“I received an interesting letter from Bologna today,” Marcel said one morning in the spring of 1922—late spring, late May, the butter on the dish at our café table soft enough to have caught one of the season’s first flies. He’d asked me to lunch, as he did at least once a week. I knew I’d disappointed him by drifting over to the Americans at the Chevalier Vert, but he was the type who went out of his way to be more attentive when he was hurt. I was trying to learn from his example. I took my croque madames the way he did—the barely touched egg running yellow off the bread—thinking that sometimes it’s the smallest things that make a person feel less alone in the world.
Spring was splitting into summer, and what a spring it had been for Marcel. His work on the Mangin story had earned him a small award, and circulation of La Voix du Soldat continued to rise, even as ads for missing men were replaced by advertisements for shirt collars and quack cures.
Marcel, with an acumen I think he had only just discovered in himself, announced in the March 1 issue that our publication would henceforth be known simply as La Voix. It would continue to tell the story of the men and women who sacrificed for France, of course, but shouldn’t it be acknowledged that all the French had sacrificed, that we were all soldats in one way or another? It was La Voix’s job to speak to, and for, us all.
“Bologna,” he said, “is the new home of the Italian amnesiac.”
We’d been following the story of the Italian amnesiac only vaguely. Like Mangin, he’d been a prisoner of war, but the Austrians, in the death throes of empire, had nowhere near the Prussian proficiency for record-keeping. They completely lost track of the man in the camp. He had no identification, and didn’t look particularly Italian, so they sent him to Serbia after the armistice.
It soon became clear to the doctors in Belgrade that the man was no Serb. For one thing, he spoke no Serbian. Not that he spoke much of any language, but he could follow basic commands—sit, stand, undress—in French, Italian, and English. Since Italy was closest, they sent him there. First to a military hospital in Udine. Then to another in Sienna, then finally to an asylum in Bologna at the request of a famous doctor who’d taken an interest in his case.
According to the report Marcel had just read, the man had spoken his first word in three years. The word was ball. According to the report, the man’s picture had been released to the Red Cross and all the usual groups. But the Italian papers still hadn’t shown much interest.
“Part of their excuse,” Marcel explained, “is that nobody knows if he’s Italian. But if he is Italian, they don’t want to pollute the glorious image of Roman masculinity by putting the focus on a catatonic coward.”
“That’s your opinion?”
Marcel sliced the fly off the butter and flicked it into the street. “I don’t much care for Italians. At least their newspapermen.”
On another day the conversation might have ended there. There was much work to discuss, and an Italian amnesiac was just a curiosity, as relevant to La Voix as the price of pearls. But the mention of Udine—even in passing—had caught my attention. And, as the waiter emerged from the door of the café with our lunch, only to pause to greet a guest at another table, I knew we had an extra moment.
“If no one cares, where did the report come from?”
“A letter from the man’s doctor. A Dr. Bianchi, I think. He believes ‘the international press,’ as he terms it, might have more interest in this amnesiac than the Italians.”
“What on earth is ‘the international press’?”
“I suppose he means the papers Americans read. He believes the patient to be an American, in fact.”
The waiter arrived. Sometimes people claim their words come out before they’re aware of what they’re going to say, but, in that moment, if I had trouble finding the words, it was because the picture in my mind was too comprehensive and vivid. An American woman in Udine coming across the notice, dreaming a familiar face upon the smudged photo, booking a ticket to Bologna in perfect Italian. I’d rather be humiliated than hopeless, she’d written.
“I’d like to be the one to go,” I said.
“What one? To go where?”
“To Bologna.”
Marcel laughed. “We have plenty to say about France, my friend.”
“I’ll pay my own way,” I said.
“Can you even pay your way home tonight?”
“Just.”
“It makes me feel good, really, that you would ask. That you would think I could say yes, just because you asked. People must have been very kind to you in the past to make you think that. I suppose you’ve always wanted to go to Italy, is that it?”
