The Reckoning

by Chonghaile, Clár Ní;

  “Thanks be to Christ, they didn’t give us bikes as well, like those poor lads over there,” he said as he pushed past me.

  “Good luck, Georgie. Stay right behind me and do what I do.”

  After we got off the beach, we were supposed to secure Caen to stop the Germans from getting to the coast. We knew there were Panzer divisions around and we’d heard the stories of what Hitler’s youth troops, the Hitlerjugend, were doing to captured paratroopers. True or false, it didn’t matter. It got our blood up. We were fired up for the fight. We’d been told that this was it, this was where we were going to win the war. And we wanted that end; we wanted it so very badly by then. So yes, you might say we were itching for a fight. And then we’d all come over from Blighty, we’d seen the damage that’d been done to our cities and our towns so there was a desire for revenge too. And the fighting in Normandy was brutal – dashing across open cornfields or tiptoeing down those lanes with their high hedges, not being able to see the enemy but knowing he was there. It was enough to break the strongest spirit. So there we were: tens of thousands of angry, vengeful, tired young men who just wanted to be done with it all. Against us, some of Hitler’s most fanatical fighters. It was never going to be pretty but what happened in Caen was beyond awful.

  The town had been bombed as part of the invasion but it wasn’t enough. We still couldn’t break through and so we held back. It was July before we went at it properly. I remember the day the Lancasters and Halifax bombers came over. I was standing with Robert on a hill outside the town. You’ve never seen anything like it, Lina. Wave after wave of bombers, dropping their loads like confetti at a wedding. We watched the bombs float down, then the flowers of smoke bursting all over the town. We’d been told the people had been ordered to evacuate and we believed it but still. It was terrible to stand there and watch the city get hammered like that. It was brutal and sickening, the air was vibrating with the shockwaves and the ground was shaking under our feet.

  That night our guns opened up on Caen. Hour after hour of shells whining and crashing and exploding until none of us could bear it any more. It was as though the machines had taken over the earth and were hell bent on destroying it. Metal and noise and smoke and flames – that’s what I remember. Treads and tracks branding the ground. We’d sold our souls to get the machines on our side and now they’d become our masters. That’s what I thought.

  Robert and I were with some other chaps in a barn a few miles away but we couldn’t sleep. The dead themselves wouldn’t have been able to sleep through that. So we went back up to the hill and watched the flames devour the town until the smoke burned our eyes so much we had to go back.

  I remember Robert said: “Will they ever be able to forgive us when they come back and see what we have done to their home? I know we say this is the only way, but what will they think? Is this any different to what the Germans did to our towns and cities?”

  He took his helmet off and held it in front of him, like he was in church. Or at a funeral. I felt odd looking at him like that but I did the same. He didn’t say anything else for a while. The shells didn’t leave much space for talking. They filled every moment.

  “Can peace be worth this?” he said eventually. “Is this really the only way or is this the only way we can imagine?”

  I remember his face flashing like a beacon in the light of the explosions, white eyes and teeth like holes in the night. It was the first time I doubted his survival. And I suppose by extension my own. I was suddenly very scared.

  “This is who we are now,” he said. “We can never be other than what we have done here.”

  The next day, we walked into Caen together. I say walked but that’s not right. Every road was knee-deep in rubble. Wood, bricks, chunks of plaster, torn curtains and sheets, smashed furniture, toys, splintered branches from felled trees and broken cartwheels. Houses gutted, churches pulverised. Like sandcastles smashed by children. And the smell. Death on our lips so that we didn’t even dare lick them to quench our thirst. Death in our throats so we didn’t even want to breathe in case it would get into our lungs. What would you do with death in your lungs? There were bodies everywhere, some out in the open, some in shallow graves, others we could only smell. On one side of the road, someone had tried to bury a child. There was a doll sitting underneath a cross made from two bits of branch. The doll was wearing a green bonnet. She’d yellow hair and was sitting quite daintily on the pile of earth. Only thing was they hadn’t managed to dig deep enough – the soil was hard by then, parched and dry. One shoe, a black canvas shoe, like the one I saw today, was poking out of the grave. I could see the tiny shin too. Socks all rumpled like kids’ socks always are. And the doll there like a guardian angel. Only not even angels could save the people of Caen.

  The only sound was the creaking and whining of the tanks blasting a way through the rubble ahead of us and the dull thud of shells falling away to the north where we were still trying to drive the Germans out. And the odd gunshot because there were still snipers around, taking potshots at us.

