The Invisible Mile

by David Coventry

  ‘How long?’ he asks.

  ‘Enough.’

  ‘How many hours?’

  ‘17.’

  ‘17,’ he says then swears. There are tears making their way through the dust. I am crying.

  ‘They will mean nothing tomorrow,’ I say.

  ‘Last place is –’

  ‘It’s an utterly necessary place,’ I say.

  ‘–’

  ‘It has to be taken,’ I say.

  He smiles, he nods, he snorts. He’s crying and so thin now.

  And time is temporary. I made this claim earlier. I claim it again because we remember seconds so poorly, recall hours so mundanely, like the fall of drizzle or misted rain: by morning it has gone. Only the pain remains. Somehow, it’s the proof of passing, the measure by which we count. We leave that town two days on with little but the cracks in our bones and the last great hill reduced to memory and forgotten prayers, the mumbles of broken men. We are a flood and we fill the valleys.

  22

  Last night in Évian I felt my voice change as I told Celia what it was she wanted to know.

  ‘It wasn’t that I was infected,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t infected by any disease they knew about. They thought I had a cold, or influenza – but I got sick with something else. It wasn’t ever named. I had been in Cairo six weeks at that stage. Doctors kept taking my temperature and being dumbfounded. If I tried to get up, I fell down, there was nothing in my legs. A nurse mopped my brow, but I wasn’t hot. My neck was swollen where the nodes had swelled up so it was impossible to swallow. Under my arms, all over my body. The doctor just started to ignore me in the face of worse conditions, real fevers. Word got out around the mess that I wasn’t sick, that no one could figure out what was wrong with me. Word was I was faking it.’

  ‘You’re going to tell me how you broke your . . .’ she said and pointed at my leg.

  ‘They got me out of bed and told me they were taking me to the pub. Just the mess bar, but they had me up and got me to the stairs and one of them, he slapped me on the back –’

  ‘They thought you were a coward –’

  ‘– and I tried to compensate and stumble down the stairs away from their hands. And I fell and –’

  ‘– you fell and you broke –’

  ‘– and I broke my leg.’ I looked at her watching my lips, and watched her mouth my words back to me. She didn’t flinch, didn’t query. She appeared to be following me faithfully as if along a track dividing and splintering and coming back together. All the while my voice was telling her which way to tread; all the while I was expecting her to stop and protest she couldn’t step any further; all the while I was quietly surprised at how easy it was, this lying game.

  ‘So, what was wrong?’ she asked. ‘In damned Cairo. So sick, unnameably sick? You slept with a prostitute. Fans going, flap, flap, flap. You got sick, little man got sick.’

  ‘Not so much,’ I said.

  ‘You all slept with them, even those who didn’t wish to, they slept with them.’

  ‘Up to our eyelids. We all did.’

  ‘Galoshes to keep diseases at bay,’ she said.

  I nodded and laughed, slowly and right through my body. She put her hand on my chest.

  ‘Young men. There ought to be a law. Men standing around throwing whatever at belly-dancers, watching the coins glint off the light as they flick ’em from their thumbs.’

  We sat silently, waiting on the sun, on something strong to begin the conversation once more. The grass shimmered and I realised the wind had changed direction, that it was now coming down off the mountain instead of the lake. She put her hand on my arm. It was warm, how a relative’s should be, but never expected.

  ‘And when you were out of plaster,’ she said. ‘Once they cut it open. And you were told to stand up and your legs were all weak and you smelt so bad and the nurses, and you stood and it felt like it meant something. That’s when –’

  ‘I knew they were all gone. At Gallipoli. Not all, but – they were all gone. So, what?’

  ‘What were you going to do?’

  ‘What was I gunna do?’

  ‘Sail after them on some chartered ship?’ she suggested. ‘Charter a boat and run after them all.’

  ‘Jump overboard at the sight of land and swim to the shore, waving.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I was awaiting court martial.’

  ‘But it never came?’

