Eugène, dear comrade . . .
He could not be sure whether there was still official censorship, whether letters were still opened, read, redacted. Being uncertain, Albert had taken the precaution of addressing him by his new name. A name Édouard was already accustomed to. In fact, it was a strange twist in the story. Though he did not like to think about such things, memories flooded back in spite of himself.
He had known two boys called Eugène. The first had been in his primary school, a skinny boy with freckles who mumbled unintelligibly, but he was not the one who mattered; that was the other Eugène. They had met at an art class Édouard was taking unbeknownst to his parents and quickly became inseparable. Almost everything Édouard did, he had to do behind his parents’ backs. Luckily, his sister, Madeleine, worked everything out—at least everything that could be worked out. Eugène and Édouard, because they were lovers, had applied to the École des Beaux-Arts together. Eugène was not quite gifted enough and his application was not accepted. After that, they had lost touch; in 1916 Édouard heard that he was dead.
I truly appreciate the fact that you have kept in touch, but in the past four months, you’ve sent nothing but drawings, not a word, not a line . . . I’m sure it is because you don’t like to write, and I can understand that. But . . .
Drawing was easier because the words simply would not come. Had it been down to him, he would not have written at all, but this boy, Albert, was enthusiastic, and he had done everything he could. Édouard did not blame him for anything. Well, maybe a little . . . After all, it was in saving Albert’s life that he had ended up this way. He had done it willingly, but—how to put it?—try as he might, he could not find words to express what he felt, the unfairness of it . . . No one was to blame and everyone was to blame. But facts are facts and had it not been for Soldat Maillard contriving to bury himself alive, he would be at home now, in one piece. When he thought about this, he cried, he could not help himself; yet it hardly mattered, there was a lot of crying where he was, it was a literal vale of tears.
Whenever the pain, the anguish and the grief subsided for a moment, they gave way to thoughts in which the figure of Albert Maillard melted away and was replaced by that of Lieutenant Pradelle. Édouard did not understand the whole story about being summoned to appear before a général and narrowly escaping a court-martial . . . This episode had taken place the day before his transfer, when he had been doped up on painkillers so what little he could remember was vague and full of gaps. What was crystal clear, on the other hand, was the image of Lieutenant Pradelle, standing motionless amid the hail of shells and shrapnel, staring at his feet, then moving away, and then a wave of earth rising up and breaking . . . Even if he did not understand why, Édouard had no doubt that Pradelle was somehow involved in what had happened. Anyone else would be seething with rage. But, although on the battlefield he had mustered all his strength so he could go to the aid of a comrade, now he had no strength left. His thoughts now were frozen images, distant and yet tenuously connected to him. There was no place for anger or for hope.
Édouard was profoundly depressed.
. . . and I have to say it’s not always easy to know what is going on in your life. I don’t even know whether you are eating properly, whether the doctors talk to you sometimes and whether, as I hope, there is now the possibility of the graft I was told about, the one I mentioned . . .
The graft . . . That was ancient history now. Albert had been wide of the mark; his understanding of the situation had been purely theoretical. All these weeks in the hospital had served only to contain the infection and to do a little “replastering,” to use the words of Professeur Maudret, chief surgeon at the Hôpital Rollin on the avenue Trudaine, a lanky, red-headed man with boundless energy. Six times he had operated on Édouard.
“You might say we’re intimate, you and me . . .”
Each time he explained in detail the reasons for the procedure and its limitations, had “put it into the context of the overall strategy.” Not for nothing was he a military doctor. He was a man blessed with unshakeable confidence, the result of hundreds of amputations and resections performed day and night in field hospitals, sometimes even in the trenches.
Only recently had they finally allowed Édouard to look at himself in a mirror. Obviously to the nurses and the doctors, having taken in a man whose lower face was little more than a bleeding wound where nothing remained but the uvula, the windpipe, and a miraculously undamaged set of upper teeth, the sight of Édouard gave them a certain satisfaction. They spoke about it optimistically, but their satisfaction was usually swept aside by the abject despair such men feel when, for the first time, they are faced with what they have become.
Hence the little homily about the future. Essential to the morale of victims. Several weeks before Édouard was allowed to look in a mirror, Maudret had recited his maxim:
“I need you to remember that who you are today is nothing like who you will be tomorrow.”
He emphasized nothing; it was an immense nothing.
He expended all the more energy because he could feel that he was not getting through to Édouard. Of course the war had been unimaginably brutal, but on the positive side it had made possible significant advances in maxillofacial surgery.
“Extraordinary advances, I would say.”
They showed Édouard dental devices for mechanotherapy, plaster heads equipped with steel shafts, a wide range of gadgets that looked like medieval torture implements but which represented the most modern advances in orthopedics. Bait is what they actually were: Maudret, being a skilled tactician, adopted a strategy of encirclement where Édouard was concerned, gradually leading him toward the grand finale of his therapeutic plans.
“The Dufourmentel graft!”
Strips of skin were harvested from the scalp and grafted onto the lower part of the face.
Maudret showed him photographs of wounded men who had been “replastered.” There you go, thought Édouard, give a military surgeon a soldier whose face has been completely mangled by a bunch of other soldiers, and he’ll give you a perfectly presentable gnome.
Édouard’s response was understated.
“No,” he wrote in large letters on his notepad.
And so, against his better judgment—curiously, he hated such devices—Maudret talked about prostheses. Vulcanite, lightweight metal, aluminum, they had everything they needed to make a new jaw for him. As for his cheeks . . . Édouard did hear him out before grabbing his books and once again writing:
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?” the surgeon asked. “No to what?”
