13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [55]
You swear you have seen this man’s face before, with his coat buttoned all the way up like that, against the cold he suffers from—artfully arranged and still for a moment—the moment of picture-taking. Ah, yes, there we are:
First row, first Frenchman all the way on the left, feet crossed right over left, same distant facial expression. This fellow in Lorraine: on guard in the trenches, as he has helpfully written in violet pencil on the bottom of the first picture, is also on the postcard Louise’s father sends home on October 12, 1918. Who is this fellow? And why is Louise’s father not in the collective photo?
It comes to you all at once; it comes to you like the blast of a nearby shell that knocks you clean down but somehow leaves you uninjured, yet makes you deaf in your left ear (the other ear works just fine). This man is Pierre Cleper. He was at the war with Louise’s father, in the same company. Louise’s father was the only one who knew how to properly work the camera, how to properly immortalize Pierre Cleper in the trench, posed surrounded by his accoutrements. His own gaze, properly immortalized: Pierre Cleper is looking back at him—
Pierre Cleper is looking back at you
through the lens.
All of them are looking at you, all of them properly immortalized for the record, captured by unseen eyes:
huddled together, but strong
still for a scrap of time
for this picture
look at it
they want you to.
[NB: An empty envelope, addressed to Monsieur Camille Victor, 3rd Battalion, 2nd Company, 1st Section, Postal Sector 68. Stamped in violet ink: The addressee could not be reached. RETURN TO SENDER. The date mark is too blurry; you cannot read when the letter was returned. The letter came back to Louise the day before she got word from her aunt, Camille’s mother, that she had received the telegram. She did not need word of the telegram. The returned letter was enough. She tore it open with trembling hands and read over her last words to Camille, words that never reached him. She ripped this letter to tiny shreds and threw it away. She erased it from the record. Yet she stayed her hand when she was about to dispose of the envelope. Somehow she wanted to preserve it, that empty remnant of the seemingly endless weeping that would rack her body for days.]
[NB: Shot on the battlefield like so many others. There is no way to know where in the body, how many times, and how long it took him to die. Half a heartbeat, hours, days? It is possible that death was kind. Perhaps the bullet struck him in the head, penetrating the bone with disconcerting ease. Perhaps his cranial plate shattered from the impact, a little. Perhaps he did not have time to suffer, did not have time even to formulate the thought that he was dying. We can pray that it was so.
Perhaps death was slightly less kind. Perhaps the bullet tore through his throat, making a neat hole through his trachea, the air sucked clean out of him in the most painful second of his life. Perhaps he had time to lie there for a few minutes, unable to scream, as he drowned in the blood from his wound. We can pray.
Perhaps death was very unkind. Perhaps he was shot in the back, the bullet hitting him right at the base of the spine, a little to the right—just where the padded flesh of his buttock tapered to an end. The bullet shredded its way through the springy muscle tissue at his waistline, then tore its way through his viscera like so much tissue paper. The bullet fell not far from his feet, slickly covered in his blood, but he didn’t see it. He was too busy being aghast at the gaping hole in his gut, from which his entrails were beginning to spill. It hurt so much that he had no idea what to do with himself except