The Sixteen Trees of the Somme

by Lars Mytting

  “Let me ask you one thing, Edouard. Your reason for coming here. Are you here to find peace? Or . . . are you searching for something?”

  “This probably sounds strange. But I have to know what happened.”

  “Yes, but why? Again, excuse me. Why do you want to know this? There’s a reason we prefer to remember the good things that happen in our lives. People have a phenomenal ability to filter out the bad. So the bitterness is given a sweet dose of healthy reality. Children can adapt to most things. But now you’re returning to the place where your truth once existed. That could open wounds you may not be able to bear.”

  She was right, of course. She had said that Mamma was upset when we returned. While I had told myself that a sad person does not eat perch with saffron. So maybe my only true memories were those I believed to be true.

  “Are you hiding anything from me?” I said.

  “Not at all. But there are theories about what happened, which may be too much for you.”

  The water boiled and she switched off the hotplate.

  “It’s so . . . unfair,” I said. “I know of people who went into those woods in 1943 without getting hurt. Yet Mamma and Pappa stepped right on top of a shell.”

  She shook her head. “But that can be explained. The shell casings are made of iron. They rust, but it happens slowly. During the previous war they might have been stepped on without consequences. But by the time your parents went into the woods, the shells had lain there for more than fifty years.”

  “And now?” I said.

  “Now they are even more rusted. It’s nature at work. The woods are getting more and more dangerous.”

  She could tell what I was planning.

  “Don’t even think about it,” she said. “People still die from unexploded shells. We had an incident near Thiepval only a couple of weeks ago. Two road workers were taken to the hospital, confused and groggy. They had somehow displaced a gas shell that was so rusted there was only a couple of millimetres of metal left. In fact it made me think about the incident – your incident – when I read about it.”

  She stopped to glance at me out of the corner of her eye. An unsolved mystery that had grown up, a young boy who was now a man, sitting at her kitchen table in the flesh.

  “What do you think actually happened?” I forced myself to say. “If you could imagine a scenario.”

  “I have a theory. But to understand it, you’ll have to understand the area we live in. The Somme releases the loss in people. The battlefields leave such a violent impression that it puts some people in quite a state. The history of this place creates a longing for meaning and life, for something humane. I know what it’s like not to be able to have children. The empty space inside and outside of you. So I believe you were kidnapped, at the site of the worst slaughter in the history of mankind.”

  “You think that someone just . . . took me?”

  “Time after time I have seen this desperation at the adoption agency. Even in its Sunday best, with a forced politeness that attempts to conceal years of longing. So yes, I believe that you were separated from your parents, and that they went looking for you. I have no idea how it happened. Presumably you just wandered off and someone found you, scared and desperate. Maybe the initial thought was to get you to safety, but then another desire was awakened. There are millions of people out there who lack foresight. Something might seem like a good idea for a few minutes, but then comes the reflection. They ask themselves what the neighbours will say. Then the child gets hungry and starts crying. They think about the birth certificate they don’t have. Their enthusiasm for the plan soon fades. Most often they come to their senses within half an hour, or a couple of days at most. Then there are those who think there is money to be had from missing children. But a plan like that would have gone to pieces after twenty-four hours, when they read in a newspaper that your parents were dead.”

  “The hotels would probably have asked why someone was suddenly showing up with an extra child?” I said.

  “Exactly. You were gone for several days and whoever took you must have stayed somewhere. That’s why we checked with all the hotels and guest houses in the area. We suspected an abduction by a childless couple in their thirties or forties. Or a single woman of the same age. We checked all the guestbooks in the district. Apart from exposing nine instances of infidelity, we found nothing. I think they must have driven you to Le Crotoy because it was far enough away from the centre of the search. They waited until Monday morning because all the offices were closed at the weekend. They decided on a doctor’s surgery, a place with intelligent, responsible people. They might have sat a distance away and waited for the police car to arrive. They’re probably still alive. With or without a child. What I am quite certain of is that they live far, far away from Le Crotoy.”

