The oily patriot in the Commissar’s hat had made himself quite clear to the family – history itself expected acquiescence and their full and total agreement. The plan for the property was simple: The house and grounds would serve splendidly as an infirmary for any casualties in any conflict in the unquestionably short time it might be needed, and refusal on their part to cooperate (though surely unthinkable) might necessitate a compulsory purchase. It was hinted that appropriate recompense, in the event of such an outcome, would be determined by a notoriously Jacobean branch of the Estates Office in which the Commissar himself, he told them sweetly, had a first cousin of no little influence. The Commissar gave them a smile that could press olives. He conveyed the news most delicately.
The family in Épernay was a mercenary brood, but not without some sense in it. Angry clouds were mustering to the east where empires rattled their sabers. Russia and Austria-Hungary traded words, and Germany, always Germany, was not so very far away from them. To take umbrage with their grasping government might mean months before the courts; to take umbrage with the Kaiser would mean a great deal more besides. In the early summer of 1914 the winds of change were blowing, and the family in Épernay signed over. They sold their furniture and thumbed their noses and took sail for Martinique directly. The Commissar got his hospital and considered them most foolish. He had thought the grounds most admirable, and especially the maple.
The Épernay Infirmary for the Rehabilitation of Veterans (it had seen three name changes in the last five years) had become more democratic in its guest list since that time. During the torrential fighting at Aisne in 1917 the casualties overran the bedrooms. Soon the drawing room and library were full, and then the stretchers spilled out into the gardens. The lawns had disappeared under tents, and still the men kept coming. The terraced balcony, through the war years, had catered to patients in the hundreds. The dining room had been transformed and was used for operations, its kitchens turned to boiling bandages and sterilizing instruments. Gangrenous limbs were amputated at the same table where game had been carved. The stains it held would never wash clean – the blood of a generation.
Unless Paris fell, the hospital was far enough away that it would not be overrun, but it was close enough to the Western Front that its trade and business remained steady. By the end of 1917 the front had stabilized, and the battles moved further on.
In March of 1918, the hospital’s role changed again to one of convalescence and rehabilitation. The spirit of liberté remained, but égalité and fraternité were discharged. Democracy was put aside, and the hospital was reserved for officers. Reconstitution of their flesh and spirit, it was judged, could be better served in the absence of the common soldier.
Arthur had seen much of this change.
“Do you remember that ambulance, Dermot?”
Arthur had arrived in the second week of May, 1916, in an ambulance choked with rotting flesh and delirious opiate ramblings. He’d come with the crushed and torn and rendered whose cries drowned out the engine. It had been a four-hour ride from the last hospital, the field hospital, a journey he wouldn’t wish on anyone.
At the field station before Épernay, the triage doctors had been busy. They had waded through the piles of mangled men strewn on the ground before them. It was their job to decide who should go under the knife and who would lie out in the rain.
“They called your wounds ‘hopeless’,” Dermot said mistily.
Men with a better chance were going to get help before Arthur. The Lieutenant was lucky to find an ambulance that had room enough to take him, which carried him to the gardens of Épernay, though it might have been Elysium. The men in the ambulance were the rejects. When the orderly at the field hospital shut the ambulance door, he did so on the damned. No one expected them to make it, and he looked relieved to see them gone.
They fit eight men into the tiny ambulance, stacked like sardines and laid out flat. Dermot rode with the driver. Only six survived to hear the crunching pebbles under the tires on the Épernay driveway. Arthur was operated on that day, and twice again on Sunday. It was May 14th, 1916. He remembered it like it was yesterday.
“I waited,” said Dermot. “They wouldn’t tell me anything at first. I sat in that lobby for hours.”
The Lieutenant knew the details from his own medical records. The files gave the facts but lacked the brushstrokes, and they did nothing to show the pain. It read, he’d thought, like a menu: Arthur Malenfer – a dish upon a plate.
