The Maschinengewehr 08 fired in bursts overhead. It lit the night with fire. It was just a distraction of course. The real centerpiece of the show was slowly approaching over the no man’d land, through a flurry of thunder and steel. Yellow gaz, almost brown in the dark, seeping through the very earth to get to you. It would burn the lungs slowly. Only then would the constant hammering of the shells begin. This had been life for days, and months. Then, one day - a day like any other - it was over. And no friend would ever die again. And a fairy tale like sense of surreal peace of freedom set in. One could almost thank God for the trial, the experience, that had made one a real man. One could bow his head to the creator. Nicolas did. And then, something, somewhere laughed. For a fever was born in a faraway country, And seeped through the lungs of the wounded at the infirmary. Its cloud was invisible, unlike the yellow gaz, and silent, unlike the shells. Yet it was more deadly than the two combined. At the end of the First World War, the Great War, when everything came back to normal, Nicolas, who had survived everything, was laid down by this strange fever, and taken to a war hospital, on a stretcher. Some God up there, or random chance, or fate, had it that most surviving soldiers caught this fever. "Now that, he thought, is bad luck." In the beautiful city of Nice, all the luxury hotels had been shut down for the duration of the war, and turned into military hospitals.. The most magnificent of them all - the Negresco - seemed to have been built for that purpose : it opened right before the war, and stood in front of the sea, cream-coloured and pink, inviting, and large enough for a bataillon. One could die in such a palace. Nicolas had seen a few pictures of Nice before the war. There was a casino built on piles right over the sea. An opera. A long beach made of white pebbles. Palm trees. And the whole bay enclosed in a distant mountain range that kept all the clouds away, leaving a clear blue sky. It seemed as beautiful and remote as a dream. When Nicolas awoke, carried on the stretcher under the dome of the Negresco’s great hall, his first thought was that he was dead, and brought to a bright place, somewhere beyond life. Then he saw Doc by his side. "Hey, doc. This place is alright." Doc walked briskly alongside the stretcher. They were taking them into the hall in a long line. "Don’t talk, you’ll hurt. You’re in Nice. We're in a hotel." "I knew you loved me." Nicolas grinned as he could, and whispered : "Not dead yet. Not quite. Nice place, for the end" Doc as usual did not smile. They had shared a trench together and returned together. Doc wasn't sick - though he knew he would soon be, and die, and had accepted it, in his own professional way. Because of that, and because he was naturally grumpy, he did not smile. All the beds were laid in the main hall, under the dome, and the bright light of spring filtered through the windows. "Hey doc." Doc sighed. "Yes?" "I never saw Rome." "We’re in Nice." "Yeah I know, I heard. But I never saw Rome. Or Istanbul. Paris even. Saint Petersburg. Japan. Or Nice. …" "You need to rest now. You’ve done enough." In the bed next to them another soldier, there for some days already, erupted in a gangly cough, and wheezed for a long time. A thin streamed of hair hissed through his gaping mouth. His fingers had turned blue. Under the covers, his feet, his sides, and parts of his wrists, had turned blueish too. The doctor and Nicolas had both seen other men in that state. They never made the night. They sweated silently, breathing less each minute, and in the end could net even grasp their blanket to struggle against death in their bed. They stood still for a while, floating. Then, at one precise moment, something weighed too hard on them. They broke down, somewhere near the heart. Their chest fell a little. And they died. "Hey, doc." Nicolas panted quietly. "Yes?" "You go and rest … a bit. I’ll take your watch." Doc put his hand on Nicolas's brow. They had exchanged memories of their childhood, in the rare moments where the Maschinengewehr ceased fire. In those precious minutes, when night reclaimed its silence, when stars emerged again, a sort of wall fell between the two men. To be a man, a grown man did not matter, and they would speak about everything. Nicolas had told Doc that he missed his parents, and how, each night, they would visit him, and sign a cross on his brow, before kissing his cheek. Doc signed a cross on Nicolas's brow, and left to tend to another dying man. "Never saw Rome". Nicolas dreamed of that idea as he fell half-asleep. Again it seemed that he was in heaven, and sleeping not on a beige cloth stretcher, but on some cloud, like in the children’s tales he used to listen to in religion class. He remembered suddenly that he held on his mother’s hand when he crossed the door and left school … Visions of his childhood came by and comforted him for a time, then drifted away, and dirt, and mud, fell once again into his dream. The ground had turned to muck after a week of rain and howitzers. They had laid planks to walk