In the Fall They Leave, page 20
Her mother has only one question. “Will he live?”
Marie-Thérèse almost hesitates. “We’ll do everything we can, Maman.”
Brio
Jacques? The doctor has a new medicine for you. Now you’ll get better. Soon it’ll be spring and you’ll be able to sit in the garden. This is something to think about, yes?”
She’s predicting, she realizes, but it doesn’t seem a bad thing.
“You came for my funeral.”
“Ah, dear brother, I didn’t come all this way to attend any funeral. Au contraire! I came to help you get well. And I vow to do so. I made the journey from Antwerp in a sugar beet wagon and also a woodcutter’s wagon. People helped at every stage of the way and now I’m going to help you. Sometimes things seem so complicated and confusing, but actually, under it all, it’s quite simple. Your body, for example, wants to get better and is trying very hard.” She explains about his new medicine and how the blood pressure apparatus works. She talks about the heart and how it works. As if I know.
When she takes his hand it feels like a stone in winter. Blood pressure and pulse readings confirm her fear. The heart weakening, stumbling forward and pausing, stumbling forward again. Yet heat singeing his brow. Is the fever killing him or the dysentery? Or both?
Using half a grain of the emetine hydrochloride dissolved in sterile water, she prepares the hypodermic.
“There. Now you will get better.”
In the parlor she tells her parents and Willy she’ll wake them if there’s any change or if she needs them. She keeps all dark thoughts to herself.
Madame Prennet, the cancer patient, died.
So did the bayoneted officer.
Sometimes the body doesn’t want to get better. Sometimes it only wants its freedom.
Outside, the chalky light of a waning full moon makes shadows in the back garden. Jacques drifts in and out of consciousness. Each time he moans, she places a cloth over his brow and says any quiet words pulled from the haze of her own exhaustion. A pet they once had. A soccer game. Boating on the largest of the Ixelles ponds. She takes his blood pressure and pulse every hour and notes the numbers.
Rising! But if it’s too fast there’ll be fibrillation or, worse, cardiac arrest. She watches for danger signs as she fights off sleep.
Sometimes he can swallow the water she gives him. At intervals purges of fecal matter gush onto the sheet. She bundles it up, wipes down the rubber mat, cleanses her hands and forearms, and puts another folded half-sheet on the bed.
On and on throughout the night. At dawn, the numbers are holding steady within the normal range.
Waking later in an unfamiliar room, she throws on a robe and rushes to Jacques’s room. Willy is just removing the blood pressure cuff. “You fell asleep and Father carried you to your room. I can do it. I watched you, and Father also showed me. I wrote everything down.”
“Très bien!” After looking at the numbers, she takes a new reading. Still in range. Her own heartbeat slows as she prepares another hypodermic.
By the fourth day Jacques is sitting up and able to eat by himself. The great purges have abated, and there’ve been no violent muscle contractions. When she stands out in the back garden to breathe fresh air, her mind is all but blank except for a single thought held there as if within a gilded frame: Jacques will live.
Doctor DeKett expresses no surprise, but she doesn’t mind. Her own happiness at what seems a miraculous achievement is validation enough. At scheduled times, she administers the emetine hydrochloride, and the family keeps to its regimen of shifts and monitoring and hygiene. She even insists to the doctor, again mostly by gesture, that he send all of their stool samples to Rotterdam for testing, a request shocking Madame Hulbert into silence, though she complies.
One evening, the three of them at the dining room table, Marie-Thérèse tells them about their house in Brussels. Her mother grips the table edge and goes pale. Her father takes hold of his wife’s arm. Willy is staring at Marie-Thérèse. Then Monsieur Hulbert says, “I was afraid of exactly that.” A lengthy silence follows until he adds, “Sometimes people lose everything in a fire. This is not so different, no?”
“I didn’t want to tell you.”
“It’s better to know.”
An image of the stripped music room comes, the glint of copper wires, the scraps of felt, the cast-iron plate jutting out of the subflooring and reflecting a bit of light.