  We ran between the broken buildings, hunkering down low. As ever, Robert was in front of me, racing across the street, leaping over piles of rubble, glancing quickly behind him every few minutes to make sure I was there. You have to understand how important his concern was, Lina. We all felt dispensable by then. To have someone pay attention to your life, as well as to their own, it felt like a mother’s kiss. It really did. Every now and then, bullets pinged into the masonry around us. We tried to get a line on the snipers and the tanks blasted away in the direction from which the shots were fired but those deadly, single shots kept coming. I saw the soldier in front of Robert fall as he stepped around a corner. He didn’t shout out, his death was silent, just an intake of breath, a space left in the heart of the noise. Robert rushed forward, grabbed the man’s arms and lugged him into the shelter of a crumbling wall. I couldn’t tell who the fallen man was. I didn’t want to know. He was probably gone. Time enough to count the dead later and what good would knowing do anyway? I hunkered behind my own bit of smashed wall and watched Robert bend over the body, ear to lips and then the slight dip in his shoulders that meant the man was dead. I saw Robert close his eyes and rise. He stood for a moment, tall and exposed, facing the direction the bullet had come from. I will never forget that sight. I wanted to shout at him, to tell him to stop mucking around and get the hell down but the cry died in my throat. I felt like standing up myself. What if we all, on both sides, just stood up and let our arms drop to our sides and just looked at each other? What if? Robert did that for us. He made us believe that things could change and that was maybe the only thing that kept us going sometimes.

  A few streets later, we came to a cobbled square. The ruins of a church rose over the eastern side. The steeple looked like it had been cut down the middle with a knife. The body of the church had taken a direct hit. You could look straight through the windows to the street on the other side. Few of us were believers by then, but even so, the sight of a bombed-out church always made us pause. A few of the lads crossed themselves as they went past. Something flashed in the corner of my eye, a splash of colour. It was a little boy, couldn’t have been more than four or maybe five. I’ve never had children so I could be wrong and by then, a lot of the French children in that area were small for their age because of how hungry they’d been for so many years. He was wearing a red wool jumper. That’s what caught my eye. He was hunched low beside the church wall but he straightened up when he saw us. Robert took his hand from his rifle and waved. The boy waved back and then he dashed towards us, arms pumping, little legs vaulting over the piles of rubble. And then he stopped. We heard the shot a second later and a second later than that, an anguished cry. Something between a sob and a scream but it didn’t come from the boy. It came from Robert. The boy was a few yards from us. His eyes had widened under his dirty brown hair, the smile was still half on his face but it was going rigid already. His cheeks were dirty and there was
a single tear track on the flushed, mud-streaked skin. Robert got to him and caught him before he fell. I whipped around, whirling like a crazy man, trying to see where the shot had come from. Dust sprang up around Robert’s feet as he sprinted back with the boy in his arms. We ran towards a café and smashed through the splintered wooden door. Robert laid the boy on the floor as I crouched by the glassless window. I could hear Robert whispering behind me. “Come on, come on, little man. Not like this. Not after all you’ve been through. Come on.”

  I couldn’t bear to turn around, I didn’t want to see another death but I couldn’t leave Robert to handle it, not after all he’d done for me. I crept from the window and put my hand on Robert’s shaking shoulder. I could see the boy was dead. His face was grey now. He’d taken the bullet right in the chest. Blood was pooling under him. I was glad we hadn’t turned him over.

  “Robert, we should go. This is over. There’s nothing you can do.”

  I held out his helmet to him.

  “I don’t know why I waved,” he moaned. “What’s wrong with me? Why did I do it, George?”

  He looked up at me and his eyes were red and the boy’s blood was on his cheek and his lips were trembling.

  “I did this, George. I did this.”

  He closed his eyes for a minute. I thought he was going to collapse. I’d seen it before. Men falling to the ground, legs crumpling under them when whatever it was that kept them upright just ran out. Some never got up. I’d never thought it would happen to Robert.

  “This is it, George. This is why I’m untouchable. It’s blood on my hands, deaths on my conscience. Every fucking scrape I come through means someone else has taken my bullet, my shell, my death. Why the hell should I survive? What makes me special?”

  He stood up and ran to the door. I tried to grab his arm, he shook it off and then he was outside, walking bareheaded, without his rifle, straight across the street, screaming something at the sky. I got to the door. I wanted to follow him but I couldn’t. My feet wouldn’t cross the threshold. I knew the sniper was still out there, invisible, playing God from on high. A bullet pinged past my ear. I ducked back into the café. When I dared to look out again, Robert was still striding across the square, towards a half-demolished four-storey building on the other side. The sniper had to be at one of the blackened windows. Bullets were pinging into the ground around Robert but he kept going. I was terrified. The sniper would adjust his aim, it was only a matter of seconds before Robert would drop. I could not tear my eyes away. Death was usually instantaneous so Robert’s walk across that square was something of a miracle. And then, the hollowed out shell where the sniper was hiding disappeared in a dull detonation of smoke and dust. One minute it was there and then my ears were ringing, Robert had stopped and the square was filled with dust. When it cleared, I saw that the top three storeys of the building were gone. Just like that. The tank crew had scored a direct hit. For a moment, everything stopped. There was total silence. I ran towards Robert but stopped a few feet behind him. He was still staring at the building. His arms hung empty at his sides. A captain ran towards us.

  “What the devil do you think you’re doing? You want to get killed? ‘Cos you know you don’t have to try that bloody hard here.”

  He was shaking with fury.

  “Turn around soldier when I speak to you.”

  Robert turned around slowly. I wish to this day I hadn’t seen his face. There was nothing there. It was so empty. So hard.

  “Go get your helmet and your rifle, you idiot,” the captain bellowed. “You pull something like that again and I’ll shoot you myself. Still, you smoked him out for us, I suppose. I’ll give you that.”

