by Anita Shreve
Jean thought of the balustrade as his.
He came to this place often. He had removed the crosspieces that barred the door so many times now that the nails slid effortlessly in and out of their holes. He knew the route across the attic floor as a sapper might a minefield—which boards would give way even under a boy's weight, where to avoid the crumbling plaster chunks that dangled from the ceiling. He came here as often as he could manage. It was, within the school, his sanctuary. As was the wood when he was not in school.
All forays here meant some risk. At the least, a flogging by Monsieur Dauvin should Jean be discovered; an injury or a fall should he not be careful where he stepped or rested his weight. But this journey today was, by far, the most dangerous of all.
For the building was no longer a school. Nor was the church any longer a church. The sisters, in their white-winged cornettes, had fled to the adjacent convent to pray; Father Guillaume had not appeared since the Gestapo had entered the village. The classrooms of the school were now interrogation rooms; the school was a prison. All day, from his perch, the boy watched them come and go, heard, even through the three floors that separated him from the ground-floor classrooms, the muffled screams, followed abruptly by an uncommon silence, as though silence were the only way to survive.
The boy had known this all his life.
Earlier that morning, Jean had ridden his bicycle to school as he always did, but Marcel, whose house he daily passed en route, whispered frantically to him from an open window. Marcel, who was still in his nightshirt and who had not yet combed his hair, told Jean of the assassinations and of the reprisals, and that the school had been closed indefinitely. Go home, Marcel had whispered fiercely. It was rumored, Marcel added, that the Germans had brought in reinforcements from Florennes. The Gestapo were everywhere, like cockroaches. Jean, who had taken all of this in, thought it must have been Marcel's father who had said that, who had made the image of the cockroaches. Marcel was loyal, but he lacked imagination.
Jean left Marcel and rode to the dark safety of an alleyway. He was considerably closer to the school than he was to home; the ride to his father's farmhouse might, in fact, be more dangerous than remaining in the village. He could, he thought, seek shelter with Marcel: Madame Delizée would not refuse him. But the thought of being trapped all day (and all night?) in Marcel's cluttered and claustrophobic three-room apartment, where the indoor toilet seemed continuously to be backed up, made Jean shake his head quickly.
He hid his bicycle behind a pair of dustbins, hugged the backs of the terraced houses, and ventured to peer into the village square, bordered on the north by the old school. The shades at the classroom windows had been drawn. Two armed and uniformed sentries stood at the door where normally Monsieur Dauvin waited to reprimand the tardiest of the students.
All the boys knew of the basement entrance. It was where the older boys went to smoke; the younger to play cards for centimes. From the basement, there was the back staircase, filthy and always smelling of stale cigarette smoke. The teachers never used the back staircase; they complained to Monsieur Chabotaux, the old caretaker, that dust caught at their trousers.
Jean crept into the darkness of the basement, heard from the floor above the occasional tread of heavy boots. Behind the boiler, the staircase began; it encountered on each level a heavy metal door. When he had climbed to the ground floor, Jean hesitated, put his ear to the door. There was behind the green-painted metal an odd sound, the low murmur of many voices, as though he were eavesdropping on the waiting room of the railway station at St. Laurent. The sound seemed benign and gave Jean the courage to continue up the stairs, but as he put his foot on the first step, he jerked his body. A scream had come at him through the door. Paralyzed, the boy listened as the terrible voice, a woman's, trailed off and was followed once again by the uncommon silence.
He reached the walkway without much trouble, but needed immediately to piss in the corner. He crouched into the opposite corner, where there was a bit of solid wall, perhaps three feet long, before the balustrade began. He pulled his coat around him. It was cold, but not as cold as it had been, and besides, Jean knew, the sun, which was bright today and unobscured, would soon warm his southern wall of the school.
