Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

by Richard Powers

  Of the much touted far-reaching political changes, the League of Nations and the Weimar Republic were little more than failed experiments. The Russian Revolution, entrenched more firmly, cannot be denied. What exactly it signifies, however, is open to debate. In short, the political revampings were far-reaching only in that they established a system so volatile it broke down almost at once into a second, far more horrible conflict.

  Perhaps the war’s central consequence is not the first that comes to mind. Europe lost its innocence and importance by pushing warfare to the cusp point: fighting making itself known to itself through the irreversible practice of total war. Every citizen, not just paid soldiers, now became a direct protagonist in war in ways never before imagined and never afterward escaped. From aerial bombardment to the sinking of passenger vessels to the economic front, war’s totality now included each individual. Nowhere was this new totality clearer than in the occupation of enemy territory.

  The German program for victory, derived from Clausewitz, called for total subjection of occupied territory through the cultivation of fear in civilian populations. Their strict, timetabled march through Belgium did not allow for the terrifying setbacks of guerrilla warfare. With turn-of-the-century naïveté, the Germans tried to solve the problem of snipers firing on soldiers through a series of public proclamations. To the German General Staff, whatever was proclaimed became legal, even if it flew in the face of every war convention yet laid down. Citizens found guilty of subversive activities would be shot at once or sent to Germany for hard labor. And, establishing the most important intellectual precedent in this century, they declared that each entire village would be held hostage and punished for the work of so much as one rebellious bullet.

  The German army of occupation legislated what peace had been powerless to promote and the atomic bomb was to enforce as a terminal inheritance: every human being was now to be held accountable for its neighbor.

  But in the early days of the war, none of these consequences was immediately obvious. The war had reached a deadlock; month after month, commanders sent men over the tops of trenches, refusing to believe that the last debacle would be repeated. At the Somme, desperate for a breakthrough, the British regressed to the eighteenth-century tactic of the “slow walk”: thousands of men almost linking arms, walking stately into waiting machine-gun nests.

  Europe was stalemated in a static front. War had reached that transmuting moment. It had become self-reflexive, self-knowing. It would now go on forever. It was about itself.

  Yet on the morning of November 25, 1915, New Yorkers awoke to a Tribune whose headlines declared:

  GREAT WAR ENDS CHRISTMAS DAY

  FORD TO STOP IT

  Chapter Eight

  Static Front

  Each man would die of the disease of his own class if war did not reconcile all the microbes.

  —Jean Renoir, Grand Illusion

  Willy’s shotgun used exploding shells. These made it easier for the old Socialist to continue hunting ducks, which had become a good deal smaller and faster than when he was thirty. “Evolution,” he explained to Hubert. “We hunters keep bagging the fat, slow ones and the survivors are breeding a super race. The last century had it easier. They didn’t have evolution yet.”

  Will would sit in his duck blind before sunup, his pants all beshitted by ulcerative colitis, waiting for a flock to fly overhead. Any birds would do, since he could no longer see well enough to care. If the probabilities seemed reasonable, he’d raise his shotgun over his head, close his eyes, and try to cover his ears with his extended upper arms. He would have liked hunting a whole lot more without the noise. Releasing both barrels dropped birds with surprising frequency.

  The same exploding buckshot shells should have made Hubert deadly at the twenty yards’ distance he was from the detonating crew. But he shot hastily, falling off his bicycle. Possibly, in believing this handful of Belgian engineers to be the advance guard of a German army several million strong, he had not felt the need to aim. Buckshot, scattered in any direction approximating east, would necessarily contribute to thinning out the enemy. Inexperience, too, weakened his aim. This was, after all, Hubert’s first real war.

  For these reasons, Hubert’s buckshot spray, which ordinarily would have cleaned a butterfly from the side of a barn at five hundred paces, did not make an auspicious contribution to the opening of the war. The left barrel sliced way wide, most of the lead pellets falling into the Meuse tributary that the Belgians meant to unbridge. The pellets lay in the sluggish current, growing sizable algae beards over the next several decades.

