Echo House

by Ward Just

  It wasn't effective, he added. The schnapps.

  Fred stepped to the sideboard and filled his glass with whiskey and then turned to face the count. He was flushed with anger and his voice was harsh. Boo-hoo, he said, my heart's bleeding. Thanks to you that bastard is probably back in the line at this minute. That Kraut bastard is shooting at Americans right now.

  The count said to Axel, Please, help yourself to whiskey.

  Axel said, Surely you must have known that.

  He lifted his shoulders and let them fall. He lit another Gauloise.

  Shooting at Americans, Fred said again. Probably shooting at French also. Thanks to you.

  I doubt that, the count said mildly. I doubt that very much. I had to amputate his hand.

  Fred turned away, not believing a word of it.

  You said the wounds weren't serious, Axel said.

  The count said softly, You would see things differently from the way I do. You would have another point of view altogether. The Germans arrive in my country every few generations. They arrived in 1871 and again in 1914 and 1940, and those are only the invasions within memory. We expect it; the Germans are part of our national life. They are as much a part of French culture as Joan of Arc. The sun makes its transit. The moon rises. The tide goes in and the tide goes out. And the Germans invade. Perhaps it's revenge for Bonaparte; perhaps it's their own disquiet that sends them over their borders again and again. They are a restless and romantic people. They are never satisfied and this is understandable. They are descendants of the horse people. It is in their nature to move violently from place to place. In another thirty or forty years they'll come again, regardless of whether your General Patton crosses the Rhine this month or next month or next year. Or never crosses it. We French think of the Germans as a natural phenomenon, like the mistral. So when they arrive my family does its best to accommodate them, since we know they will return; they always have before. I have had to make my own rules within our particular family tradition. We have properties in the north also. We have a petit château near Sedan that has been a German headquarters in three wars. It is a German headquarters now, unless your Patton has liberated it for his own headquarters. My maternal uncle, who occupies the Sedan château, is a droll fellow. He considered adding a German library to the one already there, cautionary tales like those of Musil and Joseph Roth. Now perhaps we can add an American library, Twain, James, and Melville. Perhaps you too will return in a generation. No doubt you will.

  The count poured himself another schnapps and looked directly at Axel, his eyes alive with a bright worldly glint, eyes that found irony wherever they lit. He apparently had chosen Axel as the senior man. He said, We have had a great deal of experience with wounds, my friend. We have seen many hundreds of wounds in the 1871 war and the great 1914 war and this war also. And I am bound to tell you that losing an ordinary hand is not a serious wound, not serious at all, when you consider the many possibilities.

  My family has occupied this château for five centuries, the count concluded almost as an afterthought, no doubt to give the Americans valuable perspective on the inventory of wounds, grave and trivial, from sticks and stones to maces and lances and arrows and boiling oil to bullets from machine guns and thousand-pound bombs from planes in the air, each with its specific signature.

  Axel looked him up and down, so nonchalant in his soft country clothes, so elegantly threadbare. He thought he had been listening to a relic from the dim past, but now he wondered if the count wasn't the immediate future—worldly, unmoved, sardonic, unsurprised, aloof from the common experience, coolly neutral unless the knife was drawn across his own throat. Axel believed that his generation of Americans would have to be responsible for the Europeans, because the Europeans would not be responsible for themselves. The Europeans had too much to explain to their own children. Of course for the count explanations would be a luxury, superfluous; they had been superfluous for five centuries. He and Fred had had many earnest discussions concerning the moral rearmament of Europe, the better to stand against the Soviets; and had decided they would have more luck with America, for America had so much more to lose. He did not see just then how they could go about morally rearming this count.

  Axel poured another whiskey, tipping the glass in salute.

  It's good whiskey, he said.

  A gift from before the war, the count said. We had English partners.

  For your wine, he said.

  Our wine was popular in England, he said.

  I can imagine, Axel said.

  It's ordinary wine, he said. Not too expensive.

  Your family is with you here?

  My father is with the government at Vichy, the count said. He is a legal administrator. He is what you call a collaborator but he believes in Pétain. He was with the old man at Verdun in the last war, so they are comrades. They share the burden of eight hundred thousand casualties in seven months. Soon we will have General de Gaulle, so I do not know what will happen to my father, but I expect it will be nothing good. I have a brother who is a résistant. He's somewhere in the countryside doing whatever résistants do, sabotage and assassination, espionage of one kind or another. He likes it. It suits him. He has his own group and excludes no one, not even communists. His wife is with him. And their children are in England. My older brother works in Zurich with the Americans. I have no idea what he does, but I assume that it's unwholesome. He has always wanted to emigrate to America, and now I suppose he will. He wants to marry an heiress and live in California. Do you know any heiresses? He's very attractive. He speaks excellent English.

  That would be the way to do it, Axel said.

  You've covered all the bases, Fred said in English. And then in French, You're a luck)' man. You're drawing water from all the wells. No matter who wins, you're covered.

  Certainly, the count said with a look of surprise. Of course.

