Fall of Poppies

by Heather Webb

  “The war, madame. It’s over! Armistice has been called. Today marks a new”—­he choked on his emotion—­“a new beginning.” He wiped his eyes with his filthy hand.

  Her head began to spin. She’d never repay the Germans for all they took from her. For her mother’s coldness. Her breath grew ragged again.

  “It’s all right,” the soldier said, seeing the look on her face. “We’ve survived. It’s all over.”

  Her loss would never be over, but she must be. The bag of dynamite grew heavier, a reminder of her mission.

  More and more soldiers filled the street. Some looked worse than others: bandaged, crippled limbs, or filthy and starving. Others looked fresh from the bath. She frowned, trying to make sense of it all. It didn’t need to make sense, she reminded herself. She needed to get even, to end her misery. She looked around her. Why did she need to go farther? She could end it all here. She opened her bag, fumbled with the box of matches, and retrieved one.

  “Is this a barracks?” she asked. Tears rushed down her face.

  “A prison, madame. We’ve all just been released.”

  It was then she noticed their uniforms, the language they were speaking. They weren’t Germans; they were French and Allied soldiers. Her eyes flickered from one face to the next. Some appeared bewildered. Others whooped in joy and relief. These men would go home to their wives and children, their lovers, their mothers. The match pressed against the flesh of her palm. She would never share their joy.

  Her legs collapsed beneath her and she dropped her bag. Sticks of dynamite rolled in every direction.

  “Where are they?” she shouted. “The murderers who killed my son! My husband!”

  Soldiers gaped at her, their eyes traveling over the sticks of dynamite strewn at her feet. Many scattered out of the way.

  “Madame, steady now.” One brave soldier crept toward her. “Let me help you with that.”

  “I don’t need your help. Stand back!” She held the match to the strip on its box.

  The soldier’s voice turned soothing. “But it’s over.” He inched closer. “There will never be another war like this.”

  “But I can’t get my son back,” she sobbed, allowing her emotion to overtake her at long last. “He didn’t know how much I loved him. I can’t . . . I must . . .”

  “Let me help you.” The soldier coaxed her.

  Another soldier pushed his way through the gathered crowd. A bandage stained with rust-­colored patches of dried blood wrapped his head and covered half of his face. He hobbled with the help of a cane.

  “Let me through,” he insisted, voice muffled by the confusion around them.

  “Don’t come any closer!” she shouted. With a stroke of tip against box, the match burst to life. If she couldn’t have revenge, she would end her days, the pain.

  The soldier paused a few yards away and tilted his head to the side to peer at her through his good eye.

  Beatrix dropped the match.

  “Maman?” Adrien’s voice rang out like church bells.

  That single, astonished word silenced the roaring in her ears. Hope brightened the edges of her vision and flooded her heart—­a golden, beautiful thing—­dissolving her anger, draining the bitterness. She clutched her chest at its intensity. Could it be true? She struggled to her feet.

  “Adrien?”

  He staggered toward her. “Maman!”

  With a strangled cry, Beatrix gathered her son in her arms.

  To those left behind in wartime,

  may there always be hope.

  Also, to the man I love.

  An American Airman in Paris

  Beatriz Williams

  Paris. Mid-­April 1920

  HE CAME TO Harry’s to drink, not to find a woman, but sometimes the one just naturally leads to the other, doesn’t it? Sometimes you haven’t got a choice.

  Besides, you’re in Paris! You’re in Paris, in a smoky establishment not far from the Opéra, surrounded by souls in a similar state of reckless desperation, and who can resist that fug of inevitability? Sex hangs in the air, thick and musky, and it tastes like Scotch whisky. Nearly irresistible.

  Octavian lights another cigarette, gestures for another drink, and considers the array of bottles on the wall before him, for example. Plenty of choice there, right? Except that there isn’t. It’s all an illusion. A fellow’s got to drink something, or he’ll die. You can choose what to drink, but you can’t choose whether to drink.

