21
THEY DROVE IN SILENCE through the lengthening shadows of the afternoon. They went very fast, sweeping around the turns of the humped, narrow road, the tires squealing. Tony was tight over the wheel, and he seemed to Lucy to be driving fast and dangerously for a purpose, to keep himself so intent and concentrated on passing cars and managing curves that there was no chance of thinking about anything else.
She did not try to talk to him. I am expended, she thought dully. There’s nothing further I have to say.
They were approaching a village. It was still a quarter of a mile off, in a little declivity, a huddle of bluish slate roofs over gray stone, clustered around a church steeple.
“There it is,” Tony said.
Lucy stared through the windshield. The town lay quietly in the sunshine, surrounded by its green fields, with the road running straight into the middle of it, looking like a dozen other villages they had gone through.
“Well,” Tony asked, “what do you want to do?”
“It happened at a crossroads,” Lucy said. “I got a letter from a man who was with him and he said they were coming in from the north and there was a crossroads just outside the town.”
“North is on the other side,” Tony said.
They were silent as they drove through the village. The street was narrow and winding and the buildings were right along the edge, with boxes of geraniums in bloom under the windows. The shutters were closed on all the windows and Lucy had a sudden picture of all the inhabitants lurking within, balefully spying on the strangers rushing through their town in their noisy machines, breaking the centuries-old peace of the place, reminding them of their poverty and their bitter roots in this peasant soil, and of the hard lives they led.
Lucy remembered the Sergeant’s letter, and thought, distractedly, He crossed an ocean to take this empty place. And he never even reached it.
They were almost through the town by now and they still hadn’t seen a single person. The cracked shutters on the windows absorbed the glare of the sun and the single gas pump on the edge of the town was locked and unattended. It was almost as though, for her benefit, the town had remained exactly as it was, asleep and dangerous, on the day eleven years before when her husband had walked up the road toward it with a white towel on a stripped branch.
Tony was scowling a little as he drove through the town, as though he disapproved of the place. But it might only have been the effect of the sun, reflecting off the flaking stone walls. They pulled slowly out the other side of the village and Lucy saw the crossroads. Looking at it, the two narrow country roads, thick with white dust, intersecting each other in a meaningless small widening of their surfaces, Lucy had a sense of recognition that was almost pleasurable. It was like searching for something that you have lost, that has nagged you with its loss for many years, and suddenly coming upon it.
“Here,” she said. “Stop here.”
Tony pulled the car a little to one side, just before they reached the crossroads, although he couldn’t get all the way off the road because of the ditch that ran alongside it. The ditch was almost three feet deep and was overgrown with grass, powdered with the dust of the road. There were no trees, although there was a row of hedge a few yards back from the road.
Tony leaned back in his seat, stretching and working his shoulders.
“This is the place,” Lucy said. She got out of the car. Her legs were stiff and cramped and the sun beat down, very hot on the unshaded, bright road, now that they were no longer moving. She took off her scarf and pushed her hand through her hair and walked to the crossroads, the dust rising in little chalky puffs around her heels. The countryside slumbered all around them, empty and stretching and anonymous, without emotion, sending up a grassy, thin aroma.
In the distance there were several clusters of roofs and church steeples, other towns lost under the open sun. Only to the north, on the side away from the town, was the landscape broken. There was a rise about a hundred feet away and trees along the edges of the road which came down toward them in a gentle, direct slope, and Lucy could imagine, from the Sergeant’s letter, the jeeps parked facing in the other direction, just under the rise, and the four men in helmets lying there, rifles ready, their eyes just over the crest of the ridge, watching the town, watching the three figures walking through the hot naked sunlight in the white dust, coming up to the crossroads, outlined there for a moment in the blank and meaningless swelling, then starting on the other side toward the silent walls …
She paced slowly down the center of the road, thinking, I am treading on the spot. This is the place he was looking for, this is the place he was traveling to. Why did I come here? It is just a place, like any other. A back-country road, marked by cartwheels, in a part of Europe that looks as though it might be anywhere, Maryland, Maine, Delaware, with no sign any place within the horizon that a war ever passed this way, that armed men ever died here.
She shook her head. She felt empty and at a loss. There was no possible ceremony at this nondescript, vacant crossroads with which to dignify the moment or bring it to a climax. There were no symbols or monuments, just meaningless roads without history. She was conscious of Tony behind her, brooding and implacable, and suddenly resented his presence there. If she had been alone, or with someone else, anyone else, she thought, she would have been able to find significance in the moment, give way to sorrow or relief. I’m here with the wrong man, she thought.
Despite herself, she found herself wondering, How long should I stay here? Will it be decent to leave in ten minutes? Fifteen? Should I drop a flower, weep a tear, scratch a name on a stone?
She looked back at Tony. He was still sitting at the wheel of the car, his hat pulled down in front, so that the sun was kept from his eyes. He wasn’t watching her, but was staring incuriously across the empty fields. It occurred to Lucy that he had the air of a chauffeur waiting for his employer to come out of a shop, not caring what she was buying, how long she would stay, where the next stop would be, waiting with a remote, hired, unconnected patience, earning his salary, thinking of six o’clock, when he would be free to go his own way.
She walked over to the car. He turned his head toward her. “What a place to get killed,” he said.
Lucy didn’t answer him. She went around to the other side of the car, being careful not to slip into the ditch, and opened her bag, which was on the seat. She took out the Sergeant’s letter, and carefully removed it from its envelope. The paper was cracked and flaking with age at the edges and when she opened it she could see little holes along the creases.
“Here,” she said. “You might want to read this.”
Tony glanced at her suspiciously, the chauffeur wary of being involved unwillingly in the secrets of his employer. Then he took the letter, spreading it against the wheel, and began to read.
Lucy went around to the back of the car and leaned against the baggage rack. She didn’t want to watch Tony reading the letter. She didn’t want him to feel that it was necessary to put any kind of expression on his face for her, pity or amusement at the Sergeant’s grammar or sorrow for the event of the distant afternoon. She became conscious of the silence, so different from the crowded music of the American countryside, and she realized that she missed the sound of birds. That’s right, she remembered, the French shoot everything, the birds are dead or they have learned to keep quiet.
She heard Tony rustling the letter, putting it back in the envelope, and she turned around. He was being very careful with the frail paper and tucking the edges in neatly. He tapped the envelope reflectively against the steering wheel several times, then sat still, staring out at the road. Then he climbed out of the car, putting the letter in his pocket. He went out into the middle of the road and stopped, scuffing the dust with his shoe.