The Passion Page 8

  The great clock in the Piazza struck a quarter to twelve. I hurried to my boat and rowed without feeling my hands or feet into the lagoon. In that stillness, in that quiet, I thought of my own future and what future there could be meeting in cafés and always dressing too soon. The heart is so easily mocked, believing that the sun can rise twice or that roses bloom because we want them to.

  In this enchanted city all things seem possible. Time stops. Hearts beat. The laws of the real world are suspended. God sits in the rafters and makes fun of the Devil and the Devil pokes Our Lord with his tail. It has always been so. They say the boatmen have webbed feet and a beggar says he saw a young man walk on water.

  If you should leave me, my heart will turn to water and flood away.

  The Moors on the great clock swing back their hammers and strike in turn. Soon the Square will be a rush of bodies, their warm breath ascending and shaping little clouds above their heads. My breath shoots out straight in front of me like the fire dragon’s. The ancestors cry from about the water and in St Mark’s the organ begins. In between freezing and melting. In between love and despair. In between fear and sex, passion is. My oars lie flat on the water. It is New Year’s Day, 1805.

  Three

  the

  ZERO

  WINTER

  There’s no such thing as a limited victory. Every victory leaves another resentment, another defeated and humiliated people. Another place to guard and defend and fear. What I learned about war in the years before I came to this lonely place were things any child could have told me.

  ‘Will you kill people, Henri?’

  ‘Not people, Louise, just the enemy.’

  ‘What is enemy?’

  ‘Someone who’s not on your side.’

  No one’s on your side when you’re the conqueror. Your enemies take up more room than your friends. Could so many straightforward ordinary lives suddenly become men to kill and women to rape? Austrians, Prussians, Italians, Spaniards, Egyptians, English, Poles, Russians. Those were the people who were either our enemies or our dependants. There were others, but the list is too long.

  We never did invade England. We marched out of Boulogne leaving our little barges to rot and fought the Third Coalition instead. We fought at Ulm and Austerlitz. Eylau and Friedland. We fought on no rations, our boots fell apart, we slept two or three hours a night and died in thousands every day. Two years later Bonaparte was standing on a barge in the middle of a river hugging the Czar and saying we’d never have to fight again. It was the English in our way and with Russia on our side the English would have to leave us alone. No more coalitions, no more marches. Hot bread and the fields of France.

  We believed him. We always did.

  I lost an eye at Austerlitz. Domino was wounded and Patrick, who is still with us, never sees much past the next bottle. That should have been enough. I should have vanished the way soldiers do. Taken another name, set up shop in some small village, got married perhaps.

  I didn’t expect to come here. The view is good and the seagulls take bread from my window. One of the others here boils seagulls, but only in the winter. In summer they’re full of worms.

  Winter.

  The unimaginable zero winter.

  ‘We march on Moscow,’ he said when the Czar betrayed him. It was not his intention, he wanted a speedy campaign. A blow to Russia for daring to set herself against him again. He thought he could always win battles the way he had always won battles. Like a circus dog he thought every audience would marvel at his tricks, but the audience was getting used to him. The Russians didn’t even bother to fight the Grande Armée in any serious way, they kept on marching, burning villages behind them, leaving nothing to eat, nowhere to sleep. They marched into winter and we followed them. Into the Russian winter in our summer overcoats. Into the snow in our glued-together boots. When our horses died of the cold we slit their bellies and slept with our feet inside the guts. One man’s horse froze around him; in the morning when he tried to take his feet out they were stuck, entombed in the brittle entrails. We couldn’t free him, we had to leave him. He wouldn’t stop screaming.

  Bonaparte travelled by sledge, sending desperate orders down the lines, trying to make us outmanœuvre the Russians in just one place. We couldn’t outmanœuvre them. We could hardly walk.

  The consequences of burning the villages were not only our consequences; they were those of the people who lived there. Peasants whose lives ran with the sun and moon. Like my mother and father, they accepted each season and looked forward to the harvest. They worked hard in the hours of daylight and comforted themselves with stories from the Bible and stories of the forest. Their forests were full of spirits, some good some not, but every family had a happy story to tell; how their child was saved or their only cow brought back to life by the agency of a spirit.

  They called the Czar ‘the Little Father’, and they worshipped him as they worshipped God. In their simplicity I saw a mirror of my own longing and understood for the first time my own need for a little father that had led me this far. They are a hearth people, content to bolt the door at night and eat thick soup and black bread. They sing songs to ward the night away and, like us, they take their animals into the kitchen in winter. In winter the cold is too much to endure and the ground is harder than a soldier’s blade. They can only light the lamps and live on the food in the cellar and dream of the spring.

  When the army burned their villages, the people helped to set fire to their own homes, to their years of work and common sense. They did it for the little father. They turned themselves out into the zero winter and went to their deaths in ones and twos or in families. They walked to the woods and sat by the frozen rivers, not for long, the blood soon chills, but long enough for some of them to be still singing songs as we passed by. Their voices were caught in the fierce air and carried through the stubble of their houses to us.

