Divisadero (30 page)

He thought, strangely, not
of his family but about MarieNeige, with whom he had rarely spoken since his
marriage. For a series of nights his mind leapt with excited freedom all around
her. He would recall something and force himself to journey across the episode
again, slowly. He had seen her rise from sewing and
arch
her back, slip her left hand up within the sleeve of the other arm and tug at
the muscle there. If he had been more relaxed as a man, he would have crossed
the room and kneaded the muscle free of its stiffness. There’d been some
sibling-like desire in him towards her. He began sorting the evidence of that.
Where he had turned right, he now turned left and entered a room with her, or
helped her carry bundles of laundry when it started to rain—they rushed into
the house, their arms full, his shirt and her blouse speckled, no,
sodden,
with
rain. She picked up a towel from the basket and dried his hair. His palms
rested on her thin shoulders while his head was bowed towards her, aware her
taut body was made up only of essentials.

In Épernay that November,
all
that kept him warm were
her shoulders. His mind
reached forward and lit them like a gas
fi
re. He
’
d been a
secretive man for most of his life, and now was disconcerted by the secrets he
had kept from himself.

The furlough allowed him
ten days. He returned home and it was midsummer and the August storms, or the
threat of them, came every night. Sometimes there was lightning but no rain.
His thoughts and emotions were loose in him, random, similar to the abrupt cuts
of light in the sky. He would walk in the
fi
elds by the river long past midnight, unable to lose his wakefulness.
In the house, his wife and daughters were asleep. He had been home three or
four days and was still not used to the quiet, was not used to the chance of a
suddenly lit room while he waited for the nightmare or the dream. The lack of
the war was like a frozen river around him. There was security only in the
past, with Marie-Neige always somewhere, in the symmetrical rows of her garden,
or steering a wheelbarrow full of wet clothes back from the river.

What had touched him most
on the day of his return was her greeting, the odour of the mud on her hands as
she reached up to touch his new beard. He wanted to thank her, somehow, for
saving him during the days and nights in Épernay. But he was
cautious,
fearing his strange obsession about her during the month of diphtheria was
nakedly evident.

He sat at his desk
organizing his reports, hiding everything he felt. Twice he walked to
Marseillan and back. The town had been devastated, losing almost all of its men
in the German war. It was a village of widows. Marie-Neige told him Roman had
been released, but only into the war as a soldier. Lucien wondered what his old
neighbour had been told he was
fi
ghting for.

At one or two a.m. he’d
still be awake. He would dress and go outside and walk to the river. He’d leave
the footpath as if splashing into long, coarse
grass,
and a wave of insects would lift around him so that anyone could be conscious
of where he was by their sound.

Another
night.
In his bed he could hear thunder, the
formal distance of it. He listened for rain but it did not come, and the
frustration hovered alongside him till he fell asleep. Then thunder again, like
a cynical, dry hand-clapping, and he was awake, with hope once more.

Another
night.
He had his shirt off and stood among the noise of cicadas and grasshoppers. The
ochre colour of a lamp came through the trees like a lit vessel being carried
over the sea. When she reached him they both were still and quiet, as if intent
on listening for some pronouncement or signal in that hesitation, and then the
silence was lost, as the chirp and clatter of insects rose like dirt once again
into the air around them. There would be no privacy even here, even now, after
all this time in their adjacent lives. A wakeful nature surrounded them. A
mockingbird at a height beyond their reach in the new branches (he would never
see the bird) was consistent and woeful.
The lamp hung from her
fi
ngers beside her dress. But they said nothing. As if they knew that
darkness was also a liquid, and just one uttered word thrown out would ripple
back to the house. He held her hand and walked with her to the edge of the
river. She dimmed the light, just enough so they could
fi
nd this place again from the water, then
moved away from the burn of the lamp and undressed and walked into the river.
He could hear her wading

251

movement
. A few minutes later they faced each other. When his weaving hands
touched her underwater, he pulled back in a courtesy or
a
shyness
, she couldn’t tell which. Lucien could see no edge to the sky,
not a star. He moved into the deeper darkness. He had not swum in a night river
since he was a boy. He was with his sixteen-year-old self, and it was a while
before he became aware of her absence.

Marie-Neige was on the
shore, near the light, a tin outline. She lifted the lamp above her head and
called out his name and he said
Yes
and
she turned. She could see the ribs on his thin body as he came into more and
more light. She placed the lamp on the grass and picked up her cotton dress and
began drying her hair, so it was no longer plastered around her face, then came
nearer to him and rubbed his hair dry with the dress. So now they looked as
they did in a room, or across a table, no longer appearing as strangers to each
other. On his knees, behind her, he pulled her thighs back to him in a slow
rocking, as if he wanted her now to search for him, the heat of her cave onto
his coldness, missing each other, and she said his name again and he moved into
her, her softness and the unknown warmth.

How many stories were read
between them in which they had discovered the codes of eventual love and said
nothing in their
shyness.
She’d barely been touched by
him—his cupped hands once on her shoulders, his hard grip when she pulled the
splinter out of his eye, his holding her small hands across a table. It was as
if they had both known what all this would be like, these doorways and re
fl
ections of each other, this cautious
modesty and the secrets of herself she had hidden from others. All that
witnessed them was a lamp in the grass. She moved back onto his lap so she
could control their movement, slow him into more intimacy, so his hands could
hold the quiver in her stomach and there could be an equal pleasure. They heard
nothing, not the sterile thunder or the mock of the bird or the million insects
carelessly yelling. Just their breath, as if they were dying beside each other.

