The Electric Hotel

by Dominic Smith

  * * *

  He felt emptied out by her wan expression, bird-boned with relief. For years he’d imagined this moment as a reckoning, feared that the old ache would thicken in his throat, mangle through his stomach, but now he felt light and steady and desireless on his feet. He’d plucked a bomb out of a celery garden, exhibited German atrocities while Berliners sat in feathered hats, driven a taxicab from Paris to the Pyrenees, filmed hysterics, his dying sister, a dark melodrama that had changed everything. Now it all seemed to have happened to someone else. But this particular emptiness was happening to him alone. He had traveled years and continents and hundreds of miles to feel this strain of nothingness. There was no way—or reason—to speak any of this, so he just looked at her blankly.

  * * *

  Then he noticed the white face masks around their necks and it occurred to him that Leo was the one dying of the Spanish flu in a room at the back of the house or above the salon. The disease, he remembered, favored the young. He would be almost eighteen by now, a boy running into the smoke-mirrored hallways of manhood. Claude thought of the shifting wood-light above the Hudson, of the astonished look on Leo’s face when he was discovered in the crook of a tree during a game of hide-and-seek.

  * * *

  Sabine eventually moved from the window and came toward him. She said to Cora, Do you remember Claude Ballard, from our days in America? Cora could only nod. The rainstorm had swept in a Catalan vision, a hallucination from an ancestral shrine. Sabine raised one hand in the air and he thought of a conductor’s hesitation before a difficult symphony, the way the music hovered just in front, unplayed and therefore still perfect, like an undeveloped photograph. She was unsure how to begin. He smelled of damp wool, of something unspeakable. To touch his face or shoulder was unimaginable.

  —Is it you?

  —More or less.

  * * *

  Cora said she would fetch some tea and she joined Helena, who had been watching from the doorway. Sabine’s hand had been in the air for a very long time. Finally, she used it to point to a divan.

  —I’m drenched to the bone.

  —No matter.

  * * *

  He settled on the divan and she sat opposite, on the edge of a wingback chair. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his face. He knew he would have to ask directly, that she was too preoccupied with her own onslaught to address the obvious specter in the room.

  —Where is Leo?

  She shook her head.

  —Oh dear, of course. No, no, he’s safe and sound. Studying at Oxford. His first term, such as it is, with half his classmates off in the trenches.

  —The yellow flag. Qui?

  Claude pointed to the back of the house and for a moment he imagined a husband dying of fevers.

  —Poor old Pavel. The doctor says he may not live through the night.

  —I’m very sorry to hear that.

  —We were told to send him to the quarantine station in Barcelona, but we couldn’t do it. Instead we wear masks and gloves whenever we go in. Helena has been the most industrious nurse. For years they quarreled, now she’s his cherished confidante, writes letters to his family in St. Petersburg for him …

  —That’s very kind of her.

  * * *

  The silence, when it gathered, was interrupted by the arrival of Cora with a tray. She poured them all tea and sat on the divan next to Claude. Cora’s look of worry had vanished and now there was some of Helena’s briskness, a preoccupation with china and a sugar bowl and spoons. Sabine looked off at the window, at the marbling underbelly of clouds. When she came back to the room, her voice unraveled.

  —Oh dear God, what did I do to you, Claude?

  —Don’t flatter yourself, madame. This is mostly my own doing.

  Sabine dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief, offered up a careworn smile.

  —Hal Bender wrote me about you. Told me what happened during the war. It’s unimaginable … I never wrote back to him, I’m ashamed to say.

  * * *

  When Cora picked up the thread of a cheerier topic, Claude realized it was with an orphan’s instinct for pragmatism and self-preservation. She was not about to sit through a maudlin recounting of betrayal and misplaced desire. The girl had lost both her parents and her homeland before the age of twelve.

  —I remember you playing board games and showing us films above the mantel. You taught us how to swim in the Hudson River. Leo used to call you Clowd because he couldn’t pronounce your name the way you said it.

  They all smiled at this.

  —How has life been for you up in the mountains, Cora?

  —Dull, mostly. I prefer Barcelona, but Sabine thinks I’ll end up with a Spanish grocer for a husband if we spend too much time there.

  Of course she called her Sabine instead of Mother. Claude looked at Cora’s face, tried to discern traces of Dorothy Harlow, but he remembered nothing from the sanitarium except the vials of sputum lined up in the doctor’s cabin. Their one-night honeymoon at the lake. That atmosphere of bacteria and inoculation should have been a portent of the coming ruin.

  —What will you do? he asked Cora.

  —I’m going to study law at the Sorbonne next year.

  * * *

  Claude blinked, smiled weakly, sipped his tea. He was happy for their bright, promising lives, but it all seemed unfathomable. Oxford, the Sorbonne. One day there would be a wedding, he thought, to a diplomat or a statesman. There had never been a place for him in their lives. Even back in New Jersey he’d been standing outside the firelight, staring through the window at the hearth. The Mansion of Happiness was an unwinnable board game that eventually had to be packed up and put away. He’d always known that, even then.

