The Figures of Beauty Read Free Page A

doors in. They went room to room. “All clear,” they shouted back to the street.
    When one of the soldiers found the baby, he lifted it from the marble vat in the kitchen and said, “What the fuck?”
    Somebody found an earthenware jug on a shelf. It was identified as goat’s milk by a private who had been raised on a farmin Minnesota. He thought it wasn’t that sour. They found some bread to soak. They brought another blanket from another room. It was kind of a miracle. But even finding a baby would not prove to be their most vivid recollection of the day.
    The bodies were piled around the perimeter of Castello’s central square. That’s why nobody in the patrol fully grasped what had happened until they reached the end of the narrow street that led them into it. Even then it took a while to sink in.
    “Christ almighty,” said the sergeant.
    There were so many bodies in so circumscribed a space they did not seem like people. Depending on where in the States each of the soldiers was from, he’d remember the population of Castello looking something like the last ridges of snow at the edge of a field, or mounds of beach kelp, or spills of coal on a foundry floor.
    The Americans were standing pretty much where the German machine guns must have been positioned. The G.I.s could see the radius of the spray.
    Women and children, all of them. Except for a few old men.
    And except for the figure hanging from a branch of a tree in the centre of the square. He was suspended above a few charred, still-smoking pieces of wood. His feet were burned to stumps. He might have been in his thirties. It was hard to say.
    “I seen this near Salerno,” the sergeant told nobody in particular. “They build a pile of firewood, then they stand the poor bastard on top of it with the noose around his neck. He kicks himself free when he can’t stand the flames anymore.”
    One of the soldiers was holding the baby in the crook of his arm. He was amazed by the force of her sucking. He could feel the swallows through his combat jacket. He was thinking exactly these words: I shall never see anything as strange as this for as long as I live.
    Because it wasn’t just the baby. And it wasn’t just the corpses. And it wasn’t just the body hanging from a branch of an old tree in the centre of the square. It’s amazing what you can get used to seeing in a war.
    It was the goats. They were the strangest thing.
    There were about a dozen of them. They must have come into the square after the Germans had left. They must have come through the same gate in the wall and down the same cobbled street as the Americans. And now, there they were: unperturbed by the clattering arrival of the recon patrol in the square. The bells made only the softest and most occasional tinkle. It was as if they were grazing on the slopes of a peaceful hill. They were milling slowly around the taut rope, and the black stumps of feet, and the remains of a fire. It was as if they were waiting for something to move.

CHAPTER THREE
Paris, May 1968
    T ROOPS WERE CORDONING OFF parts of the city. The police were securing other parts. The students were in control of other parts still.
    All this made for a lot of unusual noise. But Oliver Hughson didn’t know what usual was in Paris. He’d never been there before. He assumed the constant sirens were somehow characteristic of the pale, enormous place. He was twenty years old. He was going to travel in Europe for the summer.
    Late that afternoon he set out for a walk from the Louvre in what he took to be the approximate direction of his hotel. It wasn’t, as things turned out. It wasn’t anything like the direction he thought he was headed in.
    The rushing convoys of police and military vehicles through the streets were noted by Oliver as he walked, but noted in the same way the immense city was noted. Something was going on. He was aware of that. But because of his eccentric, almostrandom route through the streets of Paris he never