Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

by Richard Powers

  Without such a machine, Peter recognized his own fraudulence enough not to trust his own telling of the war. Convinced that his subjects could tell their story better than he, he turned his reports into little more than pastiches of overheard conversations.

  Hungry for quotes and paraphrases, he wrote the Schreck farm in the Westerwald:

  Volken, please tell me where I can write ’Dolphe and Hub, too, if you are in touch with him and he has gone to war. I’m not cross at Adolphe; by accident, he did me a good turn. I’m not so silly as before, as I now have a vocation. I will come back after the shooting and tell you. There is something remarkable in this world war that people reading the papers cannot know.

  Peter knew he risked arrest by posting this letter. If this signed confession did not bring the authorities down on him, the letter, even routed through Holland, stood little chance of making it from one belligerent to the other. But his desire to get his brothers’ firsthand accounts side by side with the enemy’s was so great that he took the risk. Receiving no reply, he blamed the censors or suspected that the Schrecks disowned him for running out on the Kaiser.

  The newspaper’s home office complained to Peter/Theo on two counts. After causing their initial stir, the Langerson articles began losing their readers to other, more impersonal and strategic reports of thrusts and reconnoiterings. For newspapers have always served the same purpose as memory: to repeat the dry, physical fact again and again until it no longer threatens the individual. Peter’s quotes, by involving the readers too deeply, did exactly the reverse, and so slowly lost popularity both with the public and the paper. The paper also suspected that by excessive quoting, Peter meant to avoid the work involved in saying something for himself.

  These criticisms hurt Peter deeply, and he soon found out how quickly dedication can turn to cynicism under resistance from the home office. But he did not capitulate just yet. He had another plan for sending home the war in a literal and undeniable package. With his thoughts increasingly on his brothers after his abortive letter to the Westerwald, he was ripe for an unsponsored memory.

  It came one Wednesday as he descended the stairs of the press detention center. As he had on countless days previously, he put his hand on the wooden rail leading to the street. But this time, because he touched the rail while sidestepping a puddle at the bottom step, he received the electrifying impression that he held his old cane and stood in the muddy road on that May Day so long before the start of history. He thought of the photo and how easy it would be to carry a box camera all the way to the front if need be.

  Even the larger papers at that time still relied on engravings for their principal illustration, a preference largely habitual and partly economic. The halftone process, decades old, permitted cheap, fair-quality mass printing. Even a poorly taken, poorly reproduced photo could surpass an engraving in information. But the papers rarely used them, aside from oval portraits of Archduke Ferdinand, John French, or the Czar, preferring the block-diagram map and bold arrows marking out wishful thinking.

  Peter’s idea—the one great insight often given to the inconspicuous—was that, by using the incontrovertible evidence of an amateur’s photos, he could prove that the war had nothing to do with line-drawn maps. He did not know, in fact, what the war had to do with, but felt certain that what went through the lens onto the plate would be it. His pictures would be forthright beyond editing, too naïve to be faked, taking both subjects and viewers by surprise.

  To purchase his machine, Peter resorted to the time-honored method of not eating for four days. He did not want to requisition money from Maastricht; that would take too long and blunt the surprise. Hunger seemed small hardship; four days left him hardly faint. He bought the camera and rudimentary instructions. He made a few experiments, including the obligatory box-at-arm’s-length self-portrait. He felt ready.

  He did not know what image he looked for or where to find it. It seemed best to keep strictly to his old routine. He had an appointment to visit a British field hospital staffed by nuns and teenaged girl volunteers. He set out for the site as usual, only now carrying his machine at his waist.

  With novice’s luck, Peter came on his image almost at once. Trucks carrying wounded arrived just after his own escort. The doors opened and out came the casualties from the second Battle of Ypres, the first gas victims of the war. All hands at once began bearing stretchers. Of the first three soldiers removed from the camions, two gurgled in the backs of their throats and the third had already died. With no time to crate the corpse someplace more circumspect, the bearers simply tucked it out of the way by the rear wheels of the unloading truck. There it lay exposed to the air, without so much as the grace of a sheet. It posed itself in the simplicity of agony, showing more than anything how wrong the old masters were about the moment of death.

