The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [145]
"Well, sonofagun," Ben pulled his attention away from Belgium moving past on spokes and wheels, "Erewhon, huh?"
"You know of it? This is magical!" Maurice showed genuine enthusiasm for the first time. "Not many people can locate 'nowhere' spelled backwards, more or less. A devotee of the works of old Samuel Butler, are you then, Ben?"
"Not especially, read him some in college. Odd facts run in the family."
"I know it's only a book done where I was bred and raised," nostalgia wafted from behind the steering wheel, "but still, old Sam caught the country around Christchurch to the very blades of grass. To this day, freshets off his pages play against my pores."
"Maurice? Not to put too fine a point to this, but what in hell did you do in civilian life?"
"I professed," the occupant of the jeep driver's seat said as though it was perfectly obvious. "I was professor of rhetoric and argumentation there at Canterbury College. The war rather took care of that. The Japanese were closing in on Australia, and New Zealand looked to be next, so I joined up to fight for the homeland"—he looked aside at his uniformed passenger—"didn't we all. Naturally, the instant I had my commission, I was seconded to London. Plopped into the RAF, plopped again into the communications branch, put in charge of a pencil. Daft of the higher-ups, but there you are." He glanced over again. "You're a considerable word man yourself, as I understand it, the byline and all."
Ben shifted the aggravating .45 on his hip. "Tepee Weepy seems to think so or they wouldn't keep sending me to places like this."
"Tepee—? Oh, ha. Very good."
In what amounted to a blink at the rate Maurice drove, they passed one last open field and were in the city, aged three- and four-story housefronts with steep crenulated gables and tall skinny chimneys suddenly everywhere. An unwilling spectator to any more misery of war, Ben had to spectate nonetheless. Antwerp had gone gaunt during the occupation years, the German army had seen to that. The fresher depredation was even more shocking, cavities in the crowded-together streets of homes and shops where buzz bombs had found their target and taken out a building or two. At some such sites, hunched men in flat caps and women in flimsy lace kerchiefs picked through the rubble. At others, everything lay in a dead heap. From the doorways of scarred houses still standing, children so tattered and bony they looked feral jumped out toward the jeep and in Flemish accent shouted the universal "Hey, Andy, any candy? Any gum, chum?" Ben had steeled himself for this bomb-torn tour with the hope that it would be his last of the war. Even so, as the route wound through scene after scene of devastation he felt dismay to the pit of his stomach; Maurice had not been stretching the truth, this was sickeningly like London during the Blitz. The jeep twisted its way around a set of corners—there did not seem to be a straight street in Antwerp—into a neighborhood of sizable abandoned shops that seemed even more forlorn and tortured than others they had passed. "The diamond district, largely Jewish, before," Maurice covered a dazzling history of gem merchantry with the sad wave of a hand.
The streets began to show more life near the market squares in the center of the city. Ben stared up at the Old World guildhalls, ornamented to a frenzy. He couldn't tell if the architecture was meant to be baroque or rococo—perhaps baroco—and there were constant glimpses of a stone-lace cathedral spiked atop it all. Everything with the crust of centuries on it. "All older than dirt, isn't it," Maurice read his thoughts. "Just think," he expanded on that, "a hundred and fifty years before the first four ships made port in New Zealand and while red