Half in shadow a novel, p.16
Half in Shadow: A Novel, page 16
“If the war goes on for a lot longer, who’s to say? I am prepared to serve.”
“Do you miss being home?”
“Yes,” he says after some deliberation. “I miss my grandparents, sister, and nieces. You are very thin, Josephine. I hope you don’t mind me saying. Do you have enough food?”
“No one has enough food. Prices are high. Most days we have bread, and other days what vegetables and meat morsels Maman can buy from the market. The money I get paid hardly meets the rise in prices, but we are more fortunate than some.”
It is silent for a period as they finish their tea, and then he looks at her, waiting for something. She examines the bottom of her cup without really seeing it, before looking toward the window. He affects her. Words and sentences jumble in her head.
“You have a nice view,” she says to fill in the awkward silence.
He stands to walk to the open window that overlooks the square. It is her cue to do the same to see the people passing below.
She is level with the patch of white-gold skin in the hollow of his neck. A cold breeze on warm skin and she is thinking of his body just inches away. She turns toward a different view to hide her discomfort. She can sense him watching her, and without warning he is touching her hair, gentle hands pulling the pins that hold her cap. Then hands on her shoulders, burning through her clothing, warm breath at the nape of her neck. She closes her eyes to wait for his lips to connect to her skin.
There is a knock at the door.
“Stay,” he whispers.
He is gone in a second. She stays watching the people walk below as she listens to an exchange that is brief, male, official. When she turns, the door is already closed.
Whoever was there she didn’t see.
He is reading a note that has been handed to him.
“I have to leave,” he says abruptly, like a cold splash to douse the flames that still burn through her body.
His gaze is distant, the cold look of a stranger, preoccupied with bigger worries. She is a waitress again, a prisoner in her own country, and he is someone else, someone who lives far away in her imagination.
“Thank you for the refreshments,” she says. He picks up her cap, discarded on the floor, and hands it to her as she passes through the doorway. She cannot bring herself to look at him. In the corridor, she is free to breathe deeply again, but there is a warmth in her belly that she has not felt before.
Josephine hasn’t noticed the housemaid who has caught her smiling. Josephine nods a greeting; however, the maid does not return the gesture, purposely looking away.
Her mother is overcome with shock at the news of Xavier and has to sit down. Gisela weeps silently and crosses herself.
“I knew it. I felt him here,” she says, clutching the front of her blouse.
Her breathing is laboured, and Josephine worries the news has affected her heart.
“We have to wait, Maman. Nothing is certain. It may be some time before we find out everything.”
But her mother speaks of nothing else, what clothes she hopes to sew him when he returns, what items she will buy to make his favourite food.
Both women sleep better with the news, her mother still excited the following morning.
Franz is nowhere to be seen at the restaurant the following day. Josephine is both relieved that she doesn’t have to face him after their moments together and disappointed, too, that she can’t thank him for the gift.
A parcel of food had arrived at their home that morning. Inside were sausages, kohlrabi, butter, milk, salt, and coffee.
“Do you know anything about this?” Gisela had asked.
“I believe that it is from the manager of the restaurant,” she said.
Gisela is not ready for the whole truth.
15. LOST
Arthur sleeps wedged into the wall of the trench. A drizzle of rain is enough to be a bother, but a choice of shelter is nonexistent. He puts his woollen coat over his head, and despite everything he sleeps so deeply until someone has to shake him several times to wake. It is time for watch. Sentry duty.
Once at his post, he stares at the blackness, low clouds that wash out any definition, imagines the distant Germans, their sentry staring back. The hiss of a flare precedes a burst of red and yellow in the sky that lights up the cratered grey-brown wasteland, and several enemy rifles fire at ghosts. Their side responds as if in conversation.
Just when he thinks he might sink back into his hole in the wall again, he is told it is time to move out. After walking fifteen miles northwest, he can see bursts of fire from another battlefield, two sets of firing lines just ahead.
