In 1918—more than two years after I’d come to France, and almost a year after I’d joined the Field Service—the United Sates Army arrived, marching past the base at Souilly in clean uniforms, laughing gleefully at their own bad French, boasting about the Boche heads that would roll.
“Hallo?” I heard a voice call one morning from the top of the stairs of my abri, the French-style underground bunker. I’d been sleeping the sleep of the dead. The man must have called and called. “Any English spoken down there?”
I’d driven all night and, as I took the stairs to the entrance, I could still feel the running board vibrating in the soles of my feet, could still hear the grind of the clutch, like the sound of a man retching. The Americans, three of them, stood in their comical helmets, dressed up as soldiers. “Sorry to bother you, friend,” one of them said.
He looked like a baby. I don’t mean that he looked merely young. I mean that he appeared to be an adult-size, rattle-and-pacifier baby. “It’s just that we haven’t glimpsed the front. We’re not sure where it is exactly,” the baby said, his English quite intelligible despite the fact his teeth hadn’t come in yet. His companions, who seemed older, but whom I couldn’t quite get to come into focus, grunted their assent.
“It seems quiet today,” I said, which was true. “I’ll take you up to Tunnel Kronprinz, if you like.”
We single-filed through communication trenches. The whole while, the baby went on about breasts, which he contended were like snowflakes, like fingerprints. Could the eyes tell the difference? Sometimes, obviously. But the mouth always could tell. Then he switched to nipples. Just in color there were endless variations: brown nipples, rose-pink, sunburn red. An 808 whistled overhead and exploded half a mile off. The two men and the baby dove onto their stomachs.
I felt disconnected from the earth and the air, from my own body—it wasn’t an unpleasant state, actually—and I didn’t understand why I’d volunteered to take these men, whether these men were even real at all. The Kronprinz was real enough, though. The Germans had dug the network of timbered tunnels and galleries when they’d held Mort Homme—an ancient and presciently named ridge east of the city—in the spring of 1916; it was a bunker so elaborate that whispers of German ingenuity even reached us in the citadel.
Perhaps they’d built it too well. When the inevitable French counterattack came, the Germans refused to give up the Kronprinz, even after they were surrounded and presented with terms. The French responded by gassing every last man inside. Later, they blasted the doors to find a labyrinth complete with lamps and fans on electric generators, gleaming surgical wards, officers’ quarters with wing-backed chairs and Persian rugs looted from fine maisons in Laon, all buried a hundred feet under the earth. A neat and useful spoil of war, but for the fact that the tunnels were also crowded with hundreds of German corpses.
Americans loved the Kronprinz, loved the idea that they were fighting on the side that would beat these ingenious engineers, that they, in fact, would be the ones to tip the balance. Even the baby drooled happily as I led him and his friends to the doors of the auxiliary tunnel.
“Should it smell like that?” he asked.
“No. But everything does.” I shrugged. “Try to get used to it. The electric lights still work. There’s a switch at the end of the chamber.”
I waited by a hunk of burned chassis as the two men and the baby dissolved into the tunnel’s mouth, leaving me to imagine their slow, stupid walk, a hundred meters through the dark, the smell thickening with each step. Leaving me to imagine them feeling along the walls for balance, suspecting that they were being had but too afraid of looking weak to turn around. The light switch really was a hundred meters or so back. I saw it flicker on. What must they have seen in that instant? Empty eye sockets. Flesh deserting bones. The image gave me no pleasure, at least I can say that. One of them screamed, then I saw them moving toward me—I say moving because I couldn’t describe exactly how—they seemed to have been spit more than anything else. And when they came out they breathed in fast and long. The baby looked at me with angry, natal betrayal, but I knew he would say nothing, lest he begin to cry.
It’s hard to keep a sense of right and wrong when you’ve lost your sense of what is real and what isn’t. But that’s no excuse. My madness was small. Small enough that I usually recognized it, and it was obvious to me even then that those boys from Kansas City and Cleveland were guilty of nothing but arriving in France a bit too late for my taste.
