The Electric Hotel

by Dominic Smith

  * * *

  The consul was a beleaguered career diplomat in a moth-colored suit. He thanked Hal for his proposal, but kept looking at his watch.

  —I will make some telephone calls and be in touch. However, we expect this will all be over very soon. Belgium, after all, has a ring of fortresses around every city … We’ve been defending our turf for centuries …

  Hal knew the look of an investor with cold feet, knew when a Brooklynite was shambling down Fulton Street, worrying the coins in his trouser pocket but not quite ready to part with them. So he stood, buttoned his coat, and shook hands with the diplomat. Casually, almost as an afterthought, he added:

  —If nothing else, we should document this big German embarrassment. I’ll let you consider and return in the morning.

  * * *

  When he came back the next day, he carried a copy of The New York Times with the headline “ANTWERP PREPARES FOR A SIEGE,” ready for another round of lobbying. There was no need: three letters were waiting, signed and sealed, including a letter of introduction to a government official in Antwerp, plus a document the diplomat referred to as the laissez-passer.

  —Your films, Mr. Bender, must persuade the world to come to us in our time of need.

  Hal put the letters into his coat pocket, shook the consul’s hand, and went out into the street.

  * * *

  On the train ride back to Queens he rehearsed what he would say to Claude and Chip: We’ve been living like misers and monks, worrying that Alroy Healy will show up one night with his henchmen, too afraid to bring a woman or prospective spouse through that door, into the black pit of our lives, and Claude already broken and loveless, a waste of a great cinematic mind, if you ask me, and me afraid to step foot back in Brooklyn, the streets I know like my own two hands, the place where I was born and where my father died in debt, which is the Bender family curse, as far as I can tell. The city’s dead to us and we’re dead to it. We’re of no use here …

  * * *

  His speech sounded convincing, even patriotic, in his mind. It had the zeal of the curbstone evangelist. When he delivered it, though, he didn’t get more than a third of the way in before Chip waved his hand from 1A, told him to give it a rest, that of course they’d bloody well go to Belgium because what else was there for them.

  —Besides, I’m too short to join up with the Australian army. They won’t take any man under five feet six inches and I’m one inch in the red. So this is probably the next best thing for a shrimp like me.

  It was Claude who took his time, picking up the official letters in their envelopes, weighing them in his hands. For years Hal had watched him slip away into sorrow and distraction, his eyes floating across the empty space in a room. Claude looked down at his scuffed oxfords.

  —We will need the right shoes for Belgium. I hear the mud can be murder.

  * * *

  A five-day steamer passage to Liverpool, an overnight ferry to the Netherlands, a barge up the river Scheldt. Within a week they found themselves in Antwerp, joining an army of photographers, journalists, and war tourists from all over the world. Whereas the French and British had forbidden foreign correspondents from traveling with the military, the Belgians were lax. But every horse, lorry, and motorcar had been commandeered for the war effort, so most newspapermen couldn’t get out of the city and into the hinterland of besieged towns. They filed their stories from the back of the front, dispatched from the upper rooms of the Hotel St. Antoine.

  * * *

  As part of Hal’s deal with the Red Cross and the Belgium government, they were provided with a ninety-horsepower Berline, now painted elephant-gray, that had once belonged to a florist from Ghent. With Chip at the wheel, they made daily trips into the shelled-out moonscapes of Flanders, stopping every few miles at a German or Belgian checkpoint. In addition to the government letters and the laissez-passer, they also carried cartons of Chesterfield cigarettes and racy postcards. It was usually a combination of credentials, passwords, and pornography that got them waved through a checkpoint.

  * * *

  When they were out filming a skirmish, they carried more weight than artillerymen—Graflexes, hand-held Aeroscopes, a cinématographe, the Pathé movie camera, film canisters, tripods, log books. They carried rolls of muslin and built crude filming shelters, like deer blinds, so that the hand-cranking from the tripod didn’t look like the grinding of a machine gun.

  * * *

  Claude carried the Italian cowhide suitcase that Sabine had left behind when she’d vanished. Monogrammed with her initials, he’d filled it with spare cameras, extra rolls of film, rations, cigarettes, a sheath of her letters, a field diary, a first aid kit, and reels for showing the troops. The Belgian soldiers made fun of him for his petite valise, chided him in three languages, accused him of looking like a tourist on the Riviera. But he had no use for rucksacks, preferred the hard shell and compartments of the suitcase, the way it doubled as a seat or lap desk. He wiped it down at night with mink oil, this elegant piece of wreckage from his former life.

  * * *

  They spent a week filming skirmishes along the roadway or out in the smoking fields. To personalize the desolation, to give it human scale, Claude captured the residue of the fighting, the fine silt that covered the hedgerows across Flanders, the flecks of Belgian blue cloth in the treetops. His intercuts included a pair of false teeth resting on the windowsill of a burned-out farmhouse, and a single row house left standing in a ransacked village, its door marked in white chalk—Nicht phindern, Do not pillage.

