Letoile de mer the starf.., p.42
L'Etoile de Mer (The Starfish), page 42
“Answer for what?” my father asked. “And to whom? Not to your country, surely. Not to your brother. Not to me—”
“I deserted my unit!” I lashed out.
He didn’t reply. I stood staring at the pan, and then I turned to look at him. “I deserted, Father. I ran to save myself. Yes, I have everything to answer for.”
“Ohhh... Geoffrey—”
I turned back to the stove and dipped the spoon repeatedly into the soup, stabbing it rather than stirring it.
“That damned fog... It was dark and so cold that night, and I was sleepy. We were all sleepy, and I was exhausted, but I just couldn’t sleep. I sat there in the underground barracks we had tunneled out, and while on watch outside I had seen that fog rising, and I knew the French were taking advantage of it, I just knew. We were sitting ducks underground. Finally, I nudged Gerhardt—you remember Gerhardt—” and when I looked up again, I saw he had risen to stand close to me.
My father nodded.
I sighed. “But I couldn’t wake him. Something terrified me, I don’t know what. I couldn’t take it any longer, so I grabbed my rifle and I ran. I ran!”
“Geoff—” My father reached for me; his face lined with pain. I felt his hand on my shoulder.
I turned away from him again. “I ran,” I said to the soup. It bubbled and frothed like a crater of fresh lava, and my father reached around me to turn off the burner. “I left them all sleeping, the damn fools! I wasn’t half a kilometer away when I heard the shelling. The earth collapsed on top of them, buried them, I learned later. The French had been marching toward us while we slept, and I heard—I heard their screams—”
The spoon went clattering to the floor. It lay there until my father picked it up. Mutely, I accepted the clean spoon he handed me. He waited for me to continue as I poured the soup into a bowl and sat down at the table. I blew on the broth, and he sat down too.
“Not being able to breathe...” I went on, “that’s the most terrifying thought. I was on the verge of panic so many times, living underground in those fucking tunnels we dug. They weren’t even tunnels, just holes in the ground with only one way in and out.” Goblin tunnels.
“I was claustrophobic, on the verge of panic so many times. It didn’t help when the younger soldiers became hysterical. I knew we were already dead, so why not live? I tried to convince my commander to let us take another position that night, but he refused. I tried to wake Gerhardt when I couldn’t take it any longer. It wasn’t my fault no one would listen to me!
“And by that time, I hated the war and knew it had been a mistake. I didn’t want to die for a lost cause, and I didn’t want to kill one more man...” I paused. “No, that’s just an excuse. I’ve tried to rationalize it so many times, but I ran to save my life and I don’t know if what I feel is guilt, because I wouldn’t do it differently. I’m not sorry. And what good would it have done if I stayed?”
“You did more than your share,” my father argued, sitting across from me and leaning forward. “You were a brave soldier. And you really put me through hell, Geoffrey! Running away to join the army, lying about your age! Therèse became hysterical when I told her. Marianne was inconsolable. And Franz blamed himself because he had just been called up and you always followed him, looked up to him. You served too young, and longer than many men.”
“Because I was luckier longer,” I muttered.
My father shook his head. “So you finally ran to save your life. Do you think I blame you? Or judge you? I fought a war, too.”
I nodded, swallowing my soup. In 1850, my father’s great uncle, my Great-Great Uncle Geoffrey, abandoned his staid, boring upbringing in Shropshire, England, for a bohemian life in Paris. He married a Frenchwoman who worked as a stage magician and had a son. When war broke out, he automatically enlisted for France in the Franco-Prussian war, but a growing political sense caused him to become disillusioned with France’s arrogant and unjust provocation of the war, compelling him to serve as a double agent.
His son—and my father’s uncle, my Great Uncle Hiram—renounced his father and eventually died, childless, estranged from the rest of the family. I never met him or his mother, Geoffrey’s wife. But Great-Great Uncle Geoffrey and my grandmother Helena, my father’s French mother, eventually reconciled, which allowed him to live out the rest of his life with my father’s parents in Marseilles, and vaguely I could remember the old man telling us stories of Paris and of then-Chancellor Bismarck whenever we visited.
