I think of my husband. He says: “It’s inevitable, Helen.” “Inevitable,” he repeats, again and again.
His voice can still make me shudder with desire, that rather drawling accent, his intonation that was always on the point of turning into a soft groan, as if speaking were lashing him with a forbidden, sexual pleasure.
“I’m not a thinker,” he said regularly on our trips.
Then he looked through the lens of his camera, and usually added: “I trust me eyes. I think with my eyes.”
“And I with my fingers,” I would reply.
THE NO MAN’S land he took me to later that day after the ruins was blooming in the summer sunshine with an exuberance that dazzled the eyes like an affront in technicolour. All that flora, which did not blossom but exploded in kilometre-long smudges of the brightest white, the deepest red or purple and shimmered in the sunlight between the pools and the mud. Butterflies rose in dense clouds above the nodding poppies and marguerites, and the wind carried them along: a paper din as if the angels were hastily leafing through the telephone books of fate — in the calm between offensives they kept count of the bullets and the dead. The unrecovered dead, whose bones in their threadbare uniform tunics lay bleaching in the sun. The unexploded projectiles that lay gleaming like the eggs of a prehistoric reptile among the plant growth.
The life that purred and buzzed. The bumble bees that helicoptered in swarms around the calyxes of the flowers seemed, when they rose, to swell into the bodies of the balloons which went on ropes far away above the horizon into the azure. Dragonflies shot between the clouds of butterflies, birds performed caprioles in flight and snapped at prey. Above, aircraft imitated the membrane wings and tentacular behaviour of the insects. Somewhere shots rang out and, above the butterflies, under the aircraft shrapnel, burst open in puffs of grey smoke. The balloons descended, submerged in the glow of the colour below.
It was as if the earth were practising revenge, an unsurpassed exercise. As if to show how nature would act in the days after the last human being, it thrust out flowers on hairy tentacles up out of its mud-brown folds, made them crane for light and the soggy ground and the corpses pulsate through their veins until their buds burst. In the muddy pools and cadavers the maggots swelled and the pupae ripened, in order when the first warmth came to strew illusions of buzzing and humming over the land.
I tried to capture that abundance with one of the cameras that he had brought for me so that I would make a credible impression that day, with the long tailored coat which I had worn on his advice, with my hair in a bun under a black hat, not too wide, and the bag of negative plates over my shoulder.
The atmosphere in the trench to which he had taken me was easy-going, since the earth was dry after a period without rain. I laughed along with the men who were on guard, Frenchmen. I did my best to add a British accent to my words and the men didn’t ask any questions. Excited by the variety my arrival brought them, they offered coffee, or the chlorine-flavoured liquid that had to pass for it.
I laughed with them when one of them, a tough chap whose cheeks had an apple glow, came crawling with the jug out of the narrow hole that they mockingly called “la cuisine”, and inside had obviously quickly rubbed his moustache with rancid fat or butter to impress me. While we made fun of his vanity countless gossamer-thin wings rustled around his figure. A swarm of crib sheets that had burst open landed on his shoulders, his chest, and a swarming of wings, antennae, compound eyes — perhaps the butterflies saw his uniform jacket as a huge blossom. As he put the jug down on the wooden crate that served as drawing room table, they swirled up, sailed above his crown, landed on his trunk and rolled out long, fine tongues, and combed the material of his tunic, the shine of the buttons, as if a bunch of medals came to life on his chest.
The men laughed and motioned to me that I should get a photo of him. They nodded to me, with an imaginary camera in their hands, and I did what they asked — looked at them there, arm in arm in that narrow trench, all good mates, a stump of tobacco between their lips, surrounded by a frozen swirl of white spots. When I announced that I wanted a photo of the plain, they pushed the crate against the wall of the trench, so I could stand on it and my eye was level with the peephole they had made in the top row of sandbags. The splendour of the landscape was scarcely bearable. The camera was too small, the lens too small for the view of that crazily blooming earth. It was as if the soil wanted only to have its mud-brown mug immortalized in the cold seasons, when the vegetation had withdrawn and the seeds were asleep, the larvae were overwintering in the carcasses, and the earth opened its folds to suck up the mines and the bullets and hatch them out — God knows what will stir in its skirts the day the shells break. What grimaces has it still in store for us?
Obscene is the word I repeat. Obscene the trick they played in one of the photos I took of my husband, much later, in the first weeks of the peace, when my mother was lying in bed gravely ill.
I snapped him that afternoon without his knowing it, when we had stopped in the middle of that bare plain between the old fronts, right on the spot where according to the map there should have been a hamlet, but where there was only emptiness, and a stream on a bed of frozen earth and ice. No sketch or photograph can ever capture the silence that prevailed there, ghostly since there was no longer a house front or alley in which our voices and footsteps could echo. Every sound was concrete, self-contained, and, now the concert of cannon barrels had fallen silent, was a scratch on the grey-white canvas of silence. The crunch when my foot shot through the steamed-up spectacles of ice in the puddles. Our voices that seemed to float lost on the steam of our breath in the chilly air.
He wanted a photo of that spot. I had followed a few steps behind him along a path by the stream, which led to a deserted trench. I snapped him from behind, just before he jumped over a ditch that flowed into the stream. It was a photo for my own pleasure, I wanted to catch the irrepressible keenness with which he went to work on his trips. And I could never get enough of his broad shoulders and especially his back, which I so liked holding in both arms, to knead his neck and feel my way down the slope to his buttocks when he lay on top of me and buried his face in my neck.
Only in the improvised darkroom which he had rigged up here at home in the cellar did it become clear what I had really captured that day.
In the red light first his back in that winter coat took shape on the paper. He understood at once the associations that the image evoked in me, our moments of stolen intimacy — but we fell silent when, at the bottom in the undulation of caved-in mud just above the surface of the water, a forearm suddenly appeared, unmistakably, and then a second, the two hands, folded in a lap, and a head, bent and obscured by the helmet. A man, a soldier, whom the mud, obscenely drained of colour, only seemed to want to expose in that photo — a caricature of a dead man who appeared to be waiting agreeably for the tram; hands in his lap, slumped on the bench, as he dozed, overwhelmed by earth and covered with a glaze of ice.
As the liquid ate more and more meaning into the paper we saw, farther away, on the bank of the stream into which the ditch flowed, between a pair of snapped, submerged tree trunks, a trunk standing, a torso, one arm raised; and above that arm, under a helmet, mostly merged with the mush of earth and glistening with ice, the arc of an eyebrow, the bridge of a nose and an eye socket which, darker and darker as the paper continued changing colour, stared at us with an expression of disgust and reproach, so it seemed: how can you allow me to be brought to light so — obscenely is the word?