The morning I left the Hotel de Guise I could scarcely imagine why I had done such a cruel thing. And, as I washed, I wondered if, in the years to follow, I’d feel the same shame, the same sense of a very different type of temporary madness, for having spent the night with Sarah.
It all came to mind because I was scheduled to drive up to Mort Homme that very morning. But I’d found no bones there in months. I didn’t want to be reminded of any of it, not when I could still smell the sheets of her hotel room, her violet perfume on my skin. I realized that what I wanted most was to spend the day at a café. There was nobody to tell me not to.
* * *
I passed the old opera, where two men were hoisting a new door. I walked through the old town gates, across the drawbridge, then north along Rue Mazel, turning when I saw a pair of bright red shutters on an aching brown hinge, a cat licking its tail on the splintered sill.
On Rue Saint-Pierre the windows were polished, the woodwork stained dark. Signs had been painted on the glass in looping gold letters: a tailor, a fromagerie, a hardware store with a movie projector in the window.
As I approached, Sarah stepped out of a shop, carrying a parcel wrapped in butcher paper. She passed me without saying anything with either her mouth or her eyes. I felt hot blood in my face. I kept walking.
“Tom,” she called. And I spun to see her standing, half-turned up the street. I waited as she hurried toward me.
“I was just surprised,” she said. “And I didn’t want you to see.”
“To see your candle?” I asked, gesturing to the parcel.
“I suppose you know what it’s for. My aunt’s a firm believer. I imagine you aren’t.”
“Well, no. Because they’re all frauds,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “Actually, I don’t know. What makes you so sure? Have you ever been?”
I knew only the names—the Madame Misteriosos, the Madame Houdinis—the mere mention of which would send Father Perrin into a rage. It was funny how skeptical he could be, except when it came to the subject of God’s word made flesh on earth.
“You must be going somewhere,” she said.
“I suppose I am,” I said.
“I want to come with you, wherever it is. Can I take your arm?”
Reality felt loose. She slid her arm into mine and we continued up Rue Lemper. The citadel was only two streets away, so there wasn’t time to say much before we turned a corner and stood before its gray stone walls.
“Did Lee ever come here? To the Vauban Citadel?”
“There was a lot he never mentioned, but I don’t think so.”
I was glad. I wanted to show her something that was mine. The citadel had been the headquarters for the general staff, and the center of life in the city during the battle. I’d spent my seventeenth birthday in its galleries, a dungeon of twisting alleys and vague green walls. The light so dim that I always felt like my eyes were just on the edge of adjusting.
The rumors in such a place were lethal. I often woke in the night to whispers running through the barracks: The Germans had taken Fort Souville. They were one ridge away, the city was lost. The roof was finally ready to collapse.
But for three years the roof held, and Fort Souville held, and, after September of 1916, the Germans never came particularly close to the city. The shelling tapered off. It must be admitted: the citadel felt safe. Something that could not be said of many places in eastern France.
The place bustled with a kind of begrudging, melancholy life. A narrow-gauge railroad clattered through the galleries, delivering flour and bullets. In the canteens, scratchy music skipped on overworked gramophones. The men had no one to dance with, but sometimes would stagger to their feet and sway as if holding some invisible love.
It was part of my job to serve these men in whose desolate eyes, in whose scraps of conversation, I found dim and horrifying hints of life outside the walls. Once, I brought glasses of water to a table of three men—fresh water was at a far higher premium than the thin wine they called pinard. Their uniforms were splattered, their lips scabbed. One of them waved me over. “Smell this cup for me, would you?” He held it out with a blistered, trembling hand, though his voice was steady. I did as he said. The water was fetid, smelling of the particular kind of decay that was all too common in Verdun, probably from a barrel contaminated by groundwater seeping in.
“I’ll get you another,” I said, “from a different barrel.”
There was a mark just below his right eye, as if from the press of a scalding thumb. He took back the cup, and sipped, and licked his lips.
“You should try this,” he said to the other two. Their blue caps were pulled low over their eyes. “I said you should try this.” He pushed the cup across the table with his knuckles. “Go ahead. It tastes just like Jean. Go ahead, tell me I’m wrong.”