“Since you ask, I once went through considerable trouble not to go to Italy. But I’m going now. And you are going to Rodez.”
He laughed, harder this time. The laugh was so good-natured that I started too. “I am?” he said. “I seem to have forgotten.”
“You’ll need to in order to profile the families coming to inquire about Mangin. Meanwhile, I’ll file from Bologna. What if we published them side by side? The experience of the missing in two different countries. Has anyone done that?”
He bit into his egg, breaking the yoke, drizzling his napkin in yellow. And he chewed slowly, sneaking glances, not wanting me to see that he was considering my proposal.
It must be said: I had no idea if she was still in Udine, if she was still in Italy at all. I may have hoped, though I certainly didn’t expect, to find her in Bologna. But as I imagined her reacting to the news of this poor amnesiac, I felt a sense of attachment to her I had not known in months.
As Marcel chewed, I tried to look something other than desperate. Only when I was older and had some concept of money did I realize how generous he had been. Only when I had responsibilities and deadlines of my own did I realize how recklessly he’d assigned me work. There were many friends I was unable to track down after the second war ended, but I did manage to get back in touch with Marcel. He’d run a press for the Resistance during the occupation; he’d done some time in one of the camps but had come out all right. They no longer made the cheap scotch we used to drink in the Chevalier Vert, but I sent him a case of Cutty Sark, and he sent me a picture of two healthy-looking children, standing in front of his home in Grenoble, though there was no mention of their mother.
“No one else is doing such work, I have to admit,” he said eventually. And then he smiled in a way he never smiled. It was a cynical smile, even a little mean. Seeing that expression on Marcel’s face reminded me that I knew nothing of what Father Perrin had told him about me, about why I had left Verdun, about Sarah. “And perhaps it will be good for me to go to Rodez,” he said. “Perhaps I’ll meet a beautiful widow.”
* * *
At Dijon, my train compartment emptied. I moved to the window. A white-haired man slid open the glass door as we left the station.
“May we?” he asked, in a thick English accent. “No. No. Peut . . . nous?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “I speak English.”
He saluted this happy coincidence with a lift of his white brows, then led his wife into the compartment. He was a small man, and she was nearly twice his size. He lifted their suitcases onto the rack with shaky arms and smoothed a wool blanket over his wife’s knees.
“Ah, now that’s done,” he said, turning to me. “For a few hours, anyway. Not enough hours, but a few.”
The train shook across flat fields and gentle hills. The man’s wife pulled what appeared to be a wedge of cotton from one ear and fished a brass horn from her bag.
“My name is Edna,” she said. “And you are?”
“Tom,” I said.
“That’s it, young man,” her husband said. “I’m Derrick. She won’t say very much more, young man. But it’s not personal. You see, her hearing is going. She can hear some with the horn, but you can’t walk the streets of Dijon, let’s say, Tom, with a horn in your ear now, can you?”
His face told me I should laugh, so I did.
“That’s it, Tom. It’s not all gloomy, is it? Even in France. You must be hungry, young man. When I was your age I was always hungry.”
I hadn’t brought a thing to eat and admitted I was hungry. He set to work emptying a basket of food, cans of pâté de canard, brown bread, soft cheese.
I told him I was on my way to write a newspaper story in Bologna, and he insisted that Edna put in her ear horn so I could explain to her as well.
“We’re traveling for the pure pleasure of it,” he said. “Geneva next. Might as well, shouldn’t we?”
“Oh yes.”
“We live in Essex, have you been to Essex? Beautiful country. The ocean is always gray, but that’s the real ocean, isn’t it, young man?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
As we finished the canard, as Edna’s eyes closed, as her mouth dropped open, Derrick described the famous trees and bloodlines of Essex. I could have almost predicted what he would say next.
“Yes, well, that’s always been our home. And if home becomes a gloomy place, let’s even say a sad place, you can’t just change it, can you, young man? And you wouldn’t want to, not really. But you might want to get away if you could, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, I think I would.”