  Neither horror nor an explorer’s excitement came to the first-time photographer. Rather, Peter calmly recognized, as if by prearranged signal, his subject matter. Surely and quickly, memory dictated to his fingers; he did as he was told. Then, mechanically, he hid the camera where it would be safe, freed his hands, and pitched in with the unloading. He took no more photos, nor did he enter a single note into his books. He spent the day assisting the camp medics, thinking no more of reporting until back in the safety of his Paris flat.

  There, under the guidance of the technical manual, the image came into existence out of a dark closet and the stink of chemical reagents. Peter watched the image develop, and at the precise moment dropped the print into the stop bath. A corpse huddled up near a truck’s rear axle. It was, at the same time, precisely what Peter had seen through the viewfinder and yet radically different. So much more took place in the picture now than then—the play of detail, the crumpled form in halftones, the thing’s utter silence. More than he’d seen in the original, yet exactly what he’d imagined on opening the shutter.

  He had done the work of his assumed identity, the work he had been sent to the front to do. In this simplest possible snapshot the noncombatant observers would see finally, unequivocally, without interpretation, the dance of 1914. No word could gloss the effect. This photo would show the onlooker what the war was about. It was about this corpse, this latest in a long history of Pietàs, with truck axle standing in for mother. As with every new addition to a tradition, it did not call attention to itself so much as point to all the past Pietàs, ask what they now meant in this changed world.

  All he could tell the news-hungry audience in Maastricht was that the war was this dead fellow, and leave it at that.

  Peter put the print on his windowsill for two days, as if it were the studio portrait of a near-relation. Then, pressed to give the thing away, he carefully wrapped it in brown paper and twine and sent it to the home office. After, he felt vacant and acquitted. The final report had been submitted, and he only awaited a reply.

  As with all replies of consequence, his was unexpected. In two days the censor board summoned him for a closed conference. Peter appeared in the old work clothes he’d last worn at The Spoon the day he met Theo. The same petty official who had earlier reprimanded him for slack reporting, threatening spy trials, now launched another magisterial dressing-down.

  —Mr. Langerson, we on the board have all seen and admired your photo of the unfortunate British fellow. Gas victim.

  —Thank you, Your Horseface.

  Mumbled, the crack passed for “Your Honor.” Peter’s deadpan and the old adolescent smirk confirmed the Hegelian dictum that opposites meet.

  —Quite a bit of artistry, we all agree.

  —The gas?

  —The photo, young man. May I remind you that you stand before this body as a guest of France.

  —Just as I stood in front of the other body.

  —Quite. We’ve arrived at the point, then. It has been the policy of the Entente Powers to ask newspapers to oblige us by not printing photographs showing visible corpses of either side. Nor are the Entente releasing any such photos to t
he press of neutral nations. This war, you understand, will be won or lost by the morale of the civilian populations.

  —No dead bodies?

  —No photographs of visible corpses of either side.

  —You’re to keep the citizens happy by denying the dead bodies?

  —Not denying them. Just not serving them up for dinner.

  Peter searched one end of the council to the other for a cracked smile, exposing the whole, extended joke. His mouth hung slack in incomprehension.

  —Gentlemen, in my village, that’s called shitting your pants and blaming the stink on the cows.

  —That’s as may be. But you are forewarned that failure to comply or further attempts to print the photo will lead to immediate deportation at the least. Perhaps after the war, God willing, you will find a taker for your fine piece of work. I understand your frustration and your hostility. Good day.

  There was nothing for it but to bow out of the room. Surprisingly, the rage called for by the circumstance did not creep up on Peter either at once or in the days to come. Having consummated his work as a journalist, he gave up the pretense and lost whatever modicum of conscience or motive he had had. He had had his great insight and moment of articulation. He had taken his photo. Back in the incarnation of Peter Kinder, congenital Lümmel, he no longer cared what became of the image. Now he needed diversion.

