Birdsong

  There was another silence. Then Weir said, “I can’t do it, Wraysford. I can’t do it. It’s just a tiny bird. It’s done nothing wrong.”

  Stephen, trying to keep control of himself, said, “For God’s sake kill it. Just squeeze it in your hand. Bite its head. Anything.”

  “You do it.”

  “No! It’s too risky passing it back to me. It might escape again.”

  Weir rolled over on to his back and held his left fist toward Stephen. The bird’s head appeared between the forefinger and thumb. “There it is,” Weir said. “I’ll hold it still while you take your knife and just cut its throat.”

  Stephen felt Weir’s eyes boring into him. He reached into his pocket and found his knife. He opened the blade and reached up over Weir’s knees. Weir, straining up on his back, was able to meet his gaze as Stephen’s head appeared between his shins. The two men looked at each other over the tiny yellow head between them. Stephen thought of the lines of men he had seen walking into the guns; he thought of the world screaming in the twilight at Thiepval. Weir looked steadily at him. Stephen put the knife away in his pocket. He fought back the rising tears. Weir might let the bird go. It might touch him.

  “I’ll take it,” he said.

  “You’ll need both hands to dig and crawl,” said Weir.

  “I know.”

  With his handkerchief Stephen made a sling for the bird. He tied three corners together and left an opening.

  “All right. Put it in there and I’ll tie it up.”

  With teeth clamped very tight together he held out both hands to Weir, who released the bird into the handkerchief. Stephen jumped as he felt the battering of wings against the palms of his hands. He managed with fumbling fingers to bring the fourth corner of the handkerchief in to the other three and tie it. He put the knot between his teeth and crawled back over Weir’s body.

  They began their slow retreat, Stephen pushing back the loose earth and enlarging the tunnel where he could. Weir fought his way with his left hand.

  In the narrow darkness Stephen felt the feathery weight beneath his face. Sometimes the bird beat its wings and struggled, sometimes it lay still in fear. He saw in his mind the stretched skeleton of the lower wing, the darting movement of the head, and the black, relentless eyes. He tried to turn his mind away from it by thinking of other things, but no other thought would lodge in his mind. It was as though his brain had closed down, leaving only one picture: the fossil shape of a bird, a pterodactyl ribbed in limestone, the long cruel beak with its prehistoric hook and the bones fanned out, their exiguous width and enormous span, particularly the underside of the breakable wing, with its sinewy feathers plugged into the bird’s blood at one end, then stretched over the delta that would flap and bang in his face as the frantic creature, in the storm of its true hostility, would bring its vast plucking beak into his eyes.

  The small canary suspended from his mouth made feeble movements and its yellow feathers protruded from the handkerchief to brush softly against his face. He closed his eyes and pushed onward. He longed for the mud and the stench, for the sound of shells.

  Behind him Weir crawled as best he could. He asked Stephen to stop as he tucked his arm into the front of his shirt for support. He shouted in pain as the two bones momentarily rubbed together.

  They reached the ladder and were able to stand up. Stephen took the handkerchief from his mouth and handed it to Weir.

  “I’ll climb up and send a couple of your men down to help you. You hold on to this.”

  Weir nodded. He was very pale, Stephen noticed. Then Weir gave the wide, empty-eyed grin that worried Ellis so much. He said, “You’re a brave man, Wraysford.”

  Stephen raised his eyebrows. “You just wait there.”

  He climbed the shaft of the mine with growing pleasure. Up in the mud, in the yellow light, beneath the rain, he stretched his arms and breathed deeply of the chloride of lime as though it were the finest scent from the rue de Rivoli.

  He found Ellis waiting nervously near the tunnel head.

  “Ah, Ellis, get a couple of sewer rats down there will you? Major Weir’s broken his arm.”

  “Where have you been, sir?”

  “Helping out the sappers, you know. You have to show willing. If you ask nicely they’ll even build a dugout for you.”