  * * *

  They talked of their shared summer in the Palisades, of the Andorran litany of religious festivals, of the visitors who occasionally came through the town. Nobody mentioned the war. Claude offered up nothing of his recent years except to say that lately he drove a taxi and lived above a Paris violinmaker’s workshop and it often sounded like cats being tortured below. This got a generous laugh from Cora.

  * * *

  After an hour, Sabine asked if Claude would like to spend the night and take a hot bath. When he accepted, Helena boiled the water in the kitchen and then Sabine prepared the bathroom like a sanctuary, laying out a lavender-scented towel, lighting candles in glass jars, filling the tub with fragrant, steaming water. She placed some hot coals in the brasero to warm the room, placed some clean clothes that belonged to the Basque gardener on a stool.

  * * *

  It was the enormous copper bathtub sitting below the dormer window that unnerved Claude. In the basement of the château, he’d read about the copper tub and it seemed like a shining emissary from a vanished world, an image of oblivious wealth and privilege and safety. He removed his damp clothes, stood naked at the edge of the tub, his feet cold on the white marble floor.

  * * *

  When he lowered himself into the hot water, he was surprised by the sound of a very old man’s rheumatic moan. It was an exhalation that swallowed the room. His life used to feel unyielding to him but now it felt warmly contained inside the tub. His hands and his fingernails, the knuckles and kneecaps, the uncoiling thread of his own breath and thoughts, these were all entirely knowable. Apart from his dreams, there was nothing he could think of that frightened him and the feeling was like being wrapped in a goldbeater’s skin, a zeppelin’s membrane filling with helium. He was a forty-two-year-old man reclined in a copper bathtub, perched above three thousand feet. He was about to begin all over again, perhaps make another film, start out small, careful, unafraid. He took his time in the tub, scrubbed himself clean, submerged his head so that he could hear the steady tempo of his own heartbeat.

  * * *

  After dinner, Helena announced that Pavel had asked to see Claude. He walked toward the back of the house and up a narrow wooden staircase, his face mask in place, a pair of cotton
gloves on his hands. The children’s bedrooms and a guest room were up here, the latter converted into a sickroom for Pavel. Claude thought of Bedouins and desert encampments as he entered, a paraffin lamp burning, the walls whitewashed and hung with Turkish prayer rugs, the canopy above the bed an enormous sash of red arabesque. Beneath it, Pavel lay propped with pillows, his cropped head diamond-pricked with sweat, his eyes yellowed and bloodshot. A sheet was pulled up to his bare, bristled chest. In one blotched hand he held a sprig of rosemary. Claude sat on the stool beside the bed. Pavel was the first to speak.

  —I don’t know who is looking worse, you or me.

  —Definitely you.

  Pavel blinked into an abstract smile.

  —You look like someone starving that they pull from a coal mine. A survivor of calamity.

  —The war changes people.

  He lifted the rosemary sprig to his nose.

  —I can only imagine what you’ve seen. And here I am the one dying, a ridiculous bourgeois malcontent …

  His mouth opened and closed a few times.

  —I am the oldest and fattest man in the village avec la grippe.

  —You’re not very old.

  Another faint, dry-lipped smile. His eyes were once imperious and quick, Claude remembered, always seemed to be peering down at you from a height, or he was staring into the middle distances where a new theory or idea coalesced. Now his gaze was sidelong and slow and yellowed with fever.

  —I was never sick in my life. Healthy as oxen. There was a Russian flu epidemic … when I was young, and it didn’t lay a single finger on me. Not a pinkie. I’ve always pictured my lungs like two hot-air balloons … waiting to float me away.

  It occurred to Claude that respiratory complaints had shaped the course of his entire life. Odette, the widow, the feature film with a tubercular seductress, and now this pair of wheezing Slavic lungs drawing him in from under the canopy. The world is too much for some people to breathe. Pavel turned his head to one side.

  —We might not have had Romantic poetry without ailments of the lungs, Claude said. You’re in good company.

  —Chekhov blazed the trail for me, among others.

  —I remember you telling me the story of his death one time on a train.

  — … the glass of champagne, the hotel room in Germany, the oyster train car they used to haul his body back to Russia …

  Pavel’s breathing turned hooked and phlegmatic.

  —One time … this was some years ago, I met the bellhop who worked at the hotel where he died. He was the messenger sent for the doctor. Do you know what he told me?

  Claude shook his head.

  —That Chekhov’s dying breath sounded like a bull being lanced through its side. That his wife, Olga, grabbed the doctor by the lapels and screamed into his face. She was hysterical, you understand … and they both sat out with her on the iron balcony until dawn … and then they smuggled the body out of the hotel in a laundry basket … so as not to upset the other guests.

  He looked down at the sprig of rosemary, wincing and panting with pain.

  —When Olga told that story in later years … she never mentioned any of that. She said he took the glass of champagne and went off peacefully … a canoe slipping into a lake.

  Pavel closed his eyes, seemed to doze off for a full minute, before coming back as if no time had elapsed.

  —Will you tell me about the war?

  —What do you want to know?

  —Everything. We have been so cloistered up here. They say millions have died, and I barely know the names of three battles. We’ve been drunk on peace up here in the mountains, dithering our days away. I am sorry for that … Leo wanted to enlist, but Sabine wouldn’t let him. Will you tell me what you saw?

