Chapter 13: Chapter 1 of Saunders’s jaw-dropping novel

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After the War There Was Sunset

Chapter 1

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??????????? During the war, there were three men in a Jeep riding through the mud when one asked that they pause so that he could use the bathroom. Stateside, he normally would not have been so forward, but in the war, men were forward because men were with men.

??????????? He walked several paces off the road to relieve himself.

??????????? “Don’t worry. I like an audience,” the soldier yelled to his friends. Their response was muffled by propellors. The soldier turned to see his friends, their pistols toward the sky, firing uselessly at an enemy plane. The soldier fumbled with his belt. When he was finally ready to make a run to the Jeep, the enemy’s artillery began sawing its way through the mud until it reached the soldier’s friends and turned them into red dust.

??????????? Then there was silence and it was only the soldier in the grass, lying on his back. He smoked one cigarette after another. On his last, God seemed to answer some un-muttered prayer from deep inside his soul. His other men had found him.

??????????? The soldier’s name was Alfred, and when he told this story, he told it well, and when he drank, he told it often. There were always differences, but the men always died because they were real men and the war had been real. In this telling, Alfred had smoked until he was found. In another, he’d smoked until he’d walked into the closest village.

??????????? Alfred was a drinking friend. He had a long face with a chin that would have been beautiful on any face but his. On his face, the width of his jaw could not complement the beauty of his chin and the whole combination gave him the look of a caricature artist doing his best to insult a handsome man.

Alfred drank quickly and held it well and we all enjoyed him because of it. There were more drinking friends, but only Alfred and I had been in the war. The others had moved to Paris to get away from home and Alfred and I spent the times when it was just the two of us trying to figure out who in the group was the richest.

??????????? We’d decided on Jerry because he was the quietest and he was even quieter when we spoke about things that could reveal the breadcrumbs of wealth: hometowns, colleges, family trips, and the like. To add to our theory, Jerry had a way of insisting that he pay if you dined one on one with him. He was an American in French real estate who never seemed busy.

??????????? Tom was older than all of us, but there was never a patronizing dynamic with him because he desperately wanted to stay young. None of us said a word when his blond hair started turning white at his temples. Albert met Tom at a gallery. Tom had grown up in Louisville, where Albert had spent a summer, and the two quickly convinced themselves that they’d met. In private, Albert and I reasoned that Tom had already been out of Louisville at least a decade by the time Albert had ever stepped foot in Kentucky.

??????????? We knew that Tom was not richer than Jerry because he worked hard as an art collector and was too kind. He had an amazing eye but refused to ever sell his works at market for a fear of being rude, so he helped many people see amazing returns that he never realized himself. He was not poor, but he took extra time to tabulate his bill before ever ordering.

??????????? Alfred was a writer and he had written a novel that I’d never been able to finish reading. In a stroke of fortune, all the schools in California had put it on their syllabi and he enjoyed comfortable royalties that he generously donated to Paris’s restaurant economy.

??????????? I was a writer, too, but not in the way that Albert was. I wrote for three different papers back home about everything that was going on in Europe after the war and the biggest of the papers gave me a small office in the 5th that shared walls with a British and a French journalist. We all nodded politely to each other and never spoke meaningfully and none of the papers that I worked for ever bothered me and the checks paid for my life and a little bit more.

??????????? Alfred promised me that if I ever finished my novel he would give it to his New York agent. Now was the time, he said, because there was fascination with anyone who had been in the war. But I was not like Alfred and I had trouble telling stories about the things I’d seen.