Chapter Text
1.
little piece of paper
The bomb goes off in a crowded train car on a bright, perfunctory morning in Manhattan. Theo is thirteen. The tragedy has nothing to do with the war and everything to do with the war, although he won’t come to understand this for a long time. It’s the first explosion in a series of many.
Theo is fourteen when Poland is invaded. He doesn’t know where that is, exactly, or what Nazi means. France and Britain, with their war declarations rendered in print, seem like faraway places in a storybook. Denmark, Norway, then Italy. Newsreel footage of missiles dropped from planes in Egypt sucks the air out of him, and Theo stumbles out of the theater to run all the way back to the safety of Hobart & Blackwell.
Theo is sixteen when he learns that a harbor in the middle of the Pacific ocean has been blasted apart. They’re in the middle of a Biology lesson; a girl hides her face in her textbook and cries theatrically. Everybody seems to know what’s coming next.
Theo is eighteen when the letter arrives on a (bright, perfunctory) morning like any other. A plate of quickly cooling eggs on the table in front of him, a single piece of thin paper. Order to Report for Induction is printed beneath the letterhead in matter-of-fact ink.
“Oh, Theo,” Hobie sighs. The news settles heavily into the lines of his face, deepening them somehow. He puts his hand on Theo’s shoulder and tells him that he’ll be alright. That it’s a noble thing, and he’ll come home safe, which of course neither of them can know for sure.
Theo is eighteen and in two months it will have been four years. Now, as the tea kettle's whistle climbs to a dull shriek, the past and the future have never felt closer. Bearing down like a ballast, every breath dragging him back to that singular moment.
2.
basic
They are trained as infantry replacements at a sprawling installation in Georgia. It’s as close to the middle of nowhere as Theo has ever been. A huge, claustrophobic blue sky over flat nothing: administrative buildings, tents, barracks, Quonset huts, and dry dirt.
The recruits — all young men too, drafted between the ages of eighteen and twenty — run and march and slither on their bellies through mud courses until every muscle aches. Drill sergeants accustom them to the sound of gunnery and snarled orders, make every implicit threat explicit: If you fuck this up over there, you’re dead, and is that what you want?
Theo learns to hold a rifle and to shoot it well. He pulls the pin from a grenade and watches it explode beyond a bank of sandbags, so much louder than he’d ever expected, and all along he knows he wasn’t built for this. He doesn’t break, but it’s a near thing.
“Must be gettin’ us ready for something big,” Theo’s bunkmate mutters after a morning drill. He’s a rough, freckle-faced slab of a boy from Virginia, and Theo doesn’t even know his first name; everybody calls him ‘Mix’, after some cowboy from a western radio serial. Theo has less than nothing in common with him, but Mix is kinder than he looks.
“Yeah,” Theo mutters. Hovering in the doorway of the barracks, they watch a long line of new Sherman tanks roll into one of the warehouses. In a few weeks they’ll be shipped off to England to wait with a million other soldiers, the future a formless dead thing just beyond.
“I hope I don’t get seasick. Never even been over an ocean before.”
“Me neither,” Theo mutters, and tries very hard not to think about it.
3.
first things first
In the long seconds before his mother was killed, Theo stared at an elegant girl across a train car aisle. And in the seconds and hours and years that follow, it’s this that he remembers: the hunter green of the plaid ribbon in her hair, which was bright red like paprika, and the small violin case in her lap.
He doesn’t remember the dress his mother wore or the expression on her face. Hadn’t turned to her and said something, anything at all, just to hear the sound of her voice. And sometimes, Theo thinks, he is as defined by what he doesn’t remember as much as the things he does. Pippa and her violin. The metal scream of the collision. The explosion and the fire.
In dreams he sees himself inside the train car, sitting in his school uniform next to the vague, ill-defined shape of his mother, and it’s in his own ear that he whispers, This is important. Remember this.
And later, much later, after they’re sent from the base to a salt-sprayed seaside town in England and before they’re sent to France, a thin man with an un-pomaded mop of black curls watches them file out of the cargo ship and grins.
“Christ, look at this. They sent a bunch of kids,” says the man beside him, sucking on a hand-rolled cigarette. “No idea what they’ve gotten into.”
And Theo doesn’t believe him, not yet, but the black-haired private’s laugh rings loud and sharp in his ears.
3.
night and day
It’s in Portsmouth that Theo really, truly begins to understand the sheer scope of what is happening. What they’ve done, what they’re doing, what they are about to do. Suddenly, everything at home — the rationing, advertisements for bonds, presidential broadcasts — quickly pales in comparison.
Every inch of England’s southern coast, transformed for one singular purpose, the first of many setpieces. Navy men choke the docks, orbiting the unfathomably large ships that crowd the sea. Sandy beaches become the stages of rehearsals: how to exit a Higgins boat, how to remain upright in water with sixty pounds of gear, how to crawl over dunes.
