Echo House (5 page)

"It might be a good idea if you called her."

"I'll think about it,' the boy said.

His father reached into his pocket and put a file card on the table. The boy took it and put it away without reading it, though he noticed that there was an address along with a telephone number. He had assumed that his mother was in London, her favorite city in the world, where she had many friends and fine wartime memories and no family. "Five hours time difference," his father said.

"I remember," the boy said.

"Do you miss London?"

"I hated the school"

His father nodded; that was old ground.

"And then you went away."

Axel smiled wryly. 'No question. That was a big mistake."

He had gone away and returned a casualty of war, so broken and torn up that he was unrecognizable. Their London house, which had been so full of life before the war, was suddenly silent and blue, his father upstairs in the wide hospital bed, his mother below. Nothing had seemed beyond Axel Behl's reach, a ticket to Wimbledon or a box of Belgian chocolates or an American convertible or an introduction to Glenn Miller; suddenly he was helpless, unable even to speak coherently, assisted by nurses every day and night. Alec said, "Where did you get the number?"

"Son," his father said. "Please. I have friends and they have friends. It wasn't very hard to do."

Then why did it take so long? "Okay," the boy said.

"Well." His father sighed heavily, smiling slowly. "What are your plans for the evening?"

"There's a double feature at the Circle."

"What's playing?"

The boy hesitated. "I forget."

Axel looked at him sharply. "The morning paper's in the library. You can check the listings."

"It's a John Wayne double feature."

"John Wayne goes to war?"

"I guess so."

"Germans or Japanese?"

"Japs, I think."

Axel Behl was silent a moment, leaning back, his hands flat on the table.

"It's only a movie," the boy said.

"I saw one once," he said. "The White House last summer. Mr. Truman invited us over. I made myself go and it wasn't easy. I swore I never would, but when you're invited to the White House, you go. Such tripe. One lie after another, and when you added up all the little lies you had a big lie the size of the Matterhorn. I left halfway through, pleading fatigue. Couldn't stand it. Hated every minute." He began to drum his fingers on the table, looking again into the middle distance.

"I know," the boy said. Talking to his father was like walking through a minefield: one false step and you were on your back, minus an arm or a leg.

"No, you don't."

"Then tell me," the boy said quickly, the words out before he could bring them back. His father had never spoken about the war and made it clear he didn't want to be asked about it. His war was so profoundly intimate that it could not be shared; at least he did not share it.

"Propaganda," he said suddenly.

"What's propaganda?" the boy asked.

"A rhapsody," Axel said. "A bully's love song."

"You walked out of a movie in the White House?" The boy wanted his father to keep talking, to tell him about the war even if it was his own false rhapsody. He had the right to tell any story he wanted, at whatever length or to whatever purpose. He could use the historical facts or invent his own; it wouldn't matter. But he did not have the right to remain silent, keep things to himself, withhold evidence. What had happened to Captain Axel Barkin Behl in the war was their common property. They both lived with the consequences and would go on living with them. This was the way the world worked, and this was their fate. His father was crippled and his mother was gone and there remained only the two of them to face the wide world. And the world was not indifferent.

"Do you remember which movie it was?"

But Axel was silent, his eyes half-lidded, his fingers again tracing the cicatrix that carved his face. He had been startlingly handsome as a young man before the war. Everyone said so and the family photographs proved it, Axel in black tie, Axel in tennis whites, not a hair out of place, the part in the center of his skull as straight as a sword's blade. But it was hard for Alec to recall the prewar years. What he remembered was a private hospital in Belgravia, its cream-colored façade suggesting a villa in the Levant, his father on the third floor bandaged head to foot, his eyes glazed and staring from a hole in the rough gauze. His mother's gloved hand pushed him forward to give Daddy a kiss. But she did not say where, so he kissed the bandaged cheek and watched his father wink. Later, when Axel was home with most of the bandages off, Alec did not want to remember him as he had been. That memory was indecent.

