Jean-Baptiste, France,
July 1, 1916, Late Afternoon
T
HE SECRET OF THE ISLAND
was the all-concealing greenery and, as Vignon had discovered to his advantage, unlike most islands it dipped rather than rose in the middle. For a while, Jean-Baptiste lay flat on his back in that hollow, getting his breath back. Only a solitary willow remained where once the small glade had been surrounded by a palisade of vegetation. He heard barges pass as he lay prostrate and invisible and the boum, boum, boum of shelling tolled across the fields. His ribs ached and he was very stiff, his mouth sticky. He spent a few minutes easing his limbs before returning to the river. This time, having looked in both directions, he jumped. The bank was sheer, the water deep where the current scoured and undercut it. The roots of long-dead trees still twined like monstrous serpents just under the surface. As a boy he had worried that they would trap and drown him. He sank into the water, his eyes stinging, and then he was heading for the far bank, though it was more of an effort than he anticipated and he was swept some way downstream. He reached the other side, pulled himself out, struggled to his feet.
He looked around to make sure the area was clear, and there to his astonishment he saw a survivor, a familiar friend, peering out from under two willows that grew more in the water than on land. He blinked twice to clear his vision in case what he was seeing was just the product of hunger, wariness, and wishful thinking. He edged forward, and the regular shape of the obstruction made it obvious, or obvious if you knew what you were looking for. It was a mound of greenish canvas, weighted down by rocks and mud and half-covered by rotting vegetation. He swept the branches aside, his heart beating as if at the sight of a long-lost lover. He moved a rock with his foot, pulled hard at the canvas, and there was Vignon’s boat. He rolled back the cover with some difficulty; it had become stiff and heavy. There was
Sans Souci
. She was on dry land, although holding water and dead leaves. The rowlocks, amazingly, were in place, and the blades of the oars were visible inside the boat. The bailer still hung on its hook.
He crawled over to the boat. The varnish had peeled a bit and a moorhen had nested in the prow, but it seemed sound. He stood up, bent under the overhanging branches, and clambered in. The boat rocked slightly in the earth. He sat down, noticing that the rowlocks had moss growing around them, and sat there for a while, feeling absurdly safe. He shut his eyes. The dappled light, the sound of the river breaking over some submerged obstacle, the birds, and even, in the thin fringe of dried grass, a cricket. With his eyes shut, the grumbling and explosions were the sounds of a summer storm. With his eyes shut, it was all right.
But then his thoughts cleared. What was he doing sitting, his thoughts drifting? Every minute he sat gathering his strength, the injured British soldier’s life was seeping away.
He didn’t want to take the towpath, but the fields proved too rough going for his bare feet. River craft passed him and soldiers were visible from time to time on both sides of the water, but he soon realized they had no interest in him. Soon he was following the canal through a broken avenue of poplars.
Jean-Baptiste felt simultaneously sick and ravenously hungry; it was hard to remember what he was doing. He thought about the food he might find. The people of Corbie would be short of food, everywhere was the same, but his mother would have something. Her tiny garden abutted a narrow waterway that ran down to the river. Every inch was covered in growing things, mostly leeks; he had teased her about the leeks, always her most successful crop, but he remembered red-flowered climbing beans too, the green pipes of onions, and the ferny carrot tops. Her pear tree bore little fruit, but she always believed in next year’s yield. Her hens pecked among the greenery, and an old chair caught the sun’s rays on spring afternoons. The privy was perched precariously on the bank. It was never a place to linger.
Now that the prospect was becoming more of a reality, he allowed himself to think properly of his mother. He wished he had written, wished he had at least told her he was safe. Had he died, she would have gotten his pension, but he had lived. She must have assumed he was a soldier—what man wasn’t? He thought, uncomfortably, that she had wanted him to be one, but that was when there hadn’t been a war; he doubted
any
mother would have wished the last two years on any son. But she would have liked a picture of him in uniform. Other men had laughed about how their mothers had cherished the pictures they had left them: of awkward poses and pristine uniforms. But his mother had never had a chance, and all because he was so furious with Vignon and with her for giving herself to him. Even the memory of it stirred uncomfortable feelings, even now that Vignon had saved his life.
