Ultimatum
Brussels, Belgium
Newsboys charge the platform, their cries a racket of startled birds. Allemand Ultimatum . . . Alle-mand Ulti-matum . . . Alle-mand . . . Alle-mand Ulti ma tum . . . Papers flap above their heads, explosions of white wings. Disembarking passengers press forward. Clots form. Movement stalls.
“What is it, monsieur?” Marie-Thérèse asks, all but shouting. “Do you know?” They have been scanning the arrivals from Ostend.
The elderly man is a little deaf. He’s also laconic to a legendary degree. “L’Allemagne encore.” His eyes are on the agitated crowd.
Germany again. Fragments of an old history lesson rise murkily through layers of other old lessons. The Franco-Prussian War—the cause of which does not rise murkily. She does recall, though, that just over a month ago, a young Serb shot the Archduke of Austria-Hungary, Franz Ferdinand, and his wife Sophie while they were in an open car on their way to visit a hospital in the Yugoslavian capital of Sarajevo. Both died. An event sending the Brussels newsboys flying then, too, shrieking and flapping their papers. And ever since, newspapers have been carrying predictions of another war, one potentially greater than any previously fought.
“Does it have anything to do with us? Aren’t we neutral?”
“Efficacement.” Extending his right arm, he slashes at the air.
“Do you mean their efficiency?”
He gives a curt dip of the chin.
“So, maybe she decided to stay in England. I don’t know if I—”
The old man surges forward, waving his cap, Marie-Thérèse in his wake. Approaching a tall woman in cream-colored linen who’s been making slow progress toward them, he holds his cap over his heart and bows.
“Bonjour, Monsieur Wojtasczek,” she responds and, turning to Marie-Thérèse, “mademoiselle Hulbert. You came too. How nice.”
Marie-Thérèse, trained in observation, detects an incipient frown held in check. She detects withheld criticism—and a miasma of disapproval. . . . you came too when you might have been doing something useful, such as studying or even taking the dogs for their walk? How nice.
“I . . . had some free time and I . . . so I asked the gardener . . . but I should not have presumed . . . Pardonnez-moi, Matrone, s’il vous plaît.”
“No, no, it’s fine.”
They retrieve the matron’s trunk from a baggage trolley and then in breezy sunlight on the Place Rogier, the gardener waits in line to buy a newspaper. When the matron, breaking an awkward silence, asks about her two dogs, Marie-Thérèse, still shaken, rattles off their latest exploits.
“I’m glad they’re well.”
In the backseat of the school’s Landaulet, the matron raises her newspaper. Marie-Thérèse wishes she had one—to hide behind. Why in the world had she asked to go along to the station? True, she was excited to begin her third and final year at the nursing school. True, she’d been free that morning, and a thunderstorm at dawn had swept through, leaving behind glitter and balmy warmth, and she’d felt some altogether uncharacteristic surge of euphoria. And further true, she worshipped the woman and was anxious to see her again, given all the war rumblings. And so, voilà, yet another mistake.
How ironic. She’d failed at her piano studies because she hadn’t been impulsive enough. Your playing is too stiff, mademoiselle. Take more risks. But risk-taking meant mistakes, no? They were kind enough and tried to explain—and demonstrate. All of it lost in the pulsing roar in her ears.
She pries a speck of lint from her gabardine skirt. Mistakes—she hates them. And the cascade of foreboding they bring on.
Turning to the window, she brushes each eye clear. The boulevard, strangely, has become a parade route of sorts. Automobiles, horse carts, trams, even bicycles, all fancied up with red and yellow flowers. Women are tying bouquets to lampposts and horses’ bridles. Young girls wear crowns of marigolds. A man on a bicycle, just then passing the slower-moving Landaulet, has two strings of onions in hand, each with yellow and red ribbons. Church bells clang at every block. Newsboys chant at every corner. Along sidewalks people are embracing and gesturing. Belgian flags drape windowsills, balconies, and shop fronts, their vertical red, yellow, and black bars puffed and rippling like sails. And sheets of newsprint are skidding along sidewalks into wet gutters.
Ribbons, flags, people, newspapers, traffic—everything that day, August 1, 1914, in motion.
Why are people celebrating?
She’s afraid to ask.
