Losing Julia Read online

  At dinner Daniel sat next to me and pulled out a small muslin sack of beet sugar. “Here, liven it up a little,” he said. I sprinkled some on my trench doughnut of bread fried in bacon fat.

  Daniel had just returned from a three-day leave to visit a badly wounded cousin at the hospital at Toul.

  “How is he?”

  “Won’t walk again.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Daniel shrugged, then continued to eat. After a moment he paused and said, “Would you believe that some of the orderlies are German prisoners?”

  “No shit. They make you nervous?”

  “Actually I liked a few of them.” He put down his bread, wiped his mouth with his sleeve and sat back.

  “So what happened to your—”

  “Bullet in the foot. Got infected. They had to cut off his leg, just above the knee.”

  “Oh, Christ.”

  “To stop the gangrene. Looks like he’ll live.” He leaned forward over his plate again, picked up his bread and used it to sop up the remaining bacon grease. “They keep the worst gangrene cases in a corner behind a curtain. But you can hear them. And you can smell them. Once the flesh starts to putrefy, it just runs up the body until it hits the vital organs. You can watch the line rise day after day right up a man’s leg or arm.”

  “Can’t they do anything?”

  “Just amputate. But if it goes too far up the limb…”

  “Christ, I couldn’t stand that.”

  “There was a bucket I saw.”

  “A bucket?”

  “Full of arms and legs.”

  “Shit.”

  We finished our meal in silence.

  After we ate we joined Giles and Page in a game of poker, until Giles had cleaned our pockets of cash and was now asking for rations. Then Daniel stretched out and took a nap, snoring heavily within minutes. I envied the relaxed expression on his face and wondered whether he ever had nightmares. I did, and whenever I awoke I rarely felt much relief.

  I was glad that Daniel was back. I couldn’t tell him how much I’d missed him. He’d become like an older brother to me, superior in almost every way but not so that it bothered me. He knew I looked up to him. I guess maybe it flattered him or reminded him of his younger brothers back home. I felt safer around him too, as though he were too good to be touched by the madness. I knew he felt protective of me. Maybe my innocence somehow appealed to him. But more than anything I think it was that he felt I understood him; his sensitivity and his love for Julia and how that gave him strength.

  After dusk extinguished the last shafts of light we appeared cautiously like cockroaches, thousands of us emerging from woods and dugouts and barns and farmhouses, a silent army in search of prey. To the west muzzle flashes and flares punctured the darkness like great big lightning bugs dancing to the muffled thud thud of artillery. The road was swollen with limbers and trucks and mules stretching all the way across France in a somber procession that was fed at one end by factories and trains and boats and drained at the other by explosives, gas, bullets and blades. We were told to hurry.

  “Germans broke through the French lines somewheres up north, that’s what I heard.”

  “Well, shit. Now we’re just gonna have to chase ’em back again.”

  “I got to tell you, I feel sorry for the Frogs. They’ve been doing this for four years.”

  “Four fucking years, imagine that.”

  I stared straight ahead at Tometti s pack, noting the stains. It smelled everywhere like sweat and urine, except where it smelled worse. I had had diarrhea for three days accompanied by cramps that caused me to jerk forward. Influenza? I prayed not. But everyone talked about it, how it had opened up a third front against humanity. A young kid from Indiana died just four days after he got sick. The pneumonia killed him. They say it’s just like drowning. Julia wrote Daniel that Americans were wearing gauze over their mouths on the trains and buses while office hours were being staggered to reduce congestion. My mother wrote that three houses on our street were quarantined and that little Janey Morgan had died. There was not a man in France who wouldn’t rather be shot in the kneecaps than die from some disease. It just seemed like such a pathetic way to go, coming all the way to France to get sick; to die in uniform with no hope of heroism, to die wondering if your name would even appear on the hometown memorial after the war.

  I watched Giles’s head jerk left and right as he walked and I wondered if he was sleepwalking. What a neat trick that would be, especially for a soldier. I felt another spasm low in my bowels. Funny, but when I enlisted it never occurred to me that war would be so monstrously inconvenient, so that not one single thing was easy except getting killed. Again I stopped and searched the terrain beside the road for a place to shit. From behind a tree I looked back at the silhouettes, illuminated by a half moon, that were bobbing and snaking past in an endless column, as though the entire human race had decided to up and move all in one night. I tried to separate the different sounds: whining, groaning engines; banging metal; the clip, clop of horses; creaking wood; a mule baying; the low rumble of thousands of boots on dirt like a centipede walking across the snare of a drum.

  I spent two hours pushing and dodging my way forward to catch up to my company, which was indistinguishable in the darkness from every other company. An hour later I stopped and searched for another place to shit.

  WE HAVE A lot of catching up to do.

  I’m dreaming again, aren’t I?

  Patrick it’s me, Julia.

  It is you, isn’t it? And I have so many things to tell you. Did I ever tell you about my brother? My younger brother Ian?

  No, tell me about him.

  He died of smallpox when he was six. I was nine then. It was awful, Julia. Everybody huddled in his room. My father sitting frozen in his chair in the living room. The look on the neighbors’ faces when they brought by food.

