In the Fall They Leave, page 30
Herr Fischer sits there with lowered head, absorbing these blows. Marie-Thérèse forces herself on. “He asked me to play some Schubert for you and perhaps also some Chopin.” Those might have been the worst words of all. He takes out a folded white handkerchief and blots his eyes. He’s making gasping sounds. Marie-Thérèse can’t prevent her own tears. With blurred vision, she goes to the nearest piano, one of the smaller grands, and then sits there, blinking to clear her eyes. She doubts she’ll be able to play anything at all, with her stony hands.
But finally, she positions the bench, takes a long shaky breath, and pulls her shoulders back. And then there are the opening chords of Schubert’s “Phantasie,” strong as a heart pumping life-giving blood.
An impromptu follows the “Phantasie,” then waltzes by Schubert, followed by several of Chopin’s. Then the Grand Polonaise, a ballade, an étude, mazurkas, and finally the Nocturne in E-flat Major. After holding the last chord for several beats, she raises her hands and places them in her lap. They’re tingling with life. She doesn’t know how much time has elapsed. Later she will—nearly two hours. Several others are gathered around Herr Fischer, some in long aprons. Their applause sounds like rain splashing new leaves. After a while, she slides the bench back and stands. Herr Fischer, walking toward her, opens his arms. She’s relieved to see that he’s no longer weeping.
That was her first recital. Since then, there’ve been others. Herr Fischer had the piano sent to Brussels, where Marie-Thérèse is now living, in an apartment not far from her old home on the rue Belliard Stratt, and working three days a week at a hospital. That morning in Coblenz, Herr Fischer said some mystical things about how the piano must be hers now. It had claimed her and would refuse to give up its true sound for anyone else. Not wanting to argue, she accepted the extravagant gift. Also, she knew, Rudi would have wanted her to. But then, a strange thing. Soon after the arrival of the piano, she found herself in the vicinity of the Place des Palais and kept walking to the Académie, and then up to Madame Gonczy’s salon. Madame, of course, had a pupil, and Marie-Thérèse waited on the same faded velvet bench with bowed legs. She tried not to think about what she was doing there. She tried not to think at all. Soon the pupil emerged, a girl, and Marie-Thérèse went in, once again disrupting madame’s precious schedule.
“You are back? For good this time?”
“Oui.”
Madame was silent a moment and then raising her walking stick somewhat, struck the floor. “So. We will begin.”
While leaving the Académie one evening, she notices a man seated on the bench in the courtyard. A thin man in a cream-colored suit. For Marie-Thérèse, old fears periodically surface at any unexpected breach of a familiar pattern. Usually, the bench is unoccupied at that hour or if not, then by young Académie students. Never a solitary older person just whiling away the time. Rudi, she thinks. Over the past months, she’s been noticing him in various places. On a tram. At a café. Walking in a park. Of course, the figures always resolve into strangers. There’s something in this man’s hand. A piece of paper. He’s holding a small piece of paper and studying it.
In imagination, he is Rudi, who looks up and says, I’m happy to see you’ve been practicing, mademoiselle. He waves the piece of paper, a recital notice. Mademoiselle Marie-Thérèse Hulbert plays Schubert, Chopin, and Schumann. In imagination they sit on the stone bench as evening comes on and white roses release their nocturnal fragrance. She tells him about her escape and then he tells about his, an improbable convoluted escape involving a fishing boat, a collision with a freighter, a night rescue and months spent in Portugal, and then working on yet another fishing boat, followed by a surreptitious journey home and learning about her visit and her playing, as she’d promised and as he’d known she would. After that lengthy word recital, he can’t stop apologizing for all that happened as a result of his mistakes and Germany’s aggression and, well, simply put, life itself. They go to a café where there’s accordion music, and still he apologizes until their plates of cake arrive, strawberry cake, gateau aux fraises, the white frosting decorated with sliced fresh strawberries and reminding him, somehow, of the skating cap he wore at the pond that day when they first met, the one with the reindeer pattern around the border. He lost the cap, he tells her. It was very warm. She assures him they will find another.
On and on it goes, this bittersweet fantasy she fully recognizes as fantasy but indulges because…because why? Because we need our dead to be close? Matron, Papa, Rudi—while we live, we need them and, perhaps, they us? They not ready to fully depart until assured we can go on in what we need to be doing—for ourselves and, possibly as important, for them. And we? We needing also the depth of consciousness, the chord held in the lower octaves, held there and fading into nothingness, and still you hold it, certain that its sound exists somewhere even when you can no longer hear it.
“Rudi,” she whispers, and walks on.
