Radiant Days (3 page)

“Seventeen,” Arthur repeated. “Ask anyone.”

That was his first mistake. Seventeen was old enough to be a soldier, or even a spy. The Prussians had invaded France a few weeks earlier, and now everyone was obsessed with spies.

His second mistake was not having any money for his train ticket. His third was not having any identification.

After that, the mistakes piled up so fast they buried him.

“You’re a vagrant,” the police chief finally announced with relief. He stamped a sheaf of papers, glanced at the guard standing by the station door. “Another for Mazas.”

“Mazas Prison?” Arthur stared at him in disbelief. “Are you insane? You can’t send me there!”

The guard dragged Arthur out of the station, toward a windowless black carriage rocking ominously behind two motionless horses.

“What the—shit!” Arthur kicked at him. “This is crazy, you can’t—”

Another policeman grabbed him, unbolted the door to the
wagon, and watched impassively as the boy was thrown inside. The door slammed in Arthur’s face. He clawed at the grille, shouting as unseen hands pulled him backward into a throng of drunken men as the carriage lurched off.

He never knew how much time passed before they reached the towering black fortress that was Mazas Prison; never knew how many men he fought off inside the wagon until, exhausted and beaten till his ears bled, he collapsed, and they tore at his clothes in the filthy darkness, searching for money, tobacco, anything of value.

“Leave him!”

Arthur moaned as someone pulled him from the floor. A man cursed angrily, grabbing at the boy’s coat, then screamed in pain as a flash of quicksilver momentarily flared: a knife. The man fell back. Arthur found himself propped against the wall of the wagon.

“Are you all right?”

Arthur blinked, wiping tears and grime from his cheeks. A young man perhaps five years older than he crouched a few inches away. Deep-set eyes; a lean, slightly wolfish face; shaggy dark hair spilling to his shoulders. He set a hand on Arthur’s knee, glancing at the subdued group behind them, then spoke in a low voice.

“Your first time?”

Arthur nodded.

“Do you have family here?”

“Not in Paris.”

The young man shrugged. “Maybe for the best—these days,
they might hunt them down and throw them in with you. I’m Leo. What are you in for?”

“Vagrancy. Arthur.”

“Vagrancy, that’s not so bad. If you send for someone, they’ll release you. Can you pay the fine? I’ve been here seven times—vagrancy, theft, collusion, you name it. This time it’s for spying.”

“They thought I was a spy. But I’m not.”

“Well, I am. Or I was, anyway. Carried a few letters for a Prussian soldier—love letters to a girl here in Paris. She’ll be crying her eyes out that she’s never heard from him. That idiot police chief thought they were some kind of code.”

“How do you know they weren’t?”

“Because that Prussian was dumb as a plank, that’s why—he could barely spell his own name. Serves me right for doing a favor for someone even stupider than I am.” Leo grinned and settled beside Arthur. “But if you’re going to prison, Mazas is the place. Relatively clean, and they let you outside for an hour every morning. Can you write?”

“Yes.”

“Ask the guard to bring you paper and a pen; you can write a letter to ask for help. Make sure it doesn’t look like it’s in code. If you want to talk to other prisoners, do this”—Leo rapped on the floor—“once, that’s
A
; twice,
B
; three times,
C
.”

“And what? Twenty-six knocks for
Z
?”

“Try not to use
Z
. Actually, try not to use anything after
I
.” Leo leaned against the wall and dug in his pocket for a pipe and a twist of tobacco. “You learn to be creative in Mazas. Also concise.”

He lit his pipe, drew avidly on it, and passed it to Arthur. Exhausted as he was, after a few minutes Arthur fell asleep, his head pillowed against Leo’s arm. When the wagon finally halted, Leo helped him to his feet, his hand lingering on Arthur’s shoulder as he gazed into his face.

“Look for me when they let you go outside,” he said softly, and squeezed his shoulder. “We can share another smoke.”

