It was a wonder to Alexander, this apparent detachment, this ability to carry on as normal after all that they had witnessed. He could not deny his envy of such composure.
Once his pipe was lit, Iosif set it between his teeth, stretched his arms out and brought his hands together behind his head.
“It is a good day, Alyosha,” he said. “Today we have done a good thing.”
“Yes,” said Alexander somewhat uncertainly. “I suppose we have.”
“Oh, there is no supposing, Alyosha. We have. It is a fact.” Iosif sat forward in his chair again. He took the pipe from his mouth and pointed its stem at Alexander. “In fact, Alyosha, today is a doubly good day.”
“Really, Koba?” said Alexander. “How so?”
“I have come to a decision, Ayosha,” Iosif said and waited, his head tilted back slightly so that he gazed at Alexander down the length of his nose. It was something of a demanding posture, but Alexander could see in the faint wrinkles of his eyes that it was a pose and nothing more. Iosif was playing with him, so he agreed to play along.
“It is cruel to keep me in such suspense, Koba,” he said, accepting his role with an actor’s feigned distress. “I must know what it is that you have decided.”
“You will be pleased,” Iosif said.
“Not if I am kept in the dark,” said Alexander. “In the dark I will be miserable.”
“Then I shall bring you into the light,” Iosif said, his tone becoming serious once more. He placed his pipe in his mouth and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “Alyosha,” he said, “your dear sister, Yekaterina Svanidze, my darling Kato, is the only woman I will ever love. There is nothing in the world as dear to me as she. I cannot live without her. For without her, nothing matters. Without her there is nothing of worth in this world, not even human life. And I shall marry her, Alyosha. Yekaterina shall be my wife.”
Alexander, hearing these words, recalled his vision of Yekaterina waiting happily in the doorway of her gingerbread house.
“But, Koba,” he said. “You know how she feels.”
“Yes, yes,” said Iosif, pushing himself up again and waving his crooked hand. “She will only be married in the church, I know. But I tell you this, Alyosha, if that is what sweet Kato wants, then that is what she shall have. And I do not care a damn what the party has to say about it. Besides, was not Comrade Lenin himself married in the church? If he, then why not I? I said as much to the soldier in the square.”
Alexander looked confused: “What do you mean, Koba?”
“Yes,” said Iosif, “I know. You are her brother; I should have spoken to you first. But I only decided right at that moment. You must understand, Alyosha, I felt such joy, such absolute joyous certainty, that I had to tell someone. He was closest to hand. And do you know what he said to me, that foolish boy?”
“What, Koba?” said Alexander. “What was it that he said to you?”
“I’ll tell you,” replied Iosif, sitting back in his chair and crossing his arms over his chest. “He said, ‘You are a pig.’”
Iosif was quiet for a moment, and Alexander could see his eyes darken.
“I told that Tsarist that he should not have said that to me. I breathed it into his ear like his mother when she whispered him to sleep. I told him that I was the Man of Steel, Stalin, and no longer a whore’s son from Tiflis.” Iosif thumped his withered hand against the arm of the chair. “And I told that useless stripling that my word was worth more gold than could be carried in one hundred armoured coaches, that it was worth more than the lives of one thousand jumped-up carriage drivers. Yes, Alyosha, that boy would have been wise to stay quiet. Now he no longer has the choice.”
Alexander remembered how Iosif had leaned in close to the young man, how he’d cradled his head with one hand and pressed his lips to the soldier’s ear and how he’d then put the bullet in his brain. “Yes, Koba,” he said quietly.
Iosif’s face broke into a grin again; his eyes brightened and he slapped his knee.
“So, what do you say to that then, Alyosha?” he said through his silly smirk. “We are to be brothers.”
Alexander forced himself to smile: “I say it is the most wonderful news, Koba. I say that you will make Yekaterina very happy with it.” But he was no longer so certain. It was as if a sliver of ice had worked its way into his belly and there settled in him a chill of uncertainty.
CASUALTIES
• I •
WHEN EDWARD OPENED HIS EYES AGAIN it felt as if a vise were clamped to his temples. He leaned forward and adjusted the vent on the dash so that the cool air-conditioned breeze blew straight into his face. The sheen of sweat began to slowly evaporate, leaving him with a chill. He reached for the can of Coca-Cola that he’d opened and left untouched in the cup holder before drifting off to sleep. It was warm and slightly tinny but he swallowed it greedily. The syrupy sweetness was welcome, but as the carbonation reached his stomach, he began to feel nauseated. He only spoke to hide his discomfort.