The silence lengthened. The boy looked into the candlelight and willed his father to speak. How difficult could it be to give voice to the events of your own life, to speak so that others could understand the shadow-line that divided youth from maturity? Did it involve betrayal? Was it simple stupidity or plain misfortune, obvious bad luck of the sort that everyone encountered every single day? He had gone away a healthy young man and returned a wretched old one, and this seemed to happen overnight. The circumstances were mysterious, and his silence only made them more so, and sinister besides.

Axel smiled. "They say that good judgment comes from experience. And experience comes from bad judgment."

Alec laughed even though he had heard the expression many times.

Axel said abruptly, "As you know, I went to France in early 'forty-two. Fred Greene and I were put ashore in Brittany. You might remember Fred, big redheaded fellow, hot-tempered. Wonderful pianist; he knew everything about popular music and classical music, too. After the war he intended to make his living playing in nightclubs. Fred was my closest friend; we'd known each other since we were schoolboys. His father was an editor and a great friend of the senator, wrote speeches for him. We had been in Spain together, not to fight but to study German aerial tactics, the bombardment of civilian targets mostly. Spain was a war of fire and maneuver, the tactics not much different from Lee's at Antietam, except that Lee was a genius and there were no military geniuses in Spain. The difference between Antietam and Teruel is disciplined butchery and undisciplined butchery, plus of course the airplanes. Spain was modern war and old-fashioned war at once, so we stayed on longer than we should have, learning what we could, and we learned quite a lot. Fred's wife was even less enthusiastic about this adventure than Sylvia, and in fact she left him because of it. Fred didn't understand her and neither did I, because our work in Spain was important. People were
dying,
Spain was bleeding to death." Axel paused, thinking about Spain in 1938; there was more to be said, but he didn't say it.

"Later on we went to work for Colonel Donovan and volunteered for France. That was when you were sent to Scotland to school. You were much too young for boarding school, but that couldn't be helped. Sylvia had a job in the war, too, and as you have cause to know, caring for small children was not her long suit. Baby-sitting was not in her repertoire. Nannies were impossible to find in London, and Sylvia dismissed the ones we did find, and the blitz was in progress and so forth and so on. It was very dangerous. So you went away to Scotland, Sylvia stayed in London, and I went to France with Fred Greene in a small boat."

Axel stopped talking, drumming his fingers on the table again, leaning back and looking at the ceiling and then at the three portraits on the far wall. His father and grandfather were there, along with Constance. The family resemblance was striking; all the men had high foreheads and heavy eyelids over liquid dark eyes and thin lips, and they were scowling. Young Alec was unmistakably of this tribe, except that he had his mother's fair hair and gray eyes, and his build was slender. He had a way of leaning forward on the balls of his feet when the conversation interested him, a trick of Sylvia's as well. There was much of Constance in Axel. His extraordinarily large hands could have belonged to a farmer or blacksmith. He had her stony black eyes, but they were set in his father's face; the de Barquin lip was conspicuous also.

When next Axel spoke it was in a voice as dry as an accountant's, and his manner and tone suggested that the words were costly. He did not give them up easily. Truthfully, he did not want to give them up at all. So his son had better listen carefully, because they would not be repeated.

How much there was to remember. This much was known for sure.

They formed up with Allied troops after D-Day and were ordered to report to Patton's command, assigned to his intelligence section. This was logical; they knew the countryside very well, having lived off it for the past two years. They knew where the Germans were and where they weren't and which French units were reliable and which were bandits. The politics of the Resistance were complicated, as complicated as the various lines of command in the Spanish war; so they tried to avoid politics, claiming indifference or ignorance, depending on the situation. Fred Greene was fluent in French, and Axel was fluent in German and passable in French. Patton was short of translators, and while he distrusted OSS characters generally, he had known and admired Adolph Behl and someone had told him that Fred was all right, so he asked for them by name. That was the way things were done. Someone knew someone and the word was passed down, your orders were cut, and you went off in a Jeep to join George Patton's intelligence section.

