The Running War

by E. L. Carter

  “Thanks for the ride.”

  “I got a letter in the mail. No name. Return address the city but postmarked here.”

  I look out the windshield. “And?”

  “And there was a score inside. It was beautiful.”

  He’s testing. I don’t know why, but I want to keep it a secret. I say, “A score? You mean like 85-52?”

  “I think you know what I mean.”

  “You’re accusing me of scoring you. I hope you scored well.”

  “You play the harp?”

  I keep my gaze steadfastly on the windshield, the reflection of the dashboard and behind it the door to the apartment building. “I’m not a church person. Or an angel either.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I can see him looking at my hands. He stares at them for a long moment without speaking and I know he wants to see the sinewy strength that a harpist’s hands have. I keep them still in my lap and rest my blistered fingertips against my thighs. From the top, they’re no longer the hands of a harpist; they’re my alibi. Finally he says, “My mistake.”

  I look at him again and the desire has washed thin now, still present but sucked dry. I meet his eyes, holding myself back from my own skin, shrunk somewhere inside.

  “Maybe I’ll see you at dinner sometime.” I pull the door latch and haul myself out. He doesn’t help me get the bike.

  I watch as he drives away, the ridiculous car and that man, that beautiful terrifying man.

  WE TRY to block things out, back to the disappearing point. But it’s amazing how hard it can be to forget an absence. Harder, maybe, than the thing itself.

  Mom can’t say she never knew Grandma. She rode for nine months inside an aquatic chamber, thin-walled, eating and breathing only what Grandma did, perhaps thinking and feeling the same way. She bounced and swayed, kicked and sucked her thumb. Always she could hear the heartbeat all around her, the swish of breath in and out. Always warm and dark, flashes of shadow wavering over the red haze of placenta and skin. She came out between Grandma’s legs, screamed, sucked sweet milk, felt arms, smelled skin and sweat. So when the absence came, it came as chaos, a cleaving apart of something that felt like one, and impossible to separate. It reorganized Mom’s vision of the universe.

  Papa never remarried, but the absence remained, as fixed and sure as a presence. Stories grew up. Each story has served the teller in its own way: Grand-mère, Papa, Mom. Now it’s my turn.

  Papa, the assistant to a famous landscape painter named M. Altier, was a boy of twenty-one fresh out of his service in the European theater, with dreams and fears of a future in art. He hadn’t seen as much on his tour as others, but he had seen enough to shake his insides around so that no matter where he went he brought along a queasy, churned-up belly and a nervous habit of looking over his shoulder. Working with the landscape painter calmed him: the artist settled into his work so deeply, he painted as though nothing had ever happened before or would happen again, as if the strokes of color on canvas made up the entire history of the world.

  They were in France, he and his famous artist, preparing a study of snow in a winter pasture, the myriad colors of snow in February. He set out the famous artist’s easel and his ivory paint, his yellow ochre, raw sienna, and viridian. He put out a stretched and gessoed canvas and a variety of camel’s hair brushes, set out a chair to sit in and drink Earl Grey tea and watch M. Altier choose his brushstrokes.

  The sun was wan on the field and the sky was an anemic blue. A breeze passed through the meadow, stirring the snow on the branches of the hemlock trees. M. Altier made some brushstrokes. He was an intense man, frowning at the canvas, scowling at the field as if he could intimidate it into becoming a painting.

  Papa’s feet got cold. He turned up the collar of his coat and ducked between two rails of the fence. The cows were away in the barn or in another pasture, so there were no tracks in the snow that day. The birds were quiet.

  A dark shape caught his eye, across the field where it backed up into the woods. It was large enough to be a calf, but there were no tracks. Animate? A rock? Dead? As he came closer, he saw a person in an impossible tangle of dark clothes.

  Papa stared, as if at a flower. She was tiny and bone thin, with skin the color of burnt sienna paint. Her clothes were tattered and her lips were blue. Finally he dared touch her. Cold skin. Eyelids flickered at the touch.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, his hand awkward on her cheek.

