ed note: several years ago, I read the account of a young american pilot, in France, either late '44 or early '45, who had an intimate rendezvous with an allied nurse, in the back of an ambulance, in the middle of nowhere. I've always been enchanted with the imagery surrounding that encounter within the context of their lives and the historical backdrop. Below is my attempt to flesh out how it might have happened, who they might have been. Everything below is fiction.
She walks upon fresh fallen snow, each step the only sound on the small road winding deep into the forest. Her breath graying the air as mist, rising, dissipating in the cold December twilight. The sky is a darker shade of mauve pinpricked with fledgling stars. The trees bleeding their hue in the fading light. Even the snow looks more blue and gray than white. And still it falls as if the stars were weeping, or shedding or simply throwing confetti. Her hair frosted in the parade, her skin tight, cheeks hollowed, lips red as the cross on her arm; red as the cross on the ambulance she walks toward. Red as the blood still on her hands.
In the distance she sees him, leaning against the back of the ambulance, lean, a shadow of army wool, camouflaged with mud both dry and wet. He wore a cap, tilted and a smile that looked like the quarter moon on its side. He was twenty-one, a year older than her but in these many months, on this foreign soil, where death came not in the newspaper or from around the street but (came) in a hand held, a low whistle, a friend crying or body parts no longer recognizable as such, in this world, age and time held no meaning, or, as she said to him earlier, held some new meaning, like a new word not yet learned. Days and hours and even minutes no longer meant what they had. He had nodded. Then he kissed her, his taste on her lips, earthy, rich, a smell of tobacco and whiskey, of stale linen and plowed field, of burning wood. Maybe even coffee.
He had come with a friend to the hospital. The blood of brothers, maroon, still damp, pooling in the creases of their stained tunics (draped over bone), the lower rim of their eyes weighted, stretched, pregnant such to make the eye look loose in its socket, larger than normal, so white against his dirty unshaven face. He didn't speak. The vastness of those white eyes just looking like twin moons over a foreign landscape of priest and nun, nurse and doctor, morphine and drip. He stayed to the end. Just looking as if nothing registered, the way a child looks on their first day of school. Standing in a corner, waiting it seemed, for someone to tell him what to do.
The floor was lit like christmas, lights blinking with each blast, the jingle of mercy against makeshift cots. He stood in a corner, away from the windows. He saw the hands I saw, those hands reaching for warmth to match the warmth in their veins. He saw eyes that saw what they wanted to see and hold conversations with faces fixed in smile, of eyes long teared dry, where nurses became mothers, girlfriends, lovers come to life as the light in their minds brightened in equal measure to the light in their eyes dimming. And he must have seen a vessel poured empty, a beautiful vase without flowers, becoming brittle without the loving waters nourishing local flora. I felt his water, in the way he looked. I saw what would be, his breath filling me, pouring, flowing over my lips, filling my lungs, the breath of life so very different from the breath of the men that held my hands holding drug induced hallucinatory conversations.
It is snowing, as it has been for days and everything is white and brown or some combination of white and brown slush. Only two other colors fill the landscape, green and red, the colors of christmas. The colors of war. She walks in the path grooved by the ambulance. She glances down at her blouse to see if the beating of her heart can be seen against the unwashed fabric, her small, petite torso a vitrine it seems, feels, for what lives inside, what threatens to burst forth like so many bubbles of life expiring, bubbles tinted pink, she had seen between young lips, always parted, always cracked in cold like tiny riverbeds dry. She looks at her hands. Forgotten to wash in the whirlwind, crimson as curtains between acts, shutting eyes, closing lips, echos of mother only in her mind now. They always called for their mother. Never the father.
8 comments:
I'll get back to the other version of 1944, but this is too wonderful to be kept waiting any longer.
Firstly, thank you again for the background information in regards to wherefrom inspiration came. Knowing raises appreciation for the work, for the process of fictional writing, for the development within so proficient a author that turns spark to full-fledged masterpiece. Not once moreover, but thrice. :-)
Sometimes it is the smallest of details that create a certain quality, a certain influence, an example of what I mean lies in the very first two words of this piece of writing. She walks.. Whether it is the tense used, one that is less often seen in writing I do not know, but there's a substance to those words that is enormously stirring. Perhaps it is the combined sense of commencement and opportunity, the sense of freedom, She walks, at that moment she could be walking anywhere, she could walk everywhere, to something, away from something, simply to walk, a journey, present, potentially undetermined. Perhaps I am not making much sense, but as a beginning it is increcibly rousing. And as one reads the continuance of this sentence, picturesque scene, the quietness, the atmosphere (incredibly but familiarly within these pages) materializing within the first few words, saturating the senses, sight, sound, smell, the distinct, remembered frosty freshness of a winter night, instantly through its impressiveness spawning an overwhelming desire to, in that seemingly perfect moment, be that she. Your picture painting abilities never fail to amaze. Glorious beginning.