Afterword
Although a work of the imagination, In the Fall They Leave was inspired by historical events during the first two years of World War I in Europe. Several characters, portrayed fictitiously, are historical figures: the matron, based on the real-life Edith Louise Cavell, a British nurse and the matron of L’École Belge d’Infirmières Diplômées at the Berkendael Medical Institute in Brussels, Belgium; Madame Marie Depage, nurse, and wife of Doctor Antoine Depage, Belgian royal surgeon and founder of the Berkendael Medical Institute and Nursing School; Otto Mayer, head of the German Secret Police; and Georges Gaston Quien, a double agent. It is a historical fact that Madame Depage drowned when the Lusitania was torpedoed just off the southeastern coast of Ireland. King Albert, Queen Elisabeth, Cardinal Mercier, Philippe Baucq, and Louise Thuliez, mentioned in the novel, are historical figures. All other characters in the novel are fictional. Place settings, while generally true to geographic facts, are also imaginatively depicted. Regarding military matters as well as the arrest, execution, and prison burial of the matron, I strove for historical accuracy. Edith Cavell’s body was exhumed from the St. Gilles Prison burial site in 1919, transported to England, and re-interred with full honors at Norwich Cathedral in Norfolk.
Acknowledgments
Warm thanks to Donna West, RN, PhD, who read a version of this novel and made several helpful comments. I greatly appreciate her generosity in taking time from her full academic work and family life to read the manuscript. My gratitude to Deborah d’Courville as well for offering a number of valuable suggestions, and to John Vernon, Liz Rosenberg, Jerry Mirskin, and Sara-Jo Lupo Sites for their generous comments. Many thanks to Pam Van Dyk, my editor, for her keen eye and attention to detail, and to Elizabeth Lowenstein for her proofreading. I’m also deeply grateful to Jaynie Royal, editor-in-chief at Regal House Publishing, and to the RHP staff for their commitment to literature, writers, and social justice.
And to my husband and first reader, Jerry, a great hug for his patience in reading drafts of this novel and never failing to offer excellent critiques and suggestions which helped make this work stronger. I’m thankful as well for his unstinting encouragement over the years. Without it, I simply could not have gone on as a writer.
I was drawn to the story of Edith Cavell after reading a feature article by Peter Benesh in the Investor’s Business Daily (March 1, 2005). At that time, the IBD featured portrayals of inspirational figures. The article about Edith Cavell is titled, “She Gave Her Life to Nursing,” with the subtitle, “Help Humanity: Edith Cavell died trying to keep Allied troops alive in World War I.” A striking black-and-white photograph accompanying the article shows a young nurse standing just behind a little boy of about four or five who is wearing a large round-brimmed hat, a cotton or linen jacket, dark breeches, white shirt, and bow tie. An ivy-covered wall is in the background. One can also see the creases in Nurse Cavell’s white uniform apron, perhaps freshly put on for this photograph. Her pristine-white cuffs resemble long over-the-elbow evening gloves. The sleeves above the cuffs are dark. On her head is a small white cap. Under it, her waved hair is parted to the side and drawn back. The boy appears fretful, his elbows bent, hands held outward, the fingers parted. The photo was taken in 1903, sometime in the warmer months. She would have been thirty-seven years old, a beautiful woman with strong eyebrows, an oval face, and a gentle smile. Benesh’s article recounts her contributions to modern nursing while summarizing her immensely productive, patriotic, and yet tragic life. Twelve years after the photograph was taken—and a month and a half before her fiftieth birthday—Edith Cavell was executed by a double firing squad in German-occupied Belgium.
Before reading Benesh’s article, I had never heard of Edith Cavell. I didn’t know that streets are named after her as well as hospitals, clinics, and schools, even a mountain. Nor did I know that several biographies exist as well as dramatic works, including at least one play and a film. I lived in London for a time but wasn’t aware of the statue of Edith Cavell in central London’s St. Martin-in-the Fields. So, the article in the Investor’s Business Daily was a revelation. The photograph haunted me long after I’d clipped the article and tucked it into a notebook.
Some years later, still drawn to the story, I began doing research, beginning with a book for young adults, Edith Cavell, by Rowland Ryder (Stein and Day, 1975). Another publication that oriented me in the period was Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August (alternatively titled August 1914), first published by Macmillan in 1962. Also helpful: Jack Batten’s Silent in an Evil Time: The Brave War of Edith Cavell. Tundra Books: Toronto, Ontario, 2007. A number of online sources were helpful as well, including encyclopedia.1914–1918—online.net on the Occupation during the War; the librarie-immaterial.fr; windowstoWorldhistory.weebly.com (on the spy Gaston Quien); the Diary of Constance Graeffe; the Diary of Edmond Picard, a Brussels magistrate; Cardinal Désiré−Joseph Mercier’s Pastoral Address for the New Year 1915, “Patriotism and Endurance,” (critical of the Occupation and daring in condemning the massacres during the invasion of Belgium); antique nursing books such as Charlotte Aikens’s Primary Studies and A.D. Whiting’s text on bandaging.
After reading for a number of weeks, I decided on a fictional protagonist, a young student nurse—Marie-Thérèse Hulbert—who serves not on WWI battlefields but in a small teaching hospital in German-occupied Brussels and who reluctantly, at first, becomes involved with Belgium’s underground resistance movement. I thought it would be interesting to tell the story of Matron Cavell’s heroic efforts through the point of view of a young nurse who idolizes her but also has her own story to tell.
Joanna Higgins, In the Fall They Leave