  Part of the right barrel went into the dirt, throwing a clump of chick-pea gravel into the groin of one engineer. This man doubled up in pain and went down, thinking he was dead. In fact, he sustained no permanent injury at all. The location of the wound, its slightness, and the pathetic, ribald thoughts he’d had on impact might have made a good barroom story in middle age had not the fellow gone and gotten killed only ten days later, brained by a somewhat larger piece of masonry dislodged by the German 420-millimeter siege guns brought up against Liège.

  A third spray of shot scattered into the arm of another engineer, slamming him to the ground. This man felt only the vague impression of having grazed his sleeve against something soft. He felt nothing more of his wound until after the commotion had died. Then he saw the blood welling up under his sleeve. Cutting his shirt off at the shoulder, revealing the sticky mass of the wound, he fainted with pain proportionate to the visual horror. He was sent off to Antwerp in the north, to a hospital specializing in the new techniques of prosthetic parts.

  His new arm, mobile and cosmetically passable, kept him out of the theater of war over the next five years. Much later, on days when morosity did not have him by the throat, he played a game with his grandchildren in which he was a mechanical man, occasionally made by Hitler but just as frequently a spontaneous product of Borneo or Africa, and they were Pilots, the only race congenitally capable of stopping the metal creature.

  After the danger had passed, after the disturbance came to a quick end, after even the machine gun realized it was the only sound and shut up in embarrassment, the crew rose to their feet to examine the corpse of the enemy that had fired on them. They saw a sight beyond easy explanation. Here was no professional soldier (“murderer,” as Ford had read in McGuffey’s Fourth Eclectic Reader in a section called “Things by Their Right Name”), but a boy with a French face, Dutch shotgun, and Belgian cigarettes, the ones the farmer’s wife had given him that morning.

  Following several rounds of obligatory European debate—only two liters of Burgundy short of being a picnic—most of the men agreed that the child must have been driven mad by the sensationalism in the newspapers circulating everywhere, a madness only remarkable in being a few days ahead of the median. Having decided this, they forged ahead twenty minutes later to decide that they had not much time to decide what to do with the body. They thought some more about this while completing the bridge detonations that had originally startled Hubert.

  The bridge work did not require all the men’s explosives. One or the other said it would be a shame to let any part of Mr. Nobel’s invention go to waste. Dynamite, like the tractor or assembly line, was for the greater use of mankind—a labor-saving device. Why not save on the labor, let alone the cost, involved in digging this crazy boy’s grave?

  The plan won instant approval. The crew planted the remaining charge in a nearby fallow field. The explosion left a middle-sized crater, large enough for Hubert, the shotgun, and his bicycle. (A year later, when Henry Ford spoke with President Wilson about his foolproof plan to end the Great War, he loosened up the President with a joke of his own invention: a man asks to be buried with his Ford because it has pulled him out of every hole so far.)

  With his burial, Hubert finally triggered his long-coveted mass movement. He was at last a revolutionary, the first to occupy a field that would fill to capacity with Belgian and Flemi
sh citizens found guilty on the principle of collective responsibility. After the war, each place, including Hubert’s, would be decorated with white stones bearing the ubiquitous inscription:

  1914

  FUSILLÉE PAR LES ALLEMANDS

  (SHOT BY THE GERMANS)

  The next generation of Belgians made use of the same inscription, with only the date changed.