In the past, I would have started with "she walked." Lately, I've been playing with tenses, especially present tense, just trying it on to see how it feels and then playing with the mixing of tenses, even within the same paragraph, again, just to play, to see, to feel when doing something one would be taught not to do. So very nice of you to notice. Also, as you may notice, I moved the noun and verb to the beginning in this revised version as opposed to starting with a clause. I think I like the more direct beginning, for many of the reasons you so elegantly stated. Thank you Ms Storm. Your comments are always a delight. :-)
Perhaps I shouldn't, but I am reading this is parts. Commenting as I read, rather than reading it all as one and giving that completed impression. The thing is however that so often when one reads something of yours there are individual parts within that cause such pause and when they are followed one after the other, the individuals are swept together into a torrent of wow, a whirl of breathlessness, speechlessness. The imagery in the first paragraph is absolutely stunning. The clear, clean beauty of the scene so tangible, the poetry of your words so very lovely that the redness, charged with meaning in those final words, is so visually contrasting, so surprising as the paragraph concludes with the revelation that there is so much more to this scene than a woman walking on fallen snow, beneath the stars, quite literally it were as if one had been looking at a white canvas that unexpectedly was splattered by red. Exceptionally well written, so much so, about to move to paragraph two, I am aware that I have not nearly said enough, the waves of this paragraph still hitting the shores of heart and mind.
I am always amazed at the things you see and how you see them such that after reading your comments, I immediately return to the post in question and re-read it to see if I can see what you saw. That's how powerful your comments are. :-)
Whenever I'm writing, it is almost always from an image, still or moving, in my mind. Here, the camera in my head saw what the nurse saw and felt as she walked that December evening, through the snow, to that ambulance, in the woods. She would remember every detail of that walk, the anticipation.
I've always been fascinated by character introductions, the appearence within a piece of writing of a person and how, as is the case here, they first emerge through a description rather than spoken words. This is another stage at which writers are parted, sieved, originality and quality remaining, pooled together by heightened intuitiveness and perception and mastery. I read introductions such as this one and automatically I question how, not to be answered but in fascination, in wonderment, how do you know how to do this, how do you possess such feeling, how do you know to find this balance, this perfect blend, a crescent smile and a shadow of army wool, a tilted cap and there he stands, on the page, correspondingly evolving in the reader's imagination, missing details unworthy of consideration in the effectiveness of those particulars. Like the accomplished sketch artist, a few strokes somehow capturing the essence of a building, of a person, of a scene to be detailed at leisure, no second viewing necessary.
I suppose it comes from the image in my mind. I see the scene as it is written. And, as you know, I tend to see in simile and metaphor. This is just the way my brain works, all the time. I tend to see everything else in terms of what it looks similar to, what it reminds me of, of how I can relate to it, understand it, know it, to know it from what I already know. So when I think of him smiling in the gloaming light, his face dark like the coming night except, as the night, for the moon, that moon of a smile, slightly tilted as if he is taking the measure of the woman walking, the measure of the pleasure to come, an escape, however temporary, from the war that defines, imprisons them at this junction of their lives. Two lovers between trains, a moment in the station. Nothing but the lifting of wool and breath exchanged.
Bookmarking age and time held no meaning, or, as she said to him earlier, held some new meaning, like a new word not yet learned under the title of WOW! and with the wish that tiredness were not claiming me.
Another snippet, a Polaroid of a moment seen, fading with the snow:
Within her arms he hung. A rag doll. Mouth open. Eyes blank, staring, the dull white of polished glass. No one stopped, sweeping by her as water around a boulder. She stood against the stream of bodies, of time, of life and death dancing in her mind, held in her embrace. His blood seeped into the white fabric of her blouse, the last of life leaving, leaving her standing, a shell of herself as if something within her had opened and all of her had voided leaving just the frame, her skin and bones, as empty as the vessel he had once seen, as empty as that vase without flowers, standing upon the grave of his body, empty.
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