Chickens ran about the yard and eggs laid about like tiny white land mines and Nick picked up the eggs each morning and took them to the back door where the woman cooked them and then they sat at a table in the yard and ate. The man told jokes that he laughed at himself and Nick smiled and nodded but the woman never laughed, as if she had heard it all before.
In the midmorning Nick took walks with the woman along the dirt road that twisted down a long sloping hill. The late summer mornings wet with dew and butterflies dancing across the wildflowers and the pop of artillery fire that they both tried to ignore. She talked to him on these walks and he was never certain of what she talked about but he gathered that she had at least one son and at least one grandson fighting out there somewhere. He had picked out three names but sometimes another name fell into her conversation and then she would point out across the fields or wave her hand toward the sky as she spoke and Nick agreed with her when it seemed like that’s what she wanted. But her tone was always changing and he would sense the shift into despair and anxiety one minute and then the next she would laugh a sarcastic or doubtful laugh. There was want in her hazy gray eyes and he never interrupted or tried to console. He only listened while she let it out. She said almost nothing around the house and barn except to correct or direct the old man but on the walks she let her thoughts roam.
They only ate one other time during the day and that was in the late afternoon. Nick knew they didn’t have anything to spare. But they shared with him in the late empty days. There was always bread and sometimes they ate slices of apple or thin strips of sausage and Nick pretended to be full and tried to give them food back but she would not have it. And the old man would reach and shake Nick’s thin arm and then make a fist and grit his teeth. I know I need to get stronger, he would answer. But so do you. You are giving me too much and I can’t eat when I know you’re hungry. I’d rather us all be hungry. They smiled when he spoke and then looked at one another and tried to figure out what he’d said. The old woman pushed the food back to Nick and he ate and then the night would come and they watched the flashes in the sky.
They had asked him to come and sleep inside the house but he instead stayed in the barn. He didn’t want to wake them as he came and went during the night because he could not lie still when he wasn’t sleeping. Underneath the open sky he would walk across the fields and trail alongside a low stone fence that rose and fell with the curve of the land. He would talk to himself about a favorite meal or about what he wanted to be when he grew up. He recited his ABCs and he counted the stones as he walked, dragging his fingers along to feel the separations. He imagined his own tiny house sitting solitary across the sprawling land and his own chickens and cows and he imagined sharing the cows with the old man but only the good ones that gave milk each time they were asked to. He imagined learning French so that he could share in the old man’s jokes and better understand the grief in the old woman’s monologues. In the moonlight he saw another Nick in another time and he had found in the old French couple some semblance of what it meant to be happy or to accept where you belong. He could not picture the old man and the old woman anywhere else but here and as he walked in the shadows of the moon it seemed both strange and palpable to know your place in this world.
He didn’t say anything to them once he realized he was strong enough to return. He only walked out of the barn and took his uniform from the clothesline. He changed clothes in the morning light and left the shirt and overalls hanging in place of the uniform. The old woman and her husband watched him from the open door of the kitchen and then the husband went outside and hitched the horse to the wagon. His eyes were wet as he bridled the horse and adjusted the harness but he wiped them dry and gathered himself with deep sighs. He then lit a cigarette and whistled for Nick to come on. The old woman would not come outside and Nick waved to her and waited but she would not come to him. Nick asked the old man why she wouldn’t say goodbye and he only shrugged and spoke several straightforward sentences that held none of the lighthearted sentiments that Nick had come to recognize in his voice. Nick walked over and climbed into the back of the wagon and he waved to her again. The old man clicked his teeth and slapped at the reins and the horse and wagon moved along the pathway that led to the road. The old woman watched and finally crossed herself and moved her lips in prayer.
17
The war had changed while Nick had been lost and recovering. As the tunnelers had dug themselves beneath the enemy the Allies had been giving up ground for weeks above against the strong surge of the German offensive. An uncertainty had lingered between the men as they cleaned machine guns and rifles and shoveled out trenches and ran barbed wire. But the Allies had rooted in and held strong and waited for the tide to turn. That had come with the success of the great explosion.
In August they were told to prepare to win it or lose it. They are coming with everything they have. And they did. The attack came in three waves with dozens of divisions and thousands of shells and grenades. The earth had become nothing more than a neverending series of degrading troughs, the explosions making holes where there were already holes and the soil growing powdery from the constant barrage. Machine gun fire crisscrossed and some shot or stabbed their own out of sheer reflex and the battle stood at a standstill for weeks. They fought like tired and hungry animals because they were tired and hungry. They came with everything and the Allies withstood and then the German line began to move back in the direction from where it had come. It moved east for the first time in months. And they pushed and chased with a renewed vigor that comes only with the potential for victory.