“Oh, but put that aside. When you’re my age, you’ll want to take the waters like we do. Geneva is for that. Have you ever taken the waters? Even at your young age you’d like it.”
“Just once,” I said, “in Aix-les-Bains.”
I almost hoped that the son he’d obviously lost had been there too. I imagined saying, Yes, I did remember an Englishman from Essex. A wonderful fellow.
“Now, I’ve heard it’s nice there. I have heard that.” He turned to Edna and gestured for the horn, only to realize she was deeply asleep.
“Go ahead and lie on your side if you’re tired,” he said. “Edna will have me for a pillow over here, and I’ll manage with this blanket.”
“All right,” I said, and I lay down. The temperature had dropped, and I fumbled with my coat and bunched my knees and tried to do as he said.
“That’s it, get comfortable, young man.” He leaned across the compartment and smoothed the coat around my legs. “Are you comfortable? That’s it.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Now, really comfortable, young man. I mean it.”
* * *
Dr. Bianchi was expecting me; even so, I carried a credential and a letter of introduction from Marcel, feeling very much like an imposter. It was warm and dry enough to go by foot, and from Bologna Centrale it was only a short walk into the old city, the dull red of the stone like rust on the afternoon. As it was a Sunday, the wide Via dell’Indipendenza was closed to all but pedestrian traffic. The arcaded sidewalks along the boulevard were so crowded that within steps I’d swung my suitcase into the backs of three separate pairs of legs. I cut out into the street, but there was hardly any more room there, the crowd flowing at a languid pace no one would have dared walk in Paris.
It seemed all of Bologna was out on the street: swarms of students in red scarves, prams shivering over the black cobblestones, men taking their jackets off in the sunlight, women donning sweaters as they strode into the shade. Later I realized no one was going anywhere in particular, having learned that the secret of Italians—their greatest strength and weakness—is that they like each other in a way the French, and especially the Americans, don’t.
A few remaining medieval towers leaned over the red-tiled roofs. I turned onto Via Ugo Bassi, where shop windows were full of wedding dresses, yellow rolls of noodles, and big books written in Latin. I turned into Piazza Maggiore at the foot of an enormous brick cathedral without a façade. Half the old town hall’s balcony was missing—from a Fascist bomb, I later learned. Its clock face bore huge Roman numerals, and, above the entrance, a sneering copper pope blessed the Marxists at the café tables. A man in a black field coat made a speech to no one in particular from a wooden platform, asking who had brought culture to all of Europe. The Romans. Noi. Asking what thanks they had gotten for it. Niente.
The hospital was on the opposite edge of the old town, through the university district on Via Zamboni. There, young men spilled out of cafés, chatting, or bent over books, or smoking alone. Broken glass glittered down the narrow street. In some windows, every pane was broken; other windows leered like fanged mouths; some had been boarded up, the boards pasted with posters on which Lenin and Trotsky stared into the middle distance.
Eventually, the old walls dropped away, and the street opened into a boulevard lined with newsstands shuttered for Sunday. The hospital sat on the other side of a honeycombed terra-cotta wall. Beyond that I could see a gravel path through a courtyard lined with trees, and beyond that I could hear an invisible fountain burbling.
* * *
Dr. Bianchi was at least a day unshaven. His hair, graying slightly at the temples, was uncombed. He had an almost Algerian complexion and was much younger than I had expected. His few age lines danced when he smiled.
It was late on a Sunday, and the courtyard was empty and quiet, but for the little table set with a bottle of white wine and two glasses. A strange welcome, I thought, all things considered. Bianchi handed me a glass and gestured to a chair.
“You’ve come at just the right time,” he said. “There is no strike at the moment. And very little violence, at least in the city.”
“I saw the broken windows.”
