The Man Who Walked Away A Novel (16 page)

“That was a long time ago,” is all she says.

“The smell of the sea has traveled a long way,” Albert says.

Layers of callused skin drift on the surface of the water in the basin. When she tosses the water into the sewer the river will carry the skin all the way to the ocean. “It’s true,” she says. “The shells carry their past with them.”

How could she know that Albert has wanted nothing more than exactly that, to carry his past with him? She wraps his feet in a towel, holding them against her chest as if they were her babies, patting them dry. “You should rest for a while,” and he hears how tired she is.

“Thank you,” he says again as she leaves, shutting the door behind her. He is so grateful for the tender way she bathed his beloved feet and for letting him hold her Red Sea seashells, a gift from her father whom she clearly misses as dearly as he misses his own.

The scratch of hay he pitched in Aix, the stink of the ceruse factory in Brussels, the not-distant-enough roar of an avalanche somewhere, he cannot remember where, but it doesn’t matter that he can’t remember where because if Albert listens,
he returns
; his own father’s voice returns. His father’s face with its sunset scars returns to him. It keeps him still. It keeps him here when he falls asleep in the same bed to the sound of boots on cobblestones just outside his window. In his dreams he wanders off along the tight streets winding past the ancient amphitheater where the gladiators fought, through the ancient gate to the city, the arch underneath the giant clock of the church of St. Eloi as it tolls the hour—
les armes, les jours, les heures, l’orage, les fêtes, l’incendie—
but then wakes to find he is not somewhere else at all. Instead his mind shrinks from the expansiveness of dreams to fit inside his body as the ordinary world reveals itself to him again—footsteps in the hall; the cry of a young girl—“There are so many . . .”—and what there are so many of is swallowed as the girl walks farther and farther away, the bells and then the bells, the sweet, sweet song of bells. And love? It returns to him in glimpses.

He discovered himself once, not knowing how he got there, on a bridge not far from home, and in the water lit by gas jets was the reflection of a strange man, and he knew the strange man was him. “Hello,” he said to himself, who said hello right back. He was no longer the child being scolded by his father for wandering away. Now he was a man whose large eyes were tugged down at the corners by sadness. He broke his own heart. “Help me,” he said, but the sad man only beckoned from the water,
Come join me
.

Fire floated through his reflection. A tiny boat set aflame. Sometimes children set their dead animals on fire and sent them down the river; he and his friend Baptiste once tied a dead mouse to a raft of sticks and lit it on fire. Their dead mouse raft burned as brightly as the little bundle floating downriver in front of him; turning to ash, it floated up into the air. He threw one heavy leg up onto the parapet.

“And love?” a voice asked. He thought it was his reflection speaking. He leaned over the parapet to listen closer and was nearly startled into the water by the laughter behind him.

“You’re not talking to yourself. Turn around.” He pulled his leg down and turned to find a real live woman. She was dressed as though she had just come from a party—her face freshly rouged, her lips painted a luscious red. She erupted again with laughter.

“I’m a mess,” she said, catching her breath. Her hair was tousled, strands of it escaping its loose braid.

“No, no,” Albert stammered. “You’re not a mess at all.” Above him, another cool sliver of moon disappeared into another morning sky. “You are quite . . .” She looked so solid, so thoroughly
there
.

“High praise,” she said, laughing still. Had she ever stopped? It was as though she had spent her life laughing.

“Quite lovely,” he said.

“Enough of
lovely
,” she said, smiling as she put her hand on Albert’s shoulder and stepped closer. Her breath smelled sweetly of cabbage and wine. “What about
love
?” She put her other hand on his other shoulder, swaying. “I’m a little drunk,” the woman said, still swaying, causing Albert to sway too.

He looked over the side of the bridge to check on his reflection.
Hello, myself.

“Oh, I’ve looked there,” the woman said. When she laughed, Albert wished he could stay there, inside that laugh.

She stepped forward, balancing on his shoes; it was then he noticed she wasn’t wearing any herself.

“Your feet,” he said, “are splendidly arched.”

“Would you like to marry me?” she asked. She told him to meet her at her family’s house at four o’clock the next day.

“I am drunk but I’m honest,” the woman said. “I’m honestly drunk.” She laughed and touched her luscious red lips to his, and he dared to dream that he was capable of keeping such an appointment.

Was it an hour or a day later?

He discovered himself in Verdun, walking a narrow street filled with bleating sheep, their bells clanking. Why had he ever thought he was capable of love? He should have a sheep’s bell fastened around his neck. When he discovered himself later, the sound of a cart carrying pine trees for firewood rattling by cracked his heart into jagged, useless pieces.

“Fuck,” the veteran yells from the billiard room, and there is the sound of billiard balls crashing to the floor and then the gruffness of Claude telling him to stop. “It is not me,” the veteran says. “It is not my doing. It is not my doing at all.”

Love was something from long ago. Love required staying in one place. Love required knowing where you were last night and last week and last year, where you would be tomorrow.

What about love?

Here is
love: his father tapping the dying embers of his pipe into his hand and throwing them into the fireplace.

It is time for bed
, as if Albert were a normal boy who never disappeared at all.

For a moment, it is as if he never did.

There was the lamplighter and his father standing in the doorway, deep in a conversation about the need for more gas lamps in the neighborhood, or the most recent advancements in house drainage. Some nights, the lamplighter would let him accompany him on his rounds; he’d even let him hold his ladder when a ladder was necessary. Albert watched with fascination as the lamplighter used his rod with its metal U at one end to open the switch that turned the gas on. As the lamplighter lit the taper with a match, suddenly the dark street:
illuminated
. Later, back home, the sunset swirl on his father’s cheek:
illuminated
. His father settled into the chair in the living room that received him like a lap and lit his pipe, filling the cottage with the delicious bitter smell.