For starters, please consider the burns to the side of the face: juicy and disfiguring (though not life threatening) and posing a risk of infection. A suspected fracture of the right forearm is next, likely the ulna, and though mortally insignificant it looks a dreadful mess. The house specialty now follows: two bullet wounds, serious but controllable, very tasty indeed. Both bullets had exited the patient, one through the broken arm, the other through his waist; the chef is proud to say, however, that the organs remain untouched! The dish is very lucky and the wounds have been sown shut; garnish with infection risk (you can’t really have too much!).
But it was the dessert that was disappointing, the dessert that let him down: lung was on the menu, and it all boiled down to air. The chef seemed out of recipes for that poor ingredient he found.
Of the eight broken men who shared the ambulance journey from Aisne to Épernay, only one survived the week. Arthur wasn’t he.
Lieutenant Arthur Malenfer died in the Hôpital des Armées at Épernay on Sunday evening, May 14th, 1916. His burnt poisoned lungs finally gave out, the last of his strength no longer capable of shoring up his chest.
It was to his not inconsiderable surprise, therefore, that his spirit lingered on, and almost three years later, as he told it to Dermot, he was still no clearer as to why.
Arthur’s pleasant seclusion on the frigid patio was interrupted by the intrusion of two fellow patients sneaking outside for a smoke. Arthur still thought of himself as a patient – he couldn’t place himself anywhere else. He couldn’t reasonably think of himself as staff, though by now he’d been at the hospital longer than almost everyone. Most of the staff were medical, of course, and he wasn’t helping anyone, least of all himself. There were janitors and gardeners and orderlies, true, but he wasn’t doing work either. Not having a purpose somehow annoyed him. Am I now the resident ghost? he’d ponder. What the hell am I meant to do? Should he haunt the place? Make a nuisance of himself? Arthur found that his education and experience had prepared him very poorly for a life in the afterlife. He knew little about being a ghost.
His first memory of life, of this new life (this was how he liked to term it), came when he was standing over a bed in the recovery room alone with his own body. There was no one else in the room; the nurses had left them momentarily. He was looking down upon himself and it wasn’t a pleasant sight. In truth, he looked a state.
“I remember thinking: This isn’t good; and that, as they say, was that.”
“You could see yourself? You could see what was going on?”
“Oh, yes. I was apart from it, but it was me. There was no mistake about that.”
Arthur found himself fully aware, not drugged or dazed as his mind had been only seconds before. There was a feeling of cold, as if a breeze was blowing up his backside – as he soon discovered there was. Arthur, the new Arthur, this Arthur (he felt an identity crisis in the making) was dressed in the gown he’d died in, and the damned thing was open at the back. The gap up his backside embarrassed him and was more than a little chilly. Modesty, then, had claimed him first, an admission he later felt shamed by.
I’m dead! I’m really dead!
His cadaver lay prostrate before him. After sorting out his drafty gown, the import of this dawned.
Arthur the spirit gave his prone body a push, a shove on the foot. It felt unusual; that is, it didn’t feel of anything. Well, it did, but not in the usual way. He, his dead he, didn’t feel anything at all. Not that he was aware of. He, his ghos
t he... (that’s when Arthur first thought of the word) felt only smooth wall. No sensation of skin or hair, or heat or curve or toe. Whatever he tried to touch at all was empty but somehow solid, like magnets of the same polarity pressed against each other. No matter how hard he leaned into it, nothing seemed to give way, but pushed back all the stronger. The science experiment now quickly over, panic settled in.
“Help!” he shrieked, in a most unmanly tone – he was able at least to speak. “I’m dying in here!” He cursed himself for waiting; he should have brought assistance right away. Where had the nurses gone?
There was no reply.
Arthur went to the door to fetch the doctor, only he couldn’t grab the handle! He swiped at it and swiped at it but felt the smooth wall only.
“Bloody hell!” he cried now in frustration. The door blocked his path. There was no other obvious exit.
“Help me!” he cried again, but still there came no reply.
The door and room looked very solid, but he himself was sheer. Not invisible, but he could see through himself – not bones and veins and muscle, but clothes and hair and skin. He existed only in watercolors, tinting the world with his presence.