  We had killed them all without firing a shot. I prayed for the snow to fall and bury them for ever. When the snow falls you can almost believe the world is clean again.

  Is every snowflake different? No one knows.

  I have to stop writing now. I have to take my exercise. They expect you to take your exercise at the same time each day, otherwise they start to worry about your health. They like to keep us healthy here so that when the visitors come they go away satisfied. I hope I will have a visitor today.

  Watching my comrades die was not the worst thing about that war, it was watching them live. I had heard stories about the human body and the human mind, the conditions it can adapt to, the ways it chooses to survive. I had heard tales of people who were burnt in the sun and grew another skin, thick and black like the top of overcooked porridge. Others who learned not to sleep so that they wouldn’t be eaten by wild animals. The body clings to life at any cost. It even eats itself. When there’s no food it turns cannibal and devours its fat, then its muscle then its bones. I’ve seen soldiers, mad with hunger and cold, chop off their own arms and cook them. How long could you go on chopping? Both arms. Both legs. Ears. Slices from the trunk. You could chop yourself down to the very end and leave the heart to beat in its ransacked palace.

  No. Take the heart first. Then you don’t feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there’s no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It’s the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It’s the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It’s the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days and makes us waver at another mile, another smouldering village.

  To survive the zero winter and that war we made a pyre of our hearts and put them aside for ever. There’s no pawnshop for the heart. You can’t take it in and leave it awhile in a clean cloth and redeem it in better times.

  You can’t make sense of your passion for life in the face of death, you can only give up your passion. Only then can you begin to sur
vive.

  And if you refuse?

  If you felt for every man you murdered, every life you broke in two, every slow and painful harvest you destroyed, every child whose future you stole, madness would throw her noose around your neck and lead you into the dark woods where the rivers are polluted and the birds are silent.

  When I say I lived with heartless men, I use the word correctly.

  As the weeks wore on, we talked about going home and home stopped being a place where we quarrel as well as love. It stopped being a place where the fire goes out and there is usually some unpleasant job to be done. Home became the focus of joy and sense. We began to believe that we were fighting this war so that we could go home. To keep home safe, to keep home as we started to imagine it Now that our hearts were gone there was no reliable organ to stem the steady tide of sentiment that stuck to our bayonets and fed our damp fires. There was nothing we wouldn’t believe to get us through: God was on our side, the Russians were devils. Our wives depended on this war. France depended on this war. There was no alternative to this war.

  And the heaviest lie? That we could go home and pick up where we had left off. That our hearts would be waiting behind the door with the dog.

  Not all men are as fortunate as Ulysses.

  Our sustaining hope as the temperatures dropped and we gave up speech was to reach Moscow. A great city where there would be food and fire and friends. Bonaparte was confident of peace once we had dealt a decisive blow. He was already writing surrender notices, filling the space with humiliation and leaving just enough room at the bottom for the Czar to sign. He seemed to think we were winning when all we were doing was running behind. But he had furs to keep his blood optimistic.

  Moscow is a city of domes, built to be beautiful, a city of squares and worship. I did see it, briefly. The gold domes lit yellow and orange and the people gone.

  They set fire to it. Even when Bonaparte arrived, days ahead of the rest of the army, it was blazing and it went on blazing. It was a difficult city to burn.

  We camped away from the flames and I served him that night on a scrawny chicken surrounded by parsley the cook cherishes in a dead man’s helmet. I think it was that night that I knew I couldn’t stay any longer. I think it was that night that I started to hate him.

  I didn’t know what hate felt like, not the hate that comes after love. It’s huge and desperate and it longs to be proved wrong. And every day it’s proved right it grows a little more monstrous. If the love was passion, the hate will be obsession. A need to see the once-loved weak and cowed and beneath pity. Disgust is close and dignity is far away. The hate is not only for the once loved, it’s for yourself too; how could you ever have loved this?

  When Patrick arrived some days later I searched for him in the blistering cold and found him wrapped in sacks with a jar of some colourless liquid beside him. He was still look-out, this time watching for surprise enemy movements, but he was never sober and not all of his sightings were taken seriously. He waved the jar at me and said he’d got it in exchange for a life. A peasant had begged to be allowed to die with his family in the honourable way, in the cold all together, and had offered Patrick the jar. Whatever was in it had put him in a gloomy temper. I smelled it. It smelt of age and hay. I started to cry and my tears fell like diamonds.

  Patrick picked one up and told me not to waste my salt.

  Meditatively, he ate it.

  ‘It goes well with this spirit it does.’

  There is a story about an exiled Princess whose tears turned to jewels as she walked. A magpie followed her and picked up all the jewels and dropped them on the windowsill of a thoughtful Prince. This Prince scoured the land until he found the Princess and they lived happily ever after. The magpie was made a royal bird and given an oak forest to live in and the Princess had her tears made into a great necklace, not to wear, but to look at whenever she felt unhappy. When she looked at the necklace, she knew that she was not.

  ‘Patrick, I’m going to desert. Will you come with me?’

  He laughed. ‘I may only be half alive now, but sure as I know I’d be fully dead if I set out with you in this wilderness.’

