by Alex George
Just then he heard the sound of a vehicle. It was the first sign of human life he had seen since Grasset was felled by the sniper’s bullet. Night was approaching; there was no way of knowing when another vehicle would come this way. Jean-Paul understood that this was his only chance of survival. He clambered unsteadily to his feet, stunned by the pain. He staggered toward the noise, moving blindly past the dead bodies of his companions. A truck was approaching. In the fading light Jean-Paul could not tell whether the vehicle was French or German, but he no longer cared. The Germans might shoot him, but that would be preferable to bleeding slowly to death overnight. He stepped into the middle of the road and waved his arms above his head.
The truck slowed to a halt a few yards ahead of him. It was in bad shape. The windshield was cracked, the wheels were poorly aligned, and the sides were dented and scratched. There were no markings on its exterior, but Jean-Paul felt safe now. The Germans would never have employed such a decrepit vehicle near the front. The engine shuddered to a halt with a rattling sigh. A short man in well-pressed army fatigues climbed out. He was wearing a helmet several sizes too big. Jean-Paul called out his name and platoon number. The truck driver saluted.
“Mortar attack?” he guessed. Jean-Paul nodded. The driver looked around. “Any other survivors?”
“I don’t think so,” replied Jean-Paul.
“Well, one is better than nothing.”
Jean-Paul pointed to his leg. “I took some shrapnel. It hurts like hell.”
“I have morphine,” said the driver.
“You do?”
The man nodded and patted the side of the truck. “Believe it or not, this lovely old pile of junk is an ambulance.” He fetched a box of medical supplies from the back of the vehicle, and removed a syringe and a small bottle. His fingers were nimble, and he worked quickly.
“Thank you,” breathed Jean-Paul a moment later.
“That should help until we get you back to the field hospital,” said the driver.
Jean-Paul nodded, rubbing the flesh where the needle went in, wanting to hurry the medicine along his veins. He climbed into the cab of the truck and watched through the windshield as the driver moved among the corpses, looking for signs of life. He bent down next to each soldier, usually for no more than a couple of seconds. It didn’t take long to check for a pulse, and sometimes even that wasn’t necessary.
“You were lucky,” said the driver when he climbed back into his seat. He gunned the engine.
“Are you going to leave them there?” asked Jean-Paul.
“The bodies will be recovered in the morning.” The man executed a deft three-point turn. “My job is to tend to survivors.” He extended his hand. “Maurice.”
“Jean-Paul.” They shook.
“This damned war, eh?”
Jean-Paul thought of Grasset lying in the mud with a hole in the middle of his forehead and said nothing.
“How long have you been at the front?” asked the driver.
“An eternity, it feels like.”
The driver grunted. “I wanted to be a pilot,” he said, “but they wouldn’t take me.”
Jean-Paul tried to concentrate on what the man was saying, hoping it would distract him from the pain in his leg. “Why not?”
“They said I was too old.” He shifted gears as he took a sharp corner, and the engine growled in protest. “But I wanted to do something for the war effort. So they put me in this ambulance. I’m proud to do what I can for France. You make the best of the cards you’re dealt, non?”
“I suppose so.”
They drove in silence for a while. The sun had disappeared and twilight was edging into darkness. Jean-Paul leaned his head against the window of the truck. “Where are we?” he asked.
“That is an excellent question.”
“You don’t know?”
Before the man could answer, a fireball erupted just to one side of them and the windshield exploded into a million tiny shards of glass. A tornado of earth and mud ripped through the night sky. Rather than slow down or stop, the driver put his foot on the gas pedal and accelerated through the inferno. He pulled down hard on the steering wheel, and the truck veered sharply to the right. The engine screeched in complaint. The vehicle stuttered unevenly for a few more yards, its progress marked by a rainbow of sparks from the undercarriage. Finally they came to a halt. There was a glittering mosaic of shattered glass across Jean-Paul’s lap.
“What the hell was that?” he gasped.
“A land mine. We were lucky. We only caught the edge of it. Wait there.” The driver opened his door and hurried around the front of the truck to inspect the damage.