There’s an air of unreality to it all; the breathless last-minute preparations for a very elaborate school production. Theo watches it happening around him with a kind of mute awe. Impossible, incomprehensible, and happening all the same. When they start getting steak and pitchers of beer for dinner everybody knows what their role is fast-approaching.
“Haven’t had a meal like that since I was back home,” Mix whistles after dinner in his easy, soft Virginian drawl. “Je-sus. They really think we don’t know they’re fattening us up for slaughter.”
“Don’t talk like that,” Theo says, although he’d been thinking the same thing.
Mix shrugs amicably. “Sorry, Decker.”
The mess hall — a large, hastily converted tavern — is loud with the sounds of men drinking and laughing. The combat veterans put on a show of how unfazed they are, ribbing the replacements, telling stories about Italy’s fascists and fanatical Krauts and machine-gun nests.
Theo has never understood bravado, or at least never been particularly good at it. For what? Before the train explosion, none of the passengers had known what was coming. It wouldn’t have made a difference if they had. Disasters are like that. Victories, too, probably.
Exhausted, he finds himself wandering to a corner in one of the side rooms, where a dust-covered spinet piano has been pushed into a dusty corner. It isn’t much to look at, but the elegant carving of its music rack makes Theo ache for Hobie. He pulls back the fallboard and presses at a key before he knows what he’s doing, the sound ringing weakly against the hollering of the soldiers.
"That's an awfully nice piano, private.”
Theo jumps, alarmed to see the round face of Edmund “Bunny” Corcoran peering back at him. He’s accompanied by a few of the other Italy vets, one of whom Theo recognizes as the grinning soldier from the docks.
Bunny had relished in harassing the replacements as soon as they'd arrived in England. A stranger, but Theo had recognized him all the same: the solid, rosy-cheeked superlative son of New England WASPs, languid and affected with the casual callousness of old money. The kind of person who might nurse a sidecar in the Barbour’s drawing room. More comfortable in a tailored suit than olive drab, but no less contemptuous.
Now, Bunny establishes himself in a chair by the piano and turns his full attention to Theo.
“Play something for us, then.”
“It’s out of tune. And besides, I — I barely know how.” Theo sits on the bench anyway full of nerves. He’s well aware that he’s being set up for a laugh.
“Don’t care. You’re a boot. They’ve sent you here to replace our dead friends, so you have to do what we say. Now be a good sport and play something.” Bunny passes his cigarette to the black-haired boy from the docks. His eyes sparkle in amusement, locked on Theo’s, and he nods once as if to say, Well, go on.
Best to just get it over with. In her endless patience, Pippa taught Theo a few songs when they were children. “Night and Day”—he remembers some of that. His fingers fumble at the keys, awkward at first, but it comes back to him in dribs and drabs. Half unrecognizable of course, but butchered carefully enough to pass for a slow jazz rendition:
In the roaring traffic's boom,
In the silence of my lonely room,
I think of you night and day
He imagines of Pippa perched beside him, singing the words so softly, the perfect splash of her fingers guiding him through the melody. The scarring on her head and the sleepy laudanum blue of her eyes.
The last note fades. It takes Theo a moment to realize the room has grown oddly quiet. His cheeks heat up with embarrassment. Bunny, arms crossed, has fixed Theo with an unreadable look.
Before he can speak, a loud clapping breaks the silence. It’s the black-haired man. Slouched against the windowsill and smiling, but not cruelly — like he’s genuinely amused.
“Brilliant, Potter!” he cheers. Theo is taken aback by his voice; heavy with an unplaceable accent, distinctly not American. Closer to a mangled mix of the Russians from the meat markets in Manhattan and something else. His applause seems to liven up the rest of the soldiers, anyway, and Theo is relieved when they return to their drinking and chatter.
“My name isn’t Potter. It’s Decker,” Theo mutters, rushing to close the fallboard before he’s asked for another round.
The man shakes his head in exasperation. “No no — the song, Cole Potter, song you played.”
Bunny scoffs into the foamy bottom of his pint glass. “It’s Cole Porter, you Slav ingrate.”
Theo shouldn’t ask. He should leave, now, while they’re distracted. “You’re not American?”
“Don’t listen to him. American as anybody else, with papers and everything. Good enough for the Army, eh? Boris Pavlikovsky.” He outstretches a fine-boned hand, surprisingly warm when Theo shakes it.
“Yes, as far as we know Bolshie here isn’t a plant for the Reds. He’s just a fool,” Bunny slurs.
“Bolshevik,” Boris supplies at Theo’s look of confusion. “A stupid nickname. But you, with the piano — you’re Potter now.”
Bunny sucks his teeth. Barely spares Theo another glance before he says with clipped, cold ease, “You know, you’d really better not name them. They’ll all be hamburger the moment we land in France.”