He crouched or sat all day, peering around the wall only when he heard the clatter of a truck on the cobblestones of the square. First there were the Gestapo, who sprang with their machine guns from the truck. Then the back panels were opened, and one or five or twelve men and women, and sometimes children, stepped or were dragged from the interior compartment. Mostly the prisoners were silent, particularly the men, but occasionally a woman was crying, and sometimes the children were whimpering. Only Madame Gosset, who was, Jean knew, elderly and deaf, would not get out of the truck, possibly because she did not hear the commands, possibly because she refused, even in her frailty, to cooperate; and Jean was horrified to watch the Gestapo grab her by her hair, her bun uncoiling like a thin white rope as the pins popped and fell to the cobblestones. A guard jabbed her between her shoulder blades with the butt of his machine gun, Madame Gosset fell to the cobblestones on her knees and couldn't—or wouldn't—rise. She was dragged in that position by two Gestapo, who hoisted her weightless body by her armpits.
In all, he counted sixty-seven villagers who were taken into the school. In his bookbag he found a notebook and a pencil, and he recorded the names of all those he could recognize, so that he had entries that read this way. “Pierre Squevin and his family: his wife Marie, and a sister of the wife (?) don't know her name; and Georges, 17, from the pensionale.”
Fourteen villagers had left the school. Ten young men (Georges among them) were marched out, their hands behind their heads, and herded into the back of a van. The van left the square with two guards, but Jean could not hear from four stories up their destination. Three women had been let go—one was a woman with a baby. He watched the woman stand, dazed, at the bottom of the schoolhouse steps, then begin to scurry, hunching her back as if she might conceal herself and her baby, across the square to her house.
It had been an hour, at least, since anyone else had been brought to the school or anyone had left. Jean estimated the time at about three P.M. He was glad that soon it would be dark and he could retrace his steps to his bicycle. He had seen enough, recorded enough. He had not eaten since breakfast—a hard roll, a cup of bitter tea— though, in truth, the scenes he had witnessed and the sounds he had heard had intermittently stolen his appetite. The sun slanted over the village hall opposite—in another hour, it would fall behind the slate roof. When the sun set, his corner would lose whatever small warmth the stones had harbored through the day, and he would want even more urgently to leave.
Idly he looked again at the names in his notebook, thinking he might be able to fill in the blank spaces, remember a name that had so far escaped him, when he heard a new sound in the square. Six men, one with a tall ladder, the others with shorter ladders, stepladders, two apiece, entered the square. Two uniformed guards followed the men, the guards’ arms weighted down not with machine guns but with coils of rope. The Belgians were workers, laborers from the village. Marcel's father (Marcel's father?) was the man carrying the longest of the ladders. He was dressed as Jean had often seen him—in a blue overall, a pair of clogs, and his navy cap. Monsieur Delizée walked with the ladder to the eastern side of the square, along which were terraced buildings, with shops on the ground floor, apartments on the first story. All along the front of these apartments were shallow, wrought-iron balconies—wide enough for a woman to hang out a wash to dry, wide enough in summer for tubs of begonias and geraniums. The ironwork of these balconies, intricate and detailed, was thought in the village to be among the town's better features.
Marcel's father stopped, his ladder horizontal. A guard gave a command in German, then in French. Reluctantly, Marcel's father slowly righted the ladder, leaned it carefully against the iron-work of the first balcony. The guard spoke to Monsieur Delizée,
handed him a heavy coil of rope.
With growing comprehension and horror, Jean watched the father of his best friend climb the long ladder with the coil of rope.
“We were near the signal crossing when they picked us up. We had nothing on us. Twenty minutes earlier, Antoine had delivered a package of propaganda leaflets to … well, you don't need to know to who. They were after Léon, really—and he knew it. We knew it. I think they've thought for a while now that he was, you know, leaking things he heard at the hotel. They put us in a truck. We knew the guards—all of us. They were all right with Antoine and me, you know, because we have the livestock, and they've had our meat, and perhaps they were thinking there might be, in this, a favor somewhere, but Léon, what did he have to offer? Léon was coughing badly, he does this when he gets nervous, and besides he hasn't been well, hasn't been well at all, and Antoine and me were looking at each other over his head, and I knew we were thinking the same thing. Léon was not going to get out of this.
