New Tales of the Yellow Sign, page 4
The lieutenant unfolded his canvas chair and settled into a semblance of a comfortable position. He returned to his book, a slim volume entitled Notes on the Yellow Sign. Venon peeked at the front cover. The name of the author, Albert Camus, meant nothing to him.
They waited.
The lieutenant read. Girinec squatted in front of the boîte-noire. Jaquillard and Nurschinger played gin, each denigrating the other’s taste in whores. Jaquillard liked them meaty; Nurschinger preferred the thin and pallid.
Venon took out his art pad. He attempted to capture the line of the lieutenant’s posture. Finding this too difficult, he switched his study to his superior’s face. With a brisk circular motion he delineated each bead of sweat as it surfaced on his brow. Had they been civilians in a cafe together, Venon might have dared ask him what he found so disturbing on those pages.
The wait weighed on them.
Finally the boîte-noire clattered. Without glancing at it, Girinec handed the perforated message to the lieutenant. He read it and frowned.
“Fill all the shells,” he told Venon. “We’re to reduce that tower to rubble.” He paced. “A thousand years old and now we must scrape it from the surface of the earth. All to thwart the Tsar and his proxies of the hour.” He left the rest as implication—that the Loyalists had once been Russian allies, and might become so again. Venon knew better than to agree.
The soldiers traded wary glances. It was unwise of the lieutenant to critique the mission in their presence. Seeing the lieutenant so casually shrug away his authority over them led them to wonder what other missteps lay ahead.
Venon blamed the books the lieutenant carried with him. He resolved to find more wholesome literary fare for him the next time they plundered a chateau. Perhaps his present collection might find its way accidentally into a creek, or tumble into a fire.
The others assisted Venon with the shells. The lieutenant moved his chair beside the big gun. He sat contemplating the tower they were about to raze.
When the shells were ready, however, he gave the order and turned away. As they readied to fire, six Alsatians appeared on a trail, headed toward their target. Two wore uniforms; the rest attired themselves as irregulars.
By handing him his field glasses, Girinec called them to the lieutenant’s attention.
The lieutenant watched them make their way to the tower. “Wait until they have reached it,” he ordered. “If we are to sin against posterity, let us make of it a blood sacrifice.”
He removed his chair to a lower chamber. The crew fired the big gun in rapid sequence. The tower shuddered and collapsed, dropping onto the approaching fighters.
The crew expected to move out that night, but the boîte-noire conveyed no such order. Instead Venon and Nurschinger relieved Abjean and Mimet on sentry duty up in the turret.
Nurschinger rolled himself a cigarette. “When I am killed,” he said, “I do not want it to be by a falling tower.”
Venon had long since discovered the slim benefits of participating in the bluff man’s verbal fancies.
“No, the history books will say that B____________ Tower was destroyed in the war of reclamation, 1947 to whatever.”
“Or whatever they wind up calling it.”
“Or whatever they wind up calling it. But those books will never give the names of those poor geese who just croaked it under its toppling pieces.” He offered Venon a puff.
Venon inhaled deep. “They won’t remember us if we’re killed by more ordinary means, either.” He had been drawn in, after all.
Deep in the night, they were relieved in turn. Venon dragged himself to his bedroll and gave himself up immediately to slumber. Not long after, snoring awakened him. He realized that it was his own. Muscles aching from contact with the cold stone floor, he rose to stretch. His hand brushed something wet. He felt down the wall—definitely a leak of one kind or another. Venon crouched to feel blindly through his pack. If a puddle was about to form on the floor, he meant to sleep well clear of it. He found his penlight and shone it on the wall.
A rivulet ran down the wall all right, but it wasn’t water. Its color was the deep red of fresh blood. Venon overcame his revulsion and sniffed at it. It smelled of blood, too.
Keeping the light source tight to the wall, to avoid rousting his fellows, Venon searched for the leak’s source. He could not find it. The flow appeared to begin at eye level, as if one of the castle stones itself had been wounded.
He dismissed the thought that he might be dreaming: the chill, and his soreness, were too acute for that. Also, his dreams were colorless, while the trickle of blood was anything but.
Venon shook off the dregs of sleep and reentered the realm of logic. The origin of the stream surely lay in some obscure mineral process. Or perhaps not so obscure: Venon’s mastery of chemistry extended no further than the mixture of paints. He did recall, however, that red was the most difficult of colors to replicate. The natural world offered few pigment ingredients this deep and rich. Still, this could only be a remarkable phenomenon, not an inexplicable one.
Braving his comrade’s ever-ripening odor, he moved his bedroll closer to Nurschinger’s. Venon remained soundly asleep, even when the dead infiltrated his dreams. Their complement had grown, now incorporating several of the irregulars who’d died in the toppling of the tower.
After Girinec prodded Venon awake with a booted toe, it took him half an hour to so much as remember the blood-like substance. Returning to the wall, he found only a faint discolored streak extending vertically from eye level to the height of his ankles. Venon decided that his odd little anecdote required more telling than its reception would reward. He staggered to the latrine, then returned to the others. Jaquillard’s morning oatmeal already bubbled in a cook-pot, suspended over a low flame. The men ate and waited for the ship-out command.
