Echo House

by Ward Just

  Ahead of them was the tiny mairie, with its tricolor hanging from a staff over the entrance, and under the tricolor was a squad of German soldiers, all down. They had been placed against the wall of the mairie and shot, their bodies torn to pieces by the fusillade. Many had been shot full in the face at close range. Their weapons lay scattered here and there. The German soldiers looked scarcely older than schoolboys, even the lieutenant in charge. Their haircuts and soft skin gave them away.

  Fred braked and they sat looking at the mess. They could hear low moans, death rattles from the mortally wounded, and other human sounds they did not identify. Axel forced himself to look closely, and remembered then something that he had heard from one of his officers in Scotland. Such moments produce in the witness a kind of megalomania, because you are alive and everyone else is dead. A dangerous time, the officer added. A time to behave with modesty, and to believe only what is in front of your eyes. The officer was a fool, but Axel remembered what he said.

  Then Axel heard Fred's noisy breathing as he opened the door and got out, leaning against the hood, bracing his elbows to focus the Leica. His hands were shaking so badly he could not get the camera properly to his eye. At last he squeezed the shutter with his arms held straight out and his face turned to one side, as if he were warding off an attacker. His eyes were closed. He took off his helmet and hurled it into the back and put the carbine on the seat and stood silently a moment, undone, disarmed, and unprotected, the useless Leica in his trembling hand.

  Partisans, Fred said softly. Outstanding, just outstanding.

  Didn't they do a fine job, he went on. The Germans massacred the villagers and the partisans massacred the Germans.

  That's the logical sequence, he said.

  There can't be any other explanation.

  And it's impressive, he added. An outstanding job they did.

  Shall we liberate a Schmeisser? he asked. His voice was high and trembling, almost like a child's. It's a fine weapon. It's better than anything we have. These carbines are toys.

  But Axel did not want to liberate a Schmeisser or anything else. He wanted to get out of the city of the dead. The stench of it, rising each minute with the sun, was suffocating. And he did not believe Fred's sequence of events, at least not in the logical, matter-of-fact way he presented them. Something else had happened here, to sweep clean the village, to come through it with a scythe and kill ever/thing that moved, even the animals. He touched the stock of the carbine, seeking reassurance.

  Get moving, he said. Right now.

  They were exposed, as exposed as the villagers or the Germans, and unless they escaped at once they would forfeit life, too. There was nothing more to be done in this place. But Fred remained standing in the road.

  Do you mind driving? he said. I'm not myself.

  Fred shuffled around the car to the passenger's side while Axel heaved himself behind the wheel. He placed the carbine across his lap. Fred was utterly withdrawn now, sitting quietly with his hands in his lap, humming some Broadway show tune. Axel put the Jeep in gear and moved off past the mairie, and it was then that he saw the German scout car parked at the side of the building. Three men lounged inside it, smoking cigarettes, Gaston and the two others they had met the night before when Fred fixed the carburetor. Nadège stood beside the scout car, her arms folded across her chest, watching. They had been there the entire time, just out of sight around the corner of the mairie. Nadège seemed to be in charge.

  Hello again, Fred said. What do you suppose she wants? What is she doing here at this time?

  Axel said, Be quiet.

  Only twenty yards separated them, but Nadège and Axel stared at each other across a chasm. No question here who the intruders were, who belonged and who didn't belong, and who would be made to give way. The steady malevolence of her glare was unambiguous, and Axel knew without a doubt that she wished him dead and was entirely capable of seeing to it herself. He put his hand on Fred's arm, warning him to be still and to make no sudden movement. Gaston and the two others were nervous, and there were already so many dead.

  Nadège seemed too young to be so fierce and self-possessed, but of course for years she had managed on her own, guarding secrets, her own secrets and the secrets of her community, this distant valley in Aquitaine with its churches, vineyards, and villages. The war had transformed it utterly, but the war would not last forever and when the war ended life would resume as before, except that there would be many more secrets. Axel was suddenly at a loss—and beside him was Fred Greene, he who had always been so resourceful and steadfast, grinning and humming one of Cole Porter's society melodies.

