Articles of War (3 page)

“Quite unnecessary,” Albert said. “Not at all. I know there was some blood, which is always rather alarming, but the cuts are shallow. I have dealt with many such wounds.” Albert began pacing the room and an element of herky-jerky uncontrol dominated his movements. Heck was not sure if this could be caused by the imbalance of the missing arm. It seemed possible that Albert was somewhat mad. He wheeled round suddenly. “Don't talk very much, do you?”

“Sorry, sir. I'm still catching my breath.”

“She's a quiet one too.” He indicated Claire. “Ives sometimes talks as if it were necessary as breathing. But not now. Must have put a scare into him. I told you not to be playing in a place like that, didn't I?” He glared at the boy and the boy looked back with a defiant expression. Albert turned again to Heck. “I know what you're thinking. I should keep better watch over my children.”

Heck shook his head.

“You are thinking—I would be thinking if I were you—what sort of a father lets his son go out and step on explosives?” He said to the boy, “You're unbelievably lucky the damage was not worse.”

The boy appeared unconcerned with any of this. Of course, the father was speaking in English.

“I should be going,” Heck said suddenly. “I'll be missed soon.” He wouldn't, but he felt uncomfortable here; these people seemed ensconced in some peculiar, haunted world of their own.

“Well,” said Albert. He clenched his single hand into a fist, making a large and dangerous-looking object. “Come back tomorrow. We will be prepared for a guest. We will thank you in proper fashion.”

“I may not be able to.”

“My boy, just come. Tomorrow. Please.”

Without answering, Heck took his shirt and went to the door. He looked around the dank dwelling one more time. “Perhaps I can get some things for you. I could bring food, clothes. No one's really paying much attention. There's so much stuff passing through.”

“No, no,” said Albert. “Thank you. We don't need anything.”

“Fresh bandages, maybe.”

“No,” said Albert, waving toward the door. “You've done enough already.”

Heck glanced once more at the girl—she was watching him quietly—then turned and stepped quickly out the door. He picked his way through the overgrown, weed-infested lawn of the “château,” entered the woods, and stood a moment in indecision. He listened for the ocean or the noise of a road, but could hear only the birds and the wind. Finally he simply picked a direction he hoped would take him back to Omaha and set out, gripping his still wet and bloody shirt in one hand.

When he heard footsteps coming up rapidly behind him, he stopped. After a moment he saw Claire. She affected to be studying things other than him—the leaves, the path. “Hello,” he said.

She said, quietly, in her accent, “Hello.” Her features were now more calmly composed than they had been when she was helping Ives, and she looked somewhat older, perhaps as old as Heck himself. He wondered how old he appeared to her, and he felt self-conscious of his thinning hair. He was curious why she had followed him, but unsure whether she would understand the question, and how she would take it if she did understand, so they walked on together a while in silence. They were on a narrow, vaguely defined path that evidently had not been much trafficked in a number of years. The girl said nothing. Heck fidgeted with the buttons and cuffs of Albert's shirt. “So,” he said, “where are we going?” But Claire glanced around with a look of not understanding. She looked thin—not terribly so, but the angles of her bones showed a little more in her face than they probably would have if she were eating well every day. She had full lips, narrowly set eyes, and a narrow, sharp nose. The flesh immediately under her eyes was the color of faded bruises. She wore her hair short in thick dark curls. On her pale skin, at the line of her chin, were a series of small dark moles and she looked to him not at all like any of the girls he had known back home. She was soon moving through the woods with a quick confidence, and Heck fell slightly behind her. Sunlight sparkled between the leaves overhead. The path took an increasingly erratic course, meandering around trees and slopes so that soon Heck had no idea where it would ultimately lead.

They came to a small glade where the trees ringing around blocked all the sky except for a single porthole at the center. Across the ground grew a thin carpet of grass and mosses. There was a buzzing sound that came, Heck saw, from a series of beehives in a row along one side of the clearing, small wooden structures painted white but peeling and weathering to gray and black.

