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Chapter 25: And in Those Days Shall Men Seek Death
BRANDHOEK AND PARTS UNKNOWN, FLANDERS, BELGIUM
November 1917
Freddie stood like a pillar of salt, a man stripped at once of purpose, past, and future. He wished the dead man would come, and take his vengeance. He was a murderer. A traitor. He should have drowned too.
Beside him, Faland resettled his shoulders in his shabby suit. “Well, then,” he said. “I shall leave you to it.” He stepped into the dark. But a stray gleam caught his rain-silvered hair, and Freddie came out of his stupor and snatched Faland’s sleeve.
Faland’s expression turned inquiring.
“Where are you going?” said Freddie. He was thinking of that deep, quiet cellar, the way it had looked in the light of the candle held in Faland’s fist. Otherworldly. Even safe. Freddie would give anything to have that feeling again. He wanted to leave the world and never come back. But he was too much of a coward, he thought bitterly, to put a pistol in his mouth and pull the trigger.
“Here and there,” said Faland.
“Will you— May I come with you?”
Faland raised both brows. “That is the behavior of a very bad soldier indeed. You’ve comforted your enemy, and now you’ll desert your country?”
Enemy? Was Germany his enemy? In the last few days, Germany had become Winter, breathing with him in the dark. Freddie said, “Germany didn’t put my sister’s hospital next to a munitions dump.”
Faland’s smile was beautiful in itself, but brutal in its contrast with the night. “Perhaps you may. I do have my fees, however.”
“How much?” whispered Freddie. “I’ve nothing.”
“No? Every night you stay with me, I want you to tell me a story. Something about yourself. Good or bad, I don’t care. But it must be true.”
Freddie didn’t know if it was the cold rain or his own rattling heartbeat that made him shake. Nothing felt real. “Why?”
“Call it inspiration,” said Faland.
“For whom?”
“Yes or no?”
“I—yes. Yes.” Not him, Iven, Winter had said. But Winter was gone. “Anything,” Freddie added aloud, and even he could hear the desperate truth in his voice.
Without another word, Faland turned and crossed a muddy ditch, light on his feet. Freddie scrambled after him. They passed out of earshot of Brandhoek, found themselves in a gray field, swaddled in bitter mist. The world already seemed set at a remove, even the shellfire flattened to distant thunder. Freddie was so relieved he wept. He didn’t know where they were going, and he didn’t care. All his heart told him was away, and that was enough.
He would dream of that walk, after. Dream imaginary horrors: an orchard of dead men hanging like fruit, a river of silky black water. But memory told him only that he walked until the end of his faltering strength, that the world narrowed to nothing but the uneven sway of Faland’s stride ahead of him. That at last they stood together in front of a heavy door set into a timeworn wall.
That Faland pushed the door open and went inside.
Freddie hesitated. Raindrops pelted his face, but within lay a flickering darkness. He almost turned around. But his life was out in that rain, his losses, his ghosts. He crossed the threshold. The door swung shut.
“Welcome,” said Faland.
Freddie’s first impression was of a vast space, his second was of magnificence. Mellow gilt, soft firelight, marquetry and parquet, diapering and gilding, velvet and glass, almost painful in contrast with immediate memory. It could not be real. And yet Freddie could feel the nap of the velvet on the wall, on a chair, when he ran his fingers across. The heat of the fire made his numb face tingle.
His third impression was of decay. The velvets frayed, the gilding peeled, tarnish showing through cracks in the glass. A faint dust, raised by Faland’s feet as he crossed the room.
Freddie followed him in a daze, registering dimly that the room had a startling number of doors. Faland laid his hand on one of them, but before it opened, Freddie caught sight of a mirror. He did not see his reflection in it. He saw Laura.
She was with Winter. They were sitting together at a table. They were well. Whole. God, even friends. They looked up at him, in unison. Laura and Winter, alive. His sister: quick, wry, competent. Winter, his face clean, his hair straw-colored. In the mirror Laura smiled at Freddie and said something to Winter, and he laughed.
Something inside him cracked, horribly, wide open. They were right there.
Faland caught his wrist. Freddie realized that he’d been reaching toward the glass. “Not now,” said Faland. “Later, if you like.”
“What is it?”said Freddie.
“It depends on the person looking.”
“That’s impossible.”
“More so than anything else?” The tilt of Faland’s head seemed to encompass everything outside; the whole world gone mad.
To that Freddie had no answer. Perhaps he was dreaming. He hoped he never woke up.
· · ·The bedroom at the top of the staircase was as grand as the foyer below, and as shabby. More velvet—on the heavy curtains, on the counterpane. Fine wood furniture, elaborately carved. But all of it chipped, splintered, faded.
Faland said, “Rest,” and left him in the doorway.
Freddie stopped thinking. He clawed off the rags of his uniform, found tepid water, a basin, scrubbed his skin raw, and then collapsed naked on the bed.
But he found himself too exhausted to sleep, ill at ease on a mattress, under sheets, in solitude, after so many nights sleeping rough with a dozen others, in barracks, in dugouts, in strange catch-as-catch-can billets. So instead of sleeping he thrashed and sweated and finally dozed, only to awaken in darkness, thinking he was back in the pillbox, thinking he was being smothered underground. Knowing he was all alone. Winter wasn’t breathing. Winter wasn’t there.
A sound, not far from a scream, nearly tore blood from his throat, and he folded in on himself, caught in an airless void. For a moment he yawed right on the edge of madness. He was already dead. Everything was broken, blackened by rain. He thought he saw a star through the fallen-in roof.
Then a light flared from the corridor, and his door flew open.