“Most have been replaced, but around the university they refuse in protest.” He sipped his wine in a way that made me wonder how many he’d already had. “You are from a French paper, but you aren’t French, are you?”
“I’m American,” I admitted.
This seemed to make him genuinely happy. “Then I must congratulate you,” he said. “You have inherited the world. Be careful what you do with it.” We laughed. “That is why you’re interested in Douglas Fairbanks?”
“The actor?”
“The amnesiac. Our amnesiac.”
* * *
“Why do you call him Douglas Fairbanks?” I asked after he had ordered our dinner at a small restaurant a few blocks from the hospital. The tables around us were crowded with generations of Bolognese. We sat under a ceiling of kitchen smoke as old men and young boys poured wine from straw-covered jugs. Bianchi’s eyes followed mine. It had been years since I had spoken to a psychiatrist. What would he make of my eyes? Could he have guessed that I half-expected to find a woman I knew seated at one of these tables?
“The Sunday meal is for the family,” he said.
“I hope I’m not keeping you from yours.”
“No. I have a brother near, but it is difficult to see him. My parents are far away, in the south. Eating together, better food. Soon the waiter will put a bowl of tortellini in broth before me, and I will try, for you, not to burst into tears of disappointment. But I have not answered your question. It is very simple. A nurse named him. Robin Hood, you know?” He drew back an invisible arrow.
“Does he look like Douglas Fairbanks?”
He laughed. “He was the only American she could name. Fairbanks and Woodrow Wilson. But Wilson is not so popular now. I have to tell you, it is a pleasure to sit here like this, talking.”
“No. You are working. You don’t need to say that. You see, it is difficult for me here in Bologna.”
“Is it? I’d think you could leave tomorrow if you wanted. Someone with your reputation?”
“You’re confusing me, I’m afraid. Our hospital has a famous reputation, and there was a famous doctor who ran this hospital, Dr. Consiglio. But he was replaced. And they chose a man from as far away as possible to replace him. If you want, I’ll tell you why sometime. But that place was the Salento, and that man, as you see, was me.”
He smiled, and indeed it was the smile of a man with too much responsibility. His eyes were bright, but the flesh around them had a bruised-fruit quality.
“You must forgive me. Sunday is my day to drink wine. I don’t permit myself otherwise. In Leccese we’d say, la Domenica sta bau fortissimo. I go loud, or I go strong, something like this.” He pounded the table, but meekly, and smiled sadly to himself.
The waiter put down our bowls of tortellini in clear shining broth. And huge pink slices of mortadella. I thought the food among the best I’d ever tasted. Bianchi waited patiently for me to finish.
“You’re not too tired? I’ll take you to my favorite place to drink,” he said. “We can meet someone, if you want.”
“Of course. Who?”
“Another journalist,” he said. “I should have invited him to dinner, but, as you see, it is hard for me to eat this food even without an Austrian across the table.”
* * *
I followed Bianchi through tunnels of sidewalk, past gated storefronts and tall doors with brass nameplates and buzzers. Lampposts breaking apart the darkness, corner by corner. Graffiti slashing down the stucco walls.
“Every street in the city center is arcaded,” Bianchi explained. “Here, you could walk for an entire day without standing in the sun. A truly stupid idea.”
Considering how far we’d traveled, considering how many cafés we’d passed with small tables outside, I was somewhat surprised when Bianchi ducked into a narrow storefront lit well enough to see brown grease stains on the walls and spiderwebs shattered in the pane above the door.
The mirror behind the bar was cracked, as was the glass in several shelves. In fact, there was still broken glass on the floor, and a tangle of splintered chairs pushed into one corner. Several of the remaining tables were taken by young men sitting alone, looking bitter and bored.
“Do you like it?” Bianchi asked.
“The décor isn’t what I expected.”