Claire went to the hives. She seemed to have no fear of the bees, and she opened a door with her bare hands. As she reached inside, the collective whine of the bees altered in pitch and volume, and they began swarming out. In the slant light cast through the opening overhead the stirring, rising bees looked like the sparks of a campfire someone had kicked or prodded. Claire paid them no attention. She closed and latched the hive, and she returned across the glade with a piece of honeycomb in her hand. Or not a honeycomb, Heck saw. It was some other small object, a toy or a box, perhaps—she held it away from him and twisted it in her hands. “What is it?” he said.

She giggled and continued to twist or turn the thing; then with a flourishing gesture she presented it on the palm of her hand, a small ornate silver box playing tiny notes of music. He did not recognize the tune.

She smiled broadly at Heck, offering it to him. He gazed, dumbfounded. She said, “It is named? What? Is called?”

“A music box?”

“A—music—box,” she echoed. A fat bead of honey hung from a corner. She wiped it with a thumb and forefinger. Then she took Heck's hand and deposited the music box there.

“No,” he said, trying to push it back toward her.

“I give you,” she said, licking her fingers.

When he tried again to give it back she stepped away, raising her hands in the air. He looked at the music box. The silver was patterned with entangled scrollworks and arabesques. A tiny latch allowed him to open it and peer at the mechanism inside. It was not much larger than a cigarette lighter. The music slowed then stopped and she showed him where to wind it again and left it playing in his hand, this silver, musical thing, and a happy bewildered feeling rose inside him. “Good-bye,” she said, and she waved and walked away, back up the path. When the music box had slowed and stopped he listened to the quiet and realized he could hear, very faintly, the purr of waves striking the shore.

In the mess tent that evening the army fed Heck with Spam, marmalade, crackers, and thin coffee. It was the same every day. While Heck sat over his dinner at a long wooden table, the man across from him was showing the men to either side a photo of his wife. He seemed to think his wife was something pretty special, and he had a whole monologue going about how beautiful and smart she was. When one of the men set the photo down on the table so he could eat, Heck looked at it and thought she did not look like all that much. He thought of Claire, and Claire won the comparison with the girl in the photo. That evening he lay on his back listening to the creak of the tent canvas as it rocked in the breeze and to the muted indecipherable voices of men whispering around him. He held the music box in his hand, not playing it but feeling the honeyed, tacky surface of it. He recalled the few words Claire had said—
It is named? I give you
—weighed them and examined them like unusual coins. He began to wonder at his behavior in the field, at the airplane. He felt he had done well once he had gotten to the boy. But he also had a desolate and dry feeling as he considered his hesitation at the edge of the field. He wished Claire had not seen him hesitate. He felt woefully young.

The next morning he woke to the sounds of the games of poker and spades that had already begun. Tanks and armored personnel carriers were moving by with noises of grinding and straining metal. Shortly after dawn a vast number of airplanes passed overhead. Eventually the mutters of the card games widened into the shouting, cursing, angry voices of men trying to get things through the physical and bureaucratic morass of the beach. Heck obtained a new shirt from a wooden-faced supply sergeant. It began to rain, and he waited in his tent listening to the drumming of it. Idly, he tried to remember the songs his mother would sing in the kitchen, but he could recall only a phrase or two. He'd never been able to carry a melody himself. In the mess tent at lunch he sat alone. Then he pulled on a plastic rain poncho and set off to find Albert, Ives, and Claire at the château. While he walked the rain slackened to a misting drizzle, then tapered to nothing. Low wraiths of fog rose from the hollows of the land, looking solid and sulky and unlikely to retreat before the feeble sunlight that filtered through the ashen clouds.

They had cooked rabbits—or hares, Heck wasn't sure—two of them, and there was half a wheel of cheese and some cauliflower and a sodden mass of cooked greens of a type that Heck could not identify but he suspected would normally have been classed as a weed. From tin cans they drank cider, which tasted punky. The boy was served on his paillasse and ate voraciously. Albert and the girl and Heck sat together around the small table. Albert's elbow jostled against Heck's. He kept both knife and fork in his hand, switching them deftly between his fingers. “You see,” said Albert, “we know how to treat guests when we know to expect them.”