The other two men exchanged a glance. One adjusted his cap, pulling it lower, as if the best answer was just to go to sleep.
“Go ahead, go ahead, it’s Jean, it tastes just like him.”
Eventually, the second of the two men took out a pack of cigarettes.
“Have one,” he said to me. “And leave us alone.”
“Should I take the water away?” I asked.
“For god’s sake, yes!” he shouted.
Those were difficult months for me, and I thought often of Chicago, of the games of ring-a-levio I’d played with neighborhood boys whose names I’d already begun to forget. I thought often of my mother. She couldn’t afford a salon, but on Sundays her friend Helene always dolled her hair. We’d ride miles down to Oak Street Beach on the trolley even though we could have walked to the beach off Sheridan Road.
Her typical answer to my complaints about the ride was that she wanted me to meet nicer children. Though, one afternoon not long before she died, she raised her round sunglasses and said, “The truth is that I met your father here.” After that I didn’t complain. I thought she meant that Oak Street was a place of special significance, that returning to the beach in the summers was a way to feel closer to my father.
But one night, when I was trying to sleep with a hundred orphans snoring around me, I realized she hadn’t meant that at all. She’d been looking for a new husband. Even though they were both dead by then, I felt as if something had been taken from me, just an impression of affection, I suppose.
Even so, compared to life in the citadel, the past felt like safe harbor, at least at first. The soldiers glowered in passageways and spat at my feet when I helped to serve the meals of crusty bread and weak wine. My French improved month by month but I never got the accent right. I worked as hard as anyone, and, eventually, the glances and jabs began to be replaced by offers to sit and talk at the end of mess. But then those soldiers would go up to the line, many never to return, and new soldiers would come cycling in, mocking my accent, pushing past me in the dim halls.
The rest of the orphans distrusted me too, but they had nowhere to go. In March, a boy named Alain whose parents had died in Fleury arrived with a shoulder wound. He refused to talk to anyone, even Father Gaillard. For days he lay in his bunk in our dormitory. The surgery on his arm was clean and he’d avoided infection, yet his eyes remained a sickly, scornful yellow.
“I have a fever,” he kept saying. “I have a fever.”
He said this for five straight days and thrashed on the bed in a strange sort of rage. He put up such a fight that Father Gaillard himself came to kneel next to him and read from The Count of Monte Cristo.
“Alain,” he said gently, “you can see what is happening here. I know you can. You can see how important it is that you live?”
“I don’t have to do anything. I can’t do anything. I’m on fire.”
“You are fine,” Father Gaillard said. “Many others aren’t, but you are.”
“I’m on fire.”
I sat with him one night, picking up the book and beginning to read—as much to prove to myself that I could as for any other reason. “How’s your fever?” I asked when I finished the chapter.
“Very bad. I don’t care if you say it’s not.”
“You might want a cold towel,” I said. “It might help you.”
He glared up at me with the yellow eyes, as if I were trying to trick him. But eventually he nodded, and I dipped a piece of a field coat we’d shredded for rags in water, and pressed it to his cool brow.
“Thank you. Why doesn’t anyone else believe me?” he asked.
The better question is why did he insist on the fever? I thought I understood. His village had been destroyed, his parents had been killed. He couldn’t possibly be fine. That would make no sense at all.
I kept the rag to his forehead until he fell asleep. And a few days later I taught him how to knead dough for the bread. How to gauge the big ovens, and set the crust, and pull the wooden peel back from the heat at just the right moment.
“Can you tell me about Chicago?” he asked one night.
I could hear the other boys shifting in the dark on their bunks, could hear the murmured conversations die. I described the elevated trains. The downtown streets. The cold lake. They asked me about American girls, American food. Were most American men really two meters tall? Had I ever killed an Indian? Would the Americans ever come into the war?
