The Verdun Affair

by Nick Dybek

  The man with the blue handkerchief had already jumped from his seat and fallen on his backside; he was trying to pedal backward through the mud. The bear blurred toward the front of the stage. And somehow I knew, and it wasn’t just the narcissism of fear, that the bear was coming straight for us. Not the crowd, but Sarah and me. I put my arm across her chest, but couldn’t find the strength in my legs, and then the bear was before us, directly before us, and I could feel Sarah against my arm, stiff as the dead but blaring heat. The bear reared on its hind legs. We were close enough to smell its breath of earth and meat.

  Then the bear smiled. He smiled. The corners of his mouth turned up like a man’s. He smiled. And galloped back to the three trainers and the other bear, the men standing with straight backs, then the five of them bowing to the crowd.

  In the years since, I’ve told the story many times. But I tell it without Sarah in it; I don’t mention the pleats in her dress that I found myself clutching as the rest of the audience applauded, or the slow descent of her breaths, or the soft hand with which she untangled my fingers.

  I told the story recently at a dinner with some young actors. I’d had a little too much to drink and was feeling the strange euphoria that comes at the end of a huge meal, a feeling of invulnerability but also acute mortality. One of the actors and I had teamed up on the rest of the table. I’d been charming and had grown a little too confident.

  After I finished the story there were chuckles, much draining of already empty glasses, much stamping of already crushed cigarettes, but I could read their faces well enough: this old man is crazier than we thought. Finally, my actor friend, a comedian famous for starring in a picture about a talking motorcycle, said, “You know, that reminds me of a story my great uncle used to tell. He was a jockey in Buenos Aires many years ago—the twenties, I think, or before even. Apparently there was a horse that was supposed to be sent to the glue factory, but then my uncle gave him a try, and they started winning races. He wasn’t a champion by any means, but a winner. Anyway, my uncle swears that the night before he left for America, he paid the horse a visit in his stall, and the horse knew immediately that he was leaving. Not only that, he swears the horse started to cry! Real human tears, real human sobs, and my uncle just had to hold this horse’s snout until morning.”

  No one said anything. The actor looked at me in the sour way the young look at the old. If not for that look, I might have thought he was trying to help.

  But how can I blame him for not knowing what the world had once been? The Pyrenean trainer would no sooner have believed in the concrete freeways that all of us would take home that night. The hot showers we’d run and the lights we’d flip on and forget. The comedian couldn’t have known. He couldn’t have known that a lifetime is a sad thing, that, in the end, it is a bridge between two worlds that don’t believe in one another.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  * * *

  I stole a scarf from Father Perrin. I hadn’t wanted to. I had some money saved that I’d planned to spend on new clothes at a shop called Pingouin’s. The original building had been demolished during the battle and the owner had recently reopened in a new storefront along the river with only a fraction of the former space. The racks were stuffed with a fairy tale’s worth of gowns. Half-buttoned shirts piled in wooden boxes, mannequins wearing cocktail dresses and bowler hats.

  The proprietor—a rather penguin-like man, as it happened—only glanced up from a desk covered in dinner crumbs. He seemed to think his store needed no explanation. I thumbed through trousers and misshapen jackets, giving him time to come over. I considered a few shirts, and played with the buckles on a pair of shoes, but still he didn’t come. I walked out without closing the door behind me. Why hadn’t he asked me how he could help, what I was looking for? Why hadn’t he given me the chance to say, Perhaps something a bit special. Tonight I need to dress for dinner.

  * * *

  Mrs. Lee Hagen seemed to have no shortage of clothes. She was waiting in the lobby in a green dress with bows at the shoulder and waist.

  “We have time for a walk first,” she said, and we stepped out into the evening. It was a warm Saturday, and the tables along the river were full of the men who had come in droves to rebuild the city.

  We passed a table of Italians, sipping little glasses of something strong. Beside them, a table of Poles sat sweating in the damp dusk. All were smoking. The river didn’t smell right, and cigarettes almost masked the odor.

  I felt their eyes follow us as we passed, felt them wondering who I was and why I was walking with her. One of the Italians interlaced his fingers, then pulled them apart like an exploding bomb.

  “Did you understand what he said?” I asked.

  “Yes.” She didn’t say any more.

  “Verdun will probably never be so cosmopolitan again,” I said.

  “At least until another war comes,” she said. “Who are those women?”

  At another table, six or seven women sat in long, loose dresses. They had dark eyes and hair, though the eldest of the group wore hers up in a twist that had gone white.

  “Mediums,” I said. “Verdun is lousy with them now.”

  “Perhaps someone should put a lighter to the street.”

  “They tried that already.”

  We cut inside the arc of the river on Rue Levalle, where much of the wreckage was still untouched. The skeletons of broken buildings played on the imagination. The remains of a mossy window looked like an animal gone bad in the teeth, or a stroke victim dragging a frozen eye up to meet your gaze. But there also could be a certain beauty to a smattering of plaster left on stone, to a slash of rose wallpaper on a gutted interior.

  As I walked with Sarah, I thought mostly of her—the length of her step, the fall of the green silk over her narrow shoulders. I hadn’t noticed her shoulders before, I realized. I hadn’t noticed anything about her body. I wasn’t allowing myself to, but then suddenly I was.