And then here was my father, himself part British, part French, and half German, who fought briefly for France in the Franco-Prussian war, yet after Germany’s victory left Marseilles for Austria and married first a Polish girl, the mother of Alöis, and then an Austrian one, Karin Horst, my mother and Franz’s. What a family!
“When it comes down to it,” my father continued, “right down to the dirt and the death, you’re not fighting because of the lofty reasons they give you—you’re fighting to stay alive one more minute. You’re killing men who want only the same thing, the same damn thing. You don’t have anything against them. It’s not your fight.”
“The lofty reasons do count, though,” I contradicted him. “It is our fight; if not in one form, then in another. We can’t run away from politics.”
He sat back. “Politics. My God, what the hell do I care for politics when I’m ripped in half, my family standing on both sides of someone else’s border?” He rubbed his chin. “You know, Geoff, legally you are French. You were born in France…”
“I told you a long time ago I wasn’t interested in that!” I snapped.
He kept right on talking. “Your birth was registered in Marseilles as well as in Spital. On your grandparents’ insistence. You could claim French citizenship. Actually, you would have an easier time doing that than Franz did in getting dual citizenship, because you fought the War under a false name.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” I retorted. God, no wonder I dreamed about twins and doubles and such. “I’m Austrian. Of course I’m Austrian. What else could I be?” I spread my hands while he watched me. Then he looked away. Irritably, I scraped at the congealed ring of soup inside my bowl with my spoon. A Frenchman. I could imagine Heumer’s insolent face; I could imagine Gerhardt’s. Hell, I could imagine Artaud’s. Me, a Frog.
“It just wouldn’t—well, I—let’s face it,” I spluttered. “France doesn’t mean anything to me. Yes, I know I was born here, but I didn’t grow up here. I’m living here now, and I accept being here, but it’s not my home.”
My father listened gravely.
I tried to soften my words. “Maybe I’m just too young. You had a full life before me with Alöis and Franz, with Mother and my grandparents. Maybe if I weren’t so much younger than Franz and Alöis, it would be different. Franz remembers Marseilles and Strasbourg. All I remember is Spital and Vienna and Berlin.”
“You loved Spital,” my father murmured. “The only time I remember you being truly content—God knows you weren’t a happy child—was when we lived in the Waldviertel. But do you want to know something, Geoff? You seem particularly happy here, in Paris. You run around with your friends and have so many interests now, and it strikes me this is the happiest you’ve ever been. Don’t you think?”
The teakettle whistled, and he struggled out of his chair to turn the water off before the sound could wake Yvonne. I went on idly scraping my spoon in my bowl while he moved quietly about the kitchen for the tea and a cup. Finally, he came back to the table.
“I have some news, Geoff. Franz and Catherine are considering moving to a larger house, one in the country. There is no spare room here, and…well, your Aunt Therèse will be coming to live with us. Maybe for a long time. Her house in Marseilles will remain in the family but left in the care of her tenants.”
“Oh,” I said carelessly, “really?”
Father laughed. “Don’t sound so enthusiastic!” He set down his filled teacup.
“Of course I’ll be glad to see her. It’s just—well, never mind.”
“I know what a gossip she can be.” Father sat down and blew on his tea. “But it will be such a help to Catherine. Hopefully, between Catherine and the baby, Therèse will be too busy to dote on us men.” He lifted his hand and imitated a chattering mouth by tapping his fingertips against his thumb. It made me laugh.
“Franz is spending a lot of evenings at the office now,” I mused. “His work consumes him more and more. I still can’t figure out exactly what he does, and whenever I ask him anything about the bank, we end up talking about my life and my future. Catherine is either left alone or called upon to play hostess to a bunch of dull businessmen and their wives. And she’s good at entertaining—it would have been torture for Marianne—and she seems to enjoy it too, and I realize it’s her duty, being Franz’s wife, but—”
I broke off. A sad look filled Father’s eyes, a faraway look. I told him, “I hope Franz doesn’t take it personally when I avoid those evenings. Estate planning, investments, ugh. It’s so boring!”
