Losing Julia (9 page)

“You think he knew?”

“I can’t be sure.”

“So we both knew,” she whispered. I watched the quiver in her lower lip.

We slowly walked to the edge of a trench, which was partially filled in from the rain and wind. I made out the outlines of a rifle half-buried in the dirt. A Mauser.

“I wasn’t scared of dying until I had Robin. The prospect of suffering frightened me, but not the idea of being gone.”

I thought of Sean and how much he needed me; how much there was to teach him and to protect him from. Then I thought of Daniel and what a wonderful father he would have made, patient and loving; how his daughter would have been the highlight of his life.

“Freud says we’re anxious about sex. I think we’re anxious about death,” said Julia. “It colors everything.”

“I haven’t read much Freud,” I said, remembering Daniel’s descriptions of her voracious reading habits.

“Don’t you think it makes sense, that underneath everything we are all terrified of dying, only we can’t bring ourselves to admit it, so we complain about everything else? Look at the way people live their lives; you’d think they had all the time in the world. It drives me crazy.”

“You can’t expect people to dwell on the fact that they’ll ultimately lose everything they have and love.”

“Why not? It might make them think about what really matters.”

“What does really matter?” I asked.

She looked at me as though wondering if she could trust me with some immense secret. Finally she said, “Having someone to love. Being compassionate. Being fully alive every day so that you really see and hear and smell and feel things.”

Listening to her made me think how wonderful and rare it was to hear someone talk that way. Was that what really drew me toward her, that she talked and cared about the important things? So few people seemed to that it left me with a certain unshakable loneliness, especially after the war.

“Do you feel fully alive now?” I asked, anxious as to how she’d reply.

She looked at me and smiled. “Yes, I do.”

“Good.”

I dropped down into a shallow trench and retrieved a battered canteen, the lid still screwed tight. I unscrewed it, then held it to my nose. “Old wine,” I said. “Must have been a Frenchman.” I turned the canteen upside down and watched the sour liquid pour out onto the ground, then tossed the canteen back into the trench.

“I don’t see how one got the courage to attack; to stand up and run toward the Germans.” I noticed the muscles in her face tighten.

“It’s amazing what you’ll do when you don’t have a choice. At the Somme one British officer offered a reward for whichever platoon could kick a soccer ball across the German front line first.”

“They kicked soccer balls?”

“Yes, soccer balls. You know, good sport and all.”

“Good God. Did anyone… win?”

“There were sixty thousand British casualties—on the first day. The Tommies called it ‘The Great Fuck-Up.’”

Julia pressed her palms against her forehead and shook her head slowly.

“Did many men refuse to attack? The odds seemed so awful.”

As she held my gaze I suddenly longed to be able to explain to her what happened; to make her understand what really took place here.

“Not many,” I said. “If you did you’d be court-martialed and shot anyway. The French had quite a bit of trouble with that. Whole mutinies in 1917. Their generals were extremely fond of
l’attaque à outrance
—the all-out attack; the
Furia Francese.
That made it awfully easy for the German gunners. I don’t think the poilus—that’s what everybody called the French soldiers, it means the hairy ones, in honor of their unkempt beards—I don’t think they minded defending their nation so much, it was the senseless offensives against machine guns they were protesting. It just became too much.”

“So they were shot?”

“Or sent to Devil’s Island. It was all rather hush hush. Still is.”

Who shot them?”

“Other French soldiers.”

“That must have been a wretched job. To be pulled from the line to shoot one of your own. I have the most terrible image of it: some poor young kid who simply can’t take any more. My God, if a mother saw a thing like that.” The lines of her face tightened again. “Were there many that were executed?”

“In 1915 a French battalion refused to go over the top at Vimy. The whole battalion was court-martialed.”

“What did they do to them?”

“They didn’t want to shoot them all—or at least they weren’t sure they could pull it off—so instead one man from each company was sentenced to be shot.”

“How were they chosen?”

“The commander of each company drew the name from a hat. It was worse in 1917, when the French Army nearly broke. The men would baaa like sheep on the way to the front.”

Julia turned her head away. We walked for a while in silence and then sat by the edge of a large crater. She pulled out a cigarette from her bag, lit it, and then wrapped one hand around her silver bracelet and twisted it slowly back and forth. “You were wounded once, weren’t you? Daniel mentioned it.”

“I got gassed. Only slightly. Trouble with my damn mask. I was back in five days.”

“What about on the day Daniel died?”

“I had some stitches in my shoulder. A concussion. Then in the last week of the war I got some shrapnel in my thigh. But no permanent damage. I was one of the lucky ones.”

I watched her peer over the edge of the crater and remembered the wounded men who drowned in the filthy cold water that pooled at the bottom.

“I didn’t realize there’d still be so many shell holes,” she said. “The place is covered with them.”

“We did leave rather a mess, didn’t we? Men are such slobs.”

She frowned at me, then asked, “What was it like to be shelled?”

I laughed out loud.

“If you’d rather not… ”

I thought for a moment.
Try. Try to tell her.
“It was the random helplessness of it, more than anything.” I paused, suddenly feeling more upset than I wanted to. “There was nothing you could do. Nothing at all. You cowered and prayed and played these games in your head to keep you from going crazy. You told yourself all the reasons you probably wouldn’t get hit, or you told yourself that if you were going to get hit there was nothing you could do about it anyway.

“The physical sensation was another thing entirely. I could tell you that the earth shook and trembled but that wouldn’t really be it. It was more like the earth was bucking and kicking as though trying to throw you off. And the sound, well it was like someone was hammering against your eardrums. And the air just came alive with objects, pieces of metal and wood and dirt and flesh and bone flying every which way, like a tornado.”