  It was growing dark as we crested the bluff and began to descend past crumbling garden walls and the zigzag of crippled shadows. Our steps didn’t sound as they should have on the empty street, the echo coming back only half-pronounced.

  “What was Verdun like before?” Sarah asked. “Do you remember?”

  “Not like Paris, not like Chicago. Small, I guess. Dreary, a lot of people say.”

  “Do you think it will ever be the same again?”

  “If they work very hard they might manage to make it small and dreary again someday,” I said, but she didn’t laugh, and the joke no longer seemed funny. “The restaurant is just up here,” I said.

  We passed the old primary school. Inside its half-leveled walls nine or ten boys were kicking a football, some shirtless, their voices rising. They were losing the light and their game would be over any moment. One boy, who clearly didn’t understand the sport, yelled above the rest, “Pass it here. It’s my turn. It’s my turn.”

  * * *

  The restaurant was completely empty. Even so, Sarah was forced to insist that her concierge had made a reservation before the dark-eyed host finally offered to take her wrap. I would have been just as happy to leave. There were low electric lights on the moldings, and candles on the six or seven tables—far too few to fill the room. The host removed the silver plates. Sarah spread a scalloped napkin on her lap. I felt shabby.

  “I’ve been looking forward to this aperitif for hours,” Sarah said. Her perfume smelled of violets. I felt my pulse like an insect at my neck.

  “I think I need to know why you asked me to dinner,” I said.

  “And why is that?”

  “Because then I might know how to act.”

  “Would you?” she asked, eyes amused.

  “Probably not, but I’d still like to know.”

  The host—also the waiter, it seemed—bent to present the menus, a thick wooden cross falling from his shirt. In his unbuttoned black vest and open collar he looked more like a village tailor than a sommelier. It occu
rred to me that he hadn’t been planning to work that night.

  “Campari? Campari, two please,” Sarah said in French. “We’re going to have a grand meal.”

  “That pleases me,” the waiter said, “but, I’m sorry, we don’t have Campari. I think you’ll prefer Suze anyway.” Then he withdrew to the kitchen as if he’d been whipped.

  “One thing I can tell you,” Sarah said to me, “I asked for the most expensive restaurant so it would be impossible for you to pay.” She glanced around the empty room, the green walls flickering in the candlelight. “Apparently it’s impossible for everyone else too.”

  Marshal Pétain had dined here—I’d driven him, in fact. He’d complimented the pork knuckle and decided the future of Europe with three tables of attendants. But now the room was so quiet I thought I heard someone calling for a coup de rouge at one of the cafés by the river.

  “I understand why you’re asking,” she said. “You’re thinking that I’ve invited you here because I want to know about Lee. That I’m going to drink enough wine to have the courage to ask you about him. Well, I probably am going to drink enough wine. So perhaps I should just ask now.”

  That’s her way of answering my question, I thought. And it was the best and kindest way she could. Any other ideas I’d invented I’d have to tap from my mind. That was all right. That was for the best.

  “I wish there was more that I could say.”

  “But everything there is, please say it now.”

  In the previous five years, I’d rarely had to make anything up. I didn’t quite know how to go about it.

  There was a man in Aix-les-Bains, I told her, with hair longer than was customary. He looked like he was inviting lice, I told her, yet there was a glow about him that suggested he couldn’t be touched by such things. All this was true. There really was such a man.

  I was lying on the hotel terrace above Lake Bourget, I told her. My mind had decided that it was safe for my body to feel again, and I found that I was constructed of materials that didn’t work together. My legs were rubber. My neck wood, my arms tin, and so on.

  The man strolled out into the sunlight and sat down beside me, smiling as if we knew each other. After a moment, he began to sing.

  I fled to the sea, the sea was too small

  But I still had a ball, I still had a ball

  I drove into town, the girls cried in the hall

  But I still had a ball, I still had a ball

  I arrived in the summer, it was already fall

  But I still had a ball, yes, I still had a ball

  The melody was vaguely familiar, better suited to a smoke-dim room. His cadence changed and the notes slid minor.

  I kissed my girl out in the park

  There’s better light, now that it’s dark

  I stumbled home at the end of the night

  There’s better dark, now that it’s light

  I left in the summer, and arrived in the fall

  But I still had a ball, yes, I still had a ball

  The snow covered the window and spread to the mirror

  The perfect end to a perfect year

  What are you supposed to do when a stranger sings for you? I was too tired to clap or whistle. “What’s that song?” I asked him.

  He turned to me and smiled, shy and proud. This, too, was true.

  “I wrote it. With a friend. We used to sing in the ambulance, you know.” He had the grating cheerfulness of an Englishman, but his accent was American.

  “Time passes that way, doesn’t it?”

  “Any interest in learning it?” he asked.

  “Sing it again if you want,” I said, and he did. The second time through I could join him on the refrain. I liked the song, melancholy and hopeful. The lyrics seemed ironic, but something about the man suggested irony wasn’t his traffic.

  “Any interest in cribbage?” I asked when he finished.

