After the war, p.1
After the War, page 1
ALSO BY RICHARD MARIUS
Fiction
The Coming of Rain
Bound for the Promised Land
Nonfiction
Luther
Thomas More
A Writer’s Companion
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
Copyright © 1992 by Richard Marius
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Marius, Richard.
After the war/Richard Marius.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-82893-4
I. Title.
PS3563.A66A68 1992
813′.54—dc20 91-23212
Published May 21, 1992
Reprinted Twice
v3.1
For my editor,
Ann Close,
in love and gratitude,
and
in memory of my father,
Henri Marius Panayotis Kephalopoulos,
foundryman, farmer, Tennessean
1893–1988
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part One Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Part Two Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Part Three Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Chapter 130
Chapter 131
Chapter 132
Chapter 133
Chapter 134
Chapter 135
Chapter 136
Chapter 137
Chapter 138
Chapter 139
Chapter 140
Chapter 141
Chapter 142
Chapter 143
Chapter 144
Chapter 145
Chapter 146
Chapter 147
Chapter 148
Chapter 149
Chapter 150
Chapter 151
Chapter 152
Chapter 153
Chapter 154
Chapter 155
Chapter 156
Chapter 157
Chapter 158
Chapter 159
Chapter 160
Chapter 161
Chapter 162
Chapter 163
Chapter 164
Chapter 165
Chapter 166
Chapter 167
Chapter 168
And I, too, lived once in Arcadia
1
I AM NOT MAD; I never was. Wounded in body and soul, yes. Melancholy, yes. Suicidal, perhaps. Selfish? Deceitful? Disloyal? A liar, even to myself? Yes, all those things. But I never went crazy, no matter how it may seem in the story I sit here to tell.
I write late at night in a still house, waiting for sleep as a man waits alone for a train, not knowing when it will come, not sure that it will come at all. I have been an insomniac since the Great War. For years I read books at night—a lonely business, for people in Bourbon County have no taste for any book but the Bible.
Tonight I sit at my kitchen table and look over the darkened hillside pasture towards my lower field, where lespedeza hay grows lush in the summer dark. I can smell the heat—a baked, hard smell. We need rain. At my open windows insects beat against the screens, frantic for my small lamp with its green glass shade. I hear the infinitesimal thumping of tiny bodies against the wire.
Beyond the lower field in our shallow valley runs the two-lane highway to Nashville. The lights of passing cars blaze at intervals. Sometimes a truck rumbles by, and the sound carries up to me at this mysterious hour when a rural world is fast asleep. My solitary light must seem mysterious to them, too. More strange if they knew the memories that crowd around it and me.
I will tell my story. Brian Ledbetter said that if a man could not tell stories, he had not lived. Father Droos said we had to write things to know them. “Know thyself!” he said, standing over me at the Institute St. Valéry in Ghent—a world of cobblestones and yellow trams and orderly houses pressed wall to wall and orderly people in medieval streets and cafes and taverns, a lost Arcadian world—while I tried to master the art of writing essays in French. “You must know those words, Mr. Kephalopoulos.”
That is my real name, Kephalopoulos, not Paul Alexander, the name I have lived by in these long years in America.
Father Droos lifted an ironic eyebrow.
“The Delphic oracle,” I replied.
Father Droos wagged his cigarette in the prophetic mode. “Excellent! To know yourself you must write about yourself. I have always kept a journal.” I wonder what happened to it; what happened to him? He used to sit and drink wine with Madame Boschnagel at the tavern she owned called the Vieux Gand. It seemed strange to see a plump priest in a cassock talking with her in his constrained and serious way, his face red with wine. He smoked cigarettes one after the other and waved them around his head as he talked about books. Sometimes Madame Boschnagel leaned forward on her elbows, her ruddy Germanic face in her hands, listening rapt to his words. He had read and remembered everything. Mention a character in a play or a novel, no matter how obscure, and Father Droos was off on a lecture. Madame Boschnagel adored him. We wondered if they were lovers.
