An extraordinary love story and a captivating novel about the power of memory and imagination. Flanders 1922. After serving as a soldier in the Great War, Noon Merckem has lost his memory and lives in a psychiatric asylum. Countless women, responding to a newspaper ad, visit him there in the hope of finding their spouse who vanished in battle. One day a woman, Julienne, appears and recognizes Noon as her husband, the photographer Amand Coppens, and takes him home against medical advice. But their miraculous reunion doesn’t turn out the way that Julienne wants her envious friends to believe. Only gradually do the two grow close, and Amand’s biography is pieced together on the basis of Julienne’s stories about him. But how can he be certain that she’s telling the truth? In The Remembered Soldier, Anjet Daanje immerses us in the psyche of a war-traumatized man who has lost his identity. When Amand comes to doubt Julienne’s word, the reader is caught up in a riveting spiral of confusion that only the greatest of literature can achieve.
Excerpt from The Remembered Soldier
Maybe this is the last time he will walk down the familiar corridor as the man called Noon Merckem, that door there on the left with those welcoming panes of glass could mean the end of his existence, weak in the knees like a man being dragged to the gallows, that’s how he feels in this instant, as the hope that sustained him, the certainty that everything would be new and better beyond imagining and normal at last, that he would pass through that everyday door and be another man when he came out, a man with a home and a family and a life outside these walls, all drains away. And he comes to a halt on the sun-dappled tiles and Brother Reginald turns toward him and sees the desperation on his face and murmurs that God will never test Noon more harshly than he can bear, and gives an encouraging nod, and Noon remains silent, because in his four years here he has not seen much to reassure him about God’s notions of what is bearable.
And his heart pounds in his throat as he sits on the chair in Dr. De Moor’s office and stares at the colored tiles on the floor, the recurring pattern, its predictability, and he tries not to think of the door leering at him, motionless, a few yards away, soon to open and let her in. The garden, he is in the garden, on his knees pulling weeds in the gentle rain, the heads of lettuce, the endives, the cabbage, the beans, everything is covered with fat drops of water and he watches their slow roll downward, down to their death in the black earth. And just when the silence of the garden has rendered her imminent arrival impossible, made it unthinkable like a fantasy that has filled his mind for days and now loses its hold on him as he awakens, just then he hears her voice in the corridor. She is speaking to Dr. De Moor as they approach, what a shrill, unpleasant voice she has, she doesn’t seem to sense that everything here is supposed to make as little noise as possible, the people and footsteps and things and even the nightmares, like hiding your head under the covers so long you start to suffocate, that’s how it sometimes feels, and when the wind rages and the other men grow restless and fearful, Noon steals out into the garden to hear the cry of the gale around the building and imagine himself for just a moment a living part of the world.
And she talks about her husband, she calls him Kamiel, she never could believe he was dead, she says, she tried, but she went on dreaming about him as he had been when he was with her, and then in the morning it seemed he had come in the night to give her courage. And she stops outside the door, and he sees through the grid of the glass her silhouette, a woman’s frail head, a broad-rimmed hat bustling with flowers, and his breath is ragged in his throat, and she, she must be just as nervous as he is, he thinks he hears it in her voice, and he feels a slight pity for her, and at the thought of her fear, his own abates. And the handle is lowered on the other side of the door, and Brother Reginald motions to him to stand up, and the door swings open, and Dr. De Moor steps aside and lets her enter first.
And she is beautiful, he had pictured his wife only in the vaguest outlines, like a figure in a dream, more a feeling than a tangible presence, but never like this woman, with her dark hair arranged in artful, wavy strands, stylish and slender, in a tasteful outfit. And she doesn’t dare look up at him, as she crosses the threshold he feels her gaze linger on his crude asylum shoes, then creep up the legs of his trousers and hover at knee level until the doctor silently closes the door behind her and with desperate courage she decides the time has come. She raises her head and, trembling, looks him in the eye, hers are large and dark brown, the color of damp soil, and it must be her, it can’t be otherwise, she is a woman he could love, sincerely, deeply, and a weight lifts from his shoulders, and he gives her a cautious smile.