  All right. Maybe you can, if you try hard enough. If you care hard enough. Octavian has always believed in choice. Hasn’t self-­control been the guiding principle of his life? Until this moment, on this particular night, he’s resisted that barbaric impulse to copulate, in the manner of his broken-­down compatriots, with whatever lady happens to look fairest in the hazy glow of a quarter liter of decent Scotch whisky and a half dozen smokes. In fact, Octavian’s abstinence has made him a legend. A religious idol, almost, except for that inconvenient absence of outward religion. J.C., his friends started calling him, way back in the middle of a Paris leave two years ago, and it stuck.

  “Now, J.C.,” says Jack Marmot, plopping sloppily on the stool next door, “just tell me what you think of that bird over there, talking to Dashwood. A real doll, ain’t she?”

  Octavian squints between the bodies until he finds Dashwood, and then the woman furled up next to him, lush and sleek-­skinned, holding a slender Gauloises in one hand and a highball in the other. Her lips are dark, her hair is short and curling. Underneath a sheer black dress, her breasts are enchantingly visible.

  He returns his attention to his drink and tips it back between his lips. “Sure. A real doll.”

  Jack leans close. “Do me a favor, J.C. I want to see this before I die. Why don’t you just drag your handsome mug over there and relieve Dashwood of his responsibilities? He don’t deserve a doll like that.”

  “He’s welcome to her.”

  “Aw, what is it with you, J.C.? You don’t like girls?”

  “I like girls, all right. Just not that kind of girl.”

  “You gotta girl back home, J.C.?”

  “Nope.”

  Jack finishes his drink and signals the bartender. “On account of I got to talking to an old buddy of yours, name of Peterson—­”

  “He’s not a buddy of mine.”

  “Says he knows you, though.”

  Octavian pulls out the packet of cigarettes from his jacket pocket and fiddles the dwindling contents. “I guess we know each other.”

  “Anyway, Peterson says you got a girl back home, pretty girl. You kept her picture in your wallet. In your pocket, every time you went up on patrol.”

  “He said that, did he?”

  “Yep. True or false?”

  “I guess that’s true.”

  The bartender arrives. Refills the glasses, without a word. Jack waits in drunken patience, mesmerized by the delicate flow of whisky against the black waistcoat of its source. When every drop is safely delivered, and Jack has clinked the careful edge of his glass with the edge of Octavian’s glass, he returns to the subject of the photograph in Octavian’s wallet. Because who doesn’t want to hear more about someone’s girl back home?

  “So? What’s the story? What happened to her?”

  “Nothing happened to her, that I know of.”

  “All right. So what happened to you, J.C.?”

  Octavian doesn’t reply to that. What a question!—­What happened to you?—­as if it’s not obvious what’s happened to him. What’s happened to all of them. Why it’s impossible to return to an unspoiled America, to an unspoiled girl. Why they are smoking and drinking and fornicating in Paris, instead of returning home to nice clean lives and nice clean wives.

  He shrugs instead. Shrugs and lifts his drink, examining the bottom of the glass, as i
f expecting to find some kind of message. The cigarette burns implacably between the first two fingers of his right hand.

  But Jack, it seems, will not be denied. “You still got that snap?” he asks, reaching in his pocket for his own identically smashed packet of pungent French cigarettes.

  This time, Octavian decides to answer him. Why not? The existence of that photograph doesn’t make a difference anymore. But at some point between the instant of opening his mouth and the instant of making voice, the smoke parts to his left and a woman inserts herself in the crack, very close, smelling of perfume and muscular Turkish tobacco, the scent of Paris. And gin. And something else, beneath it all: something salty and perspiring that sends the hot blood rushing where it shouldn’t. She places a hand on the back of his neck—­an interesting choice, and more pleasurable than Octavian expects—­and bends right next to his ear to tell him she’d like to suck his bite. Octavian glances to the side, and without even trying he spies the tips of her enchanting breasts, puckering the material of her sheer black dress like a pair of large, textured polka dots.

  “As a matter of fact,” he tells Jack, not looking away, “I don’t.”

