Strindberg's Star (30 page)

Over on Rijselsestraat, the shopping seemed to have finished up a long time ago. The small boutiques had pulled in their awnings, and all the display windows had gone dark.

The only living thing that was braving the downpour, against its will, was a lone dog. It stood forgotten, tied to a lamppost in the rain. Soaked through, it tugged and pulled at its leash, trying in vain to get free.

“I
guess we really ought to go there and see if you’re actually right,” he heard a voice say behind him.

Eva had drawn her trench coat up around her neck and stuffed her hands deep into its pockets. It was hardly possible to make out the attorney’s face in the darkness of the entryway.

“To Malraux’s grave, I mean,” she continued. “Number 1913, at Saint Charles de Potyze, if you remember.”

At first Don didn’t bother to answer, because he assumed she meant it as a joke. But it wasn’t: “So we can find out if his body is really there.”

“Tomorrow morning, in that case,” Don managed to shiver out.

He couldn’t see the attorney’s eyes. He continued: “And what’s the point, by the way?”

“What is the point of finding that Camille Malraux at all?”

Don was so cold he was shaking. It was as though the violent rain had blown all the enthusiasm out of him.

“Then we’ll at least have tried to get as far as we can with the postcard, right?” she said.

“If it’s the right Malraux lying there, then he’ll probably still be lying in his grave when the weather is better and …”

But then Don saw that Eva had already raised her arm and was starting to wave at the line of taxis that were waiting out on Grote Markt.

T
hey got no reaction at all from the first illuminated car. Its driver had become absorbed in a newspaper that he had hung up over the steering wheel. The next taxi was unlit and deserted, while the third in line emitted a sluggish blink from its broken headlights. And when the couple in the doorway didn’t immediately start to move out into the torrent, the short light signal was followed by an angry honk.

Eva grabbed Don’s arm and dragged him across the square in the rain. And although he squelched his way through the puddles as fast
as he possibly could, his shirt had already become wet through under his jacket by the time he could finally throw himself into the backseat of the ivory-colored taxi.

A liver-spotted face looked at him with bloodshot eyes in the rearview mirror. The hand that was resting on the stick shift was covered in blurry blue tattoos, and when Eva had closed the door on her side, the scent of liquor in the taxi increased quickly.

“La nécropole Saint Charles de Potyze,”
Don mumbled dejectedly. After he had repeated the address in English a few times, the driver seemed to understand at last. They rolled away along Meensestraat, and Don glimpsed some senior citizens in raincoats who were pointing up at the forgotten soldiers’ names on the arch of the Menin Gate.

W
hen they had left Ypres behind and got out to the misty, gray countryside, the driver began to point out all the graveyards that the car passed slowly.

“This particular road, Zonnebeekseweg,” he informed them, slurring in the front seat, “the English soldiers called Oxford Street when they marched out to their death in the trenches of World War One.” Now all that was left was their white crosses, in long, hopeless lines.

The car swerved in its lane as the eyes peered back toward Don: “They say that the corpses lying out there can still smell the rain. The mud and mire trickle down through the collapsed lids of their coffins, and then the dead are seized with hope that they might still be alive.”

Don looked over at Eva in the dark car, but her eyes were directed out at the mists of the cemeteries.

“The end comes far too quickly in war,” the driver continued in his slightly slurred voice. “The soul doesn’t have time to follow; the changes are too quick. One second, the screech of all the scrap metal, when every fiber of muscle is busy carrying on the rush forward. And the next second: everything is over. A soul can’t handle change like
that. It continues to crawl across the mud forever, even though it no longer has a body to crawl with. It refuses to see that its time is up, and that life is over forever.”

The eyes in the rearview mirror again.

“You can see them crawling between the gravestones too, can’t you?”

Don chose not to answer. The rain kept falling, and the driver slowed down alongside a low brick wall.