among the tight labyrinth of trenches that extended for miles before the killing grounds. They walked on the planks, one by one in long lines to reach the battle. There was a sound on their right, like a branch cracking, and Nicolas saw a boy of twenty slip into the muck. The men gathered, still on the planks, reaching out to him. One managed to grab his collar, and pulled on it. The other men pulled on the rescuer. But the boy was half sucked-in already and kept sinking. They pulled and tore his collar open. The boy kept screaming for help. He could not be pulled to safety, and was slowly silenced by the mud. The boy drowned. Nicolas had seen this, and other things, some of them as harsh. But in that moment he saw again the eyes of that boy, right when he had lost all hope, and stopped moving. He looked like a deer stuck in a tiger's jaw. He did not look human. All those strange images coalesced in a white hot feeling inside of him, stronger even than the burn in his lungs. Nicolas looked at the windows, and formed a new conviction in his heart. First, he had no hope for recovery. THere would be no miracles. But, then, what was the use of remaining here, in that hypnotizing, soothing place ? Outside, yes, out there, he would see the sun. He would see Nice. And do something, for God's sake, before the end, and not lie there in his sweat like that poor neighbour. Second, Nicolas felt perfectly conscious of the danger he would impose on others, if he went outside in his state. "I'll be careful", he thought, and that was that. He was conscious of his crime against life in the war, and did not feel as though he should have a right to live on and grow old. But to see Nice, in that moment, seemed as universal a right as water and bread. Third, he had grown tired of soldiers and medics, and wanted to see civilians. Having made three times the round of all the arguments, he reached that conclusion : that he was going to escape, not because he needed it, but because it was his last will, at the expense of his life, and at the risk of endangering others. It was the human thing to do. The boy had abandoned all hope. He would not. Nicolas stopped thinking and looked inside himself, to see if there was any guilt. There wasn’t. And so he escaped. The difficult part was to stand up after so much time lying down. But as soon as he was on two legs, he understood than no scheme would be necessary. A sort of grace touched him, as when he was a kid exploring the house in secret at night, and he felt that nobody would wake up as long as he wasn’t done. The doctors, exhausted, were nodding off here and there, near a bed or at a desk. All the soldiers were asleep or dead. They would see the dead in the morning, and it would be quite a while before they noticed his empty bed. Just before going out, he took a black plaid used to keep the dying warm, and put it around him to hide his uniform. He caught a glimpse of himself in a window : all in black except for a white, exhausted face and fixated eyes, he looked strange and scary. « Just enough to keep the children away », he thought, and went on, a little less worried. He headed for the empty entrance, passed the sleeping nurse at the reception, and pushed the great door wide opened. * The first light had just risen at the horizon’s edge. Shade by shade, the street and the sea were coloured by the light. It washed over like water. A wall next to him suddenly turned orange. The white feathers of a seagull began to shine as it flew by. The whole wind of the sea followed the light, rushing in the streets, and passed through him. He tasted the salt on his tongue, and breathed deeply. Nicolas walked around. The city was almost empty. He walked slowly, and kept to the Promenade along the bay. The silent city felt like an illusion. When he turned to the sea, water filled his eyes. The morning sun burned the sea. It trembled in gold. And behind him the buildings were orange, pink and green. Te thought that people slept in coloured houses warmed his heart. Often he had to stop, and take as deep a breath as possible. Nicolas walked what seemed a long time. When he returned to the Promenade, he noticed a clown. He wore a harlequin garb, disposed in lines rather than diamonds. The clown was setting up his little show for the day. He took out a long stick with a circle at the end. Then scraped a bar of soap on the bottom of a pail filled with water. And he blew his first bubbles. They lasted a second and collapsed over themselves. He worked some secret gesture in the pail once more and the new bubbles, growing and growing, escaped the stick and floated away in the morning light. Nicolas hid in his black plaid like the ghost in an old play. When the first passers-by arrived, he withdrew from view and watched from afar. There was a few palm trees between him and the clown, and so he could catch glimpses here and there without disturbing the children. They were early. In a city that would usually rumble with the extravagances of all the world’s aristocracy, and live on its hotels, casinos and opera, life had become still and quiet. There was a quiet air of dream