4.
bespredel
Boris keeps turning up, after that.
Whether this adoption is by design or chance, Theo doesn’t know. But whenever one of the privates says something stupid and Theo looks up, it’s always Boris smirking back at him, rolling his eyes in some sort of silent understanding. He trails alongside Theo during drills, bumps elbows with him at meals, conscripts his begrudging assistance for the disciplinary mess duties he seems so talented at racking up.
And yet, oddly, Theo doesn’t find that he minds. If Boris has any great talent it’s the enthusiastic filling of silence. He talks Theo’s ear off about anything and everything; stories about a strange scattered upbringing with his father, a Ukrainian national who supervised exploratory mining projects in dozens of countries; explosions, death, exotic animals, salt-battered shacks along the coast of the Black Sea or in the jungles of the Dutch East Indies. How he’d run off at fifteen to ride the rails from city to city, getting into — according to Boris — “just some trouble here and there.” Theo has never met anybody who has seen so much of the world, even before the war.
It’s a welcome distraction from the dogged limbo, the hurry up and wait. Bunny says it’s all down to the weather and the sea; they won’t know until the last minute. Everything rides on the Germans being taken by surprise. Theo thinks Portsmouth makes for a very effective purgatory.
Then they’re reminded once, twice, three times to sign their insurance papers. As harbingers go, it's a little obvious. Theo tosses and turns in his bunk until he can’t anymore, Mix thick southern accent from above, “If you’re gonna roll around all night, do it somewhere else.”
The air is cold and salty outside the barracks, quiet. He isn’t surprised to find Boris sitting at the edge of the docks, smoking through his fireguard duty, post long abandoned.
“Potter!” he waves, and dog-ears a page in his book. Dostoevsky’s Demons in Russian, roughly the size of a brick. “You should be in bed. Tomorrow, I think, is the day. These Generals are all morons. I’m telling you.”
Theo settles on the bank of sandbags beside him. “I don’t know how they can expect us to sleep.”
“Trust me, this will be the last time. Usually, is the opposite,” Boris produces a cigarette from his pocket and holds it out to Theo, who shakes his head, then lights it for himself. A foghorn moans plaintively over the dark of the channel.
The silence between them is companionable, if atypical. Theo waits for him to launch into some story, complaint, diatribe, but he doesn’t. There’s something disconcerting about it; as though Boris is nervous too. His too-black eyes offer up nothing, caught in a staring match with the water line.
“Can I ask you something?” Theo ventures, because it’s the only thing Boris hasn’t talked about. “I want to know what Italy was really like.”
Boris snorts. “Beautiful girls with arms full of flowers. Blow jobs and vineyards every night, American flags all over. But, you know what? Not very good coffee.”
“Right. Forget I asked.”
“Am serious!” he insists. “About the flowers, at least. That part is true. When we came through the towns — muddy little shit-heaps, mostly — the girls brought them to us. Many flowers, whole mountainsides of flowers. Fiori di zucca were the ones they ate. They were all starving.”
“I meant Anzio.”
Theo had heard about it on the radio, Winston Burdett’s description in anodyne terms: the boys were having a rough time of it, the casualties were high, but that the great American spirit was indomitable. There were no photographs of the dead in Life Magazine.
Boris regards him with raised eyebrows, smoke curling from his mouth. “Know what you meant,” he replies coolly. “It was terrible, of course. Bespredel, unspeakable. Like hell.”
“Oh.” Had he expected to be comforted by the answer? In a way, Theo had hoped for one of Boris’ typical descriptions, expansive and poetic, a meandering fable.
“Yes, ‘oh’. But you want my advice. Alright, will tell you: keep your helmet on.”
Theo watches the cherry of Boris’ cigarette light up in the dark. Out on the water, hundreds of ships bob and sway in anticipation.
5.
gesamtkunstwerk
It isn’t like the stories in the newspapers, or the radio broadcasts, or the black and white newsreel footage. In the end, it isn’t like anything else.
The beach of France is fire and earth. It’s an orchestra of naked percussion, mud-sand and red water and writhing bodies, wind whistling, machine guns belting out sounds like fabric being torn. If Normandy is the production they have all been rehearsing for, it’s an opera of two unfathomable giants. The infantrymen are ants on its pulsating back, scrambling around the hedgehog barriers that dot the landscape like enormous iron bone fragments.
Theo is on his stomach at the foot of a gully. He is looking at the lifeless body of a man whose right shoulder has been blown away. Mix, he recognizes distantly, beneath all the mud and viscera. Pigs for slaughter. Mix was supposed to go home to his family in Virginia; three little sisters. June, Jackie, Jean. Or was it Jane?
He can’t move. Seconds pass like minutes, like hours, as though time might stop or be borne back completely. Maybe the mortar that lands a few yards down the ravine is imploding after all; maybe it will go sailing back through the air and into its German stovepipe.
