Lilou

I threw up on the plane just ahead of the jump. The colonel said to expect high casualties, but it wasn't a reality until we were in the air. The bottom of the plane was shot to hell, the third round of antiaircraft guns ripped us to shreds. I closed my eyes and put my head between my legs, but no matter how much I balled myself up, I couldn't become invisible. I couldn't disappear. A gun below found it's mark and ripped the left wing off our plane causing us to convulse and nearly roll over. The bullets tore into seven or so men to my right and then up and out of the roof. The wind howled and squealed like a demon through the holes. Like it was laughing at us. It was dark and cold and we were all going to die. 

The sergeant screamed to get up and jump. I could hardly hear him because the bullets kept coming and that demonic wind screamed louder than he. He grabbed my sleeve and told me to wake the fuck up and get out of the plane or I was going to die. The plane was going down. I followed two others ahead of me and waddled to the door. The clip of the ripcord squealed in panic above my head and there was not a single comforting sound to be had or to imagine. Everything was chaos. Everything was hell. I was the third to jump, white-knuckling the submachine gun they gave us to use. My eyes wide-open, looking down at the fiery red eyes of that demon that seemed to pleasure in our panic and to devour us as we jumped straight into its mouth. 

As I was falling, only two more came out after me then the plane was consumed in flames and seemed to disintegrate to a ball of gray smoke until I could not see it all. The bullets kept coming. I suppose they were aiming for the parachutes, or the dangling legs as they became clear to them. They shined floodlights up at us as we fell and as we got closer to the ground, the guns below fired more rapidly and louder as though they were angrier. They ripped through my chute and I started to spin wildly and fly out of control at the mercy of the wind which flung me out of the thick of the firestorm. Then I was struck in the head, which knocked my helmet off and me unconscious. The last thing I recall was going limp just as I hit the ground with a dull thump.

When I woke, I was in a field. It was daylight and it was warm. There were bugs chittering and birds chatting, indifferent to war. My face was covered in blood and my head ached worse than it had ever. Worse than when my brother shot me with an arrow when he played William Tell and tried to make the famous apple-shot. I didn't believe that anything could have hurt worse than that. The sun was warm and comforted me, despite the gravity of my situation. At least if I were to die, it would be in peace and warmth. It would be here in the French countryside where Claude Monet painted flowers and hayfields. I took a deep breath, felt dizzy, and passed out again. 

I woke up some time later and I was being dragged on my parachute. At first, I panicked, thinking it was SS, but soon I realized my captor was much more pleasing. I could hear her grunting. It sounded like a young lady. I couldn't see her face because the sun was too bright behind her, but I could make out her form. She dragged me a few yards and then stopped, gathered herself, then did it all over again. It was a considerable effort. I didn't weigh anymore than 180 pounds, but the woman appeared small and thin. Perhaps she wasn't any older than seventeen, I could not tell, but she had no one to help her. I tried to speak up but couldn't. I choked on my own blood which left an acrid taste in my mouth after I swallowed it. She looked down onto me and said something in French that I couldn't understand, but that which comforted me for her tenor. I fell in love with her voice. It was the most pleasing sound I had ever heard. 

I woke up and I was in a comfortable bed inside an old stone and stucco villa. The girl attended me and daubed my head with a warm wet wash cloth. She spoke to me again and I could not understand anything except for her intentions. Her face was blurry but around her several candles were lit and I could see out the window that it was evening and there was a chorus of frogs and insects outside which lulled me to sleep. Again, I felt that if I was to die, this was a fine place for me to meet my maker, hopefully civilly, and hopefully with His forgiveness of those sins I was aware of and of those I was not. I began to tally my sins as I fell asleep like some count sheep and there was a courtroom in my mind where impaneled jurors heard jurists argue for and against me. I hoped their judgment wasn't Hell and that I wasn't to be collected from this fine estate by some demon to pay my eternal debt rather than to be granted my eternal reward. 

But thankfully, such was not to be. I opened my eyes again and there she was. Clear. I have not seen a more beautiful woman, and even though my experiences had not been broad, as I hadn't left Owensboro, Kentucky before joining the army, I knew that I never would. As doubtful a person I have always been, that was a certainty. I stared at her and couldn't believe it for a moment. How perfect her face was. How comforting her smile. How warm her eyes. How delicate her lips. I didn't care where I was in that I was so happy to be here. She daubed my head and spoke softly in French. I knew neither of us understood the other's language, but I could understand her kindness as she could my gratitude. It was my good and incredible fortune to not only survive such a hellish ordeal that killed most if not all of my platoon, but to be rewarded so richly by her presence and her attention. 

