A Country Road, A Tree (33 page)

The quayside, when they reach it, is a lunatic forced into a straitjacket: chaos twitches beneath the surface and wriggles out around the edges. Rubble has been swept back; there are drifts of broken brick and stone and bent steel and copper piping and splintered beams. Work weaves around it all, between the temporary wooden huts and the idling trucks and the remains of the railway line, as if this were quite reasonable, as if the broken and twisted crane lying half in, half out of the water were just part of the natural scenery of this place, and the box car hanging with the ground gone from underneath it, the rails twisted across a crater, sleepers splintered, had somehow just grown there like a buddleia from the gaps between the stones.

He creeps down a swaying gantry. On the dockside he just stands as others jostle by him. He is overwhelmed by the rank smell of broken drains and diesel fumes, by the powdered brick under his feet, by the heaps of rubble and the carious bits of wall like broken teeth.

A hand clasps his shoulder.

“If you think this is bad,” Alan says, “just wait till you see Saint-Lô.”

He grimaces. He fishes out his cigarettes. He does not see how anything could be worse than this and still be. He lights up and struggles to fit himself back into himself. His boots are wrong. His tunic, trousers, puttees, are all wrong. He feels his eyeballs when he blinks. The world is in flitters, in bits and shreds. He has to work out how he can be in it, and move through it, again.

Alan beckons him along. He does his best to arrange his face.

“There’s a lift waiting for us,” Alan calls. “Come along, old son. Chop chop.”

—

He can see it in his mind’s eye, the dot dot dot of their progress across the map, as he sits in the back of the car, the wind in his eyes, the dust crunching between his remaining teeth. He does not have to do anything but wait. Crossing the French countryside like this, at thirty, thirty-five, forty miles an hour—watching the speedometer over the driver’s shoulder, the needle ticking upward even while the driver veers round potholes and rattles over the rough—changes everything, so that thistles and teasels are a dotted blur, and the stands of Queen Anne’s lace are brief pale clouds; on foot, he’d have seen them grow from a distant haze to up-close snowflake precision. A burned-out tank stands in a field, sooty and scorched and grown around with this summer’s nettles. And then it’s gone.

“You all right there?”

“What?” he has to yell over the noise of the car.

“You all right?”

He nods, turns back to the window. They thunder through a settlement—church-café-crossroads-and-it’s-gone. He’s left with an image of blowsy overblown roses, rank grass, charred beams, a crow perched on a fencepost, an empty window frame like a crucifix.

Then they’re out, and they rumble over a Bailey bridge, and there’s a flash of blue sky-reflecting water, and he glances off and up along the river and through the wide emptiness of the Normandy landscape, which manages somehow to be at once lush and bleak. He fishes for his cigarettes.

He holds the packet out to Alan, who takes a cigarette, eyes narrowed in the bright sun. He taps the driver’s shoulder, holds the pack for him to see. The driver shakes his head. There are two hundred miles or so between Cherbourg and Saint-Lô. They sit and smoke past deserted towns and farmhouses and neglected fields and burned-out barns and abandoned gear, and nobody talks. The emptiness gets inside him, like the cold.

—

A bank of cloud slid in overnight, while they slept, comfortable and oblivious, at their digs outside town; this new morning feels more like November than August. As they drive in through the dripping green, the damp makes his chest tighten; a cigarette soothes, and there are more cigarettes, cartons of them, crates. For once he can be certain, thanks to the generosity of Gallahers, that he will not run out of cigarettes.

The car crawls into what is left of Saint-Lô, along a road cleared through the rubble. There’s no colour here; it has been bleached out by the bombs. Dead trees stand skeletal against the grey sky. Mounds of rubble rise and fall into the distance. The town has become a desert of grey dunes, glittering with shards of glass. Here and there stand slabs of remaining wall, calling to mind those ruined English abbeys, the still, sad music of humanity, though these ruins stand not on grass but knee-deep in drifts of broken stone.
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

And all of it done in a day by the circling Allied planes. A necessary evil is an evil nonetheless. They don’t need a new hospital here; they need a new town. There can’t be anybody living here as it is. He yells it over the rattle of the engine, over the rumble of the tyres on the rough road: “There can’t be anybody living here.”