But there are hands on Theo’s shoulders, then, and it startles life back into him. He whips around, scrambling for the trigger of his gun. Boris’ face whirls into focus, white and wide-eyed in the filterless bright of overcast skies. Another mortar round, closer this time.
“Potter, we have to keep moving,” Boris hollers raggedly.
“I can’t.” There’s sand in Theo's mouth and the tang of iron where he’d bitten his cheek going over the edge of the landing craft. He lies: “I think I’m hit, I, I can’t, so just—”
“Listen,” Boris hisses. It’s hard to listen, hard to hear anything over the mechanized roar of artillery and the thud of his own heartbeat in his ears, but Theo tries because the hand that encircles his wrist is like a vice, bones grinding together until the pain feels more real than anything else. “You are not hit, but you will be, will both die if we stay. Almost there, Potter.”
Almost where? Theo realizes he’s asked it aloud when Boris shakes his head.
“Doesn't matter. Just stay with me,” Boris says, “yes?”
There isn’t time to answer. Isn’t even time to blink, because Boris fists his hand in Theo’s jacket and they’re up. Running, running into the deafening roaring nothing. And he doesn’t remember much after that.
6.
book of genesis
Theo kills a man for the first time before nightfall. There’s nothing remarkable about it. No dramatic swell of music or elegant collapse; he doesn’t even really register his own gunshot over all the rest. Knows only that the soldier is running from one bombed-out building to the next and falters when he sees Theo in the doorway, raising his Mauser a second too late before he crumples.
Their company settles in a church when the village is finally clear. They huddle around the pews in exhausted, stunned silence. Nearly half who landed with them are gone; wounded, or dying, or dead on the beachhead. A worn crucified Christ — carved wood, common in France’s more rural provinces, something Hobie would like — hangs above the apse with a kind of impassive regard, eerie by candlelight. Chiaroscuro.
Theo’s knees, pressed to his chest, won’t stop shaking. Some of the men fell asleep the moment their heads hit their haversacks, too tired even to drink or eat. Others murmur with the sergeants about objectives over weak tins of coffee and maps splayed on the stone floor.
Theo can’t bring himself to sleep or wake. A blitz could rain hellfire down on them and he still wouldn’t be able to stand. He isn’t sure he’ll ever be able to move again.
Boots pad softly to his right. It’s Boris, but Theo jerks back anyway. He feels humiliated, wretched, unfit to be seen. Maybe this is when he’s found out: Look at you, Potter, curled up and shivering like a coward. Phrasing every statement like a question: This is all that’s left in the USA? Yellow crybabies?
But Boris just collapses to the floor next to him with a long sigh. Close enough that his side is a heavy weight, solid and warm. He shakes a half-full bottle of sacramental wine.
“Found it in the little room with the robes,” he announces. “How is it called, again?”
“The sacristy.”
“That one, ya, riznitsa. Here.” Boris nudges it against Theo’s fingers, bone-white where they’re clutched around his knees.
“I don’t want any,” he forces out.
“So? Not for a good time. To help with the shaking, your nerves. Now drink,” he replies in a tone that brooks little room for argument, and Theo is too tired to argue, too tired to say another word. It’s sweet and stings the back of his throat going down.
“Was like this for me, too, in Italy. Gets easier, though,” Boris admits, and leans into him.
7.
no honor
It doesn’t get easier, but it doesn’t get harder either. Theo kills his second Kraut and then his third and then his fourth, and when he stops counting it’s a blessing.
The company fights through miles and miles of hedgerows: tall mounds of earth covered in trees and shrubbery arching over narrow dirt roads, snaking fields of grass and poppies in a never-ending series of grids. It would be beautiful in another context. If every strip of thicket didn’t conceal a machine gun nest, every green expanse a patchwork of mines. The roads are littered with the stinking corpses of soldiers and — worst of all — the German’s dead horses, stiff under black clouds of flies. They leave more in their wake. Theo learns that the replacements die as easily as the Italy veterans.
“What on earth is a hedgerow, anyhow?” Bunny asks one morning, prickly after the night spent sleeping in a dry irrigation ditch. Everybody is on edge; the familiar sound of a Panzer tank had served as their alarm clock before fading off to some other battlefield. A close call in a series of endless close calls.
“Row of hedges,” Boris replies sagely, and Theo coughs loudly to stifle his laughter.
Bunny gives him a sour look. “Ha-ha. Christ, am I getting sick of you.”
“The Romans built them under Emperor Augustus. They were enclosures for fields and livestock,” Corporal Winter pipes up, surprising them to attention as he fiddles with a pair of binoculars. A severe, dour figure, Theo only knows Henry Winter attended boot camp with Boris and Bunny, and that he rose quickly through the ranks after.
“See, Bun? Listen to Mister College.”
Winter spares Boris a disinterested hum. “I’m going to check in with Sergeant Murray. Be prepared to move out.” With that, he sets off down the edge of the ravine.
