The Verdun Affair

by Nick Dybek

  With affection,

  Mrs. Lee Hagen

  I couldn’t be angry with her. Instead, I was left with a far more particular and improbable feeling, that of having my worst fears and regrets so clearly—to say nothing of so elegantly—expressed in another’s words. I told myself then that only those truly in love ever have that feeling. And because love literalizes everything, because it closes distances—ironic distance in particular—I began to consider how I might become another person entirely.

  * * *

  In November, Dr. Fenayrou, the director of the asylum at Rodez, and his already exhausted staff received more than two hundred queries about the amnesiac, many of which—heartbreakingly—described a man that couldn’t possibly have been Mangin. Some wrote of blue eyes when Mangin’s were brown—but wasn’t mustard gas known to affect eye color? Some set the man’s height at six feet when Mangin was only five feet, three inches—but certainly such strain could shrink a man? Some wrote of augers and visitations in dreams, as if these might strengthen their case.

  Meanwhile, Mangin’s resolve to remain unidentified only seemed to deepen. When the doctors asked him for a sample of his handwriting, he scribbled muddy waves. When they asked what he remembered of his profession, he looked back with the gentle, stupid eyes of a deer. When they presented him with trowels, threshing scythes, and levels, he let them clatter to the floor.

  Ironically, Marcel wrote on our editorial page, this man’s lost memory is a reminder for the rest of us. But can’t we also see him as a man who rejects the crude tools of the very industry that led to the machine gun and the green cross shell? A man who rejects any semblance of identity, only because he has learned that, in the age of industrial war, an identity can be stolen on the whims of strangers and at a moment’s notice? These are only the most rational of responses, and yet he finds himself watching the night stars through barred windows. He might be the greatest artist of our time, yet he wears a straitjacket.

  “What do you think?” he asked me. “Too sanctimonious? Too romantic?”

  “Do they keep him in a straitjacket, really?”

  “No. No. By all accounts he’s quite docile, even sweet.”

  * * *

  As is well known, the artists left Montmartre for Montparnasse during the war. By the time I arrived in Paris, the quarter Sarah had described in her stories had become passé—one of many new words I’d never needed before. I asked Marcel about where we lived in the 3rd—there must have been part of me that saw my life in Paris as something I would talk about, perhaps even brag about, later—but he said no one should brag about life in our neighborhood. I decided I’d have to take pride in being out of fashion. I’d take pride in the Chevalier Vert, for example—that haunt of shy editors of minor papers, with its chipped glasses and yellow windows. Why the name? Marcel said there had once been a flower factory on the block; the flower girls had come drinking in the evenings, their hands still green from the arsenic dye. Indeed, you could still see their poison fingerprints smeared on the bar.

  The Vert was the kind of café that filled with immigrants, not expatriates. Yet I met Shelly Harris there one evening in December. I have no idea how he found the place, but he asked in surprising Dixie vowels if he might sit at our table.

  Almost immediately, and for reasons I couldn’t quite follow, he began a story about a party he’d recently attended in the 6th. There, he’d chatted and drunk as always, until a bell rang and the guests assembled in the living room, each holding a length of rope. Promptly, everyone but Shelly fell into a trance and began to channel the dead with fluttering eyes.

  The host, Shelly later learned, had begun this ritual some weeks before; the ropes were meant to tether his guests to the world of the living. But, on that evening, Shelly looked on, first with bemusement, then horror, as they began to fashion the cords into nooses, as they began to hang the nooses around their own necks. What a time! What a world! Thank god I was there, Shelly said, to shake them all awake.

  It was a gripping story, I suppose, though there was something immediately off-putting in the sheer performance of it. The next time I saw Shelly, he told the story again, almost word for word. And the next time too.

  “Does he always do this?” I asked Rose Pemberton, who’d arrived at the Vert with Shelly and a group of his American friends a few nights later.

  “That’s just Shelly,” she said. “Never wants to say the wrong thing.”