  He looked up to where the building had been just seconds before and shook his head.

  “C’mon, lad. Pull yourself together now. We’ve still got a lot to do.”

  He smiled at Robert but he might as well have smiled at a statue for all the reaction he got.

  As Robert was walking back to pick up his rifle and helmet, a small woman with wild hair rushed past him into the café.

  “Il est oú? Il est oú, mon fils?”

  We heard her shrieking when she got inside. “Christophe, mon ange! Non, pas Christophe! Ils t’ont fait quoi, mon ange?”

  Robert stepped towards the door, paused for a second and then went in, picked up his rifle from the floor and walked away. He didn’t look back and he never wore his crooked smile again, not even on the day the war ended. Caen was the breaking of him, I think. It nearly broke me too. It would’ve if I’d been the one to wave at the boy. I nearly did. I so nearly did but Robert was always two steps ahead of me.

  ***

  So, there you have it, Diane. That was the cancer that ate away at your father’s heart until he could bear it no more. It is a tale soaked in tears. George wept as he told it and I wept as I heard it that night and I have cried again now in the retelling of it to you. It is a story so terrible it transcends time to ring its hopelessness through the ages.

  This was the secret that Robert struggled to tell and that I could not help him carry because of my own guilt over Penrose. My shame made me fearful and fear displaced compassion. They say fear can unify but I don’t believe that. Fear diminishes us. It diminished me and it diminished the sniper who shot at Robert with a child nearby. It diminished us all when we bombed cities and towns and villages so that we could win a war that had mechanised fear, turning us all into killing machines. For Robert and I, guilt and fear overpowered our love. We both paid the price. And you, my darling. You too paid a heavy price.

  CHAPTER 23

  After I left Vietnam, I lost touch with George. I genuinely liked him, even before he told me Robert’s last story, but I was never very good at staying in contact once people were out of my line of sight. Perhaps after giving you up, I had to cultivate an extreme level of detachment to be able to go on. That may sound like another of my self-serving excuses but I do believe there is something to it, even if it cannot offer total exoneration. Out of sight had to be out of mind. Otherwise I would have been out of my mind. Evelyn was the exception. Our friendship was immutable because she always knew the true me.

  I found it hard to sustain the relationships I developed after I started living my lie. I had lost too many loved ones already and although I carried on because I could not face the alternative, when it came to meeting new people I felt a bonedeep fatigue. If the price of love is grief, it was a price I had decided was too high. Or was it something else? A lacuna at the heart of my personality? I don’t think we’ll ever really know.

  I returned to Paris in April 1962 and with McNeish’s blessing took a month off. I told him I needed to recharge my batteries but really I needed to grieve. It was as though I had lost Robert all over again. I needed to revisit his death in the light of what George had told me.

  I rented a cottage in the Drôme and I drove myself south into a land where still-brown lavender bushes contoured the dips and rises of vast fields and where cool rivers cut through deep gorges. I passed through sleepy red-roofed villages where old men cycled high bicycles down silent streets, offering an illusion of stasis and permanence. My one-bedroom bungalow with its unfenced front lawn was at the end of a rutted lane in a pine and cypress forest. You could go this far and no further. I revelled in the solitude, walking up and down the hills until I couldn’t take another step and couldn’t tell if it was sweat on my face or tears. Each night I drank a bottle of wine, sitting on the veranda, watching bats trace secrets onto the darkening sky and listening to the cicadas, the lowing of the cows and the odd car juddering along roads I could not see. I don’t know that I found peace or salvation or answers but I did what I needed to do: I stayed alive in the present. I drowned my pain each night and then I sweated out what was left as I trudged for miles under the prickling, punishing heat, now and then stopping to lie down and scream into the fragrant ground as unbending, uncaring fir trees looked on. I forced myself to relive every moment, every glanc
e and every word of those last weeks with Robert, remembering it all through the prism of what I now knew. It was utterly pointless and utterly unavoidable. Nothing could change what had happened but I owed it to Robert to stare directly into the sun. When I returned to Paris, I was scorched, inside and out.

  For the next few months, I threw myself into my work. I became a recognised voice, my opinions lauded or loathed but always provoking a reaction. I relished the freedom I had to choose my stories, set my own lines and argue my points of view. I watched Europe split into two, travelling to Berlin to write about people trying to escape from the east over the ‘wall of shame’. I was there when a young man was shot in the pelvis as he tried to flee and then left to bleed to death for an hour as the East German police looked on. The West German police could only throw him bandages as he lay writhing under the barbed wire, his bloodied hand marking the sand with desperate ciphers. The needless waste of that young life made me shake with fury.

  In late 1962, I held my breath as we teetered towards a nuclear Armageddon because of a missile site on an island half a world away. It should have come as no surprise. We had opened that box nearly two decades before and although we did it in the name of peace, one would have to be a fool to believe one can force the evil one creates to do one’s bidding forever. Henry had known that. We all knew we had crossed a line in 1945 but we tried to forget about it when the war ended because otherwise we would have to acknowledge the price not just of the war but also of the peace.