Motherhood

In the hush of a parlour aglow with Edison bulbs, a middle-class American husband and wife crack open a gilt-edged storybook and inhale the acrid smoke of another continent’s tragedy: Albert, a Breton ploughman conscripted into a sepia war, returns home on a single furlough to find his cottage requisitioned by an enemy captain whose epaulettes glint like guillotine blades; Louise, his wife, moves through her own rooms like a ghost, her womb already secreting the fruit of a night whose memory she has tried to drown in well-water and prayer. When the armistice bugles fade, Albert strides back along rutted roads expecting triumph, but is met instead by a cradle that might as well be a coffin: the infant son he had dreamed of naming after the harvest moon is a living indictment, swaddled in silence because Louise has never dared to touch the small fists that might resemble the intruder’s jawline. In a single candle-lit reckoning she confesses the occupation of her body as bluntly as any village burned on the horizon, and Albert—his face a cracked icon of soldierly honour—raises the child like a defective rifle, meaning to dash it against the hearth. Louise’s motherhood, until now paralysed by shame, detonates into a primal roar: she throws herself between man and destiny, arms outstretched in a Pietà reversed, forcing Albert to confront the abyss of his own absolutism. Blood, not the child’s, is spilled that night—only the blood of the old world, dripping from a marriage that will limp forward on the crutch of shared guilt. Back in the safe circle of lamplight, the American couple close the book just as newspaper headlines trumpet that their nation has sidestepped the conflagration; their relieved laughter ricochets against the nursery wallpaper, oblivious to the way the European parable has already stained their own unborn futures.