The Verdun Affair

by Nick Dybek

  CHAPTER THREE

  * * *

  Mrs. Lee Hagen greeted me in the lobby of the Hotel de Guise wearing another blue dress. The de Guise had been spared most of the shelling and was the nicest of the three hotels that had reopened. I’d hauled the bags of generals and politicians up the looping staircase, wishing each time that the room I moved toward was my own. I always looked forward to listening in on the conversations in the lobby, each person far from home, starting from scratch. Like so many French words, I thought of it by its English homonym. Disguise.

  Her hair was held back in two mother-of-pearl combs, and she wore a necklace of silver flowers. She was reading an English newspaper.

  “I didn’t know you could get those,” I said.

  “You can’t. I brought an entire stack with me from Boston.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “I’m sorry. I’m only joking. I’m not that hysterical. It’s yesterday’s paper, from Metz. In Metz you can get the paper. I ordered coffee. I hope you don’t mind. Will you sit down and tell me?”

  I sat. “What should I tell you, Mrs. Hagen?”

  “It’s all right to use my first name, isn’t it?”

  “If you permit me.”

  “I do permit you. I was hoping you’d tell me what you’re doing here.”

  “There are a hundred stranger things.”

  “Yes, you said that yesterday too.”

  She folded the newspaper and laid it flat on the table. The second half of a headline read, “DOUBTS WILSON.” A man stepped in from the sunlight and said a few words to the concierge, his head bowed. He left as if rushing from a bad dream.

  “There isn’t much to explain. When I left the AFS, Father Gaillard asked me to help him. I couldn’t refuse.”

  “To help him retrieve bones?”

  “Among other things, yes. But when you say it like that it sounds—”

  “How do you say it?”

  “I never do.”

  “I really meant, how did you come here originally.”

  A waiter in a black jacket pushed the kitchen doors open with a brushed steel tray, then deposited saucers and cups on the tables, delicate spoons and dishes of brown sugar cubes. He bent, with the same formality, over our table. I have to admit that I felt a certain pride, sitting with a woman for whom such pleasures were routine, a woman who could speak to anyone she wanted but wanted to know about me.

  “My father was American but he was born in France. He was a doctor with the AFS. He brought me here,” I said.

  “Irresponsible.”

  “No one ever accused him of being responsible.”

  “A strange thing to say about a doctor.”

  “He was an adventurer first.”

  “That’s a kind light.”

  “Perhaps. He claimed to know Shackleton and Percy Fawcett.”

  This made her laugh. “He was interesting.”

  “He probably was. When my mother died, the Rileys—the neighbors who took me in—cabled him purely as a formality. Anyway, I hardly saw him, even once I got to France. I was boarding with a family around Bras. But when he died, there was no more money to pay them, and I moved into the Episcopal palace with Father Gaillard, and later into the citadel.”

  “Wouldn’t it have been sensible to return to the States?”

  “Yes. But, as you probably know, it wasn’t a very sensible time.”

  “No grandparents wondering where you’d gone?”

  “I’ve been told my father’s parents are still alive in California, but I don’t know them. My mother was another adventure.”

  She blushed, stirring her empty cup with a slender spoon. But anything I’d once felt about my parents’ arrangement had washed off me years before. And it was a pleasant feeling to sit at that table and find that things that had once made me feel ashamed no longer made any impression.

  “Father Perrin was afraid you were a journalist,” I said. “I begin to wonder.”

  She laughed again. “I’m just used to asking questions. There’s no reason you have to answer them. At least not truthfully.”

  “I don’t mind. And don’t worry. It’s not entirely true.”

  The truth was that before my father died, I met Father Gaillard at a Casualty Clearing Station in a rye field outside of Souilly. My father had insisted I come, but then he worked for twelve hours straight, and even when he stopped to eat, I could see my questions glancing off his glazed eyes.

  Father Gaillard had come on a pastoral visit. He sat down beside me, a giant man with tiny glasses. Much to my surprise, he knew my name. “Tom,” he said, “if you wanted, you could be a great help to me. Would you mind very much?”

