I will go wherever you want to go, he thought. I should have the last time and I know it. You wouldn’t be sick and we would be somewhere safe like you said. I should have listened but I’m listening now. Wherever you want to go and whatever you want to do. He had three days left where the laws of war were concerned but he didn’t care. All he wanted was for the morning to come and for her to wake and feel better so that he could tell her we can go. As soon as you feel like it, we can go.
Morning came. He was out when she woke. Ella sat up and rubbed her eyes. Rubbed her stomach. She leaned over and grabbed a bottle of water and drank. And then she slowly got to her feet and stood and stretched. She spotted a pack of cigarettes and matches on top of a stack of books and she took the bottle of laudanum from the chair. She removed the cap and drank a sip and then she lit the cigarette and milled around the attic with cautious steps as if the floor might collapse beneath her.
She moved until the cigarette was gone and she flicked it out of the window. Then she knelt next to her suitcase and dug around until she found the advertisement that had brought her here. Nick had placed it on the bottom beneath skirts and stockings and boots. Folded it neatly in the center. She unfolded it and placed it flat on the floor and pressed the paper with the palm of her hand to smooth the wrinkles. With the tip of her finger she slowly traced the outline of the dancing girl as if she would later have to draw it while blindfolded. She traced it once. Twice. Then she folded the ad and slid it back underneath the clothes. His pocketknife was on a plate next to the suitcase and she picked it up. Squeezed it in her hand. A door closed in the alley and she heard Nick coming up the stairs and she stuck the pocketknife into her suitcase. Then she sat in the chair with her legs crossed.
He came in holding a white bag of croissants and a bottle of milk and when he saw her sitting up he smiled and said you look better today. He moved to her and kissed her cheek. Set the bag on the floor. She then pulled him close and kissed his forehead. Cheek. Mouth.
“You are a special doctor,” she said.
“Are you hungry?”
“Yes.”
“That is good. The more you eat the better you’ll feel. I think.”
He handed her a croissant from the bag. Took one for himself. He uncapped the milk and handed the bottle to her and she drank.
“Maybe after you eat we can make it down the stairs. Get some real air and some real coffee.”
“I think it is possible.”
“Good. Did you want some medicine?”
“I took some. But I do not hurt so much as before.”
“But you still hurt?”
She nodded and ate.
“If we can get outside you will feel better,” he said.
“I think when you return you should tell them to give you a white coat and put you in the hospital. Do you have hospitals?”
“Sort of.”
“Then you will become a doctor. No more gun.”
“I’m not going back,” he said. “So there is no worry.”
“The war ends while I sleep?” she said.
“It can go on without me. I want us to go somewhere. Anywhere. As soon as you are well.”
He expected her to smile. To maybe cry. To reach for him. To give back something in the way of affirming what he had said. She only looked at the bread in her hands.
“Did you hear me?” he asked.
“We cannot do this,” she said.
“Yes. We can.”
She stood from the chair. Moved around behind him.
“I asked you to stay before,” she said. “I do not ask this time.”
“Ella,” Nick said and he turned to her. “I did not know. I could not have known what happened.”
“It is not that.”
“Then what is it?”
“It is only that it is different. I want you to come back. And I will be here.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“I cannot ask you to stay.”
“You didn’t ask me,” he said, taking a step toward her. “I told you I wanted to.”
“But I asked you before.”
“And I’m staying. We don’t have to wait on the war or anything else.”
“I am hurting, Nick. Everywhere.”
He paused. Dropped his eyes. He waited on the silence to change her mind but it only held them.
“So am I,” he said.
He stepped toward her and she didn’t move. When he was there he held out his arms and she leaned into his chest.
“I am better,” she whispered.
“Then we will go outside. Walk.”
“I want to stay here.”
“Okay.”
“Can I be alone?”
“Yes.”
She raised her head and he saw that she did not mean for a little while. Or for the day. Beneath her eyes there was no end. He let her go and stepped back. His pack was beneath the window and he walked across the attic and picked it up. A fold of franc notes and his papers were in a small pocket at the front of the pack and he took out the francs and he left them on the windowsill without her noticing. He looked at the mattress where she had been lying there thinking about it all while he sat next to her and he wished he knew what had brought her to this.
“I will return soon,” he said.
“I believe it this time,” she said. “I will be here. I will be better.”
“And then we will go.”
“Yes. And then we will go.”
He had three more days but he walked directly to the Saint-Lazare station. He boarded the first available train and he sat by the window in an empty car. The whistle blew and the porter made the final call and then at the last second a rumble of rowdy voices spilled into the car. A gang of soldiers already drunk or still at it from the night before and they pushed and shoved and laughed as they swapped bottles. They spotted Nick and lifted him up and hugged him as if he were a lost brother. They shoved bottles at him and he nodded politely and took a swig of this and a swig of that. The soldiers stumbled over one another when the train lurched forward. A couple of the men going down in the aisle and then the others piling on top and yelling and cackling with intoxicated exuberance. And then they started singing. Songs about lanky and loose women and songs about whiskey and songs about rambling men and then more songs about women. They sang and swayed and drank and tried to wrestle Nick into their boisterous world. But he only sat still in the midst of them with his eyes on the passing landscape and for the first time he felt like he understood something about his mother as the same blackness that had governed her began to seep into him.