  That’s so tragic, when children die.

  After he died I’d go and sit in his room for hours. There is nothing in the world so perfectly still and quiet as the room of a dead child.

  I’m sorry.

  The priest tried to make sense of it but he couldn’t, not to me. When children die it’s always murder, Julia. Always.

  Yes, I understand.

  I had an older sister, Katherine. She died ten years ago in Arizona. I still miss her, even though we were never that close. I don’t think her husband liked me. Thought I was a bit flaky, not being married all these years.

  You’re anything but flaky.

  Thank you, Julia.

  You don’t look good today.

  I feel tired.

  Get some sleep.

  Yes, I think I will.

  Good night.

  Good night.

  I CAN’T BEAR to leave my room today. I feel altogether too weak. Not the weakness that comes from old age or even from cancer, but the weakness that comes with sadness, which is much worse. I’m starting to think that sadness is organic; that sad people are cursed with more insight than others. While our smiles defy our bitter plight, our tears acknowledge it.

  Maybe that’s why the only people who have really interested me in my life—besides children—are those who have experienced the loss of a loved one. People who haven’t felt the caustic burn of death are like students who haven’t yet held a real job; the world is still theoretical; intellectualized, vigorously debated, but not fully experienced or comprehended.

  Any search for the deeper meanings in our lives has to start at our deaths. That’s the fundamental, overwhelming dilemma of our humanity. But the great absurdity of our lives—which I can only now see clearly—is our unwillingness to concede that we are in a bit of a pickle in the first place. It’s quite funny, really: several billion people all feigning immortality, as though they each have some secret exemption, or at least an indefinite future, and thus can afford to run down the clock without the least sense of urgency. And the incredible thing is, you can live through a world wa
r and still not make the most of the time that you’ve got.

  LAST NIGHT I dreamed that I met a young boy who told me with the saddest eyes that he was never born and I asked how could that be and he explained very slowly and quietly that his father had died at the front. And then I looked behind the boy and I saw hundreds of thousands of children, just standing there. Infinitely mute.

  Rapidity of fire. Men are trained to fire at the rate of about three shots per minute at effective ranges (600 to 1200 yards) and five or six at close ranges (0 to 600 yards), devoting the minimum of time to loading and the maximum to deliberate aiming…

  Muzzle velocity. When the bullet leaves the muzzle of the rifle it is going 2700 feet a second, or roughly, 1/2 mile a second, or 30 miles a minute.

  —Privates’ Manual, 1917.

  LAWTON BECAME an accomplished sniper as the months passed, methodically picking off careless Germans from seven hundred yards with a patient squeeze of the trigger. Page seemed to grow more quiet while Tometti waxed on endlessly about Teresa and Giles amassed a small fortune trading in German souvenirs, using much of the money to supplement his diet with chocolates and jams and smoked meats. Daniel kept us all together with his calm confidence and unerring sense of terrain so that we each trusted him instinctively, even when he led us out on raiding parties loaded with sacks of grenades slung around our necks and shoulders and stumbling through the pitch-black darkness over ground churned like the North Sea by the shelling.

  I turned twenty that July. In August Page’s father died and Tometti spent a week in the hospital with a slight bullet wound in the arm. Except for the occasional shows at the Y or pickup games in the rest areas, there was little in the way of relief from the intense fear and boredom and loneliness that gripped us. Good news seemed unheard of.

  Maybe that’s why we made such a fuss on the day Daniel learned that Julia was pregnant, celebrating with brandy that Giles scrounged up and howling drunkenly into the night, until the MPs rounded us up and sent us weaving back toward our tents.

  It was our first mail call in weeks and several of us were sitting against the side of an abandoned barn fifteen miles from the front, greedily tearing open letters.

  “I’m going to be a father!” he said, shaking the pages. His voice was cracking. “Julia thinks it’s a girl and look here, she has a list of names and wants me to circle the ones I like.” He stood up and pranced around like a Russian dancer as he recited the names. Several of us slapped him on the back.

  “What if it’s a boy?” I asked.

  “If it’s a boy, we’ll name him Patrick. How about it, assuming Julia agrees?”

  I blushed, and hoped fervently that it would be a boy.

  Daniel decided right away that he would marry Julia and spent weeks crafting his proposal, which he carried on a small writing pad he kept in his breast pocket. “I don’t think she expects I’ll ask, because of my family, but I always knew I would. Now we’ll just have to marry by mail, if that sort of thing can be done, and to hell with what everybody thinks.”

  “Where will you live?” I asked.

  “San Francisco, unless that embarrasses my parents. We could always travel down to Monterey or even Los Angeles.”

  I couldn’t imagine such spontaneity.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve given any thought to how you’ll make ends meet?”

  “Julia can teach painting, and maybe even sell a few of her works. I could try to get a job writing for some newspaper or magazine.” Daniel was always writing, even during bombardments. He said it was the only way he could understand what he was thinking. He had submitted three articles on the soldier’s life to a magazine in New York and one had already been published, much to the delight of the battalion.