“No to everything. I stay as I am.”
Maudret closed his eyes with a knowing air; he understood: in the early months refusal was a common reaction, a result of post-traumatic depression. It was something that would pass in time. Even the disfigured sooner or later become realistic again. That is how life is.
But four months later, after a thousand attempts at persuasion and at a point where every other patient, without exception, had agreed to put their trust in the surgeons to mitigate the damage, Soldat Larivière still stubbornly refused: I am staying like this.
And his eyes as he said it were fixed, glassy, obdurate.
They called in the psychiatrists again.
That said, from your drawings I think I have a sense of what’s happening. The room you’re in now seems bigger and more spacious than the one before, am I right? Are those trees I can see in the courtyard? Obviously I’m not foolish enough to think that you’re happy there, it’s just that I don’t know what I can do to help, being so far away. I feel completely helpless.
Thank you for the sketch of Sister Marie-Camille.
Before now, you always managed to draw her from behind or in profile and now I understand why you wanted to keep her to yourself, you old rogue, because she is very pretty. In fact, I have to say that if I didn’t already have my Cécile . . .
In fact, there were no female nuns in the hospital, only civilians, kindly women of great compassion. But he had to find something to say to Albert, who sent letters twice a week. Édouard’s first sketches were clumsy; his hand shook convulsively and he could hardly see. To say nothing of the fact that after every operation he was in terrible pain. It was Albert who saw a “young nun” in the barely sketched face in profile. Let’s say she’s a nun, Édouard thought, what difference does it make? He called her Marie-Camille. From his letters, Édouard had formed a certain sense of Albert, and he tried to give his imaginary nun the sort of face he thought Albert would probably like.
Though united by a shared experience in which each had taken his life in his hands, the two men did not know each other, and their relationship was complicated by a murky combination of guilt, solidarity, resentment, diffidence, and comradeship. Édouard nursed a little grudge against Albert, but it was tempered by the fact that his comrade had found him a new identity so he did not have to return home. He had not the first idea what he would do with himself now that he was no longer Édouard Péricourt, but he welcomed any life in which his father did not have to see him in this state.
Speaking of Cécile, I had a letter from her. Like me, she thinks the end of the war is taking too long. We talk about the good times we’ll have when I get back, but from her tone I can tell that she is tired of the whole thing. In the beginning, she used to visit my mother a lot, but she doesn’t really go much now. I can hardly blame her. I told you about my mother, she’s a real character, that woman.
Thank you so much for the horse’s head. I know I went on and on about it . . . I think it’s perfect now, very expressive, the way you’ve drawn the bulging eyes, the half-open mouth. It’s stupid, you know, but I often wonder what that horse was called. It’s as though I need to give him a name.
How many horse’s heads had he drawn for Albert? They were always too scrawny, the head should be turned to the side . . . no, actually, the other side, and the eyes should be more . . . I don’t know how to describe it . . . No, they were never quite right. Anyone but Édouard would have chucked the whole thing up, but he could sense how important it was for his comrade to dredge up, to remember the head of the old nag that had probably saved his life. Albert’s request masked a deeper, more troubling issue that concerned Édouard, one that he could not put into words. Édouard set to work, dashing off dozens of sketches, trying to follow the ham-fisted instructions Albert—between profuse apologies and gratitude—offered in each new letter. Édouard was just about to give up when he remembered a sketch da Vinci had done of a horse’s head for a statue—a red chalk drawing if he remembered rightly—and he used this as a model. When he got the picture, Albert had literally jumped for joy.
Reading those words, Édouard finally understood what Albert was going on about.
Now that he had given his comrade his horse’s head, he set down his pencil.
He would never draw again.
Time drags here. Do you realize, the armistice was signed last November, it’s February already and there’s still no sign of us being demobilized? Weeks we’ve been sitting around doing nothing . . . They’ve given us all sorts of different reasons to explain the situation, but there’s no way of knowing what’s true and what isn’t. It’s just like the trenches here, rumors travel faster than news. Apparently, Parisians will soon be going on sightseeing trips with Le Petit Journal to visit the battlefields near Reims while we’re still moldering here in conditions that—like us—are going from bad to worse. Sometimes, I swear, we wonder if we weren’t better off being shot at—at least we felt useful, at least we thought we were winning the war. I feel ashamed to be complaining about my petty gripes to you, my poor Eugène, here I am whining on and you’re probably thinking I don’t know how lucky I am. And you’re right, it’s amazing how self-centered people are.
Sorry if this letter is a bit rambling (I never could stick to a subject, it was the same at school), maybe I’d be better off taking up drawing . . .
Édouard wrote to Docteur Maudret saying that he refused any cosmetic treatment whatever and requesting to be returned to civilian life as quickly as possible.
“With a face like that?”
The doctor was livid. He was clutching the letter in his right hand while his left gripped Édouard’s shoulder, forcing him to look in the mirror.
For a long time Édouard stared at this swollen magma of flesh in which he could just make out faint vestiges of the face he had known. The folds of flesh formed pale, milky pads. In the middle, the hole, partially scarred over where the skin had been strained and stretched, formed a sort of crater that seemed more remote than it had previously, though it was still as crimson. It looked like the face of a circus contortionist who could suck in his cheeks and swallow his lower jaw, but could not reverse the process.
“Yes,” Édouard nodded, “with a face like this.”