Story B: Where poppies grow
"How many times do I have to tell you? It's win or lose, lose or win. In war only victory matters!"
With her foot on his back, Louise forced her enemy down on his knees. How could he be such a fool to have chosen this place as their battlefield? In a dense forest, he might have escaped from her clutches, but in a field where only poppies grew, he could no longer hide, snivel, and snicker behind her back. She promptly ignored his craven whimpers and smacked him again with her sword. Bursts of flower petals flew up in the sky with every lunge she made. A sea of red surrounded them.
"Get that stick away from me!" The boy yelped.
Her sword prodded his sides as she watched him grovel beneath her. Tears and snot were smeared all over his bruised face. Just hours before, he was acting all high and mighty with his cronies, taunting her, promising with a patronizing smile that he would go easy on a poor little orphan girl like her. Louise pushed the tip of her sword deeper into his ribs. She took her time, relishing in every ear-piercing scream. They were so far from the village that no one could hear his cries. Only inhuman faces, only the poppies that dotted the fields could see and judge them.
"Have you learned your lesson?" She said.
"Y-yes."
A pause. Hesitation. Louise tilted her head, waiting. Only when she raised her sword once again, did words tumble out of his foul mouth.
"I'm s-sorry, I shouldn't have said that your mum left your dad because he was drunk all the time. I shouldn't have laughed at you that you still haven't gotten any letters from him. I shouldn't have called you an orphan, please can you let me go-"
"You forgot one thing." That dumb boy had forgotten the most important thing.
"W-what?"
"My dad is a hero, the best soldier of France, the one that will slay all the Germans and kick the Kaiser and he will win and win and win and win."
She made him repeat these words at least three times. One for him, one for herself, and one for the flowers. The following evening her grandparents made her apologize to the cobbler for beating his son till he bled and for making him cry. She counted how many times they scolded her that night.
Four times.
Four.
Whenever she picked flowers with her dad, she made sure to only choose poppies that held four petals. He said that they were the loveliest. After all, four was their lucky number. When he left to fight in the war along with the other men in the village, he promised her that he would come back in four days with at least four medals. When the fourth day turned into the fifth, Louise told herself that he meant weeks instead of days. Four weeks turned into four months, four months into four seasons. It was her first summer without her father.
Sometimes it was hard to even remember his face. Little details she thought that would be forever etched in her heart weathered under the forces of time. Did he lean more on his right leg when he watched over her or was it his left leg? How many times did he twirl her around when he picked her up? Which eye twinkled more when he smiled and ruffled her hair? However, there was still a measure of certainty within the growing sea of doubts. Whenever she looked at her dad's old wedding picture, the face of a hero stared back at her. What she saw was a knight who could blow away armies like a mighty storm, who could turn the black cold world into a brilliant white, who could make any wrong a right again.
Therefore she had faith that he would come back one day even though he wouldn’t answer any letters she'd written. Over the course of the following weeks, the men came back home, sometimes in pairs, sometimes alone, and sometimes in the form of a mailman, a letter, and a chained necklace. It always began with a simple knock on the door, a sound that Louise yearned for more and more with each passing day.
The night July died and August began, weeks after most of the village men had returned, Louise received a knock. She was the only one who was still up around this hour; her grandparents always slept in early to rise in the early morning to tend the fields. In her nightgown, she sneaked to the door. Her heart thumbed with every step. No one would visit their house at this late of an hour except….except…
With one click she opened the door.
Screws, bolts, stitches, and metal peaked through the ill-fitting soldier's uniform that seemed to have almost entirely swallowed the figure standing at the entrance. Its body looked as if a mad professor had cut up several bodies and hurriedly sewn them back up together. The stench of alcohol, sweat, and grease that wafted off its disfigured body only confirmed her theory.
It hobbled on one leg with two rods of steel acting as its second limb. Its body swayed by the slightest breeze. Air was sucked in and out through a giant tubelike hole on its face. When this machine of flesh lifted the corners of his mangled mouth, all Louise could see was its hanging eyelid that barely covered its empty eye socket. There should have been an eye, but only a hole remained.
"It's been a long time, hasn't it?"
It bore the same voice as her father.
"Louise."
There was a light lilt in the last syllable with a gravelly undertone that she could only hear in her dreams. Louise's stomach lurched when he said her name again. It was a near-perfect match, a sickening imitation of something she treasured so dearly.
