Radiant Days (20 page)

Outside, snow covered the courtyard and distant fields. It was a clear night, the sky like polished jet and so bitterly cold that the stars winked in and out of view, as though momentarily obscured by clouds. Arthur pulled on his greatcoat, then reached beneath his bed for the stolen bottle of cognac. He took a swig, set it beside him, and huddled over the table.

He took out a fresh sheet of the expensive paper the aunts had given him in Douai, warmed the little bottle of India ink between his hands—it was so cold it had grown viscous, too thick to write with. He stared out at the glittering stars and recalled the October night when he had seen the northern lights, that spectral wash of scarlet and emerald and lapis lazuli: as though gems had been melted, like lead in a blazing athanor, then splashed across the sky.

After several minutes, he dipped his pen into the ink and drew a crude eye of Horus at the top of the page, followed by a few random letters and words. He paused, overcome by the odd vertigo that struck him sometimes when he most wanted to write—a feeling that he was poised to jump into a terrifying yet inescapable abyss. Once he plunged, there would be no turning back.

He squeezed his eyes shut, rubbed them until bright jots of
orange and red appeared on his eyelids, the eerie tracery of blood vessels. When he opened his eyes, the afterimages hung ghostly in the air before him, as his pen nib scraped the creamy paper and he wrote.

Letters burned upon the page and silvery petals blossomed across the windowpane as he released each breath, until the glass held as many stars as the sky outside.

Shivering, he set down his pen. The bottle of cognac was nearly empty. He drank what was left in a fiery mouthful, gazed
out at the sky in rapture. A torrent of memory and words and desire surged through him, and his head pounded: a dike had been breached. The membrane that separated him from the written world dissolved, a white flame that burned away flesh and hair and bone so that only words remained and he was there and not there, sole creator of a world that contained only him and the wheeling stars: Alpha and Omega,
I
and
somebody else
.

His breath caught in his throat. It was not a revelation but a life sentence, not rapture but rupture.

“I” is an other.

The blood pounded in his ears. He no longer felt the chair beneath him or his hands on the scarred wooden table; didn’t hear the soft thump as the empty cognac bottle rolled to the floor. He felt nothing but the shock of realization that he possessed this secondary self, cupped within his consciousness like an egg in its shell: the Arthur that the world tore through like a gale and the Arthur who gazed steadily and unblinking at the glittering night sky, opening himself to that tumult like a sail: voyager, visionary.

Poet.

When his sister Vitalie came to wake him next morning, she found him slumped across the table, the lantern cold, splinters of frozen ink covering his fingers like black feathers; and his eyes wide and bloodshot, as though he had stared too long at the sun.

Charleville

DECEMBER 1870—FEBRUARY 1871

IT WAS A
brutal winter. Snow sheathed Charleville’s streets, too deep even for horse-drawn sledges to pass. The rivers and canal were locked in ice. The air rang with the sound of axes as bargemen smashed the frozen canal, cursing when chips keen as flints struck their cheeks, sharp enough to draw blood. Arthur and his sisters wandered the fields outside town, scavenging fallen trees for firewood, but no matter how much they gathered, the house was always cold.

As the year wound down, the fighting drew ever closer. Men released from military service began to limp back to Charleville, and sometimes came to the door begging for food. Many were missing legs or arms, and if the Mouth of Darkness was gone, Arthur would let them in and give them sips of brandy beside the woodstove. The school became a makeshift hospital, reeking of carbolic soap and ether. Often he would hear screams, and once while scrounging for firewood he discovered
a corpse huddled against a tree, eyes frozen shut and its uniform in tatters.

V
ERY EARLY ONE MORNING NEAR THE END OF FEBRUARY, HE WENT
downstairs. Paris had signed the armistice with Prussia a month before: he no longer needed to worry that he might be conscripted into the army.

His mother eyed him coldly as he walked into the kitchen. He was wearing almost everything he owned—heavy boots, trousers, woolen vest. His greatcoat was stuffed with paper and pen and Leo’s pipe lovingly wrapped in flannel; the fish-bone key was in his trouser pocket, along with the watch he’d won as a translation prize at school. He took some bread from the cupboard and began to eat it, spilling crumbs on the floor.

His mother stared at him suspiciously. “You’re up early. Did you find a job?”

“I’m going to Paris to work for André Gill’s newspaper. Tell the girls I’ll write to them.”

When she started to argue, he stormed out the door. But for once she didn’t follow, and he didn’t stop until he reached the train station.

He sold the watch to a pawn shop on a drab Charleville side street. The money barely covered his train ticket. He had no way of contacting Gill, no money, nothing but the address of Demeny’s bookshop. It was a start, anyway.

Paris

FEBRUARY 25, 1871

THE TRAIN DREW
into the station in midafternoon. The air held the violet tinge of winter twilight and stank of piss and charred wood. People mobbed the platform—women and children, injured soldiers. A one-legged man using his rifle as a cane spit at a group of Prussian soldiers as they clambered from the first-class carriage.

“Watch we don’t take the other one!” a Prussian shouted, and kicked away the rifle. The wounded soldier collapsed. The Prussian turned to see Arthur staring at him.