Alan nods in contradiction.

“How?”

A shrug, a smile. “It’s desperate, though, you can see it is.”

He turns back to the window. This place is not human any more. They lurch along with the motion of the car, and he stares out at the wilderness of stone, a shiver gathering at the back of his neck. The road itself is not real. It has been cut through the rubble. They’re rattling through ghosts of houses, backyards, shops and streets. It’s a film, black and white and grey, flickering past the window; at any moment it could just snap. Flicker out into blank white and be gone.

But then colour: red, a punch of it. They’re past now, rumbling along. He cranes round to look back.

The red is hanging from the bones of a tree.

He turns right round in his seat, stares out of the back window. He can see a bundle of flesh and grey and glowing scarlet, and for a moment it’s an atrocity. But then it coalesces and is…a child’s red pullover, a boy in shorts, and an older lad in flannels, his arm wrapped around the younger child. The two of them are huddled together on a tree branch in a casual embrace, legs dangling, watching the vehicles roll into town.

The figures shrink, and slide upward to the top of the rear window, and are gone.

That instinct to take oneself up and out of the adult world, to get that distance. What they may have observed from there, these past years. The tanks rolling in and out again. The planes droning up the valley. The first bombs beginning to fall.

—

On the edge of town the road gains clarity, begins to know itself again; it slips into old habits and rises over the hillside and is gone. They park up beside a government Citroën. Everybody gets out. There’s talk, handshakes, gestures round the empty plot. On the far side of the road, a fine glossy horse stares out over the fence.

“The stores will be set up at the stud farm,” the Colonel says. “We’ve requisitioned the attics.”

The farm. A handsome building; long and low, to accommodate the horses on the ground floor. The walls are hazed with bullet holes. Not a windowpane seems to have been left unbroken.

“First job there will be to make the place secure.”

Nods. People are desperate, and there will be temptations here. Penicillin is, right now, worth more than diamonds.

“And the hospital itself,” the colonel says, “the accommodation huts and walkways, will be over here.”

They pace it out; they talk. From this point, on the edge of town, the devastation is even starker. The lush Normandy fields, the hedgerows thick with flowers and foliage, and then just turn your head and everything is grey, broken, done with. They are wasting their time—he almost says it out loud to Alan and the colonel. They have made a mistake. How can anything they do here help with this? How can anything be retrieved from here? They may as well pack up and leave. But then, grey on grey, along the rubble-swept road, something moves. A figure—a woman. Wearing a drab greenish dress, she carries a basket hooked over her arm, and carries also her distended belly in front of her like a medicine ball. He stares, and then remembers himself and goes to greet her. Explains what they are doing there, in the emollient courtesies of French. She has big famine eyes. Her hands are twigs.

“We know. We are very grateful you have come, you Irishmen. You are very welcome.”

Then she takes a bottle from her basket and hands it to him. “God bless you,” she says, and then she turns and walks away.

“And you, Madame.”

He’s left there, standing, the bottle in his hands, watching her go. From the back, she is narrow. Skinny legs, the wings of her shoulders visible even through her clothes: no hint at all that she is expecting. Fifty feet away and she pauses. He thinks she might be about to turn back, as if there’s something more she’d like to say, but she just stands there, head bent, hand to her back, catching her breath. Then she straightens up and just walks on. As though tomorrow is worth the trouble that it takes to get there.

—

The prisoners of war are marched there from some draughty detention camp a little further out along the road. French guards march with them, though they do not give the impression of being eager to escape. They all walk with the same fatigued, uncomfortable gait, as if their feet are broken. Their uniform is faded to the grit-grey of the ruins. They are the boys who should not have had to be soldiers, they are the old men who should not have had to be soldiers again. They are the very young, they are the very old, they are whoever was left to guard this stretch of the Atlantic seawall when the storm broke.

Markers for the foundations are laid out already: stakes hammered into the ground and tied with string. The architect is pacing, talking, pointing, showing around the man from the Ministry of Reconstruction. While this discussion takes place, the prisoners are allowed to fall out and rest. Overlooked still by the guard, they sink to the ground in a cluster, quiet and acquiescent.