When the train came to a stop and he returned to camp he did not report to his battalion. He did not go and get a rifle and pistol. Instead he found his commanding officer and he volunteered to go into the tunnels.
12
It was the war beneath the war. While men and machines destroyed one another above the ground, hundreds of feet below the surface miles of tunnels twisted and weaved and were busy with men crawling on their hands and knees. Working in absolute silence. In candlelight or maybe in the pitch black. Trying to hear and kill before being heard and killed. The Germans digging one way and the Allies digging the other. Hundreds of human moles burrowing and clawing their way through the French underground.
The first tunnelers were British workers brought to France as a special unit. Experienced miners and tunnelers who knew how to dig efficiently. Understood how to work and understand one another without the need for words. They handled kick irons and spades with precision to remove clumps of dirt and clay as quietly as clumps of cotton. Because noise meant death.
The tunnels were high and wide enough to crawl through or walk through stooped at the waist. Twentyfour hour work by the steady changing shifts of men who lined the tunnels and passed the dirt and stone out piece by piece. Hand to hand. They worked under the constant fear of death. Carbon monoxide poisoning or tunnel collapse. Enemy explosion if one of their tunnel
s was found out. Or the crisscrossing of enemy tunnels and fighting with fists and knives in the dark and cramped spaces like blind barbarians.
This was the world that Nick entered when he returned from Paris. When he left her there because she wanted to be alone. Had to be alone. Because she said she hurt everywhere. He wanted to disappear and so he would disappear.
In the first years of the war the tunnels began as a defensive project to detonate the German land mines that mutilated and maimed the infantry. But as the war had worn on, the tunnels now turned to the offensive. As an aid to the infantry as explosives could be set that would throw great masses of earth into the air that would climb high into the sky and pause like the silhouette of a great willow tree. The massive explosions killed, distracted, opened lines for the infantry that weren’t there before. With the Western front at a standstill, the Allied tunnels turned ambitious.
The trained workers were long dead and gone and the tunnels relied on men who learned the basic skill of digging and removal and silence from those buried before them. Another group handled the explosives and detonation. A select few and the most important were the listeners. Trained and tested ears who were responsible for detecting movement of the enemy. Detecting the direction of their tunnel. The proximity. A simple miscalculation meant catastrophe.
Nick joined the workers who filed down into the tunnels and passed the mounds of clay and dirt from one to another. Toward the end of the line wheeled carts sat along steel tracks and the earth was then pushed out of the tunnel by weary men with hurting backs and large pupils. He had twice seen bolts of fire shoot through a tunnel after Germans sniffed them out and set explosives, the fire rushing toward him like a fierce orange torrent and he and the others dropping flat with faces in the ground while the gust shot past. Others were dragged out on fire or suffocated and some never came out and had in an instant found their graves.
But he kept going back in. He was one of few Americans in the tunnels as most were British and French. Some of the workers were lifelong miners recruited from the coal mines of France. Men already rejected for the infantry because they were too old or too small or in possession of some other physical abnormality. But they were welcome to the tunnels and they worked with vigilance and appreciation. All that the assortment of men and nationalities meant was the men were silent in different languages. And Nick found what he wanted in the silence of the tunnels as he never felt the urge to speak. He could pass dirt and think about what he loved and what he didn’t love and what he regretted and what he would say when he stood at Judgment and had to explain. Quiet and simple labor in the closest he thought he could be to hell. He thought and passed dirt all day. Or all night. There was no way to tell the difference.
As the tunnel-building kept its aggressive pace, collapses and casualties doubled. The men were given less relief and this caused less precision which caused noise. Noise captured by the German listeners. Explosions to follow. There could be no rest and new men were almost impossible to come by and soon the number of listeners had dwindled to twenty and then twelve and now ten.
During shift changes the men would wander over a hillside and sit in the shade of a grove. Some would sprawl out on their backs and fall into a dropdead sleep while others would squint at the light of day and stare across the bluewhite sky while chewing pieces of bread and sausage. Sallowfaced and hardworking men with gnarled hands and thin waists. Their numbers shrinking each time they came into the light and as Nick chewed an apple or stared up at the clouds and imagined the shapes of monsters he knew they were losing and could not figure it to be any other way. He did not want to die in the tunnels. But he sure as hell didn’t want to die in the tunnels because of the mistake of another so he found the commanding officer. He was sitting on his helmet. Digging dirt out from under his fingernails with a pocketknife. He raised his head and squinted at Nick who stood there in some vague resemblance of the soldier he had once been.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“I’m a good listener,” Nick answered.
He scraped at his fingernails. Drank from a canteen.