Freddie threw a hand over his eyes. Faland was in the doorway, a candle in his hand. The light showed an intact roof, a room of shabby magnificence.
“Hush,” Faland said. “Take the candle.”
Bed,he thought. Walls. Floor. Air. His feeling of choking eased. He tried to get up. But he couldn’t move. Shell-shock. Laura had patients who couldn’t move after they were shell-shocked.
Faland crossed the room, put the candle on the nightstand. His hair had dried from the rain, lightened to silver-gilt. Freddie found that his rigid limbs would heed him again. His chest was sheened with sweat. He must have made a racket in his sleep. He shivered at the draft from the door and drew the blankets up. “I—I’m sorry.”
With the candle on the nightstand, Faland’s face was in shadow. With a strange note in his voice, he said, “I woke in darkness once. I dream of it still. Now go back to sleep.”
· · ·With the light beside him, Freddie slept, and the next time he woke, it was to music, and he was alone. Someone in the hotel was playing a violin. Precisely, achingly, flawlessly, the music trickled through the room: a melody he almost recognized. He saw fresh clothes folded at the foot of the bed. At first he thought they were a uniform, then he realized that they were just pieces of one. Canadian trousers, a British jacket. Castoffs. Like himself. He put them on. Ventured to the door, stiff in every limb. Peered out. The hallway was soft with carpet. The music rose. Freddie followed it down a flight of stairs. Found a door and opened it.
The music struck him in the face, like walking into rain.
He was back in the foyer, but it wasn’t empty. Men in proper uniforms packed the room, sitting at tables, drinking, talking, laughing. Sometimes crying. Their lips were stained, the floor was sticky. Their noise made the chandeliers quiver. Was it advertisements, Freddie wondered, that brought them all? He didn’t know if it was night or day. The room revealed nothing of the outside world.
Freddie clung to the shadows. The sheer, tenacious life filling the room frightened him, as though if he got too near he’d be swept back into its bloody gyre. But no one beckoned, no one was looking at him. They were all watching Faland. He was the one playing a violin.
Freddie was surprised somehow, that the musician was him. Faland seemed so remote. Detached. But there was nothing detached about his music. It reached a clawed hand right inside Freddie’s forgotten heart, alive with things he was too wounded to feel anymore. Regret, tenderness. It was beautiful, and it hurt so much.
He stood there frozen, and that was when he caught sight of the mirror over the bar.
Winter and Laura were eating supper. The war had never happened. Freddie and Winter had met in the ordinary way. There was no white in Laura’s hair, there were no lines on Winter’s face.
He didn’t hear the music ending. He didn’t hear anything at all until Faland’s voice in his ear shattered the illusion, left him reeling once more. “Well, you are among the living after all,” said Faland. He was carrying his violin in a case.
“Who are you?” Freddie said. He realized his face was wet. “I don’t understand.”
“I am a notable hotelier,” said Faland. “And fortunately you don’t have to understand. Would you like some wine?”
“God, yes,” said Freddie.
· · ·He drank until he was no longer afraid. He drank until longing became only a pleasant ache. Faland drank too, color on his cheekbones, the paler eye brilliant. It was a compelling face. You wanted to look at it, and know its secrets. You wanted to look through it to where the music lived. The room around them was sunk in murmured talk, heady with warmth and wine.
“Will you tell me a story now, Iven?” said Faland. He’d taken a seat beside Freddie, lounging in the half-light.
Freddie hesitated. A story meant remembering. He wanted to stay adrift in the unmoored present. But Faland’s silence was expectant. I have fees, he’d said. Well, it was little enough, for the hours of glorious oblivion. Freddie found himself groping through his wine-hazed memory, thought of things he could tell—good and terrible—and finally he blurted, “Laura stole an ice cream for me once.”
“Misdeeds run in the family, I fear,” said Faland. He propped his chin on his fist and waited.
Freddie hadn’t thought of it in years. But he found himself slipping into the memory as though it were playing out in front of him. Faland leaned forward.
“Laura— God, she spoiled me. I’m nearly three years younger, you know, and I was a fat little brat of a red-haired thing. Awful freckles. And she had me by the hand once and we were walking past the shop, and I told her I wanted an ice cream. She didn’t have any money, of course, and neither did I. But you know it never occurred to me, even then, that she couldn’t get me one. So she looks at me. Looks at the shop. And then she marches in like a queen, holding me by the hand. She was—twelve? Twelve, I think. And she orders ice creams for both of us. With chocolate sauce. And then she gets to the till. Of course she’s not got a penny. And she reaches into her pocket. Nothing’s there. Her eyes fill up with tears. I started to cry myself, seeing her get started. She turns to the shopkeeper and says, ‘Sir, my dollar fell out of my pocket.’ She’s weeping like a Madonna the whole time, and she turns to me and says, ‘Freddie, go home, for I must make amends. Please, sir, spare my brother at least—’ She was heartbreaking, I can tell you. And the long and short is we got those ice creams and got off scot-free. I used to think she was terribly clever; now I think the shopkeeper was just impressed with her barefaced cheek and crocodile tears.”
Freddie raised his eyes and saw Laura’s adult face in the mirror, without a single mark of strain on it. As though the woman there had grown from the girl in his memory, with no Armageddon come between. He didn’t know how long he stared and when he looked away, Faland had disappeared.
Freddie didn’t remember how or when he got to bed. But he must have managed somehow, for he woke up back in that luxurious bedroom, dry-mouthed, with a headache. He had no notion of the hour, or even the day. He dimly remembered telling Faland a story. But he had absolutely no memory of what the story had been about.