Somehow a ritual was born. There was no one watching over us. If we wanted to talk in the electric light of our dormitory, there was no reason we couldn’t. Yet many nights we’d turn the lights off and wait until the rumble and din of the corridors and galleries had died. We would slip into our coats—old field coats, far too big for most of us—and light the kerosene lanterns stolen from the kitchen where most of us worked. We would put the lanterns against our chests and button up the coats so that only a glimpse of light bled onto our chins and mouths. We would talk.
Why go to all the trouble? Perhaps there was a reason in the beginning, but it was quickly forgotten. It was a means of granting permission, really, of confirming that we weren’t just talking. Alain described the evacuation of Fleury, Serge the fall of Ornes. Franck described his village on the edge of Lorraine, the prehistoric rock there, once a site of pagan worship. He told us how the parish priest had stuck an iron cross into the rock and how, despite the devout nature of his village, the cross was ripped down in a matter of days. Why? Because the rock was and always had been a place for bodies, not spirits. Franck himself had been pushed behind the rock with a girl from the village, and in the darkness they had found their mouths pressed together.
“And who did you tell them about?” Sarah asked me as we turned back toward the river.
* * *
In a different time and place, the medium might have been famous just for her eyes, large and shallow-water blue. She met us in the street below her flat. I’d seen her before, I realized, at a table by the river, drinking alone. I never learned her real name, but she went by Madame Goyas.
“The address is hard to find,” she said in perfect English, “so I always come down.”
She led us up a narrow staircase to a door with a glazed bowl hanging upon it, painted like an eye. Inside was the room of a pauper: a sagging table and three unmatched chairs, a cloudy oil lamp on a windowsill. The walls were bare except for a row of telegrams of condolence in French, German, Italian, and Russian. One was addressed to Mr. and Mrs. John Fields of St. Louis, Missouri.
“I can speak many languages,” Madame Goyas said. “It’s all the same to me. Which do you prefer?”
“What language do the spirits speak?” I asked.
“It’s all the same on the other side too.” Even as she narrowed her eyes they seemed huge. “I know who you are. You’ve come to discredit me, no?”
She may have been a fraud, but she certainly wasn’t a fool. She looked from me to Sarah, those eyes asking what kind of friend I was supposed to be.
It was a fair question. Sarah and I had eaten lunch, poking fun at acquaintances who’d buried fingernails in flowerpots and slept with photographs under their pillows. She asked me to accompany her to the séance, and only after I agreed did I realize she was serious. No matter. I’d already decided to give myself over to her wishes, whatever they might be. But now I didn’t know what I was supposed to do or say, let alone what I was supposed to feel. Madame Goyas needn’t have worried. I was a fool but not a fraud.
“It’s right to be cautious,” Madame Goyas continued. “There are many charlatans. The dead don’t want to talk to the living. It isn’t easy to make them.”
She gestured to the table. Window light slashed toward a basin filled with an inch or two of water. Madame Goyas stepped toward the mantel of a collapsed fireplace and lit white candles with a long match. Sarah unwrapped her candle—the duplicate of the half-burned others—and placed it in the center of the table.
“Why don’t they like to talk to the living?” Sarah asked—skeptically? Sincerely? I couldn’t tell.
Madame Goyas smiled and dropped the match into the basin.
“They’re happy,” she said, “and we upset them.”
“Heaven, you mean?”
“There’s no heaven,” she said. “Only the other side.”
It was obviously a show, but a good show. The show was in the poverty of the room, in its disdain for the luxuries of this side. The show was in the absence of heavy drapes, or silver bells, or crystal balls, or iconography of any kind.
The show was in Madame Goyas’s parochial dress, modestly covering her from ankles to neck, but too small and cut for a girl, so one’s eyes adjusted to the rounds of her shoulders and hips, the swell of her breasts, as if to the dark. The show was in her body, hidden in plain sight, emanating aliveness more than sexuality. And the show was in her face, in that expression some people—powerful people—can summon. The expression that says, Yes, I understand. Father Perrin’s expression. I began to grow nervous because I feared that she did understand; I feared she understood what was happening between Sarah and me far better than I did.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“France, of course. Aas,” she said. “In the Pyrenees. And you?”