By the end of February Jacques can sit in a wheelchair. Sometimes his eyes are dull; at other times he’s able to focus on conversations and even play a hand of cards with Willy. One afternoon a small dog follows Marie-Thérèse back from the village center. So many dogs wandering about now, a villager complains. Many lost or abandoned in Belgium and wandering across the border. This one has a black coat with black and brown markings around its face. His paws are narrow and all four legs are encased in dried mud that resemble plaster casts.
Willy helps bathe the dog outside, fleas and flea dirt falling from his fur, the water blackening and bloody with them. The dog shakes his coat nearly dry, and she combs out the remaining fleas. The small body with protruding ribs is pocked with sores both fresh and scabbed over.
Madame Hulbert isn’t pleased. What if fleas get into the house? What if he has some disease and bites one of them? “But he wants to be here, Maman,” Willy says. “He has no home. Jacques can give him a new name.”
Marie-Thérèse brings out more warm water and soap.
The presentation takes place in Jacques’s room, the dog wrapped in a towel, with only his face and ruff showing. “Look, Jacques!” Willy says. “Look what we have!”
Jacques has been gazing at the ceiling. Slowly, he focuses on the bundle.
“We must name him! What do you want to call him, Jacques? He’s ours!”
Marie-Thérèse watches her brother’s face.
“Let me see,” he finally says. Willy brings the dog closer and unloosens the towel.
“Brio,” Jacques says.
Marie-Thérèse exhales. Brio: Vigor, brilliance. But then she wonders if he’s being sarcastic.
“Brio it is!” Willy cries, hugging the dog.
That night Madame Hulbert, wrapped in a shawl against the chill in the house, knocks on Marie-Thérèse’s bedroom door just as a church bell in the village is ringing midnight. It’s Marie-Thérèse’s turn to sit in Jacques’s room, and she’s been awake for a while. But the exhausted, distressed look on her mother’s face causes her to abruptly sit up. Worse, her mother is apologizing and her eyes are filling with tears.
“Maman, what happened? Has Jacques—”
“No, no, ma chérie. He is sleeping well.” Madame Hulbert sits on the side of the bed and extends her hands. Confused, Marie-Thérèse takes both in her own. Then Madame Hulbert is examining her daughter’s hands as if she were the nurse.
“Once I hoped that these hands would create wonderful music on grand stages. Dreams die very hard.”
“Oui, Maman. They do.”
“I was foolish, trying to relive my life through you. It is a drug, you know, all that adulation from an audience. One simply…wants it again and again. Needs it. Sitting with your brother night after night, I’ve had much time to think. And I see now that you’re able to create miracles of an entirely different kind, and no less magnificent. I was selfish, and I’m sorry. I was angry, and you, with me. I hope you won’t be any longer.” She exerts pressure on her daughter’s hands. “Can you forgive me?”
“Maman, I wasn’t angry, just sad. And of course I forgive you, though there’s no need for forgiveness. You—”
“My not understanding, my withholding love, the vanity of requiring an artistic passion, imposing one’s will…those are sins. Failures of the heart. You must not be sad any longer. You’ve found your true talent.”
Words Marie-Thérèse has longed to hear, but these hold no enthusiasm. Just resignation.
Madame Hulbert leans forward to hold her daughter.
“Oh, Maman,” Marie-Thérèse says, patting her mother’s back as if she were little Janine in need of comforting. “Merci.”
Geese
For news there is the tobacconist shop in the village, which carries newspapers from larger towns. Using a pastiche of French and rudimentary Dutch, Marie-Thérèse learns that the war, far from nearing a close, is worsening. The Allies have been mounting a large offensive in the Artois and Champagne regions, while in late January German Zeppelins floated across the English Channel and dropped their bombs on England. Now German U-boats have been attacking shipping in the Atlantic. “Torpedoing everyone!” the tobacconist says with disgust. “Allies, neutrals, even British passenger liners. And fighting now, in Poland and on the Mediterranean. Soon, maybe here. Who knows?” When the man’s rage subsides, she asks if he’s read anything about a clinic in Brussels. “No,” he says. “Just about the scarcity there.”