  ‘No. I fell in with the British,’ I said. ‘Luck and the British.’ She didn’t interrupt so I went on. She heard how Thomas met five British servicemen ranking from lieutenant to major as they visited the officers’ mess at Zeitoun. She heard it through me and there seemed no question, no query asking if I was lying. I went on and onward. They’d come in to cool themselves, they told my brother, some of them stifling their sweating bodies by hiding them inside layers of cotton. Each time he told me about these officers there were more of them, but I kept the number at five. For hours they talked and drank beer. He met them again one weekday afternoon in the souk at Khan el-Khalili. Thomas was dehydrated and sitting alone in a corner, dazed from walking in heat without water. They picked him up and revived him with tea under shade of a vendor’s roof. Once standing they had him join them in their walk in the city as they looked for inscriptions in stone. ‘I would walk about Cairo with a core of the officers,’ I told her. ‘Men who each seemed to know where they were going. They had notebooks and hand-drawn maps and spoke short sentences. There were five of them, sometimes six or seven. They seemed to have agendas. I can’t name them, but they were always looking for a building of one name or another. Small, obscure mosques, of whose past they knew a great deal as if they were born with a map of antiquity in their heads, a homing instinct for extraordinary places and people. On one occasion I found myself in the small courtyard of a house drinking apple tea and smoking cigarette after cigarette as two of the English officers spoke with an old man who must have been in his eighties, or older. He was gentle and was looked after by his daughters – in fact, no: his granddaughters or great granddaughters. They were young and beautiful, or such is my memory. Pretty brown eyes batting long lashes at where we sat under a sycamore whose roots were cracking the tiles so the floor seemed restless.’

  ‘Who was the man?’

  ‘I didn’t have any idea, I didn’t know until much later when I was in France. But he talked so quietly I could barely tell what he was saying, whether he was imparting his knowledge in English or Arabic. I would nod, as if falling into a light sleep. I imagined I was dreaming. I remember it clearly: he was talking in this voice and the wind was shuffling the leaves of the sycamore tree and it all seemed so improbable. I drifted and felt a lightness; like love, but it was just air. It was the next day that one of the officers took me flying for the first time. I was a lieutenant and I was asked –’

  ‘The Air Force?’

  ‘The Royal Flying Corps.’ I gazed past the hedge to the hills from where we sat on the balcony of the hotel room. The sun was on the horizon, or at least evidence of the sun: a purple blue lifting from the foothills. Thomas travelled to England after Cairo. He joined the RFC, indeed became one of their pilots. That was how he came to be shot down. How he ended up in the dunes on the wrong side of the mud. How he lived with the decay of the dead for seven days before he was frightened from his hole and found his way home. ‘That is the story of how I went to France,’ I said to her. ‘That’s my story.’

  ‘And then the Fokker curse,’ she said. ‘That’s what they called it, was it not?’

  ‘Fokker plague.’

  ‘Fokker –’

  ‘Plague.’

  ‘Fokker curse,’ she said.

  ‘God.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Fokker scourge,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’

  I nodded and shook my head. ‘Then I went down. An exhaustion, so deep, like a dream out of control. That was the weight of it. Time was another
thing, a broken thing. I am yet to rectify it.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Days in the sand. Two days in an old mine.’ I say the word two because I have to lie. I should expect no sympathy for my brother’s misfortune, that is not the aim of this. ‘When the French came I pulled two bodies over me. I didn’t know if they knew English and I was beyond reason to reason with myself. On the second day it rained and I collected water on my tongue and in a German helmet. It tasted of metal.’

  ‘Blood?’

  ‘Metal.’

  She nodded.

  ‘And the officer was killed. The one who took me to meet that old man. It was only a few days before I went down that he told me who the man was. The one in the courtyard with the sycamore tree and the beautiful daughters. He was on an archaeological dig. That’s why they went searching for him. That’s why they sat with him and spoke. The archaeological dig, the one at Hisarlık. That old man. He was there in 1894 with Wilhelm Dörpfeld. Was that his name?’

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘I’m talking about Troy.’

  ‘I know what you’re talking about,’ she said.