  “I was worried, sir. Couldn’t you have sent someone else?”

  “That’s enough, Ellis. Just get two men down there. I’m going for a walk. Nice day, isn’t it?”

  Down the line he could hear CSM Price issuing orders for a fatigue party to begin trench repair work. Stephen smiled. When the fields of Europe were no longer needed for human use and were allowed to sink back into the fires of creation, Price would still be making lists.

  “Of course you can go,” said Colonel Gray. “This is supposed to be a civilized war now. And we shall know where to find you. Just don’t let young Ellis here lead you astray, that’s all.”

  Stephen nodded. “Thank you, sir.”

  Gray picked up his book and swung his feet back on the desk. He was already a page further into Thucydides by the time Stephen and Ellis left the house that was acting as battalion headquarters.

  The next day the train took them into a countryside almost buried by the debris of conflict. To begin with Stephen had found it strange to look up from a shelled trench and be able to make out normal country life a few miles back from the line, but after almost three years of fighting the ground had become littered with the light-industrial detritus of war. Gasoline cans, shell cases, wooden boxes, tins, the packages of all kinds of supply goods and ammunition lay on either side of the tracks.

  After ten minutes they saw their first green tree, the first trunk not blasted and blackened by shells, but still covered with brown bark and crowned with branches in which pigeons and thrushes were gathered.

  Ellis offered him a cigarette. Stephen took the packet and looked at it. “ ‘The Flag.’ How do you get these things, Ellis?”

  “I’m trying to see how many different brands I can get through. Apparently there’s some called ‘Kitchener’s Small Size’ that I haven’t had yet.”

  The cheap smoke filled the compartment.

  Since Ellis had first mentioned Amiens, Stephen had allowed himself to weaken slowly. He had thought he would never return, but he had come to believe that what had happened there was so long ago and was an experience of so peculiar a kind that it had no real bearing on the life he was living. Perhaps there was something dangerous about revisiting places from an earlier time, but he did not feel open to any sentimental feeling. He had only a certain curiosity to see what had happened to the town. Gray told him it had been “knocked about” by shells.

  “Tell me something, sir,” said Ellis. “You know those cards the other night. Did you—”

  “You don’t have to call me sir, you know. As for the cards … what do you think?”

  “I think you fixed them.”

  Stephen smiled. “Of course I did. Even Weir knows that.”

  “So why does he want you to do them?”

  “Because he’s frightened.”

  Ellis looked puzzled.

  “Yes, it’s strange, I suppose. Weir doesn’t believe in anything. He needs something to sustain him. He tries to believe that his own survival is something to fight for. Something to die for, you might almost say.”

  “And the cards help him?”

  “Perhaps. He’s a very scared man. He can probably trick himself.”

  “I see,” said Ellis. He spoke with a clipped, abrupt voice. “And when did he first get the wind up?”

  Stephen said very gently, “I don’t think it’s fear in that sense. He’s not afraid of gas or shells or being buried. He’s frightened that it doesn’t make sense, that there is no purpose. He’s afraid that he has somehow strayed into the wrong life.”

  “I see,” said Ellis doubtfully.

  The train rattled on toward Amiens and Stephen felt his pleasu
rable anticipation increase. Ellis was not the man he would have chosen as a companion but he was determined to be kind to him. Weir was resting in a rehabilitation centre near Arras. He had hoped for a trip home, but injuries like his had been viewed with suspicion since the early days when the infantry had taken to sticking their arms in the rapidly unwinding winch gear in the hope of serious damage.

  Ellis took out a writing pad and began a letter home. Stephen gazed from the window. The sounds of war were leaving him. Unlike Weir, who stood imprisoned by imaginary shell sounds in the quiet bedroom of his parents’ house, Stephen found himself able to forget.

  What had he been like seven years ago? What world had he lived in, what heightened, dazed existence? It had seemed coherent at the time; the powerful feelings it had set loose in him, inflamed each day by the renewed pleasure of his senses, had appeared to make up something not only comprehensible, but important. In his life at that time he felt he had come close to understanding, even proving something, though what that thing was he could no longer say.