On the other side of the wall, white crosses ran in symmetrical rows toward a horizon of stunted trees. As they passed, the pattern between the crosses seemed to be vertical one second and diagonal the next, forming a long transverse incision.

T
he taxi was soon standing at the entrance of the cemetery: two white columns and a black wrought-iron fence. Iron swords had been riveted onto the columns, and their long, narrow blades were covered with laurel leaves.

Inside the wall they could see a melancholy monument to the memory of Golgotha. On a granite pedestal stood two women in pleated bronze mantles with their faces hidden by hoods. Above them in the rain rose the cross on which the Christ figure was nailed up. Under the sharp crown of thorns, his eyes were open.

“No rest for the dead in Flanders,” said the driver, turning toward Eva and Don.

Don felt how his shirt had glued itself onto the small of his back like an ice-cold hand.

“And it’s going to rain like this all night,” the driver continued. “At least, that’s what they said on the radio.”

“Maybe you can loan us an umbrella, then,” said Eva.

Then she grabbed hold of the shoulder bag, which was lying in the backseat, and tossed it over to Don so that he could pay. He took out a few bills and said to the driver:

“This isn’t going to take very long. We’re just going to check something, and we’ll be back soon.”

“I can’t just stay here and …”

Don handed him 30 euros.

“But there are runs in …”

The driver received another few bills, and he bared a sparse row of teeth in his liver-spotted face. Then there was a powerful stench of liquor: “You can look back there and see if you can find something for the rain. I have no defense against the other thing.”

Eva gave Don an encouraging look. He shivered once more and then opened the car door.

When he pulled open the trunk of the car and looked in, there really was an umbrella with a broken-off handle. When open, it displayed the text
COLRUYT SUPERMARKT—
LAAGSTE PRIJZEN
, but at least it was quite large.

They walked as close as they could under the umbrella, and the gates creaked open.

A paved walkway cut a line between the fields of crosses that rose above the waterlogged grass. There must be space for several thousand graves here, Don thought, and he approached the nearest one.

A fine-meshed net of mold had covered the surface of the white concrete cross, but the plastic nameplate was still clean. Under the French name were the words that Don would soon come to recognize in his search along the numbered gravestones:
Mort pour la France.

After they had wandered among the graves, stooping, looking at random and without success for number 1913, they finally managed to find a map of the cemetery. It rose up above a long stone bench like an altarpiece.

Don found a small plastic lighter in his shoulder bag, lit it, and held it up to the sign.

NÉCROPOLE NATIONALE FRANÇAISE
SAINT CHARLES DE POTYZE

Under the black text, the cemetery had been divided into four bright red rectangles, covered in miniature numbers.

Don started from the bottom and used the flame to search along the first hundred or so graves, and then he kept going up across the four fields. Finally, the lighter became so hot that he couldn’t hold it, and he was forced to let its flame go out.

“Malraux’s grave isn’t here,” he said to Eva in the dark.

“You must have simply missed it. Try again.”

Don sighed. Then he started to point at the four fields, whose red edges were now only faintly visible:

“On this side are all the grave numbers up to 1800. And over here …”

He moved his finger:

“The next series of numbers begins here, from number 2101 to the last grave, 3567. No grave with the number 1913. There must be some problem with the numbers from Cloth Hall.”

Eva took the lighter out of his hand. It had had time to cool, and she flicked it on again and began to systematically move it once more across the laminated map. Just under the black band that marked the far boundary of the cemetery, she found a bluish rectangle:

“Le mausolée de Gravenstafel,”
she read, and let the light pass over the line of text.

Then the flame went out, and they stood silently in the falling rain. Don threw one last glance over toward the taxi as Eva grabbed his hand. Then he followed her along the paved path, farther into the darkness.

T
hey passed the French tricolor, which was suspended just above the ground in the middle of the cemetery. A pond of dirty water had formed on its sagging surface.

Eva seemed to be in a hurry now, and she didn’t bother trying to avoid all the puddles on the path.