  Like Shelly, Rose became a fixture at the Chevalier Vert. Rose wore men’s pants and her hair undone to her waist. She was married to an English lawyer she told everyone she’d never liked very much.

  Rose introduced me to a dozen other Americans. Wilson Rohn, for example, who had the manners of George V and even looked a bit like him. There was something alluring, I had to admit—after a childhood of cabbage dinners with the family across the hall—in eating with friends who ordered oysters and lean meats. There was something alluring, too, in the realization that, had I met any of them in Chicago, they likely wouldn’t have given me the time of day.

  Perhaps Marcel sensed my excitement. Anyway, as these Americans began to haunt the Chevalier Vert, he found excuses to leave early, saying that he had fallen too behind in his work to sleep, let alone to drink and socialize.

  I probably didn’t try as hard to convince him otherwise as I should have. Though there was truth to his excuses. Interest in the Mangin case had nearly doubled the circulation of La Voix du Soldat, and, as Marcel devoted more and more time to the story, he let me pick up some of the slack.

  My first article covered a new marble monument in Le Mans, a subject now relegated to the last page. Next, I wrote a series of articles on La Voix’s most stalwart topic: the inconsistent and often unfair payment of benefits by the Ministry of War. Next, I wrote a feature on a soldier who was mistakenly reported dead in the Nivelle Offensive; when he rang his mother’s bell in Pigalle, she died of joy.

  Marcel was appropriately hard on my copy. Nevertheless, he continued to publish what I wrote and to offer more assignments. Eventually, he abandoned the Chevalier Vert altogether. I felt guilty going without him, but, by February, when the snow fell through the chimney smoke, there was little choice but to watch it through the Chevalier Vert’s steamy windows. A glass of wine was cheaper than the coal it would take to heat my flat, and I often stayed until closing.

  By then—though I had written her several times care of the address in Trieste—I hadn’t heard from Sarah in six months. Some days I still woke with the sting of her on my mind. And some mornings I woke to the pinch of Rose’s nails because, in the night, I’d pinned her long hair to the mattress. She made clear that our relationship would never be serious. Despite that, my life began to feel slightly more than provisional, as it often does when one outgrows his first friends in a new city and makes a second set.

  “Why here, of all places?” I asked Wilson Rohn one night, after he’d ordered a second bottle of Bordeaux, after everyone else who had to work the following morning had left the Chevalier Vert. Wilson had a slim and witty face, and as I’d gotten to know him I’d realized that his politeness shielded a good-humored maliciousness.

  “Haven’t you heard?” he asked. “There’s an American who drinks here, who used to pick up the bones from Verdun. This is quite the chic place.”

  Santa Monica, 1950

  My house nearly has an ocean view. That’s what the agent said when I bought it several years ago. Nearly. If the house were three stories instead of two: ocean view. Three blocks further west: ocean view. She said the phrase as if to imply that I was close, so close, to a standard of attainment that I obviously didn’t quite grasp. She was right. I didn’t care about an ocean view. Partially, that was due to my education. The French don’t like to look at the water, except in August.

  Still, I bought the house—an Eclectic Revival cottage with a catslide roof and eucalyptus trees in the front yard—when several others would have been just as suitable. And
when I signed the papers, the agent said that I had been both wise and lucky, which led me to believe she’d had a hard time interesting anyone else. Indeed, the house would have been small for a family. “So many people don’t realize there’s no reason to buy space you don’t need. Yet,” she was quick to add. I suppose it’s possible she just didn’t realize that I was on the other side of yet, that I was at the end of something—a marriage, in this case—rather than the beginning.

  At least I can say that I’ve never had cause to regret the house. Though I don’t have an ocean view, every day I do see people walking to the beach. There’s something salubrious in just that. The zinc-tipped noses, the sandals and oxfords without socks. The easy conversations tossed over shoulders, the striped sun umbrellas and towels.