And then Monsieur Hulbert tells them at dinner one evening that he found a house in Rotterdam through an agent and also has been offered a position in an eye clinic. He refills their wine glasses and raising his own, says, “So now, my dear family, we can begin anew.”
“Father, I—”
“Ah, ah, ah! Before you say anything, please consider that you will be able to continue your studies there in peace. So will Willy and soon, Jacques. We cannot move back, at least not for some time.”
His words bring Brussels to the foreground again, along with a surge of anxiety, and longing for the girls.
Later, in his room Jacques says, “I will never find peace.”
“Why do you say that, Jacques?”
“Why? When I was shot, I fell on top of someone who was cut right open by bullets. His insides sprayed all over me. Even in my mouth. Did I help our country? No. I fell on top of a dead man. Then I was captured. Then I was left to die with some others. We were supposed to be taken to Germany. I don’t know why we weren’t. Well, they ran away instead. I don’t know why I didn’t die like the rest of them. In my head they are crying for water. How can I give them any? So, no. I will never find peace. Why should I go to school and learn? Learn what? There is nothing more to learn.”
Hearing these words horrifies her. Yet she knows that if he can talk about it, he can heal…possibly. Brio jumps up on the bed and settles himself alongside Jacques, but Jacques pays no attention to him. “For hours I listened to men dying, wanting water and dying. And now I should have peace? In the fine city of Rotterdam? I hear them screaming and then they are quiet and I am alone. Then they start screaming again, all of them.”
“I’m sorry, Jacques. I’m so sorry.”
“Well, you tried to warn me, but I wouldn’t listen. I ran off and then I did…nothing.”
“You may have inspired others.”
“What good is that if I couldn’t help them? I don’t believe in honor anymore. I think I killed one German. Just before I was shot. I fired and saw three go down but others were firing too so I don’t know. Still, I thought, I killed an enemy soldier! And then I was falling down on top of that dead man. I don’t know his name. I would like to know his name. Even though he is in my dreams and is terrible. A mass of guts. I am so frightened of him in those dreams, yet if I knew his name maybe I wouldn’t be. Maybe.” Jacques covers his face and gives way to weeping, his thin body convulsing. She sits alongside him, an arm around his shoulder as he cries. Then he’s saying, in short breathy phrases, “Nothing made sense before…how I am German and the Germans are fighting and killing us and we them. Nothing makes sense now. Least of all honor. Oh, I thought it was honorable to serve our king. You tried to talk me out of it. But I was stupid. I wanted to with all my heart. But I don’t think that way anymore. I couldn’t think that even if I tried. There’s nothing honorable about…swallowing someone’s guts.”
“No, you’re right. But, my dear brother, you followed your heart. You did what you felt at the time was the only thing to do. How could you have known? How could any of us?”
“You tried to tell me.”
“Because I thought you were too young, too inexperienced. But love of one’s country is still a good, Jacques.”
“You know, I think I finally went because I was so…angry.”
“Yes, you were angry.”
“Well, I learned, didn’t I?”
“We are all still learning, my dear brother.”
In the next days, his wounds continue to heal, but his deteriorating mental state alarms everyone. There are outbursts alternating with sullen silences and refusals to join the family or eat. The nightmares continue, sometimes waking the household. Days, he rebuffs Willy and ignores Brio. When he does speak, he’s curt and sarcastic. Marie-Thérèse’s father is afraid that Jacques will find a way to take his own life. “I don’t share this concern with your mother, but I’m quite afraid. I would like to move now. What do you think? Will a change of scene help?” Marie-Thérèse wishes she could talk this over with the matron. Her own instincts, though, tell her that Jacques needs a specialist in mental trauma and as soon as possible. The prospects for that will be good in Rotterdam. So, yes, she tells her father, they should go.