  Directly on being dismissed from his finger-slapping, he crossed over to the Left Bank and Montparnasse, where he traded his topcoat for a hip flask and some change. Outside an unassuming cabaret, the Left Bank found him. Two suspect young men—apparently avoiding the draft on grounds of acute hemophilia—both with spoons strapped to their shoulders to resemble epaulets, neatly accosted him and wrestled him to the pavement. One, wearing a pointed felt hat, seemingly superior in rank, spoke first:

  —Art thou that which governs, the so-called Prime Minister, he who rules those lessers that comprise his constituency?

  Peter, normally poor at answering questions, could not even recognize this as one.

  —You pushed me down!

  —He shows, in truth, the logico-physio-nuclear faculties of he who governs.

  —It is! It is the Prime Minister.

  —My Prime Ass, I am.

  —He admits it. We’ve got him then.

  The overeager junior partner sans cap, whose nose threatened to set up a populist rebellion from the rest of his face, began to grab Peter. The first speaker checked him with a cuff on the ear.

  —Keep silence, you who are second in command. If it is, in truth, the Prime Minister, then he must know that which men call the logico-mechanical purpose of this interview.

  Recovering from his rough handling, Peter began to get the spirit of the thing. Unable to match the floridity of his interrogators’ diction, he went to the opposite extreme, cursing them out in Dutch. He started with a phrase meaning, loosely, “Chop up your genitals and use them for stewing meat,” working up to bigger and better as he warmed.

  —Eh? The Prime Minister is a partaker of the German nationalogicality? That explains much, does it not, Petit?

  The capless one rubbed his tremendous nose and laughed. His breath smelled of paint thinner.

  —Jawohlt. The whole logico-mechanical war. The Prime Minister of France a German. Très bizarre, geopolitics. But who are we to demand that things make sense?

  Peter stood and brushed himself off.

  —Listen to me, rubes. I’m not your goddamn Prime Minister.

  —What? But you as good as admitted it.

  The capped one calmed the nosed one and, by gestures, asked to be allowed to handle the crisis.

  —It’s you who had better do the listening, bub. We were sent to fetch the Prime Minister and bring him back, and you’re it, or we’ll bash your bob in.

  —I abdicate. Find another.

  —What? Another? Among all these . . . these Primettes?

  The grand anemic dismissed all humanity with a great gesture, so startling one or two passers-by that Peter laughed despite himself.

  —Buy us a drink and we’ll talk about it.

  The capped fellow looked confused, and consulted his assistant.

  —Drink? What means this “drink,” Petit?

  —That which men swill, Your Dregness.

  The man’s shout of recognition loosened his spoon-epaulets and sent them jangling to the streets. With general hilarity and back-slapping, the three headed off as if old comrades.

  The two took Peter to the catacombs under Montparnasse. On the way, in their tortured, inextricable syntax, they explained that a dozen or so artists—“Reality modulators,” as the cancerous nose termed them—had banqueted underground for the last seventy-two hours, sleeping in shifts and taking turns going aboveground to buy that which men swill and that which men swallow. Only an hour before, someone had pointed out that they had no guest of honor, no one to throw the banquet for. Ruling out Genghis Khan and Simon Bolivar as ineligible on grounds of death, they settled on the Prime Minister. Since guests of honor customarily attended their own bash, Charles and Petit were dispatched to fetch back said official or suffer emotional agony and verbal abuse.

  Taking this in, Peter reflected on how in a short time he’d been Dutch, German, Dutch again, and Parisian expatriate; gone by Kinder, Schreck, and Langerson; had been a derelict, farmer, tobacconist, newshound, and now chief governing official of France. It all seemed, as the reality modulators were fond of saying, logico-mechanical.

