Skylark, p.7
Skylark, page 7
“Me too,” Julian says quietly.
They stand there, staring at each other for a moment longer. Then Kristof sighs. He straightens his shoulders, cracks his neck to one side. “I guess we should get back to it.”
CHAPTER 16
Henri Allard had arrived at Sainte-Anne’s two weeks earlier—one of thousands of men broken at the Battle of Sedan. Most not by bullets or shrapnel, but by something far more insidious.
Kristof has always tried to meet new patients with empathy, to picture their experiences. At their intake interview, as Henri talked, he imagined the scenes in detail. Henri in the Ardennes with his brigade—boots soaked in morning mist, rifles slick in their hands, still believing what they’d been told. That the forest was impassable to tanks. That the Maginot Line would hold. That Belgium’s neutrality would buy time.
Then the forest exploded. As the earth shook, Stuka bombers screamed overhead. Their sirens designed to crack nerves well before their dropped ammunition loads cracked bodies. The wailing sound—part banshee, part machine—drove into every crevice of a man’s brain.
“The communication lines went dead first,” Henri said. “Cut to ribbons. Then came the rumors. German tanks at Bulson, they said. Panzers everywhere. We couldn’t tell what was real.”
The panic spread like wildfire through the ranks. Soldiers abandoning positions that had never been breached. Equipment left behind. Entire units dissolving into chaos.
“I ran,” he said, voice hollow. “Everyone did.” He’d been found days later, catatonic in a ditch, physically unharmed but mentally shattered.
Now, on early rounds, Kristof finds Henri awake, staring at the ceiling, restraints lightly tied to the bed railings at his sides.
“Do you know what day it is?” Kristof asks quietly.
“Wednesday.” Pause. “I’m not sure.”
They usually speak in brief exchanges. Henri startles easily. He doesn’t want to talk about the war. But when Kristof mentions his Lyon accent, he nods.
“My mother had a restaurant,” he says. “I used to make sauces. Béchamel. Hollandaise. Things that can split, if you’re not careful.”
Something in that sentence sticks with Kristof.
“You’re not crazy,” he said once, when Henri flinched at his own reflection in the dark window. “You’ve just seen too much. And your mind is trying to survive it.”
Over the coming days, Kristof returns to Henri’s room again and again, working to build trust. Some visits last only minutes. A check of the restraints. A question about sleep. Other times, he lingers—talking softly or saying nothing at all.
Henri doesn’t warm quickly. But he begins to accept small comforts: a cup of tea, a folded towel under his knees, a lamp Kristof leaves burning low. When Kristof offers to read aloud from the newspaper—just the headlines—Henri doesn’t say no.
Progress is uneven. There are still nights when Henri thrashes in his sleep or stares down an empty corner of the ward like it’s full of ghosts. But he also begins to ask quiet questions of Kristof.
“Where are you from?” “Do you believe in God?” “Do you think I’ll ever be normal again?”
* * *
HYPNOSIS HAS RARELY been Kristof’s first option with a patient. It’s not a trick or a shortcut. But for someone like Henri—locked in traumatic memory—it can become a door. Not to revelation, necessarily, but to stillness. To relief. The felt memory of safety.
Kristof remembers one patient in Amsterdam, a dockworker who hadn’t spoken for months after watching his crew die. Under hypnosis, guided by nothing more than the image of seaweed drifting in a tide pool, the man’s breathing had changed. His eyes softened. For ten minutes, he had rested in the world again. That was enough to begin.
With Henri, Kristof waits for the right day. Not until the orderlies report three nights of sleep in a row. Not until Henri volunteers a memory—one filled not with concertina wire or mortar explosions, but food. Helping his mother make ratatouille as a child, how she would always slice the zucchini thin enough to see through.
That same afternoon, Kristof asks Henri if he would be open to trying the therapy. He doesn’t ask plaintively or even hopefully—just as a next step. And Henri nods.