In the garden behind the small brick house, snowdrops have given way to crocuses, and those to early tulips, everything finding its way out of the dark sodden earth. She wants to take it as a hopeful sign, but progress in the vernal world, and its heartbreaking ephemeral beauty, only makes her dilemma all the more painful. Is it possible to save the girls, the matron, and Jacques? Or is she guilty of a kind of hubris in thinking that she can somehow accomplish all that? In fields surrounding the village, the newly tilled loam is chocolate brown against the chartreuse line of windbreaks. Spring breezes waft about the spicy sent of poplar buds. Birdsong and color. Streams and canals brimming. A heaven, in its way, but she’s always tired…tired, anxious, and restless. Dreams of frozen water and white, wind-blown curtains rob her of rest.
You’re coming with us, Marie-Thérèse, aren’t you? You really can’t go back there now. It’s too dangerous. Really, it’s madness to go back! Come with us, and when it’s safe, you can return then, if you wish. Doesn’t that make sense? And you can help us take care of Jacques.
But I’m needed there. I can find a good doctor for Jacques in Rotterdam and then… You say you are needed there, but others are at the clinic, no? We have only you.
Those words, finally, the proverbial straw.
In early May they move into the new house in Rotterdam, one overlooking a small park and a canal running from Rotterdam, through Delft, and on to The Hague. When the house’s casement windows are open, she can hear bargemen calling to one another. And can see livestock floating by or bales of wool, sometimes straw and hay, coal and produce, a ceaseless procession of goods and creatures plying both ways, all in some service to humankind. On sunny days flecks of light ride the water. Willy begins school and makes a friend named Kiels. Madame Hulbert has begun involving herself in the city’s cultural life, and Monsieur Hulbert is relieved to find acceptance, not prejudice, at his new clinic. Marie-Thérèse, after interviewing several doctors, engages one who doesn’t treat mental trauma with opiates. Jacques seems less truculent after his first session and agrees to go again. Despite her gratitude for all of it, Marie-Thérèse has to disguise her own unhappiness and uneasiness.
Nights, the two of them sometimes sit at a casement window, Jacques usually quiet. The inertia wears on her, and worry adds to the sense of malaise. She often wonders if her warning letter ever arrived at the clinic. Her father had to find a different courier; the one he hired previously had left the area—or was apprehended. Now, in Rotterdam, they may have to find still another and hope he’s honest. An old dream returns. She’s walking at night in an unfamiliar city, trying to get to some unknown place by walking fast, not taking an automobile or tram, which would have been more logical, but simply walking, leg muscles straining, the pavement underfoot hard, the light dim, the buildings dark and slick with rain, and she’s making no progress whatsoever even though walking as fast as she can. A dream from Académie days.
One morning at breakfast she tells them.
“You want to return to your Germans,” Jacques says. “You must be in love with one of them.”
“No, Jacques. It’s not that at all. I need to—” She stops herself from completing the sentence—warn the matron. Sadly, she can’t trust him with that truth, given his state of mind.
“Finish my studies and then I’ll return and work in a hospital here.”
Deferential now, her parents politely argue. It’s far too dangerous and difficult in Brussels. Couldn’t she finish her studies here, in Rotterdam?
There is a bit of the truth, a mere crumb, she can give them, in response.
“Mon Dieu!” Madame Hulbert cries. “Children? You want to get two children?”
“And then return,” Marie-Thérèse assures them.
A sudden din outside breaks the silence. A pack of dogs, it seems, have decided to start barking all at once. Brio runs from room to room, adding to the clamor.
“Geese!” Monsieur Hulbert says. “Wild geese!” They all stand to watch a large flock beating their wings and rising as one in the vaporous morning light.
The Mouse
She breathes in their scent and strokes their hair. It’s hard to let go. But soon the girls are opening their gifts—paint sets, books, a piano lesson book, and a new summer dress for each. They’re in a holiday mood until Elli mentions that she’s still carrying her big doll about the district. She says this with pride. It’s what Marie-Thérèse hasn’t wanted to hear—that Madame Blanche is still active at the clinic. Dread shoves away the joy of homecoming.