  In the relative comfort of her policeman father’s house, Wies sought safety from Hubert’s attacks of the night before. She said nothing of the incident to her parents, naturally, who knew little of the boy’s existence. Their plans for their daughter—education, in Paris if possible—kept them from noticing anything so slight as the impediments of reality. There were matters of more concern and excitement loose in the world; her father had taken a knife graze across the neck three days before, and still repeated and clarified the details for his family each night over dinner:

  —A marriage fight, cat-and-dog. Every footer on the force will tell you that that’s the worst a fellow can come across. Give me anything—an armed robber, crazy man, drunken students, auto accident—just don’t send me into matrimonial bliss gone wrong. The Bremmers, on Schunk Straat, married sixteen years. Everyone says here’s an ideal couple. Then the call comes Tuesday the Bremmers are at it, and I say to myself that I’m all in. Sure enough, I come in the front way to break it up, and the two of them turn on me. The little woman charges with a fruit peeler: “My husband’s been beating me for years and I love it. You get out.” And she gives me one across the neck. I’m lucky just to make it out the pantry. Don’t talk to me about international huzza; I’ve got my hands full with the domestic.

  And for many nights running, the family would proceed to lamb with mint jelly or stewed chicken so pungent that no amount of current event could dispel the taste.

  After a few days of hiding out at home, Wies grew used to her safety and so no longer felt or needed it. She wondered about what had come over Hubert. He had always been two parts crazy, laughing like a wolf and slobbering like an infant. But this last trip had been worse. He began by swearing that his brother Peter could not make him return to the Westerwald. He told horrible stories about what he would do to the rich if he ever came across any. Wies tried to quiet him by telling him how dangerous it still was to speak such words in Maastricht, even for a boy. But he only pinched her forearms until she said he was not a boy and could talk as he liked, anywhere.

  Then came the attack. Wies went home afterward and washed out her sex with warm salt water, an old wives’ contraceptive she’d heard about somewhere. Two weeks passed, while she by turns dreaded and hoped for some word from him. Visits from the cousins petered out. She sat safe, anxious, in the sitting room of her father, the law.

  She passed time with the novelty of newspapers. At first the stories made no sense to her, but soon she grew used to their cadences. She thought it strange that the Germans fussed so much over Belgian Limburg while against Dutch Limburg they raised not a finger. She felt the guilt of unearned favoritism. Beyond that, 1914 did not much touch her. She lived in a neutral country. Hubert’s madness was all that she knew of the world’s.

  Bored with her police-state home, certain that Hubert would not in these times return to Germany, and curious about what the boy could find that was more fascinating than she, Wies set out to locate her displaced love, without any leads. His blood mother, ordinarily evasive, was now unreachable. In stabilizing the province for the outbreak of war, Limburg officials put many citizens under house arrest and swept suspicious elements into quarantine. The net caught Hubert’s blood mother, who’d committed no crime greater than wondering publicly which of the two armies, French or German, would be better business.

  Wies had similar problems finding Hubert’s friend Willy. On the day that the Maastricht police, with apologies, released the old man from his monthly revenue stint, Limburg officials picked him up for much tougher grilling. They released him only after he’d agreed to sign thirty-four different documents, oaths, and affidavits. Once free, he could not recall anything he had put his name to. The general gist, though, was that he denounced everything political he’d ever thought or said, and acknowledged that the instant he stopped behaving he’d be back in the jug.

  On the day that Wies came calling for him, Will simply closed the doors and windows on her, hoping that no one had seen the girl who knew the boy who heard the man who said the crazy things that the signature denounced. That swallowed the fly. That Jack built. That was going to St. Ives. Under this policy of strict noninvolvement, Willy survived a good, long, apolitical while, and became among the first in the area to enjoy the boon of postwar, government-subsidized housing.

  Aside from Hubert’s streetball friends—and Wies would have gone to them if she thought they could have helped—only one other person in all Maastricht either knew or cared about Hubert’s existence. This was the one person Hubert forbade her ever to try to meet: his brother Peter. Hubert kept the two from meeting simply because for two years he had bragged to Peter that he never knew any of the names of the women he had “done over.” Until Wies, Hubert’s claim was at least as valid as the Kaiser’s assertion that Germany had to invade Belgium to prevent a French violation. The logic of the null set cannot be challenged, and a false antecedent implies anything.

