In most of these photos you can’t see that it’s war, or that the war is just over, and yet they seem to suck all wars from all times into themselves. Whether we die in chain mail or in the flash of a bomb full of deadly rays, the vocabulary remains the same: emptiness and traces of blood and dirty bandages. Look at the arsehole. Who catches the shit? Those of whom there is no sign, just taken away, to the recuperation ward, the mortuary, the final grave after the anonymous hole in the ground? Those photos are waiting. Everything has been brought into a permanent state of readiness for our arrival, alive or dead or decimated to a hunk of meat without arms or legs. Every peace is an interval between two wars.
I can remember him taking this one, I was there. One of the early autumns a few years after the armistice, when we went back to my uncle’s house annually as a kind of pilgrimage; my husband, my brother, a handful of others, to spend a few days there. From there he and I sometimes made day trips, or went on two-day ones, always to the area of the battlefields.
That day, I remember, we were walking through a wooded section in the hills around Reims. It was the end of August, hot, late in the afternoon. We were walking some distance apart, and at a certain moment I had lost sight of him. I retraced my steps, but he was nowhere to be seen. Only when he called out my name—“By Jove,” he cried, “Helen, look at that!”—did I find him again, in a natural basin surrounded by trunks and undergrowth, where it smelt strongly of mould.
A wall of thoroughly weathered wood with a narrow doorway in it portioned off part of the basin. He stood looking inside and beckoned me as he disappeared into the cave. I followed him, but it took some time before my eyes got used to the darkness.
“Incroyable…” he muttered, and I heard him feeling the ceiling of the low cave with his hand.
Instead of earth or stone his fingers, to judge by the sound, met metaclass="underline" the curve of a roof of corrugated iron that had been laid over the basin, then covered with a layer of earth and finally, autumn after autumn, buried under fallen leaves.
It smelt stuffy, smells I could not immediately place. My foot hit something that rolled over the ground — in the darkness I could only make out contours, unnaturally angular.
“Wait here,” he said. “Get my gear…” As if he was afraid that while he was away his discovery would vanish for ever into the earth.
We waited outside, nestled on a blanket on the edge of that little valley, and ate our sandwiches. He was waiting for the right light, the right moment. He had calculated that the sun, when it sank further, would shine through a gap in the treetops directly through the doorway inside, and that’s what happened. He went in and positioned himself with the camera against the inner wall of the wooden partition.
In the photo it really is as if he was able to trap the shafts of the evening sun while they secretly entered the underground space, furtively lit the four or five bunks against the side wall, above them the shelves with a few bottles and bandage tins, and the chair that seemed to have been hastily pushed away from a small table in the corner, and even a glimpse of the small notebook open on top of it, the handwriting rendered illegible by seeping damp.
You would say it is a snapshot, but I saw the patience with which he waited until the light reached the walls and the vault of corrugated iron at exactly the right angle. He did not stage anything, did not pull the blankets straight so that it made the impression even more strongly that the bunks had just been made up, or arrange the pillows in such a way that the mould marks in the cotton would come out better, or put the basins or the kidney bowl with a clamp, a pair of scissors with a long bent beak in it, on that low wooden box. Everything is as we found it — apart from that one thing, a pebble he thought at first, a piece of stone in which a strip of calcite or another crystal reflected the sun’s rays too directly. He threw it to me, and I sat on the blanket waiting until he was finished. It was not much bigger than a spirit glass and there was earth caked round it. When I picked it off with my fingernails, I felt the coolness of metal, a sharp edge, albeit dented. A piece of tin, a cap, I suspected, but gradually an inscription was revealed beneath my fingers. It could only be read after I had rubbed it clean with my moistened handkerchief. It said: “Oleum infirmorum”.
Only in words can the earth tremble in reverse, through the static syllables. Only here can the joints and ligaments stir, bones return like restlessly sleeping children under a grass-green quilt. Here the springs of the earth can whine and grind, its mantle becomes a soft placenta-like mattress. It shivers till it has gooseflesh. It draws explosions together in one point and spews out bullets and bombs. Here the house fronts can crawl out of the dust with wobbly knees, street after street, stuff door and window frames back in their gaping mouths like dentures, and have themselves measured up for hairdos of step gables and chimneys. Around their beams the fallen tiles flap in dense swarms to land on the cross laths and close up — I want everything at once.
And here I grip his fingers in mine, squeeze them and say: “Look. Look at us, Matthew Herbert!”
Without letting go of my hand, he turns round his own axis on the mattress, from his back onto his belly. I am standing against the side of the bed, opposite the tall mirror in the large wardrobe. “Look,” I repeat — and then the crown of his head brushes the side of my knee while he turns and pulls hard on my hand. His black hair scraping my pores gives way to his cheeks, his lips, the unexpectedly moist glow of his tongue. The skirt of my dress falls over his head, and his other hand glides up along the inside of my thigh, until his fingers encounter his own fluids, which make a chilly trace of tears down to the back of my knee.
And I say again: “Look!” and give him a teasing tap on the head. He giggles, pulls the material of my skirt round his face like a bonnet and surveys us in the mirror: I standing, he lying.
Behind us the half-open door. The wallpaper with the ethereal roses. The holy water vessel hanging askew. A palm branch. A row of clothes brushes on hooks under another, smaller mirror. Other people’s intimacy surrounding us.
“Look at us,” I say again. “I never want to forget this.”
“Better cover me arse then,” he giggles, taking his hand from between my thighs. And grabs behind his back for his trousers until the two white half-moons of his bottom disappear behind the khaki.
I stretch my fingers. He lays his fingers back in mine, turns my hand and strokes my nails with his thumb and now he stretches his neck to kiss my wrist, the collar of his unbuttoned shirt falls open and his shoulder is exposed.
He rolls back onto his back, stretches out his free hand and twists a lock of my hair round his finger.
“Look at us,” I repeat — the ribbon of my dress loose. My slip around my ankles. The tails of my tailored jacket creased. “Look at us.”
He tugs at my arm. His pupils look at me literally upside down, boyishly earnest. A hint of top teeth between his lips: “Helen?”
“What?”
“I have to pee.”
He must have found a po in one of the rooms. A minute or so later the sing-song of his water rang out in something that by the sound of it was made of metal. I heard him pull his trousers up and arrange his shirt before buttoning up again.
“All set and ready?” he beamed when he came back.