“Is this an autobahn?”
Paul responded without looking at him: “Autobahns are in Germany. We’re in Belgium now.”
Edward nodded, though it hurt him to do so, then turned and gazed out the passenger window toward the city that stood some miles to the north. It sprawled hazily across the horizon, beyond the dry and dusty flatlands that shimmered in the midsummer heat, its outskirts obscured by a lowlying smog that was broken finally by stark high-rise buildings.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Brussels.”
Edward felt as if he should say something more, but his hangover had too firm a grip on him. So he said nothing and leaned his aching head back against the headrest. The previous evening was little more than a blur to him now. There had been a great deal of laughter, he remembered that. And something had been broken; he was fairly certain that he’d done the breaking. And there’d been angry words between him and Paul, though he wasn’t certain what about. It had been very late at that point and he was stretched out on the bed in the guest room. Possibly something about the woman, whose name was now well beyond his powers of recollection. Best let things alone, he decided, having learned long ago that drunken words are redressed at peril.
He had wanted a quiet night. On the flight across he politely refused the offerings from the drinks trolley and pressed his forehead against the window, watching the silvery waters so far below. He was full of nervous energy, jittery. If he were back in London he wouldn’t have thought twice about taking a drink to chase the feeling away. But not now. Now he wanted a clear mind.
The airport at Maastricht was comforting. The Dutch, Edward noticed immediately, unlike the English, were not ones for clutter. And as he passed unchallenged through customs, it was like walking into an automobile showroom: all glossy polished floors and glass walls that looked out onto the passing traffic. Clean lines and smooth surfaces, the polar opposite of grubby, confused London.
Edward half-expected his brother to be in uniform. Not his utilities but his dress blues, complete with sharp creases, epaulettes, spit-polished boots and peaked cap. But Paul was wearing narrow-legged, faded blue jeans with a mauve golf shirt tucked in snugly at the waist. On his feet he wore a pair of new white trainers. Edward felt strangely disappointed.
They hugged awkwardly and Paul reached down and took up Edward’s suitcase before he could protest, then led the way through automatic glass doors to a silver four-door Mercedes sedan in the parking lot outside.
“Whose is this?” Edward asked as Paul tossed the suitcase into the back seat of the car.
“Mine.”
“Very nice.”
“Don’t be too impressed. They’re dirt cheap over here.”
A calm descended on Edward as they drove out of Maastricht and toward the German border. Only an hour’s flight from London, and yet he had the sensation of having come home; this part of Europe held a distinctly Canadian flavour. The roads touched him first: excessively wide wi
th gravel shoulders sloping away into shallow ditches. And then there were the fields that stretched out on either side after they’d passed into Germany—the only indication of the border now a subtle blue EU signpost. The crops of sugar beet, their stalks shifting in the breeze, were not hidden behind the tall privet hedges or stone walls of the English countryside, but openly displayed—a sea of deep green to bathe the eye. And as they reached Geilenkerchen and made their way along the sleepy residential streets to Friedlichstrasse, the cul-de-sac where Paul lived, Edward felt as if he were in the suburbia of his childhood. Large single-dwelling homes with proper paved driveways and closely trimmed weedless lawns, flower beds rather than planters, and cement walks leading to front doors with steps and screens. It made the cramped flats and narrow car-crowded streets of Kennington seem unnatural. In the parked Mercedes, looking at the scene around him, he imagined the past three years of his life in London fading away into nothing.
“Where’s Sheila?” Edward asked after removing his shoes in the front hall.
“Home. Flew back a few days ago to visit her mother. Didn’t I tell you?”
Paul hadn’t told him, and Edward was sorry to hear that his sister-in-law was away. He’d hoped to have both of them there. He wanted to talk and had been counting on Sheila’s level-headed perspective.
After he’d settled himself away in the guest room, and taken a quick walk through the house—which he found slightly cold now, even in the intense July heat—he found Paul reclining in a chaise longue on the concrete patio in the backyard. He accepted the cold can of Labatt’s Blue out of nostalgia rather than thirst. The first crisp sip chased away the chill from indoors, and sitting down in a lawn chair opposite his brother, he was overcome by an intense feeling of familiarity.