“How bad is it?” asked Jean-Paul.
“The wheel’s all but destroyed.”
“Do you have a spare?”
“I did, but one of the rear tires blew out last week. They never issued me with a replacement.”
“So what do we do now?”
“Well, the first thing is to get out of sight.” The driver climbed back into the cab of the truck and turned the ignition. There was a shower of sparks as the vehicle lurched forward. The metal of the ruined front wheel scraped against the road, making a terrible noise. They limped along for fifty yards or so. “Hold on tight,” said the driver. The truck swerved across the verge into an opening between the trees that lined the side of the road. They edged forward a few yards and came to a stop. The driver grimaced, put the truck in low gear, and tried to ease it further forward. The three good wheels spun but could not gain traction on the soft, uneven ground.
“This is hopeless,” he muttered.
“My leg hurts,” Jean-Paul whispered.
“I’m afraid we’re going to have to walk,” said the driver.
“Through the forest?”
“Unless you have a better plan.”
“Can you give me some more morphine?”
“I’ll bring some with me, but I need you conscious until we find shelter for the night. You’re twice my size. I couldn’t carry you ten yards.”
Jean-Paul nodded and opened the door of the truck. When he put weight on his damaged leg, the pain took his breath away.
“Here.” The driver handed him a thick branch. Jean-Paul leaned heavily on the makeshift walking stick and started to hobble into the trees. He followed the driver, who was holding his medical bag in one hand, his service revolver in the other. The only sound was the snap of twigs underfoot. Jean-Paul had to pause every few steps to regain his breath.
“Sorry I’m so slow,” he muttered through gritted teeth.
“Hardly your fault,” said the driver. “I’m the one who should be apologizing. My job was to get you to safety, not to take you on a hike through the countryside.”
The pain obliterated everything else after that. Every step felt as if it would be his last, as if there was no way for him to move another inch, but then he closed his eyes and somehow took one more. Time and distance had no meaning. All he could do was keep moving forward.
Night had fallen now. The two men stumbled through the darkness of the woods, moving slowly over the uneven terrain. There was no more talking.
After what felt like hours, they reached the far edge of the forest. As they emerged from the trees, they passed from darkness into light—a gibbous moon hung above them, high and pale in the night sky. There was an open field in front of them. Beyond it lay the dark outline of a cluster of buildings.
“There’s a village,” said the driver.
As soon as they began to make their way across the field, Jean-Paul longed for the safety of the forest they had just left behind. The moon illuminated the scene more clearly than a searchlight. Two dark figures moving slowly over an open field: they must have been visible for miles. He leaned heavily on his stick and pushed on. At least the ground was firmer now.
By the time they reached the village, both men were breathing heavily. “Let’s find some shelter,” said the driver.
“Can’t we just
knock on the nearest door and ask for help?” asked Jean-Paul.
The driver shook his head. “This place is deserted.”
“How do you know?”
“There are villages like this all along the front. Ghost towns. Abandoned. People just locked up their homes and left.”
“Where did they all go?” wondered Jean-Paul.
“As far away as possible, until the fighting is over. This is what war does, mon ami. The whole world is holding its breath, waiting for life to begin again.”
Jean-Paul thought of Anaïs. While he was in a convoy being driven toward the Western front, she had taken a train to Montpellier to stay with her parents. The war had put the whole country between them.
“What’s your plan, then?” he asked.
“There’s one place in every village that’s always open. Follow me.”
They continued down the narrow streets until they reached a small square, deserted but for some empty wooden benches around its periphery. Jean-Paul had a fleeting vision of a bustling market, bursting with color and noise, farmers selling their wares and shouting out to the passing shoppers.
There was a church on the far side of the square. The driver led Jean-Paul toward it. He grabbed the iron handle on the large wooden door and gave it a twist. The door opened.
Once inside, the driver switched on his flashlight. He trotted toward the altar and disappeared into a side room. A moment later he emerged and shone the beam of his flashlight directly into Jean-Paul’s face. “I found some candles,” he said.