“So then we were driven to the school. Inside the school there was … it was … In the classrooms, there were the children's drawings and their papers up on the walls, and oh the floor and on the desks there was blood, spatters of it, the way it spatters when you've hit a calf before slitting its throat. In some rooms, there were old women huddling with their husbands, Monsieur Claussin and Monsieur Clouet. I saw Risa with her baby. But I could catch only glimpses, because they hurried us to a separate classroom—even though you could hear. It made you want to shit what you were hearing.
“And then an officer introduced himself—he was known to Léon and to Antoine,” but not to myself, and while he was telling us his name, a guard, from behind, hit Léon such a blow, a whack with his truncheon, that Léon fell over sideways and one of the lenses of his glasses shattered. So I reached over to get him, and I was hit, too, but I was bending, and the stick hit me on the side of my face, but it didn't knock me down. So I stood up. And they started on Léon first; he was the weakest of the three of us and would break first, they reasoned, and they told him they knew he was with the Maquis, and they wanted to know what we were doing at the signal crossing, where we had been and were going and so on, and Léon, who was sitting at a child's desk, put on the glasses with the shattered lens and looked up. I’ll never forget this. He began to read the signs that the teacher had put on the walls for the children. ‘Jean is eating an apple.’ ‘Michelle is playing with the cat.’ He spoke the words very slowly and distinctly, like a student learning to read. This made the officer furious. He yelled at Léon to stop, and Léon did, but as soon as he was asked a question, he would begin to read the signs again in the same voice. ‘Jean is eating an apple,’ ‘Michelle is playing with the cat.’
“Antoine, who was frightened for Léon, said Léon There were ways to answer questions without making the Gestapo angry. We'd talked about this before. But Léon, you see, he knew he was going to die, he'd seen it as we'd seen it, and he hated them so much he wouldn't even give his own name when, of course, they knew it.
“So the officer, his face was purple, he couldn't stand what Léon was doing. It was suicide on Léon's part, but it was beautiful in a way, too. And the officer screamed at the guards to tie our hands and take us to another room and then return, at least that's what I think he was saying, it was in German, but Antoine thought so, too, and we knew that if we were taken out, Léon would be tortured and killed right there. The guards began tying our hands behind our backs. Léon, who was coughing badly, looked up at us briefly and shook his head, as if to say, don't worry about me, don't think of me.
“And that was the last we saw of Léon.
“We got pushed out the door and down a hallway and shoved into an empty room, a smaller classroom with bigger desks, Monsieur Parmentier's room it was when I was a student there, and they tied us to the desks and left us.
“Antoine was on one side of the room, and I was on the other. He said, ‘Léon will die,’ and I said, ‘Maybe they'll just scare him,’ and Antoine shook his head. Then we struggled with the ropes for a bit, but I could not get free and neither could Antoine, but Antoine, who barely fit into the space between the chair and the desk, discovered something while he was struggling, and that was that two of the three bolts on the desk's pedestal had loosened. Later he said it was probably the work of a bored student. So Antoine began rocking back and forth violently arid thrashing about, he knew we only had minutes at best, and after a time the third bolt popped, and he was free. So he slid and walked his desk over to where I sat—it would have been funny maybe if it hadn't been so frightening, and actually I was so close to panic I did almost laugh, Antoine's face was bright pink and he was huffing and puffing like a pig—it has to be said—but he got himself at right angles to me, and We fumbled with each other's ropes from behind, both at once, then Antoine said to stop, it wasn't working, he said he'd get me free first. And that's what happened.