  No, I didn’t mind. I’d sat like a statue for hours watching the surgeons, bearers, drivers, nurses, and orderlies rush and stagger through the tents. I’d watched them dressing wounds; shaving for surgery; administering morphine, saline solution, and brandy. I wanted nothing more than to be of some use myself.

  I followed Father Gaillard into a tent set off from the rest of the CCS by a path worn in the unthreshed rye. There was little light, little movement, and almost no sound from the rows of cots inside. A single nurse sat on a pallet of sandbags and wrote in an enormous notebook. The tent flaps were open at both ends, but the space smelled powerfully of lavender and festering wounds.

  Father Gaillard relieved the nurse and opened the notebook to a page near the back.

  “Mark a cross next to each name at my nod, would you, Tom?”

  The task was mercifully easy. I followed him from bed to bed as he inquired after the needs of the few soldiers who were conscious, said prayers for those who weren’t, and, just before passing on to the next bed, gently touched the tip of each soldier’s nose with his palm. If he nodded, I drew a careful cross in the margin next to the name.

  Only later did I understand that we had arrived at the moribund ward, that these men were not expected to survive and could not be afforded the doctors’ precious time. Only later did I understand that it was the chaplain’s responsibility to write to these men’s families in order to prepare them, but that the inevitable dying could go on for weeks, sometimes months. If the nose was cold, if the cross was marked, it was time to begin the letter.

  Even to my fifteen-year-old mind such a method did not seem especially scientific or sound, yet, when I asked my father, he said Father Gaillard was seldom wrong. In fact, three months later, I watched Father Gaillard touch my father’s nose in just that way. Soon after, he began to administer extreme unction, and, soon after that, he pulled the blanket over my father’s face. Later that afternoon, Father Gaillard drove me back to Verdun himself, offering anecdotes about the parishes we passed on the way. More than once I thought he might cry.

  “How do you feel, Tom?” he asked. Mostly, I felt angry that Father Gaillard seemed more affected by my father’s death than I was.

  “Tom,” he said. His English was good, but with his accent my name sounded like “Tome.” He kept repeating it, “Tome, Tome, Tome. I’ve gotten to know your father well. You might not be aware, but he was a decent man in many ways. And he would want me to help you. You think that you don’t have a choice about what happens now, but you do. Have you thought about what you want?”

  I’d already thought plenty about what I didn’t want: the steamer ride home, the train ride across the northeast, coasting past Chicago’s squealing stockyards. I’d thought of the kind but thinly stretched Rileys, waiting at Union Station. Then the familiar hall, smelling of cabbage; the familiar stairs and the apartment where I’d lived all my life with my mother, no doubt filled with someone else now, peering out, wondering who the new boy was.

  I could also imagine the train as it picked up speed, heading west. Yellow fields and mountains and, somewhere beyond that, California, where my grandparents supposedly lived. Then: nothing. I couldn’t picture them at all; even worse, I knew they couldn’t picture me.

  “What would it mean to stay here
?” I asked.

  It meant the orphanage in the Episcopal palace and shifts in the kitchen. After the battle began, it meant ten months traversing the passageways of the citadel, baking bread, and working in the canteen. But it also meant a promise from Father Gaillard that he would get me into the AFS once I turned eighteen, and, in those days, the AFS was reserved for men of a better class than the one from which I’d come. And it meant the illusion of choice for the first time in my life, the feeling that my choice was brave and possibly even noble.

  That day at the CCS, after we had finished in the moribund tent, I’d listened as Father Gaillard assembled the surgeons, orderlies, and nurses for prayer. God has given us all a purpose here, he’d said. Our lives are difficult, certainly, but they are no longer futile. Those words had meant a great deal to me. Though at the time, my French was still miserable, and it’s possible I misunderstood what he was saying completely.

  * * *

  Several times on the way to Bar-le-Duc, I’d considered asking the driver to turn around, to take me back. I’d considered pleading my obligations for the day, of which there were indeed many: the letters to be typed and signed with Father Perrin’s stamp, the stretch along the river near Forges to be walked for the sixth or seventh time.

