The Remembered Soldier

Set in early 1920s Belgium, the novel follows an amnesiac World War I soldier and the woman who claims him as her husband, tracing their year together as they attempt to rebuild a shared life from fragments of memory, wartime trauma, and carefully managed truths.

In 1922, a man known as Noon Merckem has spent four years in the Guislain Asylum in Ghent with no memory of his identity. Found near the Flemish town of Merckem in December 1917 wearing pieces of Flemish, French, and German uniforms, he was named by the field hospital that received him around midday. His psychiatrist, Dr. De Moor, places an advertisement seeking women whose relatives went missing during the war. Two women visit and leave in disappointment when Noon proves not to be their husband. When Noon refuses further meetings, Dr. De Moor has him restrained in a straitjacket. A third woman enters and lets out a cry of recognition. Julienne identifies Noon as her husband, Amand Stephaan Coppens, a photographer who disappeared near Diksmuide in December 1917. She confirms a scar above his temple from a horse kick, produces a wedding photograph from 13 years earlier, and embraces him despite the straitjacket.

Julienne insists on taking Noon home immediately. Director Segers brokers a compromise: a one-month trial, after which she must return with Noon for examination. She helps him into his prewar clothes the next morning, and his hands remember how to knot the tie, as if his body retains knowledge his mind has lost. The journey to Kortrijk is fraught: A locomotive triggers Noon's first panic attack on the platform, and Julienne holds him until it passes. At the narrow house on Doornijkstraat, with Photography, A. Coppens on the window, 10-year-old Gus is suspicious and hostile, while seven-year-old Rose asks innocently whether her father has a fake hand, since all the soldiers her mother photographs have prosthetic limbs. The house reveals Julienne's poverty: The attic bedroom has no furniture, just clotheslines and pots catching rainwater, yet she has kept Amand's prewar suits pristine for eight years.

Their first weeks are difficult. Amand suffers insomnia and nightmares in the studio where he sleeps alone. One night, he wakes to find himself gripping Julienne's throat, having attacked her while sleepwalking. She remains astonishingly calm. At the asylum for his follow-up, Julienne delivers a carefully edited account, omitting the panic attack, the assault, and their struggles. Amand, who had planned to ask to stay, finds he cannot betray her. He repeats her lies, Dr. De Moor signs the discharge papers, and outside the gate she takes his hand.

Back home, Julienne teaches Amand photography and invites him to share her bed as a practical measure against his terrible nights. For the first time since leaving the asylum, he dares to sleep. Their business grows as Amand begins posing in a prewar Belgian uniform with widows of missing soldiers. Felice van Gucht, the downstairs neighbor and widow of a tailor, procures the uniform. Julienne orchestrates these sessions with sincerity and salesmanship, telling each widow the story of her own miracle.

In whispered installments at night, Julienne reveals their shared past: his mobilization, their courtship, and her great secret that she was his mother's housemaid before they married. Their first sexual encounter unfolds through storytelling, Julienne narrating their history as they undress each other, making lovemaking inseparable from the reconstruction of their past. Weeks of intense happiness follow, but Amand's nightmares intensify and he begins experiencing dissociative episodes during which he loses awareness and memory of his actions.

He also discovers troubling discrepancies. When he walks to their supposed former home in Meenen, he finds the building undamaged, contradicting Julienne's claim that it was destroyed by bombing. A woman on the street calls Julienne a "filthy Hun-loving whore" (274), and the terror in Julienne's eyes confirms she has been hiding something significant. She eventually confesses: During the German occupation, she volunteered at a German field hospital, nursing wounded enemy soldiers who called her the Flämische Engel, the Flemish Angel. Her motivation was a private bargain with God that each act of mercy would bring Amand closer to home. After the war, a mob besieged her house until she fled Meenen with her children.

As Amand's episodes worsen, the couple acknowledges that his permanent memory loss is approaching. He writes a letter to his future self documenting which truths Julienne will conceal from the man he will become, and they hide it among her belongings. During an argument they deliberately provoke, hoping to trigger his permanent transformation into the alternate self, Amand strikes Julienne. He has no memory of hitting her. She tells the children and neighbors she stumbled into a table, and he gives her a field spade so she can defend herself. Felice discovers the truth and urges Julienne to return Amand to the asylum. Julienne refuses, declaring she cannot live without him a second time.

They sign a lease for a house on Groote Markt, Kortrijk's main square. On their last night, Julienne stands naked before Amand in the light of their new bedroom. They make love as the Belfort, Kortrijk's bell tower, strikes midnight. Before dawn, he dresses silently, takes the suitcase she packed, and leaves. At the station, he places his monogrammed handkerchief on their bench and boards the four-eleven train.

The narrative shifts. Amand has permanently become "the other man." He wakes in the attic and does not recognize his surroundings. A voice asks, "Is that you, Amand?" (425). He calls himself Louis Blauwaert and insists he is married to a German woman named Käthe. Julienne shows him photographs and newspapers, but he dismisses everything as fraud. She persuades him to stay for two weeks, telling him stories at night that sometimes match his own dreams with uncanny precision. He writes a letter to Käthe at an address that surfaces in his memory, and Julienne mails it.

The letter returns with insufficient postage, and Louis travels to Germany, journeying through a country devastated by hyperinflation. At a farm in Werschberg, he finds Käthe married to Rainer Berger, a comrade from his own platoon. Their older children do not know he is their father. On his second night, Käthe comes to him in the hayloft. They hold each other in the dark, but she is saying farewell. In the morning, he finds his suitcase packed with provisions at the foot of the ladder.

Louis departs before dawn. Walking toward Belgium, he tears open the lining of his coat, remembering a dream in which Julienne showed him money hidden there, and finds five twenty-franc bills she had secretly sewn inside. On the train to Kortrijk, memories of his year with Julienne return: evenings in the studio, dancing together, swimming in the Leye, the river near Kortrijk. He arrives at dawn and walks to their shop on Groote Markt. Julienne comes downstairs and tells him the shop is not yet open. He says her name, and she takes the last steps at a run. They embrace. She asks if he found Käthe. He tells her there is no Käthe and declares that he is Amand.