Silence is a short story by Jack Rusher, published here Tuesday, January 31, 2006. It is part of Stories.
Silence can be a blessing.
Passchendaele
The shells fell and fell until Marcel was too deaf to hear them coming, no longer cowering at each oncoming train-whistle — waiting, instead, for thunder to shake loose foxhole dirt, pouring filthy Flanders rain onto his helmet, down the back of his uniform, into his already soiled culottes.
He had heard no music since singing folk songs with that Englishman, Butterworth, but the sounds of the Conservatoire de Paris came clear as the those of the world faded away. His mind’s ear filled with the sound of the massive organ at L’Eglise St-Eustache playing a waltzing totendanz in Beethoven’s sad C#-moll over the low E rumble of exploding bombs.
While rhapsody shook Marcel, the fighting outside intensified, men and horses drowned in mud, shots rang out between day-night-day-night flashes of artillery; even the rats ran for cover. Mustard gas slithered along the soggy soil, burning the living and the dead.
Marcel’s eyes drifted closed, as if in sleep, and then snapped opened. The muddy furrow in which he had slept for months was gone. Instead, he stood in his Quartier Latin garret, worm-oozing earthen embankments became faded wallpaper, thick tree-roots were Francine’s strong thighs, the smell of death became the smell of her sex. She reclined on his bed, lips red and face painted, her costume from the Folies Bergere left behind, she was in the ecru peasant smock she wore home after every performance, her dark hair plaited in a chaste natte de cheveux, her dark eyes anything but innocent.
His longing for her, always profound, grew dire. Clawing at his uniform’s buttons, mouth watering, he stepped to the edge of the trench and kissed its muddy wall, licking at dark places, as his helmet fell behind him. Finally, naked but for his boots and fully engorged, he pressed himself into the wall, whispering his love to a woman three hundred kilometers away.
The moment he penetrated the November mud, he was shocked back to the reality of his circumstances. Shells shattered the fosse, leaving a narrow channel shaped as carefully around Marcel’s body as an outline traced by a child’s crayon.
“Elle m'a sauvé,” he said aloud, before he climbed up to search for another fortification, slogging through deep mud, tripping over corpses and parts of corpses, until a sniper’s bullet shattered his right shoulder.
He lay in the mud for hours, drifting in and out of consciousness, until the fighting stopped and dawn broke over the field. The medics found him there, miraculously alive, and carried him to the field hospital at Le Treport, where he awoke, still deaf. The doctors had saved his life, and even his arm, but not its mobility — he would neither play nor hear the organ again. In the silence of his broken ears, he could not hear himself crying.
The blasted landscape of Flanders.
Paris
Marcel returned to Paris, where he found Francine in the influenza ward of the Hôtel Dieu. He held her hand through four days of fever dreams, unable to hear her calling the name of her beloved Poilu, Pierre, a blacksmith from Pontoise. Pierre, for his part, was sleeping a deep, post-coital slumber in the lousy straw bed of a Belgian whore when Francine died. Marcel buried Francine himself, spending his last few francs to lease her a proper grave at Père Lachaise. Her epitaph, which he composed himself, lauded her beauty and her loyalty.