November 4, 1918
Adi walked through the doorway into what remained of the kitchen.
There wasn’t much left of the grande maison, only the foyer and a few meters of wall, held together by a bramble of ancient rosebush. The rest of the house was a pile of debris, knocked down years before by artillery.
Pulling her greatcoat tight about her against the November chill, Adi sat herself onto one of the chairs that still had most of its seat intact. In the mornings, when it was quiet, she liked to sit at the big wooden table next to the glassless windows and think. She was close enough to the hospital to hear if anyone yelled for her.
Someone was shouting now. But it wasn’t from the hospital.
Lifting up in her chair, she could make out soldiers, couriers—three of them on two horses, riding into camp from the east, getting a warm welcome from a group of men by the gate. It was too far away to make out the riders’ faces. They must’ve come down from Bazancourt or Rethel, maybe. That couldn’t have been easy.
“Just keep the bandage dry. You’ll be fine.”
Adi looked over to see Doc helping a soldier up the steps from the basement of the hospital. An American from the west. New Mexico, or that other one? Arizona. He was smiling, his arm no longer in a sling.
“Mer-ci, Doc, and bon voyage,” he said. He spotted Adi at the table over at what was left of the kitchen. “You boys keep your heads down up north, hear?” Adi smiled. The soldier gave a wave and made his way back in the direction of the tents.
Doc squinted up at the sky, the light glaring off his dirty glasses. He shuffled over to the maison. “The weather might just cooperate for a day or two.”
He examined the choice of chairs at the table until he found one acceptable. Lowering himself down, he leaned back against the wall.
• • •
The immovable front had finally moved. For the first time in four and a half years, armies were on the march again.
Not that the Germans had made it easy. Just a few months before, small bands of special forces outfitted with automatic rifles and flame throwers had swept through the lines, reinforced by a moving barrage of artillery. The British 5th Army had nearly broken. For the second time in four years, the Germans had come within a few kilometers of marching down the boulevards of Paris.
But they had neither the men nor the resources to support this tactic for long. The assault collapsed upon itself and the Allies rushed into the breach. The Americans had finally joined the fight. The Austro-Hungarian Empire had surrendered, abandoning its alliance with Germany. Troops were deserting. German cities were dying of starvation and the Spanish flu. Baron von Richthofen, “The Red Baron,” had been shot down. They had no hope now of winning the war. They struggled only to better their bargaining position for an armistice that was, now, as inevitable as the sunrise.
This didn’t mean much to Doc and Adi. They were presently eighty kilometers from the front, but that didn’t keep a steady tide of wounded from pouring in every day. Tomorrow, their rotation in this rear-area hospital was done. It was back to the front.
• • •
Adi looked at Doc for a moment, then reached over and took his glasses from his nose. It was a wonder he could see through them, speckled as they were with spots of dried blood and Lord knows what else. Like the rest of his uniform. Not that hers was much cleaner.
She pulled out her handkerchief, exhaled on the lenses, and began wiping them.
Doc took the opportunity to rub his filthy hands across his face. He turned and looked out the window. From where they were sitting one could see the sky and a distant curve of the Vesle River. Beyond that, a bit of Reims Cathedral rose up through the haze. You could almost make believe that the city wasn’t a shell-blasted ruin.
“When I was growing up,” said Doc, “some child drowned in that river every year. It’s like glass on the surface, but the current was fierce.”
She handed him his glasses. Doc put them on, smudging the lenses in the process.
“We used to, my family, used to come here every August when we were kids. About a half-mile up river, where my cousins used to live.”
Adi leaned her chin on her hand to listen. It wasn’t often that Doc would quit yelling and just talk, rarer still when he might say something about his previous existence. Most of his conversation would lead you to believe he was born an old army medic.
“Right down the way”—he motioned with his hand—“there’d be people in boats, kids swimming, families picnicking.” He laughed. “We made sure my mother never heard about all those people drowning—she’d have never let us go in.”
