A Fable

‘Thanks,’ he said, not even looking at her but looking still at the tall cold-faced sister standing over him. ‘Only about that time or during that time or at that time or whenever it was afterward that I woke up, I was in a hospital in England so it was next spring before I persuaded them to let me come back to France and go to Chaulnesmont until at last I found that sergeant-major and he told me where you were. Only there were three of you then. There was a girl too. His wife?’ The tall woman just looked down at him, cold, calm, absolutely inscrutable. ‘His fiancée, maybe?’

‘Yes,’ Marya said. ‘That’s it: his fiancée. That’s the word. Eat your soup.’

‘They were to be married,’ Marthe said. ‘She was a Marseille whore.’

‘I beg pardon?’ the Englishman said.

‘But not any more,’ Marya said. ‘She was going to learn to be a farmer’s wife. Eat your soup now before it is cold.’

‘Yes,’ the Englishman said. ‘Thanks:’ not even looking at her. ‘What became of her?’

‘She went back home.’

‘Home? You mean, back to the—back to Marseilles?’

‘Brothel,’ the tall woman said. ‘Say it. You English. The Americans too. Why did your French boggle at that word, being as good as it is with all the others?—She must live too,’ she said.

‘Thanks,’ the Englishman said. ‘But she could have stayed here.’

‘Yes,’ the woman said.

‘But she didn’t.’

‘No,’ the woman said.

‘She couldn’t, you see,’ Marya said. ‘She has an old grandmother she must support. I think it’s quite admirable.’

‘So do I,’ the Englishman said. He took up the spoon.

‘That’s right,’ Marya said. ‘Eat.’ But he was still looking at the sister, the spoon arrested above the bowl. Nor did the man with the feather wait this time to demand to be served, swinging his legs across the bench and carrying the bowl himself to the stove and plunging it, hand and all, into the pot before returning with the dripping and streaming bowl to the table where Marya had made the neat small stack of his coins and where the Englishman was still watching the tall sister, talking:

‘You had a husband too then.’

‘He died. That same summer.’

‘Oh,’ the Englishman said. ‘The war?’

‘The peace,’ the tall woman said. ‘When they let him come home at last and then the war started again before he could even put a plow in the ground, he probably decided that he could not bear another peace. And so he died. Yes?’ she said. He had already taken up a spoon of soup. He stopped the spoon again.

‘Yes what?’

‘What else do you want of us? To show you his grave?’ She just said ‘his’ but they all knew whom she meant. ‘That is, where we think it was?’ So did the Englishman merely say ‘his’.

‘What for?’ he said. ‘He’s finished.’

‘Finished?’ she said in a harsh stern voice.

‘He didn’t mean it that way, Sister,’ the other woman said. ‘He just means that Brother did the best he could, all he could, and now he doesn’t need to worry any more. Now all he has to do is rest.’ She looked at him, serene and unsurprised and unpitying. ‘You like to laugh, dont you?’

He did so, laughing, strong and steady and completely, with that side of his mouth still capable of moving, opening to laugh, the single eye meeting hers—theirs—full and calm and unpitying and laughing too. ‘So can you,’ he said to Marya. ‘Cant you?’

‘Why of course,’ Marya said. ‘Now, Sister,’ she said. ‘The medal.’

So, in the lane once more, there were three of them now instead of the two he had brought with him—three bits of graved symbolic bronze dangling and glinting from the three candy-striped ribbons bright as carnivals and gaudy as sunsets on the breast of the filthy dinner jacket as, facing them, he braced the two crutches into his armpits and with the hand he still had, removed the ruined homburg in a gesture sweeping and invulnerable and clapped it back on at its raked and almost swaggering angle and turned, the single leg once more strong and steady and tireless between the tireless rhythmic swing and recover of the crutches. But moving: back down the lane toward where he and the man with the feather had appeared, even if the infinitesimal progress was out of all proportion to the tremendous effort of the motion. Moving, unwearyable and durable and persevering, growing smaller and smaller with distance until at last he had lost all semblance of advancement whatever and appeared as though fixed against a panorama in furious progressless unrest, not lonely: just solitary, invincibly single. Then he was gone.