“I’ve arranged a little get-together,” Paul said, raising his can to Edward. “In your honour. What do you think of that?” “Sounds great,” Edward replied, hiding his disappointment.
People started arriving before they’d finished their first drink. They were fellow airmen, Québécois mostly. They came with their wives, some brought along their children and all brought cartons of Canadian beer and steaks and hamburgers picked up that day from the CANEX on the NATO base.
Despite his misgivings, Edward found himself enjoying the evening. The smell of the barbecue, the cold cans pressed upon him and the familiar accents from home acted as a balm, soothing away his uneasiness. The men were loud and back-slappingly friendly. They were proud and happy and more than once took Edward to the street out front of the house to show off their cars: Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs and Audis and a Porsche. Automobiles that they couldn’t have dreamed of owning back home, but here, where luxury was domestic and the servicemen’s salaries were inflated and tax free, there was the possibility of owning two. And back in the house, the wives pointed out Paul’s dining-room table and chairs, obscenely solid oak, and the massive wall unit that held fine china and a carousel clock, and thrilled at the fact that they all owned the same, though some in blond; all bought on the cheap in Belgium. Back in Canada these same furnishings would cost the equivalent of the down payment on a bungalow. In the backyard, which stretched down a grassy slope to a linked fence, Edward kicked a soccer ball with the children, breaking a sweat and falling twice, and calling himself Franz Beckenbauer. It was a party and though he hadn’t thought it possible, Edward was in a party mood. It was nothing like the dreadful, tight-lipped cocktail affairs Linda dragged him to back in London, but free and easy and unbounded.
It was late when the woman arrived. She was an officer and a hush descended when she stepped through the door. It was brief, but noticeable. Others coming in had been greeted with shouts and friendly gibes that Edward didn’t understand, though he shared in the laughter that followed. But when she arrived conversations faltered, then were picked up again, their volume conspicuously raised, as if to make amends for the momentary lull.
She wore her uniform, with the sleeves of the blouse rolled tightly up her forearms. Paul went to her and shook her hand, then led her from the front hall and up the stairs. Before Edward had the chance to ask about her, he was swallowed up again in the conversation he’d been having with a lance corporal from Baie-Comeau. The next time he saw the woman, her standard-issue blouse was hidden beneath one of Paul’s sweatshirts. Edward recognized the Roots logo; he’d given it to his brother for Christmas the previous year.
Did they argue about the sweatshirt, Edward wondered; it was entirely possible considering the state he was in. Or maybe it was the lamp. That’s what got broken, he now recalled. It had sat on an end table beside the sofa, and when Edward flopped himself down on the cushions his elbow struck the shade and toppled it to the floor. He laughed when it smashed against the tiles because the lance corporal did, and he felt a bond had grown between him and the Frenchman. One of the airmen’s wives swept up the mess, and Edward had the vaguest recollection of having made a comment, something disparaging, about her buttocks, which sent the lance corporal into another shuddering bout of laughter.
He wished now that he hadn’t drunk so much. He wished he wasn’t in the stifling car speeding along an autobahn, or not an autobahn, or whatever it was they called a highway over here. He wished he knew why Paul was so angry. There were a lot of things he wished.
“It looks a bit like Toronto, don’t you think?” he said, his head still lolling against the headrest.
“What’s that?” Paul said, staring straight ahead.
“Brussels.”
“Sure. I guess so.”
Edward turned and looked back at the city as it faded in the distance. He could feel his stomach begin to turn.
“Do you miss it at all?” he asked over his shoulder, then looked at his brother. “I mean Toronto? Home?”
Paul turned his head partway toward him.
“Not a bit.”
• II •
His plans had all gone to pieces, like the ceramic table lamp his brother had smashed the night before.
The fields that encircled Geilenkerchen were to have been the starting point, the first instalment in his historical monologue that would take them out of the Westphalian countryside and along the Rhine to the bridge at Nijmegen, then down into the heart of Belgium and east until they reached the cemeteries of Ypres. But Edward, ruined from the previous night, had fallen asleep before they’d even reached the outskirts of the town.