or death everywhere. Men were gone, and a serene order had come to be, tinged with restlessness and expectation. Women walked around quietly. One could feel in them some secret life moving beneath the petrified city. But the children, they broke that tension and erupted with joy or sadness - they didn't care. They cried and shouted and told the truth - and the truth was that they wanted to see the clown blow bubbles. Under their new patronage, the old clown had grown more and more successful, attracting a small crowd even in the early morning. The bubbles flew out of him like pollen from a dandelion. Adults and children alike watched them grow, suddenly become whole and separate, fly miraculously, and then pop. The first pop was alway sad, almost shocking. Nicolas wanted the bubbles to rest on the ground, and become malleable spheres that you could touch and play with, or that would trap you and take you away. But then, bubbles would grow again from the stick and the old clown’s breathe, so many bubbles in fact that it was almost joyous to watch them fill the Promenade, hit boats, stones, palm trees and passers by. Make them pop ! The children ran after them to touch them and see them disappear without leaving a single drop. Nicolas watched the clown play for a long time. Among the public, there was a young woman with her son, or her little brother. Nicolas watched her laugh at the clown, then withdrew quickly behind a palm trunk. He felt shy as a boy. Her eyes squinted when she smiled. The others called her Suzie, as if everyone knew her little name, and hoped to be her friend. Nicolas looked at her as he had never looked at anyone. There was a strength in her, he thought. She looked always restless, eager to see more, and unable to stay quiet in one spot like the others. Even the little boys moved less than her. Something in her curves made him think of her dancing. He wanted her. And he chuckled. He would not go further of course - he would kiss her dead. A thought came suddenly to Nicolas, that his life had been strange, that he had missed some things, and that it had all happened haphazardly. The clown bowed and took a break. Children came to him with a little coin. Suzie was already far away on the Promenade, swaying in her dress with a quick step. She disappeared where the Promenade curved downwards. There, there was a port, a hill, a new bay, then another hill, and another bay, and on and on into Italy and along the whole coast. All of this was too far away, however. He felt his short breathe and even standing still made him pant and sweat. Nicolas finally noticed the great casino built over the sea. It had always been there of course but the golden sea had blinded him at dawn, and then the bubbles and Suzie’s hips had blinded him some more. But now, as noon came and the sun was high over the sea, the casino appeared. It was a fantasy land of little domes and spikes in the modern style, built over wooden piles, and tied to the Promenade by a long bridge. It was empty now, even at this hour. Some restaurants here and there in the old city might be opened, but nobody came to see the sea and pass by the palaces during the War. The city was half-asleep. Nicolas crossed the bridge, and approached the glass panes all around the main hall. As the reflection faded in the shadow, he saw through them inside the casino, where he expected to see elegant tables and pool tables. Instead it was all was a mass of soldiers, on beds. Still asleep, most of them. Some were moaning already. Those weren’t casualties of the flu, but wounded men, missing limbs, or a jaw. Those men had taken the Maschinengewehr 08’s bullets in the face and chest, and were sill alive. They had been shelled, and gazed. There was not one whole man among them. Even when a blanket covered them, it fell right after the knee, or the elbow, into an empty space. Nicolas stared at them, squinting. Some stared back. « Do I look like Death to them, in that black cape ? », he thought. Their eyes were empty too, like the boy’s. He felt pity for them, but disgust too, as if Death had an ally in that deeper, more thorough kind of death that had happened in their souls. Nicolas walked out of view, and followed the casino’s wooden platform. Turning around the building, Nicolas arrived at the edge, where the sea opened suddenly. He looked at the waves. The sea had turned black and gold. Only half of each was lit with sunlight. The whole day had passed, then ? He had not felt hungry or thirsty. Even the pain did not come back so often as to provide a rhythm with which to measure time. There had been the garden, yes, the round place, the Promenade … and then the clown, beautiful beautiful Suzie, the soldiers … how many hours had he spent looking at them in his black garb? Nicolas chuckled. Before the war, he had always been late to appointments and dates. Nights had flown by without notice, in dances and conversations. The plaid felt heavy now. He let it go. The shoes, the jacket, the pants, too. Pretty soon he was naked on the empty deck, and let the sun shine on him as it lowered on the other side of the bay. Who cared for