River Escaut, Cambrai, France, 1917

We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?

* 

The shadow of a bird moved across the hill; he could not see the bird. 

*

Certain thoughts comforted him:
Desire permeates everything; nothing human can be cleansed of it.
We can only think about the unknown in terms of the known.
The speed of light cannot reference time.
The past exists as a present moment.

Perhaps the most important things we know cannot be proven.
He did not believe that the mystery at the heart of things was amorphous or vague or a discrepancy, but a place in us for something absolutely precise. He did not believe in filling that space with religion or science, but in leaving it intact; like silence, or speechlessness, or duration. Perhaps death was Lagrangian, perhaps it could be defined by the principle of stationary action.
Asymptotic.
Mist smouldered like cremation fires in the rain.

*

It was possible that the blast had taken his hearing. There were no trees to identify the wind, no wind, he thought, at all. Was it raining? John could see the air glistening, but he couldn’t feel it on his face. 

*

The mist erased all it touched. 

*

Through the curtain of his breath he saw a flash, a shout of light. 

* 

It was very cold.
Somewhere out there were his precious boots, his feet. He should get up and look for them.
When had he eaten last?
He was not hungry.

*

Memory seeping.

* 

The snow fell, night and day, into the night again. Silent streets; impossible to drive. They decided they would walk to each other across the city and meet in the middle. The sky, even at ten o’clock at night, was porcelain, a pale solid from which the snow detached and fell. The cold was cleansing, a benediction. They would each leave at the same time and keep to their route, they would keep walking until they found each other.

*

In the distance, in the heavy snowfall, John saw fragments of her  – elliptic, stroboscopic  – Helena’s dark hat, her gloves. It was hard yet to tell how far away she was. He shook the snow from his hat so she might see him too. Yes, she lifted her arms above her head to wave. Only her hat and gloves and the powdery yellow blur of the streetlamps were visible against the whiteness of sky and earth. He could barely feel his feet or his fingers, but the rest of him was warm, almost hot, from walking. He pulsed with the sight of her, the vestige of her. She was everything that mattered to him. He felt inviolable trust. They were close now but could not make their way any faster. Somewhere between the library and the bank, they gripped each other as if they were the only two humans left in the world.

*

Her small ways known only to him. That Helena matched her socks to her scarf even when no one could see them in her boots. That she kept beside the bed, superstitiously unfinished, the novel she had been reading in the park the day they understood they would always be together. The paper-thin leather gloves she found in the pocket of the men’s tweed coat she bought from the jumble sale. Her mother’s ring that she wore only when she wore a certain blouse. That she left her handbag at home and slipped a five-shilling note in her book when she went to the park to read. The boiled sweets tin she kept her foreign change in.

*

Helena carried the handbag he had bought for her on the Hill Road, soft brown leather, with a clasp in the shape of a flower. She wore the silk scarf she had found in the market, made hers now by her scent, autumn colours with a dark green border, and her tweed coat with velvet under the collar. How many times had he felt that velvet when he held open her coat for her. A finite number. Every pleasure in a day or a life, numbered. But pleasure was also countless, beyond itself – because it remained, even only in memory; and in your body, even when forgotten. Even the stain of pleasure and its taunting: loss. The finite as unmanageable as the infinite.

*

They walked to his flat and left their wet clothes at the door. No need to turn on the lights. The blinds were up, the room snow-lit. White dusk, impossible light. John was always surprised, he never stopped being astonished, at how little there was of her, she was tiny it seemed to him, and so gentle and fierce he couldn’t breathe. He had bought the scented powder she liked and he filled the tub. He added too much and the foam spilled over the steaming edge. ‘A snowbank,’ she said. 

* 

The young soldier was lying only a few metres away. 
How long had the boy been staring? John wanted to call out to him, make a joke of it, but couldn’t find his voice.

*

Pinned to the ground, no weight upon him.
Who would believe light could fell a man. 

*

John’s child-hand in his mother’s hand. The paper bag of chestnuts from the vendor with the brazier in front of the shops, too hot to hold without mittens. Leaning against his mother’s heavy wool coat. Her smooth handbag against his cheek. Peeling the brown paper skins of the chestnuts to the steaming meat. The tram squealing on the track. The edge of his mother’s apron escaping from the edge of her coat, the apron she forgot to take off, the apron she always wore. Trams, queues, the smells of fish and petrol. Her softness against his hard childhood. Her scent before he succumbed to sleep, the burnished warmth of her necklace as she leaned over to him. The lamp left on.

*

The inn had been built beside the rail tracks, next to the rural station, in a river valley. Long ago, the inn and the valley had been a tourist destination, promoted by the train company for its view of the mountains, the wildflower meadows, the aromatic pines and betony. The rail tracks were shadowed by the slow river, like a mother struggling to keep up with her child, silver lines running the length of the vale. Helena had been heading for the larger town beyond, but had fallen asleep. She could not stop herself from drifting off, succumbing as if drugged by the motion of the train. And when the train stopped at the last station before the town, she had, half asleep, misunderstood the conductor booming out the next stop and had grabbed her satchel and disembarked a station too early. Beyond the dim lamp by the exit, it was dark  – profound country darkness. She felt foolish and slightly afraid; the deserted platform, the locked waiting room. She was about to sit on the single cold bench and wait for daylight, when she heard laughter in the distance.