Arthur joined the queue of men being pushed toward the entrance by guards armed with truncheons. Inside, they stripped him and searched his pockets, finding only a stub of pencil and the wad of poems he always carried. They shoved these back into his overcoat, then proceeded to shave his head against lice, pour disinfectant that burned like acid onto his bare skull, and finally toss him back his soiled clothes.

“‘Raimbault,’” the registration clerk said, squinting to read a scrawled document. “‘Vagrant.’ This way.”

He was marched down one cold, echoing corridor after another, past ironclad doors and ranks of silent, tight-mouthed warders. He looked in vain for Leo, avoiding the dispassionate gazes that followed him down the dim hallway as he passed each cell with its grated window.

“Here,” the warder announced at last, opening a heavy door with an iron grille. “Good afternoon, Monsieur Raimbault.”

The room was large and empty save for a wooden stool, a small oil lantern, and a tin ewer filled with water. After an hour, a warder returned with a tin plate of greasy potatoes and dense black bread.

“Do I sleep on the floor?” demanded Arthur.

The warder cocked a thumb at the ceiling, where an intricate array of ropes and canvas hung, like the rigging for a sailboat.

“There,” the warder grunted, and left. Later, he came back to collect the empty plate, and used a long wooden pole to release and lower the ersatz sail, which after some untangling became a canvas hammock. “Voilà: your bed.”

Then the warder was gone. For some minutes Arthur sat on the wooden stool and surveyed his bed, which in the flickering lamplight seemed at first a crumpled tent, then a fragile boat, and finally a stained bolt of unbleached canvas, suspended by ropes from a wooden block and tackle. He settled himself into it, gingerly, and was immediately dumped onto the floor.

“Goddamn it!” he shouted, and heard an echoing chorus of curses and laughter from the corridor.

“Need someone to tuck you in, sweetheart?” a voice called out, and was silenced by the warder.

Arthur swore again, but softly. He began to pace the cell, counting off the steps; walked the perimeter of the room, one hand on the wall as he shut his eyes. He tried to summon the city outside the prison walls, but saw only a courtyard, rain-swept, the looming shadow of a gallows and a line of hollow-eyed figures that grinned as they reached for him with skeletal hands.

He took a deep breath, trying to calm himself, then pulled out his bundle of poems. He found a nearly blank sheet, blotched where he’d spilled something on it. He sharpened the tip of his
pencil with a fingernail, and scrawled a few lines across the crumpled page.

He had not in fact seen a gallows anywhere at Mazas, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one. And he was certain there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of bodies buried on the premises. He read over what he’d just written, skin creeping as he thought of a body he and Ernest had once seen hanging from a tree outside Charleville. A deserter, or maybe a Prussian spy. Either way, he was dead.

It was perhaps not the best thing to be thinking about, alone in a prison cell.

Arthur hurriedly folded the paper and shoved it back into his pocket. He pulled his coat tight around him and scrambled closer to the lantern, warming his hands. After a few minutes he stumbled to the door and shouted for the warder until he was hoarse.

The man appeared at last. With his shaven head and patched uniform and bleary eyes, he seemed scarcely less miserable than Arthur.

“What is it?” he croaked.

“Can you bring me paper and a pen? I need to write a letter so I will be released. Please,” Arthur added.

The guard peered through the grate in the door. “You can write?”

“Of course I can write,” Arthur snapped, then poked a finger through the grate. “Listen, please—this is all a mistake, I swear, just let me write to my mother and I’ll be out of here. The police chief in Charleville knows me, I’ll make sure you get a promotion. Please?”

The guard stared at him, shook his head, and turned away. But some time later he returned and slid several sheets of coarse paper and some envelopes beneath the door, then passed a pen and bottle of ink through the grate.

“Don’t forget about the promotion,” he whispered.

Arthur sat on the floor of his cell, squinting in the feeble lantern light. First he wrote a brief letter to the police chief in Charleville, professing outrage at the inferior intelligence and standards of the Paris constabulary, especially compared to the superior intellects of their provincial counterparts, and promising to inform Madame Rimbaud of the exemplary behavior of Charleville’s prefect in this irksome matter.