“Shouldn’t you know?”
“Should I? Are you dead?”
“He’s also American,” Sarah said.
“American? I had no idea, you see?” She smiled.
The slash of light fell from the table. Madame Goyas peered into the basin and nodded her approval.
“The match is pointing toward Mrs. Hagen,” she said. “We should begin.”
The match was pointing toward Sarah, directly at her, in fact. It floated, unwavering, its head splintering bits of black sulfur.
“I ask you to close your eyes, and to put your foreheads to the table. Don’t think that I have left you. That is the one thing that will not happen.”
“All right,” Sarah said, her voice snagging on something. This was no lark. She was nervous, perhaps even afraid.
“But first light the candle you brought, Mrs. Hagen.”
Sarah’s face flared yellow above the match. She put her damp hand in mine and I reached to take Madame Goyas’s hand, wide rings on every finger.
I closed my eyes. It was too late to get away. The tabletop was surprisingly cold.
Silence. Then Madame Goyas began to whistle. Or not quite. She began to speak. But the words, vaguely French, would phase in and out like wind whipping through branches, like the breathing of a man shot through the throat.
“There,” she said in English. “There. Now don’t move.”
“What was that?” Sarah asked.
“The dialect from my village. No one speaks it now.”
“But the dead do?” I asked.
“I asked if you had a preference. This is my preference,” she said. “But now I must explain, Mrs. Hagen. Ask questions. Ask what you want to know of Lee. Do not speak of anything other than the questions you want him to answer. That is important. Do you understand?”
“When?” Sarah asked.
For a time there was nothing to do but listen to Sarah’s breath. Then I heard footsteps. I thought someone had come into the room from behind the curtain opposite the window, but the picture of the room in my mind had broken into shards. Madame Goyas whistled again, and the sound now seemed to carry a chill. I felt drops of sweat on my neck.
“Lee?” Sarah said.
Madame Goyas’s fingers were stiff as the bands of her rings. Though I knew I was still holding Sarah’s hand, I couldn’t feel it. The footsteps circled the table. More drops on my neck, on the backs of my ears, in my hair.
“Lee?” Sarah said again. “Lee. Lee. Lee.”
Silence.
“Lee,” she said.
“What is that?” I whispered.
“Rain,” Madame Goyas whispered. “Don’t talk.”
Rain? Yes. The entire room seemed to rustle with the sound of falling water. It smelled like rain too, warm and light. My eyes were still closed, but I could see it all around us. Cloudless, wolf’s-wedding rain, with the sun shining through. The steps squeaked and slid across the floor, nimble, insouciant, a child’s. Lee. Lee. Lee. The darting tongue of the name lashed like brambles along naked legs. Lee. Lee. Lee.
The steps were running now, not over floorboards but through wheat; there was the crush and swish of a field giving way. Birds startled in the underbrush and fluttered past my face. I could smell the ashes of an old fire, could hear the tolling of a church bell, faint and far. The footsteps skidded through a brook. The ringing fell away. But where was the question? Lee. Lee. Lee. Madame Goyas’s hand had started to shake.
I tried to rise, and felt Madame Goyas’s grip tighten, her arm going rigid to hold me in place. I didn’t move again. The specter, the actor, the illusion—whatever it actually was—had reached a road.
“Say something, Mrs. Hagen,” Madame Goyas said.
“Lee,” Sarah said. “Lee, what was it that tasted like berries?” The words came out all at once. My stomach clenched. The rain shut off. Someone was coughing. Madame Goyas’s hand jerked away and I opened my eyes. The sun had faded entirely and the room was lit only by candlelight. She was the one coughing, and pink-tinged slime poured out of her mouth and down the front of her dress.
She coughed as if she had been pulled from the bottom of the river; the slime came out in spurts on the table. I pushed my chair back. Finally, she released me from her grip and put up the hand to cover her mouth as fresh slime slid through her fingers.
Madame Goyas shook her head as if to say there was nothing to worry about. She ducked behind the curtain and returned with a glass of water and a rag.