I’m not white, he thought as his body lay lifeless and uncared for. I thought ghosts were meant to be white. Or is it dark? The uncertainty bothered him.
He refocused. He had to get help. It was only a door. He took a few steps back and charged it. Shoulder down he ran full force, closing his eyes at the last second.
“I can’t run through doors, Dermot. I learned that lesson the hard way.”
Arthur’s head hurt quite a lot now, though not as much as it might have. This detail he only understood later from experimentation and reflection.
Arthur the corpse lay still and quiet on the bed, the chemicals in his body already preparing for the first steps of decomposition. His dead self, at least, was aware of what was expected of it.
Five minutes passed before a nurse checked up on him. Arthur had calmed down by then. “I’ve died,” he told her, though she didn’t hear; by now he’d sort of expected that. “I think I sort of stopped breathing,” he informed her regardless.
There were a lot of them in the room then: the doctors, four nurses, and a couple of others. He was pushed out of the way, knocked into the corner, tumbled as one might cast aside an empty hat box. Arthur hadn’t expected that. He was bigger than all of them and dwarfed the tiny nurses. He took it with good grace, though; he was already starting to accept things. He stood on a chair out of the way to watch, and ducked his head to miss the ceiling.
His body was shaken and slapped. His dead eyes were held open and a light shone into them. The doctor said his name loudly, over and over, shouting into a deaf ear. Arthur found it unsettling to stare back at himself, but he could not look away. They felt for a pulse at his wrist and then at his neck, they pulled his mouth open and showed his strong teeth, they pushed down on his chest. They put a mirror in front of his face; not a breath, perfectly clear.
Arthur felt himself a little hungry as he watched them shake their heads. A glance at a watch, a scribbled note on a clipboard, then the sheet drawn over his head. I really have died. Somehow it all felt official; he thought of his family for the fist time.
“I had to be quick. I jumped down and snuck out the door before the nurse. She closed it behind her. I didn’t want to stay with myself any longer – my old dead self just lying there. No one could see me and no one could hear me and I didn’t know what to do next.”
“That’s… that’s terrible, Arthur.”
“Yes. It’s what the Americans term a ‘raw deal’.”
9
The Young Couple
While a despondent Arthur Malenfer was turning into a urine-splashed alleyway off the rue des Trois Frères in pursuit of an elusive Irishman, his niece Simonne was on a quest of her own, the coincidence of which was known to neither of them. She slipped from her room without disturbing the dust and slunk down the stairs like a black cat. She left the house by an inconspicuous side door, the secret of its key one she guarded closely. It was bitter outside, miserable compared to her warm vacated bed, but she was resolute and unbowed by the sudden change. A Ural wind redoubled its torment and Simonne lifted her hood by reply. She paused only to let her eyesight adjust, for she carried no lantern nor candle. Certain that the coast was clear, Simonne set out down the road. Her rendezvous was a ten-minute walk around the bend. Engines off, headlights dead, the car would not be seen from the house.
Robert’s cigarette gave him away long before Simonne made him out. He was standing on the road beside his father’s pride – a Peugeot Type 153. (Robert had told her its name a great number of times – he seemed to think it important.) It had polished brass trim and a gleaming maroon body, which looked smoky under a dry moon. It was barely distinguishable now.
Robert heard her step disturb the gravel before he made her out. “Darling!” he said, and he dropped his cigarette, ran to her, and held her tight in his arms. He pressed her cold lips in a strong embrace. Simonne was a little taken aback. She wasn’t used to spontaneous displays of ardor. Robert hadn’t been like this in a while.
This was the spot where they had been meeting privately for months. At the beginning, Robert would come as often as he could, which was as often as Simonne would let him. He had been quite forward with his hands at first, until she had set him right. She was stirred by his passion, but more than that was the appeal of what Robert represented: escape – freedom from her small boring life. Robert had an agitation for living life that Simonne found irresistible.
