The Crime of Julian Wells

7

There is no substitute for meaning, and the luckiest of us are those who have felt the spur of a grave commitment. I couldn’t possibly include myself among the men who hung in dark frames from the walls of my father’s apartment. They had been warriors and diplomats, and a few, as my father had once reluctantly admitted, had been spies. I knew that my own life would never be as charged with mission as theirs. Even so, that map of Argentina, the grim fact of Marisol’s disappearance, and finally Julian’s curious mention of some crime I had witnessed-his crime-had joined together to provide a purpose to my going to Paris that was larger than any I had known in a long time.

This purpose was still in my mind when I got back to my apartment.

I poured a glass of brandy, took my usual seat at the window, and looked out over the park, a glance into the night that loosened the bonds of recollection, and took me back to Berlin with Julian more than twenty years before.

He’d gone there in an effort to track down and interview some of the surviving German soldiers who had massacred the villagers of Oradour-sur-Glane in June of 1944. He had decided to write an account of this atrocity, and on the train from Paris to Berlin, he’d gone through its terrible details.

He was twenty-seven at the time, and although we had regularly exchanged letters, it had been well over a year since I’d seen him. By then, a certain texture had been added to him by his travels and his studies, and his voice bore a gravity that I associated with the knowledge and experiences he had accumulated since last we’d met.

“So, how is the new book coming?” I asked him.

“Oradour is hard to write about,” he said.

His eyes were still blue, but their shade seemed deeper, though I doubt their color had actually changed. Still, there was an incontestable depth in those eyes, something that spoke of the charred village whose tragedy he had chosen as the subject of his next book.

“Yes, it was terrible what happened at Oradour,” I said.

“I don’t mean that it’s hard to write about in that way,” Julian said. “It’s that there’s a kind of voyeurism involved, a peep-show quality.”

I looked at him, puzzled, and at that instant, the train entered a tunnel that threw us into shadow, so that we sat in silence, rumbling on, until the train passed out of the darkness and we were bathed in light again.

Something in Julian’s face had changed. It was as if, during the brief darkness of the tunnel, some other, deeper darkness had fallen upon him.

“The pain of others should not be made thrilling,” he said softly. “There should be no intellectual sadism in reading about Oradour.”

Had that been the moment when it first occurred to him to write his book as he’d later written it? I wondered now.

One thing was clear: In The Eyes of Oradour, Julian had focused exclusively on the victims, all 642 of them, each given a single page to bear witness, a kind of Spoon River Anthology for the members of that murdered village. That was the magisterial oddity of the book, the way Julian had managed to see the massacre through the eyes of those who’d suffered it. To write of the atrocity at Oradour in so strange a way had been a brave choice, and at times-when a little girl used her own body to shield her doll from the attack, for example-he had brought a heartrending vividness to the victims’ deaths.

But in that same narrative, he’d refused to name either the men who ordered the massacre or those who carried it out. Even as unnamed figures, the Germans are glimpsed only at quick moments when the crowd breaks and the back of a soldier, or perhaps only a boot or uniformed leg, is glimpsed in what amounts to a photo flash. At other times the soldiers are disembodied voices, shouting commands or gently deceiving the villagers of Oradour as to their real intent. In other instances, they appear only as the blurry hint of a figure, a brushstroke of helmeted gray.

On the whole, I thought the book extraordinarily accomplished, worthy of the many years it had taken Julian to write it, though a few reviewers had complained that he had concealed the methodical human agency behind the massacre too much, making the innocent of Oradour seem less like the victims of actual cruelty than of the touching down of a storm.

At the time, even though I greatly admired the book, I also thought this criticism not altogether unfair. It was a monumental crime, after all, and Julian had determinedly concealed the men who had carried it out.

Why had he done that?

We were sitting on a bench behind the great library on Fifth Avenue when I posed that very question. It was winter, and we were both wrapped in our overcoats. It had snowed the day before, and the bare limbs of the trees were laced in white. Julian remained silent for a long time before explaining why he hadn’t identified any of the German soldiers. “They deserve to be forgotten,” he said, as if shielding the murderers had been one of the book’s metaphorical devices. “It’s the innocent who deserve to be remembered.”

“But don’t you think the perpetrators need to be remembered, too?” I asked.

He turned to me and something in his eyes told me that this was a subject that pained him.

“What would be the point of telling some little boy that on a particular day, in a particular place, his father was complicit in a terrible crime?” he demanded. “What good would come of it?”

“But otherwise the father would get away with it,” I answered. “And a man who does a terrible thing should be identified.”

Julian gave no response, so I hammered home the point.

“Like whoever killed Marisol,” I added because the unsolved crime of her disappearance suddenly occurred to me. “He got away with it.”

One of Julian’s gloved hands wrapped around the other. “Yes,” he muttered.

He seemed so abruptly moved by the mention of Marisol that I quickly added, “You did your best to find her, Julian.”

Then, to change the subject, I glanced at the book peeking out from the pocket of his coat.

“What are you reading?” I asked. He drew the book from his pocket and I looked at the title, quite surprised by what I saw.

“Eric Ambler, I see. So, you’re reading spy fiction now?”

“It helps to pass the time,” Julian said.

“Betrayal and false identities,” I said jokingly. “People who are not what they appear. Thrilling stuff,” I added with a laugh, “but not the stuff of great literature.”

“You might be surprised,” Julian said softly. “Life is a shadow game, after all.”

I absently opened the book and saw that he’d underlined its most famous line. “It’s not who fires the shot,” I read, “but who pays for the bullet.”

He removed the book from my hands and returned it to his pocket. “It helps to pass the time,” he repeated. “And I don’t read Borges anymore.”

Borges, I thought, and felt the dust of the Chaco settle over us once again, a place I’d never seen, but which our guide had called home.

Borges.

A sure sign, I knew, that Julian’s mind remained on Marisol.