Chapter 29: A Slow and Silent Stream

FALAND’S HOTEL, PARTS UNKNOWN

Winter 1917–1918

Freddie awoke in bed, and before he even opened his eyes, he was clawing, frantic, through his memory. He didn’t even know what he’d lost, but he could feel the absence. A dry-socket ache. He felt—smaller—somehow.

The violin was playing, tormenting his ear with strange familiarity, calling to him as it always did. He found himself putting on his crumpled pieces of uniform, walking to his door.

No,he thought, with a flare of rebellion. That night he was going to explore the hotel. Behave like a man, not a ghost. Decide, logically, what he ought to do.

When he stepped into the corridor, he went the opposite direction, as though fleeing the sound.

The corridor was just as it had always been: dim, soft, dusty. The doors were set a little too close together, so that you imagined strange rooms on the other side. Prison cells maybe. But when Freddie put his hand on the nearest handle and tried to turn it, the door was still locked.

He tried another. Door after door. All locked.

He began to walk faster. Kept trying doors. The corridor never changed. It was the same length, the same carpet, the same deceptive light. Even the same violin, taunting him with things he could not remember, a sound he could not escape. Even when he put his hands over his ears the melody sounded, endlessly, in his head. Finally he stumbled, gasping, through an archway and found himself back in the foyer. Felt the place as a trap instead of a refuge: a luxurious version of the pillbox. He found himself longing to hear Winter breathe.

It took Freddie a moment to pick out Faland. He was across the room, his back turned. Freddie’s first emotion at the sight of him was relief. As though familiarity were stronger than any reflexive horror. He tried to claw his anger back. He needed the courage. He’s going to turn round, and I’m going to ask him again which one is the door outside. And he’s going to tell me, and I’m going to go. I’m no puppet.

But Faland didn’t turn.

Freddie’s skin prickled. Faland was facing the grand mirror over the bar. He had put down his violin. He wasn’t laughing or talking or pouring wine. Freddie found himself stealing toward him. The room was packed, but Faland was all alone in his corner of it. Freddie came up behind him. He didn’t see Winter and Laura in the mirror. He didn’t see anything he understood at all.

The mirror flickered with images. A throne. A dead forest, a red-laced sky. A city shining gold like the peeling gilt of the hotel and a light that made Freddie want to sob…

Faland turned. Freddie tore his gaze from the mirror. Faland snatched up a bottle of wine and drank, throat working as he swallowed. “Come to pay up, Iven?”

“What do you see?” whispered Freddie. “In the mirror—what is it? What do you want?”

Faland put the bottle down. “Oh, no. No, I never promised you stories. I don’t have any you’d care to hear, anyway. They’d freeze your blood. No, tell me a tale, Iven, I’m waiting.” His hand had fallen on the violin case; his fingers flexed. His face was flushed with wine, his eyes glassy with it.

“Why?” said Freddie. He’d had noble visions of standing before Faland in defiance, demanding his freedom. But what he said was, “I’d work for my keep or—or anything. You can’t just—just take my—you have no right!”

Faland said, bitter as aloes, “It’s the pattern of the times. Were you expecting honest justice? There’s none. It’s a new world now. It eats you up, sinners and saints, all alike.”

“Tell me who you are.”

“You know,” said Faland. “Or you think you do. But you don’t. No one’s the same now. Not even I.”

“You lied when you said it’s my choice to leave. I couldn’t. All the doors were locked.”

Faland drank again. “You didn’t really want to go. You still don’t. You think you can best me, and you know there’s no victory to be had outside.”

The mirror was dark now. Faland had nearly finished the bottle. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. In his face, in that light, was the shadow of a terrible beauty, timeworn like his hotel. The light silvered his hair. Freddie, with clairvoyance borne of despair, recognized Faland’s expression. With slow surprise he said, “You hate this place, don’t you? You hate everything. You hate the war as much as I do.”

Faland drew the cork on a new bottle and raised it in toast. “Yes, I hate it, clever boy. It’s a hell with no master, that men made themselves.” He drank. “Of course I hate it.”

Freddie whispered, “But can’t you leave?”