Back then they would go for short rides in the car or walk hand in hand through the woods. They would sit and talk and trade sips from his pocket flask. Simonne had no doubt that Robert filled it from his father’s bottle and that they smoked Monsieur Crevel Père’s cigarettes. She didn’t care – it felt so daring and exciting and, importantly, such fun. They would interrupt their stolen time with kisses.
It was here in the misty twilight of a November evening that he’d surprised her with a question. Simonne remembered sitting on his knee inside the car, snuggled against him to keep them both warm.
“Simonne... darling. I’ve been thinking a bit,” he started. “I’ve been thinking that for something to change, you’ve just got to make it happen. Do you know what I’m trying to say?”
She didn’t, but was too polite to say so. They had been talking about the war, as everybody was – soon it was coming to an end. The papers were full of an imminent armistice, and Simonne was forced to believe them for once. She could hardly remember a time of peace. Everyone was talking about what came next.
Robert tried his best to clarify. “I mean that we decide. Us, you, me, our generation. No one else is going to change things for us.” He was flustered when he spoke, his ears glowing red, and Simonne read this tic as conviction.
Such sentiments never failed to strike a chord with Simonne; she was vulnerable to pulpit plauditry. She didn’t need clarity or facts and figures but had a strong sense of right and wrong. We decide. Her gut told her ‘yes.’ It was then that he asked her the question. She was sitting on his knee, so he couldn’t go down on it, and Simonne hadn’t seen it coming.
“Simonne… darling. I think it best that… I think it best that we get married.” It just popped out. He ran the words out at the end. He seemed relieved to say it, as if he had been bottling it up and now it was just spilt ink. “How would you like it if we did?” He grew enthusiastic. “Can you see how wonderful it would be?”
Simonne did not know. She was a little taken aback. She felt rather silly sitting there on his lap, but there was no polite way to climb free.
She liked him fine, Robert, her man – he was a way out for a lot of things. She considered herself rather sweet on him, but she hadn’t expected this. She’d been thinking of letting him leave a hand on her thigh, maybe allowing him to touch her garter strap. Madame Simonne Crevel! She had played
the sound in her mind once or twice, even practiced writing her signature (that fancy had gone on the fire). It wasn’t that marriage had never entered her mind. But marriage? Really? Right now, and to him? Robert? Where had she thought this was leading? What had she been doing? Her complicity filled her with shame.
But then, she thought, why not? The war was over, and things would change. Robert was right to say so. Was not she already eighteen? It was time to take charge of her life. Was she, Simonne, going to kowtow to Grand-mère and live under her thumb all her life? Did she want to be parceled off – or elope into nothing like her mother? Wasn’t she, Simonne, her own person, and couldn’t she do as she wished?
Robert seemed anxious beneath her skirts. Time was passing by.
“Oh, Robert, I’d love to!” It arrived on the spur of the moment, like many of Simonne’s decisions. “We’ll get married, yes. Yes, we will. I suppose that’s what comes next. And we’ll both be terribly happy.”
Right then in the car at the side of the road, the future had seemed so bright.
* * *
“I’ve missed you, Simonne.” Robert’s lips tasted bitter, of tobacco. He had one arm around her back, gripping her close, and the other one down on her stocking.
Robert’s work had become demanding, and he was now only able to see her on weekends or when he came up to the house by invitation. Robert’s kisses were not as urgent as they’d been during their first weeks of courting, but Simonne had heard the other girls talk and knew that sometimes happened.
That was what made tonight so unexpected; he hadn’t held her like this for months! He seemed so... urgent and needy. Simonne responded with a heat of her own.
“Oh, Robert!” She leaned into him, her hands high around his neck. “I missed you too!”
Robert released her and she unwound herself reluctantly. He held the door open on the passenger side and offered his hand out to help her. Simonne took it for balance, and then, mindful of her dress, she stepped up on the running board and climbed into the car. Robert closed the door, walked around front, and joined her on the other side. They sat close together on the sprung leather seats in their intimate little box. The roof was up and fastened snug. He didn’t start the car.
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