  The student-artists had stumbled upon a section of the old Roman catacombs beneath Paris that was not on the state tour system. The caves made a perfect if fusty and moribund draft dodge. Charles lit a candle and led on into the tombs, with Petit prodding Peter from behind. The stone wall harbored periodic cavities that Peter chose not to look into too deeply. An occasional objet trouvé—a bicycle chain, shower nozzle, commode fragment—each bearing a placard reading The Path of a Proton, or I and We: the Metaphysio Pronouns, indicated that an anonymous reality modulator had taken on the task of sprucing up the crypts.

  The sounds of clinking and speechifying grew more distinct, and a moment later the party of three pushed free into a cavern that, although hewn from rock, leaking water, and stinking of slime mold, passed for an elegant dining hall. A dozen men and women lay about in varying degrees of oblivion. Thick smoke hung in the air and debris from food and drink littered the room.

  The guests broke off singing and fell silent at Peter’s entrance. Finally one fellow, the tacit ringleader judging from his tux and tails, the single ugliest, most hirsute gentleman Peter had ever seen, rose in trembling gravity and bellowed in stentorian voice:

  —The Primatique Minister!

  This coinage signaled that “logico” and “mechanical” were now passé, and words ending in “matique” would hold court for the next forty-eight hours.

  Peter was feted, toasted, and forced to drink a liter of wine without coming up for air. Everyone wanted to stroke the Prime Minister, and some of the women rubbed him so hard that he got an erection, which two of them promptly announced to the crowd in official tones. The hairy fellow rose, looked stern, and demanded:

  —Speechify. Tell us about the war. The people demand of he who governs to inform them of the course of the war.

  Much yelling and concurring followed. They dragged Peter to a rock slab that served as a podium.

  —Friends, Frenchmen. The plans of the war are to . . . to keep . . . the plans of the war . . . very, very secret.

  The crowd broke out in boos.

  —Tell us!

  —Trust us. We’re as mum as the dead.

  —One thing I can tell you, however. I have it on the highest authority that we’ll keep fighting until either they are all dead or we are all dead or both they and we are all dead or they stop fighting and say it’s all right for us to stop fighting or they stop because they thought that we stopped or until they say that they aren’t going to stop unless we say that . . .
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  —Bravo!

  —Exactement.

  —Liberté, égalité . . .

  The banqueters broke into hymns; some, “The Marseillaise,” others, “You Should-a Seen-a Lina.” In the confusion, the ringleader took the podium from Peter and demanded silence.

  —After the informatiququitive speech of our beloved Primatique . . .

  —Encore!

  —There is little one can say. Yet I might add that word has reached us from aboveground via this delightful and generally accurate paper called . . .

  Pulling a newspaper out of his tuxedo, he held the banner close to his eyes.

  — . . . Le . . . Monde, that we reality modulators are not alone in trying to remake the world on proto-willpower. It says here that a certain Monsieur Henri Forte, famous American motorist and car driver, has invented a torpedo that is right at this minute sailing across that which is wet with the intention of blowing up that which is old, Europe, and starting a new Golden Age of Peace. Equals, may I propose a toast. To Peace.

  —To Peace and Diplomacy.

  —To Peace and Diplomacy and Motorcars.

  —To Peace and Diplomacy and Motorcars and those pretty packages rolling papers come in.

  The cumulative toast worked its way clockwise around the party, each adding another toast and obliging all to drink. But the self-replicating, self-improving chain broke at Peter, and the hilarity drew up short. For the Prime Minister had snatched away the copy of Le Monde and was reading it furiously.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Catching a Connector

  I don’t blame any person but the system.

  —Henry Ford

  Mays lay in the tub shortly after 2 A.M. The bath water, scalding when he’d drawn it a few minutes before, now seemed tepid to his touch. Peter had noticed the phenomenon many times since childhood: had the water actually cooled, or had his skin just adjusted to the status quo? Neither answer made him any warmer. The situation called for less metaphysics and more hot water.