Jim Cherry

The Third Day

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Vlad was lying in the rubble of a bombed-out building amidst chunks of concrete and twisted steel. He wasn't trying to blend into the rubble so much as to become part of the rubble. His rifle jutted out in front of him hopefully looking like nothing more than an errant piece of pipe. The surrounding buildings looked like tattered paper, their facades ripped off, rooms with furniture still inside, beds overturned, pictures shattered, clothes strewn about exposed to the elements, burned from fire and mildewed from the rain. Blocks of concrete with steel sticking out of them twisted into abstract sculptures of war. Bricks and powdered concrete poured into the strasses like frozen rivers of destruction. They looked like ruined doll houses, their lives laid bare, their secrets exposed to the city for all to see. Jigsaw pieces of broken lives waiting to be put back together again. Rusted and burnt-out cars sticking out of the strasses like rusted teeth pushing up through the asphalt, crenelated parapets of the fortress city, the architecture of war. Battlefields were no longer in the country, extending out across fields, stitching together the wounds of the earth. They had breached the walls of the city, amorphous, like a virus absorbing neighborhoods or receding at the hint of resistance, civilization encroached upon. Children would play among the ruins, war was their playground, nightmares acted out, a game among the ruins. Everything was covered in dust, all shades of gray, black and white. War bleeds the colour out of life.

Vlad’s face was caked in dust, his lips parched and cracked. "Pfft," he spat out some concrete dust as soundlessly as he could. He lowered his head back to the sights of the Mauser. If someone spotted him up here, they'd send a patrol to flush him out. He had visions of an armed militia bursting through the door to the roof, machine guns blazing as he scrambled across the rubble like a spider trying to escape until his body gave out to the assault and fell dead, the crimson of his blood pooling on the gray-white powdered plaster before soaking in and being absorbed away until it became nothing more than a memory, a dark blotch, part of the lifeless colour of war, part of its DNA. Even worse, he could imagine someone on the strasse below simply aiming and firing a rocket launcher, toppling what was left of the ravaged building and he would be swallowed in the rubble, another grave monument to the war. But he was beyond caring, he was beyond life and death, he was beyond good and evil, he was beyond right or wrong, he knew this was right.

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Lost Stories, a Literary Mystery: Hemingway

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It was a miserable, wet, dreary, afternoon in Paris in December 1922. Hadley Hemingway was fighting back the sniffles, a last remnant of the cold she had just gotten over, as she rushed around the apartment trying to get everything together that her husband Ernest had asked her to bring to Chamby, Switzerland for an extended holiday of friends, drinking and skiing, probably in that order. He also wanted her to bring along the manuscripts of the short stories he was working on. He was still mostly unknown except to a small circle of friends who knew his writing and had read what he had already published, but he was ambitious. Hadley looked through the stories and the different drafts of them and wasn’t sure which to bring. She put them all carefully into the valise including the carbons of the stories because she didn’t know which of the stories Ernest wanted to work on.

The streets and sidewalks of Paris were damp, the icy drizzle pelting her and causing the streets to be slushy, she could have stayed in Chicago for this she thought, standing on a street corner surrounded by a veritable fortress of suitcases piled on the street corner as she tried to hail a taxi, as she raced to the train station. At the Gare de Lyon, she grabbed a porter and loaded him up with the suitcases, including Ernests stories, she knew she should probably be carrying the valise, but she still exhausted easily from her cold especially dashing around Paris on a wintry day, besides the porter was only four feet away and the valise was right on top where she could see it.  When they got into the station Hadley told the porter which train and the compartment number and sent him ahead. She would be right behind him. She lost him once or twice on the platform, lost in the vertiginous swirl of the people on the platform, the din of contained noise of conversations, with the push and pull of peoples bodies and the steam venting from the trains. When she catches up to the porter he’s standing outside the compartment in which he had the suitcases as best he could. She gave him a tip and then simultaneously snapped the compartment door shut behind her and collapsed into the seat. She looked around for Tatie’s valise. Tatie was her pet name for Ernest, it was a little umanly and if any of their friends had known it they might have changed their idea of Ernest, but it was just for their games, games that were for themselves. The valise wasn’t on top of any of the other suitcases like it had been when the porter got too far ahead of her. Fear and adrenaline kicked in at almost the same instant. Ernest had worked so hard on these and had such hopes in them, if they’re lost…Hadley started pulling the suitcases out and unzipping them and checking every compartment, they weren’t there! She sat back exasperated, “the porter!” She threw open the compartment door, and along the bouncing corridor of the moving train, how could he know what was in it was valuable? At least to her and Ernest, what was in it couldn’t mean anything to him, maybe he just liked the valise. She found the porter.

“Monsieur, monsieur, s’il te plait. Je ne trouve pas la valise de mon mari. L’as-tu-vu?”

“Non, madame.”

“Then could you have put it in another compartment?!” She blurted out in English.

“Oui, madame, we shall check the other compartments.” They never found it. When Hadley tearfully arrived in Lausanne and told Ernest what had happened. He jumped on the next train back to Paris, checked the stations lost and found and rushed back to their apartment, hope against hope that it wasn’t as bad as Hadley had said and she missed something. When he got back to the apartment his search was perfunctory, he could already see she indeed had packed all his stories, every draft and their carbons, all gone, two years of work gone. To mourn his loss Hemingway sat in one of Stein’s darkened salons brooding and drinking among the Picasso’s, the Matisse’s sometimes repeating what sounded like a hypnopompic mantra, “what did I do tonight, what did I do tonight,” Neither Stein nor Toklas could get Hemingway to say anything more and didn’t make any effort to leave so Stein and Toklas conducted their lives as usual and by morning Hemingway had recovered and left. It was the first major fracture along the fault lines of the Hemingway’s marriage that led to their divorce.

 

Discovery

Jacques was going through the dust tortured attic of his father’s house, three shafts of light poured into the window at the far end of the attic, four beams that landed on different parts of the the room, one of the beams fell into a narrow corner illuminating a leather valise. Jacques had never seen it before, maybe it held some of his fathers papers, it looked like there was enough dust on it and judging how far back in the attic it was, his father had the habit of climbing to the top of the stairs to the attic and push the box in as far as it could go and maybe every decade or so would come up and straighten things out or end up sitting on a box near the window reading an old magazine. So, there was sort of geologic stratification of the layers of a lifetime so the farther back in the attic something was, the older it was. At the very least if the valise was still in good shape Jacque’s could use it. He went over to the corner, luckily the shaft of light still provided enough light that he could just sit there and look through it and see what was in it, and if there was nothing, he didn’t have to go to the trouble of carrying it back down into the house and then bringing it back up if it was empty. The valise was dusty with what looked like several centuries of dust covering it. When he picked it up, it felt heavy, suddenly he felt like an archaeologist cracking open an ancient tomb and about to make a major discovery and not some old insurance papers his father or maybe even his grandfather may have put away and forgotten about. The hasp was old and a bit corroded, but finally he was able to push it open. Inside was a thick sheaf of papers, yellowed and brittle with age. He looked at the top page, it said stories by Ernest Hemingway.

Jacques, of course instantly knew who Hemingway was his reputation precedes him still and of course everyone knew of his early years in Paris, but what was a valise of his stories doing in a valise in the attic of his father’s house?