PUZZLES OF WAR
by Jason DeBoer
(Author’s note: This work is an experiment in which each and every word used in the story also appears in William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” barring some modification of the original elision. The words of the play have been individually restructured into a new narrative. In effect, the language of “Hamlet” has been fragmented and then recast into what I term a Shakespeare “reintegration”; this is the third in my continuing series.)
The assault on Normandy was over. Birds scratched curiously at bodies, the many shapes in the waves, and dark blood stirred the sea, turbulent and muddy against the fortified cliff. France was in ruin, a nation of graves and dead boys. Beneath the low battlements, Private Cornelius turned up the dirt with his pick-axe, where he and several rear guard privates were working as grave-diggers, packing friends and enemies into the same loathsome hole. “Dig deep because of dogs,” a passing captain said, and the men did. The Norman sun made the dead bloat and split open, and like fat puppets with their strings cut they fell drooping into the earth.
In the afternoon, a soldier hit a mine with a shovel, blasting him into the crow-flowers. He clawed at the dust, croaking red bubbles, as they picked shards from his throat. After a while, the privates and the doctor put him quietly in the hole. Husbands, nephews, sons, all fell mute beneath the spade. Cornelius dug until dizzy, his arms weeping dirty sweat. He looked up. A new ship was in the water, boarded by a stream of wounded in white rags. England’s broken soldiers were already going home. Cornelius, woundless, watched each cataplasm enviously.
A canopy of metal angels made their flights from England, dropping death on the German lines, and the blasted earth shook like a kettle-drum clapped by a million angry hands. Breathing heavily, Cornelius had to wince at the flashes and clamour, and the distant violence seemed worse to him than the gore at his feet. He became unnerved and the first cracks appeared in his bravery. On break, he sat aloof from the others and read a pocket book about Nero. As Cornelius pulled cold food from a can, the immortal moon, still skyish as a pale morning apparition, fed his lunacy and seemed to say: “I will outlive all, even this rotten continent and its war.”
Nero, that imperial changeling, ruled with the cool assurance of a distant star. Indeed, the weight of his crimes seemed to impress its horrible stamp on all of ancient history. Rome, that mother of monsters, actively esteemed the wild flourishes of his villanies, even though the vast millions of the empire dreaded his name.
The German army fell back, but their cannons still cleft the morn. A battery to the east had Cornelius and the Second Army in its range. The fight spread in all directions. In vain, England’s armour battalions advanced and tried to cause havoc, but the stronger German armour repulsed them and held firm. The constant air strikes kept at some southerly target, and on occasion the silvered wings would get hit by ground fire and dip like flaming kites to their doom.
They buried soldiers in white sheets without ceremony or epitaph. The graves were not even permanent––after a month, the bodies would be dug up again and shipped to grizzled churchyards or proper grass-green plots. Sick to his stomach, with a blister on every finger, Cornelius could no longer endure the whiff of death, the dry loam in his eyes. His mind was steeped in funeral day dreams, fears of being swallowed by the ground. In desperation, he walked up to the sergeant for help.
“No more, sir. No more. The flies, the smell… It’s bloody hell, sir.”
In a rage, Sergeant Laertes turned and cursed him. “What did you say, Private?”
“I’m losing my head, sir.”
Laertes knocked him down with one hand. “Sword Command says we need graves, Private. You will dig––dig, I say––until their order changes!” he said tyrannically, then whipped the men with more threats. They started to dig again, but Cornelius moved stiffly, slow with insolence. That was it. He was through with duty. Hereafter, his only allegiance was to his sanity.
“Damn it, Private. Work!” The huge sergeant seized Cornelius roughly and shook him. The private swore under his breath, but Laertes would not unhand his shoulder. Cornelius struck wildly and the pick-axe hit the sergeant in the skull. The two other privates, speechless, jaws open, scanned the scene. The hush was murderous. The company tyrant was now just a barefaced object bleeding in the dust. “You’ll hang,” one said softly to Cornelius. The other tried to cross himself. They had despised the sergeant too, but were unbraced for his murder. “Run, Cornelius, you bastard.” They frowned and gave him a push. “Run, you fool!” It was a strange moment of friendship. In amazement, Cornelius looked at the body and met the force of his traitorous act. Fighting tears, he turned toward the forest and broke into a run.