  Which isn’t the reason he finds himself in a taxi an hour later, trundling along the wet streets of Montparnasse while la belle Hélène (not her real name, but who gives a darn about that?) traces a few interesting fingers along the outside of his trousers. Still, it’s part of the reason—­the loss of that photograph—­and anyway he’s not thinking about why he’s there, is he? My God. He’s just there. Choiceless. He’s closing his eyes and listening to the rapid crump of his heart in his ears. Savoring the movement of Hélène’s finger along his bite. Wondering if he’s really going to do it, holy God, really going to do it this time: fornicate with a woman he’s just met: a lush, smoky, drunken, enchanting woman from Harry’s New York Bar in Paris, who doesn’t even seem to want to kiss him first. Who doesn’t even seem to expect payment, other than the pleasure of his company.

  Well, why shouldn’t he? No law against it, is there? No human law, anyway. How many times has he watched his pals climb into similar taxis, in the company of similar women, since he started this whole business by walking into a U.S. Army recruiting station on the day after his eighteenth birthday, all chock full of shiny ideals, startling everybody in the room by announcing he knew how to fly an airplane? How many times has he watched his compatriots climb flights of sordid stairs, or line up outside sordid establishments, or—­faute de mieux—­simply fornicate in sordid corners, trying to reclaim a minute of joy from God’s dispassionate clock?

  So maybe it’s time he gave in. Maybe the vinous, musky scent of this woman is what he really needs, after all. Maybe there’s no point in keeping himself whole; maybe he’s too late for that. Who knows? Maybe this is the way to make himself whole again—­maybe this has been the way to salvation, all along—­and Hélène’s nimble fingers and unencumbered breasts are a symbol from God Himself. Or maybe not. Either way—­and here la belle Hélène finds the topmost button of his trousers, just as the taxi swerves around a corner, the corner of the boulevard St.-­Michel, where he keeps a room on the attic floor of a decrepit Second Empire hotel—­either way, he lost that photograph of Sophie Faninal on the day of the Armistice itself, and you can’t get more symbolic than that.

  But that’s another story, and isn’t that the point of all this? The point of Paris, the point of Harry’s, the point of Hélène. To forget that story. To forget the other stories. To forget . . . well, pretty much everything that came before.

  Rembercourt Airfield, France. November 11, 1918

  EARLY ON, YOU learned not to make friends with the other pilots. In the first place, you didn’t have much time—­five, six weeks—­before your plane crashed or his plane crashed, and even in the intense atmosphere of a U.S. Army Air Ser­vice squadron, in which life took place at several times its ordinary speed, you couldn’t learn much about a fellow in six weeks. In the second place, why would you bother? Either he died or you died. End of friendship.

  Oh, sure, you got along with the others. You made a few buddies—­fellows you could drink with on leave, fellows who’d loan you a franc or two when you were short. And there was the incontestable fact that you might (willingly, without a second thought) sacrifice your own life for your mate’s life, should the opportunity arise, say, out of a clear blue sky.

  But the trick was not to care too much. To care just enough.

  Because, by the time a cold, gray October passed into a colder, grayer November, the man who had given Octavian his nickname (to take just one example) was long gone. Shot down a ­couple of weeks after that legendary Paris leave, and a few days later a Fokker flew past the base, very low, fluttering a white banner, and dropped a note in halting, courteous English: Lieutenant Morris is killed and body buried with full military honor. Fondest respect. The men who carried on calling him J.C. were likewise mostly dead, or taken prisoner (if lucky), or else too badly injured to fly. Not a single man remained who’d witnessed Octavian’s improbable feat of abstinence that weekend, and the three pilots who accompanied him to the airfield through that bleak, drizzling midmorning of November 11 were all replacements of replacements, eighteen years old, white-­cheeked. Octavian, who’d just turned nineteen, felt like a statesman.

  “Right, boys,” he said as the biplanes took shape before them, pale and spectral, “no one does anything stupid. We’re making a simple patrol, northeast sector, Trier airfield, not trying to finish off the whole Boche army single-­handed, do you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Johnson, a little cocky.

  Yes, sir, the other boys said, more meek.

  “Follow me, stay in formation, nice and tight. I don’t want any idiot getting lost in the clouds. And watch out for any darned Fokkers hiding around. And for Pete’s sake, don’t get shot down. Christmas is around the corner. You don’t want to ruin Christmas for your folks.”

  (Another reason for the sobriquet: Octavian didn’t swear.)