“When we were both free, Antoine put the desk back where it was supposed to be and put the bolts in and we took the ropes, so there wouldn't be any obvious evidence of an escape. Antoine was counting on the right hand not knowing what the left was doing in all the confusion, and that maybe the guards when they returned would think we'd been taken by other guards to another classroom. In any event, we opened a window and dropped out. I stood on Antoine's shoulders and closed the window.”
Henri shivered beside her in the bed in the dark. He was naked, but the shivering was from shock. He spoke nearly in a monotone, yet his voice was unsteady because of his shaking. She had put blankets on him and was holding him in the bed, but she couldn't stop his trembling. He had come into the kitchen just as the sun was beginning to set. She had nut her hand to her mouth and cried out when she saw the bruise on his face. He had stripped off all his clothes and bathed himself at the pump, waving her away when she tried to tend to the bruise. Naked, he had walked up to the bedroom, drawn the curtains and climbed into the bed.
“I can only stay a few minutes,” he said when he had told her his story. It was the most he had ever revealed of his experiences in the underground. “I’m going to have to go into hiding with Antoine for a while, until this thing with the reprisals is over. I’ve come for my papers and some money.”
She heard what he said, held him, and said nothing.
“You should know that they are taking women,” he said. “They have taken Emilie and Thérèse. And even Madame Bossart.”
“It's all right,” she said. “They won't come for me.”
“Claire …”
Henri began suddenly to make a deep, heaving, gutteral sound—an awful, rough sound—that frightened Claire and made her sit up in the bed. She thought her husband was about to be sick. Henri coughed into the pillow to muffle the terrible sounds of the crying. Claire, who had never heard her husband cry, lay down again and held him more tightly and thought of the pilot who was so near them, just beyond the wall. He must be hearing this, she thought.
“It's all right, Henri,” she said quietly. “It's all right.”
“No,” he said, stopping his crying nearly as quickly as he'd begun, wiping his nose on a pillow slip. “It's not all right.” His voice was thick and full of congestion.
He felt then with his hand for the hem of her skirt, raising it beneath the comforter so that he could put his fingers between her thighs. Without waiting for a sign from her, he snapped the garters of her stockings, rubbed his free hand hard along the length of her legs, rolling down the stockings to her ankles. He pulled down her underwear, so that it, too, was tangled at her feet. Raising himself onto his knees, he climbed over her. She looked for his face, but when it passed near hers, the room was so dark, she couldn't see him clearly. He bent his head into her neck, held the skin of her neck lightly with his teeth.
When she felt him coming, she shifted slightly, jerked her hips. He spilled himself onto her thigh.
He did not move or ask why.
She thought of the pilot beyond th
e wall. He must be hearing this, she was thinking.
Ten nooses hung from the balconies, ten stepladders beneath them. The boy watched Marcel's father drape the rope through the ironwork, expertly fashioning the nooses, as if this, and not carpentry, were his trade. The villagers who had been inside the school were Brought out into the square to be witnesses. From corners and doorways, a few other curious villagers joined the witnesses, so that by the time the German officer entered the square, there were perhaps fifty men and women on the cobblestones. There was among the villagers a quiet and anxious murmur. It was not clear yet who would be executed—but some of the women who had been inside the school and who had been let out and who could not now find their sons or husbands began to grow panicky, moving rapidly through the crowd, asking questions, receiving small, embarrassed shakes of the head in reply. The officer, whose name Jean did not know, stepped up on the small stone wall that surrounded the fountain in the center of the square. He read, in Walloon (for what good were reprisals if the people did not understand the reason?), the names of those who would be executed as payment for the assassinations of the three German soldiers. Jean was stunned to hear the name of the village Burghermaster, Jauquet, among the condemned, as well as a woman's name, Emilie Boccart. Several women in the crowd screamed and began to claw their way forward, but were held back by their neighbors, who knew that to confront the Gestapo was to invite a certain death for oneself. Jean watched as two Belgians led an elderly woman, who seemed overcome, quickly from the square.
