fifth death resulted a few days later when an eighty-four-year-old woman, refusing sustenance out of grief over the gutted church, died in bed, chattering to the Virgin.

  Word came down the chain of command that the army’s policy, not only in Petit Roi but in all Belgium, dealt totally and inflexibly with such costly civilian actions. It could not blanch from meting out retribution to any civilian involved in conflict. The power in Petit Roi, by order of higher-ups, elected the enactment of collective responsibility.

  On the third day following what was now called “the incident,” handbills began blooming. They covered over the old announcements describing the terror waiting for armed insurgents. Plastered on lorries, shellacked to posts, glued to the pavement, the new, clean face of textual history said nothing more than that everyone was to assemble in the square that evening at five. At the appointed hour, in the gray of late day, the entire village, on signal, poured out of a thousand doors in files, head down, without sound. Each parader, from the broadest burgher to the smallest infant at the breast, was decked in Sunday clothes. They dressed as if some archivist were to meet them to take a group portrait. This was an occasion, and everyone turned out in their finest.

  The camera-ready files queued into an orderly matrix in front of the demolished and rebuilt reviewing stand. The soldiers, Adolphe among them, formed an identical matrix across the square. Someone had thought to bring wooden chairs for the old, so they could sit up front and hear as judgment was leveled. Judgment was swift and to the point. The sublieutenant stepped forward and commanded the Belgians to count off by twenty and every twentieth to step to the center of the square. The first Belgian, a woman of thirty who made a living selling eggs, recognizing the intent of the new century without being able to rescue herself from the values of the old one, began by saying, “Twenty.” The next man, an accountant, also said, “Twenty,” without hesitation. The whole Belgian matrix followed suit, repeating, “Twenty, twenty,” in a orchestra of accents.