“Décor? Yes, funny. This was once a workers’ club. Two months ago the squadristi—the Blackshirts, if you want—came to confront the men who gathered here. You understand, the Blackshirts came to intimidate their socialist enemies, but only a few of the men here were actually socialists. The others only liked to play cards. It did not matter. They were all confronted. Do you know what political confrontation today means, Tom? It means castor oil and cudgels to the little of the back. The broken chairs and glass were an afterthought.”
“Who are these boys? What are they doing here?”
“They wait,” he said, “for rapture.”
“And us?”
“We wait for the Austrian. And for the man behind the bar to sing.”
“I don’t think I quite understand,” I said.
“Some of the boys at the tables are communist lookouts. If the Blackshirts should return, it will not be so easy for them this time. I hope you don’t mind that I’ve taken you to quite a dangerous place.”
His eyes and voice suggested he wasn’t serious, but I’d given up trying to tell. One of the boys did, in fact, seem to take note of us and left the café while Bianchi ordered drinks.
“In truth, all of Bologna is dangerous right now,” he said. “One way or another I believe a revolution will begin here. What kind of revolution is the only question.”
“What kind would you expect?”
“The problem is that the socialists can never agree on anything. But there is no ideology to Fascism, so it is easy to get people to agree. In that way, I must admit, it is a very modern political party. Anyway, we wait.”
We didn’t have to wait long. The Austrian came in as we finished our first round of drinks, apologizing for his lateness in perfect English. “It’s a bit hard to know where you are on these streets, isn’t it?”
“I told Tom,” Bianchi said, “who would want to cover all of their sidewalks, to never see the sun?”
“Aside from Germans, you mean?” the Austrian said.
Bianchi laughed—impressed, I think—and introduced us.
* * *
I suppose my first impression of Paul was that he looked very German. I couldn’t have said how exactly, but I remember thinking that faces like his broadcast a terroir in the way a good wine is supposed to. At the time, not such a strange thought, as many people believed that on certain hillsides, in certain valleys, the essential German, French, or Russian character grew like grapes. A war had been fought over those hillsides and valleys, after all. Of course, the awful consequences of such thinking were only too apparent in the next several years.
So Paul looked German. And he had a calm cheerfulness about him that is hard to fake. He said his name and we shook hands. He insisted on another round. He said that he had come from Vienna, that he wrote for a newspaper there; I didn’t recognize the name.
“What interest do the Austrians have in our amnesiac?” Bianchi asked.
“Well, we did it to him, didn’t we?”
* * *
In 1922 it was still all but impossible to have a third round of drinks without the war coming up. I bought us the third round and tried to answer their questions about Verdun but, as usual, found I couldn’t say very much without portraying my experience as something that it wasn’t.
“I was just an ambulance driver,” I said finally.
“As was Douglas Foulbanks,” Paul said.
“Fairbanks,” Bianchi said.
“He’s making a joke, I think,” I said.
“Yes, isn’t Foulbanks a better name for a man in his position?” Paul asked.
“Now I see,” Bianchi said. “Yes, you’re right.” But he obviously didn’t see the humor. It might have only been the drink. He hadn’t needed the second round and certainly not the third.
“Was he an ambulance driver?” I asked.
Paul answered instead of Bianchi. “How many other Americans served in Italy? Not many, I don’t believe.”
“There were many Austrians, though, weren’t there, Paul?” Bianchi asked.
Paul looked at Bianchi cautiously. “Are you asking if I served here? I did,” he said. “I was almost everywhere.”
“Yes.”
“Serbia?”
“And Montenegro.”
“Russia?”
“Yes.”
“Then I must ask you a question,” Bianchi said. “Where were the most beautiful women?”
We all laughed.
“If forced, I might choose Poland.”
“Perhaps because they were the most frightened,” I said. I was channeling Sarah, but they couldn’t have known that, and the words sounded ridiculous, even alarming, as they left my mouth. Paul only smiled. He had a pleasant face, a resting expression that exuded well-being. People must either like him immediately or find him insufferable, I thought.