  It would be romantic to say that I didn’t protest because such responsibilities seemed distant in comparison to the woman sitting beside me in the car. Truthfully, I allowed myself to continue because Sarah herself hardly seemed real, because it seemed that if I were to touch her, my hand would pass right through.

  Her car dropped us on the outskirts of Bar-le-Duc, where the Voie Sacrée met Rue St. Michel. We fell into step with a crowd arriving in their second-best clothes, crossing the field toward twin tents the grimy yellow of kitchen aprons. The grass was damp, the hem of Sarah’s dress shaggy with it by the time we reached the gate and I paid the twenty-centime admission to a man in a shapeless hat. Beside him two other men who could have been his brothers—the same raisin-like eyes—smoked hand-rolled cigarettes. The swarthier of the two held the flap up just high enough for us to duck inside.

  The tent smelled of lamp smoke. We took seats on a long bench in the front row and watched the crowd file in, eating nuts from greasy paper bags. On the far wall a curtain with the faint outlines of waves or mountains hung on a wire between two knotty posts.

  “The show might not be very good,” I said to Sarah, as if it had been my idea to come, as if I should impress her, as if impressing her were possible. The crowd smelled of livestock and loam. Their backs were stooped, their faces dirty. I realized just how out of place we—or at least Sarah, in her blue crepe dress with its pleated skirt—must have appeared. And yet some of the tension had already left her face.

  The oil lamps came up, and the man who had taken our tickets, now wearing a fur vest, stepped out from behind the curtain. Everything about him suggested exhaustion. He leaned on a cane and began to speak.

  “What did he say, what did he say?” the man to my right asked. His neck was thick and glossy with sweat. He’d somehow made it to the tent without losing the shine on his shoes. I shrugged and we shared a smile.

  The trainer’s Pyrenean accent was so thick, his dialect so heavy, that I could barely understand a word. As he spoke, his gaze swept the tent, appraising the audience. Then he waved his cane as if to dismiss us, and withdrew behind the curtain. Just as he did, two bears emerged from the wings.

  They were led by chains attached to iron rings looped through the backs of their mouths. They were an identical deep brown, except one bear had a smudge of white above his right eye, like an old man’s wild brow. They plodded, snouts to the ground, to the front of the stage, then reared up and roared. Sarah gasped, and—pressed next to me by the crowd as she was—I could feel her body quake. She laughed at herself, and I could feel that too.

  One of the bears fell back to his paws, but the other—the bear with the white eye—remained with two black pads exposed, admonishing the audience until he was tugged down by the chain.

  The bears circled like boxers. They rose to their hind feet again and touched noses. They took three steps back, then toddled forward like jousters, each with a paw outstretched, narrowly missing the other. They roared in frustration, but Sarah and the rest of the audience were prepared this time, and applauded to show they were not afraid.

  The man with the thick neck didn’t applaud. His hands were busy holding a blue handkerchief to his brow, trying to shield his eyes so that he could look at Sarah instead of the performance.

  The trainer stuck two chest-high posts into the stage. Slanting his eyes up toward the audience, he removed the chains. Freed, the bears reared again and placed their paws on the posts to steady themselves. From behind the curtain came a thin music, played on a brass instrument, a trumpet or cornet. The bears bowed.

  They began to dance.

  First two steps to the right, then two steps to the left, a semi-pirouette around the posts, another two shuffling steps back. The music was major-keyed, a galloping staccato. Someone behind us whistled, and I stole a glance at Sarah, who was smiling with her hands clasped. Though the man’s leering was repugnant, I couldn’t blame him for wanting to look at her face, alight with thrill.

  The bears spun like ballerinas, paws flared around their heads. I could picture the white curled wigs, the sunlit parlors. A few dainty turns, another press of paws, and the song ended. More applause. The pure brown bear bowed to the audience, but the white-eyed bear sat down and began to scratch his ear, until the trainer came from around the curtain and, with a hooked pole, yanked the ring in his mouth.

  “He’s the bad bear,” Sarah whispered to me.

  The trainer appeared again with his cap held out. Sarah whistled.

  “Is it like you thought?” I asked.