Unlike being shot by my older brother, who entirely missed the apple, this shot was worth it. So much so that whatever German gunner had fired it, I prayed for his safe passage through the war and a life of love and longevity. For else without his errant shot, I would not be here. I would never have seen her at all and since seeing her, I cannot imagine not. She fed me vegetables, soups, bread, cheese, jams and various teas. When she gave me something, she said what it was in French and I replied what it was in English. She watched me closely and I could tell she hoped I would like each thing she offered, and her. We began to communicate through sign language and by gesturing. Then she spoke a few English words and retrieved a book off a shelf which was written in English. It was Peter Pan.

"Neverland," she said in a heavy French accent. "The Hook. Wendy. Peter Pan," she smiled. "Tinkerbell." 

"I've not read it," I admitted, smiling back at her. 

"Oui. Tu lis! You read!" 

So as lay there recovering, and each night before I slept, I read the novel. It wasn't long before I finished it. I learned more about her as time passed. I was soon able to get up and walk around the beautiful estate. Her mother died years before, of cancer, I think, and her father was murdered by Nazis for harboring a Jewish family in the attic. He was a lawyer before the war and the family owned a vinery. He would bring her books back from his travels to England, which is how she learned the English that she knew. She was timid to speak it, but she spoke it well for having never practiced with anyone in actual discourse. She explained to me how she got me from the field to the villa. We took a walk to where she found me and I couldn't believe that she had managed to drag me such a distance. She explained she used the parachute as a makeshift skiff. Still, the distance was quite incredible.

The war had moved on. The Germans were pushed out of the area and would soon surrender France eventually. But for me, the war was over and there was no chance that I was going to go back. It was as though Hitler killed himself and they all surrendered. There would be parades in America and soldiers would be given medals for valor and the like. I could be awarded a purple heart. Given a pension. But I didn't want it. All that I wanted in this world was Ms. Lilou Toussant. I was no longer Private John Bell of the 82nd Airborne. I was simply John Francis Bell. I was everything I had ever wanted to be as a man because in her company I was whole. A man who had twice cheated death and landed in the lap of love. The lap of the most beautiful woman in the world. 

The hills around the vila were awe-inspiring and full of wildflowers, the likes of which I had never seen before. One was composed almost entirely of red posies which were particularly striking against the green of the grass and trees and the blue of the sky. Lilou gave me some of her father's clothes and they fit well. She gave me a herringbone cap of his and his pipe. She said she longed for the smell of his tobacco and I obliged. We walked around the countryside and I took her hand in mine in likely the most presumptuous thing I had ever done in my life. I didn't want to let her go. I never would have let her go if it could have been avoided and it felt to me that she felt the same. She had a bicycle in the barn and I asked her to ride with me. 

She laughed and said, "I'll n'y a qu'un seul siège," or  "There is only one seat," but I told her she could ride the handlebars. She at first declined, but with some coaxing and trust, she sat on those handlebars and I peddled us down the long country lane through those beautiful fields that had inspired Claude Monet and that were at peace as we were at peace, that seemed so contrary to war as were we. She laughed and squealed, desperately holding on to my hands to keep her balance but I was not going to let her fall. In a million years, I would not let her fall. But down the lane there was a pond and it was such a hot day that I peddled us straight into it. And some angry ducks flapped wildly away as we crashed into the water and she laughed and I laughed as we came up from beneath. And there in the cool of the pond I kissed her, which trumped the previous most impetuous thing I had ever done when I held her hand. 

All good things, they say, must come to an end. I've heard that all my life, but I had never experienced it, perhaps, because I was too young. The better something is, the more unreal and unfathomable it's ending is. It is hardly even a consideration at the time. But I had been so blind to the obvious because I was so in love with her that I am myself to blame for that inevitable outcome. She disappeared now and then, never for long, but for a little while. And I would search for her through the villa and in the surrounding hills. I found her here or there and she at first looked at me so sadly that it broke my heart. I thought maybe she was thinking of her father, seeing me in his clothes, or of something else lost, for the French had lost so much. But she would hug me and it would pass. And she was once more that which she truly was in her soul. 