“I’m afraid I disagree,” Paul said. “A happy woman is always more beautiful, at least to my eyes.” He touched my shoulder as if to show there were no hard feelings.
* * *
“You ask at the right time. I only talk about the war on Sundays,” Bianchi said.
In fact, neither Paul nor I had asked about the war. Obviously, it was only a matter of time before the doctor turned sour or sullen, and neither of us wanted to give him a push.
“On the subject of fear, everyone was frightened on the Isonzo River. My job was—I don’t know how to say it—to un-frighten them. Is that how?”
“I don’t think there is a word for that, exactly,” I said. “Not in English.”
“Whatever the name, it sounds like more ethical work than most did,” Paul said.
“Yes, ethical work that I pay penance for now. Is there a word for that? There was a word for me. A name, if you want. They gave it to me in the field hospital in Caporetto. Caronte. That one I know in English: Charon. Do you know him?”
He pronounced it Sharon. I’d learned my Greek myths from Father Gaillard. The boatman on the River Styx was named Charon in French too.
“You couldn’t have deserved that,” I said.
“What did you actually do?” Paul asked quietly.
“Do you know how few psychiatrists we have in Italy? Not even two hundred. So you see, I was very important. I treated men who were compromised, suffering from hysteria and neurasthenia—shell shock—and got them back to the lines.”
“How?”
“Easily. I was a wonderful hypnotist, but both of you could have done my job. Truly, you could have. A man who hasn’t eaten or slept in three days, who has feared for his life for months, is very susceptible to suggestion.”
“What did you suggest?”
“That fear is only a reflection of the less noble part of his soul, a weakness and an obscenity. These men, my god. Sometimes they absolutely refused to open their eyes no matter what was threatened. For me, it was twenty minutes only to cure them. Twenty minutes. But I had a record of twelve. Are you not impressed?”
Fortunately, before we could answer, the man behind the bar began to sing in a grumbling baritone. I didn’t know enough about opera to have an opinion of his performance, but I suspected it was very bad. The voice had a strangled, sardonic quality, the runs sounding almost intentionally tuneless. He was short and practically hairless, with shattered-glass wrinkles around his eyes. As he sang he never stopped working—polishing the stemmed glasses with their gold rims, stacking white saucers on a high shelf.
“It’s from Falstaff, I think,” Paul said. “Though difficult to tell.”
Bianchi shrugged. “Naturally. The great local nationalist. They say without Verdi there is no Mussolini. Perhaps you understand why the barman sings Verdi as he does.”
“I might understand, but it’s still criminal,” Paul said.
“A fan of Italian opera?”
“Certainly. The Viennese invented Italian Opera.”
“Yes. If only you’d been as generous with Trieste and Trentino, there would have been no war. Were you on the Isonzo, Paul?”
Paul nodded, but he must have sensed Bianchi was trying to bait him and wisely said no more. We listened to the singing, which seemed to grow only more sarcastically maudlin, more sour and grating. Something about a horse. Something about a river.
* * *
“Is there any use in feeling guilty now?” I asked Bianchi, a question I had asked myself often in the preceding months.
Bianchi smiled. “I’d like to say no, but, sadly, Tom, there is much use in guilt. If you want, I can say as both a psychiatrist and a Catholic: there is no civilization without it.”
The barman finished the aria. We clapped and bravoed, but he never looked our way. Only three or four tables were occupied now; the young men sipped their drinks and stared off, just as they had all night.
“Do you think that boy will return?” Bianchi asked. “You remember, the one who left when we arrived? It’s been too long.”
The boy never did return, but later an older man with yellow skin appeared in the doorway of the café, and Bianchi got up to speak to him. They argued for what seemed a long time, leaving Paul and me to exchange glances, to raise eyebrows at one another, a bit too shy to speak without our chaperone.