There is little record of
Lucien during the
fi
nal year of the war. He disappeared back within the anonymous fabric
of troop movement and
fi
eld hospitals. In those
fi
nal months, while he was stationed near Compi
è
gne, one letter of hers got through to him. Who knew how many she
might have written? But he assumed this was the
fi
rst since he had seen her during his
furlough. The note was about Roman, how she had recently met him, and how she
had been relieved that they had been close, able to talk easily. Roman was
still a bear of a man, and she hated the idea of him imprisoned once more
within a regiment.

For some reason Lucien did
not write back to her. Perhaps he had already imagined and written every kind
of letter in the voice of those other soldiers when he had helped compose their
messages to wives and lovers, using so many verbal emotions that honest
literary empathy did not exist in him anymore. He no longer trusted words. He
wrote a few notes to his wife instead, about the moral state at the front and
the dangers that might come with the winding down of the war.

His own family was living
temporarily with his wife’s relatives near Paris. The countryside around
Marseillan was rumoured to be unsafe with illnesses, and there were mercenaries
now, and deserters breaking into homes and farms. The only order seemed to be
within the last of
fi
cial gestures of war. In the towns and villages there were continual
incidents of violence caused by poverty and need. Lucien had no idea what his
family’s life near Paris consisted of. But in Compiègne he was recording what
he saw taking place around him daily, witnessing the deaths and even suicides.
Priests forgot the names of those they were giving last rites to. He himself
had prayed dutifully over dying strangers, and they had looked up at him with
disgust. He had scarcely enough time to think about Marie-Neige. He had lived
and relived so much of their life together before that last journey home. Now
he had to somehow keep himself alert, keep
himself
safe, be aware of exactly what was taking place. One night someone tried to
kill him; he woke up being strangled, and this man was not even the enemy.

A few days before the war
was over, the soldiers were allotted train passes, but with a warning that all
transport was slow. The journey home could take weeks. He looked at a map and
realized that with a horse he could return to Marseillan and see whether the
house was safe; later he could take the train and meet his family in Paris. He
looked for an animal he could buy, anything that would allow him to leave the
war zone sooner, eventually bartering for a horse that might take him a day’s
journey. Further away from the front, he could probably buy another. He
strapped up all his documents and left everything else behind, medical texts,
clothes, the utensils he had needed till now. There would be clothing at the
house, and he could shave and bathe there before eventually going on to Paris.

At Montargis, he traded
the horse as he had planned. With luck it would be only three more days, and he
would reach Marseillan late on the third or fourth evening.

There was bright sunlight
everywhere but it was cold, and what he was wearing did little to keep him
warm. At an abandoned farm he found rolls of burlap that he cut and fashioned
into a cloak. The animal was not
healthy,
they had to
move at a slower pace than expected. He found himself losing his judgement. By
the late afternoon on the second day, Lucien was fading into half-sleep,
then
waking unsure of where he was. He was lost for two
hours in a river valley. He discovered himself suddenly riding through a
fi
eld of onions and dug some up with his
hands, ate one, and saved the rest in a pannier.

In Figeac, a farmer sold
him a bowl of milk, which he gulped down. He saw virtually no one on the roads.
A man on a horse passed him, going the other way, cradling a dog in his arms. The
rider said nothing, did not even look at him. He too must have been fearful of
gangs. Lucien realized he should have waited for a troop train.

The next night was colder,
and Lucien shook, as he had with the diphtheria. He kept looking at the
whiteness of his breath to convince himself he was alive. He believed it would
be the last thing he saw in his life. He woke in the unending darkness and lit
a match to see the time and whether his breath was still there. The horse, near
him, had not moved. It started to rain and he gave up. He slept or passed out,
he was not sure which.

When he woke in the
morning, his body was stiff from the coldness of the ground. He could hardly
rise. He turned and saw the horse calmly eating grass, its head coming up
slowly to gaze at him. He walked beside the animal for more than an hour before
he was able to mount it. This must have been the fourth or
fi
fth day of Lucien
’
s travels, and he was skirting the forests
whenever he could because he feared encountering strangers. Though what did he
have that they would want? Then he thought of the documents he was carrying,
and the awareness of them made him step back from his torpor. What he had was
more than
himself
.

It had been dark for many
hours when Lucien reached Marseillan. Everything was closed. He went on the
last ten kilometres. It was unlikely there would be food at the house, maybe
some cans, or dry food, but at least he could bathe and sleep. Or perhaps
Marie-Neige would still be next door. He had no knowledge about where Roman
was, or whether he was alive, or home by now. The animal was slowing down, and
he got off and walked beside it, needing to generate more energy and heat in
his stiffening body. The dampness in the air
fi
lled his cloak. He knew his mind wasn
’
t right. For some time he had been
thinking his mother would greet him. Then, when he remembered, he began to
believe she would welcome him as a quiet ghost. She would welcome him and feed
him, have his bed made. There would be a
fi
re.