  In fact, I was watching a young man walk two spotted dogs in bandanas past my window when the phone rang the morning after the composer’s birthday party. It was Max Steiner.

  “How do you feel this morning?” Steiner asked. His tone suggested he’d already written two scores and a sonata.

  “I don’t remember giving you my telephone number,” I said. “Does that answer your question?”

  “But obviously I have your phone number,” he said. “I did not think you would mind speaking at home.”

  “It’s an honor, actually. Did I tell you that last night?”

  “Like you, I am somewhat unsure what we spoke of last night. Nevertheless, upon reflection, I believe it to be perfect.”

  “You believe what to be perfect?”

  “Your song, of course.”

  The song. The ridiculous song. I tried to massage back my headache, to find a little lucid space to think. “By the piano?” I said, dismissively, as if my tone of voice might sway him away. But then—all the more ridiculously, since it wasn’t even my song—I couldn’t help myself. “You said you didn’t like it, though, didn’t you?”

  “I believe that I said it was too lonely. The reason I do not often drink is that my mind becomes too literal. Loneliness, of course, is the perfect subtext for a lullaby.”

  “That may be,” I said. “The problem is I don’t remember any of it.”

  “None?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “You made it up on the spot? Impressive.” Though a click in his voice suggested he wasn’t feeling very impressed.

  “I must have channeled something in the house,” I said.

  “I would not say that,” Steiner said. “But it’s quite all right. I remember everything perfectly. Isn’t it . . .” And he began to sing. His voice was bad by any standard, but the words were exactly right. The moment should have been funny—the unexpected call, the deeply accented performance in which “the snow covered the vindow.” Only I was too afraid to laugh. Truly, I was afraid. Who would care, really, if that song ended up, improbably, in a picture? Who would even know? Yet my chest clenched.

  “That’s impressive,” I said when he’d finished.

  “Naturally, I don’t forget music.”

  “Naturally.” There was a pause on the line, and I realized just how ill I suddenly felt.

  “But I have forgotten,” Steiner said. “Why were you at the party?”

  “I came with Paul Weyerhauser.”

  “Yes, yes. That was it. How do you know Paul again?”

  “We met in Italy,” I said, feeling too dizzy to lie or deflect. “Almost thirty years ago now.”

  “Is that right?” he said. “Fertile soil, I suppose.”

  “It didn’t seem so at the time.”

  “I mean only that he met his wife there too, after all.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  * * *

  “I received an interesting letter from Bologna today,” Marcel said one morning in the spring of 1922—late spring, late May, the butter on the dish at our café table soft enough to have caught one of the season’s first flies. He’d asked me to lunch, as he did at least once a week. I knew I’d disappointed him by drifting over to the Americans at the Chevalier Vert, but he was the type who went out of his way to be more attentive when he was hurt. I was trying to learn from his example. I took my croque madames the way he did—the barely touched egg running yellow off the bread—thinking that sometimes it’s the smallest things that make a person feel less alone in the world.

  Spring was splitting into summer, and what a spring it had been for Marcel. His work on the Mangin story had earned him a small award, and circulation of La Voix du Soldat continued to rise, even as ads for missing men were replaced by advertisements for shirt collars and quack cures.

  Marcel, with an acumen I think he had only just discovered in himself, announced in the March 1 issue that our publication would henceforth be known simply as La Voix. It would continue to tell the story of the men and women who sacrificed for France, of course, but shouldn’t it be acknowledged that all the French had sacrificed, that we were all soldats in one way or another? It was La Voix’s job to speak to, and for, us all.

  “Bologna,” he said, “is the new home of the Italian amnesiac.”

  We’d been following the story of the Italian amnesiac only vaguely. Like Mangin, he’d been a prisoner of war, but the Austrians, in the death throes of empire, had nowhere near the Prussian proficiency for record-keeping. They completely lost track of the man in the camp. He had no identification, and didn’t look particularly Italian, so they sent him to Serbia after the armistice.