* * *
THE THERAPY ROOM’S green wallpaper is meant to be calming, though Kristof always finds it vaguely unsettling. He lowers the shade, softening the light. Henri lies stiffly on the chaise. Kristof settles into the chair across from him.
“Thank you for trusting me,” he says.
“I wouldn’t go that far.” Henri’s mouth turns up ever so slightly. Then he says, “I’m ready, I guess.”
“I want you to close your eyes and take a deep breath.”
Henri looks a bit uncertain but follows the cue.
“Now, try to think back to a time before the war, a moment in your life when you felt completely at peace. It could be a place, a person. Anything that brings you a sense of calm and happiness.”
Henri is quiet for a few moments, brow furrowed—then: “My grandparents have land near Bordeaux. They keep goats. I used to spend summers there.”
“That sounds like a wonderful place. Was it hilly?”
“Rolling. A little rocky.”
“Good. Now I want you to imagine yourself there. Can you see it?”
“Yes.”
“What’s there, right in front of you?”
“A path. My grandfather’s dog chasing a rabbit. The grass is tall. Chicory, little white flowers…”
“You hear the goats’ bells. You feel the sun. The grass moves like water in the wind.”
“Yes,” Henri says, as his hands begin to unclench. His breathing grows more steady.
Kristof continues, spinning the threads of the dream weaver. Together, they follow the path up the hillside. Grasshoppers click like flint. Clouds drift like schooners across a faultless blue sky. The world wraps gently around them, receding.
Kristof’s own memories are part of the spell. He knows that and gives in to it, using every soft pang from his lost boyhood to lift the magic carpet higher. Soon, he doesn’t need to think about the words. The action of speaking and his intentions do all the work for him, drawing out the right cues and markers like bends in a familiar road. Ones he can find by feel alone.
Soon they both stand in the same place, having gone there together. The light at the crest of the hill is gold on gold. Looking out, the sun on their faces, they both see the countryside, where generations of shepherds have tended their flocks. Where they will go on tending them, unharmed and undeterred, into the distant future.
Kristof watches Henri’s forehead go smooth, his hands loose in his lap, and feels moved. The war has slipped out of Henri’s body for now, swept away like chaff. Even minutes of peace like this can make a difference. The body remembers. And where memory goes, healing might follow.
When Kristof brings him gently back, Henri blinks, adjusting, like a man climbing out of a diving bell after a voyage below.
“How do you feel?” Kristof asks.
“A little sleepy,” Henri says. “Calmer.”
“That’s a good sign. You know… I feel calmer myself.” He says this without moving from the chair, without shifting his notebook. For now, the world outside can wait.
CHAPTER 17
Spring has never been Kristof’s favorite season. He can still remember every etched detail of that March in 1935, when the thaw came too quickly. The Waal River ran fast with melted snow, its banks sodden and treacherous, even though the air smelled of cherry blossoms.
He was in medical school then, focused on textbooks and cadavers. The cling of formaldehyde followed him everywhere, no matter how vigorously he washed his hands, and yet he loved learning the map of human bodies. He took comfort in this—in names, in order, in control. Here was the brachial plexus. Here was the sciatic nerve.
But Annelies lived outside such lines. Light hit her too brightly. Sounds cut too sharply. The world poured into her, more than her slight frame could hold. Most afternoons, he would find her in the living room, sprawled on the carpet, surrounded by books. Never a chair—too ordinary. Books were her portal, her escape.
Some days, she wouldn’t even notice him standing there, her concentration like a room she entered alone, closing the door behind her. Other times, she leaped up like an uncoiled spring, words rushing from her in breathless, urgent bursts.
“Listen, Kristof. Hölderlin writes of rivers as if they’re the veins of gods. Die Donau, der Rhein—they’re not just water but time itself flowing.” She looked up to see if he was following her. “The poet’s voice still reaches us, long after his mind collapsed.”