This sounded like something she recalled Xavier and Xander telling her. That they’d had the same rule with their mother. Or was it their governess? “Always in trouble,” they said. “She never knew the half of it.”
At least that’s what she thought she remembered.
These days it all seemed but a dream, her life before. The only thing real anymore was the never-ending war and the wounded, Doc and Gershom and the others. She was not a young lady at university, as she had once dreamed. Or even a girl with a beau, engaged or married. She was Jean Joseph Goux.
She watched Doc as he tilted his head back and closed his eyes, letting the pale sun warm him.
Pulling the watch up from inside her coat, she laid it on the table. She hardly felt wobbly anymore to lose contact with it. Probably that strange reaction had just been her imagination anyway.
But it had gotten harder for her to look at the thing, this reminder of her failure. To ruminate on the boys’ whereabouts was to invite an almost paralyzing anxiety. She had dwelled upon the mystery until her head ached, till she thought she would go mad. She never got close to an answer. Who was he? Why had he done these things to them? Why had he saved her life? If indeed he had saved her. And been there in the middle of a battle? The further away the memory got, the surer she was that it was a result of having her head banged on the floor.
She slid a fingernail under the lid and pulled it open. The boys stared out at her, their appearance never-changing, no matter how much time passed.
She had no idea what she looked like these days. There weren’t a lot of mirrors in trenches—nor in the hospital, for that matter. The wounded didn’t need reminding of what they’d lost. Nor did she. It terrified her to think of how little of herself might still be recognizable. Just as well, she thought. That silly girl, off to Paris, to live her life in splendid isolation, discarding her brothers like a pair of shoes she no longer fancied.
She flipped the watch face around. The first three squares on the left were now empty.
It still took too long, but she had gotten better at figuring the time. Thirty-six hundred seconds in an hour, 86,400 in a day, 604,800 in a week. A meager 859,429 seconds was all that was remaining. She watched as they ticked away: 7, 6, 5 . . .
Less than seven days remained. She tried to breathe through the tightness that gripped her chest.
Three of the riddles were deciphered. That was to say, only one more had been added to the Belfort and Ypres that George and Thomas had come up with. The third one was solved a year or so after she became Jean Joseph Goux and started living in holes in the ground.
That one she owed to Gershom Yachov and a soldier from Besançon.
• • •
She’d come back to the infirmary one night from her visit to the latrines. She looked over to see that a couple of stretcher bearers were sitting in the corner, looking guilty. Gershom sat between them holding the watch open in his hand, not looking the slightest bit guilty.
“Your cockamamie watch?” he said. “Who made this? And what do the riddles mean?”
“Give it back, Gershom,” Doc rumbled from his chair where he was napping. Adi grabbed the watch back in astonishment and held her hands wide to ask how he’d managed to lift it from her.
Gershom grinned. “I was beginning to think you weren’t gonna notice. I’ve had it since we were on the motorbikes this afternoon.”
According to rumor, Gershom Yachov, before he found his way into the army, was something of a gonif, which, he explained with a crooked grin, was Yiddish for “thief.”
No one knew where he came from. No one was sure he had ever even signed up. He had simply been around one day when Doc needed a driver. He was fearless behind the wheel and brilliant at procuring supplies, so no one questioned why he would be crazy enough to be there when he didn’t have to be.
Because of him, the riddles became a regular topic of conversation in the infirmary. At first, most of the men didn’t know what they represented, something about this Second Lieutenant Goux’s brothers having been kidnapped. Perhaps his sister Adi as well. Didn’t matter to them; it passed the time.
At the beginning, the men thought Goux to be a bit of an odd duck, with his not speaking and his peach fuzz cheeks. But there was something about his shy manner and good nature that inclined most of them to look after the lad. Woe be it to you if Doc caught you being mean to the kid. The colonel who muttered about “not having some bloody brown wog bandage me” found himself face-first out in the mud.
His loss. At this point Adi, as anyone who paid attention to these things agreed, had marvelous hands.
It had not started out that way.
