13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [5]
“Here, I will help you with these,” she says, and she does.
They are naked and free and at the cusp of the rest of their lives: it’s like he’s starting over, as if he were being born.
THIS MAN THERE, HE is barely more than a boy. He has not even left his father’s household. This is his first serious picture, taken alone without his family. His father laughs and says: “The next picture you’ll have taken, you’ll already have your wife and your children. Enjoy your bachelor life!”
He is excited. He looks forward to the future. Look at his forthright gaze. He has just gotten an apprenticeship making jewelry. His father is disappointed that the boy will not pursue his studies in law but understands that the boy is good with his hands and wants to do something with them. The boy has always been gifted with tiny work.
His protruding ears are endearing. He is too young to even know that a portrait from a profile or three-quarters perspective would be immensely more flattering. The ears would not stick out so. Eventually, he will figure this out.
If you were a romantic, and you hadn’t just been pulled back here through what is to come, you would say: He has his whole life ahead of him—how lucky he is.
A Photograph Undated
(likely taken in the last decade of the nineteenth century)
Un souvenir de ma villégiature
THIS IS A POSTCARD that Louise receives from her father in the last month of the Great War:
*
Who are these men? You do not recognize any of them. The father is not pictured here. At least, none of these faces looks to you like the face of the man pictured on January 26, 1943, or the same man pictured in the last decade of the nineteenth century.
Still, you gaze at this photo because you cannot help seeing the following:
The black dog in the foreground. You know nothing of dogs, but this animal looks to you something like a golden retriever, except dark. Is it an especially courageous breed that is well suited to life in the trenches? You cannot know. Perhaps he is just a mutt—perhaps he is even a she. The dog is indeed a female. The men have called her “Eclat d’obus,” but just Eclat for short. An éclat d’obus means “shrapnel,” literally “shard of shell”; there isn’t a single word that means shrapnel in French. The men call the dog this because their time at war has given them a perverse sense of humor: Eclat is the daughter of another dog they had before, this one named Obus—thus Shell begat Shrapnel.
Obus is dead now; she was blown up on the front lines: both her hind legs exploded clean off, with a great splatter of canine gore. The dog’s howls of agony were so terrible that the man nearest her took his revolver out of his holster and immediately shot the animal in the head. He wept then, silently, covering both eyes with his hand. He will never forget the heat of his own forehead cupped in his palm that day. He had not cried for some of his best friends—friends who died right in front of him—friends he did not have the courage to shoot in the face to end their suffering though they begged for it, as they knew the ambulance would not come in time for them.
Some of the men are smiling for this picture, just a little. How are they doing that? They are so strong.
That mincing fellow in the middle. You can tell just by the jaunty tilt of his cap and the limp wrist on his right leg, crossed tightly over the left—just from looking at this, you can tell the man is queer. If you look at the rocky ground at his feet, you can imagine how hard it is. You can see the dust and the scuff marks on his shoes. If you let your gaze travel up his body, immediately you see the bindings around his skinny shins. You have to look up what those are called: “puttees,” you think is the word.
Can you imagine? The soldiers wear them every day. They cannot be comfortable: certainly, they must be tight. Do they not hinder the blood flow down to the feet? Can