The candles were short and thick. The driver placed them in a circle at the front of the church and lit each one with a box of matches he had found in the vestry. The flames flickered, casting long shadows up the dark walls. Jean-Paul lay down on the front pew, utterly exhausted and weak from pain. The wood was hard and unforgiving, but he did not care. He had stopped moving; that was all that mattered. The altar was covered in a heavy white sheet. The driver pulled it off, folded it, and lay it over his patient’s shivering body.
“I need that morphine,” whispered Jean-Paul.
The driver knelt down beside him and opened his medical bag. He quickly prepared the syringe and pushed the needle into Jean-Paul’s arm. “I’m going to clean that wound in your leg,” he said.
But Jean-Paul was already drifting away.
How long he slept he did not know. His rest was deep and dreamless.
It was the music that pulled him back to consciousness.
A piano.
The first theme emerged quietly from the depths of the keyboard, no more than a whisper. Jean-Paul heard a heavy melancholy in the stately procession of low, single notes. What had the driver lived through, he wondered, to draw such sadness out of himself?
And then, through the dark clouds, a shaft of brilliant sunlight. A new melody emerged, high and clear and heartbreaking. The tune cleaved the gathering shadows and wrapped itself brightly around Jean-Paul’s heart.
Those first brooding tones retreated, but they did not vanish. Now the music was two intertwined melodic lines, one low, one high, one sad, one full of hope. They met and diverged, echoing each other, dual counterpoints of darkness and light. Sometimes they came together in sweet harmony; sometimes not.
Finally the music resolved back to its first theme, that simple, forlorn elegy. The driver’s left hand stretched down the keyboard into ever-lower registers, until there were no more keys to be pressed, no more notes to be played.
Silence crowded in.
Jean-Paul opened his eyes. All the candles had burnt out. He twisted his head to one side. He could make out the silhouette of the window behind the altar, early dawn light creeping at its edges. He heard the driver clear his throat, and then the low, mournful melody began again. Jean-Paul lay still, bewitched by the beauty of the music. He closed his eyes and allowed the notes to wash over him. The driver played the piece two more times. Jean-Paul listened, finding his way through the complex thicket of harmonies. Finally, after the notes faded away for the third time, he called out.
There was a scraping of a piano stool against the cold flagstones of the church floor, and then the driver was by his side. “How is the leg?” he asked.
“It hurts like thunder,” replied Jean-Paul.
“I would imagine. I cleaned it up as best I could last night, but the wound is deep.” He knelt down and started to unwrap the bandages. “I’m going to see how things look and apply a fresh dressing. You need to keep the weight off your leg. I’m going to leave you here and go and find help.” He paused. “This is going to hurt. You passed out last night, so you didn’t notice.”
“All right,” said Jean-Paul. He gasped as the driver swabbed his leg with a pad soaked in alcohol. How could it be, he wondered, that the same fingers that conjured such beauty from the piano keys one minute could cause such excruciating pain the next? “I liked that piece you were playing,” he said. “It’s sad, but beautiful. It made me think of my wife.”
“Is she sad and beautiful, too?”
Jean-Paul shook his head. “Just beautiful.”
“Ah, then you are a lucky man.”
“Who wrote it?”
The driver smiled at him. “I did.”
* * *
Jean-Paul stands in the Jardin du Luxembourg, his eyes closed. He knows every note of the wordless tune that the woman sings to calm her daughter. It is the same melody that the diminutive ambulance driver played in the abandoned church in northern France all those years ago.
He will never escape Verdun—every damaged step he takes reminds him of the tangle of metal he pulled from his leg that day. But the memory of this melody casts a different spell. The low, sad notes pull him back: he can smell the damp inside of the church, he can feel the hard, wooden pew at his back. The driver—the pianist—is there by his side, that small smile on his face.
The man had saved his life. If he hadn’t appeared in that decrepit truck, Jean-Paul would have bled to death on the battlefield along with the rest of his platoon, and Anaïs would have been another young French widow.
