The Light from the Dark Side of the Moon

by Norman G. Gautreau

  “Yes, vaguely. It was mostly red and blue. But I don’t remember the name I gave it.”

  “Waffles.”

  “Waffles? Why would I name a balloon puppy Waffles?”

  “You don’t remember? On the way to the fair we stopped at IHOP for breakfast and you had waffles.”

  “Really? Was I that unimaginative?”

  “Nana and I loved it. Waffles! But within the hour, first one balloon burst, then another, and another, until you were left holding an empty stick. You cried your eyes out. To tell you the truth, I almost cried, too. It always got to me when children were sad. Still does.” I look out the window for a long moment, thinking of those children in the Pyrénées. I turn back to Callie. “But then I realized there was a kindness there.”

  “A kindness?”

  “Yes. It was a loss, but it was a little loss. One you could deal with. Far better than if the first loss you experienced was a pet.” A shudder passes through me at the thought … thank God Arlequin showed up! “Or, God forbid, a parent, or a sibling. Or a grandparent. That’s why it’s a kindness when we experience the loss of pets before grandparents, grandparents before parents, oneself before one’s children. It’s the natural order of things. It allows you to build reserves of strength and the wisdom to deal with the terrible pain of great loss.”

  Callie leans over and hugs me around the neck. “I love you so much, Papa!” It’s amazing how the heart can feel so full when she says those words.

  “And I love you.”

  “I suppose according to your philosophy, doctors like me build up extra reserves because we also experience the loss of patients.”

  “I suppose.”

  She shakes her head emphatically. “No! Not nearly enough for me! If I lost you, it would be like losing the balloon, the pet, and the parents all at once. Nothing will ever have prepared me for that. So, I insist you stick around! Doctor’s orders!”

  I laugh. “I guess if you put it that way, I’ll have to keep hangin’ on.”

  “Good. Now, speaking of which, I talked with your surgeon and with your hospitalist. They agree on transferring you to Spalding Rehab in a few days. The people there will help you get back on your feet.”

  “And do you agree with them?”

  “I’m an emergency doctor, so it’s not my field. But, yes. Hedrick is one of the best trauma surgeons we have. I’ve worked with him before. And Osborn is a great hospitalist.” Callie pauses, hesitates, and I sense this is one of those good news, bad news things. “Papa, there’s something else,” she says. “They don’t think you should fly any time soon. And I agree with them. I know you were planning on that D-Day ceremony, but ….”

  Damn! “Why not?”

  “See that tube between your ribs? It’s to remove excess air from the pleural space, that’s the space between your lung and your chest wall. Otherwise, you could end up with a pneumothorax.”

  “Pneumothorax?”

  “Collapsed lung.”

  “And that stops me from flying?”

  “When I was working a field hospital in Iraq, we wouldn’t let kids fly to Germany for more complete medical treatment if they had sustained sucking chest wounds. We waited until they had recovered enough. That was generally at least a week or two. The problem is air pressure at altitude.”

  “But it’s a good four or five weeks before my flight to France.”

  “And you’re over ninety, Papa. Frankly, we don’t get many nonagenarians who have been shot in the lungs. Those guys in Iraq were young and fit. With you, there’s too great a risk of a recurrence.”

  I turn my face away from her and stare out the window. I’m trying not to show how much this galls me. Goddamn luck!

  Callie grasps my hand. “That was really something you did, Papa. Saving that woman. I’m so very, very proud of you. Everybody down in the ED has been talking about it.”

  “Your mother isn’t happy. She thinks I’m too old to be doing things like that.”

  Callie frowns. “How do you even put up with Mom?”

  “Oh, she just wants to be needed. She was always that way. But I swear, she talks more and more like Nana every day.” Callie’s face tenses, and she looks away for a moment. “You look like you want to say something.”

  “No, I—”

  “Go ahead. Say it.”

  “Nana was never as much of a bitch as Mom is.”

  I chuckle. “Well, perhaps you never saw her the way I did. She had her moments. But, so do we all. I loved her anyway.”