  Against all odds Axel found himself drawn to the Frenchman, his candor, his fragile dignity, his utter imperturbability. He believed his duty was to survive at all costs, and in this distant region he was landlord-by-right. And you, he said. Monsieur le Comte, what's your role in the family scheme of things?

  I am here, as you can see. Someone has to occupy the château and supervise the vineyards. The village depends on this domain for its livelihood. So that is my responsibility while the others are away. We go on as before. We get on as we have always gotten on. It makes no difference to us who is in charge at Paris. It made no difference in 1789 and it makes no difference today. The tumbrils never got this far south. They never will. There is only one road into this village, and you go out the same way. They do not care that we are here and we do not care that they are there. It is our duty to get on as best we can, theirs too. Sometimes it is a struggle, as when the Germans come. But my duty is to preserve and protect what we have and I do in my way what my father and brothers do in their ways. Sooner or later they will return, except for Alain, who I expect will emigrate to America. He has always wanted to be an American. When you have lived on one piece of land for a very long time you become proprietary about it. There is no difference between it and you. So you become stubborn.

  Sure of yourself, Axel said.

  Cowardly, Fred said under his breath.

  Shall we go in to dinner? the count suggested.

  They did not talk about the war at dinner and obviously avoiding Nadège was difficult. She was as lovely up close as she had been at a distance. Her hostility and sexual heat filled the room; and she was aware of this. She served the plates, filled the glasses with wine, and withdrew, strolling as if she heard music somewhere and wanted to join the dance. She sang softly to herself, her music easily heard over the desultory conversation, something to do with a pest that was attacking the grapevines. The candles began to gutter and throw fantastic shadows. The count droned on as Axel lost himself in his troubled thoughts. When Nadège removed the dinner plates, she seemed to glance fondly at the count, brushing his shou
lder with the tips of her fingers; but he took no notice and did not look at her. Had they become lovers in the absence of her patriot, and was that the cause of her extraordinary aplomb? Absence usually created its own demands, especially when the rules were rewritten.

  Axel watched her turn and look through the door. She stared at him with high disdain. He thought she had suddenly recognized him as the enemy of her future, not liberation at all but occupation. America's future would be her future as well, this valley a part of the American empire no less than the Blue Ridge near Middleburg. And then her eyes slid away and she returned to her kitchen chores. The count and Fred Greene were debating modern French and German music, Massenet and Mahler, and which was the more timely. Axel apathetically sipped his wine, filled with an exhaustion that was close to despair. What was he doing in this place while armies raced across famished Europe? In Russia and the Pacific the corpses were accumulating in a vast hecatomb. Civilians were exiled or imprisoned or slaughtered where they slept, whole cities torched and liquidated. Nothing again would be as he had known it. People and places and the emotions that connected them would disappear, except from the memory of those who could bear to remember. The West would set about reassembling its history. Fred was making some point about The Song of the Earth. Axel promised himself that if he survived he would make his life count for something, to bear witness to what had happened in the war. He realized he had never before thought about surviving.

  He stared across the great dark dining room to the heavy door slightly ajar and saw Nadège at the kitchen counter slicing strawberries, her face lit by a bare overhead bulb. The crimson juice of the strawberries flowed over the cutting board as she stared at it, savagely slicing the fruit with a huge knife, the juice on her fingers and the cutting board. He could not fathom the look on her face, and then he thought he knew. She was waiting for one who would never come. She would wait forever, her lover always out of reach. Even when he returned he would be out of reach, because she would never be able to imagine his days in Poland. He would not be able to explain them and she would not be able to imagine them. And he would be unable to grasp how she had lived in their remote village. Axel knew that he, too, was out of reach, an American on foreign soil. Only the war was near to hand, and if the count was correct—and who would daresay he was wrong—it would not be the last. And Axel was not yet forty.

  The table was silent now, the count and Fred having reached no agreement on Massenet or Mahler. Nadège delivered the strawberries and did not appear again. The kitchen was dark. At the count's invitation they returned to the fireplace for coffee and Cognac, but after only a few minutes he announced that he would have to retire. He was obliged to be up early on business and, alas, would be unable to see them off in the morning. He wanted them to know that they were welcome to stay on. They could stay with him in the château or in the village. There was much to be done in the fields, and anyone familiar with machines was a godsend. Of course they would be paid for their work. Even Americans needed a respite from combat, and there was no more secure location in all France. This was logical, but the choice was theirs.

  Unfortunately, Axel said, they were expected at the war. Personal invitation of General Patton.

  As you wish, the count said.

  They shook hands and he walked off, pausing at the staircase to look at Fred. His expression was impish.

  It is not cowardice, Monsieur Greene. You should be clear on that point. Cowardice is a simple thing, and we are not simple here. No, it is a more complicated thing altogether.

  And then he was gone.

