Several times her head rises from the page, as if she is considering the words that she has just read. She looks toward the window, and he glimpses her profile, but she turns away from him. Occasionally she puts her finger to the page and he wonders what word it is that her finger touches.

She stands and pours herself a glass of water. Her shadowed face shifts in the mirror as she looks at her own reflection, pulling her hands through her hair. He leans his cheek against the paper wall and watches her in the mirror. He hears his own heart beating; the silent room throbs with the pulse of his heart. He is shaking.

He thinks about Francis in the Blue Angel. Did he sit in that cellar turning pages while the glasses rattled and plaster fell from the ceiling? Was this the act that caused him to be tied to a post? Was it Harry’s own words that were responsible for his brother’s humiliation? Or was it her action in putting the ribbon around his neck? His mind replays the action. Everything that comes after is an unbearable blur.

His crouched limbs ache. He watches her until she puts out the light.

Chapter Fifty: Harry

Chapter Fifty

Harry

Ypres, September 1921

HARRY MOVES FINGERTIPS, TOUCHES THE FLOORBOARDS, THEN HIS wrist. He turns his head to the cool wood. His limbs feel wasted, like after a route march, and his head feels as fragile as glass. He feels all hollowed out. The curtains billow, bright with sunlight, and there is the noise of crockery being set out somewhere downstairs. He rights himself cautiously. When he puts his eye to the wall, there is nothing in her room but tidy order and absence.

He splashes water onto his face and looks himself in the eye in the replaced mirror. What should he say to her today? Must he now speak the words that she has already read? Or, her having read them, should he forget that he had ever felt that way? He buttons a clean shirt, dampens his hair, and tries to make it lie flat. Will she cry? Will she scream at him? Or will it be a day of terrible silence?

When he opens the door it is all there in the corridor—the papers stacked neatly and buttoned back into his haversack. The ribbon, once again, is circling the diary. Edie, though, isn’t there.

THE BUS RATTLES along the road. He looks out the window and tries to find features that he recognizes. Only there are very few features. There is only agriculture interspersed here and there with new red roofs. The wind makes waves across a field of wheat. There are lines of sugar beets. Cows graze in fields where pillboxes crumble.