Radiant Days Read Online Free PDF

you?
”
    “Why the hell do you think he left?” Arthur shouted back at her. “He hated you! Frédéric joined the army because he hates you!
Everybody
hates you!”
    The entire house shook as she stormed outside. Arthur dived onto his bed and covered his head with a pillow. Moments later, someone knocked furtively at Arthur’s door.
    “What?” he demanded.
    The door cracked open and his younger sisters came in.
    “I thought she was going to kill you,” said Vitalie as she settled on the bed. “What was Paris like?”
    “A lot of dead people. A lot of soldiers. Everything was all bombed out.”
    Isabelle stood near him and sucked her hair ribbon. She was ten, but acted younger because she was the baby. “What happened to your head?”
    “Don’t touch,” he warned. “They shaved it. I got lice.”
    Vitalie shrieked, but Isabelle only nodded solemnly. “Did you see Frédéric with the soldiers?”
    “No.” He hated his older brother. “Frédéric’s hiding under a log somewhere. Go away, I need to sleep. Wait, here”—he pulled two lumpy packages from his pocket, each wrapped in a linen tea towel—“apple tarts, from Georges’s aunts. I savedthem for you. Don’t let the Mouth of Darkness see them.”
    “We won’t.” Vitalie handed one to Isabelle, turned to pat her brother on the forehead. “I’ll bring you supper later.”
    When his sisters left, he pulled out the wad of pages he’d been carrying since he first left Charleville, almost a month ago. Notes, some antiwar cartoons he had tried to sell to the newspaper in Douai, the poems he’d copied into the notebook he’d given to Demeny. After a few minutes he shoved them under the bed. He shouted a curse and punched the wall, leaving a dent in the plaster.
    Prison would have been better.
    Two weeks later, he ran away again. Before leaving, he tracked down his friend Ernest, telling him outrageous lies about a girl who was waiting for him in Douai.
    “Beautiful. She has a friend, too; I’ll get her to introduce you. I said I’d go back and meet her for dinner, only I need the train fare. Maybe you can set me up, and I’ll pay you back when we all get together, how’s that?”
    Ernest gave him a few francs. Not enough for the train to Douai, but Arthur wasn’t headed to Douai—he was on his way to Belgium.
    He left shortly after breakfast. That afternoon he stopped for supper at a place called the Green Tavern, where he had a rush of pure happiness: a beer on the table before him, sun slanting through the windows, a buxom blond waitress who flirted with him and laughed when he asked if she had a friend.
    “What, I’m not enough for you?” she said, tweaking his ear.
    After she brought his food, he sat and wrote, and it was as ifthe words on the page and the words in his head and the room around him all became one thing, a dazzling light that spilled from his eyes onto the creased notepaper.
    Eight days, I’d worn my boots to shreds
    On the stony road. I got to Charleroi.
    “The Green Tavern”: I ordered bread and butter,
    A slab of warm ham.
    Feeling good, I stretched my legs under the green table,
    Checked out the graffiti on the wallpaper—
    And what could be better than when the laughing girl
    With the “I’m available” eyes—
    A kiss wouldn’t scare that girl!—
    Brings me bread and butter,
    Lukewarm ham on a bright-colored platter—
    The ham pink and white, perfumed with garlic—
    And fills a huge beer mug, its foaming head
    Gilded by a ray of dying sun.
    Remembering it long afterward, he could have kicked himself for not getting her name.

3

    Washington, D.C.
    APRIL 1978
    THE FALL SEMESTER ended. I went home for a few days, then returned to D.C. to wait out the weeks until the January term began. Winter melted into an early spring. Clea and I would meet in the afternoons, after my life-drawing class; sometimes in the evening, if her husband was studying late. We never returned to the Blue Mirror or anywhere else near