I wonder whether those bodies were ever recovered. Perhaps the earth swallowed them up, in the days following, when the thaw set in. Perhaps only the freezing cold maintained an impression of their bodies, and when the iced crystals in the soil became liquid again their tissue seeped away around their skeletons that became stuck in the ground as the land dried out and formed a second body around their bones.
Season after season the ploughshare must have spread their remains even farther, dispersed the 200 or so screws and bolts and props of which the human frame consists underground. I wished I could let their fragments run through my hands. That I could, as archaeologists do with the skeletons of monarchs or plague victims from old mass graves, spread them out on a table, with everything in place, from cranium to fibula. And that they would not only let one read the history of their diseases, the osteoporosis, the tuberculosis, the bullet wound or the fatal sword stroke in their vertebrae, but that, as it were, their hiatuses would come to life and lead us to suspect a whole semantic system — as in our words, which I sometimes compare with false teeth, the echo of other words rattles through their syllables, in which other words awaken, and so on, so that whoever pronounces one word, if he listens hard, can hear the teeth of a whole language chattering in it.
“It’s inevitable, Helen,” repeats my husband, sliding a plate into the camera, and adjusting a lens. “What if I’d been killed, or your brother? If they hadn’t been able to evacuate him in time, and he had bled to death there in the mud and his body had never been found? Wouldn’t you want to see the spot where he spent his last moments? And if some farmer were to discover his rattling bones, what would you prefer? A nice tomb, or his empty eye sockets staring at you from under the glass of a shrine that commemorates the catastrophe that cost him his life? It’s inevitable, love. Inevitable.”
I thought of the incident during our second visit to “bloody, glorious Ypres”, of which by now scarcely a stone was left standing. When I stood up in the car, I had a view of virtually the whole town: a grey expanse of rubble that lay in the middle of rolling fields like a huge bird dropping. There was no trace to be found of the house where we had sheltered and made love. In the extensive plain of heaps of stone that with the best will in the world could no longer be called ruins, it was impossible to point to within ten metres of where it must have been.
My husband had got out and walked over to the soldiers and workmen who, at the foot of the cloth hall, almost the only structure that retained a certain recognizability, were clearing rubble. He wanted to take a picture of their work. In the shapeless masses of stone, over which, here and there, a buttress of the cathedral, a corner of the old guild houses stuck out, they had made themselves a path and somewhere in the shadow of the tower they were using tackle to remove heavier fragments.
I had followed him at a distance, meanwhile looking round, in my mind rebuilding the market square from my memories. When I got closer a commotion broke out in their ranks, the tackle was set aside. The men bent down and seemed to be pointing at something at the bottom of a wide ditch they had opened up at the foot of the tower.
My husband also leant forward, in order, between the trunks, the legs, the gesticulating arms, to get a view of what had made the men stop work.
I saw him lift up the tripod of the camera, take it with him and go and stand close to the men — when I joined him he hissed at me: “Don’t look now, sweetheart. Take a stroll, dear. Be with you in a wink.”
I did as he asked, but not without first, when the men stood to the left and right against the wall of the ditch to give him room, peering into the hole that had been uncovered when the tackle had moved a heavy stone and a more or less concave opening had appeared. In it lay four soldiers, by the look of their uniforms British, entwined arm in arm.
They awakened associations in me of hungry chicks in the narrow, round space of their nest. Probably they had crawled from the crypt that became their tomb up a slope of fragments to near this hole. It must have closed before their eyes when the bombardment, which had driven them into the crypt or whatever it was, pulverized the spire and the falling masonry cut off their escape.
Perhaps they had tried to dig out the hole with their bare hands, but in vain — no one could have dislodged the block of stone that lay inert in the tackle by muscle power alone. It looked as if they had gasped for breath, stretched their necks as the fire of the burning town above their heads sucked all the oxygen to itself, through every chink and gap that proved too narrow for them. The skin of their lips had dried to yellow parchment round their teeth.
Probably they had been lying in their catacomb since shortly after the outbreak of war, and they had lain for four years in that cellar while around them people tried as best they could to lead regular lives in the town, which with every barrage had collapsed a little more.
I waited by the car until my husband returned. He said there must be more down there, they had been able to see them vaguely in the darkness, at least fifteen or twenty, maybe even more. He shook his head. “Poor devils…”
“You want it all ways,” I said to him when he showed me the prints later. The careful framing. The tackle with the block of stone. The men left and right against the slanting wall of excavated earth, between them the mouth of that subterranean vault, almost slap in the middle. In the darkness of the hole the pale skulls of those soldiers, like a grotesque multiple birth, four foetuses stranded during birth.
“You allow those poor souls a grave, but you snap them in their death agony. For all the world to see. How inevitable’s that? You want it both ways, Monsieur Heirbeir.”
He pulled the prints out of my fingers with feigned indignation, took my chin in the hollow of his hand and gave me a fleeting kiss.
“And I think, Miss Demont, I’m not half as perfidious as you and your precious little words. You want it all, you greedy monster, in every possible way, you do…”
He pulled me off the sofa, put his arm round my waist and whispered, as we sailed laughing across the parquet floor to the couch in the bay window: “We’re two of a kind, madame.”
ILIKE PHOTOS more the less there is to see in them, when they leave all avenues open. That one pile he kept in a separate drawer, in large, flat boxes. They must have been outside his work for him too, or maybe the reverse: perhaps they were the hidden heart of it, more and at the same time less populated than the scenes of the living and the dead that he immortalized for press bureaus and newspapers; their all-too-fleeting, noisy ink.
I mean that country road with the deep tyre tracks, an almost abstract pattern that moves in a wide arc to the horizon, where, not quite cut off by the framing, a narrow band of clouds is hanging dripping in five poplars.
I mean the hole from which the body of a missing soldier has been dug up. A corner of the tarpaulin on which the remains are placed. The sole of the boot that was left on the bottom. Farther on, higher up the slope of the hill, a few heaps of sand, the shaft of a spade. Next to each heap of sand is an identical tarpaulin.
I also mean the operating theatre in the hospital. The operating table is empty, the nurses must have just left the theatre to take the instruments to be sterilized. The surgeons have gone for lunch or a rest after what seems a quiet day. Everything is bathed in spotless white light which picks out all the more sharply the smudges of blood on the floor tiles under the operating tables, three in number, and the dirty bandages in the shiny, enamelled buckets next to the tables, just before they were emptied.