Strindberg's Star (28 page)

But the clerks’ enthusiasm for shuffling off in search of documents didn’t seem particularly great once they had found their way to one of the small offices for
Archief en Genealogie,
the archive for genealogical research.

The girl who sat yawning behind the gray plastic computer terminal could hardly be twenty years old. She seemed to be a temp worker, or else it had been a grave error to hire her. Skinny white arms, purple lipstick, and a black T-shirt on which the bloodred face of a goat shone behind the text
CHURCH OF SATAN
.

The girl put a piece of gum in her mouth and then yawned again, obviously bored, in the direction of the older man who had the misfortune of sitting in the chair in front of her. When he finally got up to leave, apparently without having received answers to any of his genealogy questions, the girl slipped out a small violet paperback book, which she began to read with great interest.

Don looked at Eva, and then he walked up to the small office booth and gave a cough.

“Een moment,”
the girl said obstinately in Flemish, without looking at him.

“Yes, hello,” said Don. “My name is Don …
Malraux.
I would like to …”

The girl shook her head, irritated, shoved a notebook with an attached pen toward him.

“Spell, please,” she muttered.

Don tried to smile at her, but the girl had already started to read
again. He wrote the surname
MALRAUX
in neat block letters. When the girl took the time to look at what Don had managed to produce, she sighed deeply.

“Jesus! … First name. Birthplace. Year.”

“Her name was Camille,” Don said quickly, while he still had the girl’s attention. “My sister and I think that she might be a relative.”

“Your sister?” said the girl skeptically, looking at the blond woman behind Don and then back at his swarthy face.

“Yes. Our family has Walloon roots.”

“So what relation are you to this Camille?”

“It’s a …”

“Are you her grandchildren? Second cousins thrice removed?”

“It’s a bit of a long story, I’m afraid. Does it matter?”

“No, no,” the girl muttered. “I don’t give a damn. This Camille, she was born here in the Westhoek region?”

“Yes …”

“Yes, we think so,” said Eva, sitting down beside Don with a resolute expression on her face.

“I see,” said the girl. “When?”

Don sneaked a look at Eva.

“Sometime in the late 1800s, we think,” he said.

The girl suddenly became interested in her fingernails and began to examine them thoroughly.

“You can look at the years between 1870 and 1895,” Eva said.

“Eighteen seventy to ninety-five,” the girl repeated. “In the city of Ypres, or one of the surrounding villages?”

“We …” Don attempted, but he was interrupted by an uninterested babbling:

“Boezinge, Brielen, Dikkebus … maybe Elverdinge? Hollebeke, Sint-Jan … Zillebeke?”

“We …”

“So, Zillebeke,” the girl decided.

“We think we know that this Camille Malraux died in Ypres,” Eva
said. “She was still alive in 1913, we know that for certain. Perhaps she died during the war.”

The girl turned unwillingly to her plastic-enclosed keyboard and brought up the civil registry of Ypres on the screen.

She tapped in “Camille Malraux” with one index finger.

“Ah,” she said, without turning back to them. “There are actually two people with that name who apparently died during the war. One born in 1885 in Voormezele; her parents were named …”

“And the other one?” Eva asked.

“For the other one, there’s no information about her parents’ names or where she was born. French citizenship. It says she died in Ypres in 1917.”

“So what else does it say?” Eva asked impatiently.

The girl sighed even more deeply, took out her gum, and threw it in the wastepaper basket.

“That’s all there is. Not all the information is entered into the computers. Unfortunately. If you want more, then I’ll have to go down into the archive to find her folder. It’s rarely worth the trouble.”

“I insist,” Eva said curtly.

With a groan, the skinny girl got up from her comfy place at the keyboard. Then she locked the computer by hitting two keys and pointedly sauntered away slowly between the shelves.

W
hen she came back just over half an hour later, she had two thin folders. The girl threw them down in front of Eva and Don and then returned to her book.