At the edge of the cemetery stood a simple obelisk that marked a mass grave. Behind it rose a row of willows, like a wall, their branches trailing on the ground.

Just next to the trees, a small gravel path veered off to the left. It had presumably once been carefully raked, but now it looked like just a narrow, muddy trail.

As they followed the trail along the far side of the cemetery, Don noticed that the graves no longer bore French names. Here lay the bodies of Moroccans, Algerians, and Tunisians. Their stones ended in an onion-shaped point and had winding Arabic letters. But when it came to the years in which the Muslims died, they were no different from the Frenchmen’s gravestones.

T
he muddy trail led them to a bunch of trees, and among the trunks they could see a temple-shaped building.

Perhaps the facade had once resembled Roman marble, but now the pillars were cracked. Rainwater poured down from the angled roof, and it formed a small lake in front of the wide staircase.

Eva dragged Don along with her in among the willows so that they could avoid wading the last little bit up to the mausoleum. There was no door, only a gateway with an inscription:

Les crimes de guerre—La grâce divine

“Après vous,”
said Eva.

D
on took a few hesitant steps past the pillars, into the gaping opening of the gateway. It was so dark inside that he couldn’t even make out where the concrete room ended. The only thing he heard was his own breathing, which came creeping back toward him in a trailing echo. Then the sound of Eva’s steps, and their breathing blended together.

“There must be some light in here, anyway,” Don heard himself whisper.

He fumbled his hand along the wall toward something that was flickering red, and there was a crackle from up by the ceiling. Then a pale blue light woke from frosted glass globes.

“So, what have we here?” Don asked, just to have something to say.

The floor of the mausoleum was covered in tiles with ingrained flecks, and along the wall stretched a checked pattern of gravestones in the form of rectangular plaques. The names and dates of the dead were embedded in the concrete under a greenish web of mold.

It smelled like a public bathroom, and a hole in the middle of the floor was barely covered by a few rough-hewn planks. They had been nailed together into a hatch, and it looked like a temporary arrangement.

When Don had taken a few steps closer, he realized that the musty stench was coming from down in the covered hole. They heard a faint gurgling, as though from a water seal that was no longer holding tight.

H
e turned away from the gloomy wooden hatch and started to search through the numbers on the wall. Found the first plaque number in the left-hand corner of the room:

–1801–
MONTARD JEAN-LOUIS
MORT POUR LA FRANCE LE 22–4–1915
TUÉ À L’ENNEMI

Then he followed the checked pattern of the wall until he arrived at plaque number 1850. The series of numbers continued on the other wall, only to stop thirteen numbers too soon, with a plaque marked 1900.

I
n the sound of the rain that roared against the roof of the mausoleum, they each took a side of the sloppily nailed-together planks. It took a great deal of effort for them to heave up the hatch, and when it had finally been lifted into a vertical position, Don was left to bear all its weight alone. Eva had let go and covered her mouth with one hand to keep out all the putrid air that was now streaming toward them. In the rectangular opening that had been hidden under the planks, a staircase descended into someplace pitch-black, where the lights were apparently completely dead.

D
on pushed the vertical hatch away, and it landed on the floor with a bang.

He looked hopefully over at Eva, but she just shook her head. Then she signaled to him that he was the one who ought to go down.

He took a deep breath through his mouth and lit the lighter again. He turned the little plastic lever to max and climbed down with his Dr. Martens boot on the first step.

The staircase ran down along the bare wall on the right side of the lower room, and Don looked up at Eva, who still had her hand over her mouth. He listened to the pounding rain. Then he decided they’d come way too far to turn back now, and he slowly continued downward.

W
hen his eyes had started to adjust to the light, Don realized where the abominable smell was coming from. A sewer pipe must have sprung a leak somewhere down here, because floating above the final step of the staircase was a brownish sludge that covered the floor of the lower level.