  ‘I met a man who’d been there. Who’d stumbled upon the walls. That’s who they were looking for,’ I told her. ‘That’s who we met in Cairo. He’d walked and mapped and dug at the site. I only found this out a few days before I went down. A real place. I find it extraordinary that I met the man, that he was there and I was in his courtyard with his granddaughters.’

  ‘Do you ever think you ended up on the other side of the Dardanelles? That you ended up in some other time and this isn’t the place you left?’ she said and looked out at Lake Geneva, in much the same way as Percy the day before when he spoke about his lanterns and tried to recall where he was.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said.

  ‘And these men you were with, they went looking for that old man. You followed them and you walked the old city looking for him in the streets?’

  ‘I didn’t know where we were going. It was some task, it seemed. Something that went on alongside the war. Two of these men were from Cambridge; I assume they returned there after the war. This was an exercise, not to replace the war, or forget about it, they wanted to legitimise it. That was the thing, they wanted to have the conversations, long conversations that were somehow a reasoning of their time spent away from their offices and desks and the libraries. I imagine dark libraries.’

  ‘Dark libraries,’ she repeated. I think she laughed. ‘What about now? Is this racing, is this about legitimising? Coming back here?’

  ‘I came back here to remember. That’s why I’m here. For them it was about the conversations.’

  ‘That’s what it’s always about.’

  ‘I guess. I guess we used to talk about things,’ I said, ‘to distract us from the real thing which was about killing people. Everything we did was about killing people. All the photos I took from my cockpit were funnelled into a system that was designed for the killing of people. We’d clean the latrines, all with the purpose of killing someone. And it’s not like you finish your day and you say to your pal, “So, who did you kill today?” And it’s not like they say back, “Leonard Braun. Captain Leopold Braun.”’

  ‘Leonard.’

  ‘You never ask if you killed someone. Which seems somehow ridiculous. You hear about girlfriends and wives and sisters and mothers.’

  ‘What about your sister?’ she asked. ‘Did you ever describe your sister to your British officers?’

  I shook my head. ‘I never let on that I had a sister. Never. She’s the only one, Celia.’

  ‘She’s the only what?’

  ‘The only one.’

  She asks again, her voice alone and distant, cheerless and lingering. She’s knows I can’t say. As Percy had said, it’s so easy when I think of her. But it is so hard to speak, so hard to see what you need to see when all about you are the words of others.

  It seemed extraordinary, as I spoke out the contents of his story, that they were real events, a set of events that were somehow true and somehow related to my time here. I’d heard this narrative at Lake Wanaka at the back end of 1921 a few weeks before the race out of Timaru. From there we drove to Queenstown and deeper into the south. We doubled back to Mount Cook, and from there, Timaru. The entire time he spoke on and on. I rode up the east coast and found myself in that strange trance which may not ever have been broken, not even by the fist that caught my chin and sent blood and tooth into the dirt. And despite that we went on and carried it all with us, every word spoken, every attempt to forget. Six years later I left for Sydney, then Melbourne, then Perth, then Colombo, then Ismaïlia, then Toulon, then here. This hotel beyond the Alps, I can’t name the region because I seem to have forgotten to remember. The town is Pontarlier and I have no desire to explore and here I tell it all again. Celia is beside me. I can’t tell if she is sleeping or in one of those dream states one reaches for but only finds on the end of that pipe. I haven’t the energy, and I fight any thought. I notice in the quietness something deep and unrelenting creeping at me. Melancholy doesn’t so much have claws, rather it has tides.

  We sleep – or at least I believe I sleep – for I speak to him across the room: Louvière and his face hidden by the fall of shadow.

  Such lies are dreams, I’m terrified I report them at all. I turn him off and wake. I lie with a sheet covering my nakedness though I feel no cool air. Celia breathes as if instructed, as if she has trained for days and months to learn the correct pattern just for this moment. Her rump glows in the slight moonlight in from the window. I kiss her hip and expect a change in position but her belly undulates in the same precise manner. I kiss the hollow of her waist and hope she will turn and face me. But the breathing continues and I lie back in the throes of calculation, trying to surmise how curves and angles happen to be perfect.