  The three men climbed from the car and stood beside Nadège, the four looking like statues in a village square, some muscular tableau by Rodin, implacable in defense of what was theirs—the results of the revenge they had wrought. This was private, having to do with them alone. Permissible under the rules they lived by, but private also. Surrounded by dead boys, it was obvious they believed themselves heroic. They were so few and their enemy so numerous. When one of the Germans cried out in a high trill of pain, Gaston looked at him, reached into the scout car, shouldered his rifle, and shot him where he lay. The trill ceased, and they were alone again in the appalling echo of the explosion. Fred put his hands over his eyes and bent his head.

  Nadège had not moved. She remained standing, head forward, arms crossed on her chest. In her summer dress and red beret she seemed a stranger to this environment and opposed to it, the dead and dying soldiers in their heavy uniforms and ugly weapons. She occupied another space altogether, yet seemed entirely at ease and familiar. She had not looked at the German soldier before Gaston fired and did not look at him now. She seemed purely unafraid and relaxed in her own zone of profound indifference. The soldier had surely found his Valhalla, good luck to him. The Germans had no place here, so distant from their homeland. They were the invaders, and according to the rules of war deserved their fate no less than an arsonist caught in his own fire. In war, force rules. Yet—this, too, had to be said, although Axel did not say it—they looked so young, too young to have paid such a price. They were boys who had loved their country, had loved it in France no less than in Germany.

  Nadège took a little hitch in her skirt and opened her mouth to speak. Axel waited for her words, Rodin's beautiful heroine finding voice at last, words to explain these dreadful events. He imagined what they were before he heard them. Malevolent forces oppose us and these forces are more powerful than we are. They are unyielding. They are incoherent. But we understand them better than we understand ourselves. When we are put in the way of events we cannot fathom, among people whose souls are mysterious, then we must alter the events or eliminate the souls. We carelessly stray beyond our boundaries to a place where we do not know the rules. We are far from home and our duties are only abstract and half-remembered. But we cannot decide, just this once, to neglect them. Our own survival is at stake, meaning the future of the known world ... Nadège smiled. Gaston and his two comrades elevated their weapons, and then Axel heard the click-click of the Leica. Fred was taking their portraits, an act so startling that they ducked their heads and scrambled behind the scout car, all but Nadège, who remained patiently standing as if she were prepared to wait for a thousand years.

  Axel's fingers closed around the stock of his carbine. His head swam in the heat, his vision blurred and fractured. The sun was directly overhead. He believed he would have to kill her, but he did not see how he could go about it. There were only seconds remaining and then he would have to decide. On the margins of his vision he saw general movement among the young Germans lying under the tricolor. First one and then another, the dead were rising before them, rising painfully but with purpose, rising on wrecked limbs, rising woodenly as if hauled by invisible wires. The lieutenant was looking directly at Nadège in her summer dress. He had a gaping wound in his neck and croaked when he spoke, trying now to rally his command, who were swaying like wraiths as t
hey gained their feet. He held a Schmeisser in one hand, and the other was missing, the wrist sealed by a leather plug. He awkwardly raised his arms, pointing the heavy Schmeisser at Nadège. She did not see him. She appeared to see nothing at all as she stood motionless in the heat, German infantry coming to life around her.

  Axel whispered a warning before the first shots were fired. In the pandemonium she dropped from sight. He knew in his heart she was hit. Her head jerked forward, the red beret filling and pluming, and then she was down. She was unarmed, without means to defend herself. Gaston and his comrades began to fire from positions behind the scout car. Three Germans were standing and they never retreated or sought cover or bothered to aim their weapons, moving the gray barrels from side to side as you would a common garden hose. Axel hesitated only a moment, then threw the Jeep into gear and raced away. There was more firing before they were around a bend in the road and out of sight. Beside him Fred Greene continued to snap pictures, humming loudly. Axel recognized a march from one of Gustav Mahler's symphonies.

  They drove off into the milky noonday sun. Neither of them looked back or spoke. Axel was incapable of speech, his thoughts in memory's shadow, the shadows deepening. He was no longer certain of what he had seen and its meaning. He drove erratically, the Jeep spinning from side to side, catching ruts and hurtling off center. The wheel was hard to hold. Axel could not find accord; his body refused to synchronize as the shadows grew darker still. He wanted Fred to shut up but could not find voice. Two miles up the road Axel jerked the wheel, steering the Jeep onto the rough shoulder of the road, where it swung left and right, skidding, and then detonated the land mine.

