Chapter 27: The Mind Is Its Own Place

FALAND’S HOTEL, PARTS UNKNOWN, FLANDERS, BELGIUM

Winter of 1917–1918

Freddie never learned to distinguish night from day in Faland’s hotel, although he had a vague sense of sleeping in daylight and rousing at dusk, when the music wound its way up the stairs and summoned him. But he was never certain. Day and night had no meaning in a place where all the light came from fires and the outside world was so effectively shut out.

Freddie didn’t miss the sun. He kept to the shadows and drank and watched Faland’s mirror, lost in longing. It was an endless, daydreamer’s longing, satisfying in itself, with no need for fulfillment. The people in the mirror could not disappoint in any way, and he would never fail them, or lose them, or mourn them. It was easier so. He had only to watch and yearn. And tell Faland a story.

Freddie had no idea why Faland wanted to hear them. “Inspiration,” he would say, and nothing more. Perhaps it didn’t matter what Faland wanted. Stories were a small price to pay for the surcease of night terrors, for the wine, for the silence in Freddie’s head that might almost have been taken for peace, so Freddie told him of the time he and Laura were picking beetles off the cabbages in their mother’s garden, and decided to play avenging angels, with the beetles as their victims, until Freddie burst into tears and said he hardly thought the beetles deserved eternal damnation for eating cabbage.

He told Faland of the time Silas French got taken with Laura and kept following her home from school trying to carry her books, until she finally got tired of it, opened one of her books, and started reading, in a syrupy voice, about bowel resections, until Silas turned green and went away.

He spoke of the ships they watched from Laura’s upper window, how they’d imagine whole stories for them: manifests, and destinations, and secrets, and murders.

It wasn’t easy. Often, he hated it. Each memory felt like pins and needles, a deadened limb stirring sluggishly to life. Thoughts he did not want would run through his head: What would my family think of me? And, worse, his sweet fairy-tale longing for the dream in Faland’s mirror would become a sick sorrow, when he remembered afresh that he had nothing but mirror and memory, that his sister was lying in a pine box, under the same earth that he, sometimes, wished he’d never escaped. That Winter had gone to an unknown fate. He’d tell Faland a story—even a lighthearted one—and then press the heels of his hands to his eyes to stop himself feeling, reaching desperately again for forgetfulness.

Faland would pour Freddie a cup in silence, the glittering eye and the lightless one both fixed on his face.

One night, Faland tuned his fiddle as he listened, the instrument laid tenderly across his knee, the murmur of it a background to Freddie’s voice when he spoke of the battle royale that took place in their house when Laura got into nursing school, how their father had flatly refused to pay, and how Laura had told him that he didn’t have to, that she was going to do scut work in the hospital and pay her own way. And she had. By God, she had.

When he fell silent, the wandering sound of the fiddle seemed, briefly, to take the story up, chords of determination and stubborn pride, more like Laura than the smiling girl in the mirror was.

Freddie turned away from the sound, shaking with regret and love and sorrow, poured himself a cup, tossed it back quickly, and while he waited for it to work, he blurted, “Why are you here?”

Faland scraped his bow over all the strings at once, and the tune vanished. Freddie was glad it was gone, and wished he’d play it again. “Here?” inquired Faland.

Freddie hardly knew what he was asking. But the thoughts still were trying to crowd his mind, so he opened his mouth instead. “Here. In the war zone. You could keep a hotel anywhere. London. New York. You could play your violin at Carnegie Hall.”

Faland’s bow drew another shimmering run of notes from the fiddle, something nostalgic that evoked a bright city, far away. “Perhaps. But in New York, they’d pay me in money. Or perhaps in love, or secrets, as men sometimes do. But here—” The violin changed key, seemed to whisper slyly to itself. The firelight sharpened the edges of Faland’s face. “Well, here, people will give me anything at all.”

“But you don’t ask for anything. Just stories.”

The violin murmured again, something vaguely familiar this time. Where had he heard that tune? “Yes,” Faland said, meditatively. “Just stories.”

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· · ·The next night, when Freddie was half-asleep in the shadows near the bar, his eye settled dreamily on the people in Faland’s mirror, a question occurred to him. He tried to dismiss it. But he could not, so when Faland came to him and waited, Freddie blurted, “What did I tell you last night?”

Faland just looked at him.

“My story,” said Freddie. “Last night. I don’t remember what I told you.”

Faland had poured himself a glass of wine. He sipped it. The subtle lines of laughter deepened round his eyes. “No?”

Freddie cursed his sodden brain. He tried to think back—one night—then the next. And he said, slowly, “And—and the story before that—do you remember what I told you?”

