The Paris Wife

EIGHTEEN

It might be malaria breaking through the quinine, but everything is strangely yellow. The long road is a tamped and stark ocher color and the mountains in the distance are darker. There’s a river, the Maritza, and it’s running high and fast because it’s been raining for five days and the rain, too, is yellow.

He hasn’t slept well since he left Paris, and this makes the rain harder to walk through. There isn’t an end to any of it, the rain or the walking. Columns of refugees surge and spill onto the Karagatch Road. They’ve loaded their carts with everything they can’t bear to leave behind, the ones who have carts, and the rest are strapped to bundles and carry other bundles or carry children. The children carry what they can and cry when they get too tired or scared. Everyone’s scared and wet and the rain keeps coming.

He is here to bear witness, he understands that, and so makes himself see everything and not look away from any of it, though much he sees gives him a sick feeling in his stomach. It’s his first taste of war since he was inside the war, and that alone started a terrible shaking in him the first two days. The shaking is gone now. He’s forced it back and now can do what he came to do.

Along the Karagatch Road, he talks with many who’ve come from Smyrna and seen the fires there and worse. A man with a bright red face watched his sister run down to the quay screaming and alight to the tips of her hair. Another man is bandaged from his hand to his shoulder, the cloth filthy and sodden, and even in the rain you can smell the gangrene, a sweet smell like roasting almonds. The man speaks through an interpreter and says he hid under the pier at Smyrna for most of a day and a night, the water up to his chest sometimes. It was the mussels on the footings of the pier that cut his hand and arm when the tide came in and pushed him against the hard shells.

“There were searchlights in the harbor,” the man says. “And you didn’t want to see the things floating there, all around you.”

In the end he came out of the water and found his family and took to the road, like so many others. He was cut deep in several places but he wasn’t bleeding. He had thought the salt would cure his wounds and that he’d be fine without a surgeon.

“You can see I’m not fine,” the man says through the interpreter, and keeps walking.

“Yes, anyone can see that,” Ernest says.

They walk next to a cart pulled by a single great ox streaming with rain, and in the cart the man’s wife is in labor. The bedding in the cart is wet through, and there’s another blanket, tented and dripping, that two of her children hold over her as she bears down. An old woman crouches between her knees while the children try to look away, and it makes Ernest sick to see this and to hear her screaming, which won’t be helped until the child is born, and maybe not even then.

The man is still walking and looking ahead through the rain and says, “My wife knows I’m a coward. I hid under the pier. I meant to leave them all.”

Ernest nods and looks up to see they’re coming to a bridge over the river, a wooden structure that looks slick but sound for all the weight on it, carts and oxen and camels, the bodies packed in and no one moving forward or back.

In the distance, over the heads of the living, he sees the fine white spires of a mosque, minarets rising out of the yellow muck, detached from the very real things happening on the road, the mud and the screaming and the cowardice and the rain. In the pocket of his jacket there’s a blue notebook folded in half and two pencils. The paper’s drenched through, he knows it without having to check, but he couldn’t write any of this anyway. He’ll send a dispatch from the hotel tonight, if it hasn’t floated off in the rain. For now, all he can do is make himself see everything and not shake and not look away.

A week passes but it feels as if he’s never been anywhere else. It’s one of the things war does to you. Everything you see works to replace moments and people from your life before, until you can’t remember why any of it mattered. It doesn’t help if you’re not a soldier. The effect is the same.

He sleeps on a cot in a hotel in Adrianople wrapped in a dirty blanket and covered with sores from the lice. He spends his days talking to refugees and writing and sending dispatches to the Star and to the INS under the name John Hadley. Sometimes he’s too tired and sends the same story twice. He could give a damn; let them fire him. They’ll have to find him first and he’s nowhere.

When night falls, he goes to a bar where a very dark Armenian girl with deep shadows under her eyes wears a colored dress that ties at the waist. He can see the shape of her breasts under the cloth and wants to touch her, and it all becomes very simple. Another man comes along, a British soldier, and puts his hands on the girl’s waist and she smiles. That’s when Ernest flares forward and punches the soldier. He hasn’t meant to do it exactly. He just knows he needs to move if he wants the girl. They never come to you, and why would you want them to? He feels his fist connect with the soldier’s jaw and the jaw springing loose. He doesn’t feel anything yet himself. The soldier drops to one knee, and then comes up again fast, his eyes bright and very wide. He lunges, but isn’t quick or low enough. Ernest hits him in the gut this time, and feels the man’s breath collapsing around his hand.

The girl says something he doesn’t understand, but it sounds like “Enough.” He takes her hand and they leave. There’s a taxi outside and they go to her room without saying anything. Behind the door, she unties the dress, and then reaches for his belt. He pushes her hands away. He’ll do it all himself, though his right hand is bleeding. He sits on a small wooden chair and pulls her down on top of him and feels how rough and silky she is straddling him. He is the one moving her, as if she’s a doll, and he knows it has to be this way because it makes him feel that he won’t die, at least for tonight. He groans when it’s over, and it’s over quickly the first time. He stays with her in her filthy bed, and in the morning, he leaves the address of his hotel on a sheet of notebook paper and also two American dollars. He thinks he probably won’t see her again, but that it would be all right if he did. He has more money to spend, and maybe if he saw her again, he wouldn’t feel so sick, like he does now, and maybe it will be better and maybe it will fix something.

He goes into the street, where it’s still very early and cool and hasn’t yet started to rain again. He walks back to his hotel thinking, You’ve done it now, haven’t you? It’s too late to take anything back and you wouldn’t anyway. You need to remember that later, when you see your wife and want to die for hurting her. Remember no one made you do anything. It’s never anyone but you who does anything, and for that reason alone you shouldn’t be sorry.

Now it is raining again, a very fine drizzle that seeps into the fabric of his shirt and trousers. He feels the small buildings push toward him along the muddy road, and there is the very real thought, again, that there isn’t any other world. What does it matter if you know your being with another will kill your wife, if you have no wife? You don’t have Paris, either, or anything else. You might as well see the dark girl again. You might as well bring yourself down and make yourself stinking sick with all you do because this is the only world there is.