Of Silence | completed

THE BOY

LILLE, FRANCE. 23 DECEMBER 1938

Charles sat in front of the mottled-wood pianoforte at No. 8 Rue Lepelletier. Monsieur Lévesque waited behind him, holding the yellowed sheet music for Chopin's Prelude No. 7 and tapping insistently on the wood.

'Play again,' said Lévesque. 'You must practice. You do not practice enough. It is a small piece; you should be able to play it.'

'But Monsieur...' Charles ran his fingers over the ivory keys. They were so very beautiful, and oh, how he loved to play! But he could not for the life of him play this one piece with the same ease as he did the others.

'But nothing.' Lévesque dropped the sheaf of notes onto Charles's lap and got up. 'I want you to practice.'

Charles had been playing for a little over nine months; everyone who heard him play said he had a natural gift, something Charles could never see in himself. He found it rather difficult to focus. Every new piece was harder than the last, and he could practice only twice a week, here at Lévesque's flat, but only after his lessons.

His lessons took up the better part of his days: French Literature, Arithmetic, Science, History, among others. Lévesque was a wonderful teacher, kind, gentle and patient, and Charles loved to sit and listen to him talking about the world and how it worked.

He especially loved learning about the history of France: of Joan of Arc and the siege of Orleans, and about his namesakes, the many kings of France. He loved hearing stories from the Franco-Prussian war and the First World War - how the soldiers had been beaten by fatigue near the end, tired and hungry and sick of all the fighting they had done.

Charles liked to imagine what it would be like as a soldier. To be put into the same routine over and over again. To fight, to take the lives of fellow men. He could not fathom it. Nor could he understand how anyone could survive with the scars of what they had seen, how anyone could bear such reminders of bloodshed and death.

He remembered his own tryst with violence, on that dark night of February 1934. His parents had dressed in their best and bid him a short, hurried goodbye. He had run out after them, leaving the apartment door open, and followed his mother's bright blue dress to the Place de la Concorde. He remembered the surge of people, the gunfire, losing sight of his parents in the crowd. The sobbing - his own.

'Mama!' cried Charles in his memory. His mother was nowhere to be seen, and the press of people all around him was too much to bear. He collapsed into a small lump on the road, and was roused by a rough hand grabbing him by the shoulder and pushing him back out of the Rue Royale, into a side alley that was dark and empty. He rose to his feet and ran back, down the Rue des Capucines, into Rue Boudreau, and found his flat empty, open and ransacked.

The memory of that event alone was enough to send Charles often spiraling into bouts of crushing depression. In the beginning, when he had first come to stay with her, Madame Marchand would spend hours trying to make him speak about what had happened. In recent days, however, she would just let him be, and he would slowly rise out of his mood and return to his usual self.

He could not - would not - join the army, even if there was another war, even if he was forced to.

Charles sighed and placed his hands onto the keys, letting himself spin the notes from his fingers. The music drifted from the strings, low, soft, and melodious, and he quickly found himself lost in it - until Lévesque loudly said, 'Non! You are not doing it correctly, Charles, it is a crescendo, and then a diminuendo! And then it flows, like this...'

Lévesque placed his fingers where Charles's had been and played the same part again, and the music moved a thousand times better. He played the notes - low, high, and then low again, and they spilled like water. He drew his hands away and said to Charles, 'Play.'