He has had plenty of time to think on Harriet’s letter, torture himself with words she hasn’t spoken directly, that he knows are there. He has pored over it a dozen more times, hoping he had read it wrongly. Perhaps her time away is only temporary and another letter is on the way to say she misses him. But it is there in the things she doesn’t say, an absence of intimacy. He has lost her.
The Belgian roads are hard on his feet and knees, and his water can is empty. A mile from their destination, there is a strange, pungent smell that attempts to claw its way into the back of his throat.
“Something’s happening,” shouts their lieutenant. “We need to go back.”
The platoon is restless. Something doesn’t feel right. They approach a wagon with a horse lying down still tethered. In the back lies a couple, their faces burned, their tongues hanging out. Several of the men, including Arthur, run a few yards forward to check others lying on the road. There are at least a dozen dead Canadian and Algerian infantrymen, one with green froth around his mouth.
“What is it?” says Arthur.
Someone shouts and points. In the distance he can see what these people had been running from, though they had been caught in it, too late. Another wave is coming. A greenish-white vaporous wall is edging ominously toward them, and the group of soldiers turns to scatter. As he runs to escape the gas, Arthur pulls at the straps of his haversack for the cloth veil soaked in sodium hyposulphate, losing some of the contents of his knapsack, his eating tin bouncing off into a ditch and something else, maybe the rest of his medical kit. He can’t stop to check with the killing cloud on his heels. He discards his ammunition belt and sack as he reaches the nearby canal, his eyes now stinging, and he puts one foot on the edge of the embankment, then crouches to slide the rest of the way into waist-deep water, filthy, muddied with floating things: tobacco packets, paper, an empty tin, and torn pieces of cloth from soldiers’ backs.
Arthur places his face just below the surface. The burning in his eyes is unbearable now, his eyelids on fire. The water is doing little to take away the pain, and tentacles of gas still linger over the canal. He rubs his eyes, then blinks them open. There is burning at the back of his throat, and he submerges again, swallowing a mouthful of water as he does. He bursts from the water coughing and spluttering. He has a choking feeling, as though his throat is closing, and imagines for himself the same fate as the dead men on the road.
He panics, scrambling blindly up the side of the embankment, unaware which side he is on and running several yards. The sounds of firing and then a whistling, and he braces for an onslaught of firepower, the earth then crashing in around him. He is thrown several feet. There are explosions farther away, a different target; he rolls over to rise on all fours, crawling across the earth, which rumbles under his hands and farther upward through bones. It is hell, he is sure of it. Life now muffled with the shrill of crickets in both ears. He stands to walk.
Arthur raises his heavy eyelids a fraction, his vision blurred. Squinting in all directions, he attempts to draw from memory the sodden stretch of wasteland and wooded valley that he came through. The cloud of gas has diminished, or he has strayed far enough from the path of the breeze, he can’t be sure, and he heads toward the light that filters through a woodlands in the distance, tripping over himself and the bumps on the ground. It is unfamiliar territory.
Across a shallow swell of fog that hides the ground, he attempts to walk again, his foot landing awkwardly in a rutted track. He slips, hip smacking the slimy grey clay, elbow cracked on something solid. His hands find the coarseness of a knapsack, useful to lever his weight to stand; then at once he discerns the body attached. A dead man lies front down almost buried in the mud, his head twisted unnaturally, chin resting backward, one eye looking over the shoulder, the other a gaping exit wound.
Arthur hasn’t stayed to find out if the soldier is one of his. He has scrambled once more to right himself, his feet sinking and his clothes now lacquered with claggy mud. A random shot flies over his head, and he ducks, waits a moment to ready for more, then on hands and knees crawls the last yards to the woods.
Bullets whizz past his ears as he stands to walk, then run, the sounds of war following him through the hazy line of poplars. A large explosion overhead, and suddenly the trees above him are on fire, raining burning leaves. He runs again and out the other side through the mist that swirls and rises thickly from the ground.