“Henry left Yale to enlist, you know. He was a student of the classics. It makes terrible sense, when you think about it,” Charles Macaulay tells Theo. Of all the Italy veterans, he’s the most genial; bright-eyed and somehow largely unscathed.
“Yes,” Bunny drawls, “he thought the war was going to be very romantic and noble. I hope he’s been able to reconcile that with the stench of cow shit.”
“Crazy and stupid, if you ask me. A rich boy enlisting to be a simple foot-soldier. Could have become a commissioned officer like that!” Boris says with a snap of his fingers. “You know why I enlisted? For—“
“A pair of boots and free food,” Theo finishes flatly. “We’ve heard this one already.”
Boris kicks him in the ankle. “No honor in being drafted, either.”
Bunny lays back in the grass and throws an arm over his face. “If all we have are Yale students, bolsheviks, and draftees, we’re well and truly fucked.”
“Hey,” Charles perks up. “I've got a joke. So, during halftime at a football match, a Yale man and a Harvard man encounter one another in the restroom—"
"I think we've all heard this one too, Macaulay."
"Let me finish! So, the Harvard man fixes his collar, but he doesn’t touch the faucet. ‘You know,’ says the Yale man, ‘at Yale they teach us to wash our hands.’ The Harvard man looks at the Yale man and replies, ‘Yes, well, at Harvard they teach us not to piss on our hands.’”
A beat of silence follows the punchline, but it’s something about Charles’ expectant golden retriever smile that does it. They laugh like children doubled over in the grass, despite what came before and what would come after.
8.
natural advantage and so on
Saint-Lô is a defeated pile of rubble and ash when they finally reach it, still smoking from the aerial bombardment. A young reporter calls it “the city of ruins” and “a victory” in the same breath. Theo stares at the last few standing buildings and the civilian casualties laid out beneath sackcloth in their shade. Wonders, not for the first time, what are we doing and what have we done?
Soon, though, it becomes a kind of guilty paradise. Told to “hurry up and wait”, the company sleeps on cots and eats hot meals for the first time in recent memory. They laze around in the hospitable July sun between bouts of manual labor, guns limp on their backs, aided by the apparent abundance of wine over fresh water. Whispers that they’ll be home before Christmas begin to trickle in. It’s a nice idea.
The postal orderlies deliver armfuls of backlogged mail while they eat lunch along the Vire riverbank, greeted by a round of cheers. Families, friends, high school sweethearts, wives. Theo tears into the first of his small stack of weekly letters from Hobie, stale sandwich forgotten.
A photograph of Pippa flutters out; her college portrait, Theo realizes. She looks happy. And safe, of course, tucked away in one of the Seven Sisters. His heart stutters and clenches painfully at the sight, all loose curls and tired eyes and rosebud mouth. He should write to her. I played Night and Day. Terribly. But it made me think of you.
It must show on Theo’s face. Boris plucks it from his fingers, settling back on his elbows to inspect it. “This is your sweetheart?” He lets out a low whistle. “How did you manage it?”
“No, you ass,” he grits out, and snatches the picture back to stow it in his pocket. “That’s Hobie’s daughter. Adopted daughter. I told you about her. We’ve — we’re childhood friends.”
“Ah... Pippi. Girl from the train, you mean.”
“It’s Pippa.” Theo should never have told him about the bomb. It had only seemed fair at the time, delirious with exhaustion after another firefight on a nameless hill. A dead mothers club. Some comfort, too, in how easily every awful thing seems to roll off Boris' shoulders.
He smirks coyly. “So I should not ask you if she has these freckles all over. Doing such would be bad for me.”
Theo might have been outraged by the vulgarity a month ago, especially concerning Pippa, but the impulse fades away. They aren’t civilians; they don’t communicate like civilians. That, and anyone who gives in to Boris' taunting has already lost. “It would. And fuck you,” he deadpans. “Where’s your mail?”
“Nie. Don’t write letters. Better things to do with my time.”
“You're dad doesn't want to know how you're getting on?”
“Hah!” Boris cackles, loose-limbed, fingers laced over his narrow chest. “Too drunk. Nothing to say to me, and besides, basically he's illiterate.” He sucks in his cheeks and deepens his voice in a cartoonish exaggeration of his own accent: “Borya, this month I am near mine in Canada. I beat some strikers. Tell me if you are dead yet.”
Theo laughs, although it seems a bit sad. “Come on. He can’t be that awful.”
“Of course not, but why do you think you’re my favorite, Potter? Both of us orphans, more or less. Probably this is why you were drafted,” his explains, tapping his temple: think about it . “Nothing to lose, less hesitation — much better soldiers. Natural advantage and so on.”
“Somehow I doubt the draft boards are secretly targeting orphans," Theo says. Boris never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like.
