Free 1914 by Jean Echenoz

lean on furniture with both elbows, shake his right fist, controleach finger individually, and he even tried to pick up the telephone or wave good-bye, waving—or believing he was waving—when someone was leaving, which made that person think him rather cold and unfeeling.
    As if equally possessed by two opposite certainties and at the same time completely aware of these anomalies, Anthime was afraid that others could see this and that pitying him, no one dared mention it—just as Anthime himself didn’t dare confide in Padioleau, who was precisely the only one of his companions unable to notice these problems. Problems that worsened and complicated Anthime’s life, becoming so invasive that he could no longer confront them alone, no longer grapple with them without asking for help. He finally admitted his misgivings to Blanche, who revealed that she had indeed seen what was going on and then encouraged him, naturally, to consult Monteil.
    So Anthime found himself again in the doctor’s office, explaining things to him while pointing with his left hand to his missing right arm the way one points at a silent witness, an accomplice a trifle ashamed to be there—while Monteil, frowning attentively as helistened, stared out his office window at a view in which nothing, as usual, was going on or past. Anthime having stated his case, Monteil looked thoughtful for a while before delivering himself of a little speech. This sort of thing happens frequently, he began, and a great deal of anecdotal evidence exists. It’s the old story of the phantom limb. It can happen that the perception and sensation of a lost body part will linger on, then disappear after a few months. But it can also happen—which seemed to be Anthime’s case—that this body part reasserts its presence in the body long after its loss.
    The doctor then developed this speech in the classic manner by calling upon statistics (the upper right limb is, for eight out of ten of us, the most adroit), historical anecdotes (Admiral Nelson, after losing his right arm in the Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife and experiencing the same suffering bedeviling Anthime, considered it proof of the existence of the soul), dull jokes (one places a wedding band on the ring finger of the left hand, which then requires the right one to help remove it: the dilemma of the one-armed adulterer), bloodcurdling comparisons (certain penis amputees have spoken of phantomerections and ejaculations), clinical frankness (the cause of these pains is as mysterious as the phenomenon itself), and perspectives that are both semi-reassuring (it will go away on its own, it usually diminishes with time) and semi-worrisome (although it can also last for twenty-five years, that’s not unheard-of).
    Oh, by the way, Paris, wound up Monteil, when are you going there with Blanche? And the following week they arrived in the Gare Montparnasse, after Anthime had read every last newspaper on the train. Upon his return home from the front, he hadn’t wanted to keep up with the news, or at least hadn’t shown the slightest interest in the press—although he would sometimes leaf through a paper on the sly—but now, in their compartment, he borrowed the dailies from Blanche and plunged into the events of the day, focused entirely on the war. We were then in its fourth year, well after the particularly murderous business of the Chemin des Dames, the explosive events in Russia, and the first mutinies. 13 Anthime read about all that with close attention.
    Blanche had reserved two rooms at the other end of Paris in a hotel run by some family cousins, so theytook a taxi at Montparnasse and, as it passed in front of the Gare de l’Est, they saw groups of men on leave milling about, either arriving from the battlefield or on their way back, possibly drunk but certainly vehement, looking angry, singing songs the couple could not clearly hear. Anthime asked the driver