Ahead he can make out the barbed wire where others have failed to cross, men snagged garishly like scarecrows. He can see the lights glint off the bayonets of the enemy. He can even make out their faces, and then another shell and he is flying once more through the air, landing this time at a strange angle and winded badly. English voices sound vaguely in the distance. Arthur attempts to rise, but a rush of pain travels upward from his ankle, and he falls sideways.
“Over here,” he calls, his own voice clearer, his hearing slowly restoring.
“One of ours,” someone shouts back in English, and then more shots are fired and no more voices.
He drags himself on his good side, his left lower leg completely unusable, though he is unsure of exactly the point of injury since the pain extends all the way to his hip. Then dragging himself through sloshy earth, he reaches a dip in the ground, a shallow crater, and slides inside. He reaches down to touch his leg, feels that there is some kind of mess now near the end of it, buried in a mass of bloodied, torn, and ragged cloth. He straightens so that he can lie out fully on his back to rest, too exhausted now to contemplate his injuries further.
Arthur is unaware how long he stays there, drifting between wakefulness and sleep, dreaming of the fire once more with Jack, and Harriet, too, this time, burned to ash now in his nightmares.
He wakes to late afternoon and heavy rain upon his face, lying drenched in a pool of water. This haven from rifle fire is quickly becoming a small drowning pit should he fall back into unconsciousness.
To move his throbbing head too suddenly is worse than the pain in his leg, the burning sensation in his chest, and his stinging eyes. He drags himself inch by inch along the ground, teeth gritted against his suffering. Did Jack suffer? Too quick, it seems, if Private Penney is right.
Through the fog that sits permanently in his eyes, a low structure—a farmhouse, he thinks—lies ahead, across a stretch of land that seems impossibly far to cover. He stops, exhausted, then moves again, hand against something solid, a barrier or fence. He believes he is now behind enemy lines.
Must keep going.
Arthur climbs over the low fence and hauls himself the final yards to reach the house, to discover it is only the remains of one. He is surrounded by misshapen, jagged pieces of building that have stubbornly refused to yield. There is no roof to protect him from the rain, but a barrier against rifle fire at least. He may not die after all.
He can see dimly in the distance a crimson sunset sinking into ruin, and watches till its flame is extinguished.
He is so thirsty.
His eyelids are almost swollen closed.
16. DISTRACTIONS
“A French plane has been downed near the city just outside the military zone,” says a woman who has come for lunch, perspiring and breathless from rushing to the hotel with the news, dampness showing in her armpits. “You can see the smoke from here.”
“Can I help you, madame?” says Josephine.
“Yes, if you could take my arm,” she says, and Josephine grasps the fleshy excess just above her elbow. “It has been a frightfully long walk. And all this smoke is terrible for my lungs. The tram didn’t come today. Nothing works properly anymore.” The last said a little quieter.
She leans her weight on Josephine until they reach the table with several women and an elderly gentleman of means.
The crash is all the news that is going around the hotel. Whispers and people pretending to be concerned while they overcrowd their cake forks with sponge and cream. Another Allied life gone.
Josephine stays with the woman a moment and waits for her to be comfortably seated. The customer flicks out her fan to wave it at her face.
“I’m terribly sorry you are feeling this way,” says Josephine.
“Oh, never pity me. You look very tired, my dear. It is you I pity, working here,” she says, then more quietly, “with all those Boche.”
Josephine nods politely, giving nothing away, then is pleased to move on. She yawns when no one is watching. She had worked with Anja late into the night.
Benôit is snappy, and Chef acts like a growling bear. They have had to shrink their menu with supply lines blocked, and Chef has had to come up with other things at the last minute, all with Benôit nipping at his ankles. Chef has had to fatten up the sauces with whatever he can find. They are down two staff also, and all the tables are booked.