He seemed more calm today, less sudden and vehement in his movements. Perhaps the emotion of his son's injury had unsettled him the day before. Still, he was clearly an eccentric. A
character,
Heck thought—his father would have used that word, the implied disapproval curtailed by the belief that the judging of others was a needless and unhelpful habit.

The smoke of the fire did not clear the room easily but accumulated in visible stratifications. Occasionally, Albert got up and stood wagging his hand overhead to direct the smoke toward the hole in the roof. He looked particularly ungainly and extraordinary in this posture. “The Great War,” Albert said, sitting again. “I do not understand why they call it that. And what is this then, this thing we have now? What do they call it? Is this the Not-as-Great War, or is it the Even-Greater War?” He gestured slashingly at the stump of his missing arm. “For me it was not such a Great War.” He laughed. He spoke in a rambling, desultory way. He said he and the children had been wandering the countryside ever since the June invasion, when their home was destroyed by a stray shell. “It was not such a château as we have here, but the roof was intact, and the walls did not sweat like this.” But he also gave the impression of moving from place to place for some time now, years perhaps. Heck wondered if it was the children's mother's death that had unhinged Albert. Or had it been the trenches, the Great War, the loss of an arm?

Without prompting Albert would recommence his meandering talk. “I'm glad to see you because I am glad to be able to speak in English again. When I was a child I had a grandmother who lived with us and would speak nothing but English. She came from Nottingham. She said Shakespeare's language was the only civilized language on earth. In fact she was quite senile and had forgotten her French, which was her second language. I would find her sitting like a child on the floor, scratching naughty English words on the wall with bits of charcoal. From her I learned
fuck, shit, damned bloody hell.
She was stupid as a horse but she lived a long time and spoke nothing but English.”

Claire leaned over to her father and whispered. He nodded. “She says you have very good teeth. Like a horse.”

Heck smiled, self-consciously, showing his teeth. “Thank you,” he said. He looked at Claire. “Thank you.” She smiled. Heck reexamined her other features. As she drank the cider, her cheeks grew redder. For a moment Heck tried to imagine how she might look in the pink-and-white frilled dresses the girls back home wore to dances. The juxtaposition was strange and caused him to look down in embarrassment.

“Of course,” Albert said, “the Germans took all the horses. She likes horses but thinks only Germans can have them.” He stuffed his mouth full of cauliflower and greens. Suddenly, through the greens, he said, “I was an artist, before the Germans came. They didn't know what to make of my paintings, so they burned them, to be safe. You can paint, you see, with one hand. Only need one hand. It's like masturbation that way.”

He didn't laugh at this, so Heck didn't smile. “Do you have any left? Paintings?”

“No. I was not great. At painting I mean. At masturbating I am terrific. At painting I would never be a genius, but I was sometimes quite good. People paid money for my paintings from time to time. That's not bad. And the best ones I had kept. The best I did not want to sell. Not yet. I would put together a show of the best, when there were enough of them, and perhaps I would gain some small fame. But the Germans did not understand them. Of course, the paintings did not have anything to do with the Germans. What do I care about Germans? But they looked at me, an artist with my arm obligingly removed by some German lad, and they made their assumptions, and they burned all my work in a big heap in the garden, on the rows of radishes and spinaches we had then. Years of life. Up in smoke. Isn't that a common phrase? Up in smoke.”

“I'm sorry,” Heck said.

“No,” Albert added abruptly. “I don't blame her for leaving.” He looked defiantly at Heck.

“Your wife?”

“Yes.”

After a minute Albert began talking again. “There's no one to trust. War makes thieves and liars of everyone. Dishonor is everywhere. People will do anything—loot a neighbor's home, murder a grandmother—anything they can think of to help them live a day or two longer. And people are stupid. I'm stupid, you're stupid. These children, bless them, are quite stupid. The best thing to be done is keep to yourself, stay away from all the others, keep the stupidity to a minimum. Because the stupidity accumulates. One or two people are manageably stupid. A handful of people are, collectively, dumb as your average dog. A mob: stupid as an insect. Armies, nations: stupidest things on this earth.”