Famished Lover (3 page)

Biting, drenching, endless rain, and my feet have gone through the soles of my blasted boots so that the mud and cold have invaded my flesh and bones, now rub raw my joints, suck my strength. I am reduced to a pair of hazy eyes fixed on the back of the sod ahead of me, yet with this wounded lad draped around my shoulder. He collapsed a long while ago and would have been left to rot by the bloody uhlans if I hadn't moved swiftly. And stupidly, it now occurs to me. I'm fag-tired, and my left arm was bent hard in battle, and I've no idea how many miles are still to go.

The arm might be broken, but it's nothing compared to what this lad is up against.

Ahead the uhlans ride in their polished helmets and soggy plumes, like sour gods ashamed to be assigned this menial work when there's a war on, for Christ's sake. Already I've seen too much of the tips of their fancy lances. But behind us bombs shudder the earth into the crumbling lip of hell's boiling cauldron. And every step is away, away from that disaster.

“What's your name?” I say to my burden. He's bleeding down my uniform from an unbandaged belly wound. Little gurgles of gas and bubbled pus escape with every step, and his head wobbles like a toy soldier's.

He murmurs something that I can't make out, then I feel the weight of him even more and struggle to hold him up.

“Keep walking. Use your legs!”

He responds for a moment, then returns to drunken swaying. If only he were simply drunk. I'd lay him in the ditch and he'd wake up in the morning, cold and bedraggled and with a body that only feels split open.

A man ahead drops his haversack and staggers on. I look up at the long, ragged line of prisoners disappearing into the rain. The road is littered with heavy saucer helmets, muddied greatcoats and extra boots that look so tempting. How long would it take to set this fellow aside and trade my wrecked boots for some new leather? But I can't imagine my fingers working fast enough. Some sour uhlan would just run me through.

So I walk on past, my feet bleeding into the road.

“Come on. Come on! What's your name?” I say.

My load groans.

“What's that?”

“Jekyll.”

“Like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?”

“No doctor.” A grudging, exhausted smile.

“No. No, if there was a doctor you'd be all right. Or even a stretcher. Do you think the German army could afford a stretcher?” I say it loud enough for others to hear, and the English officer who thinks he's in charge of us — a captain of some sort who walks like a man who has had his horse stolen — turns to me. “Private, keep your commentary to yourself!”

Murmurs from some of the others but we're too tired, really, to take it up.

“Where are you from, Jekyll?” I ask.

“Picton.”

“Where's that?”

“South of Kingston.” Whenever he talks gas leaks out of him from somewhere. If I had a first aid kit I could check him over and maybe plug him up. But no bloody way. “We have a farm,” he gasps.

“You'll be able to write them back on the farm,” I say. “
Safe and sound, Ma!
How's that?”

“Jesus.” Blood spills down his lip and chin. “I wish they'd killed me.”

“None of that. Save your strength. Let's enjoy the surroundings,” I blurt, then look around. Surroundings? I can barely see where to place my ragged feet ahead of me.

An eternity like this.

Sometime, I suppose in the late afternoon, we're allowed to rest at a military station. The rain has stopped but the mud continues to grow, to take over everything, and as I let Jekyll slip to the ground near a tree it occurs to me again — the thoughts forming slowly, as if in a dream — that I need to get him medical help. I look around for anyone who might be a doctor or nurse. There are tents everywhere, and vehicles with grumbling engines, and a sickening number of prisoners collecting from small marching parties like our own. So many of them are Canadians.

I approach a German officer bent over by the entrance to a stone building, a farmhouse in another life, no doubt. He's scraping the mud off his boots with a stick.

“Excuse me,” I mumble. “My friend here is wounded. He needs immediate attention.
Wounded
,” I say again. The officer straightens up and looks at me in malevolent incomprehension. So I point to Jekyll slumped against the tree trunk where
I've left him. But his body is unnaturally still, and even as I gesture I know it's too late.

The officer spits past my shoulder, then stalks off. I return to Jekyll's cooling corpse in time to close his eyes.

The captain of our ragged group approaches. “Is this man dead?”

“Apparently.” It crosses my mind that I should have saluted the captain and used his proper title. But those rules seem to be for some other reality on the far side of battle.

“Right,” the officer says, thankful, perhaps, for something official to occupy his mind. “Strip his tags, then, and see if you can find a pay book and any effects for next of kin.” He lingers for a moment. “I'll see about burial,” he adds, maybe as much for himself as for me. Then he struts off in another direction and I hear his voice worrying other clumps of prisoners. “Anyone here speak German?”

Jekyll's body subsides into a different position, and for a moment I think he's alive after all. But it's just gravity having its way. I check for a pulse in his neck anyway, then feel for the leather cord and pull it off him, stuff the tags in my pocket. If he had a haversack he dropped it miles ago. In his pockets I find a soaked package of cigarettes, a few francs, a folded picture of a dark-eyed lady looking away from the camera.

For a second I think it's Margaret — my Margaret! Of course it's just a picture. She's safe back in London. But just the sudden thought of her —

“You're sweating like a horse!” Lillian said.

“Huh?”

“Why are you breathing like that? Ramsay?”

I looked wildly at her face, at the dark, rough walls of the cabin, our own breath misting in the cool air.

“What's wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing, darling. Has the fire gone out?”

“You were all clenched up.” Tentatively she reached out and brushed some of the moisture from my brow and cheek.