“Am just saying,” he shrugs, nodding at the little stack of letters in the grass, “those things will kill you in the end.
9.
farmhouse
Something changes on the road to Paris, and in ways Theo won’t come to understand until much later.
After Saint-Lô they plot a slow advance east, the scenery of pastoral bocage giving way to a wider country of wheat fields and sugar beet crops. More bucolic scenes punctuated by moments of great violence: men blasted apart by mines left behind or picked off by enemy snipers, like Sergeant Murray. He'd been a good leader. It hadn't made much of a difference.
Theo’s fingers still shake when he pulls the trigger. But the German resistance is thin, pocketed, thrown into disarray in the wake of the beachhead invasion. When the men talk about victory before Christmas, Theo begins to believe them. The City of Lights is bright in their minds like a mantra, a recurring dream, a salvo. And then, he thinks, then home.
The air is unseasonably cool when their patrol stops to rest by the fence of an abandoned farm. There’s a lavender field nearby, a bright patch of purple on the horizon. Theo still hasn’t grown sick of the smell.
“Decker,” Henry—Sergeant Winter, now—says, “go check the house, see if the Germans left anything behind. Take Pavlikovsky with you.”
Boris, for his part, trails eagerly behind. He kicks over a few German corpses by the entryway appraisingly. “No fucking metal,” he spits, disappointed. “Maybe their comrades took it. These Nazi dogs are like that.”
Theo cringes away at the smell. He’d been horrified to see Boris checking bodies for watches and wedding rings, the first time. Stop making this face. What does a dead man need a watch for, Potter. Bunny jokes that Boris will jingle when he walks before they leave France, but it's probably true.
The house is silent and still, but it bears all the marks of the Wehrmacht who abandoned it in such a hurry. German ration boxes are strewn around a table, small mountains of cigarettes dashed out on windowsills. Theo imagines the people who lived there before, the small family that would have gathered around the now-pilfered kitchen. He climbs the creaking staircase and tries not to wonder about what happened to them.
The bedrooms on the second floor have been thoroughly ransacked, mattresses overturned in search of valuables, the drawers of a handsome old highboy rifled through without care.
It’s a childish urge that draws Theo over to it. Some small, homesick part of him that needs to run his fingers over the dulled edge of the dresser’s canted corners. Not a valuable piece, but beautiful in its way. Made by hands that passed it down from generation to generation, with life in it still. All it needs is a polish, some oil, he thinks. Then things happen very quickly.
The silence is shattered by the sudden crack of the closet door being thrown open, but it’s already too late to react: Theo reels in bewilderment when the man — a Kraut, wild-eyed — comes charging out to tackle him down to the floorboards. The collision knocks the breath out of him, his head smacking against the floor, arms grappling at the soldier’s hands closing around Theo’s neck.
He left his rifle downstairs. Had Boris heard the crash? Theo tries to shout, to scream, but he’s choking and his vision slips in and out of focus, only glimpses of the red face of the German terrified and desperate above him.
Finally, in a moment of tight-wire clarity, he remembers his trench knife. It’s trapped awkwardly beneath him but still within reach, black dots closing in before his eyes, and with one single motion, Theo releases it from its canvas scabbard.
He doesn’t register it as the knife plunges into the side of the German’s throat. But the hands at his own neck go slack, warm blood dripping over his chest, a terrible mangled gurgling as the man crumples on top of him.
Somehow, numbly, Theo manages to push him away. Then he can’t move, can’t find the strength to get up himself; just lies there, frozen on his back, he sucks in ragged breaths until he can see again. The ceiling stares back. There’s a strange wet whistling, and Theo doesn’t have to look to recognize it as the death rattle struggle of the Kraut trying to breathe, too.
He’d had a young face. Younger even than Theo had been when he was drafted. Just sixteen or seventeen. A deserter, maybe an escaped prisoner of war. He’d had no weapons. There is nobody else.
Footsteps thunder up the staircase and into the room, coming to a halt in the doorway: Boris. Then it’s quiet again. The German has stopped breathing, Theo realizes, and it jolts him back into his own body. He pulls himself to sit up numbly as the room spins and then slows.
“Oh, fuck, Potter, where, what are you — alright? Are you hurt?” Theo can’t quite make sense of what’s being asked of him. He only knows that Boris is as white as a sheet. It makes his black eyes look huge, too wide for his face, and it occurs to Theo that he’s never seen Boris truly afraid until now.
Theo shakes his head. No, he isn't hurt. Is he? He doesn't think he is.
“Are you sure?” A sharp, cold urgency. Looking Theo up and down like he doesn’t believe it, Boris’ hands swipe at the Kraut blood on his chest in search of a wound. So close that Theo can smell the faint tang of his sweat and the last cigarette he smoked.