If he had died, she would have stayed in Montpellier with her parents, and met someone else. If he had died, she would not have been singing at the Good Friday Mass in the Église Saint-Gervais when the German bomb fell.
If he had died, she would have lived.
“Monsieur?”
Jean-Paul opens his eyes.
The little girl has stopped crying. She has taken her face out of the folds of her mother’s skirt and is looking at him. And there, as if conjured up by the music, her gray eyes resting steadily on him, stands Elodie.
32
An Unanticipated Development
ON PLACE SAINT-SULPICE, Camille passes in front of a café. There is a cluster of tables on the sidewalk. Every one is occupied. People talk and argue with each other as they watch the world go by and enjoy an aperitif. Camille realizes that she has not eaten anything all day. She turns abruptly through the door, sits down at the nearest table and orders a sandwich, and, after a moment’s hesitation, a glass of white wine.
She settles back in her chair and glances at the clock on the wall. The afternoon is nearly gone. She has lost count of how many people she has spoken to today. She has met with pompous antiquarian booksellers in their expensive shops. She has interrogated dozens of bouquinistes, the shifty-eyed, weather-beaten men who sell old books out of the wooden stalls that line both banks of the Seine. By now she has perfected her pitch. Her delivery is all wry exasperation, amused tolerance at her husband’s well-meaning mistake. This was all an innocent misunderstanding, marital crossed wires; it happens to us all from time to time, n’est-ce pas? And would you happen to have…?
The money that she took from the safe that morning remains in her handbag. All day she’s been getting blank looks and lectures about the futility of her mission. Such a notebook does not exist, she has been told, again and again. Inquiries as to where else she might look elicited baffled shrugs.
Camille sighs. After a day traveling across the city, she’s back in her own neighborhood and almost ready to admit defeat, to return to the hotel and tell Olivier what was in the notebook. Then she remembers that there is a bookshop near here, on Rue de l’Odéon. It will be, she decides, her last stop of the day.
She looks out of the window. A woman walks past, hand in hand with her young son. They are making slow progress. The little boy stops to examine everything he sees—a bird pecking at the sidewalk, a discarded newspaper wrapped around the base of a tree—with a rapt expression on his face. Each time they stop, the woman crouches down next to him and talks softly in his ear. She is explaining the world to her child. Camille wistfully remembers similar expeditions with Marie, short walks around the neighborhood to nowhere in particular, and how the most mundane sights were transformed into things of wonder through her daughter’s young eyes. Watching the two of them, she is overwhelmed with the desire to run back to the hotel and hold Marie tight, but she knows that such indulgence would provoke nothing but awkward squirming and complaints. These days it’s all Camille can do to steal quick hugs, before her quarry wriggles away.
When Marie was a baby, Camille had drowned in a delicious ocean of human touch. Her tiny body had to be cleaned, dressed, inspected, cared for. Skin was always on skin, a blissful, dazzling communion. She never imagined that such happiness might end. She watches as the woman runs her fingers through the little boy’s curly hair. Enjoy it while you can, she thinks. Time travels in one direction only. There is no going back.
The wine is so cold that by the time it arrives at the table the glass is beaded with tiny drops of condensation. Camille takes an unladylike swallow, and then attacks her sandwich. She contemplates her return to the hotel as she eats, wondering how Olivier will react when she tells him what’s in the notebook. She realizes that she does not especially care anymore. She’s come a long way since she climbed off the train as a newlywed at Gare de Lyon all those years ago. Back then she depended on her husband for everything. They had both proceeded on the assumption that she was always wrong and he was always right. Camille’s life was one of meek capitulation and uxorial obedience. But those intimate conversations with Marcel Proust at all hours of the day and night changed all that. Beneath the warm sun of her employer’s attention, her confidence took root and began to grow. It did not take long for her newfound self-belief to manifest itself on the domestic front, too. Like Marcel Proust, Olivier was delighted with Camille’s growing independence. Unlike Marcel Proust, his delight had its limits. Having a confident, free-thinking wife was a fine thing, but only up to a point.