  Callie smiles. “Yes, I know you did.”

  “And as to your mother, I love her, too. She’s a rose. A thorny one, perhaps, but ….”

  “She always wants to take charge of everything.”

  I sigh because I know it’s true. “She means well. You need to cut her some slack. She was great in Nana’s last years.”

  “I appreciate that. But I had to grow up with her always hovering over me.”

  “Maybe she was wise. Look how wonderfully you turned out.” Callie laughs. It’s a tension releasing laugh. She walks to the window and looks out for a moment, and returns to my bedside, and pauses, then asks, “Papa, who is Élodie?”

  As Élodie, herself, would have said, I’m gobsmacked! “What?”

  “The nurse in post op, Amy, is a friend of mine. I saw her a little while ago and she said when you were coming out of anesthesia you mumbled that name several times. She said she never knew my grandmother had such a beautiful name.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I just smiled and said I always called her Nana.” Callie narrows her eyes playfully at me. “So, who is Élodie?”

  “Was.”

  “Was?”

  “She died a long time ago.”

  “Oh, God! Obviously, she was important to you. But who was she?”

  “A French resistance fighter I met during the war. That’s all.”

  “That’s all?” She gives me a skeptical look.

  “And she played the violin.”

  Callie smiles. A knowing smile. “Seventy years later, you come out of surgery and call her name—her name, not Nana’s—and all she was to you was a resistance fighter who played the violin?”

  “It was before I met your grandmother.”

  “So, you were in love with her, and you kept it a secret all this time.” Callie touches my hand. She’s having fun. She loves to tease me. She sits on the bed and hugs me.

  “Your grandmother knew about her,” I offer, weakly.

  “You told Nana?”

  “We were always honest and open with each other.”

  “Were you with her when she died? Élodie I mean.”

  “No. I was in Austria. I only learned about it after the war when I went to find her. It was Jean-Baptiste who told me.”

  “Jean-Baptiste?”

  “Another one of the resistance fighters. I was with them for a time while I recovered from my wounds. My parents were told I was missing in action.”

  “I never knew that!”

  “I never talked about it much. I asked Jean-Baptiste to show me where she was buried, but he said he had no idea where her grave was.”

  “So, you weren’t even able to say goodbye to her?”

  “No.” I pause for a long while thinking of that foothill in the Pyrénées, all those years ago, then say, “That’s probably why I called her name in the recovery room and not your grandmother’s.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Your grandmother and I, our story was complete when she died. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. It had come full circle and it was good. As much as it broke my heart when she died, there was a sense of completion, I guess. Perhaps even a satisfaction for a life well-lived. I think she felt that way, too.”

  “But with Élodie there was no closure?”

  “Closure. That’s the word people like to use these days, but, no, no closure. There is never closure. You only learn to survive better. Inste
ad, I always thought of Élodie and me as a story without a true ending, with the final chapter unwritten.”

  Callie’s eyes shine and she hugs me again. “Oh, Papa!”

  “Please, Callie, don’t tell your mother any of this. I’ll never hear the end of it.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s our secret.”

  “She’d pester me about it as if it happened yesterday, or as if I was carrying on an affair while married to your grandmother.”

  “I promise not to tell, Papa. Now I’ll let you get some sleep. It’s obvious the pain meds are making you drowsy.”

  “Better living through chemistry,” I say. “It’s like floating.”

  “Can I get you anything before I leave? More water?”

  “No. Wait, yes. Please get my phone. It’s over there on the window sill. And the earphones, too.”

  “Of course.” She retrieves the phone and hands it to me.

  “Thanks. Now one last favor. I can hardly move my right arm, and I’m useless as a southpaw with these small buttons on the phone. In my music files you’ll find a piece called ‘Song of the Birds.’ Would you pull it up for me, please, and put my earphones on my ears? I want to drown out the noise from the nursing station.”

  “Was this a piece she played on her violin? Élodie?”

  I nod. You could never get anything past Callie.