  “Je ne parle pas français,” she responded, her voice surprisingly loud and firm.

  “Do you speak English?”

  No response.

  “Can I help you?”

  No response.

  He had never found a beautiful young woman lying in the snow before. He had seen beautiful women in rags, their skin taut around their cheekbones like a stretched canvas, their eyes hollowed by something he didn’t want to understand. As an officer he had chosen which way his soldiers should run, when they should shoot, and when they should retreat, whether to use shells or cartridges. He knew how to gesso a canvas and to nod politely when a maid served him a dish. He had pretty good aim with a clay pigeon. None of these skills seemed particularly relevant at the moment. The woman lay still in the snow.

  The absurd thought came into his mind that he should ask her what to do next.

  “What should I do next?”

  No response.

  A panic overcame him, and he suddenly decided that no one would ever know if he just left her there. He walked briskly back toward M. Altier.

  Tracks.

  He had left tracks to and fro. He stopped and turned toward the girl, toward the artist. M. Altier would be getting cold. He might even fire Papa.

  He turned and ran back toward the girl, where he seized her little body and flung it into an awkward fireman’s carry (luckily he knew nothing about first aid or hypothermia, because if he did he would know he’d almost killed her). He ran back toward M. Altier with her bumpity-bumping against his back.

  “Look what I found!” Papa called out. “Look what I found!” He pulled her from his shoulder and held her out, cradled in his arms, her head hanging back. Papa’s eyes were wild.

  They left the easel there, and the paints that slowly froze, and the camel’s hair paintbrushes that were ruined from not being cleaned. They left a few brushstrokes of a snowy field, an exploration of colors, for the sky and the wan sun.

  She lived, of course. She lived to drink soup and warm tea, and then to eat cheese, and bread and meat and a sausage and more soup and six oranges in a row, and to sleep on a bed with sheets and blankets, and wake up again and eat some more. She lived to arrive home with Papa in the states four months later, not just married but pregnant. She spoke halting French and no English. She couldn’t read or write. In fact some have argued that the marriage wasn’t valid since she didn’t know her age and couldn’t write her name. Her only identification had been a set of false papers of unknown origin that meant little to anyone but the Gestapo. Papa made his first big marital purchase before they returned home: an identity for his wife. Her name was now Anna, and whatever it had been before was gone. She was a French citizen, now an American immigrant.

  It was a disaster. Anna often seemed flustered, embarrassed by things no one else could understand, like sitting down at the dinner table together and picking up a fork. She picked at her vegetables. Grand-mère hissed that she was thinking more of herself than her baby. Anna went outside one day onto the porch and then she was just gone. Papa, frantic, looked all over the garden, the orchard, out into the woods. She came back at the end of the day without explanation and no one knew what to do with her anymore.

  Grand-mère, for whom force was the only way to relate, tried to use that force to make Anna who she wanted her to be. She looked at Anna and saw not her high cheekbones or intelligent brown eyes, not her patient work at understanding and accepting a foreign culture. She saw not her resilience in the face of having lost more than the son Grand-mèr
e lost to the war, but also everything else taken for granted—she saw only a Gypsy, a dark mysterious creature who acted on impulses Grand-mère couldn’t accept because they didn’t make sense to her. She tried to train Anna how to use the proper utensils at the proper time, to smile and nod in polite company, to wear knee-length maternity dresses from Saks Fifth Avenue without her face going blank with shame. Papa lurked at the edge of the scene with his paintbrushes and easel, choosing out of sheer confusion to document the occasion in oils.

  And then Mom was born, and Grandma was gone off the porch again, this time not returning for dinner, or for breakfast the next morning, or to feed her crying daughter or to prove Grand-mère wrong.

  It’s a piece of luck to be loved by an American aristocrat. That’s what people say. But which did she call better luck: in Europe, a family who loved her and a world that wanted her dead? Or privilege, power, and a family in America who couldn’t see her at all, to whom her true self might as well be invisible? Papa had decided to marry a Gypsy mostly out of impulse, out of some sadness he had gathered in the war like wool, out of love for Anna, who she was and who she was not, and he made his family angry. But Anna’s acceptance of his proposal, her own love or shame or logic, has been lost along with her, abandoned like a baby.