The sun was still warm, but he felt clammy in his damp clothes. He walked along the edges of the fields, pressing his ribs with his hand. Eventually the river narrowed and across the canal Robisart’s mill came in sight, just where it should, though its glass was broken and it looked deserted. Had Captain Robisart survived?, he wondered.
The outlying houses of Corbie appeared; in the few small orchards between them, unripe apples hung on the trees, though the grass was thigh-high. The first house was ruined; nettles grew immediately around it. A word had been painted on it, but it was a word he didn’t know. A scrawny pig nuzzled in the earth. He tried to remember who lived here. Was it the widow Morisot? A skinny girl sidled out of the house and stood between Jean-Baptiste and the pig, staring at him as if he might try to steal the animal any second. He called out a greeting, but the girl just went on staring.
To his left the first river gardens appeared, their neglected crops nothing more than a tangled mass. A few lines of cabbages showed that somebody was still trying to nurture his allotment, but it was mostly just yellow columns of decaying sprouts and rusting metal. There was one incongruous sight: Monsieur Petitbon’s rose bower with its seat that nobody had ever seen him sit in. Made out of old planks and wire, it had always looked mad in winter but now, rising out of rotting vegetables, it was covered in red roses. He walked on. The edge of the towpath was deeply rutted, invaded by dark weeds. Rather than go into the center of town and to the lock, which he was sure would now be guarded by soldiers, he turned toward the Remparts des Poissonniers and up the narrow cut of the Rue du Four Perrache. To his far left was the Mairie, its fairytale turrets and spires like a chateau on the Loire, Vignon had said.
As he came out on the corner of the Place de la République, he could see that the place he was returning to was not the one of his two-year-old memories, although its buildings were mostly intact. He leaned against the wall, tired but suddenly apprehensive, gazing at the British trucks drawn up from one side of the square to the other, at the sawn-off stumps of trees that had once brought shade to the town, and at the soldiers and female nurses milling about. But whom could he tell about the soldier? He was still trying to take it all in when there was a loud shout. The tone was of command, but he didn’t understand the meaning.
Two soldiers were coming toward him. They were clearly British soldiers. One gestured to him to put his hands up. He did so, realizing that in his wet clothes, with a cotton jacket over his army breeches, his own identity was hard to discern. As they reached him, one of the soldiers reached out and turned him around quite roughly. He stumbled. One felt his waistband, presumably checking for weapons, and then said something to him that he didn’t understand. He shrugged. The man spoke louder, but he shook his head.
The same man turned him back toward the square and gave him a firm push in the small of the back. As he walked on, both of them close behind him, he sensed their guns still on him and thought how ironic it would be if he were shot by France’s allies and in his own home town. He was shivering, from his wet clothes, from fatigue and hunger, and now from fear. Around him, the whole town seemed subtly changed. It was like a bad dream, its very familiarity making it appear stranger. It was not just the air of watchfulness, the pockmarked stone of the fine houses on the square, the half-boarded windows and sandbags around the doors, nor even the British flag entangled above the ancient gate to the abbey: the town’s whole character had changed. The sense of euphoria he’d felt on seeing Corbie at a distance from the ruined farm and the weary relief that he’d felt on crossing the river had both faded now, to be replaced by anxiety.
They passed along the Rue Pichet. Many of the shops were closed and boarded up, a handful with smashed windows. One of them, a draper’s, had belonged to a distant cousin of his father’s who in his lifetime had always done his best to put distance between them. Now his shop appeared to have been burned out, reduced to a black cave. More soldiers passed them, marching in loose formation, heavy packs on their backs, looking clean but tired. They reached the abbey, where the great studded door was shut against them. The Virgin in her little shrine had lurched to the left, clutching her child as if she might drop it. Diagonally opposite on the corner, Armand’s bar looked much the same as it had when Jean-Baptiste had left, with its peeling paint and grimy windows, but then Jean-Baptiste’s mother had always said both the bar and Armand himself needed a good cleanout and setting straight. They used to laugh at the priest, who could have crossed the ten meters of the square separating church and bar after mass but instead took a route right around the back and behind the cottages before coming up Rue Pierre Guinard and emerging on Armand’s worn steps, as if he were somehow a different person and surprised to be there at all.