He wanders over to them. He squats stiffly down.

“I don’t know what you’ve been told,” he says in German. “About the work you will be doing here.”

A look, a quirked eyebrow, bushy as a hedge.

“We have cleared the rubble here, we dug the graves. I think we can manage to build this little hospital for you.”

So these are the men who cut the ghost roads through the town. He nods. “You have building experience from before the war?”

The old fellow bunches his lips, shakes his head. “I don’t. But I know hospitals. I was a doctor.” He lifts his hands and turns them for inspection. Deep grained with grey, the nails blunt and matt with wear. “You wouldn’t know.”

—

He keeps his interpreting work brisk but loose, moving from French to English to German and back again as he turns between the French surveyor, the Irish staff, the German labourers. The challenge is to maintain the register as meaning is decanted out of one language and into the next; courtesy is all too easily spilt. And if it’s not there already, he might drip a little in. It’s not professional to moderate the tone like this, but then he is not a professional interpreter. And it eases, it soothes; there was a time when courtesy was a normal thing, and it helps to recall it. The ditch will be a metre deep
if you
please.
It will be half a metre wide,
if you would be so kind, sir.

The labourers take off their tunics; they work bare-chested or in vests. Thin, greyed bodies; bones on show. The staff take to handing out tea and biscuits, cigarettes, bread-and-jam. He feels that he is rich indeed. He becomes promiscuous with his cigarettes.

The prisoners of war begin to talk amongst themselves while they work, and it feels much better than that exhausted silence. Sometimes they address a remark to him. The talk makes the guard edgy, but it makes him feel at ease: the fact of it, the normality. To speak another language is to step into the other fellow’s boots. It erases difference. He tells the guard, “They’re remembering the dinners that their wives and mothers used to make.” And the guard raises his eyebrows, but nods, can understand.

Up at the stables, the windows are being boarded up, the locks fitted, the shelves clapped together out of packing crates.

Striding across the waste ground, his eye catches on colour. High up, on a windowsill, in a tooth of remaining wall, the two boys perch, legs dangling, looking down on the work going on there like little gods. He watches as the younger tugs at the elder’s sleeve; they slither down and scramble away. They leap from the end of a buried bedstead, tight-rope round the rim of a fallen window frame, thunder over a flattened door. The blot of red shrinks, then disappears amongst the ruins.

—

The men are piecing together the flat sides of the first hut like a gingerbread house when it begins to rain. The water dots and darkens the wood. The roof goes on in slabs, seals off the space beneath it, changes its nature from outdoors to in. The rain chills the skin; it soaks through tunics and trousers, it traces streams upon the gritty earth, teases in between the rubble, makes white runnels of plaster dust and broken-up cement.

His boots sink into the clay, suck out of it. Rain streams down his face and into his eyes and brings with it the salt of his skin and makes his eyes sting. The men take their boots off at the door. They pad across the boards in damp socks. The beds are hustled in, the bedding unpacked and rolled out. A chair, a locker, a bed each. One simple room for the eight of them to sleep and eat and write and read in, till all the other rooms are built. The rain runs off the new pitched roof and into guttering, and away.

Elsewhere, the rain drips through botched-up roofs and oozes in through heaped rubble and trickles down into cellars so that women go barefoot to save their shoes, and there is nowhere safe to put the baby down.

He writes a letter, wraps a parcel to Suzanne. Biscuits, coffee, a small packet of powdered milk, gleaned from his rations. He doesn’t need as much as he is given. He barely draws on his salary here; he is saving hard to repay the Larbauds.

That night, he lies awake in the dark, listening to the breathing of the sleeping men. Listening to the scratch of rats through heaps of broken stone.

—

By day, the site is an anthill, a Babel tower. Bricklayers hoist hods and slop cement, a team of Algerians rolls the hardcore flat between the huts; there is the smell of cut timber, and the grate and sigh of the saws, and the spooling out of cable and setting in of pipe, and voices raised in different languages and in heavily accented attempts at others. Fights do not break out. Sometimes, though, already, laughter does.