“Yes,” said Faland. “I remember everything.”

“I don’t,” Freddie whispered. “I don’t remember any of them.” His mouth had gone dry.

“Well,” said Faland, “you paid with them, didn’t you?”

“I— You can’t possibly—” But Freddie’s eye caught Faland’s and he knew abruptly that he could. He searched his memory. How would he even know what he’d lost? “How many nights?” he whispered. “How many stories have I told you?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Who are you?”

Faland was leaning on the bar now. “I? A relic in a brave new world. Does it matter? You told me willingly.”

Freddie said nothing. He found himself wishing he hadn’t realized. He wanted to sink back into torpid peace. His gorge rose.

Faland’s hungry gaze seemed to swallow every detail of Freddie’s horrified face, before he straightened and said, “Off you go, then.” He pointed. “There’s the door, go.”

But Freddie stood still. Go? he wanted to scream. Go where? But if he stayed, he’d— Oh, God.

Faland’s voice dropped effortlessly, took on an intimacy that made Freddie’s whole body quake. “You asked me once why I’m here. Well, I shall ask you. Why are you here? Don’t you know?”

Freddie’s eyes never left Faland’s face.

“Because out there you can give up every piece of yourself for nothing, let the mud swallow you, nameless and naked, or you can sell yourself to me, story by story, for all the delights of peace. There are two evils”—his voice turned wry—“and I am the lesser. Besides, where would you go?” The words seemed to drip down Freddie’s body, and pierce his heart. “Imagine for a moment that your sister were not dead. Do you think, for even an instant, that she’d be glad to see you?”

Freddie was silent.

“Shall I say it for you?” said Faland. “Deserter. Traitor. Coward. You’ve already decided. If you go out and they catch you, you won’t be honorably dead anymore. You’ll be another poor fool who ran. They’ll put you up against the wall in the courtyard of the mairie in Poperinghe, and they’ll shoot you.”

Freddie didn’t say a word.

“And your German,” Faland said. “Winter? He tried to warn you, didn’t he? Told you to be brave. But you weren’t. This world wants nothing of you save your death, Wilfred Iven. Yet I want more. I think you know that too.”

Freddie groped for a reply. He’d always had words. He’d been a poet. But now the only thing that came was fragments: “No—I’m not a coward.” He couldn’t think. He couldn’t even move when Faland put out a crooked finger and tilted his head back.

“No?”

Freddie was like a puppet under the other man’s fingers. He stood perfectly still. “How can you do these things?” he whispered.

“That is not the question, is it?”

Die,Freddie thought. Of course it is better to die than to sell my soul, piece by piece. Then he thought, Is it? He realized, to his horror, that his loneliness was trying to answer for him. He had tipped his face into the other’s hand, yearning after the mortal warmth in the violinist’s palm, and even more, the terrible understanding in his eyes. Faland might ruin him, Freddie thought. But he’d know him first. Out there, Freddie was just a body dressed in drab.

Faland pushed back Freddie’s hair, bent lower, and murmured, “Stay then.” In his eyes was an endless hunger. “Tell me a story.”

Freddie tore free and ran for the door.

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· · ·He didn’t know which door, of course. He groped for the nearest, opened it, and ran through. The door opened onto a long corridor, carpeted, with sconces burning low on the walls. The whole way was lined with doors. Freddie ran past them all. He ran until his first blind panic had faded and was replaced by disjointed thoughts. I have to get out of here. But there’s nowhere to go. Better to stay. What does it matter?

Winter had tried to warn him. Laura wouldn’t have wanted this for him. He came to another long hallway, full of doors. He must get out. Was it this door? He tried it. Locked. All the doors were locked. Creeping dread filled him. Take that staircase? Where was he even going?

He looked back, like a child checking that the bogeyman hadn’t followed him home.

The drowned man was there. Standing, dripping, in the hallway, his face fish-belly white, blue-lipped. Grinning, endlessly patient. The drowned man would always be there…

Freddie bolted again. He ran until his legs seized. Until he caught his foot on nothing and fell and couldn’t bring himself to rise. He curled his body into a ball, and waited for the corpse’s clammy hand. It was no more than he deserved.

He almost screamed when the touch came down between his shoulder blades. But the hand was warm. Freddie did not move. Tears had dried on his eyelashes.

Faland pulled him to his feet as though he weighed nothing at all. Freddie had the sensation of being borne along by a cold, black river, by a will stronger than his. He still hadn’t opened his eyes.

“Tell me a story, Iven,” said Faland.

And Freddie, his face buried against Faland’s throat, did.