He then penned a briefer note to his mother, reminding her of the boundless love and deference he bore her, also noting the
grave disrespect shown to the Rimbaud family name by the insolent behavior of local railway employees.

Finally he composed a longer missive to Georges Izambard, his closest friend. Georges had been Arthur’s teacher at the secondary school in Charleville; he was only six years older, amused by Arthur’s precocity and (though he could never admit it) hugely entertained by his student’s unrelenting rebellion against whatever authority happened to be in the room.

Arthur paused. In the next cell, a man shouted and pounded at the wall. Arthur winced and returned to his letter.

Arthur bit his lip. What if Georges didn’t receive the letter in time? What if he was finally so fed up that he decided to let Arthur rot in prison or, worse, turned him over to his mother? Georges was visiting his aunts in Douai. If he didn’t get this letter in the next two days…

Arthur frowned, licked his finger, and let a drop of saliva fall
to the page, causing a small blot on the salutation. He gazed at the false teardrop, his eyes welling with real tears as he envisioned his own slight form dangling from the gallows: that poor, brave wanderer, hanged for lack of a third-class rail ticket to Paris!

He stabbed the pen into the inkwell, and with a flourish signed his name.

He slept fitfully that night, wrapped in his canvas cocoon, and dreamed of being tossed in a small wicker boat plunging down a ravine choked with icemelt and biting stones. When the warder brought him breakfast (boiled onions, another chunk of black bread), Arthur handed him the three letters.

“You’ll post them today?” he asked anxiously.

The warder shrugged. “I’ll try. Mail doesn’t get out so fast, because of the war.”

At midday, the prisoners were permitted to go outside and mill around a courtyard of trampled grass and gravel, under the
bored gaze of a half dozen warders. Most of the other prisoners ignored Arthur; a few leered at him and made rude remarks regarding his baby face and red-rimmed eyes.

“Good morning, Sleeping Beauty! Need a wake-up kiss?”

“Kiss
this
,” yelled Arthur. He grabbed a handful of gravel and drew his arm back to hurl it when someone clasped his wrist.

“Save your kisses for me. That guy’s much too old for you.”

Arthur whirled to see Leo, his head now shorn, clad in a dark-blue prison uniform.

“I’m here for a longer visit this time,” Leo went on, turning to walk toward a corner of the prison yard. “I gather you’re not.”

“No.” Arthur followed him, casting a vicious backward glance at his tormentor. “I’ve already written to everyone back home; they’ll get me soon. This is all a big mistake.”

“Of course,” said Leo. He stopped, leaned against the stone wall, and lit a clay pipe. “Smoke?”

Arthur nodded. “Thanks.”

They passed the pipe back and forth, and watched as the other prisoners started up a ragtag game of keep-away involving someone’s shirt. After a few minutes, Leo gestured at the wall beside him. “Why don’t you come closer? It will be easier to talk.”

Arthur handed back the pipe and joined him, the stone wall cool against his back. Leo edged closer, until their bodies touched, and slung an arm over Arthur’s shoulder. “There. Now no one can hear us.”

In fact they hardly spoke, not that day or the next, or the one following; only found their appointed spot each midday, the sun
directly overhead and the smell of crushed grass sweet in Arthur’s nostrils as they smoked and stood side by side, so close that he could feel Leo’s skin burning through layers of rough cambric and linen, and, once, felt Leo’s hand slip beneath his shirt to trace the contours of Arthur’s shoulder blade as the older boy shut his eyes and sighed.

“I’ll miss you,” he murmured. “Here”—Leo opened his eyes; he dug into a pocket and withdrew his clay pipe, handed it to Arthur—“keep this. So you’ll think of me sometimes, outside.”

Arthur flushed. He said nothing, only nodded and, very carefully, wrapped the pipe in a bit of cloth and hid it inside his coat.

E
ARLY THE NEXT MORNING HE WAS SUMMONED TO THE REGISTRAR’S
office. The warder held the door for him, then escorted him to the room where Arthur had first been admitted. The registrar glanced up from behind his desk, and held up an envelope.