  “What are you going to do in Amiens?” he asked Ellis.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been on leave before. I don’t know how much of normal life goes on. I’d like to go to a theatre, perhaps. What ought I to do?”

  Stephen shrugged. “Most people want to get drunk first, then go to a brothel.”

  Ellis frowned. “I don’t think I should like that.”

  Stephen laughed. “Which? The getting drunk?”

  “No, the … other.”

  “I think you’re supposed to. The army thinks it’s good for your health to go with a woman regularly. The brothels are sanctioned by the military police.”

  “Well, will you go?” said Ellis challengingly.

  Stephen shook his head. “No. I’ve no interest at all.”

  “Well then. Neither shall I,” said Ellis.

  “Who are you writing to?”

  “My mother.”

  Stephen smiled. “I probably asked you at the wrong moment in that case. But I shall definitely go to a bar. You must let me buy you some champagne. That’s how we’ll start.”

  Stephen did not at first recognize the station as the train slunk in. He was braced for memories, but none came. On the platform he looked up at the vaulted roof and then down toward the concourse. He and Isabelle had left from another platform on the far side of the station. He remembered a green door he had stared at from the carriage window as they waited to depart. He looked across the tracks and saw it, just as it had been.

  It was midafternoon when he and Ellis emerged on to the cobbled forecourt of the station. It was an overcast day, but with the first signs that the six-month winter might be starting to relax its grip. It had stopped raining, and the breeze did not sting them with cold.

  They walked up toward the cathedral. Some of the buildings bore the marks of shellfire. Only a few miles behind allied lines, Amiens had suffered according to the tide of the war. The recent allied advances had made it safe for the first time: there were no bombardments, and the local businessmen were trying to profit from the new calm in the Somme region. Shops were reopening; the eight o’clock curfew on bars and restaurants was lifted.

  Stephen looked with fierce interest at the streets he remembered. Despite the occasional missing wall or patch of blackened masonry, they remained for the most part unchanged. He had not actively recalled them in the seven years he had been away; he had thought little about the town. Yet as he walked up the familiar ways, the streets remembered themselves in his mind.

  At a corner was a half-timbered building through whose open window Isabelle had once heard a tune that had excited her, though not her husband’s friend Bérard. To his right, down a narrower passage, was the restaurant to which he had so often gone for lunch. Perhaps his favourite seat would still be in the window; it was possible the same Parisian would be behind the bar.

  “Ellis, do you mind if we go down here? There’s a café I remember.”

  “As long as it has champagne. Is it the Gobert? That’s the one that was recommended to me.”

  “I can’t remember what it’s called. It was run by a man who used to have a café in the Place de l’Odéon in Paris.”

  They stood outside and Stephen peered through the window. The wooden stalls had gone. There was a bare counter on one side, and on the other some cheap-looking tables and chairs. He pushed open the door, a light piece of wood with netting over the glass that grated on the stone floor as it turned. There was no one inside. They went up to the bar, behind which were some understocked shelves.

  A bald man with a lined, exhausted face and a greasy apron came stiffly downstairs and through a small door at the end of the room. He had a cigarette attached to his lower lip. He grunted a greeting. Stephen ordered two beers.

  “Do you know what happened to the man who used to own this place?” he said.

  “He’s in Germany. A prisoner. They were rounded up in nineteen fourteen.”

  “Who were?”

  “All the men in Amiens. When the Germans occupied the town.”

  Stephen took the beer. “You mean every man in the town was taken to Germany?”

  The man shrugged. “Only the stupid ones. And the cowards. The rest made their own arrangements.”

  Stephen said, “And what about you?”

  “I was too old to be of interest to them.”

  “What’s he saying?” said Ellis.

  “He says the man who used to run this restaurant was deported to Germany. It’s a bleak little place, isn’t it? It used to be very lively, full of students and so on.”