Franz is back in the restaurant today. At his table of ten is Lady Vivienne, who has been here several times in recent weeks as a guest of various groups. The German officers pay her much attention. She looks beautiful with her hair up and a hairpin with purple feathers and a jewel. She wears fine, long gloves, which she removes so gracefully. She appears not to recognise Josephine, their former exchange brief, as she places an entrée before her. Josephine wonders if it was Franz who organised the pastries to be delivered to Lady Vivienne, and with each passing minute that she observes the pair, it seems more likely. There was a smell of sweet perfume in his room. Could it have been hers?
There is talk about the lady in the kitchen. Renée suggests that she is not English, that there is Russian in her accent, and that she is likely selling her body. According to Renée, who is a purveyor of rumours, her husband was a diplomat of some note. Chef thinks she is related to royalty. Anja says that she is probably just a war widow who has lost her husband and to stop speculating. Josephine says nothing, but thoughts of Lady Vivienne run wild with all these possibilities, and envy creeps in when Franz bends his head low so that the woman in question can whisper something in his ear. It is as if there were no one at the table but them at certain moments. When Josephine moves near to serve their lunch, they pause their conversation and make pleasantries with others.
She has not stopped thinking about the hotel room, about Franz, about their closeness, about the way he has exposed some of his heart. But in the back of her mind, she thinks that he is toying with her. Could he only want her as a mistress? And what of the information on her brother? Does it come with a price?
Franz is reserved today, charming, pleasant enough, though she has watched him plenty to know that he has much on his mind. It has something to do with Lady Vivienne, she thinks. Perhaps he is enamoured with her, and unable to relax so close to her. She is older than he by a good number of years yet still very handsome, with perfectly placed features, and poised, and wearing the most beautiful dress of pale aubergine satin, tiny pearl buttons from the waist to the neck edged with lace, sleeves gathered fashionably at the shoulder. Josephine has now convinced herself that the pastries were from Franz, and Benôit did not wish to tell her the truth. To spare her feelings perhaps? How much does he know? She is also convinced that Benôit sees everything.
“Josephine,” hisses Benôit. “You have to move quickly. You are distracted today. Eyes on the task!”
She rushes to the table with desserts, flushed and soaking in feelings of envy and other people’s surly moods before tripping on a crease in the rug.
The bowls slide off the tray she carries and crash to the carpet, pieces of cake and cream splatter.
One of the officers stands up, a dollop of cream on his trouser leg. And there is some on the sleeve of his uniform as well.
“I’m very sorry,” she says to the table, since she cannot bring herself to look at the faces.
Chef has run from the kitchen to see what has happened and then turns away to send out the apprentice with a damp cloth. Benôit apologises, then is horrified to find Franz crouched on the floor beside Josephine, helping to place items back on the tray.
“Oh no, no, sir!” says Benôit. “Please let us fix this.”
Returned to the kitchen, Josephine fights back tears. She is sure to be fired. When she looks up at Chef, he is red in the face, holding back laughter before he then explodes.
“The look on his face . . . ,” says Chef.
Benôit has entered and seen Chef. Did Josephine see Benôit smile, too? He claps his hands and tells them to get back to work. The officer has been cleaned up. Benôit says he will personally take the new desserts that Chef is preparing and Josephine is to serve another table. He says nothing specifically to Josephine about the incident and does not appear angry. Perhaps she won’t be fired after all.
Josephine is disappointed to see Franz leave with Lady Vivienne on his arm. He is smiling now and relaxed, and his dining companion is paying much attention to him. Josephine wishes she did not have to see it. She wishes she didn’t feel such jealousy, too. As she resets the table for the evening seating, she can see the pair strolling casually together across the Place.
Who cares? He is Boche! she imagines Eugène saying.
Franz is waiting for her on Hainaut Boulevard along her route home. There is a drizzle of rain, and he holds an umbrella.
He pulls the umbrella low between them so they are forced close and seemingly separated from the rest of the world.