On the August morning in 1914 when we marched to the railroad station to go to war, Belgian patriots were throwing chairs and tables out of her tavern, breaking them up on the street, and she was in their midst weeping, imploring them to stop. Father Droos was trying to defend her. He was fat and out of breath and helpless, his face blood red, his white hair whipping with his futile flailing, and people were jeering him. The Socialists swore not to fight the war; when the war came, they fought a fat old priest and a woman. I do not know what happened after that.
My story includes many stories—some without endings. A story should move from a beginning to a middle and to a climax just before the end. At th e end everything is accounted for. I cannot account for everything. Parts of my story vanish in the dark. I once yearned to know how they ended. No more. I am resigned to some things—resigned to my destiny, the fragmented story I tell here.
I will write about Guy and Bernal. I will say that they lived and died and that I lived with them in life and in death. They have been gone for years. Long after they went away for the last time, I kept expecting them to return. I would be standing in the doorway to the barn at twilight when the men had finished throwing hay into the loft, the thick summer air heavy with the smell of mowing, fireflies drifting in the thin mist rising from the field, a summer torpor upon the earth. Observing with quiet pride my harvest, I would listen for Guy’s soft laughter behind me and Bernal’s murmur of friendly reproach. Bernal thought Guy patronized me. Guy did patronize me. I loved him anyway.
I thought that I would turn and look back into the gloom of the barn’s interior and see Guy standing there with a smile on his face and his hands outstretched in his casual welcoming gesture, almost a shrug. “I am here. Of course you are glad to see me.”
I supposed that if Guy and Bernal came to me anywhere, it would be in the barn. It was a fine and private place in the twilight. They were there when I built it, the two of them lounging in the shade. Guy smirked at my pleasure in manual labor. Jim Ed and I sweated and grunted and lifted beams and planks and held them while Clyde did the real work, the art. I write to keep something of them here, in the world of the living. That was why I talked to them after they were dead.
I never believed in the ghosts. In the part of my mind where I am most truly myself I always knew that they were like the imaginary companions children make up in a lonely world—or the God to whom the religious speak, imagining that they hear him speak in return.
It happened this way. I knew they were dead. I was alive. Barely alive. I lay still, bandaged and drugged against pain in the Royal Hospital in Chelsea in a long ward where the critically wounded lay in narrow beds beneath the high windows designed by Sir Christopher Wren. Despite the drugs, the pain throbbed in my head, my chest, and my legs.
I could not remember how they had died. I remembered them alive, and I could recall—can still recall—a thousand or perhaps ten thousand details about them. I remembered waking in the hospital train on its slow way up to London, feeling the rocking of the carriages, the crushing headache. I had never felt such pain. Guy and Bernal were dead. I could not remember how they died. I lay in my cot in London, wrapped in bandages that covered the wounds left by the German shell before Antwerp in September 1914. I was alive; they were dead.
The nights were worse than the days. My right eye was left outside the bandages. I could see the tiny electric light gleaming at the nurses’ station at the end of the long ward. I smelled iodine, stale urine, fresh feces, gangrenous flesh. I heard the wounded groaning, whimpering, crying, snoring, breathing in the deep, pained, stuttering way that injured and dying men gasp for breath. From the distance came the horns of boats on the Thames and the rumble of trains, whistles shrieking—sounds of a city at night working at war.
At some moment when the air was crisp with autumn, I began talking to my dead friends.
Bernal was devout. His piety made me uncomfortable. It amused Guy. Bernal prayed in the Cathedral of St. Bavon in Ghent, kneeling in a chapel before the van Eyck’s painting of the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb. He moved his lips, and the tears poured down his cheeks. I came on him there once by accident. I was embarrassed. We never spoke of it.
Guy claimed to be an atheist. “Prove the existence of God, and I will pray,” he said. He knew the arguments for belief and could refute them all. Bernal smiled, untroubled, and said, “You do not prove that God is before you pray. You pray, and there you find God.”
That is why I spoke to them after they were dead. If I spoke, they seemed to be present. It was fantasy—a harmless comfort. I knew every intonation of their voices, their minds, how they would respond to anything I said. What was wrong with talking to them?
When he was alive, Bernal feared such things. Necromancy was blasphemy, he said. During the retreat of 1914 we came on a fortune-teller in a village where every house had been leveled by shell fire, and she was sitting amid the ruins at a wooden table as though she were a daemonic functionary; and in the same madness that afflicted her and our ruined world, Guy and I had our palms read and our futures told.
“Please God, do not do this thing!” Bernal cried. “You cannot know the secrets of God; you cannot practice necromancy. Remember the Witch of En-dor.” Guy and I laughed at him. Bernal thought that poor, mad woman could tell us the future because she communed with the spirits of the dead. She read our palms while Bernal slung his rifle off his shoulder and walked away, weeping. I could hear a Maxim gun in the middle distance while she spoke in the languid tones of the eternally undisturbed oracle. She told Guy that he would die in the war. She told me that I would cross the seas and marry a blond woman. Bernal said there was no hope for us after that.
I talked to them between waves of agony behind my eyes in the deep night hours. The leather shoes of the nurses swished along the smooth floors between the beds where the wounded lay groaning or comatose or dying. I could shut my unbandaged eye and whisper and imagine that they whispered back so that their voices were part of the wind that sighed around the eaves of the hospital’s tall roof in the autumn dark.
It rained often in London. One night I was whispering to them, and I pretended I could hear their voices in the rain falling on the roof high above and running into the guttering. An auditory illusion, changing, first one thing, then another. Sometimes the sound was their voices; sometimes it was the distant running of water in the copper gutters. Their voices, then water; their voices, then water again; first one, then the other. I amused myself talking to them when it was as though they were far away, perhaps calling to me from some deep and forested valley cleft in granite. I imagined clear water running through the valley, and we sat in the grass and whispered to each other in the charmed solitude, and their voices were a singing of strange melodies that brought this physical world to the edge of a brightness where none of the things we think we know are quite as we think we know them.
When the sound became water again, I waited, knowing the voices would return and that the sound of water would go away. Suddenly I heard voices and water at the same time—the distinct sound of words, and the equally distinct sound of water running behind.
Slowly I understood. Voices and water together. Far off I heard clocks striking two in the morning. Solemn, heavy ringing, tolling the night away. I whispered tentatively. “Guy? Bernal? Are you there? Are you really there?” I heard Guy’s laughter, low and distinct, and behind it, far up in the dark, I heard the water running.
“Of course we are here,” Guy said.
I dared not open my unbandaged eye. Maybe even then I was afraid of them, as I feared them later on.
“It is true,” Bernal said, his French accented by his delicate Argentine voice. “We are here.”
“You are alive,” Guy said reproachfully.
“It was not my fault,” I said.
“All for one and one for all,” Bernal said.
“We swore we would never be parted,” Guy said.
“We reckoned without the war,” I said.
“A promise is a promise,” Guy said.
I opened my eye. There they were—standing by my bed in the deep gloom of the ward. Bernal wore his dark blue uniform, the black cloth cap pulled tight on his head. His uniform fitted him badly. He had ordered another from his tailor; there was no time. I looked at his feet. His heavy military shoes were caked with mud.
Guy’s uniform was filthy. Even so, he looked debonair. He bowed gallantly from the waist. They smiled, Bernal slow and tentative, as he always smiled, Guy pleased as a child with his little surprise. I could see them as clearly as I see the white wooden frame of the row of windows where I sit, the table with the red checked oilcloth where I write, my lamp, the occasional lights passing on the highway across the expanse of my farm. I saw them. I heard them. I did not touch them. We were together, reunited beyond death.
I want to affirm here and now that I did not believe that they were real. I never truly believed it. I saw them. But something always stood behind the apparitions to tell me that I was not mad. Still, I saw them, and I wanted more than anything else in the world for them to stay with me and never to leave me again.
2
THIS MUST BE Pinkerton’s story, too—Pinkerton the great and the terrible.
I came to him on a train, rolling through the night from the capital of the United States. There a Mr. Davis of the Dixie Railroad gave me a job as chemist in the railroad’s car works in Bourbonville, Tennessee. “Nothing ever happens there, I’m afraid. But it’s where we need a chemist.” He shoved papers and a train ticket across the desk and dismissed me by rising half out of his chair, a jerk of his knees, and he sat down again and forgot me. Mr. Davis was busy. There was a war on.