His tutor Seneca had tried to teach the young Nero philosophy and justice, to make of him a new Julius Caesar. But the youth was more intent on reckless pranks and lewdness. He was ashamed of nothing. Over time, Nero lost himself in incestuous bonds and even bedded his evil mother. Weary of his abuses, with his bites on her breast, she constantly forged plots to usurp him. In the end, he dispatched her to hell, just as he did Seneca.
He kept running, running, his lungs clambering up to the light. Back behind him, he heard a warning shot, then an alarm of loud cries. Cornelius thought of prison. Death. Yes, it would be death. They killed cowards because they were contagious. He picked up speed until the murder and its consequence seemed far behind.
Rome, a city fed on disasters, was in flames for seven nights and its people roasted like fish in the streets. Craven and safe in his towering marble, Nero became strangely charitable and opened his huge garden to the city. Praying, they hid in the green from the hellish lick of light. Soon after, however, Nero received blame for the fire…
After a time, Cornelius found a small hamlet that had been razed by air fire. Only the chapel still stood, cracked open like an egg-shell, and Cornelius heard a female voice within. Fearful, he tried carefully to creep unwatched into the chamber. The church was being used for a livery, full of animals, straw, and excrements. An old, wretched horse bent down to feed from a basket; the wrinkled priest lay blown asunder in the corner and his brains stained the gold cross on the wall. A pregnant girl sat on her knees, kissing a man. Her dead lover was a monstrous brute, his guts spread like adders across the straw. She would pinch his cheek and chide him in shrill-sounding French as she held his hand, tears crawling down the neck of her shirt. Cornelius made an accidental noise and the vacancy left her eyes, if only for a moment, as she turned to watch him in the shadows.
Feeling a blush, Cornelius pronounced his French dreadfully, saying he was sorry for intruding. She said nothing, but offered him some old bread. In the meantime, she kept up her whisper to the dead man, whose face bore a permanent yawn. Cornelius had a drink of foul wine, then asked her name. Gertrude told him. He gave her some money, a pound “for the baby,” and she became less guarded, divulging her story in swift currents of speech. Her husband was ill, she said, from bad water. She always used the present to speak of him, as if his blood in her hair were just a dream.
It grew dark, but they did not build a fire for fear of air strikes. Gertrude gave Cornelius a blanket and made him a bed in the corner near the pile of the priest. From the split roof, the brazen light of the moon came in and smeared their bodies sugar white. He could not see her eyes, just the black likeness of a skull, as her ripe, milky form left him and returned to the straw.
When Gertrude thought she and her husband were alone, she removed her clothes and, in carnal glimpses, Cornelius saw her skin touch the cold, drooping face. Her lover beneath her, Gertrude groped at his death. Wearing a glassy expression, she sucked at his withered places, which would never rise again. She was a repugnant beauty pulled by lawless desires. Full of moan and vile grace. Aroused by the raw scent of the priest, Cornelius moved slightly to better peep at her hideous gestures. “Gertrude,” he said once in a whisper, incensed, then fell asleep and made love to her in his dreams.
The horrors of his rule made sure that Nero was feared. He held extravagant public events, where the Roman rabble were witness to fierce entertainment. Boisterous fighting, pomp clad in steel, whips. Calamity on earth. Dragged from mildewed dungeons, Christians were painted with offal and beaten, others quartered or poisoned with arrows. Spectators wagered on the dying men and beasts, as the Emperor cheerfully played host to it all.
Morning could not dispatch the heavy sadness from his heart, as if Cornelius were still corrupted from the night’s events. The everlasting war had laid waste even to love, making it seem unnatural and dismal, a weak feeling fit only for peace. Awake and no longer naked, the girl looked distant. Distracted. Empty of desire. When Cornelius called her name, she appeared to mouth a quick confession to the priest, but then started smiling like a serpent and held a box to Cornelius in her open hands.