  ‘He’s writing to me,’ she says. She stays in the same position, supine. ‘He wrote from Luchon.’

  ‘Louvière?’

  ‘The post is quicker than you lazy men.’

  I watch her in the dark, wondering where her mouth is precisely.

  ‘He’s in a state. Great sadness. He’s greedy about being sad. He desires to rejoin the race – he wrote this – any way he can, he wants to rejoin. He asks that his leg be amputated and that he be allowed back in. He says he knew comrades in the war who’d lost a leg but who manage to ride, a sight difficult to conjure without having seen in action. People rush to watch them pass.’

  ‘Where?’ I ask. ‘I want to see this. Where do I have to go –’

  ‘Belgium. He has friends there. We both do. You know, I lied,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t in Algiers. I was in Belgium. I lie about that fact. I don’t know why I said what I said. I was stranded in Belgium at the start.’

  ‘Stranded in Belgium, what? When they came over the border?’

  ‘I was stranded in Belgium, yes.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I was teaching in a small town; a few girls were teaching all over Belgium. Something that had been arranged for us by our college. Time abroad to widen horizons. Such was our life then, such was the way things seemed driven by something principled. It was summer, of course, and most of the girls had returned home at the end of term. I hadn’t, bless me. I stayed on. I’m a girl lacking foresight.’

  ‘Then Sarajevo?’

  She says nothing for a few moments and I assume she is nodding or thinking about nodding. ‘And we thought: Russia. After reading all the news, hearing word of mouth, we thought Russia. They’ll fight it out for a few weeks and then things would calm down. No one said to us: “Get out. This is a situation. Get out.” No one said to us, no one explained that they would come through Belgium. Serbia. Russia. Hungary, Germany and Austria. France and Britain, absolutely, but the way I was told, the way it was supposed to happen – it would work out differently. But they bullied their way in quick smart.’

  ‘I try to commit it to memory, what happened. The origins,
dates, the –’

  ‘But you can’t, can you? You can’t repeat it because so much happened in days and hours. So much happened beforehand. So much happened in countries and cities you had never heard of but it happened and you didn’t know, then you knew all of a sudden.’

  ‘People saying the names of Dukes, they said Belgrade and Sarajevo and the rest. My brother was so excited. His whole team, his whole football team.’

  ‘And then they came. We were in the north living in a border town near Liège. They walked into Luxembourg. Then there was Visé. We were nearby and quickly we made our way out of the village and south. That was the 4th of August. We didn’t think we needed to go far. A woman I was travelling with had family at Gembloux, so we headed there with hundreds of others. August. The whole of August there. And then September came and we got out. It took a long time to get across but we did and we got to England from Dunkerque. Small boat.’

  ‘How did you get across? Belgium, I mean across Belgium.’

  ‘Slowly. Farmhouses and hedges as cover in the night. There were four of us trying to get to England.’

  ‘Why England?’

  ‘We thought Paris would fall. We thought France would go, and then. And the. And the things. What we saw, we had to get away. Sometimes you need to cross whole borders and seas.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘What things? They were butchering people: women, children. Who knows what they were doing to the men. But I heard what they were doing to the women. And I saw. So that was why England.’

  ‘What did you see?’

  She said nothing. She rustled the bedclothes as she moved position.

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Certain moments stay. Remain inside. I was at Gembloux,’ she says quickly. ‘In marketplace. A woman. Any woman, I don’t know who she was. Any woman, I wasn’t from that town.’ She sits up and leans forward so I can see her. She takes my hand and her voice is barely audible and I think of the first time we met, how any harshness in her voice seemed somehow eradicated, as if any volume it once had had been suppressed or disconnected. Things, events, something, maybe this, maybe another day, had done something. I touch her face and expect something other than the warm skin. ‘They strung up her body in the market. Her breasts. Her hair. Cut. They cut her breasts off. Mutilated. Her organs, we could see her insides. And that, we saw that and didn’t pause to think about getting out. Babies. We went across the front, that was the easiest part.’