“I’m sorry,” Sarah said, as Madame Goyas wiped her mouth. “I couldn’t think.”
“No. I’m sorry, Mrs. Hagen,” she said. “You must have known. That wasn’t him.”
* * *
We walked back to the hotel. We undressed. We made love. Well, no, I wouldn’t have put it that way even then, but I don’t know what else to call it. The married couples I write about sleep in separate beds, after all. I take that as a good bit of fortune actually, as sex is difficult to aestheticize. It becomes funny so quickly, and there was nothing funny—or even pleasurable, in the typical way—between us that afternoon. Perhaps it’s enough to say that there was confusion in it, not the confusion of pain and pleasure you see in dirty books, but the confusion of comfort and fear.
Afterward, I searched for something to say beyond the obvious, but in my mind there was only blankness, and outside was her bed and her body.
“What did the question about the berries mean?” I asked.
“It was in one of the last letters he wrote me,” she said. “They said it would taste like berries. It doesn’t taste like berries. It doesn’t make a difference. I know it’s absurd.”
Madame Goyas had returned half of Sarah’s money. She’d apologized. She’d said all the signs were right, but signs were only approximations, trickles of light from a buried fire. We hadn’t talked about the rain, the footsteps, the slime in her mouth. Once we left, it didn’t seem to matter whether any of that had really happened.
“I wonder if you would have asked something else if I hadn’t been there.”
“I don’t believe in any of it, Tom. That’s why I invited you.”
“To prove that you don’t believe in it?”
“Yes. But I shouldn’t have.”
“You think I kept him away?”
“No, but I’ll tell you what I do believe, if you really want to know.”
“That he’s still alive?” I hadn’t realized I knew until the words were out of my mouth. I couldn’t even wish to take them back. She would have told me as much in the next instant.
She sat up in bed. “I suppose you’ve seen this a hundred times?”
“Actually,” I said, “if you want to know the truth, I’ve never seen anything like you.”
She rubbed her face with the heels of her hands, looked at me from the corner of her eye, smiled with the corner of her mouth. I started to laugh. At her expression, or at what I’d said. Or perhaps at neither. I always laugh hardest when I’m not quite sure what’s funny. And she laughed too, though not as much. She understood the joke better than I did.
“This—with you—it isn’t common for me. Suddenly I was afraid you might not realize that.”
I touched her arm to no effect. “I couldn’t think that, not unless I was completely blind.”
She nodded. “I suppose that’s why I bring it up.”
The room still felt like the inside of a jewelry box. The city outside was the same dusty black. Her back curved against my palm as it had before. And yet.
“You don’t have to go on searching,” I said. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t. But you don’t have to.”
“You’re right, of course. But my train leaves tomorrow morning.”
* * *
I saw Madame Goyas once more before I left Verdun. She wore the same black dress, but I almost didn’t recognize her. Her mouth was different, her eyes different, and her bearing suggested someone younger, someone who had seen far less of the world. Her voice was different too, shy and a little wild, as she invited me to share her café table along the river.
“You usually sit alone,” I said.
“Since you already doubt me, what’s the harm? And I have a question that I’d like to ask you.”
I nodded.
“You lied to her about something. What was it?”
“I thought you were out of character,” I said.
“Can’t you tell a liar?”
“Yes, I suppose.”
“Will she forgive you?”
“I may never see her again, anyway,” I said.
“Really?” She showed a face unlike any I’d seen her make. It must require enormous discipline to never appear surprised. “You’d disgrace yourself for a woman you don’t hope to see again?”
“I didn’t say I didn’t hope.”
She poured me a glass from a carafe of red wine. I put my hand up to block the sun so I could look her in the eyes.
“How much longer will you stay in Verdun, do you think?” I asked.
“Until there is a better place for my work. Forever? I take great pleasure in not having to decide.”
“I don’t understand that,” I said.
“No. I don’t think someone like you could understand, but if I had stayed in Aas, I’d have married years ago, and then my future would be quite certain. At least for the women there every day has been identical for hundreds of years. Certainly, I wouldn’t be able to sit out at a café and share a drink with you.” She finished her glass and poured another, as if to prove the point. “Shouldn’t I make the most of the few advantages my life has offered me?”