  Yes, sir.

  The planes were waiting outside the hangar, noses tilted expectantly to the sky. A ­couple of sleepy mechanics milled about like ghosts in the spaces between them. Later, Octavian remembered thinking—­as he strode toward the familiar rakish shape of his French-­built SPAD in much the same way a knight might have approached his charger a few hundred years ago—­This is it, the last time I’m going up. My number’s up this time. But he always thought that before a patrol. Bad luck to imagine you were actually coming back.

  Aloft, he was glad for his leather jacket, lined in sheepskin, and for his leather cap and his long woolen scarf and his goggles. For his cumbersome sheepskin gloves. The fog streamed past, cold and viscous. They climbed steadily, blindly through the frozen clouds: climbed on nothing but faith. Octavian could just see the biplanes at his flanks, holding tight, Matthews and Peterson and cocky Johnson, the best pilot among them, intuitive and reckless. Said he was eighteen but that was pure invention, Octavian knew. The kid was no more than seventeen. Farm boy from Missouri or Mississippi or someplace. Lost his virginity last week in Amiens—­lost it twice, according to a grinning Peterson, who’d arranged the escapade—­and had probably clapped himself in the process.

  Octavian glanced at Johnson’s airplane, twenty yards to the right, at the extreme edge of visibility, climbing without fear. Idiot, he thought affectionately. Everyone knew you stayed away from the war widows and stuck to the whores. Even virtuous J.C., who didn’t avail himself of either.

  The break came suddenly. One instant they were trapped in the dense, infinite vapor, and in the next instant they were free. Ice-­blue sky above, gray fleece below. To the east, the risen sun, new and brilliant above the horizon.

  Octavian climbed higher and leveled out. Eleven thousand five hundred feet, a decent altitude. Air thin and winter-­sharp. The other airplanes tucked into place around him, so marvelous
ly clear he could see the shape of Johnson’s nose against the sky. He held the stick between his knees and reached into his pocket for Sophie’s photograph.

  Yes. About that photograph. The other fellows thought she must be his girl, this image in a picture that no one—­not even Peterson—­had ever actually seen. He kept it in his wallet when he wasn’t flying, and in his pocket when he was. And when he reached altitude, and was flying toward his fate, he always took her picture out and fixed it between the windshield and the edge of the cockpit, so they were face-­to-­face, the two of them. Guardian angel, mortal man.

  Sophie Faninal. He’d never actually met her. The photograph wasn’t even that: it was a clipping from a newspaper, which he’d fixed on a piece of cardboard long ago and coated in clear wax. The girl in the picture was pretty enough—­light hair and light eyes, returning your smile with hers—­but it was her expression that did him in, every time he beheld her. Her delight. The way her gaze emerged from two dimensions to connect with him, as if she knew he was there, all along. The curious slant to her eyebrows, as if she knew the secret to happiness, as if she were (simultaneously, and not uncoincidentally) plotting some kind of mischief. Probably she was. At the time the snap was taken, Sophie was about three years old.

  Octavian touched the corner of the photograph. Smoothed the edge of her springy light hair and told her not to worry. The tide was turning. Rumor and hope (if you could call this state of cynical expectancy hope) abounded. The war had to end sometime, didn’t it? Before everybody ran out of men altogether. Men and SPADs and everything else.

  Just hurry back, safe and sound, she replied.

  All right, so maybe he was crazy, talking like that to a little girl he’d never met. But he wasn’t completely nuts. No, ma’am. At the same time he was holding this imaginary conversation, he was also watching the speedometer, the compass; checking his watch, calculating the distance they’d traveled. When you couldn’t see the ground, you had to rely on dead reckoning to figure out where the devil you existed atop the map of Europe, and Octavian prided himself on his navigation. All those sharp, precise numbers gave you something to think about, got your mind off what lay ahead. If you did it right, you found a rhythm that kept your heartbeat even, your breathing steady. Kept your mind clean, orderly, so that you noticed everything around you in simultaneous and infinite clarity, like God Himself: the line of the horizon, the faint undulation of the air, the angle of the sun. Those specks in the sky nearby, that might or might not be a squadron of enemy airplanes.