  * * *

  There were hours of artillery fire and mortar attacks, then entire afternoons of calm, the Berline scouting for new locations, coasting between checkpoints with its little American flags flapping neutrally from the side mirrors, camera out the window. Claude filmed the German observation balloons—the big gray Boches—rising through the blued distances like great primordial brains.

  * * *

  The Belgian uniforms were endlessly filmable, too. Cavalrymen trimmed in scarlet piping and oilskin hats, artillerymen in navy blue wool coats with brass buttons. They made the plundering of the human body all the more disturbing—a severed arm out in a field of mud with epaulets still pinned to the shoulder. Claude found himself, after a week, acutely aware of joinery and sockets, not just in the human body but in the hinges of a cupboard or armoire that had been dragged out into a ransacked village square by a German brigade.

  * * *

  The Germans carried arson field kits, little tins filled with lozenges of sulfur and matches for setting a town ablaze. Sometimes they turned a motorcar into a flamethrower, fitting its petrol tank with a pump, a hose, and a spray nozzle and then driving slowly through the streets, one soldier at the wheel, another two pumping and spewing flames up at the houses. Before they razed a town or village they painted warnings on church walls—Good people of this town, do not plunder—and hung the Kaiser’s flag from the bell tower.

  * * *

  Claude filmed it all, sometimes concealed in a tree, or behind a low wall, and he felt his mind swinging out like a gate. Everything in the world waited to be burned, dismantled, unhinged, blown apart. It was all he could think about when he went to bed each night, peering up at the veracity of his own bare knuckles.

  * * *

  Some nights they showed reels in abandoned farmhouses and barns, projecting images of Paris and Tamarama and New Jersey onto makeshift screens of burlap as a reprieve for the Belgian officers and conscripts. For the first time in years, Claude manned the projector, unspooling Sabine bathing in a rooftop conservatory, a Parisian couple kissing in a doorway, the teenage daredevil in flames above the ocean.

  * * *

  He had a powerful sense of cranking through the entrails of his old life. The soldiers stared up at the filmstrips, mesmerized or heckling or groaning with pleasure. When Sabine blew a cloud of soapsuds into the air above the rooftops of Manhattan he could hear the whole barn of soldiers shifting on
their wooden benches at the same time. When she waved at the camera he undercranked the projector to slow her movements on-screen, as if he might delay his own ruin.

  * * *

  But these men in their beautiful uniforms had their own ruin in mind, sitting in a darkened barn on the outskirts of Antwerp one evening in late August. Brussels had fallen and now the field army had retreated behind Antwerp’s ring of fortifications. All but a few buildings had been leveled to clear the sight lines before a German siege. As he cranked a scene of Paris onto the burlap, he wondered about these cavalrymen’s lives, about their regrets and longings.

  * * *

  A cavalry officer accompanied the reels with a violin, quietly at first, as window-shoppers pointed into the storefronts along the Boulevard des Capucines, as a woman sold bread from a bicycle. Here was Paris, a sister to fallen Brussels, flaunting her springtime bloom. Couples picnicked in a municipal park and the omnibus came glinting through noontime. The violinist changed tempo during Sabine’s rooftop bathing, worked into an upbeat waltz that had the men cheering and tapping their boot heels. By the time Chip’s high fall fluttered against the burlap, the officer had become a virtuoso and they all watched as the daredevil plunged burning into a sea of violin sharps.

  * * *

  That August night, after the reels, Claude went outside for a cigarette and to stand among the tethered cavalry horses. He rubbed the white diamond on a mare’s forehead and blew smoke up into the cooling night. There was a mineral smell in the air that reminded him of iron balcony railings after a downpour, of drowsy afternoons in his little Paris garret before he’d gone to work for the Lumière brothers almost twenty years ago. Tucked inside the mansard roofline of a crumbling old building, his whole world had been a single room with a tiny portal window on one wall, a camera, he understood now—a darkened box behind the glass aperture of the oval windowpane, a recess where he’d been exposed and developed into someone new. He caressed the horse’s jawline, stared into the brown knowing of one eye. He could see himself looking back in the half light of his burning cigarette. The world was a baffling mystery to him.

  * * *

  The mare blinked, twitched one ear, nickered. Her eyes walled back. Claude looked up into the night sky, craning, but saw only a gauzy vault of stars. A second later, an immense pressure pounded through his chest and the air keened.

  * * *

  On the other side of the roadway, the impact sent a cascade of dirt and tree limbs into the air. Sulfur rippling through the treetops, filaments of blue-yellow flame and white smoke rising above the dark woods. Claude could feel the wrenching of timbers in the back of his teeth and wondered if they’d failed to blacken the barn windows enough, if the gaslit projector had drawn the artillery.

  * * *

  There was yelling, suddenly, in Dutch and French, then a burst of Flemish cursing, as the cavalrymen came running from the barn. Claude crouched beside the mare, his palms cupped over his ears, before he had the wherewithal to fetch the Aeroscope camera and a lantern from the trunk of the Berline. Leaning against the hood, he filmed the men mounting their terrified horses. The violinist, it turned out, rode the mare with the white forehead, his instrument now strung over one shoulder like a rifle.

