Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

by Richard Powers

  ‘Dolphe stifled a grin and looked around quickly. He was safe; the other boys of the army of occupation still faced forward. He made a note of the event—the whole town breaking into heroic “twenties”—to tell Peter the next time he saw him. His brother would appreciate it.

  The sublieutenant, making no display of temper, barked a few efficient orders to a cadre of men, who then combed the Belgian ranks, ejecting every twentieth by hand. Adolphe grinned, too, at this clever response to the Belgians’ clever parry, and waited for the next move in this cat-and-mouse game. Another side glance showed his compatriots still face forward but obviously involved in this spectator sport. But just as he felt the well-being of belonging to a cause larger than himself, Adolphe suffered a sudden shock of involuntary memory. What of the girl, Comelia Després?

  Although he had not taken her when he desired her, Adolphe felt that his desire had cemented him to Comelia. He had always acted honorably; if he had not been already married to Alicia, he would certainly have said du too to Comelia after the thoughts he’d had about her. And hadn’t she given him something, the photo of Jack’s mother? Or had he taken it by force? No matter; what counted was that they had something of the other’s—she, his desire and he, her photo. So he had an obligation to watch over her as over himself.

  He looked at where the cadre was just finishing thinning the ranks of the citizens. He could not pick out faces from the large group of the safe. Anxiously, he looked over the seventy condemned. She was not among them, and he felt the last check to his happiness drop from him.

  The old commanding officer stepped off the reviewing stand to examine the seventy Belgians who were to be the example of collective responsibility. He nodded to the sublieutenant, saying the children would help make the point. He added something about how random subsets always made good cross-sections, and he returned to the stand.

  —Let the Mayor, Herr Kruger, be added to these for knowing of a conspiracy and failing to tell the authorities.

  The spindly-legged merchant was singled out and led from the community of the safe. The German boys near Adolphe snickered at the comical way Kruger walked. Kruger was needed so that the world press, so unfairly intent on distorting the German cause, could make no charge of German barbarity or favoritism. Kruger, though of German extract, had to suffer as any other.

  —And let the family residing at Seven Narrow Street be added, as the suppliers of weapons for the incident.

  The Després. Now Adolphe straightaway located Comelia as the cadre sought her out. She, in turn, seemed to return his gaze from across the open square, holding it as she was led among the victims. Reaching her preordained spot among the seventy, she took the hands of her family and faced the reviewing stand. The order came down from the stand, and with four commands from the sublieutenant, the boys of occupation were firing into the examples.

  It took three volleys to bring all seventy to the ground. The safe group screamed some, but for the most part they, like the examples, kept still, thinking perhaps that keeping still and waiting was the best defense against a future that no amount of action or words could put straight. Day after day, their farm animals had shown that bringing to market was best and cleanest done when begun and ended in stillness.

  For some days after, Adolphe found he could rest easier if he substituted for the face of Comelia, who often came unsponsored into his thoughts as he lay in bed, the face of the familiar actress behind the knotted hands playing Jack’s mother. The memory of the photographed face was calming and soporific, and he fell asleep certain that the incident and post-incident made sense in some larger context he was not party to.

  Once asleep, though, he advanced only fitfully. Often he would wake, trying to yell, “Run.” But his enunciation of the word, as with the legs of the dream runners, blurred to a leaden stillness, and those startled boys waking next to him in the barracks could no more understand him than the seventy-odd he shouted to.

  Late one night he awoke for a different reason altogether. He dressed methodically, refusing to answer his bunkmates’ questions except to say he had business. Outside in the dark, he made his way to the commanding officer’s quarters. The C.O. now resided in the home of Mayor Kruger, vacated after the post-incident. A twenty-four-hour guard rotated watch at the rebuilt picket-fence gate. Adolphe recognized the current guard as two friends from the Westerwald, one, the younger brother of the Jacob girl who had beaten out Alicia as May Queen.

  —Daniel, Johann, let me in to talk to the colonel.

  —Halloo, ‘Dolphe. What’s this about?

  —I’ve news of the first order, confidential and for the colonel only.

  —No going. It’s after midnight. Can’t wake the colonel for anything short of Germany’s victory or another sniper attack.

  Blanching at these last words, Adolphe sat down on the pavement, back to the fence and gun across his lap. He dug in and waited for his audience. Several times his friends tried to draw him out, but he would not talk. He refused offers of food, cigarettes, even contraband alcohol. When the boys’ relief came, he did not even say good-bye.

  In the morning, he still could not enter without identifying the nature of his mission. The guards pointed out that the name Schreck was synonymous with trouble, that in training, Adolphe had set a platoon record for number of times on disciplinary review. Adolphe protested; they could see he had reformed, given up practical jokes since the war. But the guards weren’t taking chances in case of Adolphe’s accidental relapse. Adolphe pleaded that the security of the Königen force, perhaps the whole army of occupation was at stake. The guards said they were plenty secure just minding their post, and would be less so if Adolphe started to pull tricks on the colonel. Adolphe had no choice but to play his bargaining chip.

  —I have intercepted an enemy wireless message.