“Potter, asked if you are sure,” Boris shakes him, “please. Because you look — all this blood, I thought house was empty, and sometimes with knives it does not hurt so much until later, so—“
“It’s his,” Theo croaks out at last. Boris doesn’t move away. He just watches Theo catch his breath with this odd, stricken look, still so close. Theo remembers how warm and solid he’d been with the wine in the church.
And Theo doesn’t know what to make of what happens next: Boris fingers reaching out to brush along his cheekbone, mouth opening as if to say something—
“Decker! Pavlikovsky!” Henry’s voice echoes up the stairs, sending them both flinching. “On me. We’re moving ahead.”
The effect is instantaneous: Boris snaps out of whatever daze he’d been in, standing abruptly to roll his shoulders with the same peculiar savage grace as ever. Theo feels foggy, waterlogged. He’s seized by the sudden urge to reach out and grab Boris’ bony wrist.
“You should check him for a watch,” he mumbles instead. The dead German bearing witness, a slowly draining heap of wool by the dresser. Boris scoffs, as though nothing more than words had passed between them, and leaves.
10.
the goldfinch
It’s evening, dim and dusty when they arrive in the small town of Garches. Paris, barely a dozen miles away, is so close they can see its lights. Fireworks bursting on the horizon of a newly liberated city, heady with a budding fable: that La Ville Lumière was so beautiful that the Nazis had refused Hitler’s order to destroy it before surrendering. Who knows if it’s true.
The mood in the village is only a little more subdued. Women had cheered as they rolled in, waving little handmade American flags, children running wild and singing songs.
Winter celebrates by setting them to work unloading the trucks, where an old stone building will serve as a temporary billet. The owner — a gray-haired widow — shows them where to stack the crates. She looks as tired as any of them.
“Pour vous, madame. Veuillez nous excuser pour la gêne occasionnée," Henry addresses her in stiff, polite French. He gestures to two smaller cases of food. “Decker, Pavlikovsky, bring these inside for the proprietress. Madame Ripert is very kind to let us stay here.”
“Mes respects,” the woman says. Then in excellent English: “It’s my pleasure. You and your men can stay as long as you like. Bring the boxes this way, please.”
Whatever its purpose before the war, the building was clearly a fine establishment once. The lobby is still beautiful, with well-maintained moulded panels and a long, heavy oak desk. Soldier's footsteps have tracked in mud and dirt, dulling the herringbone floor. Theo can hear them chattering and roughhousing in an adjacent room, setting up their cots in the emptied-out hall.
Madame Ripert doesn’t seem to mind. “Right here,” she says. Theo sets the crate by the desk and can’t help but notice the small stack of catalogs in the letter tray.
“Excuse me, I — this place, is it an, ah,” he blurts out, trying to recall the words, “maison de vente? An auction house? ”
The woman’s eyes light up. “Oui, yes, of minor artworks. Before the occupation. You like it?”
“Yes,” Theo nods quickly, “I do, very much. This is a Frans Hals on the cover, isn’t it?” He points to the drawing printed on the cover of the catalog; a drunken, grinning young man rendered in expressive pencil strokes.
The pall of the war seems to fall away from the woman’s face, suddenly younger in her excitement. He feels it too; the immediate, implicit kinship reminds him of Hobie and then, achingly, of his mother.
“A very good eye. His sketches — so lifelike, like his paintings. Full of joy.”
Boris looks over their shoulders. Theo knows what he’s going to ask before he asks it, and bites his tongue.
“Where is it all now?”
“My late husband wouldn’t sell to the fascist snakes,” she murmurs, expression faltering, “so they took what they wanted. Everything else — destroyed.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that.” It’s true; in fact, Theo is surprised and a little ashamed by the acuteness of his sorrow. It seems wrong to mourn the destruction of artworks with each day pendulumed by death and real, human misery.
Maybe, he thinks, this is the only way it makes sense. Maybe the new world they’ve found themselves in leaves no room for beauty; not in life, not in poetry or rendering. They share the heavy moment in silence, looking at the black and white photograph, considering the unspoken possibility that it’s all that remains of the portrait. Even Boris seems to understand, his eyes downcast, mouth a humorless line.
Abruptly, Madame Ripert looks up as though she’s made up her mind. “Come,” she says, already setting down a narrow corridor, “I will show you something.”
Theo follows her with Boris trailing hesitantly behind. She unlocks a battered wooden door to reveal a cellar staircase, trudging down it’s stone area without a backwards glance.
Boris stops Theo with a hand on his shoulder, eyes narrowed. “Are you sure?” he asks. They’ve all been instructed to avoid fraternization with unfamiliar locals, but Boris seems to harbor a unique distrust for French citizens. Any one could be a sympathizer, collaborator, Potter. They let the Nazis have their country, didn’t they?
“Oh, don’t be a coward. If it’s a trap it isn’t a very good one,” Theo rolls his eyes, gesturing to their holstered sidearms. Boris bristles and the magic c-word works its magic; he shoves his way past Theo and down the staircase.