“I couldn’t bear it.” Her voice broke. I longed to reach out and hold her.

“You had to. You just had to.”

“But not everybody could.”

“Some went mad.” I laughed nervously. “We had to tie a few onto stretchers. Eventually they’d be sent to the rear, but not for long. It was different with officers. When officers broke, the army usually found excuses to whisk them away; a couple of weeks in Nice until their nerves were restored.”

I stood up and walked over to the crumbling parapet of a trench that zigzagged for several hundred yards. “If I’m not mistaken we were positioned somewhere in this sector here. Ten years and you can still see our handiwork. Makes my back hurt just looking at it.” She stood and walked toward me. I think she was waiting for me to say more but I couldn’t.

As I turned and looked across the field I felt pressure in my ears and a shortness of breath. I stood perfectly still and concentrated on maintaining my balance. I closed my eyes tightly, and in the darkness I felt a rush of nausea as I saw the bloated, fly-ridden bodies with twisted limbs and blackened faces. I saw haversacks and broken shovels and helmets and rifles and boots and strips of clothing swaying in the barbed wire. There were deep shell holes half-filled with brackish water and bits of paper swirling in the wind and belt buckles and canteens and pieces of wood and smashed mess kits and cartridge belts and Chauchat clips and broken picks and shovels all littering the tortured earth. Then I heard the moaning. Terrible moaning and screaming while the acrid air began to burn my eyes and throat. Men cried for their mothers and for water and medics and morphine and some pleaded to be shot quickly please by either side it didn’t matter. Good God the noise!

“Patrick?’’

A rush of warmth in my chest. Blood? No, not that. I looked and saw Julia staring at me, her hand resting gently on my arm.

“Are you all right?”

I felt the wind hard on my face. Leaves scurried over the dirt.
It’s over.
I blinked several times, then stepped down off the parapet. Steady. “I’ll be all right,” I said.

“Are you sure? I can’t imagine what it looks like through your eyes.”

My knees were shaking. “We’d better watch our step. There must be another war’s worth of live ordnance still buried around here.”

She was still watching me closely. What did she see? Could she see miles down into me?

We walked on awhile, then I stopped and lit a cigarette. I inhaled deeply, blowing the smoke out from the side of my mouth in a steady stream.

“There is something I’ve been wanting to ask you,” she said, spinning her bracelet slowly around her wrist.

“What’s that?”

“Do you believe in God?”

“No.”

“Not at all?”

“Not at all.”

“Neither do I. But that leaves a big hole, don’t you think?”

“Enormous.” I took another long drag on my cigarette. “There’s a wooden calvary at the cemetery in Ypres where a German shell landed between the cross and the figure of Christ and failed to explode. It’s still there, lodged in the wood.”

“Do you think… ”

“No. With hundreds of millions of shells fired, a thing like that was bound to happen. It’s just interesting.”

“Did a lot of the men pray?” she asked.

“Sure. I did too. Why not?”

I dreamed kind Jesus fouled the big-gun gears;
And caused a permanent stoppage in all bolts;
And buckled with a smile Mausers and Colts;
And rusted every bayonet with His Tears.

“That’s Wilfred Owen. It’s a habit I picked up from Daniel: memorizing bits and pieces of things.”

“It’s a nice habit,” she said, smiling at me. Then she added, “I don’t think that most people can manage without the idea of some sort of heaven.”

“They don’t do so well even with the idea,” I said.

She laughed. “But if you take it away from them, if they can’t believe in some place better and kinder and fairer, then they have to somehow justify their suffering in their lifetimes. They have to make sense of things right here, on earth.”

“Which nobody can.”

“Exactly. But that’s why there is such despair.”

“Despair? What despair?”

She nudged me in the ribs. I nudged her back, then took her hand in mine.

As we walked back to the car she suddenly turned and said, “I heard a terrible story from a woman at the vegetable market the day after I arrived. Three years ago a young French boy came across a German… stick bomb? Is that what you call it? Anyway, his father must have plowed it up. When the father saw his son running across the field holding the grenade he yelled for his son to drop it and run away. But the boy threw it down too hard and it exploded.”

“He died?”

“Three days later.”

The wind blew her hair into her face and she turned so that it blew back again. “And the thing that the woman at the vegetable market kept saying was that the boy’s father fought for four years without a scratch.”

I THINK I’M
being stalked. It only occurred to me this week, when I noticed that wherever I went, Helen McCrackle soon appeared. Either this is a remarkable series of coincidences or Helen has a crush on me. Unfortunately, Helen is completely ambulatory, which makes it much harder to avoid her.

She’s nice enough, for a nonagenarian. But she hovers, always asking about my health and my grandchildren, sometimes twice a day. And she stares at me with her dull gray glassy eyes like a dog watching you eat. If I stare back, she smiles and nods knowingly, as though we have secretly pledged ourselves to each other.

I saw a picture of the former Helen. It’s a black and white five-by-seven she keeps on her dresser in an ornate silver frame. At least she claims it’s the former Helen. I have my doubts. The woman in the photo is standing at a railing, one hand resting on another, and looking out as though watching a ship recede on the horizon. I guess she is about thirty, and she is beautiful, her auburn hair cascading down both sides of her softly sculpted face.

The two Helens bear no resemblance. Absolutely none at all. To think that the one devolved into the other is almost inconceivable. I can’t look at the elder Helen without thinking that she is some tragic mutation; an evil twin who killed Helen the Younger out of jealousy and spite, suffocating her with a pillow and burying her in the crawl space.