  “It’s horrifying,” she said. “It’s fantastic. Which one do you prefer? White-eye or Pure-brown?”

  Before I could answer, the bears reemerged from behind the curtain wearing togas, laurels of waxy leaves shadowing their wet eyes. Pure-brown reared up on two legs, placed one paw on the post, and raised the other. Performing again: a string of growls that seemed in their cadence almost like human speech. In fact, he seemed to be giving a speech, perhaps in the Roman forum, perhaps about Gallic barbarians on the northern frontier.

  The audience chuckled as the slobber collected in the corners of his mouth. White-eye crouched at his side, but, as Pure-brown grunted and purred, White-eye stood on four legs, stalked a few steps, and began to urinate, the laurel coming loose and slipping down his brow, the toga flapping around him. The audience erupted.

  Pure-brown dropped to all fours, blasting a black-hearted roar, showing his yellow teeth. White-eye cowered, and Pure-brown resumed his speech, pawing the air in exclamation, his growls almost plaintive.

  White-eye sat motionless until one of the men stole out from the side of the stage and strapped a short knife with a triangular blade to his paw. As Pure-brown crescendoed—empire, empire, empire, he seemed to growl—White-eye waded toward him on his hind legs. Then White-eye raised the knife and the curtain fell.

  The man with the thick neck leaned forward in his chair, and, reaching across me, offered Sarah his handkerchief. “For your eyes,” he said. The eyes she raised to meet his were glittering cold.

  When the bears emerged next, White-eye wore a blindfold and clinking chains. Pure-brown followed in a red officer’s kepi, the kind that had cost so many lieutenants their heads in 1914.

  One of the trainers shook loose a cigarette, put it in the corner of White-eye’s mouth, and lit a match. More applause from the audience. Then Pure-brown reared up, paws on the post, and the trainers put a rifle on his shoulder, strapping it there and fastening it with snaps until the barrel ran along his arm and pointed at the blindfolded bear.

  “Italians, obviously,” the thick-necked man shouted through cupped hands. He laughed, but no one else did. He elbowed me in the side and said quietly, �
�Let me apologize. I should have realized you were together.”

  “Indeed. I ought to feed you to these bears,” I said, my voice far sterner than I intended.

  “I misapprehended, my friend. That’s all.”

  “It’s quite all right,” I whispered.

  The two other Pyreneans passed through the curtain and saluted the shooter. Ready, they yelled, as if the moment finally demanded their carefully guarded energy. A smattering of applause from the crowd, a rustle of whispers, the popping of peanut shells. Outside the sun swung up, and the tent burst with yolk-colored light. White-eye was panting. Aim, the men yelled, a few voices from the crowd joining in. The cigarette fell from White-eye’s mouth. Fire! A bang that sounded like the report of a real gun, and the bear collapsed. No pirouette or death roar. He just went down and lay in a pile.

  Pure-brown allowed the rifle to be taken from him, the men to lead him away. I half-expected the mournful sound of the cornet, but the tent was silent. Only the executed prisoner lay in the middle of the stage.

  “They didn’t really . . .” Sarah whispered. No, even as she said it, the prisoner was flicking his ears. He put up his head and yawned, pink tongue lolling. The audience applauded, but immediately one of the trainers ran onto the stage and began to shout something in dialect. It seemed the bear had risen from the dead too soon, throwing off the show. This was the bear who had misbehaved all along, and the little man who had seemed too ground-down to care about much of anything minutes before was waving his arms now, roaring as if in imitation.

  The other two trainers came out from behind the curtain, exchanging a look I couldn’t help but find worrisome. The little man’s expression changed too, his voice softened, and he ran his hand gently down the bear’s brown back. There was something in the man’s face that had been absent until now, a tightening of the lips and eyes, a flinch that flickered past and was immediately masked, but I knew it well enough as fear.

  He backed away. There was mud in the bear’s claws, spittle on his teeth. The trainer stumbled, making a pulling motion at his fellows. Where was the hook? Where? They didn’t have it. And everyone in the crowd could see that by the time they got the hook it would be too late.