Faland set the bottle aside, thump, on the bar. His voice dropped confidingly. “Oh, yes. But do you know the worst of it, Iven? I love it too. Have you been thinking me a poor victim, just like you? No. Do you know what men do here? They turn to me. They choose me. They say Better you than that. Over and over they choose me.” Avarice now as well as despair in Faland’s eyes. “They hand their souls to me. As you did. That’s why I’m here. Because I cannot bring myself to go.”

Freddie’s throat had tightened with shrinking horror, and the worst of it was he still hovered halfway between recoiling and yielding. The glitter of Faland’s lighter eye was frightening in his flushed face. His voice dropped. “But, you know, you’ve only ever told me things you want to remember. You could tell me things you want to forget.”

Freddie’s throat closed. Faland waited.

There weren’t words for some memories. The very language he’d learned in his boyhood did not feel equal to describing some memories. They were better off left wordless. Formless, hidden. Forgotten.

Forgotten…He looked at Faland with sudden hunger. You could tell me things you want to forget.

Of course, to do that, first he had to remember.

“It’s not all bad, is it, Iven?” said Faland softly.

Freddie stood caught between conflicting impulses. He thought Faland knew it, and savored his distress. His gut knotted in fear. He was yielding, he was glad to yield, and he was so afraid. “Please,” he whispered, but he didn’t know what he was asking for.

Faland just watched him. No mercy at all in that face, but who needed mercy when someone looked at you like that, like he understood every thought that passed through your mind? Like he would know every nuance of your soul before he devoured it?

Freddie bowed his head. He thought a moment. “It was raining in billets, when the order to advance came and we…”

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· · ·He told Faland everything he could remember of that advance on the Ridge, and every word hurt. The formless days that had lain like bitter fog in the back of his mind must be given phrases, given color and shape and hours and minutes. Conjured there, in the flickering dimness of the hotel: This happened, and that and that. No euphemism would satisfy Faland, no barrier, however small, between experience, mind, and voice.

The words dragged him back, made him live it all again, caught helplessly in his own mind until he was sweating and sick and gasping, as though mud and gas and rain could be embodied from memory. The tale took him all the way to the pillbox. “And then it was dark,” Freddie said, gasping for air.

“And then?” said Faland, gently.

Tell him everything,Freddie thought. And forget it ever happened. He’d never again wake up choking, afraid of the dark. He’d never remember why he ought to be afraid.

But Winter had been there in the dark. There was no way to separate the horror from the memory of Winter’s voice, his courage. He could not bring himself to let that memory go. It seemed wrong, disrespectful to the thing they’d shared, to let it go.

“I told you a story,” said Freddie.

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· · ·The next time Freddie woke, his hours on the Ridge were gone. He remembered getting their orders, then nothing before the pillbox. He felt lighter, but also unsteady. As though he’d chopped off a diseased section of limb, and now there was no limb at all, some essential balance lost.

I should tell the rest. About the pillbox, and escaping, and the shell hole,he thought. Why keep it? It’s not as though I’ll ever see Winter again.

However, that night, he told Faland of the dead man in the breastworks near Arras, whose hand they shook for luck as they went up.

One night followed another, and each night, Freddie flung his worst memories at Faland: bad days in trenches, mates in hospital, the day he told his mother he was enlisting and she sobbed on his shoulder. But he didn’t tell Faland of the pillbox. He didn’t say a word about Winter.

Faland listened, as always, in silence.

Then, in one of the unmarked hours, when the hotel was hushed and somber, Freddie’s candle went out and he woke again in the dark, screaming Winter’s name.

Only silence answered. Silence, and then a voice. But not the one he longed for.

“Why keep it so close?” said Faland in his ear, silky. He hadn’t come with a light this time. He sat on the edge of Freddie’s bed, smelling of wine and rosin and old flowers, reached out as though he could see in the dark, slid a hand over Freddie’s hair, took hold of the back of his neck. Freddie bowed his head, hating the way he turned helplessly to the warmth.

“Tell me what you remember,” said Faland. “Tell me of the dark, and yourself, and that German. That’s what I want to know. That’s what I’ve always wanted to know.”

Freddie didn’t speak. He’d never see Winter again. What good was memory? But he didn’t speak. He held his silence and held it until finally Faland got up and left, taking the candle with him.