Soon they began to cross fields and march through demolished villages that they had already crossed and demolished before. It was as if working backward through a violent and unbelievable dream. Except there were no signs of life where there had once been fleeing families, horsedrawn wagons filled with children and blankets wrapping worldly possessions, dirty and hollow faces setting out for anywhere that wasn’t susceptible to the bombing and the blood and the desires of ravaged men. The crumbled stone buildings and churches lay in piles as if they had always lain in piles, man long since gone. Reason long since gone. The destruction never finished. They fought back across the ruins and the bodies and their stomachs ached and they pushed on because they were told if you push all the way and leave none of them standing then maybe one day you can lay your armor down and go home and find a pretty girl who will open her legs for you and you can have some damn babies and a lawn chair to sit your ass in and watch them grow.
He caught up with his former division in a razed village along the banks of the Somme. The unattended fields had grown high during the summer and now waved in the wind. They had been relieved two days earlier and tomorrow they would return to the front that had continued moving in their favor. The men lay sprawled along the riverbanks and Nick asked if there was anything to eat and he was told to go to the tavern.
“Which tavern?” he asked but there was only one.
He waited to see if anyone would ask him where he had been or what happened to him and when no one asked he set out for the tavern. It was in the middle of the few streets of town and he walked in to the smell of beans and bread. A record played on a gramophone, the voice and piano wobbling with the spin of the record. Men sat at tables and drank beer and played cards and on a table against the wall sat a stack of plates and a large pot of beans. Nubs of baguettes gathered in a bowl. Nick helped himself and sat down. Looked around. He may as well have been alone.
After he ate he walked outside and found the supply tent. A redheaded man with paunchy cheeks bossed around a handful of clerks and when Nick told him he needed everything the man scratched at his chin.
“Everything?” he asked.
“Yes,” Nick said.
“You sure?”
Nick held out his arms and turned around in a circle.
“You ain’t got nothing?”
“I ain’t got nothing. I was in the tunn
els.”
“That’s a lie.”
“Why is that a lie?”
“Cause I ain’t never met nobody walking who said he was in the tunnels.”
“Here I am. I’d just as soon go back down.”
“Goddamn. Where you been? The tunnels can’t keep up with the way we’re moving now. That shit’s over with.”
“Then give me a rifle.”
“You don’t need a rifle. We need machine gunners.”
“Show me the way.”
“What the hell happened to you?”
“I told you already.”
“You got the look of not telling everything,” the man said. Then he told a clerk to get Nick whatever he needed and figure out which battalion could use bodies the most.
I am a soldier again, Nick thought moments later as he walked back across the village wearing a helmet. A belt around his slender waist. And before he could find a place to sit down a whistle blew. He heard the number of his battalion called through a megaphone and it was time.
18
After it was all over he tried again.
He sat and waited. Stared out of the café and across at Église de la Sainte-Trinité, its front lawn lined with purpleleaf trees. He got up and paced along the sidewalk, tossed bread to a family of pigeons, bit his fingernails. Nodded to those who nodded to him when they noticed his uniform. The small man swept and sang and Nick tried to ask him about her but the man only held his ear toward Nick and gave him a confused look. After a couple of hours the café crowd had thinned and Nick stared into a short glass of whiskey. Then he got up and waved to the small man and decided to go right back to the attic.
He stood and stared at the building where she had first led him through the open door. It was the same place and he recognized nothing. No more dusty windows as they had been cleaned and brown paper lined the inside of the windows and blocked his view. A deadbolt held the door shut and locked. He stepped back from the building and looked it up and down. Looked back and forth along the street. This is it, he thought. This is it.
After midnight he returned to the locked door with half of a brick and he beat the deadbolt until the lock shattered from the doorframe. He yanked and pulled until it came free and then he opened the door, stepped in, shut it behind. The room was black and he dropped the brick on the floor and struck a match. The floor had been refinished and the walls patched and painted. A stack of scrap wood sat in the corner. Nick moved along the hallway and he went out of the back of the building. He stepped into the alley. He saw the door that led to the attic and he turned the handle and pushed but the door had been locked.
But he had to see for himself. His knuckles bled from beating the lock with the brick so he kicked. The sound of his boot against the door louder each time but he didn’t care and after the sixth battering the door gave in. Pitch black but he knew where the stairs were and he followed them up without striking a match as if the dark solitude were some type of punishment. When he arrived at the door to the attic he wrapped his shaking hand around the knob and turned and said please open. And the door opened.
A gracious moon gave light through the windows and Nick moved between the costumes. He crossed the attic and the mattress was still there but the costumes they had lain on top of and underneath had been returned to the racks. The lamp was knocked over and the bulb busted. The suitcase gone. He moved to the window and ran his fingers across the windowsill where she had kept her brush and cigarette butts and the scissors she used to cut frame decorations from the costumes. He knew that her hair was still there in a pile in a corner though he didn’t bother to look though he wanted badly to see it and hold it in his fingers.