They began in Anjou, following Patton's line of march east, the road littered with empty jerry cans and C-ration cartons and the occasional disabled tank and rotting corpse. The region was thick with land mines and remnants of German units, because Patton had not bothered to stop and mop up, perform the usual housekeeping chores. Housekeeping (Axel's term) was not in the general's repertoire. From the look of things, he had destroyed everything in his path, so it made for a dispiriting ride. The litter and the stench.

Axel was driving very fast, and when he came to a crossroads he veered south, turning on impulse into a part of the country that had not been touched by blitzkrieg or invasion or Patton's stampede. Axel was disgusted by the corpse-smell and the helter-skelter of war's residue, and when he saw the turn he took it without thinking. When Fred looked at him in alarm, Axel said he was taking the scenic detour. He said they were owed one. Just once in the miserable year 1944 he intended to behave irresponsibly, and if Fred didn't like it he could get out. If they were lucky they would find a bottle and a wheel of cheese, have lunch and a snooze, and pretend they were in Rock Creek Park on a hot Sunday afternoon.

Fred shrugged and pulled his helmet over his eyes, a gesture that said, more plainly than words, Bad idea.

The unfamiliar road was winding and treacherous, but there was no sign of the Wehrmacht. They crossed one river and then another and entered ancient Aquitaine. Suddenly there were no more road signs. Axel drove more slowly now, elated to be motoring through the quiet countryside at midday. In that part of France the light is thick and milky, shadowless where it touches the earth. The atmosphere is heavy, almost dreamy; you can imagine a knight on horseback or a traveling carnival. The land was deserted and undisturbed, except for a few small farms and orchards. Many of the fields were overgrown and the farmhouses in disrepair. Axel wondered aloud if the inhabitants had fled, though there was no sign of military activity. Even the usual graffiti were missing. It was as if they had stumbled into a France of another century.

They drove south for many hours, the countryside growing wilder and less civilized and at the same time drowsier. Late in the afternoon they came over a rise and saw below them an exquisite medieval village crouched in the shadow of a narrow valley, a noble Romanesque church with its heavy walls and bell tower set in a square beside a meandering stream. Atop a low hill was a diminutive château with vineyards all around, motionless in the milky light. They stopped the Jeep and gaped, forgetting utterly about the war and their destination west of the Rhine; and they felt now that they were surrounded by the century before, having somehow stumbled into this undiscovered or forgotten valley, some place far removed from the industrialized and self-aware twentieth century. It's the simple truth that many strange and inexplicable things happen in wartime. Ask any soldier.

They motored down the road slowly, because they had no way of knowing the politics of the village, who occupied it, and whether they were friendly. They crossed a stone bridge spanning the slow-moving stream and stopped in front of the church. In the square a half a dozen old men were playing boules. The men looked up at the approach of the American Jeep but did not pause in their game. They moved ponderously, their arms swinging like pendulums, the heavy balls lofted and falling with a thud to the bare ground. From the terrace of the café across the square, a waiter was motioning. Axel and Fred left the Jeep where it was and walked to the café, carrying their carbines.

I am the
patron
of this café, the Frenchman said.

I am also the mayor of the village.

You are welcome here, but you will have no need for weapons.

The mayor offered bread and cheese and a carafe of the local wine, coarse as sandpaper. He remarked on the weather, warm even for August. The night would be warm as well. Wouldn't you prefer to wear something more comfortable? Then he offered the traditional blue trousers and smocks worn by workingmen. The mayor seemed eager to avoid any reminders of the nearby armies. Anonymous in blue, rifles stowed in the Jeep, the Americans sat at a table on the terrace of the café and talked with the mayor, an obviously well-fed mayor. Yes, there had been Germans in the vicinity, but they had departed without warning early one morning the previous week. In any case there had been no trouble with them.

Enjoy yourselves, gentlemen, the mayor said and disappeared into the interior of his café. In the square behind them the old men continued to play boules.