His father struck a match, touching the flame to the gas-soaked taper, and the lamp’s light pushed back the night. ‘‘So,’’ he said, ‘‘you’d like a story.’’ Then his father waited, on the verge of the story. That moment before the story was as sweet as the moment the flame of the lamplighter’s match touched the gas-soaked taper in the lamps and lit up the dark street to reveal a rat scurrying under a shop; the cracked sidewalk; a cracked pile of dried horse manure.

Albert’s body hadn’t been consumed by meningitis to become the sound of a body in agony like his brothers’; he hadn’t disappeared into pneumonia like his mother. He had lived.

I’m still here
, Albert thought.

His father’s voice spun a cocoon around him and held him with its silky thread.

Here, Albert, a story just for you.

Listen.

Always as if his father had pulled the story out of a hat—magic!

For years, the prince with one swan wing lamented his lot. He wondered why he’d ever wanted to see the world in the first place; if this was the
more
of the world, he wanted to go home.

What came next?

You know what comes next.

There was a magic dove. “Do you hear me?” she sang. “Does this ring a bell?”

It did! He remembered why he set out. Walking over hill, over dale, the prince’s eyes filled with the whole wide world before him. There was so much of it! His legs were strong and solid; his heart brimmed with something he came to think of as
the future
.

Ring
(
shadow ring
).

Does this ring a bell
? The quick, sharp sound of love in Albert’s ears carries him forward. It carries him up and out of his bed; it helps him put on his shoes; it walks him down the hall to join Marian and Walter in the common room. He wants to explain to Marian about the face inside her face, in part because he would like to ask her whether there is one inside his face too, but he is still a little afraid of her and he isn’t sure he wants to know about his other faces.

“You are doing very well this evening, Marian,” Walter says. “Perhaps Albert’s arrival has cheered you?”

“We’ll see about that,” says Marian, but Albert can tell she means
yes.

“Hey, hey,” says Claude, the pouches of his face alert, opening up like a purse, as the veteran stands, pointing his finger in Albert’s face. It is clear he is not shooting love out of that finger. “And fuck you, too,” the veteran says.

Albert doesn’t care. Point a finger at him. Curse him. It doesn’t matter. He is staying. And besides, how Albert has longed to be a
too
.

“That man is an outrage to the nation,” Marian whispers.

“He doesn’t bother me,” Albert says. “He is no bother.”

“As if you cared about the nation,” the veteran says over his shoulder as Claude escorts him out.

“Everyone,” says Nurse Anne, snapping her fingers, “settle down.”

“I’d like to sit in the big chair by the fire now,” Elizabeth says as Henri snaps twigs for kindling.

“Her blue feet are no divine miracle,” Marian whispers to Albert. “She wears no shoes and holds her feet out the window at night.”

Albert has no idea what she is talking about, but it doesn’t matter. From where he sits, he can look out the window to the sky over the courtyard filling with those charcoal clouds that darken the whole world though it is not evening yet. They used to darken Albert too, those harbingers of nothing, but as Elizabeth protests—“That is not true except for the one time . . .”—and Nurse Anne touches him on the shoulder and reminds him he is to see the Doctor soon, the sky does not swallow the whole world, and Albert goes to sit by the fire.

Chapter 11

The man speaks hundreds of kilometers in a breath: from Montpellier to Narbonne, from Pézenas to Geneva, from Cette to Berlin, from Castelnaudary to Charleroi. From Verviers to Vienna! The place names trip off his tongue, an incantation of bemusement and bafflement, as if he is speaking about the adventures of another man entirely. There is something oddly innocent about his befuddlement, as if he were astonished at his own debilitating condition.

The Doctor finds himself imagining this man as a part of the throngs of pilgrims during the Middle Ages who sought refuge in the asylum when it was on the pilgrimage route of Saint James. If the man had lived then, he might very well have been considered a spiritual pilgrim, but he didn’t, and so he is a patient.

“Where else have you traveled, Albert?”

“Maastricht. Düsseldorf, Cologne, Bonn . . . Kassel, Frankfurt . . . Hanau, Aschaffenburg, Darmstadt . . . Würzburg, Nuremberg. Linz . . . Amstetten! Salzburg, Schaffhausen, Basel, and Delle. Interlaken . . . the canton of Vaud. Bonsecours? Yes, Bonsecours!”

He was here and then he was there. There is nothing in between.

“I found myself in Tours,” Albert says, “but first I was sleeping on a bench in the Orléans station in Paris.” But then he is somewhere else. “Once the Dutch police, because I had no money, sent me to the Belgian frontier.” Then, somewhere else entirely. “In Prague, a group of French students took up a collection for me. Eight florins and a shirt, they gave me.”

As far as the when and where, the
if
, of his eating or drinking or his sleeping, the Doctor notes, the man has not a clue. If he ate or drank, he doesn’t remember it; if he slept, he cannot recall. In this town, the consul would have nothing to do with him; in that one, he was given a travel warrant to return home on foot. He wakes up and wakes up and wakes up here and here and here, but the journey remains a mystery.

“Arles, or was it Nîmes? I left it abruptly.”

His life is an endless sentence with more ellipses than words, with intermittent and puzzling punctuation.

The smell of burned mushrooms drifts down the hall.

“All of them burned?” the Doctor hears Nurse Anne ask.

“Most,” Henri says.