  Claude stared into the shadows in the bowl of paraffin lamplight.

  —Why don’t I show you?

  * * *

  Since there was no electricity, Claude had to improvise a limelight lantern in the lamphouse of the projector. It took him several trips to carry his equipment up from the Renault, and by the time he set the projector up at the foot of Pavel’s bed, it was well after midnight. Cora and Helena had gone to bed, but Sabine insisted on staying up. Pavel’s illness had turned her into Helena’s assistant, taking the night shift as the bearer of compresses and broths and lemon-scented spring water. Pavel sat propped in bed, marooned in pillows, blinking drowsily up at the whitewashed wall. Claude threaded the war footage and warmed the projector. Sabine sat on the other side of the bed, holding Pavel’s hand in a white cotton glove.

  * * *

  The wall granulated and seamed with light. Prussians on horseback in the ancient city of Louvain, moving among the ruins. Mustached, hale, staring solemnly at the camera from under their spiked and feathered helmets. Belgian prisoners of war performing star jumps and lunges in the northern woods. Then the march through Antwerp, the city an abandoned fortress of church spires and stone facades, the infantrymen with their cheap cigars and boyish grins, the bicycling signal corps with a thousand feet of uncoiling wire. Claude could see in Sabine’s face, and hear in Pavel’s lulled breathing, a slight sense of relief. They briefly mistook the cavalcading and marching for the actual stuff of war.

  * * *

  A dinner plate with goose livers. A chilled and salted oyster on a pewter plate. The wax pencil beside the waterproof invasion map. The close-ups were as staged as baroque still lifes. Only when the smoking trenches appeared in the twilight, when the flamethrower came over the parapet, did the footage seem improvised and lifelike. The unfurling ribbon of magnesium, the pandemonium of men on fire, batting at their own heads and arms, the cameo of Claude walking onto the smoking field, the lance corporal propping up a charred, dead Frenchman …

  * * *

  Sabine sat quietly weeping beside Pavel’s bed, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief above her face mask. Pavel was staring up at the wall, unblinking, swallowing, mumbling to himself in Russian and French and English. When the naked priest was hoisted by his wrists to the barn rafters, a bonfire lit from below, it was the first time that Claude had ever seen Sabine avert her eyes from a filmstrip. Pavel continued to stare but his breathing quickened. He began talking to the sky of red fabric above him, quoting from Chekhov’s letters and plays.

  —My father was a peasant who pulled onions from the earth … but here I am in a white waistcoat and yellow shoes … a pearl out of an oyster.

  The projector chattered through its gears. A mound of burning books incinerated against the whitewashed wall. Through the slightly ajar window above the paraffin lamp, a black moth fluttered into the room.

  —Just think about it and examine me … and you’ll find I’m still a peasant down to the marrow of my bones … all my theories just scraps of paper in my pocket … so many beautiful shreds …

  The moth avoided the fiery gulf of the paraffin lamp, but wafted drowsily through the air toward the spooling projector. A lunarscape of bare, smoking trees, some of them trimmed with tatters of Belgian uniform fabric.

  —I don’t know why one can’t chase two rabbits at the same time … if you have the hounds, go ahead and pursue …

  * * *

  The moth fluttered and warped in front of the projector’s eye, into the frame, its griffinlike silhouette darkening the wall of European twilight. Claude waited for it to find a way inside the projector, to burn up against the lamphouse, but it fluttered into the upper draughts of the room, circled above their heads. Pavel took his last breath somewhere during this flight, a sprig of rosemary across his chest, his eyes closed, his mouth open. His face and hands were birdlike, his mouth a gothic archway. Claude had seen so much death but this one was small and personal. It carried a name and a weight.

  * * *

  Claude snuffed the projector and sat on the other side of the bed. They both watched the black moth circle in the cone of light above the paraffin lamp.

  —He wanted to understand how it really happened, Sab
ine said, how it might have felt. A student of naturalism to his dying breath.

  —There is no understanding what happened.

  Claude listened to the ticking of the cooling projector gears.

  —Where will you bury him?

  —Up in the mountains. He liked it here, the peasants and their funny hats. Where will you go?

  —Back to America, I think. Europe is a burial ground for me now.

  —It makes me so sad to look at you. I see it plain as day—the war finished what I started.

  —Your vanity has always been shocking. I was always going to be doomed in love. If not you, then someone or something else.

  —In case it matters, I’m sorry for everything.

  Claude watched the moth flutter toward the open window, watched it recoil in the lamplight.

  —I’m sure it matters … but right now I can’t think how.

  —Since that first escape to Paris, when I was thirteen, I was never going to give myself to anyone. Not even myself. Cora and Leo, that’s the closest I’ve ever come.

  —If only you’d warned me.

  —I was nothing but warnings, Claude. One ringing alarm bell after another.

  —I was deaf back then. Blind, too.

  * * *

  Claude crossed to the projector, opened the side gate, and began to unload the reel. He turned to the window and opened it wide, giving the battering moth a clear shot at the alpine night. Sabine said she would like to sit with Pavel’s body for a while longer.