  “Do you remember the name of the doctor?” I said.

  “Unfortunately not. Just that he was old and distinguished. Someone had knocked on his receptionist’s door, and when she came out you were alone in the waiting room. They examined you at once. In fact they recognised you from the newspaper. Discovered that you had been fed recently and were calm. Your clothes were dirty, but your only injuries were the bruises.”

  I frowned. “Bruises?”

  “Yes. Lots of them.”

  “Where?”

  Jocelyne Berlet stood up and walked around the table. Stopped in front of me, and I saw her straining to keep her emotions in check.

  “We withheld some details from the newspapers,” she said and touched my right arm. “They were here.” Her finger ran down my shoulder and upper arm. “Heavy bruising. The skin was almost black. But nothing on the lower arm, nor on the left arm. Violence must have been used.”

  Her hand rested there for a second too long. I was going to place mine over it, but she took a step back.

  “I sat with you,” she said. “I tried to get you to speak. To say something that could help me pick up the trail. But you were silent. It was as if the incident had blocked off your memory.”

  That was the day I stopped speaking French, I thought.

  “And then . . . my grandfather Sverre arrived?”

  “I saw the two of you reunited. You ran towards him and he took you in his arms. He had to stay in Amiens for a few days, to take care of the formalities. He had to identify your parents and their bodies were sent to Oslo by plane. Your grandfather was rather unsentimental. But he seemed to be somehow . . . expectant, as if he was waiting for something else to happen. Then you both drove off in the black car.”

  I pictured him. The hate forged that day for the brother who wanted to do good, but who made a mess of everyone’s lives around him. Like a dog wagging its tail too eagerly and smashing the porcelain to pieces.

  “I seem to have forgotten the tea,” she said.

  *

  Out on the street I lit a Gauloise and looked at the Bristol. I was not sure whether to tell her about Oscar Ribaut, but in any case the occasion had not presented itself. Her work probably trained her to be good at saying goodbyes. She nodded briefly when we stood by the door, neither of us allowing any feelings in or out.

  I stood smoking with my back to her flat. A couple of buses passed, I thought I heard someone shouting, and then I felt something hard hit my shoulder, followed by the sound of an object rolling on asphalt. Jocelyne Berlet had thrown a ceramic fuse from the second floor, and hit her target. She stood at the kitchen window, her hands on the sill as if holding on to the railing of a ship.

  I came back into her hallway.

  “You were standing there smoking,” she said. “Is there maybe something you haven’t told me?”

  “Maybe. You too?” I said.

  She picked up a black leather glove that had fallen to the floor. “The explanation we leaned towards was of a spontaneous kidnapping,” she said, putting the glove next to another on a small table. “That was the only possibility that seemed to settle matters.”

  “But did it?”
I said.

  “No. For me, it was never settled.”

  The prospect of a development hung in the air. Some exchange of information to resolve an old case. So I took out the photographs and told her everything I knew. She studied the pictures of me and the toy dog with an expression similar to Gwen’s – sad, but also affectionate. A young boy a few days before he disappeared, before his memories were erased.

  Afterwards, Jocelyne Berlet sat with her fingers rubbing her temples, as though willing her brain to pick up things where it had left off. “This has not given me any new insight,” she said. “But there are irregularities in any investigation. For example, they had two sets of keys to the room but we only found one. In your mother’s jacket pocket.”

  “I think he was supposed to look after me that day,” I said. “The man called Einar.”

  “Either that,” she said, “or they lost one set of keys while they were looking for you. It’s impossible to tie up all the loose ends. The other thing that bothered me was the dress.”

  I froze. Felt my neck tightening. “The dress?” I mumbled.

  “At one point we suspected a cleaner of pilfering from the hotel, but we let it go. When they were found, your mother and father were dressed in normal travelling clothes. But the previous evening the waitress at the restaurant had noticed your mother wearing a beautiful, blue dress in an old-fashioned style. Your father – what is it? Is something wrong?”