In the first folder, they found only a few brief statements. A woman by the name of Camille Malraux, née Holst, born in 1885, had married a Ronald Malraux in Onze-Lieve Vrouwkerk, Our Lady’s Church in Voormezele, in 1905. No information about where this Camille had worked, whether she had children or siblings. A hospital record, a death certificate, and a short note that her husband had died early, in 1907.

“Worth the trouble?” the girl mumbled behind her book.

In the next Camille Malraux’s folder, there were only two pieces of paper: the death certificate and a reference to all other documents having been moved to the woman’s French place of birth, which was listed as Charleville-Mézières.

“Can copies of her French documents be ordered?” Don asked.

The girl pretended that she hadn’t heard anything.

“We would like you to order copies of all the documents that exist about this Camille Malraux from your colleague at the civil register in Charleville-Mézières, in France,” Eva said with emphasis on each syllable.

The girl gave up and placed her paperback book on the table in front of her.

“Something like that,” she said, “takes a
very long
time
. There’s a whole pile of bureaucratic crap that has to be filled out, and it takes a lot of rubber-stamping.”

The girl picked up the first Malraux folder from the table, the one containing the Camille Malraux who had originally been named Holst.

“I bet it’s this one,” said the girl.

“We want to order …” Eva began again.

“Do you plan to stay here in Ypres for long?” The girl smiled scornfully. “Because it usually takes several months to get documents from a different country. Particularly from a country like France. Besides, it has to be registered and …”

Don sensed that Eva was about to have some sort of fit.

He took out the postcard, which, after having carefully checked the seams, he was now keeping in the inner pocket of the new jacket. He placed it on the table in front of the girl and showed her the photograph of Saint Martin’s Cathedral.

“You’ve done the tourist thing at Cloth Hall, I see,” said the girl. “It’s unbelievable that people actually buy sentimental crap like that.”

“We inherited this, and it was actually purchased before the war,”
said Don. Then he turned the postcard over and pointed at the verse and the red print of the mouth. For the first time a trace of interest was aroused in the girl’s eyes. She read through the lines.

“Yes, it seems to be from 1913, as you said,” said the girl. “So what is this, a little love letter?”

She mumbled her way through the verse one more time.

“Well-chosen words,” she said. “But borrowed.”

“It was written by our grandfather to this woman, Camille,” Don said. “We would be eternally grateful if you could help us. She was the love of his life.”

“Are you really sure it had to do with love?” asked the girl.

She put the postcard down.

“I mean,
l’homme vindicatif, l’immensité de son désir, les suprêmes adieux
… He’s writing that he’s a vindictive man with unquenchable desires. But nothing wrong with that.”

Eva became tired. “Are you planning on helping us or not?”

“With what?” the girl ventured.

“With filling out an application to Charleville-Mézières in France, so we can find out if there are any documents there,” said Don. “We’re prepared to wait.”

“Well then, only because your grandfather had such good taste in literature,” said the girl.

She dug a thick form out of a desk drawer, tapped her fingers, leaned over it, and slowly began to fill in the empty lines. When she had been writing for a while, the girl said, without raising her eyes, “You don’t need to sit here and watch. Come back in a few days and maybe we’ll have gotten an answer.”

“Thanks,” said Don; he took the postcard from the table and got up.

“Dessin d’un Maître inconnu,”
the girl mumbled to herself. “Portrait of an unknown master.”

“Sorry?” said Don.

“Dessin d’un Maître inconnu,”
said the girl, looking up at him. “You didn’t think your Swedish grandfather came up with those lines himself,
did you?
Combla-t-il sur ta chair inerte et complaisante, l’immensité de son désir …
He borrowed every word, but you probably knew that already.”

Don looked at Eva and then back at the white face with the purple lips.

“You only have to love Baudelaire,” said the girl.

Then she continued to write serenely.