That was Annelies. Finding voices others missed. Building bridges that outstripped time. In summer, she read Hölderlin and Goethe in the garden while their mother’s roses blazed. But there were other days when she slept late, not wanting to leave her room. Nights he heard her pacing, reciting poetry in German, obsessed with translating the complex rhythms.
The warning signs were there, but subtle. And he had been young, and so certain of the solidity of the world. Intent on his own ambitions.
He had entered medical school at the age of twenty—far younger than most of his peers. A prodigy, they’d called him—always first in his class, especially in sciences. At first, he’d set his sights on becoming a surgeon, drawn by the precision it required, the clean lines between success and failure. There was glory in surgery, in being the youngest to master complex procedures.
This was what consumed Kristof in the spring of 1935—seeing his name in medical journals, his techniques taught to others. Meanwhile, the person he loved most retreated further and further into a black cloak of sadness.
* * *
THAT MORNING, SHE’D left for school as usual, her dark hair caught up in a neat braid, her wool coat buttoned against the lingering chill. Nothing seemed different.
The policeman who came to their door kept apologizing, as if courtesy could soften the blow. They had found her schoolbooks stacked neatly on the bridge railing. Her German literature notes carefully written out, translations of Rilke’s poetry in her precise hand. A letter lay beside them, folded twice and addressed simply:
Liebe Familie,
I’ve tried to be strong, to bear what cannot be borne, but I’m so tired. For a long time, I have wanted to believe that life could be like Rilke’s rose petals, “noiseless, living, opening without end.” And yet so much feels cold and walled off and too difficult instead, or perhaps I simply don’t have enough faith. Remember me when you read Rilke’s words:
“Every angel is terrifying.” Now I understand why.
Alles Liebe,
Annelies
Kristof had watched his mother’s face drain of color. Her hand flew to her throat, to the small gold cross Annelies had given her the previous Christmas. His father went still as stone.
The days that followed moved like a dream. Their house filled with timid whispers, with covered dishes no one ate, with relatives who didn’t know whether or not to mention her name. His mother took to her bed, emerging only to sit in Annelies’s room, touching her books, her sweaters, the dried flowers she’d pressed between dictionary pages. His father shut himself into his study for hours, emerging with red-rimmed eyes. At night, Kristof heard him pacing, pacing, much the way Annelies had once done.
“She was doing so well,” his mother would say, over and over. “She seemed better.” Just days before, Annelies had laughed telling a story at breakfast, his mother reminded him. And what about the new dress she’d wanted to wear to graduation? Why would someone who had been planning so carefully for the future suddenly choose to abandon it?
But Kristof thought back to other telling moments. The chapped, ragged edges of Annelies’s nail beds, where she wouldn’t stop picking at the skin. The way she’d given away some of her favorite German poetry books the week before. How she’d hugged him longer than usual that last morning.
“Hölderlin wrote even as his mind fragmented,” his sister had told him once, perched on the windowsill with a volume of poetry in her lap. “He kept writing, kept finding beauty, even as he lost himself. Isn’t that remarkable?”
Her entire face had lit up then. But now he wondered if she had been talking about inevitability instead of beauty. If the meaning of Hölderlin’s story for her wasn’t resilience, but disappearance.
Annelies was his sister, but she was also his first patient. Kristof just didn’t know it then.
Now, years later, on the overcrowded neurasthenic ward at Sainte-Anne’s, men sit or lie in broken postures, fighting silent battles. Their pain hums beneath the surface, just as Annelies’s did once. Waiting for someone to hear it.
This is why he stays a little longer than necessary near the bedsides of men like Henri Allard. Stays until their breathing steadies, until the tension eases in their faces and hands. These small moments feel like steps toward trust. Like beams and trusses slowly set into place for an invisible but crucial bridge.
If once he stood outside his sister’s door feeling utterly powerless, these days he leans in, listening to the quiet between his patients’ words. As if by helping them, he might finally understand her.
Here he can knock at another soul’s door. And this time, he can wait for an answer.