Often as not in those first months, when the wounded started pouring in, Adi would have to run from the room, to let her stomach stop turning. Or go and be sick somewhere.
Doc would curse and shout after her, “Goux! Get your ass back in here! It’s just a goddamned leg wound!”
She did her best. Dragged herself back in.
Until one day, she realized—staring into the chest cavity of a young British soldier, his heart still pumping—that it wasn’t the human body that made her sick, but the violence done to it.
Once she understood this, her attitude shifted. When she saw some part she’d not seen before—a lung, or a kidney, or the valves of the heart—she began to appreciate the opportunity she had stumbled into. She was receiving training that only a handful of women could claim.
There were women in the war, she knew: cooks, nurses, prostitutes—she’d even seen some ladies driving ambulances. And of course women like Edith Cavell, the gallant British nurse, shot by the Germans. But as far as she knew she was the only woman in an infirmary, actually doing surgery at the front. It made her smile to imagine what her mother would say if she could see. Well, the doctor part, at least. God only knows what she would make of Second Lieutenant Goux.
For months Adi had been certain she’d be found out. It was inconceivable that she could keep fooling all these men. They were men! Didn’t they know what men look like?!
It didn’t hurt that everyone was covered in mud most of the time, bone-tired, staring at their boots. But, as the days turned to months, she began to understand—people saw what they expected to see. They could not imagine a woman dressed as a soldier, holding a scalpel, covered in blood. So they didn’t see her.
Of course, it would never have worked if they had heard her voice. That would have been the end of it right there. Thinking back to lunch with George’s family and their discussion about all those women in disguise who fought in the American Civil War—she hadn’t thought it possible. They must have had low voices.
Once, on leave, in a little town south of Troyes, they had eaten an unforgettable dinner in a restaurant run by one of Doc’s old schoolmates. The man and his wife had made a big fuss over Doc and his friends, putting them at the best table in the room, though they were certainly the only diners in the place who were not of high rank.
Adi saw a different side of Doc. He was a Frenchman after all, food his lifeblood. She finally got to experience what real French food was like: smoked ox tongue, partridge, and snails, wonderful wines, strange pâtés, and cheeses. For several hours, the war was pushed aside and Doc, with the assistance of a couple of bottles of extraordinary wine, turned into . . . himself, she guessed.
She did have a real fright, however, when she caught the owner’s wife staring at her through the meal in a curious manner. At the end of the evening, the woman leaned in to Adi and whispered, “Bravo, mademoiselle.”
Adi almost had a heart attack, but no one else appeared to notice.
• • •
One rainy afternoon, when neither side had the will to make the mud worse by shooting at each other, they were sitting around in the infirmary playing poker and talking. At the table with Adi and Doc and Gershom was a man from Besançon with an ungainly bandage wrapped across his nose. A couple of days before, a sniper’s bullet had blown the spectacles off his face, taking a small piece of the bridge of his nose with them. Having lost his glasses, he’d been holding his cards at arms length to read them. The infirmary always had a collection of eyeglasses, left by soldiers who no longer required them. Between hands, Adi sorted through them for the man to try on. They finally found a pair that would do. “Bless you,” said the soldier. “I was like Jeremiah without his spectacles!”
Doc dealt the next hand and looked to Adi to start, but she was sitting there staring into space.
“What is it?” he asked.
Turning to the man, she pointed to her mouth and made a backwards motion with her finger.
Familiar with her gestures, Gershom asked the man to repeat what he’d said about his friend who lost his spectacles.
“My friend?” said the man, confused. “Oh. Not my friend, I was talking about the prophet Jeremiah.”
Adi pulled the watch out of her tunic and opened it up to the third riddle. She slid it across the table to Gershom, signing for him to read.
“Like, I don’t know it by heart,” said Gershom.
“How will you find . . .” he recited. “. . . now that−Jeremiah’s quite blind,
“A cool drink of water for the wanderers’ father,
“After forty years of thirst has left him quite cursed
“and unable to step cross the border.”