The river glittered in the late afternoon. A waiter whistled past. I think I wanted to hurt her feelings, to see if I could.
“Perhaps if you’d married, your husband would have died in the war. Wouldn’t that change things?”
She looked at me, laughter sparkling in her light eyes. “Who’s to say that’s not exactly what did happen? And who’s to say that my husband and I don’t get along better now than we ever did when he was alive?”
“That’s right. What did you say? The dead are truly happy?”
“No, that was a lie.” Her expression darkened, and she lowered her voice. “It used to be true, but now the dead are desperate to talk.”
“Why is that?”
“They don’t recognize the world they left and they come to ask us why.”
She was a fine actress. Had she met the right person on an ocean liner she might have been famous for a little while. Once I arrived in California I looked for her sometimes in nightclubs and on soundstages. Somehow, it seemed wholly possible that I would see her.
And a few years ago I thought I heard her on the radio in a Paris hotel. My wife was angry with me, and rightfully so. We’d taken a trip. The first time I’d been to Paris in twenty-five years, the first time she’d ever been, and I found myself desperate not to leave the hotel room.
Faye gave up and went out to meet the Mona Lisa, leaving me alone to listen to a program about the smuggling of Jews and dissidents into Spain during the Nazi occupation. The host described the language that locals used to help the smugglers, a whistling dialect that could carry from mountaintop to mountaintop. Imagine, listener, he said in a grave and gravelly voice, that you are one such refugee, that you have been traveling for weeks. You are tired and terrified. Imagine what you see across the mountains: a peaceful valley, a huddle of buildings, and a slender church tower amid the shadows of peaks. This is Spain, this is freedom, and this is the sound that guides you to it . . .
“What do you intend to do now?” Madame Goyas asked from her seat at the café by the river. It was the last day I ever sat in one of those cafés, I think, my last evening on the Meuse. I never went back to Verdun. I saw the completed ossuary only in pictures. An ugly thing, rising from the ridge just past Fleury near Fort Douaumont. A cold cement box with a bell tower like the hilt of a sword. According to Life magazine, the bones we’d collected had been interred finally in a basement vault, visible only through knee-level windows.
* * *
The end is in the beginning. Comedians have always said so, and, more recently, physicists. When Father Perrin arrived in Verdun in the spring of 1919, he called me into the office and paced in front of the big windows above the courtyard.
“I must admit, Tom, I find it strange that you’d want to stay on here,” he said. “Brave, perhaps, but it’s a nasty effect of war that bravery—so-called bravery—is valued so highly. So let me admit to you that I’m terrified that I’ll fail at what I set out to accomplish here. You’re not French. You’re hardly Catholic, I think. Are you telling me you’re not afraid you might not be able to help?”
He took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and tapped at the foil with one finger, frowning.
“Father Gaillard has asked me not to smoke in his office,” he said. “You see, I’m learning my limitations. Just when I think I’ve met them all, a knock on the door.”
“Sometimes a friend knocks,” I said.
He nodded skeptically, as if to say that a turn of phrase was worth nothing. He sat down on the edge of the desk and arranged his face, practicing, I think, for the job ahead. “My mother died when I was eleven, Tom. And this was seen as a great stroke of fortune for my family. My father saw hellfire in her eyes. Don’t misunderstand. That isn’t an expression. He saw hellfire, and dumped the water from every pot and pan in the house so she’d have no way to put it out. And also don’t misunderstand, my father was an exhaustingly ordinary man.” His expression softened, as it always did eventually. “I understand your mother is also dead. Can you tell me how?”
I told him what I remembered. The public ward. Her yellow lips, her yellow tongue. How she had died with open eyes, how the nurse who closed them had been her high school classmate, as it happened. She smoothed my mother’s dry hair on the yellow pillow. “You know what a looker she was when I knew her?” She smiled at me. “Now she will be again.” My dead mother, the looker.
