Marie picked out her chrysanthemums from the florist. Her mother and her husband were both with her; they knew how important this ritual was to her. All Souls’ Day was the only day of the year on which she allowed herself to cry for Paul or even to remember him at all. Paul had been her first love. He died at Verdun. He’d been a young man of twenty, working as a horologist in his father’s shop here in Cherbourg. A man who could fix time for others but whose own had been cut short. Marie had kept his pocket watch with his initials engraved on it, which he’d given to her before he left. It stayed in a drawer in her desk, and every day, like clockwork, Marie wound it. She cared for the watch as if it were a child from a first marriage.
She’d met Paul at the florist’s one Sunday after mass; she’d been looking for carnations to brighten up her room. He was buying a bouquet for his mother. Their hands had met over the carnations. Marie had raised her eyes to see his face for the first time. It was his eyes that struck her, his steel-blue eyes. He’d smiled at her, and time had stopped. Soon it would move too fast, but in that moment, it was still. Everything happened in a blur after that; the morning walks, the afternoon tea and the secret meetings, the stolen kisses, their first night together. She remembered so well the Napoleon hotel, the bed with the scarlet sheets, the thick curtains, the smell of fresh paint, the carpet that crunched beneath their feet. Paul undressing her. Marie had never been naked in front of a man before. His hands made her skin tingle. She hadn’t moved; she’d gazed into his eyes and waited. She was alive. She was never more alive than when his hands were upon her. Paul was dead now, and that feeling of being alive had died with him.
The bouquet of chrysanthemums was interspersed with a few carnations. They didn’t really go together, but Marie always put carnations in Paul’s bouquet. Marie’s mother took her by the arm; it was time to go to the cemetery. Marie began to cry. She always cried at this exact moment, when she had finished picking out the flowers, the moment she could no longer hope for a hand to reach out and meet hers over the carnations. Her husband, Albert, kept his distance out of respect for his wife’s mourning. He knew she was crying over youthful emotion, her first love, passion lost forever. Albert was loved by his wife, a steady, sensible sort of love. Sometimes he wished that Paul could be truly gone, and that his ghost would cease to haunt Marie. But he consoled himself with the knowledge that Paul had become an idea, an elusive dream. The dead are always more beautiful, but the dead cannot give us a future, or new memories, or new joy. The dead are frozen like icons to be venerated, and veneration was not truly love. Albert knew that Marie loved him every day, and that each day was a new testament of her love. But sometimes he asked himself a strange question, one that probably should not have niggled at his brain like it did: if he too were to pass, would Marie tend to his grave the way she did to Paul’s?
At the cemetery, the widows of the Great War were out in number. Some of them were still mourning, dressed in black and waiting for death, not caring for the years they might have left. Marie waved to them as she always did, but they saw her as an impostor: she had not been married, she’d had no children, and she had remade her life since the war. Marie was just an oversensitive girl who lived in the past, not a war widow; that’s what they said. But Marie’s mother understood and consoled her all the more. Although she’d always preferred Albert, she knew that Paul was part of her daughter’s life now, as important as any other, a part that had made her daughter who she was today. “Rest in peace, my love,” said Marie, as she laid the bouquet of flowers on Paul’s grave.
Alan Alfredo Geday