13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [4]
HE SERVES IN THE Great War. He is too old for this. This is ridiculous. He is too old for shells and shrapnel and falling men with bloody gore splattering from their shattered skulls—these men who fall and stay there, rotting and dissolving into the noxious earth.
There is an explosion behind him. He ducks from the shower of poisonous mud, covers his head with his arms. Something flies into the back of his neck and gets wedged there. It burns in his flesh. He thinks: it must be a piece of shrapnel. He goes to the doctor. The doctor swabs the site with alcohol, roots around in his muscle with a big pair of flat-ended tweezers. He pulls the thing out and shows it to him.
The thing isn’t shrapnel. It’s another man’s tooth, a man who got blown to bits in the explosion.
“It looks like a canine,” the doctor remarks.
He laughs and laughs until tears pour from his eyes. Then he vomits. He will never forget the smell of the alcohol and the needling pain in the meat of his neck as the doctor worked in the back of him.
His son is in the war too. This is ridiculous. The boy is just a child; the hair on his face is still downy.
His daughter is in love with a boy he does not approve of—her own cousin, who is in the war too and writes her torrid letters from the front lines. There are so many things that are ridiculous—he doesn’t care what world he has to live in, as long as he never has to go to war again.
HE IS IN THE Paris metro with his son and his daughter, each one holding one of his hands. His love for them often hurts him.
The train pulls into the station with a great squeal. It has five cars: four green ones, and a red one in the middle. His daughter looks up at him and asks: “Papa, why is the first-class car in the middle?”
He has never wondered this before. Children ask the strangest questions. He spontaneously answers: “Well, if the train stalls and gets hit by another train from the back, or if it hits a stalled train from the front, the middle car is the safest. It’s to keep society’s more valuable members from getting damaged, you see.”
This just occurs to him as he says it, and it immediately strikes him as true.
“Papa, that’s terrible!” His son looks at him with large outraged eyes, his sense of justice deeply shaken.
He shrugs. “Dear boy, this is the world. This is just the way the world works.”
HE TURNS OUT THE first young woman he has hired to tend his children. Though she feels so good, he is afraid he will get her pregnant. Then he would have to marry her. This offends his sense of propriety.
IT’S A CLOUDLESS DAY in the spring of 1896 when his wife gives birth to his second child, a daughter, and dies of complications from the delivery. He names the child Louise. He looks at her tiny flailing limbs and feels utterly lost. He thinks this must be the worst day of his entire life. He is still young.
HE SETS AN OVAL SAPPHIRE into a gold ring. The stone’s pure blue color mesmerizes him. The filigree work he has wrought around it is beautiful. His supervisor has spent a great deal of time showing him how to do it. He thinks maybe he is being groomed to take over after his supervisor is gone.
The stone glints darkly at him. He has never been so happy. He will give this ring to his wife to celebrate the birth of their son. It’s the first piece of jewelry he’s made that he gets to take home instead of selling. He is proud of his labor. He is glad that his wife will wear his work on her body.
HE IS FRIGHTENED the day he gets married. He’s pretty sure he loves the girl, but he isn’t sure about till death do us part. That’s a long way away. How is a man to know how much he will love a woman decades from now, after she has grown old and withered, and perhaps mean and bitter?
Today she looks lovely in her white lace. Her oval face has a high flush, and her dark eyes will not meet his. She is a virgin. This makes him nervous. Being with a virgin makes him fumble and flutter also, as if this were his first time. At first, the business of clothing removal is very serious—they don’t smile. Then, he somehow