  * * *

  They drove south, away from Antwerp, into a territory of ruined beet and asparagus fields. Somewhere north of Brussels, they encountered a pocket of fighting. A band of Flemish peasants had taken up position in a roadside ditch, behind sandbags and barbed-wire entanglements, while the Germans were firing down from a wooded hillside.

  * * *

  In the rain, the filmmakers hauled their equipment down into the ditch, but it was too narrow to set up the tripods. Because the Aeroscope was compact and required no hand-cranking—a chamber of compressed air kept it spooling—Claude could run it in the narrowest of spaces, even when he was on the move. He leaned against a sandbag, crouched low to the ground, and panned the fields on the other side of the road. There were bodies lying in the wet grass and he could tell they’d been there for days. At the Salpêtrière in Paris, Claude had photographed disease progressions and autopsies, so he knew something about the gas-filled ministrations of a corpse, the way a body bloated with nitrogen and phosphorus. Turning blue-white and rigid in the rain and heat, these dead men assumed various poses, some of them sitting bolt upright, others reclining with their hands clasped in front of them, poised to make a speech from the afterlife.

  * * *

  Claude turned the camera from the dead back to the living. When they’d first arrived, the village holdouts had been young men in vivid uniforms; now they were boys and grizzled old men in shirtsleeves. A Belgian mastiff—one of the dogs the army used for hauling the machine-gun battery like a sled—lay curled and sleeping in the ditch.

  * * *

  Claude wanted to go out to the bend in the road, out toward the wooded perimeter of the hillside behind them, to see if he could get some images of the skirmish from above. Almost all of his shots so far were low and lacked perspective; he wanted an angle that would capture the field strewn with bodies and the smoking, leafless trees along the roadway. He wanted audiences, from Brooklyn to San Francisco, to understand this desolation.

  * * *

  He told Chip and Hal his plan and moved along the ditch with his suitcase in one hand, the rolling Aeroscope in the other, the Graflex attached to the tripod on his back. Before he got to the bend in the road, a reservist who introduced himself as a tram conductor insisted on having his moving image taken. He was a gunner now, in charge of a lone mortar, his hands blackened from cordite. My mother and sisters can watch this when I’m gone. He said it in Flemish, and one of the French-speaking boys nearby translated it for Claude. He turned the camera and filmed a few seconds of the barrel-chested man grinning under his waxed mustache.

  * * *

  The gap between the ditch and the edge of the wood was no more than twenty feet. But in order to get across it, Claude asked the former tram conductor to provide some cover. The gunner sent artillery fire into the German thicket up above, briefly quelling the volleys of the machine gunners, while Claude edged out into the gap on his stomach, dragging the suitcase along the ground beside him, the weight of the Graflex and tripod pressing against his back. When he reached the start of the wood, he crawled then got to his feet, hurried for a stand of oaks and pinewoods. He crouched behind a big tree and waited for the German machine gunners to start up again, but an eerie silence fell over the road and opposite hillside.

  * * *

  From up on the rise he could see that the field of bodies stretched a few hundred feet, that there were dozens of dead men and horses out there, that the Germans had artillery dugouts deep in the opposing woods. In the relative quiet, the sound traveled along the spine of the hills, so he could hear smatterings of German and French and Dutch.

  * * *

  The battery dog in the Belgian ditch barked a single time, apparently startled by the quiet. In this unofficial pause he removed the tripod and Graflex from his back, pumped air into the Aeroscope, and loaded it with fresh film. He aimed the aperture through a clearing and waited for the fighting to begin again. Five minutes of quiet passed, then fifteen. It began to rain again and then it poured down. From this vantage point, the muddy water in the field and ditches became runnels of tarnished silver.

  * * *

  When the greenish flaming arcs finally shot out of the German thicket, Claude began to roll film. Rockets pin-wheeled into high parabolas over the roadway, some of them exploding in midair, erupting into brief clouds of light, before streaming into capillaries of smoke. To make a moviegoer understand war, he thought, all he had to do was keep the film rolling and capture the explosion of light in a downpour. But then the rockets began veering toward the wood and the ridgeline, splintering the treetops and setting the upper branches aflame. A rocket shot into the trees, less than twenty feet away, and there was an enormous flash all around him.


  * * *

  He found himself on his back, deafened, staring up through the oak crowns. He blinked, unable to move, watching the leaves delicately thread with smoke. His eyeglasses were still on his face but one lens was cracked. The first few shards of sound came back but they were distant and underwater. Then there was another observer, standing behind his thoughts and the hairline fissure in his spectacles, someone unhurried and speculative, who studied the purling smoke overhead and thought about the violinist’s horse and Sabine’s slender hands, about the sprigs of lavender she used to wrap inside her traveling trunks of clothes and bedsheets.

  * * *

  He watched the oak leaves vibrate in the rain while this mental river floated by. He saw his own reflection in the diamond-headed horse’s eye and knew it was a kind of preparation, a moment of staring into his own fate. He waited for it to happen, felt at peace with it, but then his ribs were trembling and he realized he was covered in blood.