Foreigners (21 page)

Despite his misgivings, Edward found himself enjoying the evening. The smell of the barbecue, the cold cans pressed upon him and the familiar accents from home acted as a balm, soothing away his uneasiness. The men were loud and back-slappingly friendly. They were proud and happy and more than once took Edward to the street out front of the house to show off their cars: Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs and Audis and a Porsche. Automobiles that they couldn't have dreamed of owning back home, but here, where luxury was domestic and the servicemen's salaries were inflated and tax free, there was the possibility of owning two. And back in the house, the wives pointed out Paul's dining-room table and chairs, obscenely solid oak, and the massive wall unit that held fine china and a carousel clock, and thrilled at the fact that they all owned the same, though some in blond; all bought on the cheap in Belgium. Back in Canada these same furnishings would cost the equivalent of the down payment on a bungalow. In the backyard, which stretched down a grassy slope to a linked fence, Edward kicked a soccer ball with the children, breaking a sweat and falling twice, and calling himself Franz
Beckenbauer. It was a party and though he hadn't thought it possible, Edward was in a party mood. It was nothing like the dreadful, tight-lipped cocktail affairs Linda dragged him to back in London, but free and easy and unbounded.

It was late when the woman arrived. She was an officer and a hush descended when she stepped through the door. It was brief, but noticeable. Others coming in had been greeted with shouts and friendly gibes that Edward didn't understand, though he shared in the laughter that followed. But when she arrived conversations faltered, then were picked up again, their volume conspicuously raised, as if to make amends for the momentary lull.

She wore her uniform, with the sleeves of the blouse rolled tightly up her forearms. Paul went to her and shook her hand, then led her from the front hall and up the stairs. Before Edward had the chance to ask about her, he was swallowed up again in the conversation he'd been having with a lance corporal from Baie-Comeau. The next time he saw the woman, her standard-issue blouse was hidden beneath one of Paul's sweatshirts. Edward recognized the Roots logo; he'd given it to his brother for Christmas the previous year.

Did they argue about the sweatshirt, Edward wondered; it was entirely possible considering the state he was in. Or maybe it was the lamp. That's what got broken, he now recalled. It had sat on an end table beside the sofa, and when Edward flopped himself down on the cushions his elbow struck the shade and toppled it to the floor. He laughed when it smashed against the tiles because the lance corporal did, and he felt a bond had
grown between him and the Frenchman. One of the airmen's wives swept up the mess, and Edward had the vaguest recollection of having made a comment, something disparaging, about her buttocks, which sent the lance corporal into another shuddering bout of laughter.

He wished now that he hadn't drunk so much. He wished he wasn't in the stifling car speeding along an autobahn, or not an autobahn, or whatever it was they called a highway over here. He wished he knew why Paul was so angry. There were a lot of things he wished.

“It looks a bit like Toronto, don't you think?” he said, his head still lolling against the headrest.

“What's that?” Paul said, staring straight ahead.

“Brussels.”

“Sure. I guess so.”

Edward turned and looked back at the city as it faded in the distance. He could feel his stomach begin to turn.

“Do you miss it at all?” he asked over his shoulder, then looked at his brother. “I mean Toronto? Home?”

Paul turned his head partway toward him.

“Not a bit.”

• II •

His plans had all gone to pieces, like the ceramic table lamp his brother had smashed the night before.

The fields that encircled Geilenkerchen were to have been the starting point, the first instalment in his historical monologue that would take them out of the Westphalian
countryside and along the Rhine to the bridge at Nijmegen, then down into the heart of Belgium and east until they reached the cemeteries of Ypres. But Edward, ruined from the previous night, had fallen asleep before they'd even reached the outskirts of the town.

It was here, Paul wanted to explain, in the seemingly endless flat stretches of sugar beet, that the Americans had faced some of the fiercest resistance during the final push for Berlin. The Battle of Geilenkerchen was a bloody affair. To take the town, they had first to cross these terrible fields, which would have looked much the same then as they did now: peaceful swelling carpets of green. But as the Yanks sent wave after wave of riflemen into the breeze-rippled pastures, they were cut down by Wehrmacht machine guns hidden in the tall grasses. The bullets tore low through the sugar-beet stalks. It took three days to capture the fields, whose midsts were criss-crossed with shallow trenches that concealed the German guns. By the time the Americans gained the town, it was as if the earth itself had been bludgeoned.

From Geilenkerchen he drove north toward Düsseldorf and the autobahn that would take them along the eastern bank of the Rhine and on into the Netherlands. He crossed the river first at Kleve so as to come at the city of Nijmegen from the north, via Arnhem. This was to have been a lesson in perspective. They would make the leisurely trip from sleepy Arnhem to Nijmegen inside of thirty minutes, whereas it had proved a nearly impossible trek some fifty years earlier. Of the British paratroopers who had made it to Arnhem, only one in four emerged unharmed. Those unlucky enough to reach the bridge at Nijmegen melted under the searing hail of German
fire and could go no farther. Paul had wanted to shake his brother awake as they crossed back over the Rhine and tell him that this was the same bridge from the movie, but did not.

