The only light in the hallway comes from the windows at each end, making it darker and darker towards the middle, as if I were walking deeper and deeper into a forest. I have another look at the picture and the text on the back: Parigné-l’Evêque, 1915. A village near Le Mans. I couldn’t find any more information about it.

A man shuffles towards me with hollow eyes and a suspicious glance. I tell him I’m visiting my great-grandmother, Elise. He repeats the name in a hoarse voice and slowly raises his arm, but then I spot the door with the correct number and slip inside.

The room is tiny, just enough space for a bed and a small table. When I show her the photo, a wistful look appears on her face.

“That’s Ferdinand. My first husband. Ferdi.” She takes a deep breath and peers through the window. “I remember that photo well. That was in France, in the training camp where he had ended up. Subsequently, he was at the front.”

She gets up and shuffles towards the bed, remains seated on the edge for a while, and then lies down. “Actually, he shouldn’t have been there. He was exempt from military service.”

I ask her why, but she sighs and pulls the blanket up to her chin. Suddenly, she looks exhausted and so frightfully old. Ninety-eight years old, lying flat on her back, her eyes closed, and her mouth slightly open.

“If you don’t want to talk about Ferdi, it’s fine,” I say.

“No, I’m just having a bad day. It has nothing to do with that picture. I feel like I don’t belong here. Yesterday, a priest came by. I didn’t want to talk to him, but he kept insisting; I lost my temper and threw my piss pot at his head. I shouldn’t have done that. Now they’ll think I’m losing it.”

I smile gently and say they’ll surely understand, but it sounds as if I don’t really believe what I’m saying.

“No, no,” she replies instantly. “You don’t need to do much before they think you’re nuts. That’s how it goes with people of my age.”

“You’re not used to this place yet, that’s all. It’ll be okay.”

“I don’t know. I miss my house, and I miss being on my own.”

I nod and look at the wall, not knowing what to add. She smiles sadly and presses her lips together.

The next week, I accompany my parents to her house to clean and pick up some things for her. I decide to have a look in the attic. In one corner, there is a kind of storage room. Under a load of clutter, I come across an old chest. On the lid is written, in faded letters, Hazebrouck, 1915.

In a side pocket of the chest, I find a notebook with a gray-black moiré cover. The handwriting is my great-grandmother’s, from when she was about my age.

“1913. This will be a great year, a turning point in my life. I am now eighteen years old, and soon I’ll be engaged to Ferdinand and then get married! Hopefully this year!”

The diary continues until 1915. In the back, I find some letters from Ferdi. Written in Parigné-l’Evêque, the same village name as on the back of the photograph.

“Things are worse than I feared. We don’t even have uniforms and walk about in some kind of prison garb. Pajama-thin cloth—we’re freezing! The cloth is pajama-thin, and we’re freezing! The food is disgusting: shank and beans, cassoulet with giblets… I miss you so much and feel completely out of place here. The army’s clearly not my thing. The army is clearly not my thing. They’d better throw me in jail.”

A few days later, I’m back at the retirement home. After updating her on the progress with the cleaning, I start talking cautiously about Ferdi but remain silent about the letters.

She gazes mournfully for a while and then starts talking.

“We got married early in 1914. When the Germans approached, we fled to my aunt in Hazebrouck. My aunt had something against Ferdi. We had to sleep in separate rooms: I was on the first floor, and he was in the attic. He usually stayed indoors because we knew the gendarmes were arresting young Belgian men and sending them to training camps. He was exempt because we were married, but in 1915 the law changed, and married men could also be drafted. When his birthday came around, I really wanted to celebrate it at a nearby bistro. We had vol-au-vent and wine. Then two gendarmes entered. Before we knew it, he was arrested. I never saw him again.”

She stares gloomily at her fingers, then a nurse comes in with her dinner. “So, Elise? You think you’re capable of behaving like an adult today?”

At home, I continue reading the letters.

“Yesterday, a bunch of guys who were already in the trenches showed up. Their sullen faces gave me the creeps. I’m terrified of what’s coming. I often think about God. Again, yes. You must think I’m an idiot, embracing my faith again. I would much rather be with you. In your arms. And not believe in God together with you. But here, it turns out I really need Him.”

At night, I dream about it all. An invisible hand knocking soldiers out of the trenches as if they are rats, blown to bits at the touch. All that remains of them are bloody strings of flesh in the sludge. At my feet, I see a face in the mud. A face without a head, just a layer of facial skin, like a mask. Ferdi. Then it shrivels up and gets swallowed by the mud.

As soon as I wake up, my mother enters my room. Her face is white with tension. “During the night, Elise was found on the soccer field next to the retirement home,” she says, “sitting right in the centre circle, on a chair she had taken with her, talking to herself and waving her arms. She told the staff that it was the Germans who dragged her out of bed to interrogate her in the field. They had also beaten and tortured her. It was the SS men who shot her second husband. Now they were coming for her. No doubt they’d return the next night and finish the job.”

Elise tells us the same story, with a wild look in her eyes. My mother tells her not to worry, but Elise immediately looks up angrily and shouts, “They fucking killed my two husbands! And now it’s my turn! Always those goddamn Germans, bloody Krauts! You’ll see! They’ll be coming for me!”


I browse through the letters. Mostly, the letters describe the poor conditions in the camp, until I come across one that says the training is over and departure to the front is imminent.

“Normally, we’ll be near Langemark. But first, we’ll be in Belle for a few days. That close I’ll be to you. I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s only twelve miles. If we meet halfway, we could flee to Godewaersvelde, where I have an uncle. We could hide there for a while and see what happens. Please let me know what you think. Desperately awaiting your reply.”


I spend the entire afternoon biking around Passchendaele and Langemark, passing by the military cemeteries. Endless meadows with white crosses and columns bearing thousands of names. Eighty years ago. Muddy pools of blood, urine, faeces, and rotting corpses; the stench; and the rats. This is where he walked. This is where it all ended for him. Three generations apart. If I had lived three generations earlier, I would have been the one in that wasteland of pain, misery, and gory madness.

A couple of days later, Elise is outside at night again and is brought back inside with a high fever. Early in the morning, she is transferred to the emergency department at the nearby hospital.

Her cheeks are deeply sunken. She’s breathing quickly and heavily, her voice weak and raspy. “It’s my fault he’s dead. He wanted to desert the army and asked my opinion. I replied I didn’t know. I was scared. I was so young and so scared.”

She looks at me with glassy eyes. “It happened in his first days in the trenches: missing in action. They never found him.”

She repeats the last sentence a few times. Her eyes are such a bright blue that they seem to radiate light. Then she falls asleep.

She passes away a few hours after we return home, at nine o’clock, just before sunset, sixteen months before her hundredth birthday.

The following weeks I help my parents in her house. In a dresser, I find a photo of Elise and a man who gazes at the camera with a tough look.

“That was her second husband,” my mother says. “Cyrille, a communist who was active in the resistance. That was also the end of him.”

“What happened?”

“He was involved in a sabotage operation. Things went wrong, and he was shot in the street by the SS, died a few days later. He was Grandma’s real father, and thus, my grandfather.”

I look at the picture. “You have his eyes. Me, too, no?”

She smiles and nods.

I go to my room, put the photos next to each other, and look at them until the faces fade away. And then I think about Elise’s last words, that it was her fault Ferdi was killed.