She tore her gaze away, grabbed her sword near the entrance, and hit the monster as hard as she could. It wailed and roared. She ran without wasting a single breath. Her cheeks burnt under the cool evening wind. It called out for her. The creaks of bolts and metal scraping against each other made her shudder more than the coldest winter night ever did. This thing, this monster who was more machine than man, dared to pretend to be her father. What deal with the devil had it made in exchange for her father's voice? What cruel acts had this monster inflicted upon her hero?
Her legs carried her to the field where the last poppies bloomed. There she collapsed on the ground. Her hands dug into the soil while her sword stomped any flower that caught her sight. She screamed out of the top of her lungs with no one except her own voice to keep her company. Then as her throat went sore, her sole companion left her as well, like everyone in her life.
Her father had promised Louise that he would come back, that he wouldn't leave her all by herself. Her mother made the same kind of promises the night she'd left and she broke it without remorse. Louise buried her face between her knees, making herself as small as possible. No person would look for her anyway, not at this time of day. The only living beings who heard her cries were the poppies, but she knew that these forces of nature would never answer her pleas.
Then she felt a hand on her shoulder. It was warm and solid. She looked up to see the monster sitting right next to her, leaning on one of its crutches while catching its breath. Its other hand held onto a four-leafed poppy.
"Louise, next time please be a little more gentle with your strikes. I was worried that you would run off to someplace where I couldn't find you, but I guess four is indeed our lucky number. Ever since your moth- Ever since you were little, you really liked this place, didn't you?"
"Papa?" She whispered.
She really couldn't believe it, but it was him. Everything felt so surreal. It was as if she had been dragged into the line where dreams and nightmares entered and merged with the waking world. She tried telling herself that it was part of the monster's plan and not to trust its familiar words. Yet, the warmth of his hand was undeniably real. She pinched herself in her cheek. That light sting, that was also real.
Her father chuckled in response. His trembling hand reached out to ruffle her hair just like he always did after she got scolded by her grandmother. Not wanting to cry in front of him, she blinked and hurriedly wiped away any tears that lingered.
"You've grown so much that I barely recognized you," he said.
His one eye then twisted into a deep grimace as his fingers trailed over the raised scars on his cheek.
"I should've written at least one letter."
"You should've written lots of letters."
"I know, I know. I must’ve made you worry a lot. It's just that my head becomes so scrambled with all the words I want and don't want to say that my letter always ended up to be a blank page. Then when I became injured and saw myself in the mirror, I didn't know how to face you afterward."
"It isn't as if you have any face left."
"That's a bald-faced lie." His remaining eye twinkled. "I still have more than a quarter left, more than enough to keep one eye on you."
"How did you even end up with that face?" Louise huffed.
Her eyes widened the moment she saw the flickering light in her father wither and die. His mouth drew a thin line. She'd never seen him like that before; these furrowed brows, the harsh look in his eye, and the strain in his voice as if every word he pushed out of his throat pained him.
"Shrapnel. It was a surprise attack. I was one of the lucky ones."
His eye softened as he turned his gaze back to the sea of scarlet. Although he sat right next to her, for a moment Louise felt as if he had traveled to somewhere else, somewhere far away where she could never reach him. A soft breeze carried his sigh over the fields.
"Coming back home, it still feels like I'm walking in the land of dreams. Did you know how many times I've seen these fields dyed in red? Each night when the land was razed to the ground, millions of scarlet poppies will sprout the following day in the place where soldiers lie. Isn't it funny, that only these flowers were allowed to live between the lines where so many have died? When men beg and scream at night, they only witness and watch. Black and white, wrong or right, what does that even mean if everyone bleeds the same?"
Louise clutched her sword tighter and tighter till her knuckles turned white. She had to ask. She had to. If she didn't, it might never be answered.
"Did you win, Papa?"
A pregnant pause. He squeezed her shoulder.
"Does it matter?"
Does. It. Matter.
She looked at her sword and then at him. Her words in the past, which were so full of conviction at the time, were ripped open and laid bare for the poppies to see. Beyond its iron shell, they were empty, hollow, devoid of any true meaning. They were as bound to reality as her sword, a small tree branch she found in the woods. With both her hands she snapped the stick in two and threw it away.
She hugged her father. He hugged her back.
It didn't matter, nothing mattered anymore as long as she could feel his warmth.