It was here, Paul wanted to explain, in the seemingly endless flat stretches of sugar beet, that the Americans had faced some of the fiercest resistance during the final push for Berlin. The Battle of Geilenkerchen was a bloody affair. To take the town, they had first to cross these terrible fields, which would have looked much the same then as they did now: peaceful swelling carpets of green. But as the Yanks sent wave after wave of riflemen into the breeze-rippled pastures, they were cut down by Wehrmacht machine guns hidden in the tall grasses. The bullets tore low through the sugar-beet stalks. It took three days to capture the fields, whose midsts were criss-crossed with shallow trenches that concealed the German guns. By the time the Americans gained the town, it was as if the earth itself had been bludgeoned.
From Geilenkerchen he drove north toward Düsseldorf and the autobahn that would take them along the eastern bank of the Rhine and on into the Netherlands. He crossed the river first at Kleve so as to come at the city of Nijmegen from the north, via Arnhem. This was to have been a lesson in perspective. They would make the leisurely trip from sleepy Arnhem to Nijmegen inside of thirty minutes, whereas it had proved a nearly impossible trek some fifty years earlier. Of the British paratroopers who had made it to Arnhem, only one in four emerged unharmed. Those unlucky enough to reach the bridge at Nijmegen melted under the searing hail of German fire and could go no farther. Paul had wanted to shake his brother awake as they crossed back over the Rhine and tell him that this was the same bridge from the movie, but did not.
Sitting there behind the wheel, fiddling now and again with th
e volume on the car stereo in the hope it would disturb Edward’s slumber, he felt himself growing angry. He desperately wanted to build up to what he had to tell his brother— to, in a manner of speaking, soften the target. Yet even with the opportunities of Geilenkerchen, Arnhem and Nijmegen missed, Paul decided family lore might be enough to serve his purpose. This final story he would save until they had passed Brussels and headed into the Belgian province of West Flanders. Edward would recognize it as soon as Paul began the telling. In fact, Paul was counting on it. It would be best if they told it together, shared the narrative.
It had been a Remembrance Day tradition. Every eleventh of November their father would sit them down on the floor in front of his chair and tell them the story of what had happened to his father’s father in the Great War. Pappy Dan, as their father called him, had been a soldier in the trenches. And when they asked him what a trench was he explained that it was like a big ditch, deep enough that no one could see you even if you stood straight up. He told them too about the mud and the rats and the lice and how when the soldiers’ feet got wet they got trench foot, which meant that their feet went black and smelled like rotting meat and sometimes their toes fell off. He made certain that his sons understood just how terrible war could be. How sometimes the armies bombed each other for so long that grown men curled up in tight little balls and cried like small babies. And how there was a place called no man’s land where if you fell down and couldn’t get up again you were left to die. And there was a gas called mustard that if you breathed it in would make you drown even though you weren’t anywhere close to water. Paul remembered that for the longest time Edward wouldn’t put mustard on anything, not bologna sandwiches, not hot dogs, nothing, because he was afraid he might die. And after telling them all this their father would go on to say how one day, in the middle of a bright summer’s afternoon, Pappy Dan’s captain ordered them all to climb over the top of the trench and run out into no man’s land toward where the Krauts were, even though there were bombs falling out of the sky like rain and so many bullets flying about that they made the air sizzle. The army said, he told his boys, that one of those bombs that was raining down fell right on Pappy Dan, and that when the smoke finally cleared, he was gone, blown away into nothing. All that was left was one boot: the right one. It didn’t matter how often they’d heard the story, whenever it reached this point, both Paul and Edward grew so anxious that they could no longer remain settled. Their father would always pause here, waiting for his sons to calm, then he would smile. Of course, he would continue, that wasn’t what really happened. After the war one of Pappy Dan’s army buddies found Pappy Dan’s brother and told him the truth about Pappy Dan. He hadn’t died at all, hadn’t been vaporized in the stinking sticky mud of no man’s land. In fact, the only part of Pappy Dan that had even been on the battlefield that day was his right boot, carried out and left on the foul dirt beside a bomb crater by a pal who, as misfortune would have it, never made it back to the trenches himself. As for Pappy Dan, having had a bad feeling about the next day’s attack, he’d sneaked away in the night, in the company of a Flemish farm girl he’d become smitten with, and made for France, slipping past the sentries, one foot booted, the other bare, determined to live to be an old, old man, just him and his plump little peasant maiden.
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