  The guards stiffened and their eyes grew involuntarily wider. They knew of wireless, but the whole process lay veiled behind technological novelty. Only thirteen years earlier, Marconi succeeded in sending the letter S across the Atlantic, and only the year before, 1913, Armstrong patented the regenerative receiver circuit. The first commercial broadcast was still six years off, but the military had pounced on the new technology before the public, and every foot soldier knew that both sides somehow flew messages through the naked air, not perceivable to the ordinary individual.

  Beyond that, the guards floundered. Their parents’ generation had just grown accustomed to people mechanically reproducing their own images at will. Now came the even more alarming fact that people could reproduce their own voices, their own individual qualities, infinitely throughout the atmosphere, with no mark of the sending. They accepted the fact without comprehending it.

  So Adolphe’s claim had a terrible, profound impact on the two Westerwald farmers blocking the Kruger gate. They did not think to ask how Adolphe had gotten the wireless message. For all they knew, a crystal set could be built out of wire coat hangers and incantations. This wireless communication required immediate attention. They notified the colonel, and soon Adolphe was ushered into the house.

  He went into a plush study on the first floor, filled with heavy dark wood furniture, the kind immovable once placed. Filling every free spot in the room were hundreds of toy mechanical banks—woodchoppers, circus performers, hunters, and bears—that all did tricks when coins were placed in their slots. The home was by all standards that of a well-off but not wealthy bachelor of questionable taste. Adolphe thought it a palace, the most opulent interior he’d seen. He tried to imagine what trick each of the mechanical toys did, and he had to be called to attention by the colonel, who sat in an overstuffed chair behind a breakfast tray, still in a pair of pastel Chinese pajamas.

  —You say, soldier, that you have overheard . . . intercepted a wireless?

  —That’s exactly it, sir.

  —Of the . . . ah . . . enemy’s?

  —The Russians, sir.

  The colonel lifted one eyebrow and pok
ed about in his poached egg.

  —I was under the impression that our wireless operator was named Nederman.

  —I believe so, sir.

  —And you are his assistant, then?

  —No sir. Adolphe Schreck, Contraband Council and enlisted man, sir.

  —You’ve built your own wireless?

  The colonel put down his silver and looked up with an encouraging grin. This was evidence for the superiority of the German cause, if an uneducated farm youth could get a hold on the new technology. He beamed at the boy, wondering what Frenchman could make the same claim.

  —No sir.

  —You have no crystal set?

  —I have a metal filling in my back molar, sir.

  This total non sequitur threw the colonel for a loss. He studied the peas on his plate a full minute before piecing together the boy’s logic. Apparently the Contraband Council claimed that a mixture of calcium, silver amalgam, and something in saliva—salt, perhaps—could turn him into a human radio receiver. The officer thought back to his scientific training to decide if such a thing were possible, but could recall nothing but the number 6.02 X 10 to the 23rd power, something to do with chemical weight named for an Italian who sounded like a vegetable.

  —And were you able to . . . crack the Russians’ transmission code?

  —They used no code, sir.

  —You are able to speak Russian, then?

  —Pleased to report, sir, they broadcast the message in Dutch.

  —Dutch! That’s . . . very curious.

  Adolphe sensed the colonel was having trouble with the interview. Perhaps the C.O. didn’t believe that he spoke Dutch. Adolphe was about to set his superior’s mind at ease by telling him about Peter and Hubert but checked himself. It didn’t necessarily follow that just because his half brothers were raised in Holland that he himself spoke Dutch. So he said:

  —My father is half Dutch, sir.

  Adolphe’s first lie tortured him. But the situation required him to give his story some credence. Still, he began repeating silent contritions.

  —And what was the nature of this Dutch wireless message you received from the Russians over your dental work?

  —The Russians have secretly landed three divisions on the Channel coast. These have infiltrated our lines and one is not more than twenty miles from here.

  The colonel, trying to unstick a piece of gristle from between his teeth, nearly succeeded in swallowing his tongue at this disclosure. The boy was obviously suffering from some mild dementia. Many such cases had cropped up along the front at the sights of the fiercer artillery duels. Perhaps the low-level bombardment audible at Königen was enough to bring on a light case. He did not for an instant think the story worth pursuing.

  Yet, oddly, Adolphe’s story had in each particular a factual counterpart. In the first year of the war, failure to transmit wireless in code contributed to the Russian defeat at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes. Throughout the century, people have claimed being able to receive radio over metal fillings; one famous movie actress reportedly broke up a World War II Japanese spy ring in Hollywood after hearing strange vibrations in her amalgam. And as for the phantom three divisions: all England in 1914 produced by hallucination not just three divisions but an entire Russian army being secretly transported to the Western front. Without any trigger from government or press, they saw full-coated, full-bearded Russian troops everywhere. Sober Englishmen reported them disembarking from ships, drilling, loading onto troop trains. For a few days, a whole country produced a whole army out of nothing. In a year given to hallucination, Adolphe’s was modest.