Instead the lieutenant came at them with upper lip snarled. He balled a boîte-noire slip and tossed it into the fire. Girinec handed him his porridge-cup.
“We’re to maintain position until further notice,” he said.
Fasts broken, Venon and Nurschinger went up top to take their watch shift. Birds trilled. Hints of fog played through the downed tower’s rubble. Through field glasses, Venon tracked a fox trotting along a distant ridgeline.
Nurschinger sat himself behind the machine-gun tripod. Its barrel pointed away from the river, to the base of the castle, ready for a rear-guard assault. Nurschinger took aim at imaginary invaders. Though enlisted in the Loyalist army, he was of Alsatian stock. Some might accuse him of shooting down his own people. Venon had not heard him address this point with any of the others. His own scant camaraderie with Nurschinger forbade him to raise the question himself. Nor did he imagine that the man would muster much more than a shrug in reply. Most likely, he killed for the first side to hand him a gun.
Nurschinger murmured, “Cover for me,” folded his arms over the barrel, laid his head on them, and snoozed.
Venon wished for the daring to sketch the vista laid out before him. The prospect of a Girinec scolding deterred him. He’d been caught before; the humiliation of the dressing-down still ate at him. So instead he drew the image in his head. He tried to fix in his mind the precise appearance of the tower before they knocked it down. Later he would commit it to paper. He regretted not taking the time for a precise rendering before it was too late. Perhaps he would make two pictures: one of the expanse with the tower intact, the second showing the scene as it was now.
He would not depict the moment of impact, or show corpses in its aftermath. To do so would certainly suit the depraved tastes of the day, still trapped in the aesthetic aspic of the Decadent period. Venon ached to escape from Decadence, indeed from Post-Decadence. To what, he had yet to conceive. One day epiphany would seize him. He would see the way forward, a style to shake painting from its half-century of stasis. Many could see the need. At the École nationale they talked of little else. Deep within him he understood that he would be the one to satisfy it. If only he could part the veil and truly see.
Nurschinger stirred. “Hey, I’m the one supposed to be sleeping.”
“I’m wide awake.”
“And dreaming. Of something useless, no doubt. Which is to say, of something other than pussy. Oh, don’t be such a priss, boy. If war’s good for any purpose it’s to knock the child out of you.” Nurschinger had fought in the conflicts of ’33 and ’38 and enjoyed discussing them. In his view, peace was a period of boredom between wars. However, to pursue his second favorite theme, wars themselves consisted also mostly of boredom. In this paradoxical tension lay the sum total of Nurschinger’s philosophy. This accounted for the difficulty Venon had in sustaining conversation with him. If there was anyone in the crew Venon might be able to talk with, it would be the lieutenant, but this was prevented by the gap between their ranks.
Nurschinger jolted. “Grab your rifle!” he whispered. He ducked down behind the battlement. Venon seized his weapon and chambered a round. A group of eight partisans armed with hunting pieces advanced on the castle’s eastern side.
The gruff Alsatian had his own rifle out. He patted the machine-gun. “Let’s be sporting.”
One could argue that there was a benefit of surprise in not revealing that they had a machine-gun up there with them. Venon saw through this. What Nurschinger in fact wanted was to force him to take part in the kill. A single sweep of automatic fire would cut them down easily, but then Venon’s hands would be no more blooded than before.
Venon took quick stock of the crouch-walking partisans. There were two oldsters and a pair of adolescents. The rest were middle-aged. Venon decided to shoot the old men first. It was a foolish distinction, as all were about to die. But they had lived the longest, and in a way that salved Venon’s conscience.
Since enlisting he had discovered himself to be a keen shot. He attributed this to the careful mathematics of his painterly gaze. As if rulering in a line of perspective, he gridded out his aim. A red flower appeared in the old man’s forehead. He dropped. The partisans ran for cover. Nurschinger popped one in the legs. He fell, clutching his ankle. The rest scrambled; none but the boys made it. Venon shot the second codger in the abdomen. In quick succession, he felled two of the middle-aged irregulars. Nurschinger took care of another.
The adolescents had taken poor cover. Although the bush they crouched behind was densely leafy, their position did not account for the castle defenders’ superior angle.
Nurschinger drew a bead, then hesitated. “They’re too young to haul into the boat,” he said. “Here’s what. I’ll wing one of them. When they see their cover’s no good, they’ll hoof it, likely. If they drop their rifles, we let them go. If not...”
Venon attempted a shrug but managed only a twitch.
Nurschinger fired. A boy’s shoulder exploded. It was more than a winging. The arm dangled loose, held to its socket only by exposed veins and nerve endings. He ran nonetheless, followed by his friend. Venon winced: each still grasped his fowling piece. Nurschinger raised his barrel. The wounded boy got it in the neck.
Venon’s next round went wide of the mark, striking the bush and blowing leaves into the air.
“You’re better than that,” Nurschinger told him.
Venon worked the bolt and fired again. His target tumbled into a stand of dry weeds and was still.