  “I . . . no, go on.”

  “Your father wore a suit. When we searched the room, we found the suit but not the dress. I was surprised. Who, shortly after someone has died, would enter a dead person’s hotel room to steal an old-fashioned summer dress?”

  9

  AN ELEGANT COUPLE WALKING THEIR DOG. I WISHED I had the Leica now, to make me just another war tourist.

  “I’m trying to find a farm,” I said, “that once belonged to the Daireaux family.”

  They looked at one another, shook their heads. Perhaps I had pronounced it wrong. I tried again, rounding the As. They shrugged and continued on their way.

  I had left the Bristol on the side of the road. The dull headlamps reminded me of the gaze of a faithful old dog. Slow to turn, but with a nice, comforting smell. If only it could tell me what it had experienced during all the miles it had carried Einar.

  I swung open the door and sat with my legs outside the car. Found my cassette of Bob Dylan and fast-forwarded to “Mr Tambourine Man”. I bent to tie my shoes. I had been sloppy that morning, only a single bow, but now I folded the laces for a Turquoise turtle knot. That was why Gwen could make a knot that held the entire day – because a one-armed man cannot tie his own laces.

  Somehow sensing that she was still close by I crossed a small bridge over the Ancre and walked uphill as far as a disused railway track. On the other side of it was an old brick building with an arched roof. In the picture of me with the toy dog there had been a brick wall in the background. But how many hundreds of buildings like that were there?

  I walked around it, kicking at the metal junk buried in the grass, pulled myself up to the windows and peered inside an old waiting room. A massive clock on the floor, smashed. Nobody to be seen, only the sound of birds and traffic in the distance.

  I pressed on and came across a stooped older lady standing in a ditch with a yellow beach ball. A young girl came running out from behind a hedge. The old lady gave her the ball and laughed.

  She had been alive long enough to know the local history, and she pointed me in the right direction. “But the Daireaux family – they are gone,” she said.

  “Did you know them?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Others lived there after the war, but they must have moved a few years ago.”

  I followed her directions. If she was right, the farm was a couple of kilometres away from the walnut woods.

  *

  I could just make out an old dirt road between some gnarled trees. It was barely passable; the spring thaw had used it as a stream, and tall grass had grown up in the middle.

  I had a fleeting image of Mamma and me walking together, a phantasm that came from here, and mattered here; because the two of us had wandered this path separately, but with similar thoughts: Does a part of me belong here? Or could I have grown up anywhere?

  Suddenly the vision was gone, and I was clinging to something yet still losing my grip. Like a pine cone that only realises it was connected to a tree when it falls and scatters its seeds.

  Fifty metres ahead I saw the Daireaux farm. A farmhouse with a sunken roof. A barn with no gates. An outbuilding with the doors hanging crookedly from their hinges. The descriptions from Einar’s letters fell into place. The henhouse. The stairs leading to the main entrance, where my great-grandfather met the mysterious Oscar Ribaut.

  I sat on the top step and surveyed the courtyard. Here they had stood, Einar and Isabelle, hoping that the war would end. And the Gestapo had come here, right here, and arrested her and her family while Einar escaped.

  The roots of the bushes had grown into the walls and the foliage had stained the paintwork. A tarpaulin flapped in the wind. In the barn there was a dead pigeon, the floor of the stables was covered with greyed straw and mouse droppings. On the kitchen worktop in the farmhouse there was a bicycle wheel. The smell of food had not filled that room in many years.

  I wanted to be someone the dead could rely on, but none of the dead had come forward to help me. From time to time I was forced to ask myself whether, if I found the walnut and got my hands on the money, I would buy back this farm. Would I use it as a summer house, squeeze the last drop of blood out of the tragedy and show the family ghosts that the circle was complete? Now that I was here I wandered around in the hope of recognising something, a belonging, a responsibility. But nothing touched me. It was like looking at a picture frame from which the painting was gone.

  Only when I left the Daireaux farm did I feel a sadness.