The basement is cramped and windowless, with low wood beam ceilings and crumbling stone walls. A few exposed bulbs provide the only source of dim light, their flickering lending the space a hazy, candlelit quality. Madame Ripert is stooped in one of the corners, pulling some a small iron grate from the wall. A long-disused coal chute. She reaches in, then up, feeling for something until she produces a small, flat package.
“Here, come here.”
It’s roughly the size of a large book. Theo approaches, then so does Boris. She unwraps the canvas covering to reveal a layer of glassine, and then—
And then Theo sees. He recognizes it as soon as the paper is folded away, recognizes it like the planes of his own face. It’s smaller than he would have imagined and brighter, so much brighter. He doesn’t have to ask if it’s real; he knows.
“A maquisard brought it to us,” she whispers, “to protect, until the war is over. But it makes me very sad in here, in the dark.”
“May I — could I,“ Theo falters, throat closing up, but Madame Ripert nods. She passes the painting from her own slow, careful hands to his.
He’s never seen it in color before. His mother had, once, as a girl. Theo remembers with a sharp searing feeling the way she would smooth out the pages of A Wanderer in Holland, pointing to the reproduction in black ink. Anything we manage to save from history is a miracle, she said. He can almost hear her.
Amidst the rich ochres and tawny browns, the stripe on the wing is a slash of pure light. It’s a bird, of course. Just a goldfinch with its head cocked and black eyes peering out, tethered by a thin chain.
Any words die before they reach his lips. What can he say? That it’s beautiful, that it was his mother’s favorite? There are tears in his eyes, he realizes. And finally, when it hurts too much to look at any longer, Madame Ripert takes it gently from his hands.
Boris shifts at his side. Theo, having forgotten he was there, moves to swipe at his eyes numbly. But then a hand reaches out to grasp Theo’s wrist, not gentle and not ungentle. He says nothing, but Theo knows he understands.
11.
the only city in the world
They aren’t the first Americans in Paris, but it feels like it.
The bar overflows with G.I.s in a sea of greens and khakis and red, red cheeks, mingling with the locals; shockingly beautiful women in fashionable clothes and wild-haired men in tricolor armbands. Some wild club in a basement, just shy of bohemian, where the music is loud and the drinks are very, very strong.
Even at their cramped little table, choked with all the cigarette smoke, Theo feels like he’s in a dream. He watches in fascination as Bunny wraps his arms around a young woman at the bar to say something, to which she replies with a shriek of delight. Charles, close behind them, gestures expressively at a girl who seems to have no idea what he’s saying.
Boris nudges Theo roughly. His eyes are glassy with amusement, impossible to take seriously in a dress uniform. Between the unkempt hair and his collar askew, he gives the comical impression of a street urchin in a stolen suit.
“Look at that,” Boris jeers, “pawing at each other like bears over there. No doubt the first woman Bunny hasn’t paid for! Charles’ first woman ever, maybe.”
“Well, one of them seems to like you,” Theo laughs, nodding in the direction of a slender woman in a crepe goldenrod dress across the room. She looks away and whispers something in her friend’s ear, giggling.
“Eh? The one in yellow?” Boris leans back in his chair and shakes his head. “Too clean. Girl next door type, I can tell. Besides, it’s you she is mooning over.”
“She is not. And you’re really saying you’d prefer, what, a prostitute?”
“No! Not a whore. Although” — a diplomatic waggle of the hand — “I have, of course. But someone like that? Too much like a doll.”
“Right.” Theo nods sagely as though this makes sense.
It’s been a very long time since he’s been properly drunk like this. Maybe it’s the first time he’s been drunk like this. He’s grinning and it feels strange on his lips, but why shouldn’t he? They’re in Paris and they’re alive.
The band stutters into a slow song. On the dance floor, the aspiring lovers fall in on each other. Boris stands with a derisive snort and shoves what remains of their wine bottle under his arm.
“Time to find some better music, I think,” he announces, pulling Theo to his feet.
They wander drunkenly, aimlessly, passing the wine back and forth like schoolchildren through Paris’ endless side streets and alleyways. It must be later than Theo imagined, dawn encroaching, the neighborhood they find themselves in empty and quiet. Just damp cobblestone and darkened windows, buildings towering like pristine figurines in a snow globe. Baroque, much older than anything in Manhattan, and mercifully untouched. Theo sucks it in greedily as one last sober thought — that this may be the last time he ever sees a place so beautiful — echoes dizzily through him.
“I wish we could stay here,” he breathes without exactly meaning to.
For once Boris doesn’t seem to have anything to say. He just stops and turns to Theo with his ringed, wild creature eyes, and the smile on his lips falls away into something else.
“Boris,” Theo says, though he isn't sure what he means to say. Whatever it was catches in his throat anyway, and it doesn't matter, because then Boris’s lips find his in the dark.