  “I wish I could be with her,” he said, sitting down next to me. “I miss her like crazy.”

  “Hell, even I miss her,” I said, which made him smile.

  “I never should have enlisted. What the hell was I thinking?”

  “You weren’t thinking. None of us were.”

  He closed his eyes and leaned his head back. When he opened his eyes he read her letter again, then handed it to me. “Look at this handwriting,” he said. “It’s almost like calligraphy.” I studied the beautiful lettering and imagined Julia sitting at her desk just after breakfast, dreaming of the man I fought beside as she caressed her pen across the page with a gentle scratching sound, pausing occasionally to feel for the baby’s heartbeat within.

  TODAY DURING ART class I thought I had her eyes. I was so close: the curve of her lids, the thin bridge of her nose. Yes, the shape was just right. Finally. But I couldn’t bring them to life. Every time I drew the pupils they refused to look at me, so that I wanted to lean forward and blow life into them. But no matter what I did they just stared straight ahead. Lifeless. When class ended I rolled my drawing up and dropped it into the garbage can.

  I FOUND TWO Valentine’s Day cards under my pillow this morning. One from Helen and the other from Sarah. (Do I have wide appeal or what?) I haven’t opened the one from Helen yet. Its thickness suggests a depth of ardor I don’t want to contend with. I took Sarah’s card into the bathroom, locked the door and sat on the toilet, studying the way she’d written my name on the envelope encircled in a big red heart she’d drawn. The card itself was store-bought, with pictures of flowers and hearts on the front. Inside she wrote:

  To the last of the truly great leading men. (My love life confirms this!) From your not so secret admirer.

  Love,

  Sarah

  I immediately walked down the hall to the phone booth and ordered a huge bouquet of flowers to be delivered to her home. Then I took the bus into town and bought her a large box of chocolates, which I left with a note at the nurses’ station.

  WHY DOES the longing for love have to be so acute, like a desperate thirst? Is it because love is wanting to be saved and we can never really be saved? Maybe love is really born of our fears. Love is the heart’s desire for a pain-killer; a tearful plea for a great big epidural. Yes, that’s it: love is the only anesthesia that actually works. And so people with broken hearts are really those who are just coming to, and if you’ve ever seen someone come out of general anesthesia you know that it looks a lot like the beginnings of a broken heart.

  But to find it and touch it and hold it! What relief, if only briefly, until love wears off or slips through our hands. Strange how love—that most fickle of emotions—creates the illusion of permanence right from the start, just as beauty, so fleeting and elusive, can seem so timeless and infinite to behold.

  If love doesn’t triumph, it ought to. For love is the one thing we have that feels more powerful than even death; the only respite from life’s wretched absurdity. The magic of love is not that it contains all the answers, it’s that it eliminates the need for so many pressing questions. For love makes us feel like gods—and that’s what we’re really after, isn’t it?

  THE GAS SIREN goes off just as we are carrying planks along the communication trenches to shore up the firing trenches. Six seconds to don your mask. That’s the drill. My hands fumble as the gas shells hit. There, it’s on. Isn’t it? I grab my rifle. The ghoulish mist creeps over the edge of the parapet and slides down into the trench like a snake. A slithering poisonous snake. Thousands and millions of them, hissing toward me.

  Don’t panic, Patrick. Please, don’t panic. Take a breath. That’s it. Is the hose connected? I run my hand along it. More gas shells explode. Shit, what was the drill? I remember. Breathe normally. Do not remove your mask, even if you feel you are choking. The mist clings to the dirt and my clothes and my mask and the lenses are fogging. Do not remove your mask. Am I breathing normally? Under no circumstance are you allowed to abandon your position. Stand to and maintain your vigilance. It seems hard to breathe, harder still with each breath. Am I getting air or is that gas I taste? Do not remove your mask. Never remove your mask. If only I could get out of the trench where the gas wasn’t so th
ick. The shelling stops. I look up and wonder if the Germans are attacking. But I can’t see the top of the trench. Not very well. Oh Christ, I think I’m going to puke. But not in the mask. I can’t puke in the mask. But I really must puke.

  Their expressions, indescribably, seemed frozen by a vision of terror; their gait and their postures betrayed a total dejection; they sagged beneath the weight of horrifying memories; when I spoke to them, they could hardly reply…

  —French Marshal Philippe Pétain, describing the

  sight of soldiers returning from Verdun.

  WHEN WE reached the outskirts of Verdun Julia asked me to pull off on La Voie Sacrée, the road upon which France hastily delivered its youth unto Verdun so that Verdun could deliver them with equal efficiency unto eternity. The surrounding fields were littered with the fragmented hulks of farmhouses and rusty piles of barbed wire and sheets of corrugated elephant iron and debris from trucks and wagons.

  “I can’t believe it still looks so bad here,” she said, standing by the car. “I guess I thought more of it would be cleaned up… erased.”

  “This was the only road open to Verdun,” I said. “Just a narrow dirt road. To keep the convoys from sinking in the mud, thousands of men lined the road day and night and shoveled tons of gravel beneath the wheels of the trucks and carts. It’s France’s Via Dolorosa.”