I
t had begun to drizzle even as Eva and Don had stood waiting for the taxi to come and take them back to central Ypres and Grote Markt from the city archive. And now, as the car was coming to a stop in the puddles on the square, the isolated drops had turned into a torrential rain.

Eva pointed over to the huddling crowds of tourists who had taken shelter under the archway at the entry to the war museum at Cloth Hall. Then she opened the door of the car and ran over to them, with her trench coat pulled up over her head.

While Don waited for the taxi driver to get his change in order, he watched Eva struggle to shove her way in among the tourists so she wouldn’t get drenched.

Drooping flags were hung a short distance in front of the entrance of the museum. If they had been dry they would presumably have been light red, but, drenched with water, they hung as dark as blood. On the bloody flags was a blue and white cross, which was adorned by a bunch of poppies with stems made of barbed wire. At the very bottom, on a black border, one could read:

IN FLANDERS FIELDS MUSEUM
IEPER 1914–1918

When it was Don’s turn to elbow his way into the crowd of tourists under the entryway arch, he was shoved out again and again by an older Japanese couple. At last he grew tired, caught hold of Eva’s arm, and yanked her along between the packed bodies, and they went in through the doors of the museum.

I
n the next instant, everything was peaceful, and they found themselves in something that looked like the inside of a cathedral. Along the walls were pointed Gothic windows with lead that surrounded small pieces of light blue and pink glass like spiderwebs.

Don exhaled and drew a hand through his soaking wet, lank hair. Beside him, Eva used a handkerchief to try to save her mascara, which the rain had caused to run.

In the lofty hall, they heard the hum of subdued whispers, someone coughing, and then, distantly, the sound of shots and explosions from the film projectors that were rolling inside the dark exhibition halls.

U
p at the ticket counter of the museum stood two wax models in period costumes. One of them wore a field uniform with buttons of brass from his throat down to the belt of his uniform. He had a small mustache on his yellowish face and blue porcelain eyes. On a small plaque was the name Robert Launer, German artilleryman.

At Launer’s side stood a woman in a stiff, beseeching position, with a white veil over her artificial hair. She depicted someone who had once been called Roosje Vecht, a Dutch nurse who had worked in the camps behind the trenches and whose leg had been blasted off just after lunchtime on the twenty-third of January 1915.

W
hen they had paid and gotten past the entrance gates, it was as though Eva’s back stiffened. She had a mournful expression as
she passed the long stone engraving with H. G. Wells’s ominous words:

The War Museum turned out to be enormous, and Eva moved through the choppy, black-and-white image sequences at an irritatingly slow pace. It was as though she wanted to draw all the death into herself, and she stopped for a long time at each short film to really take the time to watch it. For his part, Don thought that the dim halls gave a ghastly impression, with all their small arranged scenes and life-size wax soldiers. Contorted figures that were locked in an eternal crawl along the dirt, down in the narrow graves of the trenches.

After a while he began to be annoyed by the attorney’s leisurely pace and all the heinous details she proved to be able to tell him about the battles. When it came to the art of weaponry in the First World War, he had really met his match. She knew technical details and advances that he hadn’t known anything about. But when he asked, she only said that there are some things you just can’t forget.

Her whispered commentary on the flickering pictures of machine-gun fire and torn-up bodies from the projectors made Don feel more and more discouraged. Yet when he looked up at an information map of the different sections of the museum, he saw that they had made it through only the first floor of four.

Then Don noticed a small symbol on the fourth floor that showed a silhouette of a computer. He pointed at it, relieved, and immediately suggested that he should try to get online to see if he could contact Hex.

T
he weight on Don’s shoulders started to lighten as he moved up the stairs toward the upper floors of the museum. The sound of the volleys of shots and screams from the films disappeared gradually, and in the stone corridor at the top of the building everything was silent and peaceful.

An arrow pointed the way toward something called the Documentation Center, and when he arrived at its door he was met by a forbidding notice made of metal: