Losing Julia (24 page)

“I wish I could be with her,” he said, sitting down next to me. “I miss her like crazy.”

“Hell, even I miss her,” I said, which made him smile.

“I never should have enlisted. What the hell was I thinking?”

“You weren’t thinking. None of us were.”

He closed his eyes and leaned his head back. When he opened his eyes he read her letter again, then handed it to me. “Look at this handwriting,” he said. “It’s almost like calligraphy.” I studied the beautiful lettering and imagined Julia sitting at her desk just after breakfast, dreaming of the man I fought beside as she caressed her pen across the page with a gentle scratching sound, pausing occasionally to feel for the baby’s heartbeat within.

TODAY DURING ART
class I thought I had her eyes. I was so close: the curve of her lids, the thin bridge of her nose. Yes, the shape was just right. Finally. But I couldn’t bring them to life. Every time I drew the pupils they refused to look at me, so that I wanted to lean forward and blow life into them. But no matter what I did they just stared straight ahead. Lifeless. When class ended I rolled my drawing up and dropped it into the garbage can.

I FOUND TWO
Valentine’s Day cards under my pillow this morning. One from Helen and the other from Sarah. (Do I have wide appeal or what?) I haven’t opened the one from Helen yet. Its thickness suggests a depth of ardor I don’t want to contend with. I took Sarah’s card into the bathroom, locked the door and sat on the toilet, studying the way she’d written my name on the envelope encircled in a big red heart she’d drawn. The card itself was store-bought, with pictures of flowers and hearts on the front. Inside she wrote:

To the last of the truly great leading men. (My love life confirms this!) From your not so secret admirer.
Love,
Sarah

I immediately walked down the hall to the phone booth and ordered a huge bouquet of flowers to be delivered to her home. Then I took the bus into town and bought her a large box of chocolates, which I left with a note at the nurses’ station.

WHY DOES
the longing for love have to be so acute, like a desperate thirst? Is it because love is wanting to be saved and we can never really be saved? Maybe love is really born of our fears. Love is the heart’s desire for a pain-killer; a tearful plea for a great big epidural. Yes, that’s it: love is the only anesthesia that actually works. And so people with broken hearts are really those who are just coming to, and if you’ve ever seen someone come out of general anesthesia you know that it looks a lot like the beginnings of a broken heart.

But to find it and touch it and hold it! What relief, if only briefly, until love wears off or slips through our hands. Strange how love—that most fickle of emotions—creates the illusion of permanence right from the start, just as beauty, so fleeting and elusive, can seem so timeless and infinite to behold.

If love doesn’t triumph, it ought to. For love is the one thing we have that feels more powerful than even death; the only respite from life’s wretched absurdity. The magic of love is not that it contains all the answers, it’s that it eliminates the need for so many pressing questions. For love makes us feel like gods—and that’s what we’re really after, isn’t it?

THE GAS SIREN
goes off just as we are carrying planks along the communication trenches to shore up the firing trenches. Six seconds to don your mask. That’s the drill. My hands fumble as the gas shells hit. There, it’s on. Isn’t it? I grab my rifle. The ghoulish mist creeps over the edge of the parapet and slides down into the trench like a snake. A slithering poisonous snake. Thousands and millions of them, hissing toward me.

Don’t panic, Patrick. Please, don’t panic. Take a breath. That’s it. Is the hose connected? I run my hand along it. More gas shells explode. Shit, what was the drill? I remember. Breathe normally. Do not remove your mask, even if you feel you are choking. The mist clings to the dirt and my clothes and my mask and the lenses are fogging. Do not remove your mask. Am I breathing normally? Under no circumstance are you allowed to abandon your position. Stand to and maintain your vigilance. It seems hard to breathe, harder still with each breath. Am I getting air or is that gas I taste? Do not remove your mask. Never remove your mask. If only I could get out of the trench where the gas wasn’t so thick. The shelling stops. I look up and wonder if the Germans are attacking. But I can’t see the top of the trench. Not very well. Oh Christ, I think I’m going to puke. But not in the mask. I can’t puke in the mask. But I really must puke.

Their expressions, indescribably, seemed frozen by a vision of terror; their gait and their postures betrayed a total dejection; they sagged beneath the weight of horrifying memories; when I spoke to them, they could hardly reply…

—French Marshal Philippe Pétain, describing the

sight of soldiers returning from Verdun.

WHEN WE
reached the outskirts of Verdun Julia asked me to pull off on La Voie Sacrée, the road upon which France hastily delivered its youth unto Verdun so that Verdun could deliver them with equal efficiency unto eternity. The surrounding fields were littered with the fragmented hulks of farmhouses and rusty piles of barbed wire and sheets of corrugated elephant iron and debris from trucks and wagons.

“I can’t believe it still looks so bad here,” she said, standing by the car. “I guess I thought more of it would be cleaned up… erased.”

“This was the only road open to Verdun,” I said. “Just a narrow dirt road. To keep the convoys from sinking in the mud, thousands of men lined the road day and night and shoveled tons of gravel beneath the wheels of the trucks and carts. It’s France’s Via Dolorosa.”

I wanted to tell her more than that; I wanted to tell her that she was standing on the aorta of France and that just up the road on February 21, 1916, the Germans had raised a huge glittering blade and brought it down with all the might of the Teutonic Empire again and again and again for ten months. I wanted to tell her that the blood of a nation—the terrified and exhausted fathers and sons of France—had come coursing down the Voie Sacrée toward thundering acrid oblivion.

I looked at her standing near the side of the road next to a ditch filled with rusted axles and engine parts and when she turned and looked at me I knew from her eyes that she saw what I saw: an endless bumper-to-bumper caravan of bulging transports and lorries and wavering columns of dirty and tired men tagging alongside, all of them doomed.

And there was nothing we could say to them as they passed. Nothing at all.

OUR LAST STOP
was at a barren hill near Verdun that the French call Le Mort-Homme, which means The Dead Man, though it might also be thought of as a sloped anvil upon which men were smashed to little bits, bits that French Army chaplains still collect each week and place in the bulging Ossuary after the wild boars have dug them up.

We walked slowly to the top and stopped near where a group of uniformed cadets were receiving a lecture from a severe-looking officer with a thick mustache and a chest full of medals.