The man Nurschinger shot in the leg crawled for a few yards. Then, likely realizing that the shooting had stopped, he played dead.
“Go down and finish him,” Nurschinger said.
“He’s a prisoner.”
Nurschinger shook his head. “He’s fighting out of uniform, so we’re within our rights to shoot him. Nay, it’s our duty to shoot him, to keep this a war of honest soldiers. And not a guerrilla mess.”
“You shot him, you finish him.”
“I shot him, so it’s your turn.”
Girinec ducked his way onto the turret, followed by the lieutenant. They appraised the situation. The lieutenant settled the matter by ordering Girinec to fire the shot of execution.
He complied without qualm. Venon thought he would not watch, but then did.
The lieutenant haunted the boîte-noire. On the hour, he ordered Girinec to perform a signal check.
Jaquillard asked for permission to forage. With hostiles in the woods, the lieutenant refused him. Jaquillard moped.
Girinec obsessively polished his boots and cleaned his gun. He cleaned all of the other guns as well. The lieutenant let this violation of regulations pass without notice.
The men played gin. When cards wearied them, they switched to dice. The lieutenant permitted gambling, but only for cigarettes. Eventually Mimet would wind up with all of the cigarettes. He would then divvy them up evenly, restimulating the crashed wagering economy.
Venon attempted the drawings he had earlier planned. He couldn’t get them right. A trip to the turret to draw helped him not at all. The muttered prattle of Abjean and Mimet gnawed at his concentration. His sketch pages descended into a chaos of erasures.
Dusk came without further orders from headquarters.
Venon bolted awake in the middle of his sleep shift. The abruptness of his waking at first told him that the castle had to be under attack. But no, all was quiet. He remembered the blood-colored leak. Shining his penlight on the same spot, he saw that the leak had returned. Liquid oozed from one of the stones and ran down those below it. A few inches from the floor, the stream tapered off. Venon could account for neither the appearance of the leak or its reabsorption. There was more of it than the night before. In spots its thick substance bubbled.
Venon wetted his forefinger with it and touched it to his tongue. It tasted like blood, too.
Nurschinger snored. Venon envisioned his reaction if shaken to consciousness to look at a leak, no matter how peculiar.
Venon sat and watched the leak for awhile. The flow remained steady. Finally sleep claimed him again.
When morning came, the stain left by the liquid appeared darker than it had the day before. He waved Nurschinger over.
“Does this stain seem larger and darker to you?”
Nurschinger stared at him as if he’d abandoned his senses and staggered off to the latrine.
As they ate the morning’s rations, Venon sidled up to Girinec.
“Have you any interest in natural science?” he asked Girinec. In civilian life Girinec had managed the accounts for a large footwear concern. Often he complained that he could be doing more for the war effort serving at the company that manufactured the boots they wore.
“None whatever,” replied Girinec.
“Given that we have little else to occupy us, I thought you might be interested in an unusual phenomenon.”
Girinec’s expression suggested that such an interest would be inconceivable.
Venon went on anyway. He told Girinec of the leak and its curious properties. When he invited Girinec to examine the stain it left behind, he made toward it with visible annoyance.
“It is nothing,” Girinec said, studying Venon’s demeanor. “You wouldn’t be planning to mention this to the lieutenant.”
“Maybe he would find it diverting to puzzle out the reasons behind a strange natural phenomenon.”
“The lieutenant has distractions enough, Venon. You’ll speak of this to no one.”
“Why not?”
“Because you are a subordinate, and that is an order, and that is all I need say.”
Venon stepped back. “Do you know something about this I don’t?”
Girinec huffed. “You’re going mad. Fix your mind on the defense of our position.”
Sitting atop the turret alongside Nurschinger, watching for partisans, Venon reviewed the conversation. In the end he concluded that Girinec’s dismissal had been genuine. He wasn’t concealing any secret truth. Instead he simply regarded the bloodstain as a vexing irrelevance. And perhaps it was at that. Venon made no further attempt to bring it up with Nurschinger.
Not long after the next change of watch shift, the boîte-noire rattled. Girinec brought the slip to the lieutenant, who called an all-crew meeting in the turret. He swept his hand over the bending Rhine.
“Our orders are these: any human movement on the other side of the river is to be met with artillery fire. We will respond to it with howitzer or mortar rounds, as the designated watch gunner deems most effective. In particular, no one must be permitted to reach the river from the other side. The opposite bank marks the furthest range of our small arms. Any who get through our initial bombardment you will shoot with the machine-gun or with rifles. All targets are to be considered legitimate. Uniformed soldiers are uniformed soldiers. Persons not wearing uniforms must be presumed members of irregular forces. All persons. These rules of engagement, as they become apparent to the enemy, will increase our need for vigilance against attacks from this side of the bank. As the machine-gun will now be trained on the river side, our sole option for this secondary requirement will be rifle fire. Are there any questions?”
Venon wanted to ask the obvious question: why? As a well-trained soldier he knew better. The orders to treat all persons as irregulars violated the conventions of war. But those the incident at Schwanau had rendered quaint.