  The chassis was thrown high in the air and landed in the ditch upside down. Fred Greene's skull was crushed, but it took him a while to die. Axel was luckier. The windshield missed his chest by a foot, and he survived, terribly injured. Later, at the inevitable inquiry, the partisans claimed no knowledge of the accident. Americans were not in the vicinity. Among themselves, they called it justice, revenge of a kind. Gaston had placed the mine early that morning, and the Americans were merely unlucky.

  "You asked me what happened. And the answer is: I don't know what happened. I don't know to this day. After we left the city of the dead, my mind's blank. They said it was a land mine, and maybe it was. They told me the Jeep was mangled and that there was barely enough of poor Fred to carry away. A friendly gendarme took me to the provincial hospital, where I remained for weeks, unconscious. Once they discovered my identity and determined that I was able to travel, they sent me to London for the very finest in medical attention, et cetera. Where there were surgeons familiar with wartime wounds. Where my devoted family would be nearby. And I remained unconscious until the moment I heard your mother's voice—"

  He remembered the humidity and medicinal aroma and Sylvia looking at him with the quizzical expression she favored at moments of high emotion. Moments later the pain began. When she spoke—not to him but to someone else in the room, her voice as seductive as ever, speaking as she would to a very close friend—he suspected the worst. So he did not move. He did not let them know he was awake and listening hard, listening for subtext and nuance, for he believed they never told the truth in hospitals. It was necessary to lie quietly and eavesdrop and then crack the code, as in a clandestine operation.

  They stood near an open window. There was a soft breeze, and Sylvia was smoking one of her English cigarettes. He held his breath, not moving, and then he heard her say that he had never been sick a day in his life, had never experienced the normal anxieties and reversals. He was a man who did whatever he damn pleased and was unaccustomed to restrictions. Then she laughed brightly, and the man she was with, evidently the doctor, asked the obvious question, to which she replied, No, Axel Behl was not a professional soldier. He was not a professional anything. He went places and advised people. He was very good at giving advice. He wanted to be a professional politician because politics was the family business, like a Southern plantation or a bank. Sylvia laughed again without mirth. She said, "He protested, denied it up and down, but I know he wanted to be President of the United States. Can you imagine? My husband never thought small; give him that. When Axel saw something he wanted, he saw no reason not to take it. Have you ever been to Washington, Doctor? It's the midlands with monuments. A dreadful small-minded provincial town where the President's a kind of doge presiding over a Council of Ten. Lives like one, too, in a white palace in front of a huge square, and Axel wanted that more than he wanted anything." He could not hear what the doctor said next, and perhaps he said nothing at all. But he remembered very clearly Sylvia's long equivocal sigh, a kind of yawn, the sound a cat makes when it awakes from deep sleep. "Thank God there's no chance of that now," she said.

  Axel was silent again. His voice had grown so soft that his son had to strain to hear him. He picked up his glass of whiskey and set it down again, looking searchingly at Alec, then shaking his head, as if he had suddenly remembered something much more important.

  He said, "As the count told us, human beings are fragile."

  "The count," Alec began.

  "Amnesia can be a blessing," Axel went on. "But you can't have it any time you want it, and when you get it, it's there to stay. It's the man who came to dinner and won't go home. He's there every hour of every day, blocking the view. He will not be moved."

  Alec was back in the city of the dead, the birds picking through the bodies, the dog collapsing, the French girl and the one-handed lieutenant, events without a logical beginning or end. There seemed to be no rational cause for any of it, unless the cause was the war itself, in which strange things happened, as every soldier knows. His father seemed to have found something nearly supernatural in a city swept clean of life, implying that God had stumbled and crushed the city as thoughtlessly as you would an anthill. But God had nothing to do with it. Alec thought of the townspeople and the German soldiers, and then suddenly did not want to think of the city of the dead any longer. It was his father's story, and his father was welcome to it, especially Nadège. Alec regretted knowing the details and wished his father had kept them to himself. He wished that he had not asked his question.