  She smiles. “Drown out the noise from the nursing station, my ass! You want to dream.” Callie pauses a minute, then says, “Wait a minute! So, your Élodie played the violin?”

  “She was a musician,” I say, “and she played beautifully.”

  “Those door plates in your condo Mom was all over you for buying. What did you call them?”

  “You mean the escutcheons?” Following my move to the condo in the Charlestown Navy Yard, I’d hired a smithy to fashion custom escutcheon plates for the light switches and door hardware. Callie’s mother, the ever-practical Natalie, protested that it was a silly waste of money.

  “Yes, those. The one leading to your balcony is an embossed violin, split right down the middle so it’s only whole when the doors are closed. And some of the light switches have moon jellies and I remember you telling me you thought of yourself and the other men who parachuted into France as moon jellies because they look like parachutes. And the cross with two cross bars, I’ll bet it has some special meaning for you, too.”

  “It’s the Cross of Lorraine, a symbol of the French Resistance.”

  Callie gives a falsetto laugh. “You rascal! You created a secret code with all those symbols on your doors and light switches! You made a museum of your memory of her! A memory palace of Élodie!”

  I’m stunned. “What do you know about memory palaces?”

  “Papa, do you think I don’t read your books?”

  A thrill passes through me. “You read The Architecture of Memory?”

  There is a gleam in her eyes, a knowing grin on her lips. “You mean The Architecture of Memory in Prehistory, Antiquity and the Middle Ages by G. H. Budge with chapters on Cave Art, Cicero, Simonides of Ceos, Matteo Ricci, Giulio Camillo, and Giordano Bruno, among others, for which you won the Otto Gründler Book Prize in Medieval Studies? Is that the book you mean?” She throws her shoulders back and places her hands on her hips. She looks just like she did as a little girl when she thought she outsmarted everyone.

  “I’m flabbergasted! I didn’t think anyone in the family read my arcane books.”

  “I would have been a dull doctor if I spent my entire med school years buried in books like Netter’s Atlas of Human Anatomy and Human Histology.”

  “Indeed,” I say with a laugh.

  “I’ve noticed, Papa, most of your books deal with memory, especially of things lost. I’ve always wanted to ask you about that. Now, I think those escutcheons are part of the same thing.”

  I smile. Damn, she’s sharp! “Vainly had I sought to borrow from my books surcease of sorrow.”

  “Shakespeare again?”

  I shake my head. “Poe. The Raven.”

  “So, am I right? Those escutcheons make up a kind of memory palace?”

  “Don’t tell the others.”

  Callie throws her arms around my neck. A tear slides down her cheek. I feel the wetness on my own skin. “I love you so much, Papa!” She hugs me tighter. “Though I ache for your loss of Élodie. Even if it’s seventy years on.”

  I don’t want to let her go, even though her embrace is hurting my right arm like crazy. “I love you, too, Callie. You’ve made an old man feel at least some of his writing has a purpose. Now please give me my music and let me get some sleep.”

  “Song of the Birds?” she asks, searching my files.

  “That’s it.”

  She pulls up the music and places the earphones over my ears and presses play and kisses me on the forehead. “Pleasant dreams, Papa,” she whispers.

  I watch her leave then lean back into the pillow and allow myself another little squirt of morphine as I sink into the music.

  8 “Attention!”

  9 “Who are you?” This, and all future translations I either got from Élodie after the fact or reconstructed them after I studied German and French in the post-war years.

  10 “I am a nurse and my colleagues are combat medics.”

  11 “Please finish this poem: ‘Above all the mountain tops it is calm, in all the treetops you can hardly feel a breath.’”

  12 “The birds in the forest are silent. Wait, only, soon you, too will be at peace.”

  13 “Good. You can pass.”