  BAGHDAD—AUGUST 2005

  Two more volunteers moved in yesterday, a man and a woman from California. The man slept on the floor on top of blankets and I shared the bed with the woman. They ask me when they can go outside. I say it could be awhile. They ask me what I have seen. I tell them about the interviews I’ve conducted, the woman whose family burst into flame, the boy without legs. As I talk I watch the woman’s freckled face pinch in. The man keeps looking off to the side, out toward the balcony. They can hardly stand to listen. The volunteers rummage through the cupboards on the wall and fire up the camp stove I have yet to touch, making rice with canned tuna in it, a sprinkle of paprika on top. I share the food with them and then we go out onto the balcony to the strange and unexpected sound of a song.

  We can’t tell where it’s coming from—somewhere out on the street past the barricades—a man’s voice. I don’t know the song, but don’t need to know it to understand.

  “Do you think it’s a suicide bomber?” the woman asks, looking at me.

  “I think it’s a man singing,” I say.

  Just across the river, past the Green Zone, there was a harp that looters left in the museum parkade, at least the pieces they didn’t want. It might have been the oldest stringed instrument in the world. What ancient notes are left? Where are they stashed away? Someone is willing to sing. A song of peace or a song of war, I don’t know.

  NEW JERSEY—JULY 2005

  Kris’s staff sergeant, Benja, didn’t answer my question about the girl right away. Instead he wrote, I thought some more about what Kris’s gift might be. Just forget it. His ideas were impossible. I’m sorry if that sounds harsh, but it’s the naked truth.

  I tried again. It seems like lots of impossible things happened over there. I found Kris’s journal and read what he did. Maybe when enough is impossible, you start to give up. But I want to honor his memory.

  This time he responded quickly. What happened to Kris happens all the time—but it was impossible for him. Maybe you’re right, maybe because watching good-hearted soldiers kill innocent people became my normal, I don’t have room anymore for hope, risks, and secrets. I have room for my three daughters, my wife, and a little bit of peace. I’m sorry I’m not being helpful. By the way, the girl is an orphan named Isra.

  That was the thing about Kris. He made the impossible possible, and then, when he got it in his head, the possible impossible. Kris got scholarship after scholarship. He got to make grids out of wild lupine fields, counting rare Karner Blue caterpillars at the edges of rivers. He had his dissertation planned. It would be the most complete study to date of the biological memory of monarchs, and it would set him up for a lifetime of work cracking that code: how an insect can follow the trail of its great-great-grandparents without a single thought, aim perfectly at each roosting tree on a 2,000-mile journey.

  And then one day the scholarship didn’t come in. Kris was no less brilliant. Some functionary in an office somewhere got sand in his eyes and gave the money to the other guy.

  Kris was about to enter his last year of school and he could’ve tried to get a loan or knock on Mom and Dad’s door. But he ranted about enslaving science to big business, crossed his arms when our parents were mentioned. He had cast off his future as a stockbroker and he would not go back that way again.

  But I knew what he really felt because I had felt the same way then I was nineteen and ran away. I stood witness to the backstory—nights spent sobbing and picking at his skin like a boy infected with scabies. Boiling over, appliance-wrecking fits of rage. I held his hand and belonged with him to this world of exile.

  This time, when his scholarship fell through, the man who at eighteen had petitioned for exemption from the draft as a conscientious objector—horrifying Dad into lectures and tirades—now went out without asking anyone’s advice and enlisted in the infantry. Not just the army. The infantry.

  When I asked him, all he said was, “I’d rather work for the United States for four years than wear a lab coat with Merck on the pocket for the rest of my life.”

  And where was I? Sprinting from waitress job to waitress job like I was trying to win a relay. Maybe I should have been scared for him but I was just mad. “Are you stupid?” I asked. “Why not just wait a year and try again?”

