Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [31]
“How long has he been like this?” asked Younger.
“There was smoke everywhere after they burned Sommeilles. It got into the carpenter’s cellar, but Luc wouldn’t come out. That whole day he lay there. Then he caught cold, and that night he started coughing—badly. I thought I might lose him too. He got better, but he’s been this way ever since.”
“Does he ever have trouble breathing—when he runs, for example?”
“Never,” said Colette. “Everyone says he must have had a pneumonia, but I think it’s something else. Something psychological. A ‘neurosis,’ perhaps. Have you ever heard of Dr. Freud of Vienna?”
“Left at that signpost,” said Younger.
“He’s a psychologist, very famous. Everyone says he is the only one to understand war neuroses. And he treats children.”
“Dr. Freud of Vienna,” said Younger. “He has a peculiar theory of what causes neurosis.”
“You’ve read his work? I couldn’t find anything in French.”
“I’ve read him, and I know him. Personally.”
“But that’s wonderful!” cried Colette. “When the war is over, I am going to write to him. We have no money, but I was hoping he might agree to see Luc. Will you help me?”
“No.”
“You won’t? Why not?”
“I don’t believe in Freud’s psychology,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I don’t believe in psychology at all. Shrapnel, bacteria, sulfur—get them out of a man’s system, and you stand a fair chance of making him better. But ‘neurosis’? Neurosis means ‘no-diagnosis.’ How do you know Luc doesn’t have a problem in his larynx?”
“I know he can talk. I know it. He just won’t.”
“Well, if you’re right, then he’s shy. I was shy at his age.”
“He’s not shy,” said Colette. “It’s as if he is—how to say it?—refusing the world.”
“Perfectly rational, given what he has seen of the world. Pull up over there.”
Colette did so, bringing the truck to a grinding halt. “Dr. Freud’s patients get better,” she replied. “Everyone says so.”
“That doesn’t prove his theories are valid.”
“What does it matter, if his patients get better?” she asked.
“In that case, why not give the boy snake oil?”
“I would if it made him better. I would do anything to make him better.”
Younger opened his door. “There’s nothing wrong with your brother’s mind,” he said. “He just needs this—this bloody war to end.”
On July 13, Younger was kept busy overnight at the front, working on some badly wounded men; he wasn’t able to return to base until late the next evening. Despite the hour, he commandeered a transport wagon and drove it to the French position where Colette could usually be found. When he got there, she was laundering clothes in the glare of her truck’s headlamps.
She ran to him: they stood face-to-face, but didn’t touch. “Where were you?” she asked. “At the front?”
At a certain point, men in wartime either stop thinking about death or become paralyzed by it. Younger had stopped thinking about it. “At the moment I’m absent without leave,” he replied. “Court-martialable offense.”
“Not really?”
“It’s all right. My orderly knows where I am. Couldn’t let Bastille Day go uncelebrated.” From the rear of his wagon, he pulled out a bottle of dessert wine, two glasses, a tin of foie gras, a blue cheese, a jar of strawberry preserves, fresh butter, and an assortment of English biscuits. “Not exactly revolutionary,” he observed, “but the best I could do.”
“Where did you get all this?” she said in wonder.
“Will you allow me, Mademoiselle?”
“With pleasure.”
She laid a blanket on the grass and arranged the articles he had brought. The night was warm. He threw his leather jacket to the ground, put his cap and pistol belt on top of it, and began corkscrewing the wine—but stopped when blood drizzled down his fingers onto the bottle. “Do you sew by any chance?” he asked.
She lifted his sleeve and gasped at the deep laceration in his forearm. “Wait here,” she said. When she came back a moment later with suturing thread and a disinfectant alcohol, she added, “I don’t have any anaesthetic.”
“For