The man looked around the table in bewilderment at the sudden, breathless attention he was recieving.
“I think you’d better tell us, soldier,” said Doc, “what you meant by the comment about Jeremaiah?”
Turned out, there was a huge sculpture, a bunch of biblical figures around a hexagonal column, in a monastery down south: Moses, David, Daniel, Zachariah, Isaiah . . . and Jeremiah.
Originally a fountain in the monastery’s courtyard, it came to be called the Well of Moses.
Adi tapped her knucles on the table and gestured to her eyes.
“Yeah,” said Cloutain, one of the nurses. “What’s that got to do with him being blind?”
The soldier from Besançon continued.
The marble figures composing the Well of Moses were quite realistic, with impressive detail. King David had ivory strings on his harp. Mary wore a metal crown. And Jeremiah had little copper glasses perched upon his nose.
During the French Revolution, when the citizens of France were taking out their frustrations on the church, the monastery was destroyed and the sculpture was knocked about. Someone made off with the clever little spectacles. Never to be seen again.
Therefore, rendering “Jeremiah quite blind.”
Adi banged on the table again to get the man’s attention and tried to sign. Doc helped her out.
“Where?” he barked. “Where is this fountain?”
Utterly confused, the man stammered, “It’s—it’s in the—city of Dijon.”
The infirmary erupted into shouts of “The map! Get the map!”
Doc was ahead of them. Out from the inside breast pocket of his coat, came a folded map.
On his birthday the year before, Doc, who complained endlessly about “never knowing where the hell they were,” was presented with a map of France by Gershom. No ordinary map this, but the sort available only to generals and high-ranking officials. They knew better than to ask where he’d managed to find such a thing. When not in use, it was always tucked safely in Doc’s pocket.
He spread it open on the tabletop and they all gathered around, Adi in the middle.
Standing out amidst the myriad dotted lines, circles, and scribbles indicating their travels was a thick black ruled line extending from the city of Ypres in Belgium, down to the town of Belfort, near the border of Switzerland. On more than one occasion they had noted the coincidence between this line and the nearly unchanging demarcation of the Western Front.
The man from Besançon stuck his head into the circle and put his finger down upon Dijon. “This means what?” he asked.
One of the interns did his best to explain, making a rather fanciful mishmash of the details. Adi let it be, as did Doc. It was just as well that the men were not too clear on the particulars.
The excitement diminished, however, once the realization hit home that without the fourth city they weren’t much better off than they’d been before.
A soldier came in with a mangled hand—caught in the feeder on his machine gun.
Doc folded up the map and bopped Adi on the head with it. “We got three, Goux. We’ll get the last.”
Everyone got back to the card game, but Adi’s heart wasn’t in it anymore.
• • •
Adi looked over at Doc. He was studying her and the watch sitting before her on the table. Rubbing his thumb across the silver medallion around his neck, he shook his head and went back to gazing out at the landscape.
Adi looked at the little swallow flying, as always, across the back of the watch. Time flying.
But not for much longer.
In a week, it would all be done. Whatever it was. This game she was supposed to be playing. It was a miracle she was still alive. Were any of them? The boys? George and Thomas? Coal? It had been so long.
“I can’t remember,” said Doc, “the last time we came here to the river. Don’t know why we stopped. Always figured Lisette and I would bring the girls . . .”
Doc drummed his fingers on the table, dropped his chair down, and stood up.
He sniffed and rubbed at the end of his nose.
“Just as well,” he said, looking over at Adi. “It’s going to be a long long time before anyone has a picnic in this place again.”
If Adi had been able, she would have kept him talking. Maybe she’d find out why he wore his wife’s medallion around his neck. Find out what happened to Lisette and his daughters.
But maybe it was just as well. They all had their secrets, didn’t they?
Doc slapped Adi on the shoulder. “Come on, my talkative friend. We got work to do if we’re going to head up to Mézières with the Americans tomorrow. Let’s go see if anyone has managed to scrape together something like breakfast in this godforsaken place!”