  "We were outgunned, you see," Axel said.

  Alec nodded at this non sequitur.

  "And Fred was so god damned useless."

  "I'm sorry," Alec said, not knowing what else to say.

  "It's all incredibly vivid," Axel went on. "The mayor, the count, the slaughter in the square and the Germans in the courtyard of the mairie. And Nadège, and Fred breaking down."

  "Almost like a dream," the boy said.

  "Not exactly a dream," his father said.

  Alec heard the sarcasm and colored.

  "I don't know what happened to her," Axel said. "She was there one minute and gone the next and there wasn't anything I could do about it. I'm sure she survived." He looked up and smiled, his fingers touching his chin. "It seems to me that she tipped her beret before she disappeared. That's what I'd like to believe. And I'm sure that's the way it was. God, she was a strong character. A beautiful young Frenchwoman trying to get through the war. Did I tell you that her husband was in one of the German concentration camps?"

  "Wouldn't you like to know what happened to them?" Alec said hurriedly. "The count? Nadège and Nadège's husband?"

  Axel shrugged.

  "To know if they were ever reunited?"

  "I'm sure they were," Axel said. "They'd been through so much, it would be unjust for it not to work out for them. I doubt I can find the village, though. We were to the back of beyond. We'd lost our way."

  "You probably could," Alec said. "Sure you could."

  "It's somewhere in Aquitaine," Axel said doubtfully. "That's all I remember. I do have Nadège's photograph; the only undamaged object they found in the wreckage was Fred's Leica. Except at the end the film had run out and poor Fred was shooting with an empty camera." Axel went on to describe the Leica, beautiful thing, small enough t
o fit in your hand, made in Germany before the war.

  The boy had pulled his chair up close to his father, the better to hear each word. It was easier now, listening to him talk after the fact. Before, it was as if he were still in France, describing an incident that had happened the day before. He knew there were gaps in the story, but that was inevitable, natural in the circumstances. War stories were volatile affairs, even in the movies. Still, Axel was more animated than he had been in months. He seemed to have forgotten the pain in his back and the other pains here and there. His scar was not so pronounced. Alec remembered his father in the English hospital, motionless in bed, unable to speak. The boy had no idea what had happened to him, except that he had been badly wounded and was lucky to be alive. The hospital was crowded with wounded, many of them sightless or without limbs. It was an atmosphere thick with violence and pain, and at times they seemed to be the same thing. It was all so mysterious. When he asked his mother for an explanation, she put him off; later, dear, when you're older. When he was home from school they talked in the early evenings, while she had a cocktail before going out to dinner. The room was thick with smoke from her English Ovals, and they listened to Eddy Duchin on the phonograph. This was their time together, and whenever he spoke of his father she either changed the subject or replied with an anecdote from before the war. He remembered her cocking her head, listening to Duchin, tapping her foot as if she were in a cabaret. Then the doorbell would ring twice and she would stub out her cigarette, kiss him goodbye, look into the mirror, and disappear into an automobile idling at the curb. She always looked lovely, blowing him a kiss from the doorway. And when she returned, sometimes early, sometimes very late, she would go at once to her room and write in her journal. She never rose before noon.

  Remembering those days now, Alec was filled with remorse and confusion: his father near death, his mother so melancholy. He was unable to connect that time with this one and wondered if there was no connection. Did life pass in episodes, each episode complete in itself and without obvious direction? Did the events of a life drift like rafts on a featureless sea, pushed by random winds and pulled by a remorseless tide? His father and mother had floated far apart, but it appeared to him that he was nominated to keep them both in sight. It seemed to him that they had changed utterly and he had not changed at all. He was a little boy then and a young man now but had not changed inside, except that he was alert to winds and gales. He did not understand why his parents were at such odds; collapse had come so suddenly. Alec looked across the table to the portraits of Behl men on the wall above the ruins of the Thanksgiving turkey in its tray on the sideboard. His father had finished with the Leica and now was silent, staring at the ceiling. He was very far away, his finger moving to the beat of the clock's pendulum. Alec put his hand on his father's arm, conscious of the rough tweed and the soft muscle beneath.