  It soon became clear to the doctors in Belgrade that the man was no Serb. For one thing, he spoke no Serbian. Not that he spoke much of any language, but he could follow basic commands—sit, stand, undress—in French, Italian, and English. Since Italy was closest, they sent him there. First to a military hospital in Udine. Then to another in Sienna, then finally to an asylum in Bologna at the request of a famous doctor who’d taken an interest in his case.

  According to the report Marcel had just read, the man had spoken his first word in three years. The word was ball. According to the report, the man’s picture had been released to the Red Cross and all the usual groups. But the Italian papers still hadn’t shown much interest.

  “Part of their excuse,” Marcel explained, “is that nobody knows if he’s Italian. But if he is Italian, they don’t want to pollute the glorious image of Roman masculinity by putting the focus on a catatonic coward.”

  “That’s your opinion?”

  Marcel sliced the fly off the butter and flicked it into the street. “I don’t much care for Italians. At least their newspapermen.”

  On another day the conversation might have ended there. There was much work to discuss, and an Italian amnesiac was just a curiosity, as relevant to La Voix as the price of pearls. But the mention of Udine—even in passing—had caught my attention. And, as the waiter emerged from the door of the café with our lunch, only to pause to greet a guest at another table, I knew we had an extra moment.

  “If no one cares, where did the report come from?”

  “A letter from the man’s doctor. A Dr. Bianchi, I think. He believes ‘the international press,’ as he terms it, might have more interest in this amnesiac than the Italians.”

  “What on earth is ‘the international press’?”

  “I suppose he means the papers Americans read. He believes the patient to be an American, in fact.”

  The waiter arrived. Sometimes people claim their words come out before they’re aware of what they’re going to say, but, in that moment, if I had trouble finding the words, it was because the picture in my mind was too comprehensive and vivid. An American woman in Udine coming across the notice, dreaming a familiar face upon the smudged photo, booking a ticket to Bologna in perfect Italian. I’d rather be humiliated than hopeless, she’d written.

  “I’d like to be the one to go,” I said.

  “What one? To go where?”

  “To Bologna.”

  Marcel laughed. “We have plenty to say about France, my friend.”

  “I’ll pay my own way,�
�� I said.

  “Can you even pay your way home tonight?”

  “Just.”

  “It makes me feel good, really, that you would ask. That you would think I could say yes, just because you asked. People must have been very kind to you in the past to make you think that. I suppose you’ve always wanted to go to Italy, is that it?”

  “Since you ask, I once went through considerable trouble not to go to Italy. But I’m going now. And you are going to Rodez.”

  He laughed, harder this time. The laugh was so good-natured that I started too. “I am?” he said. “I seem to have forgotten.”

  “You’ll need to in order to profile the families coming to inquire about Mangin. Meanwhile, I’ll file from Bologna. What if we published them side by side? The experience of the missing in two different countries. Has anyone done that?”

  He bit into his egg, breaking the yoke, drizzling his napkin in yellow. And he chewed slowly, sneaking glances, not wanting me to see that he was considering my proposal.

  It must be said: I had no idea if she was still in Udine, if she was still in Italy at all. I may have hoped, though I certainly didn’t expect, to find her in Bologna. But as I imagined her reacting to the news of this poor amnesiac, I felt a sense of attachment to her I had not known in months.

  As Marcel chewed, I tried to look something other than desperate. Only when I was older and had some concept of money did I realize how generous he had been. Only when I had responsibilities and deadlines of my own did I realize how recklessly he’d assigned me work. There were many friends I was unable to track down after the second war ended, but I did manage to get back in touch with Marcel. He’d run a press for the Resistance during the occupation; he’d done some time in one of the camps but had come out all right. They no longer made the cheap scotch we used to drink in the Chevalier Vert, but I sent him a case of Cutty Sark, and he sent me a picture of two healthy-looking children, standing in front of his home in Grenoble, though there was no mention of their mother.