Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [93]
Marie-Neige was on the shore, near the light, a tin outline. She lifted the lamp above her head and called out his name and he said Yes and she turned. She could see the ribs on his thin body as he came into more and more light. She placed the lamp on the grass and picked up her cotton dress and began drying her hair, so it was no longer plastered around her face, then came nearer to him and rubbed his hair dry with the dress. So now they looked as they did in a room, or across a table, no longer appearing as strangers to each other. On his knees, behind her, he pulled her thighs back to him in a slow rocking, as if he wanted her now to search for him, the heat of her cave onto his coldness, missing each other, and she said his name again and he moved into her, her softness and the unknown warmth.
How many stories were read between them in which they had discovered the codes of eventual love and said nothing in their shyness. She’d barely been touched by him—his cupped hands once on her shoulders, his hard grip when she pulled the splinter out of his eye, his holding her small hands across a table. It was as if they had both known what all this would be like, these doorways and reflections of each other, this cautious modesty and the secrets of herself she had hidden from others. All that witnessed them was a lamp in the grass. She moved back onto his lap so she could control their movement, slow him into more intimacy, so his hands could hold the quiver in her stomach and there could be an equal pleasure. They heard nothing, not the sterile thunder or the mock of the bird or the million insects carelessly yelling. Just their breath, as if they were dying beside each other.
Return
There is little record of Lucien during the final year of the war. He disappeared back within the anonymous fabric of troop movement and field hospitals. In those final months, while he was stationed near Compiègne, one letter of hers got through to him. Who knew how many she might have written? But he assumed this was the first since he had seen her during his furlough. The note was about Roman, how she had recently met him, and how she had been relieved that they had been close, able to talk easily. Roman was still a bear of a man, and she hated the idea of him imprisoned once more within a regiment.
For some reason Lucien did not write back to her. Perhaps he had already imagined and written every kind of letter in the voice of those other soldiers when he had helped compose their messages to wives and lovers, using so many verbal emotions that honest literary empathy did not exist in him anymore. He no longer trusted words. He wrote a few notes to his wife instead, about the moral state at the front and the dangers that might come with the winding down of the war.
His own family was living temporarily with his wife’s relatives near Paris. The countryside around Marseillan was rumoured to be unsafe with illnesses, and there were mercenaries now, and deserters breaking into homes and farms. The only order seemed to be within the last official gestures of war. In the towns and villages there were continual incidents of violence caused by poverty and need. Lucien had no idea what his family’s life near Paris consisted of. But in Compiègne he was recording what he saw taking place around him daily, witnessing the deaths and even suicides. Priests forgot the names of those they were giving last rites to. He himself had prayed dutifully over dying strangers, and they had looked up at him with disgust. He had scarcely enough time to think about Marie-Neige. He had lived and relived so much of their life together before that last journey home. Now he had to somehow keep himself alert, keep himself safe, be aware of exactly what was taking place. One night someone tried to kill him; he woke up being strangled, and this man was not even the enemy.
A few days before the war was over, the soldiers were allotted train passes, but with a warning that all transport was slow. The