Meanwhile, Bianchi and the man raised their voices, speaking in dialect. And though the other man’s face was old and sickly, his shoulders were square and his knuckles were bloody. The longer I looked, the more the yellow of his skin—and the apparent wrinkles upon it—began to appear strangely uneven. The left side of his face seemed to have aged a decade slower than the right.
“I apologize,” Bianchi said, when he finally returned to the table, “but we have been asked to leave.”
“By whom?” Paul asked. “If you’re in any trouble, certainly we can . . .”
“No trouble,” Bianchi said. “No trouble. Just a matter between brothers.”
* * *
As it happened, Paul’s room was just above mine; we had the same view of a dark drugstore behind an iron grate, the same striped wallpaper, the same smoky blankets.
The wineglasses still bore the ten-lire tags from the shop where he’d bought them. It was warm enough to leave the windows open as we drank cheap Soave and talked the way strangers can when they’re young and far from home. Paul lay on the bed, smoking; or paced, smoking. And I sat in the room’s single chair, my wineglass on the windowsill, liquid shadows dripping down the walls.
His newspaper was a cultural weekly, not just edited but owned by his father. He had studied French painting—Bonnard in particular—prior to the war, a secret he’d protected with his life for four years.
“Now,” he said, “may I ask about your roots?”
“You can certainly ask, but they’ve mostly been pulled up, so to speak.”
“Perhaps that is a stroke of luck.”
“Someone else told me that once,” I said.
“Was he smart or stupid? I ask because I’m never sure where I fall.”
“Very smart.”
“That warms my heart. That’s right, isn’t it? The phrase?”
“That’s perfect. He was a priest, actually.”
“That chills my blood.”
“What do you have against priests?”
He tried to explain the contradictory and destructive lessons of Viennese parochial education, but gave up because we were laughing so hard. He pointed to a scar on his cheek he’d received in a duel. At university, before the war. Over what? Over nothing. Dueling was illegal, but, due to a medieval privilege, the police had no jurisdiction over students in Vienna. Paul had leaned into the foil with his cheek, as was the custom. As was the custom in those days, he had worn a pair of gold-rimmed glasses without a prescription and ordered a beard tonic from an advertisement in the Neue Freie Presse. As was the custom, he was obsessed with looking older. “That’s the mark of the end times, isn’t it? When the young aspire to look old, instead of the other way around.”
I smoked Paul’s Gitanes, drinking the wine that much faster to wash away the taste. He produced a second bottle, and we talked politics with a moonlit intensity that often proves hilarious by daylight.
“Did you think it really was the end times?” I asked. “I mean, before 1914.”
“Some did, certainly. When I was in gymnasium, I had a friend who was already at university, a friend of my older brother, actually. He could speak most of the languages in the empire, had read all the great Slovenian poets, could name every Turkish pasha going back five hundred years. He was so intelligent that—though I loved him—I was almost afraid at times. Do you know that feeling?”
No, I didn’t know that feeling, just as I didn’t know many of the feelings Paul described. We refilled the glasses with the yellow wine, swirled, and toasted with a cold click. No clock in the room, no light yet on the street. But his friend—he shot himself in the head one evening, leaving no note.
“I assume that’s not something you ever considered?” Paul asked. “Suicide.”
“I’ve been too busy trying to stay alive to think about it much. Have you?”
“My god, it’s absurd to say yes, after everything I did to survive later. But at the time I trusted my friend’s judgment completely. And he was far from alone. We had an epidemic, you know, quite egalitarian too: bankers, chimney sweeps, acrobats, even our crown prince. And I was sure, intellectually, that my friend had good reasons for what he did—he must have. But there were times when I simply loved being alive. At home with my parents and during the war too.”
He looked down, embarrassed, but I wished I could have explained the affection I felt for him in that moment. I’ve since seen young actors return to the set with eyes red from highballs and Benzedrine, having spent the night talking themselves into an adamantine friendship. And the fact that I now see those mornings for what they are—the fact that I see the naïveté in those faces—only slightly diminishes the jealousy I feel at being too old for such things.