“I’m afraid Franz is becoming the man I used to be,” Father said. At my look, he smiled a little, but his eyes remained sad. “Such voracity as I had then I see now in Franz. I saw it in you too, but you seem more—more relaxed now, Geoff. Hang on to your youth. When you’re young, you want to be older, and you know you are old when you want to be young again.”
“I feel old, too,” I said. “I’ve felt old since the War.”
“Oh no, Geoffrey. You’re so young. Twenty-eight! You can do anything you want.”
“And what if,” I ventured, “I don’t know what I want?”
“What a relief to hear you say that, Geoff. No, don’t give me that look. I know I’m guilty of having pushed you. I—you mustn’t take it personally. That was a mistake. My fear of having failed as a father.”
He was confusing me. “But now I have no goals at all,” I said. “I should have goals, shouldn’t I? I’m reading a lot—mostly poetry, which isn’t very practical—”
“Your mother,” he replied, “used to say, ‘He who fits himself into the world can never leave that world, but he who fits the world into himself will belong anywhere.’ You worried her—you didn’t share her interests then. She loved poetry, ideas, the arts. She was quite like that Justine, though not so flamboyant a girl. I wish I were better read myself. I mostly read the newspaper.”
He laid a hand on my arm, and when he spoke again, his voice was very gentle. “You’ve been preoccupied lately with this Surrealism, talking about it so much, trying to understand it—I don’t think it’s complicated at all.” His hand patted my arm. “The idea that life is unpredictable. That behind it all there isn’t any plan, just the Marvelous, the unknown.
“A young man,” he went on, “has a difficult time recognizing that life offers very few answers. Youth is impatient, doesn’t step back and wait. But your friends, and particularly that Antonin, strike me as being very concerned about the grand scheme, and at such a young age—it’s remarkable, I think.” His hand withdrew and returned to rest beneath his chin, and he contemplated me with bright eyes.
My mind was racing to keep up with him. “So you believe in the Marvelous—is that what you’re saying?” I was jealous of his certainty, the serenity in his voice.
“I believe I got to have a second chance with my youngest son,” he replied hoarsely. “Somehow.” Tears brimmed in his eyes. “And now I wish I hadn’t brushed aside your story, this star-creature you used to talk about. You were trying to tell me something.”
Panic rose in me, and I could tell he saw this. “Forget about that,” I said. “I was hallucinating. It was something I invented. To people my loneliness,” I added, “perhaps. I’ve talked about it as much as I need to.”
“Are you sure? The villagers spoke of it, too. You mumbled about it for hours, on the farm and during that first day here. I sat at your bedside, and you answered my questions.”
The bread I was chewing suddenly tasted like sawdust in my mouth. I forced it down with a swallow of soup. “What did I say?”
“You said the damnedest things, Geoff! Much of it was incoherent, so I can’t remember. That twin you used to pretend you had, you talked about that, and about falling. You were terrified; you were trying to get back home. ‘Lost, lost!’ I remember that. Then you switched to talking about yourself in the third person, telling me about yourself. Over and over, the same question: ‘Why did Geoffrey have to d—?’”
He stopped. But a voice in my head completed that question against my will. I dipped the bread into my soup, eating automatically to fill the crater left by the silent impact of that word.
“I’m moving out,” I told him finally, adopting a casual tone. “We don’t have a spare room if Aunt Therèse moves here. And, I think it’s time.”
“That doesn’t surprise me, Geoff.” My father nodded, but his eyes were wide, and his manner seemed forced. “This house has shrunk. And you want to spend more time with your friends.” From upstairs came the sound of Yvonne’s squalling and we both cringed. “I’m too old for this, I’m afraid. I thought I’d enjoy being around babies again, but I like to get sleep at night, too.”
I added, “I want you to come with me.”
He blinked then. “Are you sure?” he stammered after a moment. “You won’t find it a nuisance, having the old man around?”
“Artaud’s older than me and he lives with his mother, and they’re both fine.”