Father Perrin touched my shoulder. “You see? You see?”
I never fully understood what I was supposed to see, but he agreed to let me stay. And, two days after Sarah boarded the train for Udine, a day after he returned from Rodez, he invited me in and waited patiently while I poured myself a glass of water from the tray on the Second Empire desk. He poured himself a glass of wine.
He already knew about Sarah—our affair—obviously. Still, he let me tell him in my own words. A truck pulled into the courtyard, the engine idling. A door slamming, the driver—his name was Clarence—calling to the cook with whom he often played cards to come out and take delivery of the week’s vegetables.
Father Perrin closed the window. His right eye was fitful. He was worn out, and not just from the trip. In the two years I’d known him he’d aged ten.
“Perhaps you think I’m partially to blame,” he said.
“I don’t,” I said.
“Perhaps you think you shouldn’t feel ashamed.” He swallowed some wine. “You may be right. But you should be careful. Suffering speaks a language all its own. And that language is seldom literal. Do you understand me? Do you feel ashamed?”
The cook walked out into the courtyard, shading his eyes. He accepted a cigarette, as the truck continued to idle. If I could have met Sarah in a hotel in Aix-les-Bains or in a train station in Chicago, I would have. But I would not have changed anything else.
“You’re saying she may not love me,” I said. “But I didn’t say she did.”
“Am I still managing to overestimate you? Didn’t you at least do this because you thought you were in love?”
He lit a cigarette and smoked it in three draws. The cook, Michel, laughed over the grind of the truck and said, “Too true, too true.” The room reeked of smoke and exhaust. Father Perrin’s eyes were red and didn’t seem to see me. My eyes burned.
“I have pity for her, for Mrs. Hagen, for all of them—all those that come here, you know that. But I have to admit to you: pity is difficult to maintain all of the time. Especially when I can see in each face the same wish: if only it could be someone else. What I mean is that the grieving are just as selfish as the rest of us, perhaps more.”
“You’re saying that . . .”
“That, in my experience, suffering does not bring sanctity. What I mean to say is that you don’t believe in God, I suspect, though I know you wouldn’t tell me. So, if the world is all atoms and void, who could begrudge you a few unclaimed atoms that might lend some comfort? Who could begrudge her? Only I don’t believe this will bring any comfort to you, Tom. Not in the end. Perhaps that is why I’m so upset.”
“Too true, too true,” Michel shouted again; this time, Father Perrin tapped the window. The two men threw down their cigarettes and set to work.
“No, that’s not entirely true, Tom. I’m upset because you were wrong. Very wrong. And it was a mistake from the beginning to put you in such a position. It was my mistake. Just explain to me what you were thinking. How you justified this—what can I call it?—a romance, a dirty weekend? Just tell me that?”
I don’t think he expected an answer, though he certainly deserved one. He’d shared wine grown in vineyards around his village in Languedoc, and admitted to me he was once so poor that he stole those same grapes for food. He told me he hadn’t heard piano music until he was seventeen and had just arrived at the seminary in Toulouse. At first he mistook the sound for rain.
“I’ve never understood why he doesn’t turn off the engine,” Father Perrin said. “I hate to have to talk to him about it, but I suppose I will.” He waved his hand through the cigarette smoke, as if to say that was all.
“At least she wasn’t French,” he said, and smiled sadly. “No. I shouldn’t joke. I won’t tell Father Gaillard. Rather, I’ll tell His Grace you decided it was finally time. I’ll say we decided. And, once you are gone, no one will remember what you’ve done. I will. But only because you’re my friend.”
He rose from the desk. I looked up to see Michel carrying a box of mirabelles past the windows. One fell, and Clarence picked it up and pretended to throw it at the back of Michel’s head, laughing to himself.
“Do you know,” I said, “do you know that I found Mrs. Hagen sitting on the edge of the pond? Somehow she’d caught one of the fish in her purse. It was the strangest thing.”
Father Perrin opened the door to the hall.
“Why do you tell me that now?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Because I promised her I wouldn’t.”