The First of July(126)

One summer morning I sat with my beer, with nothing to do as usual but rub at the tender lump that had appeared under my armpit, knowing it was one of Nora’s steel ribs pushing through.

I had read in the newspaper the day before that the recent Tour de France, the first since the war, had been a shambles. A Belgian, Firmin Lambot, had won it in the slowest time ever. It wasn’t Lambot’s fault. They said it was the roads, blown apart by the war, but it wasn’t the roads, it was all that had happened. Where were the gods? Where were Petit-Breton, Lapize, and Faber? Gone. Lambot was racing against ghosts.

There was a knock at the door. I got up slowly; even if it was for a coffin, I could scarcely be bothered. But it was the postman with a single letter. It was postmarked London, and the writing was black and untidy. Early on, I’d had a letter from Mr. Nugent. He was sorry to hear of my injuries, he said, and said Mr. Quickseed and Jakob sent their regards. Albert had retired, as his eyesight was too poor, and Joe was gone, he said, but it was hard to tell if he meant to the Army or the hereafter or another position in men’s outfitting. They had two young ladies who’d taken our positions, he continued, and they were most satisfactory. The weather was very fine. Mr. Nugent’s letter had made me depressed; how many uniforms were hanging under dust sheets in “unclaimed” now?

There’d not been a word from anyone since then, and the writing I was looking down at was certainly not Mr. Nugent’s elegant copperplate of which he was so proud. It was more like a lunatic might write. But the letter, two pages of it on thin paper, turned out to be from Isaac Meyer’s brother, Samuel. Now that the war was over and he was out of prison, he had been grateful to know the details of his brother’s death and my comments about him and knowing that he had not suffered. Isaac had written of me several times, said Samuel Meyer, and our ideological exchanges had been important to his brother in keeping a wider vision of the world and the greater struggle even as it sank into an abyss. He didn’t know how I was fixed for work, having been injured, but though he could offer me no money to speak of, he and some comrades had a house in Stepney that had once been his parents’, where several young men and a few women now lived together, sharing what they had, be it money or abilities. They had a small printing press. He would be happy if I would join their community. They were working to change the world through public speaking, political action, and international understanding, he said. We would educate each other and then educate the masses. Wars such as the war just past were possible only because of ignorance and distrust between working men—and women, he’d squeezed in above the line—who should be brothers. The enemy was not Germans or Hungarians or Turks but the conspiracy of the privileged, the rich and the powerful across all our countries, and that fight was only just beginning.

In truth, though I went along with the first bit, I didn’t really go along with the second. Some of the best officers I’d known had been sons of great families, and you’d only relish a further scrap if you hadn’t been part of the last one. Nor were my times with his brother exactly conversations. As I recalled, apart from in London when I’d heard him deliver his talk on “The Conditions of the Working Man in Russia” (so nobody gives a fig about the women, I remember Connie saying), we mostly talked about cycles and the weather in training, and in France we just looked out for each other. He was my friend.

But still, I felt my heart beat fast; it was a life and it was London and I was used to Samuel Meyer’s sort of tone from the days when I was walking out with Connie. A cause seemed a good way to go forward and, who knows, in time, I might reach the masses by bicycle.