The ancient abbey buildings were scruffier and much, much smaller than he remembered. He knew this was probably due to his time in Paris rather than because of the war. The Boche could blow men and houses into so many bits, or incinerate them to a cinder, but they couldn’t yet shrink them. Vignon came into his head again and he understood the man’s air, which had once irked him, of seeming to find everything in Picardy rather undersized. Vignon came from a city, and cities made men bigger but they also diminished the places men had come from.
The abbey church was much the same, its tower intact, unlike so many he’d seen that had made convenient targets for gunnery crews. And there, in front of it, stood the priest and, even more dreamlike, he was talking to Armand, out in the street, which would never have happened before the war. But the soldiers were hurrying him on, and although Armand and Father Lefroy looked across at the tiny drama, neither seemed to recognize him. The next shop was open, although it seemed to be selling nothing but onions, and then the
tabac
too, and across the square several small shops were doing business. Smoke rose from the baker’s chimney. It was as if all the life of the small community had been sucked into its center.
Jean-Baptiste had begun to see what sort of place it had become. Because Corbie was well behind the lines and of reasonable size, the British were obviously using it as some kind of headquarters, which was hardly surprising. Some of the town life still continued as it always had. Two women in aprons and an old man stopped to talk on the street. One was Madame Didot, who took lodgers, her reputation suffering because of it. His mother had sometimes helped with the laundry. The younger one must be her daughter, Angeline, only grown from a lanky child into a young woman while he had been away. Both looked in his direction, and he wanted to wave but didn’t dare make a sudden movement. If only he could explain to his current guardians that he only wanted to be home. The two women continued to stare. Had he changed so much in two years?
They had reached the old schoolhouse, from where Jean-Baptiste had turned his back on his birthplace, not as he had dreamed in Vignon’s boat but on the schoolmaster’s bicycle. Would they have realized it was he who had taken it? Would his mother have looked for him, or would she have felt too ashamed at having to explain the reasons he had left so suddenly? Perhaps they’d think it was old Godet’s death that had somehow unhinged him and sent him running off to Paris. He’d seen plenty of men since go stark raving mad, faced with smashed heads and raw blood. But
she
knew why he’d gone; she knew because he’d left his father’s boots and taken Vignon’s, which were more elegant and much better fitting.
The older soldier had reached the foot of the steps to the schoolmaster’s house and barred his way before entering himself. The younger still had his gun at the ready. Did he look like a dangerous criminal? a German? a spy? But then he thought that he probably did resemble one of these: a pilferer or a deserter at the very least. Someone who might be shot.
The soldier came out again and beckoned him in. The hall was nothing like he remembered. A British sergeant came out and barked at him, then repeated the gobbledegook more slowly and more loudly. He was no different from Folz, Jean-Baptiste thought. All stripes, voice, and red scowl. The sergeant pushed his face up close. It was bristly. He shouted so loudly that it hurt Jean-Baptiste’s ears, and as he drew back from it he noticed the two soldiers grinning at each other.
The noise had obviously attracted attention. At the back of the hall a door opened and an officer came out, frowning. With his pale face and dark hair, he looked a bit like the schoolmaster, but he was a British captain. He said something to the sergeant and the man saluted sharply. The captain looked at Jean-Baptiste as if taking stock of him.
“God save the King, how do you do,” Jean-Baptiste said, and one of the soldiers sniggered.
The officer went on looking at him, and especially at his bare feet. He was conscious of dried weed on his sleeve.
“You’re French?” he said, finally.
Jean-Baptiste nodded, nodded so fast he felt dizzy and had to blink to clear his head. The captain pointed toward the back room and gestured to the soldiers to go.