  Chapter 4

  Nine Day’s Fall from Heaven

  I remember how, not long before Anna died, she reached out from her hospital bed, held my hand, and said, “We are bound together, you know. Always.” It was something she’d said often, but it was only after she died, and I first experienced life without her, that I finally came to fully appreciate what she’d meant. I now see how so much of our lives was intertwined—our passions, physical and spiritual, our love of life, our wonder at rearing children together, our shared delight in grandchildren and the bewitching but sobering appearance of great-grandchildren, the pleasures we shared of music, books, movies, Shakespeare, poetry, our delight in food and wine at fine restaurants, and our discreet comments about couples at adjoining tables. And, also, the sadness we sometimes endured together including the deaths of our parents and other relatives; the deaths of children anywhere in the world through war, famine, natural disaster or unnatural savagery; the death of a friend; the death of a pet; public tragedies like the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King and John Lennon. Anna and I would talk about these things, share our thoughts, share our grief. It was during one of these conversations (this one about the assassination of Bobby Kennedy) that I conceived the idea of a giant, wrathful mirror, suspended somewhere out beyond the moon’s orbit, that reflects the unnatural light of the back side of the moon on us all—the hellish light the Janus-faced moon keeps turned away from us.

  And now that Anna is gone, I miss her every time I see a news event on TV and can’t ask her what she thinks, or every time I go to a movie and can’t ask if she enjoyed it, too, or each time I go to a restaurant and I can’t give her a bite of my prime rib in exchange for a taste of her salmon, or a sip of my martini in exchange for a sip of her daiquiri. Come to think of it, I hardly ever do those things anymore. Movies and restaurants are just no fun without her.

  I mention all this because these things were promises—potentials—of the love Élodie and I shared, that never came to be, that were still-born. Those thousands and thousands of daily affinities, this accumulation of both grand and trivial things, are exactly what made my life with Anna complete, and what leave me wanting more of Élodie. Christ, we never even had a chance to quarrel and make up! I suppose in all ages war is like that. It so swamps your spirit with the need to stay alive, you have little time for anything else except war’s antithesis, the overwhelming need for love.
This is why I invent conversations with Élodie about trivial things as if she were still alive. What would you like for breakfast, Élodie? Where would you like to dine after your concert? Should we have red or white wine? What are you going to wear to the theater? What should I wear? I’m not being unfaithful to Anna, you understand. After all, Élodie and I loved long before I met Anna, and anyway, Anna and I are a finished book, complete and whole. Rather, it is a deep sense of the opposite of what I’d had with Anna—that stinging incompleteness—that drives me to try to reconstruct the memory of Élodie. To resurrect her.

  After running into the German patrol and passing the Goethe test, we continue south. Avoiding main roads, we arrive at a small commune called Saint-Christophe where we spend the night in a barn, owned by a friend of the Resistance, who feeds us and leaves us with several bottles of wine.14

  The following day, we meander southeastward on little-used roads, past irregularly shaped farm fields, and soon arrive at a lonely crossroads east of a small village called Javerdat. We pull the ambulance and motorcycle into a copse of chestnut trees at the edge of a meadow to hide them from the road and stop for a rest. Immediately, we notice a faint smell of smoke coming from the southeast—acrid, sulfurous. It stings my nostrils. “It smells like someone is cooking bad meat,” I say.

  “There’s no such thing as good meat these days,” Élodie says. “Only in Paris and only at the Hotel Meurice, I suppose.”

  “The Hotel Meurice?”

  “Where the Germans have their headquarters,” she replies, spitting on the ground.

  While her colleagues share one of the remaining German cigarettes they had taken from their victims in Normandy, Élodie unwraps the bandages from my head and helps me off the stretcher. She guides me unsteadily to a boulder. The wind veers to the northeast and stirs the vegetation in a meadow surrounding the copse. I sit and stretch my back and neck and I inhale the perfumed air coming from the sun-saturated field of purple, fragrant orchids and blue periwinkle. The scent momentarily masks the odor from my own sweaty body, my blood-soaked bandages, and the mysterious, acrid smell of smoke from the southeast. There is a buzz of insects. Butterflies flit over the open meadow. The twittered songs of warblers fill the air.15