clothes now ? No one had noticed him before, after all. He looked at his own body. His feet were blue. His sides were blue. His hands too. The wind of twilight rose up from the water. The first stars had already appeared. The sea was beautiful and inviting. Nicolas heard the quick sound of footsteps behind him on the deck, followed by a familiar voice. « Nicolas ! » « Doc ? » « What are you doing, man ? » Doc was half bent to his knees, panting. He had ran all over Nice. Others had too. But when they had checked in the hotel, around it, in the garden next to it, at the train station, they stopped one by one and returned to their faithful patients. Not Doc. He panted heavily. Looked angry. « You shouldn’t have come, Doc. » Nicolas’s voice was weaker now. « Come back ... You need treatment ... You’re sick. » Nicolas did not answer. He felt warm and comforted at the sight of another human, who would testify for who he was, what he went through. He turned his blueish body to Doc. « Look at me, Doc. » Doc looked. It was like looking at a corpse, or one of those exhibits the anatomy class put forward for students to wince at. « Alright ? », Nicolas said. His eyes shone with the light the waves reflected back. He could not hide the quiet emotion that came to him. There was someone there to say goodbye to. It was a sweet, sweet thought, and more than he could wish for. Doc stared, still bent. « No. Come back » Doc’s « No » was weak. His order would not have convinced a child. Doc would lose all his patients to this fever, and knew it. He had already felt a strange tingle in his throat, and strange changes in his temperature, as he walked about town. As fas as he knew, his end would soon come, and so would the world end. In his own professional way, he too was looking for help. What strange, admirable man, that Nicolas. Naked at a casino, when he should be stranded in bed. He looked alive, though trapped in illness. He looked ... somehow immortal. Nicolas nodded to Doc, smiling. He and closed his right hand in a fist. « Hold on », it seemed to say, « for life is ever at hand. » Then he turned back to face the great sea. Doc watched as Nicolas plunged and entered the water. * When the cold water hit his body, Nicolas felt his lungs burn like never before. Two flames were alive in his chest. He began to swim a long, circular crawl. The taste of salt filled his mouth and his nose. He thought of Nicolas half-bent on the dock. He thought of Suzie’s breasts. For a second he was a bit angry that such a thought would come to him at a « critical » time like this, but then he accepted it. He looked back on the whole day. He was proud in a way to have not been solemn about it all. Why make a fuss ? His captain, a young poet filled with visions of ancient heroes defending Troy or Rome or God, had raised his sword, and shouted, and risen above the trench first. Blood from his skull sprayed all over his men. Time had flown by, pain had receded, laughter and desire - the beginning of love, had seized him for hours, and he felt it was a miracle. He turned on his back and saw the whole city from afar. Doc had gone. He was out there somewhere - may be he alive for many years, have kids, grow old ! The air was settling around the hotel at sundown. It washed over the whole Promenade. The last light touched the palm trees, and slid down their trunks. The pastels, once saturated with light, had turned to crimson, deep blue, emerald, and gold. The pink dome of the Negresco turned gradually to grey again. Nicolas coughed salty blood into the sea. He felt heavy as lead now. He swam, once more, towards that faded line in the distance. After a while he could not see any land in the night. A few weeks ago, sparks had flown over him. Shells had exploded everywhere in the dark and blinded him. Nicolas was blinded again, when he turned over to see the a full sky of stars extending overhead. He put his head in the sea’s belly again. The sky felt heavy, and weighed on him. His lungs were burning and his breathing could not keep up with the effort. There, in the water, he saw new stars, of a strange light blue colour. He had reached the open sea. At every movement of his arms in the water, a million little beings lit up like fireflies, and then disappeared. After a long time of swimming, the stars and the little lights in the water melted together at each rotation of his arms. There was no sea nor sky. No up or down. His body had grown numb from the water’s cold. The pain kept in warm in the center. He swam as through an empty space. All the ocean’s water stood still around him, and could not feel time advancing. He felt his lungs burn and could not breathe. He swam through it anyway, and lost track of time. Nicolas’s mind began to falter and think in images. Nice appeared to him, like a still point. The pain was too strong now. He saw her smile on repeat, again, and swam some more. There was something, there, ahead. There was something hidden, behind everything. The colours of the day flashed in his mind. He held on again and again still to life, and pushed through the empty space. And at last, he went to sleep.