“That’s not what I hear. I hear they don’t get along well. He’s moved out and rented a room in Aleron’s hotel again, hasn’t he?”
I nodded. Artaud’s mother now lived in Passy in the 16th arrondissement. When I had visited them, Artaud had merely shouted, “I’m introducing Geoffrey!” from across the room to her, then ignored her. She had come forward to introduce herself to me and started talking, and then I remembered why she was acquainted with my chatterbox aunt.
Euphrasie Artaud was a deeply religious woman who had attended my aunt’s church while living in Marseilles. Unlike my aunt, she was heavyset, dark-haired and dark-skinned and quick-tempered. Under her criticism, her son shrank into himself, compressing his rage into a few short, cutting words that pulled tears out of her eyes. Never had I seen anyone blubber as freely as she did, and it made him recant everything he said.
Later, turning the incident over and over in conversation with me, he would grow angry again to realize how confused he always became in her presence about what was right. At other times she clung to him, petting him and calling him by that diminutive, “Nanaqui.” It was as self-effacing in Greek as his Christian name was in French; both Nanaqui and Antonin meant, “Little Antoine.”
“They don’t have as much in common as you and I do,” I told my father. “Anyway, give it some thought. I’m thinking of moving farther out, not into the city. The trains are quick and reliable, and I could have a small, manageable garden. We wouldn’t be trapped out there. I could still get to my job every day.”
My father chuckled at this. “You wouldn’t miss the night-life?” he teased. I shrugged and ate my soup. He leaned back in his chair. He seemed both pleased and troubled. “Catherine and your brother are also thinking of moving further out. There is a house in Louveciennes, a lovely village west of Paris. Rents are cheaper, and a larger house would enable all of us to remain together.”
“That would be fine, too.” I put the last of my bread in my mouth and chewed.
“I’m dying, Geoff,” he said then, calmly, while my mouth was full. I choked and chewed, and he pushed his cup of tea toward me. “I’m sorry. I’ve grown so used to the idea… Franz and Catherine have known for some time. My health was the real reason for my coming to Paris.”
I painfully swallowed tea and bread. “How can you be dying?” I demanded. “You’re in perfect health!”
“No, I assure you, I am ill. I have been ill for some time.”
“Oh, Aunt Therèse is coming to live with us all of a sudden, is she? To help Catherine with Yvonne, or to take care of you?” The bowl slid away from me when I pushed it. It fell over the table’s edge and broke, leaking soup onto the floor.
I shoved back my chair to face my father and saw that defiant look I knew so well. “You knew you were sick,” I said. “You’ve ‘been sick for some time’ and been denying it, and you didn’t do anything about it, did you?”
He looked away from me then.
“You didn’t!” I flared. “That’s why you kept saying it was nothing. You want to die, don’t you? You’ve wanted to die since Mother died.”
He sighed. “No, Geoff, no. That’s not true. I—”
“Oh, really? Are you telling me you didn’t turn your back on us when Mother was bedridden, when it got so bad she couldn’t speak? I’m not saying you didn’t provide for us, but did we see you much after mother’s death? You once complained that we used to be side by side, you and me. Who pulled away first? Me?”
Yvonne howled upstairs, and I heard Catherine say, “Give her to me.”
Franz’s hoarse voice, laced with irony, called down the stairwell. “May I join the nice, peaceful argument in the kitchen?”
“You stay right where you are!” Catherine admonished him. “It’s time they had it out.”
The rhythmic creaking of a rocking chair overhead was the only sound from upstairs. I glared at my father, and he lowered his eyes.
“You are right, Geoff, and I’m sorry,” Father replied. He sounded suddenly out of breath again, but the words spilled from him. “I threw myself into work after your mother died—I admit that.
“If it’s any consolation, Franz has also had his say about those years. Your mother was the glue who held us together, and after she was gone, I admit I pressured Franz to raise you instead of taking charge as I should have. And yes, I minimized my illness, to you and to myself. Catherine has informed me quite bluntly we need to talk to each other more instead of going to her. She has her hands full.”