  “Why not?” he said, and we began to play.

  I described the entire scene to Sarah just as I recalled it, as we sat at the table, as the waiter brought the Suze in little stemmed glasses, quickly drained. But what else did the man say? There was something that had brought him to mind.

  “I wrote it for my girl,” he said, returning to the song midway through our game. “She understands music better than I ever have. I’d like to surprise her with it when I see her again. Have you a girl?”

  I shook my head. And then, in the dreamlike way that time passes on permission, we drifted to a meal and apart, and I don’t think I saw him again.

  I imagined Lee to have the man’s easy style and purchase on the world. I thought that if I had met Lee, he would have said something like that about her. It didn’t feel completely like a lie.

  She took the white linen from her lap and dabbed the corners of her eyes. I’d meant the words to comfort her. They clearly hadn’t.

  “Thank you for telling me. Really. No one else mentioned that.”

  “You’ve talked to many others?”

  “Everyone I could find. His fellows. His lieutenant. His major. A woman he slept with in Padua. He seemed all right to you otherwise?”

  “As all right as anyone.”

  “He was already getting sick.”

  “As I said.”

  “And then I found out he went mad. They don’t write to tell you that. You have to go looking for it, if you want to know.”

  “You don’t have to talk about that,” I said.

  “And what if I want to?”

  The waiter brought a salad of bitter greens, lardons, and soft cheese. He presented a bottle of Riesling from before the war. We hadn’t ordered either. He placed the cork next to me on the table and splashed the first pale drops into my glass.

  * * *

  “Can you picture Boston, at all?” she asked. “Try.”

  I had remnants from grammar school: the three-point hats of the minutemen, musket blasts at the massacre.

  “I can picture John Adams,” I said.

  “In that case, picture my family’s house.”

  They lived outside of Boston, she explained, in a garrison-style colonial. Fireplaces in the bedrooms, claw-foot tubs in the baths, flowers on the wallpaper. There was a full-length mirror on the door to her mother’s bedroom and she remembered standing in the hall as a small child—perhaps two years old, perhaps three—looking at her reflection, listening to her mother coughing on the other side.

  Sarah was six by the time her mother returned from the sanitarium. She remembered waiting in the foyer, jerking the chain on the electric lamp, off, on, off, on. But there was nothing of the moment of return and little of the months and even years that followed. Only her mother smiling weakly from across the living room, the fire snickering between them. Smiling from across the lawn, shaded by poplars. Smiling from across the dinner table, serving herself green beans and bacon from her private platter.

  The doctors claimed she’d been cured of the tuberculosis, but she remained so afraid she was still contagious that she refused to touch Sarah, refused even to linger in the same room with her. Eventually, Sarah stopped believing the doctors too.

  “What about your father?”

  “He never argued.”

  It was acknowledged by everyone, including him, that he’d married up. He had more or less cheerfully put aside any pleasures, including his own opinions, to practice law and earn the living that was expected of him. His only extravagance was an unshakable confidence in his memory of maps, in his unwavering sense of direction. Sometimes he would take Sarah to the Boston Common, where they would stroll with ice cream cones while he waited to present his services to tourists looking for Paul Revere’s house or Faneuil Hall.

  “He was afraid to contradict my mother. Afraid that perhaps she was right. We were all afraid,” Sarah said.

  “Why not send you away?” I asked.

  “Because she loved me, all the more since she felt she couldn’t be near me. That seems strange, I know, but she ca
me from the kind of family—a rich one—where there was no expectation of acting like other people. That was my aunt’s assessment, anyway.”

  She said her aunt’s name as if I should know it.

  “Well, when I was little I thought she was famous.”

  The aunt lived in Paris, where she wrote music criticism for The Daily Telegraph. She was a fierce Wagnerian, an early champion of avant-garde Russians: Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and especially Scriabin.

  “Do you know Scriabin?” Sarah asked. “His dream was to write a piece of music so powerful it would bring about the end of the world.”

  “Finally I know who to blame.”

  “He never finished that particular piece,” she said, smiling. “Or so my aunt told me. It was the kind of thing she’d go on about in her letters.”

  When Sarah was a child she and her aunt exchanged many such letters. And, from the spring she turned fifteen, every letter came with an invitation to visit—on the condition of her mother’s permission, of course.

  But Sarah never asked for her mother’s permission. Instead she wrote to Maud that her mother had refused to let her come. She described how angry she was, how disappointed. She would simply have to spend the summer in Paris in her mind, she wrote. Imagining the blooms in the Tuileries was the only thing that would get her through to fall, she wrote.

  “You didn’t want to go?”

  “It’s not that I didn’t want to. I was afraid.”

  “Of what?”

  She shrugged. “That the boat might sink. That a war might start, trapping me in Europe for years.”

  “That actually sounds more like clairvoyance,” I said.

  “Hardly. But I was right. Wasn’t I?”

  * * *

  The waiter returned with a platter of asparagus in cream sauce, sweat beaded on his brow. He replaced our half-full glasses, and poured a richer white.

  “Listen,” I said. “Could we perhaps have some say in this?” The waiter made a perplexed face and thumbed his cross, as if it might answer my question.