  I didn’t try to persuade him. We sat together sharing the sacks and the spirit and dreamed separately.

  Would Domino come?

  He didn’t speak much since his injury, which had blown away one side of his face. He wore a cloth wrapped round his head and overlapping his scars to mop up the bleeding. If he stayed out in the cold for too long the scars opened and filled his mouth with blood and pus. The doctor explained it to him; something about the wounds going septic after he’d had himself stitched up. The doctor shrugged. It was a battle, he’d done what he could but what could he do with arms and legs everywhere and nothing but grape brandy to ease the pain and still the wounds? Too many soldiers are wounded, it would be better if they died. Domino was hunched up in Bonaparte’s sledge in the rough tent where it was kept and he slept. He was lucky, looking after Bonaparte’s equipment just as I was lucky working in the officers’ kitchen. We were both warmer and better fed than anyone else. That makes it sound cosy . . .

  We avoided the worst ravages of frostbite and we got food every day. But canvas and potatoes do not challenge the zero winter; if anything, they denied us the happy oblivion that comes with dying of cold. When soldiers finally lie down, knowing they won’t get up again, most of them smile. There’s a comfort in falling asleep in the snow.

  He looked ill.

  ‘I’m going to desert, Domino. Will you come with me?’

  He couldn’t talk at all that day, the pain was too bad, but he wrote in the snow that had drifted still soft under the tent.

  CRAZY.

  ‘I’m not crazy, Domino, you’ve been laughing at me since I joined up. Eight years you’ve been laughing at me. Take me seriously.’

  He wrote,WHY?

  ‘Because I can’t stay here. These wars will never end. Even if we get home, there’ll be another war. I thought he’d end wars for ever, that’s what he said. One more, he said, one more and then there’ll be peace and it’s always been one more. I want to stop now.’

  He wrote, FUTURE. And then he put a line through it.

  What did he mean? His future? My future? I thought back to those sea-salt days when the sun had turned the grass yellow and men had married mermaids. I started my little book then, the one I still have and Domino had turned on me and called the future a dream. There’s only the present, Henri.

  He had never talked of what he wanted to do, where he was going, he never joined in the aimless conversations that clustered round the idea of something better in another time. He didn’t believe in the future, only the present, and as our future, our years, had turned so relentlessly into identical presents, I understood him more. Eight years had passed and I was still at war, cooking chickens, waiting to go home for good. Eight years of talking about the future and seeing it turn into the present. Years of thinking, ‘In another year, I’ll be doing something different,’ and in another year doing just the same.

  Future. Crossed out.

  That’s what war does.

  I don’t want to worship him any more. I want to make my own mistakes. I want to die in my own time.

  Domino was looking at me. The snow had already covered his words.

  He wrote, YOU GO.

  He tried to smile. His mouth couldn’t smile but his eyes were bright, and jumping up in the old way, in the way he’d jumped to pick apples from the tallest trees, he snatched an icicle from the blackened canvas and handed it to me.

  It was beautiful. Formed from the cold and glittering in the centre. I looked again. There was something inside it, running through the middle from top to bottom. It was a piece of thin gold that Domino usually wore round his neck. He called it his talisman. What had he done with it and why was he giving it to me?

  Making signs with his hands he made me understand that he could no longer wear it around his neck because of his sor
es. He had cleaned it and hung it out of sight and this morning had seen it so encased.

  An ordinary miracle.

  I tried to give it back, but he pushed me away until I nodded and said I’d hang it on my belt when I left.

  I think I had known he wouldn’t come. He wouldn’t leave the horses. They were the present.

  When I got back to the kitchen tent, Patrick was waiting for me with a woman I had never met. She was a vivandière. Only a handful were left and they were strictly for the officers. The pair of them were wolfing chicken legs and offered one to me.

  ‘Rest your heart,’ said Patrick, seeing my horror, ‘these don’t belong to Our Lord, our friend here came by them and when I came looking for you, she was already in here doing a bit of cooking.’

  ‘Where did you get them?’

  ‘I fucked for them, the Russians have got plenty and there’s still plenty of Russians in Moscow.’

  I blushed and mumbled something about the Russians having fled.

  She laughed and said the Russians could hide under the snowflakes. Then she said, ‘They’re all different.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Snowflakes. Think of that.’

  I did think of that and I fell in love with her.

  When I said I was leaving that night she asked if she could come with me.

  ‘I can help you.’

  I would have taken her with me even if she’d been lame.

  ‘If you’re both going,’ said Patrick, draining the last of his evil spirit, ‘I’ll come along too. I don’t fancy it here on my own.’

  I was taken aback and for a moment consumed with jealousy.

  Perhaps Patrick loved her? Perhaps she loved him?

  Love. In the middle of a zero winter. What was I thinking?

  We packed the rest of her food and a good deal of Bonaparte’s.

  He trusted me and I had never given him reason not to.

  Well, even great men can be surprised.

  We took what there was and she returned wrapped in a huge fur, another of her souvenirs of Moscow. As we set off, I slipped into Domino’s tent and left him as much of the food as I dared spare and scrawled my name in the ice on the sledge.