Her prize was venom. Gertrude had whored herself for liquor and army drugs. Already addicted to forgetting, she put a vial of Lethe in her arm and spent the morning in dull ecstasy. Cornelius copied her perdition, but it did not cure him of thoughts of Laertes: eyes open, flat on the dirt, arms outstretched with a pick-axe for his crown. Cornelius told himself that it was an act of war, a small affront to a desperate, guilty world. In the arithmetic of murder, what was one more? Sergeant Laertes was no saint, to be sure. There might not be a stern judgment by the army, Cornelius thought. Perhaps he would see home again. Drunk, his mind in tatters, he acted the fool and told Gertrude all about England and justice and liberty and his new life of leisure, but she did not understand a word.
Despite his reputation, Nero became something of a clown for his ostentation and low habits. He often appeared in a common theatre to ply the city with artless songs. Imperial guards would not allow the audience to leave, so they would applaud his weak voice in fear of his wrath. However, a few brave souls went so far as to play dead, in order to be removed from the tediousness of the performance.
After the drugs wore off, Cornelius grew angry with himself for these flashes of madness. He devised to take his chances behind the German lines, where he would be considered a prisoner of war and not a murderer, for without a doubt he was damned if he returned to his company. When he saw that Gertrude was dead or sleeping on her husband’s shoulder, Cornelius stole the horse and quietly left the church. On his way out, he set the Nero book on top of the priest.
Smelling revolution, Nero made his escape from Rome. He fretted for his life in a farm house until the rebels caught him. Guarded only by a servant (who had been asked by Nero to kill himself so the Emperor could see how it was done), they found Nero in the middle of self-slaughter with a dagger in his neck. Fat from luxury, remorseless, he died profanely like some diseased satyr in fancy garments. His god-like lunacies came to an end.
On horseback, Cornelius moved freely, without caution, even though he knew there was combat all about. The air and shine made him feel invulnerable. The forest was unshaped colour, violets sharked through curls of grass, and roses steeped their leaves in sickly green light. Thick perfume was in the wind, the ominous rot of flowers. Caught in the branches of a knotted plum-tree, a thin pastoral gallows, the limbs of an air borne soldier dragged in space like shameful fruit. Near Cornelius, a sparrow soiled the day with its tender song. He heard men up the trail.
In a slow line, a Free French convoy jangled down the country path. An engineer dismantled mines in front of the lead armour, and there were several German soldiers at his feet, boys broken apart like puzzles that would never be put back together. To make sure they were dead, the engineer gave a hard kick to their sides. He was intent on his work and Cornelius could see the sinews move in his jaw. Suddenly, a maimed German gave a groan and the old horse became afraid and went back on its heels, sending the hectic convoy to their weapons. All at once, they aimed their riotous metals. One of the crew may have uttered “Halt!” in French, but Cornelius heard nothing, so lost was he in the rhapsody of his fate.
The shell cut through him softly, much more softly than he would have thought. Cornelius raised his hands to surrender. Another shell tickled his guts, one touched his ear. Calmly, he hoped with all his might that he would not be buried, that the ground would not take him. He did not want the dirty sheet, the hole, the hallowed words. Thinking of ancient Rome, Cornelius fell and went black to his core, while the ulcerous sun kept burning the blue. For a few hours, he got his wish.
JASON DEBOER is an editor in Madison, Wisconsin. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Quarterly West, Stand, Rosebud, Other Voices, Clackamas Literary Review, The Barcelona Review, Mississippi Review, Locus Novus, The Wisconsin Review, CrossConnect, The Macguffin, Pindeldyboz, Failbetter, The Paumanok Review, Suspect Thoughts, Eleven Bulls, Opium, In Posse Review, McSweeneys.net, Small Spiral Notebook, and Exquisite Corpse. At the moment, he is working on Stupor, his debut novel.