Century of Peace

For most of each day she lived in the past. And this was deliberate, a purposeful exploration of the time of her happiness, a reliving. She saw her old self there too, but that, like so much in her old life, was water under the bridge, flowing into the sea of her memories. It was 25^th March on the turn of century, six decades since then. But to her, it flickered out in as many seconds. She was going backwards in the river of time again.

Ulkane Fechner, by that time a svelte blonde of twenty years of age, was waiting wistfully outside her small and spick clean house at Kehl, Baden-Württemberg, a serene town perched on the bank of Rhine just opposite Strasbourg of Alsace. In late-March, wildflowers covered the place with iridescent blossoms, and the colour of river was the blue of his eyes. Didn't they say absence makes the heart grow fonder? Even at this time, the calm before the storm.

There were countless paradoxes in the history of Alsace which was forever swinging between the traditional and the modern, the dynamic and the conservative, revolution and resignation. Across the river it was as if a world apart, although Kehl was a perfect blend of the distinct cultures of the two countries. From the Vosges mountain range to the rolling hills of the vineyards and throughout the fertile plains of the Rhine, there were typical auberges, as if out of a picture book, waiting to welcome the tourists as it used to be. Now it was different. After the invasion Poland last September, approximately one third of its population was summarily evacuated to the other side of France, and part of this place was lying in waste.

Marcel Dukas bent to get out of the car, locked it, and came up the porch steps. He saw that one of the daisies was on the verge of doing a header out of the bouquet, and made a hurried adjustment. Ulkane came over, pining for his warmth and tight embrace. She felt her face flooding with colour as he looked deep into her eyes. Seeing the flush, he put up one finger to touch her cheek, the other hand followed. Then he took her face in his hands and kissed her with the gentleness of a teenager. Her body, which she now felt to have been stiff and tense for weeks, the muscles held rigidly, began to slacken and melt.

The bedroom was flooded with spring sunshine, soft golden light falling on her unblemished whiteness, in contrast to his café-au-lait skin. She could not forget the languor and the sweet idleness of that afternoon, he and her as young ardent lovers. With a pain that made her gasp, she remembered their bed and waking in the morning in her primitive beauty, uncovered by bedclothes, and he alike beside her. Like gods they were, discovered by the morning light.

A picture still lingered in front of her eyes whenever she closed them as if in a dream. The angel having taken the figure and the form of man, came into the house and said to her: "Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee." She got little meaning of the salutation, if at all. Marcel was not awake yet, his back turned to her. She tried to feel the cross hanging over her midriff while taking a glance at the calendar by the bedside. It was 25^th March 1940, the Annunciation day.

"I'll see you again, then," he bent forward and pecked the corner of her mouth, then turned and walked off. He looked back at the house, blowing a kiss, and waved as his vintage Feu pulled away. "Adieu!" he shouted, and disappeared from his view the great red tiles, stucco and shingles, all gleaming in wan sunlight, and her neat tiny figure on the steps under the big bulbous portico, tree shadows lying across her whole body like zebra-stripes. Make love not war, said the ancient epigram, but it was all but too ephemeral to hold on to.

Walking along the river to face into a strong, warm wind, Ulkane found he had lodged firmly in her mind. And rather than fading as the days went by, his effect on her seemed to be cumulative. She remembered the time when they first met, on this bridge on a mild afternoon like this eight months back. His eyes, hazel eyes with a bluish under-tint seemed to be the key to her heart. And the spell never dissipated. The young Frenchman with a nez retroussé looked back, giving her a matching expression, which hit a big red button inside her, kicking off sensations that were both powerfully attractive and alarming. She was German, one thing she could never be ignorant of, though she had a belief in Roman Catholic like most French people did and German did not. But why did all that matter when you feel the urge to answer some divine call?

She wasn't beautiful, not the media version of beauty, anyhow, but the look of her lips and the line of her jaw for some reason just about stopped Marcel's heart, and the catlike tilt of her greenish-grey eyes made him feel weak as he turned his eyes into her direction. His blood felt too high and his cheeks too hot. He knew perfectly well what these signalled, and he resented them even as they made him captive.

So the story began, until 9^th April when blitzkrieg broke out in the Norse countries following sitzkrieg. Ulkane was troubled in spirit, but her companion knew it better. The following day, as it was, she was waiting again on the bridge across Rhine, her hair hung down to the middle of her back in a classic French braid. Her fear was all at once displaced by his appearance over the other side. His face looking both hopeful and tentative, he opened his arms, and perhaps it was only a gesture meant to underline and emphasize his helplessness, but it was all the gesture her tired, hopeful heart needed; it brushed aside the prissy dithering of her mind and took charge. She found herself stepping like a sleepwalker into the opening his arms made, and when they closed around her, she pressed her face against his shoulder and closed her eyes.

"It's unfair." She cried, oblivious of the few passersby. "I'm expecting, and why do you have to leave now? Why, this time only, the One we'd always trusted didn't help us?"

She thought she saw the dream image again, right some distance back in the darkness before her tear-brimmed eyes. "Fear not, for thou hast found grace with God. The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee. And therefore also the Holy which shall be born of thee shall be called Siecle de Paix." She could not understand, she did not want to, for the peace of God passed all understanding.

"Auf wiedersehen, Marcel." she beckoned and was dragged back through time. On the way she witnessed the Fall of France in June, Alsace once more annexed by her own countrymen. Its return she would not see until 1945, when Ally's victory brought about the rapprochement between these two countries, the countries of Siecle's parents.

The sky was overcast by some unnatural vapor and suffused from below by a reddish artificial light. The peaky lady looked at the mirage, at lost lives gone beyond any real recall. The sky was scudded over with wisps of black cloud. The sounds of the city, Strasbourg and Kehl merged, as light as they ever became, thinned and rarefied, throbbed softly through the earth. In the dark river a full moon was reflected, like a round white light under the water. Trees trailed thin branches across its surface as if to catch the moon in their net. It could have been some broad sluggish river she and her never-met-again companion had sat beside, with dense vegetation growing into its banks, a mass of complex leafiness that might have stretched back across the city for miles, covering buildings in a dark wilderness.

All was lost but one, yet heaven could wait.