The Verdun Affair by Nick Dybek

Author:Nick Dybek [Dybek, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

* * *

“When he arrived, Fairbanks saw only fire,” Bianchi explained.

Paul and I dutifully scribbled in our notebooks as Bianchi roamed his office, banging open windows already warped in the morning’s heat.

“And now, with your help, I suppose he sees ice too,” Paul said.

He’d been that way all morning, impatient with my questions, dismissive of Bianchi’s answers. It was as if there were somewhere else he’d rather be, and yet he also couldn’t seem to stop talking, to stop arguing. A day before, it might have bothered me, but I felt, at best, half-present.

“I do not understand,” Bianchi said mildly. “Again, please.”

“I mean that one hears so many theories about war neurosis,” Paul said. “Microscopic lesions in the brain. Unmetabolized adrenaline in the blood. They all begin to sound ridiculous, don’t they?”

“And you are forgetting pure group suggestion.” Bianchi, unfazed, returned to his desk, which was strewn with case histories detailing the madness of at least a hundred men.

Paul blotted his brow with a handkerchief. “And I suppose I can’t help but mention Freud.”

“That is stamped in your passport, I think.” Bianchi laughed a little too loud. He switched on an asthmatic desk fan and pointed it in Paul’s direction. “But certainly you do not believe sexual conflict is the only cause of neurosis. Could it not be true that the sexual instinct, if you want, is only a biological imperative?”

“Reproduction, you mean?”

“Naturally, and when the instinct is frustrated, the mind must cope, in dreams, violence, hysteria. If you want, the Viennese—I use them only as my example—have been more repressive of the instincts of women than men. This is why hysteria has been seen as a woman’s disorder.”

“What of Italian women?” I asked.

“An interesting case. In Italy, most women—especially in the south—do not have the freedom to be ill. But during the war they did not have husbands to care for and finally they could go out to the squares and cafés at night. The war was a great crime against the men, but the women, actually, did well. Maybe illness cannot be far behind.”

“Are you teasing me?” Paul asked. Bianchi made an apologetic, almost ashamed, face. Still, Paul’s ill temper didn’t bother me. The heat didn’t bother me. I’d left Sarah asleep at my hotel. Despite what she had said, I wasn’t entirely sure if she would be there when I returned, or how to find her again if she wasn’t.

“I only mean to say,” Bianchi continued, “that the need to reproduce is descriptive of a more basic need: to live. If repression of the sexual instinct leads to hysteria, imagine what might happen when you are told that your duty is to lie in a trench under a barrage or advance into machine-gun fire.”

“Or drive an ambulance through a barrage, I suppose?”

“Naturally. Men like Fairbanks were asked to repress the very desire to live. I myself helped them to do it. This, I think, is the true meaning of trauma.”

“And you think someone like Fairbanks can be .

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