“We’re damn near out of those. You know what you’re asking for?”
“Yes.”
Without another question as to what made him a good listener or why he thought he was a good listener, he was given a geophone and a tunnel map. A box of matches and a handful of candles. A compass and a canteen and several tins of sardines. He was shown on the map where he needed to be and when he asked how long he needed to stay, he was told as long as you can. Just send a report every hour and if you detect movement and believe we should set explosives then for God’s sake say so. That’s what we’re fucking here for.
He did not disappoint. He was a good listener and to both his surprise and that of his superiors he was good at estimating distance and differences in elevation. He could sit for hours with so little movement that twice a passing worker had seen him and tapped his leg thinking he was asleep. Except for the shaking of his hand at random times he was perfectly still. He set the two geophone diaphragms on the tunnel floor and ran the tubes to his ears, a bearing between the geophone pointing in the direction of any detected sound or ground movement. It did not take much to move the bearing. The clank of shovel hitting rock. A man grunting from pain. The movement of a line of men hurrying to get where they were supposed to be. In addition to the geophone he had begun to fill an empty sardine tin with water and he set it next to the candle. Any movement in the water and he knew they were close. Maybe already on them. The skill was to detect what mattered. Where the most men congregated or the sound of German explosives being set so that you could give the signal to evacuate and then break ass getting clear.
Nick had four times ordered explosives and four times the explosion had murdered in piles. When he suspected a large group and after he quickly anticipated the distance and elevation between the two tunnels, he pointed to a spot on the tunnel wall and moments later came the fire power. Silently a hole was drilled into the earth and then a steel tube six inches in diameter was slipped into the hole. Explosives were packed into the tube and then sandbags were stacked against the back of the tube to ensure the explosion went forward and vertical.
Four successes that made him confident and only strengthened the energy he put toward the necessary concentration. He sat for six hours. Eight hours. When asked if he wanted relief he mouthed the words I will tell you when I am ready.
When attentive to the water in the tin or with the tubes in his ears, he thought of only the physical. His stomach growling or always the need to piss. Choking back a tickle in his throat or muffling a sneeze. It was the time he spent out of the tunnels, when he could see the stars at night or smell smoke or study the faces of the others mired in this war, that his thoughts chased him and he seemed to only see her. He imagined her walking around Pigalle trying to decide what to do. Saw her trying to figure out how to ask about the pills for what she needed and the rundown dance halls she moved in and out of as she talked to girl after girl who kept passing her on to someone else. You need to talk to so-and-so. She can get you some. And then he saw her finding the woman who gave her what she needed. Said it don’t hurt none. Plenty girls around here done it. Wouldn’t know it though cause they don’t miss nary a night’s work. He saw her with the pill bottle in her hand and saw her walking and walking. For days and nights as she squeezed the bottle and walked the city and wondered if he was coming back like he said. Or is he already dead and even if he is not dead and he does come back you cannot have this. You cannot feed yourself. You have no home. You have nothing. He listened to her talking to herself and he saw the placid expression of resignation once she sat down in the attic with a bottle of wine and the pills in her hand and he saw her wash them down. Down now and no decision left to be made and her thin hands holding the bottle to her mouth and drinking and drinking, trails of red down the sides of her mouth and meeting under her chin. The bottle to the floor and he saw her lyin
g on her back and the attic light shifting to violet and then in the middle of the night he saw her starting to feel it and he saw her realize there would be much more to it. He saw her as the hours moved on and she cramped and twisted and bled and vomited. And then another day and another day of the same and when he couldn’t stand it anymore he walked to the tunnel entrance and said I’m ready and he crawled under like an animal.
It had taken several weeks but they had now moved ahead and were beneath enemy lines. The Allies had planned a grand explosion on the eastern flank of the German line, a stronghold that the infantry had not been able to budge. Thousands of men lost trying. It was time for something new.
Nick’s job was now to listen as defense. To make sure that the men could keep working. That the explosives could be loaded. He focused and did not leave his post for a solid eighteen hours leading up to the attack. His eyes wild and his stomach begging for something to eat but he only drank water. Only listened and watched the water and the bearing. He raised his eyes from time to time and rubbed them. Shifted his kneeling position into a sitting position. Shifted his sitting position back to a kneeling position. The tunnelers worked and they were getting close and had been given the hour of ignition. The command from above declared that we will by God be ready when that hour comes and if we are not then we’ll all go to hell together. The infantry was prepared for blastoff and then it would pour into the eastern flank with every man who could walk or pull a trigger.
During that long stretch Nick did not detect a sound and it made him uneasy. Every hour he sent the report. No sound detected. Each time that he wrote the three words on the slip of paper he felt as though he had missed something. It cannot be this quiet. It never has been. He wiped his eyes and refocused and tried to relax. Tried to give himself completely to the silence as if he was an apparition that could pass through the earth and join the other side and see them doing whatever it was they were doing. It cannot be this quiet.
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