  That’s something at least, I thought.

  *

  On the way back to the car I felt as though I had all the time in the world. The locals did not stare, they seemed to be used to all the tourist buses, to people trotting about with cameras pointing across the landscape, to English cars stopping in the middle of the road.

  At a small graveyard, some schoolchildren were jumping between the graves and shouting. I wondered what Duncan Winterfinch would have made of it. At that moment a taxi raced past, slowing near a side road on the other side of the graveyard. The passenger leaned forward to speak to the driver.

  It was Gwen.

  Wearing a new, dark-blue jacket. With her hair styled. She was fumbling with a map, pointing at something. The car drove on. I set off in the Bristol, but I did not find the taxi, and instead went into a cafeteria with white plastic furniture and harsh lighting. With a lump in my throat I remembered her face across the table at the Raba, the smell of her skin and the way she would sigh before she fell asleep, the radiance and willfulness when she planed Zetland. Now it was over, empty and dead, gone like the trees on Shetland.

  An hour later I was standing by the Daireaux woods. Using the war map, I had followed a dirt track through some rocky fields and stopped where I imagined Mamma and Pappa must have parked the Mercedes. But I did not stay long, I would be back the next morning.

  I drove on, looking for Duncan Winterfinch’s summer house. Another round of the cemeteries, through creaking iron gates and amongst gravestones, taking in the tragedy of 1916 and trying to put myself in the head of the old captain. On a stone wall there was a brass hatch I had not noticed earlier, with a cross embedded in the metal. I opened it and found a slim book inside the niche.

  A visitors’ book, with names, countries, dates. And comments, occasionally. I wrote my name on a new line. Carefully, so the pen would not cut through the paper. Edouard Daireaux. I replaced the book and studied the gravestone of an unknown soldier. Known unto God.

  A thought struck me. I returned to the brass hatch a
nd took out the visitors’ book again.

  *

  The local office of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission resembled an upmarket tool hire company. There were lawnmowers, mini diggers and cement mixers in large, well-ordered sheds. Only the allied flags, swaying on tall poles along the drive, alluded to a sense of common history. A large truck had turned in and was now idling as a man in overalls hopped out of the passenger side and picked up some reels of electric fencing. An animal transport vehicle, judging by the ventilation slots at the sides and the plaintive baaing.

  Sheep made up the majority of the employees here, I had seen flocks of them by the memorials. They grazed the old trenches, which were too dangerous to reach with lawnmowers.

  The sheep transport drove on. I dispelled the thought of the animals at home and knocked at the office door. No answer, but in I went anyway. At a table further inside sat three men and two women in green work clothes. On a flip chart was their work schedule. Their job was to keep the war memorials tidy, maintain the plants and change flags that were bleached by the sun.

  “The visitors’ books for the war cemeteries,” I said in French. “Where are they kept when they’re full?”

  They looked at me sceptically, and then one of the men gestured for me to follow him to a basement, where he unlocked a steel door. A fluorescent tube blinked on above us and others lit up inside the endlessly long archive room. A handwritten collection of the many forms Loss has taken over the past seventy years. Worn and weather-beaten visitors’ books like newspapers left in the rain, their pages buckled.

  “630,000 fell here,” he said. “That’s only counting the allies who fought in this battle here, in 1916. The Germans have their own burial grounds with just as many.”

  He asked why I wanted to see them, thousands of record books with pages that had never been read, but which were too precious to be thrown away. I told him that my parents had died here in 1971, and that I was searching for their last signature.

  That was only partly true; I was also looking for another signature, of a one-armed man. The employee showed me the shelves with books for the cemeteries around Authuille, around High Wood, all the places where the Black Watch fought in 1916. Hundreds of volumes for each cemetery, with names densely written in fountain pen, pages torn by the wind. The signatures from the twenties were neat and formal, sometimes hundreds in a day. People must have queued. One-line messages: We miss you dearly. Sarah is nine years old now and is doing fine.