Sitting there behind the wheel, fiddling now and again with the volume on the car stereo in the hope it would disturb Edward's slumber, he felt himself growing angry. He desperately wanted to build up to what he had to tell his brother— to, in a manner of speaking, soften the target. Yet even with the opportunities of Geilenkerchen, Arnhem and Nijmegen missed, Paul decided family lore might be enough to serve his purpose. This final story he would save until they had passed Brussels and headed into the Belgian province of West Flanders. Edward would recognize it as soon as Paul began the telling. In fact, Paul was counting on it. It would be best if they told it together, shared the narrative.

It had been a Remembrance Day tradition. Every eleventh of November their father would sit them down on the floor in front of his chair and tell them the story of what had happened to his father's father in the Great War. Pappy Dan, as their father called him, had been a soldier in the trenches. And when they asked him what a trench was he explained that it was like a big ditch, deep enough that no one could see you even if you stood straight up. He told them too about the mud and the rats and the lice and how when the soldiers' feet got wet they got trench foot, which meant that their feet went black and smelled like rotting meat and sometimes their toes fell off. He made certain that his sons understood just how terrible war could be. How sometimes the armies bombed each other for so long that grown men curled up in tight little balls and cried like small babies. And how there was a place
called no man's land where if you fell down and couldn't get up again you were left to die. And there was a gas called mustard that if you breathed it in would make you drown even though you weren't anywhere close to water. Paul remembered that for the longest time Edward wouldn't put mustard on anything, not bologna sandwiches, not hot dogs, nothing, because he was afraid he might die. And after telling them all this their father would go on to say how one day, in the middle of a bright summer's afternoon, Pappy Dan's captain ordered them all to climb over the top of the trench and run out into no man's land toward where the Krauts were, even though there were bombs falling out of the sky like rain and so many bullets flying about that they made the air sizzle. The army said, he told his boys, that one of those bombs that was raining down fell right on Pappy Dan, and that when the smoke finally cleared, he was gone, blown away into nothing. All that was left was one boot: the right one. It didn't matter how often they'd heard the story, whenever it reached this point, both Paul and Edward grew so anxious that they could no longer remain settled. Their father would always pause here, waiting for his sons to calm, then he would smile. Of course, he would continue, that wasn't what
really
happened. After the war one of Pappy Dan's army buddies found Pappy Dan's brother and told him the truth about Pappy Dan. He hadn't died at all, hadn't been vaporized in the stinking sticky mud of no man's land. In fact, the only part of Pappy Dan that had even been on the battlefield that day was his right boot, carried out and left on the foul dirt beside a bomb crater by a pal who, as misfortune would have it, never made it back to the trenches himself. As for Pappy Dan, having had a bad
feeling about the next day's attack, he'd sneaked away in the night, in the company of a Flemish farm girl he'd become smitten with, and made for France, slipping past the sentries, one foot booted, the other bare, determined to live to be an old, old man, just him and his plump little peasant maiden.

Edward shifted slightly in the seat beside him and let out a low groan. He raised his hand sleepily to his temple, then let it fall again into his lap.

“I hope it hurts,” Paul said quietly.

• III •

Edward turned the map over in his hands, trying to decipher it. The mass of criss-crossing coloured lines marking highways, country roads, rail lines and rivers, along with the confusingly foreign names, some in French, others in Flemish, made no sense to him. Edward had no idea where they were. He could see where they'd come from, and could put his finger on their destination, but their whereabouts in the mass of squiggles in between was a mystery.

“Here, I think,” he said to Paul, holding the map toward him and pointing a finger. “Oudenaarde. Didn't we just pass a place called Oudenaarde?”

“Not that I saw,” his brother replied.

“Oh.” Edward looked at the map again. “Well, maybe not, then.”

Paul had handed the map over reluctantly when he'd offered to help navigate the remainder of the way to Ypres. And Edward had made the offer only because he'd felt guilty
for having slept through the better part of the journey. He knew this trip was important to his brother. All things military had fascinated Paul ever since they were young. In particular, he had been taken by the stories their father told them, many of which, Edward later realized, had been gleaned from the old black-and-white movies he watched on late-night television. Paul knew this as well, but he'd never let it dampen his enthusiasm.

And so, when he'd phoned the week before to ask if he might come over for a visit, just to get out of London for a few days, and Paul suggested they make the car trip to the many battlefields that crowded this small corner of Europe, he'd feigned excitement, if only to make his brother happy.

He looked at the map again. They were supposed to be making a detour to a monument dedicated to the Second Battalion Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry that Paul had heard about from one of the guys in his unit. Paul had made the decision on impulse, something he was not prone to doing, and Edward was happy to act as his guide. The monument was located outside a small village called Zottegem, and although he could see the site clearly on the map, a tiny red maple leaf marking the location of the memorial, there was nothing in the sprawling farmland they drove through that appeared remotely like a town, small or otherwise.

It was his fault, Edward knew, that they'd lost their way. He hadn't been paying attention since they'd turned off the two-lane highway and onto the bumpy country road. He'd done his best to concentrate on the map, but soon found that although the car was winding its way through the hinterlands
of Belgium, his head was back in London. It was the map. Its chaotic intersections of spidery lines reminded him of the legend for the Underground. That in turn reminded him of Linda, and he wondered just how many times his wife had ridden the Northern Line toward Edgware before he'd finally summoned the courage to follow her.