  When Wies arrived in his life, Hubert, for the first time accountable to a nonempty set of done-over women, could no longer make the claim honestly. So he simply kept her away from Peter and hoped to make the brag last a little longer, absence of evidence to the contrary. He was ashamed to tell his adopted brother that he returned to the same woman again and again, grew familiar with her, even called her by name. Somewhere he had learned that sex and familiarity could not negotiate except unilaterally. He was not ashamed to admit to one or the other, only the two in combination.

  For her part, Wies thought Hubert kept her from Peter out of shame for the other. The fellow—cast on poor Hubert by the machinations of the state—must have some fearful abnormality: perhaps he was a leper, or a Swede. Only on the day when she set out willfully for the tobacco shop did she worry that the brother, too, might be touched; perhaps a pathological Catholic. Hubert had always enjoyed her religious scoldings when they played the kissy game. Peter might be a reverse sort of apostate. Most likely, she’d get a beating from both brothers: once for being a devout, once for wantonness. She slunk, head down, toward the tobacco shop as if the whole process of heaping up new pain were somehow inevitable.

  Not pain but much the reverse waited for Wies at the widow’s shop. She recognized Peter at once from the folded-up photo Hubert had given her the night he went away. Even with a burlap clerk’s smock replacing the beautiful dark suit he’d worn that May Day, even where retail confines destroyed the airy memory of that muddy road, Peter wore an unmistakable smirk of confidence as much a product of the arch of bone around his eye as of his personality. He dispensed cigars to the customer ahead of Wies as if he were a hero of that school of novel, still popular in this year of dynastic crumbling, a royal heir forced in infancy into peasant upbringing by some vast conspiracy.

  Wies’s turn came to be served, and she stepped forward to the counter. Peter looked up from dirtying his hands in the greasy cash till and at once put off his business face, letting his eyes dilate. She was afraid for a moment that he recognized her: what did he see so arresting? But he said nothing more committing than:

  —Hemel! You are too pretty a woman to be doing your own shopping. And in this sort of shop, too. Where’s your lady’s maid, eh?

  He spoke with mock opprobrium, meaning to imply that no pretty and modern girl could take seriously the taboo on female smoking. Certain of his facial muscles went so far as to suggest that her being here in the smoke pit even excited him.

  Wies felt a sudden springing up of well-being, a relief almost as physical as the one she felt each evening on shedding her dress stays. She was back on familiar territory; it had been too
long since she had sat in the parlor with a Wednesday admirer. Peter’s speech, as familiar to her as the Christmas story from St. Luke, put her at her ease. There would be time for her errand later. Peter’s grace, like a lazy evening, had to be taken at its own pace. The moment for her mission had been lost. She would come again to the right moment, after a while. Hubert had been missing for days; rescuing him could wait as long.

  —Yes . . . I’m looking for some small smoking item that might be appropriate for a . . . cousin of mine. Maybe some kind of . . . tobacco that he could . . . smoke.

  —Tobacco for smoking. A novel idea, that. I’m no professor, but I bet the combination might just work.

  Peter had a way of making his speech affable and appealing, drawing his listener into a pact of conspiracy by blowing air out on the first consonants of words, puffing his cheeks, even spitting a little, the way he used to do during his five-year stint in school when he could no longer contain his hilarity at a master’s stupidity.

  —How old did you say this cousin of yours is?

  —I didn’t say, sir. But he’s about your age. Is that important? Different tobaccos for different ages?

  —About my age, hmm? Say, you’re not intending to use this little gift item yourself, are you? You might get big brown splotches breaking out all over your beautiful skin. Look here; see what working in this thankless shop brings me?

  He craned way out over the counter toward her, lifting his head and baring his jugular, so that she could see up under his fine jawline. At the same time, he reached out and put his hand lightly on her nape, guiding her authoritatively toward the blemish.