  The Americans remained a few minutes longer, finishing their Cognac. Fred wanted to replay the evening. He was especially caustic about Jules Massenet, sentimental moron. He had less to do with the modern world than Renoir, that illustrator. The German genius for dissonance and excess in music accounts for their military brilliance, wouldn't you say? But Axel was distracted and answered him in monosyllables. They were very good at reading each other's moods, so Fred did not press except to say that his friend looked tired. Why are you weary, Axel? Are you tired of our horseshit life? Are you tired of thinking about Germans? Do you want to spend the rest of your life in this leet-le château with ripe Nadège? Working the fields like two characters in a Millet canvas? Maybe we'll find God as they do in Victor Hugo's novels. If we remain, Fred said, no doubt we'll learn the subtle qualities of endurance so prized by Monsieur le Comte. Count Coward

  It was midnight. They refilled their glasses and took them upstairs. Axel checked to see if the spider had returned to its web and was gratified to find that it had. A fly was struggling in the threads, and he removed it with a fingernail and watched it dart away. He lay down at once, but sleep did not come. He lay in the nervous interval between the quiet and the frantic, heavy with desire that he knew could not be satisfied. He swallowed the last of the Cognac and put the glass aside, wishing that he had another, because he was on the spike of the present moment, the future unknowable and the past out of reach. As the French say, he was coincé, cornered, in that small room high above the valley. Moonlight fell through the open window, the air redolent of the vineyards. He was wide awake with his eyes closed, wrapped in a cocoon of his own making. As he often did during those years in France, he sought to penetrate his eyelids to discover the world beyond the nervous interval. He counted the countries he had lived in or visited, working backward from the most recent. There were twenty-six altogether, and soon he found himself on his long honeymoon voyage to India, Ceylon, Burma, and Siam.

  In India they had had letters of introduction. They were invited to visit the archives of the museum at Calcutta. The curator showed them statuary and temple rubbings, many of them pornographic. When Sylvia laughed loudly, the curator was offended; then he too began to smile. The naïveté of Americans amused him. They stayed at the museum all morning, then walked back to the hotel in the furnace of midday, Sylvia still convulsed. Axel thought she was behaving like a schoolgirl. She admitted later that she had been caught unawares, off guard, and asked him if he had ever seen such things before. Of course, he said. The British Museum, the Dahlem, even the Corcoran in Washington. Why didn't you tell me? she demanded. This became a great issue with her. You're so secretive, she said. You never tell me anything. I know nothing of your thoughts. She worried the matter all the way to Siam.

  In that way the early morning advanced at its usual pace; and in due course Sylvia left and Nadège arrived, and still he could not see beyond the next tick of the clock. He thought that when sadness closed its fist around your heart, it would never relax until it had squeezed you dry.

  They departed at dawn, driving into a gorgeous sunrise. There was no one about in the château or in the village. They went out the way they came in, but in no time were lost, driving along a country road no wider than the Jeep. After an hour Fred stopped and Axel climbed on the hood with field glasses to search for a landmark, anything that would point the way to a town. In the saddle of the next low valley was a church spire and a few crabbed buildings. A thin ribbon of smoke rose from one of the chimneys. Many birds were gathered round and about. Even at a mile or more away Axel could see them perched on the steeple and swarming nearby, tiny as insects. With the glasses he saw that the stained glass windows of the church were intact and the steeple unmarked. Townspeople were seated in the little graveyard beside the church. Fred put the car in gear and proceeded carefully. They had no idea what they would find or if they would be welcome.

  The cries of the birds grew shrill as they approached, but there was no other sound, because this was a city of the dead. The people in the graveyard had been shot and left to die where they fell. The parish priest was impaled on a bayonet and abandoned on the church porch. There were other dead in the streets and on the front steps of houses and littered like garbage at the base of the World War One monument. Huge blackbirds had collected on the tables in front of the café, walking over the bodies of the dead. More people lay a
cross chairs and under the tables, some shot and others hacked to death. There were women and children, some infants, and men young and old. A dog prowled among the corpses, and as the Americans watched, he too collapsed and died. There was no evidence of any weapons or any resistance. There looked to be forty or fifty dead; probably there were others in the houses.

  What went on here? Fred said.

  But Axel only shook his head. He said, Remember ... but he had forgotten the name of the village in the Sologne that had been destroyed by the Germans after they learned it had sheltered a unit of the Maquis.

  This is like that, Fred said.

  This is worse, Axel said.

  Fred reached into the back seat to fetch his carbine, checking to see that the clip was loaded and engaged, and the safety off. The birds continued to cry, stretching their wings as they pranced among the dead. White smoke spilled from the doorway of the café, the smoke sliding between the tables and chairs, obscuring the dead. Something was burning inside the café and it looked for a moment as if the bodies themselves were smoldering. Abruptly a demented cat shot from the doorway into the square, running in circles and screaming. Fred lowered his carbine.

  We should do something about the priest, Fred said.

  There's nothing to be done about the priest, Axel replied.

  I don't know, Fred began.

  Say a novena if you want, Axel said.

  They drove slowly around the square and up the main street, where there were more dead in alleys. They did not know what to do; there were many too many to bury. The Germans had a word for an action of this kind, Schrecklichkeit, frightfulness. They continued driving very slowly through the village. The cries of the birds receded, and soon a kind of immaculate stillness ruled beyond the cough of the car's engine. The milky light of Aquitaine cast no shadows, and the heat rose in waves.