  Stephen put down his beer glass among the uncleaned rings on the zinc counter. He had suddenly understood what had happened to all the students who used to shout out their orders and fill the air with their strong cigarette smoke. Those who had not died at Verdun would now be gathering for the attack on the river Aisne under their inspirational new general.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “Let’s find somewhere else.”

  “Why? I was just beginning to—”

  “It’s too sad. Come on.” Stephen left some coins on the counter.

  It was beginning to grow dark outside and Stephen was anxious not to blight Ellis’s first leave with his own thoughts.

  “You pick somewhere,” he said, “and I’ll buy the drinks.”

  They walked past the cathedral, which was sandbagged to the level of the lower windows. The stone was intact, though some of the glass was missing. Stephen noticed how many of the women in Amiens seemed to be in the black clothes of mourning.

  They stopped in a bar called Aux Huîtres, though there were no oysters for sale inside. It was full of soldiers of all nationalities: English, French, Belgian, Portuguese. Stephen bought champagne and filled Ellis’s glass. He raised his own and they drank each other’s health. Stephen had a desire to reach oblivion quickly. He was finding it harder than he had thought to adapt to this relatively normal world. It was the presence of so many soldiers that was disconcerting. He knew that many of them had been waist-deep in mud, crawling among the rats the day before. He looked at their polished belts and smoothly shaved faces. If they could laugh so genially now, of what other deceptions could they not be capable?

  The women of Amiens who were not mourning for their dead husbands seemed well disposed toward the foreign soldiers. They accepted drinks and sat at the tables, where they made attempts to understand the stilted French of the English officers.

  Before he had finished his second glass, Stephen found that Ellis had volunteered him to help with some interpreting. There was an embarrassed major of about thirty who was drawing down lungfuls of pipe smoke to conceal his confusion as a fellow officer from a Scots regiment tried to forge some intimacy between him and a loud Frenchwoman who was drinking red wine.

  “Tell her he’s keen to show her round his dugout,” said the Scot.

  Stephen translated, then replied, “She says she thinks he’s a very handsome
fellow and wonders if he would like to take her to dinner somewhere.” This was rather more forthright than what the woman had actually said.

  The major tried to make a stammering answer of his own, but his French went no further than “Est-ce que possible pour,” after which he returned to his pipe with various chivalrous gestures in the direction of the woman.

  “I think she’d like a drink,” said Stephen.

  “I see. I’m terribly sorry, I—”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll get her one. You carry on chatting.”

  The Scot then attempted to explain why what Stephen had said was funny on the grounds that in the army “chatting” meant trying to kill lice; he did not know the word for lice or for kill, so relied on insectlike gestures of his fingers and a smashing motion of his fist on the table. The woman shook her head in confusion, so he took a lighter and held it against the seam of his tunic, then lay on his back on the floor kicking his legs in the air.

  Stephen returned to find the woman laughing uproariously. Ellis looked up at Stephen a little uncertainly, but on seeing him smile back, also began to laugh and bang the table. Others from around the bar looked over tolerantly in their direction. Stephen closed his eyes and drank quickly. He had bought a bottle of Old Orkney whisky at the bar, a tumbler of which he now washed down with the champagne. When he opened his eyes again, he felt a melting of warmth toward the other men. He was relieved.

  The Scot said, “Tell her he’d like to take her to Paris for the weekend on his next leave. He wants to go to the Moulin Rouge.”

  “Moulin Rouge,” echoed the woman, laughing. “Very good.”

  She was congratulated on her English. She said to Stephen, “Tell him I learned English from a general who was staying in the town.”

  “She says she thinks you’ll soon be promoted to the rank of general.”

  The major shook his head in modest embarrassment. Something of his gaucherie reminded Stephen of Weir, and he felt a pang of pity for his absent friend. He wished he had been there, poor, strange Weir, who was so unworldly and yet, in the last way he wanted, experienced beyond dreams.