“Just a dream. I don't know what it was.” I wrapped my arms around her, and she continued to run her fingers along my face and neck. “Go back to sleep. Often I have . . . troubles at night. So I'll just hold you.”

She looked ready to poke and pry until she'd loosened the wrappings on this new husband and truly riled the hornets within. But it was terribly late, and it had been a long day and night, and I suppose even then she was not entirely awake. In a moment her eyes closed, and I felt the sleep take over her young body even as mine remained wounded and cocked for war.

A few months later we were sitting in the kitchen of the punky apartment I'd found for us in Montreal. Winter's ice seemed to have settled for good — the bottom half of our meagre kitchen window was coated inside and out, blurring the black iron fire escape directly outside it. I watched her from my seat at the unsteady table. In oblivious moments she was as graceful as a horse dipping her head to drink from a stream. But now she held her body tight, and she breathed in little gasps as if there was not enough time to accomplish all that was slated. She banged the dishes into the cupboard, wiped up the saucepan while looking at the counter stains and then at me, sitting so still.

I sipped my tea and glanced down at yesterday's newspaper. The world was devouring itself with an accumulating series of layoffs and failures, forfeitures and devaluations, suicides, stock collapses and windy promises that were sounding less and less plausible. I had my lump of savings but was afraid to spend it. Our kitchen furniture consisted of a card table and two folding chairs. Yet from the safety of my position at
Justin Frame Graphics and Advertising I felt, I suppose, like a man sitting onshore watching a faraway ocean liner sink beneath the waves. What possible connection could it have to me, this interesting disaster in the distance?

“I don't see how it can last,” I said. When you have survived certain things, other people's panic can seem ridiculous and overdone. “The big money boys are so used to making it hand over fist, they won't stand for many more of these losses. It's all a matter of confidence.”

“What is?” Lillian asked sharply, still banging about in the kitchen. “We're going to be late.” She was in a dark blue Sunday dress that she'd made herself from catalogue drawings. The collar had a scratchy bit of lace that never sat properly. But in those days it only made her look more refreshing and beautiful. She was about to untie her apron and put on her coat and hat.

I said, “I'm not going. I'll walk with you, but I won't take in the service.”

That stopped her. She turned in surprise and I braced myself.

“What do you mean?”

“I will walk with you,” I repeated slowly, “but I won't take in the service.”

“Don't talk to me like I'm a child! Why won't you go to church? I can't sit alone, without my husband!”

“It would be hypocritical of me,” I said, rooted in my chair. Her eyes narrowed in their way, and I said, “It means two-faced. If I go I would be proclaiming a belief in a god that I don't have.”

“But you've already been with me plenty of times. And we were married in a church!”

“Yes. And I regret that. The church, not the marriage.” I had a strange feeling of watching myself to see what I might do. As if to confound things further I reached to her then, pulled her onto my lap and tried to bury my face in her shoulder.

“Whenever you say crazy things, I know it was the war that did this to you,” she said, and freed herself from my grasp.

“You know nothing of the war.”

“How can I when you won't talk about it?” She pulled herself angrily into her coat.

“What the war taught me,” I said, “is that God is not the church. Or the church is not the building, not the fancy robes and mumbo-jumbo. You go to your church and I'll walk in mine and look at the snow on the branches and the shadows of the clouds on the buildings and the patterns of the ice on the windows. That will be my church. You go and sing your hymns and say your prayers and I'll walk around and feel the blood in my muscles, and when we come home here we'll eat and I'll carry you onto the bed and we'll celebrate the god-fire in us all afternoon and into the evening if we want. And we'll be religious in our devotions to our separate gods.”

She was standing by the door, ready to go.

“I don't understand you,” she said. “You're talking nonsense.”

“Yes, and I love it! I'm tired of following everybody else's rules. No one knows
what
the rules are. I've been in realities far beyond any rules you can imagine.”

“Stop talking like this, Ramsay.”

“It
was
the war! The war ruined me! But it made me too. I walked out of it and here I am.”

I stood up like a fool.

“Why are you acting this way?”

“Because I am in love,” I said, and I grasped her by the wrist. “Don't go to the stuffy old church. Stay here with me in this stuffy little flat, and we'll make it our own church.”

She pulled herself free. “Really!” she said, and looked around like a flustered bird.

“Come on!” I reached for her again.

“We can't be thinking of that all the time!”

“Why not? We're married now, and the world doesn't care what we do within our own walls.”

“Well,
I
care! I care very much!” Her chest was heaving, her face red with fury. “Are you making me go alone?”

“I'm not making you do anything.”

She pulled open the door, and an icy blast drove all the heat from the air.

“I was a prisoner in the war!” I blurted.

“What?”

“My brothers died, but I was a bloody fannigan prisoner rotting in German camps. That's why I don't talk about it. That's why I feel as if I've wasted too much of my life already.”

She let the door fall shut and stepped towards me. “You were a prisoner? No one said a word to me. You never —”

“It was long ago, and everything changed when I met you.”

I took her in my arms then and steered her towards the bed on the other side of the curtained-off sleeping area. It wasn't much better than the dusty cabin offering of our honeymoon: a rickety old frame with shot springs and a mattress so lumpy it might as well have been made from newspapers. The previous renters hadn't bothered moving it, and from the time
I'd laid eyes on it I swore I'd replace it as soon as prospects looked better.

I eased her down on the bed.

“Who were your brothers, Ramsay? What were they like?”

I tugged off her coat and hat and gloves and began to unbutton her dress.