  Nevertheless, the colonel had reached a diagnosis. He took a piece of onion-skin stationery from the late Kruger’s writing desk and addressed a few lines to the town physician:

  I understand there is a new treatment out of Vienna for curing the varieties of light delirium brought on by the stress of day-to-day living. Will you please administer such to the foot soldier bearing this, as he seems to be wont to exaggeration of reality.

  He signed the letter with a military flourish, affixing all the titles he had given himself on assuming command of Petit Roi. He sealed it and gave it to Adolphe, charging:

  —Your information is of the utmost importance. I have written it down here as you told it to me. You must deliver it by hand to the physician Minguette on Acorn Street, so he can advise the civilian population. I shall notify our forces in the environs. Good day, soldier.

  The colonel subscribed to the belief, held widely by officers and universally by statesmen, that the only way to cure delusion is to play along. He requested one of his personal guard to follow Adolphe at a distance and make sure he reached his destination.

  Adolphe took the note with all due obedience and departed for the familiar streets of Petit Roi. He wondered, though, if the colonel grasped the urgency of the situation. Three divisions of Cossacks were not to be sneezed at. Sparing so much as one man on an errand such as he now served could only be a mistake.

  Adolphe had never before considered countermanding a superior’s orders. Whether on his stepfather’s farm or at the Kaiser’s front, he knew that the nation depended on each person accepting subservience to command. But here was a higher authority, a greater logic to which he owed allegiance. The survival of the town, the occupation, the front, and ultimately the homeland depended on his taking up a position in the field against this surreptitious Russian force. He swerved off the road and cut across a Belgian barnyard.

  Walking across the empty field, he was visited by a strong feeling of resolve. His little mutiny would be understood in time, judged in a wider context and forgiven, even praised. The matter settled, he thought no more about the Russians or what defense he meant to put up against them. He was thinking about his half brothers.

  He was angry with Hubert for filching, out of turn, the picture of the three of them, because it might be some time before they could see one another and he could get the photo back. Alicia so loved to have the picture on her press, next to her combs: that way, he could be home when he was not. He thought of the wireless message he’d received the night before over his tooth. What a remarkable, excellent society, in which people could reproduce their voices and images cheaply and mechanically for wide consumption. Photos, radio, the new forms of mechanical reproduction seemed to Adolphe further commandments to go forth and multiply, go and love the image of others as yourself.

  He loved the image of his half brothers in his mind’s eye. He loved the image of Alicia in his wallet. He loved the image of the child of his union with her, which had not yet appeared in the world. He loved Comelia Després, whom he imagined crying into cupped hands, as in the actress’s image.

  Someone called to him from the direction of Königen, but he could not turn back now. They would understand his little mutiny in time. Another call; perhaps it was the strange photographer on the bicycle, but he could not afford to stop and find out. How did that song of Peter’s go? “Carrots and onions. If you’d fed me more meat, I might never have left home.”

  He would buy a gramophone after the war and play that song once a week for his child. Shots rang out nearby; the Russians, no doubt. Still Adolphe could not afford to stop. He found that through will and concentration he could force the bullets to bend away from him and explode at a distance.

  A LOW-RANKING OFFICER of the occupation force was charged with the paperwork documenting the Schreck affair. This is the century for records, even records of the slightest individuals. Look it up, if the library has not burned: “And not answering several calls to halt, the deserter was fired upon.” A medical examiner added excruciating detail concerning the perforation of the left ventricle. Neither saw fit to record that the deserter, for several minutes in the vacant field, before expiring, lay repeating: “Jack’s mother is not pleased with the beans.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  On the Windfall Trail

  One custom Armenian-Americans observed was to paste
in parts of photographs taken in Armenia to complete a family portrait made later in America. These composite photographs, with their artless additions, bear a child-like quality and testify to the living remembrance of sons and fathers executed in the massacres.

  —“A Poignant Portrait of an Oppressed People,” in The Boston Globe, April 24, 1983

  To the best of his recollection, Mays had never posed with Henry Ford Senior, who had died a good decade before Peter was born. The extent of his contact with celebrities was his once having seen Dizzy Dean across a parking lot swarmed by little boys. But, as the truism had it, the camera doesn’t lie, and there on the big screen at the Your Move Theatre stood a twenty-foot image of Peter with a twenty-foot Henry’s arm around him.

  They were coming out of a closed room together, unposed, startled by the camera. The slide remained projected only a few seconds, rapidly giving way to the second act. Mays snuck a surreptitious glance at Alison, whose hand he held again. She answered his involuntary squeeze of alarm with one of affection, but made no other sign of having seen anything out of the ordinary. Yet he could not bring himself to believe that he had fabricated the resemblance. The problematic caption, Heir, he could have dismissed as the sort of journalistic interpretation he did for a living if it hadn’t been for a Mays family custom he’d never before paid much attention to.

  So involved was Mays with explaining the photograph to himself that Kimberly Greene’s entrance for the second act startled him. His sense of time had been so dislodged that he was shocked afresh to see in front of him the object of his long search. But that old enigma—Bernhardt swimming against the Veterans’ Day crowd—at once gave way to another altogether, an enigma of identity related to the first in a way that Mays could sense but not force clear.