  “It’s like a new caterpillar skin,” he said, batting his thick eyelashes, innocent as any soldier will ever be. “I’m slipping into it because I got too big for the last one, and then in four years I’ll slip it back off again and cruise on by.”

  And that was it. That was when he left me. What right did I have to hang onto him when I was running? I fumed and sulked. I didn’t see him off to basic training and forgot to call for a month.

  Kris made up with me, but he fought against becoming a soldier. Pure elegance was his weapon. When they told him to sit up, he sat up. When an officer was nearby, he saluted. He spit-shined his boots and scrubbed every stain out of his uniform. Perfection—more effective than Kevlar at keeping your superiors’ verbal bayonets out of your heart. The army counts on pushing people beyond themselves and into loyalty. Kris put himself one step ahead, nodded when they talked about brotherhood, and shouted “Hooah” with the best of them. He considered himself free.

  And then the US declared a preemptive attack on Iraq. Six months later, Kris’s unit was informed of its impending deployment.

  Behind Mrs. Bird, out the window, I can see a purple geranium tucked against the rising stalk of a delphinium. Coneflowers. White alyssum. Set against the window, Mrs. Bird’s shirt almost clashes with the burgundy fabric of the chair behind her. I’ve come back to her garden room again, come to call because when I visit I feel welcome, safe, like family should feel, and there seem to be questions only she can answer.

  “Why did you know Grandma?” I accuse, pulling myself up on the seat. “How do you know all these things? I’ve never understood whose friend you were.”

  Mrs. Bird stops working on the tea and looks at me. “Well. You know what happened to your Uncle Jack, right?”

  My Great-Uncle Jack, Papa’s brother, came home from the war in pieces. He only lived into his early twenties. I say, “I know Uncle Jack hurt himself and never got better. Is that what you mean?”

  “When he fell down that ladder on the navy ship, he broke almost every bone in his body. He needed help to do anything. So I came to your Grand-mère’s house every day to take him to the garden and help him set up his paints. His hands worked, but his arms were very weak. It forced him to do abstracts, like these—” she points to the fantastic flowers above us. “Really, the injury cornered him into his best work.”

  “Uncle Jack did those?”

  “Didn’t I say that?”


  “No, I’m sure you never did.”

  She shakes her head. “Anyway, I helped take care of him.”

  “And so you got to see the whole thing happen.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. But I was there when your mother was born.”

  “You were there? In the hospital?”

  “I was there. In your great-grandmother’s house.”

  She knows more about me than I do. Defiant, I say, “Grand-mère never would have allowed that.”

  Mrs. Bird laughs. “You’re right. But Anna couldn’t help breaking the rules.”

  “She did it on purpose.”

  Mrs. Bird wrinkles her brow. “She was so quiet. Sometimes I just couldn’t understand what she was thinking.”

  “Tell me about Papa. Did Grandma love him? Hate him? Or was she just numb?”

  Mrs. Bird doesn’t answer at first. Then, “I don’t know. Your papa, Louis, was so in love with her. But he didn’t know what to make of her. He gave her roses, and when they wilted on the table and the petals fell, he was furious. He made little watercolors of her, her face, her hands in her lap, little pieces of her that he treasured. When the paint dried he just sulked around until he could sit her down for the next one. I just don’t think he could have loved her enough, Madeline.”

  “There was enough to sleep with him. And marry him and travel back to New Jersey with him.”

  “Think about her options, Madeline. Wouldn’t you have done the same?”

  “Maybe. But I still don’t like it.”

  “It was war. Everyone survived however they could. I can’t even say she didn’t love your grandfather.”

  I shrug.

  “Before she told me, I couldn’t see her story behind those hunted eyes, and I don’t think anyone else ever really knew her. It’s hard to explain. She was gorgeous, like you and your mom. Tiny. So embarrassed by our way of doing things. She told me that where she came from the women go into a sort of hiding when they’re expecting. They certainly don’t wear sweet little designer dresses and sit in the parlor with the dinner guests.”