In the next weeks he scoured the streets without cease. Going where she had taken him. Through the Montmartre cemetery where she’d shown him her favorite crosses and headstones. Through the vegetable market at the gates of Église Saint-Augustin. Along the river where they sat underneath Pont de l’Alma. He was a hawk on two feet, glaring and staring and tracing their faces and he found hundreds of young women but none with her gait or with her choppy hair or pushing a cart filled with frames. At a river kiosk he bought a journal, lineless white pages inside a tender leather jacket, and he made notes to himself, trying to keep track of where they had been together, at what times of the day. Any detail that might run him across her path.
She had become a ghost. Or he had. He wasn’t sure. He fought to keep her clear and vivid in his mind though with each day she became a clouded image, in the way that the dead lose their clarity and slowly fall away because we know they will not return.
At an old clothing store in Odéon he bought a suit, shirt, and shoes and kept his uniform folded neatly on a chair in the corner of his small hotel room. He then walked the same streets and expected to find her. He scribbled more notes in his journal. Spent an entire afternoon and night doing nothing but riding the Métro. Getting off and getting back on again. Changing lines. Lingering in the Métro halls and waiting for her to walk by. He stood on the steps at Place du Tertre and stared out across Paris as if a ray of light or perhaps a gracious bird might give a hint as to what part of the city held her. But she was nowhere to be found. And the seasons had changed and the green of Paris had faded. The wind knifed and evening shutters closed and there were fewer and fewer tables outside the cafés. He wandered day and night beneath the changing leaves of the trees.
The transformative landscape of the city made it seem more foreign than before and he began to wonder if she had been a figment of his imagination. If his life with her and the life created with her and the days together in this place all had existed solely in his mind. Or had she been created by his desire for something safe and true, something given to him by his subconscious to relieve his fears, to settle his nerves, to remind him that there was life beyond the butchery and that one day it would once again be available to him. To all of them. He stayed out at night, sitting on park benches under the soft glow of the lamps and standing on bridges and leaning over and looking into the slowmoving waters of the Seine. Trying to decide if she existed. Knowing that she did. But finding solace in the very sliver of a chance that maybe, only maybe, she had existed solely in the imaginary world. And he had not touched her. And she had not touched him. And they had not smiled the way they smiled and neither of them had been hurt.
It had all been his creation, he decided. So he could be the one to relieve the pain.
He did this by following young women who reminded him of her, wanting to see if he could create such an experience again. The first one he chose had the same auburn hair but it was long and bunched together loosely with pins. She wore a similar gray coat though it was a darker gray and not as short. Her scarf pushed up close to her chin and she kept her head tucked to defend against the cool. Nick was sitting among the trees in Jardin du Luxembourg in the late afternoon when he noticed her walking past the fountain and she ascended the stairs and walked right past him. He gave her twenty steps and then he followed. She walked out of the garden gates and onto Boulevard Saint-Michel. She kept a brisk pace and kept her hands in her coat pockets and only looked left or right to cross a street. Nick lingered behind when she stopped. Imagining her name. Imagining her smell. She turned right on rue des Écoles, stopping once to buy bread and another time for Le Petit Journal. Nick wore his hat low across his eyes and blew on his hands. She arrived at her destination, a library on rue Jussieu. She unwrapped her scarf as she entered the front door.
He sat down on a bench across the street and waited.
By the time she came out an hour later, he had all he needed from her. He had been in her sixth floor apartment and she had watered the plants on the window ledge of her tiny kitchen. She had translated the headlines of Le Petit Journal and two of the articles he was interested in. She had made them coffee with steamed milk and hers was too hot and he swapped cups with her because she had made his first and it was cooler. They had made love in her thin, single bed, falling off on
ce and laughing hysterically and then going to the finish on the floor. He had taken a bath in her tub and she had sat in the window and read by the last light of day and then they had gone out to a picture show and drunk a carafe of wine at the café below her apartment.
She came out of the library and he watched her walk away. A lonely but satisfied expression covered his face. I did it, he thought. And I’ll do it again.
The last days that he ever spent in the city he used in this same way. Finding one to follow and then creating their relationship. Then letting her go, momentarily reassured. And then finding another and following and beginning again. In a few days, he had lived a dozen lives with them. Had made hundreds of memories. He grew brave with the proximity with which he followed, sitting next to them when they stopped in cafés or standing only steps away at the boulangerie. Once he was chased into the dark by two companions of a woman who had seen him following. But this did not deter him as he had become complacent and satisfied with what he was doing and how he was doing it.
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