I had planned to ask her to marry me in some special way I had yet to figure. Before we made love, I wanted us to marry. I wanted her to know the truth of my intent. That she was not some chance encounter and this not just a playful tryst. That this was not just luck, but rather it was fate and a good fortune blessed by God. I was not some unscrupulous inveigler or a tourist. If she wanted to stay, I wished to remain here in France with her. I wanted to amalgamate and immerse myself into her culture. I wanted to speak the language fluently. I wanted to ride that bike when we were 80 on a hot summer day into that pond. And I would kiss her the same way I did when I kissed her first. 

But I awoke one morning and she was gone. I searched for her in all the places that I searched before but she wasn't to be found. I panicked, thinking the worst. Thinking that reality had caught up with me. What was someone as beautiful as her doing with me. What had I done to deserve Lilou Toussant? Regardless, I searched for her.  

"Lilou!" I called. "Lilou!"

I walked around the hills where we had walked before. I checked the barn, the cellar, the attic, the pond. But it was as though she never was at all in that moment, and that dreadful vacant feeling so overwhelmed me that I didn't know what else to do besides sit there and cry. It is frightening how quickly someone can leave you and how permanent their parting can be. I searched for an explanation. Was it possible that she went to the village for some supplies without telling me? It was a long walk. 7 kilometers, at least. So I bicycled myself to the village hoping to see a trace of her along the way. Anything to give me hope. A single footprint. Something dropped. Anything. 

When I got to the village, I found it to be hospitable and charming. Something from a storybook. It was very much in a time of its own, not having accepted modern times fully and not letting go of the past by an equal measure. Finding someone who spoke English was difficult. But after a few hours, I found a lawyer who worked with her father who spoke English well. When I mentioned Lilou, he smiled warmly before he was overcome with sadness. 

"Have you seen her today?" I asked. 

He rubbed his brow, perhaps doubting his English and wondering if he heard me correctly. A look of consternation overcame him. "Monsieur, Mademoiselle Lilou Toussant?"

"Oui!"

"No, monsieur. Mademoiselle Lilou was killed with her father by the Nazis for harboring Jews. They were part of the underground and the resistance. She has been among the angels for almost two years. I buried her and her father myself."

I didn't want to believe him, but I knew what he said was true because I felt it was true. In my heart. He tried to console me and to ask me how I came to know Lilou, but I walked the bicycle away, not wanting to speak about it. It was obvious to me that Lilou found me in death and nursed me back to life. The memories I had were with her ghost who instead of letting me die so to be with her, chose to give me life. Love is sacrifice and if you've never sacrificed anything for someone, you can hardly say that you love them. And love is never in the past tense. When it is, it was something else. It wasn't love.

I rode the bike back to the villa. The dozen ancient junipers stoically stood guard and there was an old marmalade-colored cat on the outside window sill bathing himself with his tongue. I remember Lilou brushing him off me once and him darting away, but not before offering an aggrieved sibilation at the rebuke. I was like that cat. We were both at loss without her. I didn't know what I would do. I wished that she would come back. I wished that I could talk to her once more. I thought of taking my own life as I bathed, perhaps mimicking that Frenchman who was murdered in his tub at the time of the revolution, whose name escapes me presently though the painting is clear in my mind. Murat, was it? But I couldn't take my life because Lilou had given it back to me and because I wasn't sure if my ghost would find hers in that Neverland. 

The lawyer, Maurice, came to the villa as I expected he would. He found me grieving at the kitchen table and he listened to my story. Whereas I thought he wouldn't believe anything I said, he said he believed me for I wouldn't have known the things I know, or felt the things I felt, had it not been true. He took me around the back to show me where she was buried. A simple white cross marked her grave with her name simply written "Lilou." I changed my clothes back into my uniform and we drank wine and smoked cigars and he offered me a ride to wherever I needed to go. I didn't know where that was, but I accepted and asked if he would drive me back to the American basecamp, which he knew from reading the newspapers. 

I took only one four things from that villa: a picture of Lilou; the bicycle we rode together; that Peter Pan novel; and one of those red posies from the hillside. I put her picture inside the book and pressed the flower on top of it. I strapped the bicycle to the back bumper and trunk of the car and we puttered away. I had never felt so miserable in my life. I wished I was dead. 

Back home they'll likely give me a medal and a pension. They'll invite me into their Veterans of Foreign Wars club and their lodges where a bunch of us old men will talk about The Big One until there is no one left to listen. I wonder if anyone will believe me when I talk about Lilou. Or maybe they'll clear me medically and send me back to the front and a better shot will kill me. And then my ghost, eager and in love, will find that beautiful villa and my Lilou once more. I clutched the book in my hand and rested my head against the passenger-side window and Maurice patted me on the leg like a proud father of a son he never bore.