“You too?” he yelled, and grabbed for Arthur’s arm.

Arthur fled, elbowing through the crowd until he reached the street outside the station and stopped, gazing in disbelief.

The beautiful old trees along the boulevards were gone, cut for firewood during the siege. Gas lamps lined the streets, but only a few were lit. Windows held the smeared yellow gleam of tallow candles or petrol lamps. People stumbled past heaps of
dirty snow, their pinched faces the same lilac-gray as the twilight. The city’s marble statues had been swaddled in black cloth, like winding sheets. Everyone Arthur saw looked bruised, and most of them looked famished.

“Spare something for a soldier, friend?” A man with a caved-in face lurched toward him, extending a hand.

Arthur pulled up the collar of his overcoat and ran across the street. After a few blocks, he stopped and ducked within the skeletal doorway of a building that had been bombed. He pulled out the bundle of paper in his pocket, shuffling through pages until he found where he’d scribbled the address of Demeny’s bookstore.

Night had fallen by the time he located the shop, in a shabby neighborhood on the Left Bank. There were bomb craters everywhere, and rubble-filled blocks where buildings had once stood. On a street corner, two boys sat with a filthy oilcloth spread before them. Three dead rats were lined up on the cloth, along with some twisted metal fragments and what looked like a shriveled mushroom.

“Three francs a rat,” one of the boys said as Arthur approached. “That’s a bargain.”

“Thanks. I’m not that hungry.” Arthur nudged a shard of metal with his boot. “What’s that?”

“Piece of a bomb. Five francs. That’s a good souvenir. Can’t eat it, though.”

Arthur bent to examine the shriveled mushroom. “What about this?”

“That’s a Prussian’s finger.”

Arthur started to pick it up, but the boy stopped him. “That’s ten francs. One sou if you just want to touch it.”

“No thanks.”

He found the bookshop on the next block. Demeny wasn’t there, of course, but a young clerk was, huddled under a blanket behind a tall desk covered with battered volumes and old issues of
La Lune
and
L’Éclipse
.

“I’m a friend of Paul’s from Douai.” Arthur shoved his hands into his pockets, shivering. The shop wasn’t much warmer than the street. “I’m a wartime journalist from Brussels—said you’d be able to give me some work until I find a permanent position.”

“Oh yes? Lots of luck.”

The clerk pointed out the grimy window to where a half dozen young men lumbered down the middle of the street, gesturing excitedly as they passed a bottle back and forth. “See them? That’s the staff of
The Red Pages
. Which suspended publication today. Everyone’s too busy planning the next war to bother about the last one. Why don’t you get back to school, huh?”

Arthur scowled. “What about Gill? He around? I told him I’d be here this morning, but I got held up.”

The clerk stared at him dubiously. After a moment he nodded. “André dropped by around noon, but I haven’t seen him since then. You know where he lives?”

Arthur memorized the address and left. On the curb, the boys had rolled up their oilcloth. One of them dangled a rat by its tail.

“Two francs,” he yelled after Arthur. “I’ll even skin it for you!”

The windows of Gill’s studio were dark when he arrived. It
had begun to snow. A single streetlamp glowed feebly, stinking of petrol and casting barely enough light for Arthur to read the name on the door. He knocked, his knuckles aching from the cold.

Nothing. He called out Gill’s name and pounded harder.

Still nothing. He glanced down the empty street, then tried the knob. The door opened, and he went inside.

“Hello?”

His voice rang loudly through a darkened space that smelled of ink and damp. Bundled stacks of newspapers wobbled beside the door. In a corner a ghostly form materialized into a coat rack holding stained smocks and an overcoat nearly as filthy as Arthur’s. There was a drafting desk, a tall stool and, beside the coatrack, a horsehair chaise longue covered with a frayed piano shawl.

Arthur picked up a cracked plate with a blob of dried mustard on it. He licked it clean, sank onto the chaise, and pulled the piano shawl over his lap. He closed his eyes and saw the two jeering boys, a mummified finger that swelled into his mother’s face, ratlike as she shook him, shouting.

“Who are you?”

He cried out and woke with a start. Above him stood a man in a snow-covered overcoat, fist raised to strike. Arthur scrambled from the chaise, but the man grabbed his shoulder and pushed him roughly against the wall.

“Who are you? How’d you get in?”

“The door—it was open, I just—I’m a friend of Paul Demeny.
He sent me. And the bookstore, the clerk told me I could stop by.” Arthur swallowed. “You’re André Gill, right?”

“Yes, I’m André Gill.” The man glowered. He had long, waving black hair dusted with snow, and a luxuriant mustache. “Charles sent you? From the shop? That idiot. You could be a spy. I may have to kill you.”

“I’m not a spy!”

“No?” Gill stroked his mustache. “Prove it.”

“I don’t even know anyone in Paris! That’s why I came here!”

“Ah, but how would you have known to come here, unless another spy sent you?” Gill tapped the side of his nose and smiled. He appeared to be rather drunk. “Demeny is an idiot. Terrible poet.”

Arthur nodded. “He is.”

“And you are?”