CHAPTER 18
It’s the last week of school. If the sun had its way, nothing would be wrong. It falls in golden sheets across the pavement, catches in the curls at the nape of Léa Engel’s neck as she erases the board for the last time. The classroom smells like chalk dust and pencil shavings and the faint sourness of children trying not to sweat in wool jumpers.
The bell rings, and everyone bursts out as if summer still means apricot tartlets, marbles in the street, and dusk that lasts forever. As if the world is the same as ever. But Sasha can feel the difference in the air. In the way Madame Blin didn’t meet their eyes when she handed back their last assignments. In the way Joseph Metz’s desk has stayed empty since Passover.
On the walk home, Sasha passes three families she doesn’t recognize—mothers with bundled children, one with only a single suitcase, another with none. They linger near the bakery, trying to look as if they fit in here, but their shoes are all wrong. A boy about Rald’s age crouches on the curb, drawing something invisible with his finger.
She wonders if this was how her family looked to others when they first arrived. Foreign and conspicuous. At seven, she barely knew the word for bread. Maman had tried to coach her before they entered shops: S’il vous plaît, merci beaucoup, non, je regarde seulement. And yet she stammered, reddening, wanting to run away.
They had rented a furnished apartment then, with a nice synagogue nearby. A radio that picked up Warsaw on clear nights. They were not homeless, not exactly. But they had left behind something permanent and taken the opposite with them. Their lives folded into suitcases, carried like contraband.
Now she passes the new wave of refugees and tries not to stare. Part of her wants to reach out. To say: It gets easier. To say: There are alleyways with fig trees in bloom, and small kindnesses you won’t expect. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t even slow down.
Instead, she lets her shadow stretch long ahead of her on the cobblestones and thinks about how strange it is to plan for a summer that might not come.
At the corner of the square, she slips into the Jardin des Gobelins. The gate creaks faintly behind her. It’s peaceful here, a stretch of surprising greenery tucked between old buildings with blistered shutters and mostly empty cafés. Today, there is an old man reading a newspaper on one of the benches and a girl younger than Rald dragging a stick through the dust as if she’s plowing a field. Near the edge of the fence, a woman in a headscarf kneels beside a narrow garden bed, cutting back a tangle of calendula. For a moment, the woman pauses to watch a pair of sparrows flitting down to drink from a puddle. One hops onto the stone border beside her, curious. She smiles at it and doesn’t go back to her work until the little bird flies away.
Sasha sits on a low wall beside the fountain. The water is cloudy, ringed with algae, but it still burbles as if nothing has changed. Maman says this park was an island once. The river used to run open here, before they buried it. Before the factories closed. Now the Bièvre flows underneath, hidden but still moving. She thinks about that sometimes—how a river can vanish from the surface and still exist. Still carry its story through the dark.
Is that what war is? Something hidden but rising, quiet only until it’s not? Everyone says it’s happening elsewhere. In the east. Over the airwaves. But these families—tired, slow-moving, silent—are not elsewhere. They are here now, passing like wraiths through Sasha’s ordinary streets. They wear everything they own and still carry almost nothing.
Taking out her notebook, she rests her hand on the cover but doesn’t open it yet. The wind lifts the corner of a colored flyer caught beneath a nearby yew shrub—headlines in bold type, names of cities she isn’t sure how to pronounce. She wants to write something about how this all feels. About how much she worries that nothing will ever be the same. About being thirteen and not having lived enough yet to know what a single death means, let alone hundreds of thousands of deaths. Millions.
Her mind feels muddled. The empty lines of her notebook seem to mock her. What can she say? What does she actually know? Maybe only this:
Whether we can hear or taste or touch it, the war is here. Like blazing sunshine. Like these sparrows.
Like an empty suitcase and the wrong shoes. It’s already begun.
Saint-Marcel, Paris
1664
CHAPTER 19
The last light of day slants in dulling rays as Étienne rounds the bend, hoping to get to the spring and then home before full dark. Many of the quarriers use the lower well, but the upper source runs clearer, purer, if one believes in such things.
