What’s Past is Past

“Who was he?”

We were on the train – finally, after interminable hours of waiting in the burning sun – and Rick moved directly from sleep into wakefulness.  I’d never seen anyone do that and I told him so.  “Drink?”  I offered him the canteen at my side.

“What is it?” he asked.  He unscrewed the top and sniffed the mouth of the bottle.

“It is water, Ricky. There was no time to purchase anything more exotic but perhaps along the way…”

“Mmm.” He swished some around in his mouth before swallowing it. “You still haven’t answered my question.”

“That’s because I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.  I turned away from him, pretended interest in the vista passing by the windows of the train.  My heart was pounding almost painfully in my chest and nausea rose in the back of my throat like bile.  This was the question I had been fearing for many months now – ever since Rick had twigged to what I really was, and why.

There’s a lot more to you than meets the eye, Louis.  Oh, you can demur all you want.  You can even try to deflect me but I won’t be deflected.  You see, I know you.

I’d asked him what, exactly, he thought he knew. Had he been checking up on me?

Not at all.  I’m not as dumb as people think I am, is all.

I began to protest: surely I had never said such a thing!

“Who was he, Louis?”

“Who was who, Rick?”

“The man you were in love with.”

Now that was a thunderbolt!  And I’ve learned that the best thing to do when confronted with evidence of an unassailable fact is to own up to it.

So I did the only thing I could do: I told him the truth.

“Many years ago, before this war but rather in the middle of the last one, I was attached to a French regiment stationed on the Western Front.  There were perhaps a dozen of us from my old village, and we spent much of our idle time together, reminiscing, the way men do.

“His name was Phillipe.  He was twenty years old. He had the sort of light brown hair that looks blond in sunlight, and hazel eyes.  He was very lonely, he said. He wanted to talk about home.  He had a sweetheart named Amelie; he showed me pictures of her.  She was very pretty.  Very pretty indeed, in that rather bovine way that country girls so often are.  He expected to marry her when he went home, or so he said.  It didn’t stop him from visiting the Belgian whores in the villages around us.  It was like scratching an itch with him, or so he said.

“We got very drunk one night.  On cognac, I believe it was. It hardly matters.  He was a maudlin drunk.  I didn’t care: even drunk, he was beautiful to me.  He was…very beautiful to me.

“Well, we were hiding behind a ridge – the earthworks we’d erected in the area – and he began to cry.  Of course, I comforted him!  Who wouldn’t comfort a comrade under such circumstances?  I comforted him…I held him in my arms and talked to him of home and we kissed one another and this seemed to calm him…

“I don’t think I need tell you the rest. It wasn’t my first experience with a member of my own sex, but for him it was.  Hardly ideal circumstances, but there you are.”

Rick had hardly blinked during my recitation.  “What happened to him after the war?”

“He was – ” The old sorrow clamped its teeth on me; I could scarcely go on. “When the armistice was signed, of course we all went home.  He…never got over his experiences.”

Rick’s face twitched. “Louis, do you mean – “

“No, not – not that, my dear Ricky.” It felt good to laugh. “That was as the Americans say, par for the course. No, he was badly shell shocked…he claimed that the face of a young German he had bayoneted was forever before him, hissing and gurgling and grimacing.”  I fought in vain to repress the shudder that rippled through me. “He was dispatched to a military hospital and they found him some weeks later, dead in his bed.  He had gotten hold of a medicine bottle left lying about, broke it and used the glass to cut his own throat.”

I was glad the train was dark.  I could not go on.  I turned my face to the window and feigned interest in the passing desert, the dunes seeming to rise up and down like the waves of the sea.

Rick reached for my hand, clasped it, and held on.

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