by Anita Shreve
“They are coming for you in the evening,” she said in reply, as if she had not heard him.
“Then you'll go with me.” In his stomach, he felt the beginnings of a knot of dread.
“Is not possible.”
“You have to come with me,” he insisted.
He moved toward her, but she put a hand up.
“Is not possible. I have not the papers.”
“Then we'll get you some. If they can—”
“No.” She interrupted him. “They will not be making me the papers. I am waiting here for my husband.” She took a step backwards, felt for the table behind her with her hands. “I am waiting here, because if I am leaving, it is the same as to denounce my husband. He is not being able to come out of hiding then. Ever. Not until the war is ending.”
He stood motionless by the door. In the harsh light, even from this distance, he could see the fine lines of her face. It occurred to him suddenly that he must memorize this face. The urgency that he felt with her the first time they made love now withered in comparison with the urgency he felt at this moment: four days in which to love this woman.
“I’m not going,” he said.
Her face was noncommittal. She had already made her argument. Later, he knew, she would take it up again, make her quiet pronouncements.
He took a step toward her. “When the war is over, you can leave Henri. It will be all right then.”
She didn't move.
“You don't love him, do you?”
She raised her head, looked away. She made a small movement with her mouth, a tightening, as if she were biting the inside of her lip, making a decision.
“Is war,” she said, turning to face him.
Inexplicably he wanted to kneel.
“Please, we are not speaking of this anymore,” she said.
He walked to where she was standing, looped his arms around her. Her hair gave off a rich scent—a combination, he had always thought, of animal and soap.
He closed his eyes. He ran his hands along the length of her back. He had seen the bones there, the run of her vertebrae. He had seen the white skin at the inside of her thighs. He had tasted her—the salt of the skin above her breasts. Hadn't these acts, the most intimate acts of his life, bound them together?
It was the knowing they had only four days that was the worst, he thought. It would have been better to have been taken quickly, even if there were no time for goodbyes. As in death. The worst was to know you were going down, he believed, not the act of going down itself. He thought of the gunner who fell out of the sky, hoped the man blacked out as soon as he hit freefall. He thought of the villagers, taken into the square to be hanged. Those moments of anguish. Only a minute, two minutes, to make it right. And the inevitable futility of ever making it right.
Just as this could not be made right.
He wondered what would happen to her after he was gone. He could not imagine now her life here without him. Would she tend to other aviators like himself? Would she return with Henri to their bed?
If only he could persuade her to escape with him.
He heard again her sentence: I am waiting here for my husband.
Through the old glass at the far window, he could see the sun on the matted grasses, the spongy soil.
With his right arm, he reached for her coat on the peg, wrapped it around her shoulders. She drew back; there was a look of puzzlement on her face.
She thought that he might try to walk with her all the way to France. He took her hand, led her out of the kitchen to the barn, then behind the barn into the fields. She knew they were exposed, that he had not, in all the time he had been with her, been as visible as he was now. He limped badly, but she could see that day by day his strength was returning. She suspected that he would have this limp all his life; one leg seemed to be shorter than the other.
They walked slowly without speaking. She knew that what they were doing was madness. At any moment someone might bicycle along the road and see them. With his height, his sand-colored hair, his limp, he would never be mistaken for a Belgian. Yet she could not bring herself to refuse him this walk, just as she could not withdraw her hand from his. For a moment she closed her eyes. Eve since she had seen Madame Omloop and received the message that the escape line had been repaired arid that the American was to be moved on Friday, she had felt light-headed, dizzy. She knew that it was true, that there would not be a reprieve. And it surprised her that that was how she thought of it—a death sentence. Four more days.
He would go, and she would not know what had happened to him. He would be taken across the border, and that night she would not know where he was sleeping. And within days, or even hours, another man or woman would be brought to her to occupy the hiding place. She shook her head quickly. It was not possible that another man would come and sleep where he had slept. Where they had made love.
Sometimes, when she was with him, she prayed that Henri would not come back. She knew she would be damned for such a prayer, but she could not help herself. In all her life, she had not thought that she would love a man in the way that she loved this American. Ted. Such a short, abrupt name. A boy's name. Not a name for a grown man. She thought of the contours of his face above her, his face grown thinner in the days that he had been with her. Would there come a time when she would not be able to remember that face?
She felt the dry, hard skin of his fingertips. Perhaps he would take her all the way to France, where she had once imagined there would be color; and if he kept walking, she was not sure now that she would be able to ask him to stop. A wind came up across the fields. It stung her eyes.
“You're shivering,” he said.
His face was slightly reddened from the wind. He released her hand and, with his fingers, pushed her hair off her face. She knew that even if a lone cyclist appeared on the distant road, she would not stop him or pull away.
He slid his hands down between her coat and her shoulders. She let herself go—what was there to lose now? He caught her weight at her back and lowered her to the ground. Sharp, dead straw stalks dug into her neck and pricked the back of her head. She was aware of heavy clothes, an awkwardness, of a sharp wind on her thighs. He put his mouth against her ear, pressed her hard. She thought that possibly he was speaking to her, but she wasn't sure. He tried to shield her with Henri's long coat. It was a kind of tent, she thought. She hoped that he would bury her, that he would cover her with himself, that he would stay there with her for days while the clouds moved.
In the end, she risked the truck. They tried the bicycle, he maneuvering with the one good foot, pulling the pedal up with his toe when he lost his momentum, but the going was slow and cumbersome.
Returning to the house, they had been overtaken by a kind of recklessness. He wanted to go out, he said—just this once, to be with her, however briefly, in a public place. As if there were not a war, and they were just a normal couple. She could not refuse him—his mood was infectious—but she would not go into Delahaut, she told him. If he wanted to venture into a village, she would drive him through the woods to a neighboring town where they would not be as conspicuous as in her own.
Henri's long, threadbare coat made him feel as though he were hiding more than just his nationality; it cloaked him, he felt, in an awkward and unattractive guilt. He wished he had his khakis on. The pallor of his skin and the beret Claire gave him to cover his light hair made him look, he knew, years older than he was. He supposed this was a good thing. Claire sat forward on the torn leather seat, with its tufts of stuffing and wire coils. He liked watching the way the inside of her left knee was exposed under her skirt. A flowered kerchief was poised at the crown of her head and tied hastily around the heavy mass of her hair.
In the woods, the road was uneven and sometimes treacherous. Occasionally the ruts in the road made the cab of the truck bounce violently from side to side; reflexively, Ted put his full weight on his bad leg, and winced. The muscles and tendons were still raw. Eve
n though the day was cold, he couldn't stop himself from rolling down the window. The fresh air was delicious.
“I had a woods like this near my home when I was growing up,” he said when they were well inside the forest. “I used to spend a lot of time there.”
“Alone?” she asked. “You are playing?”
“Usually alone. Sometimes with a friend. I had a BB gun—do you know what that is?—and I used to shoot squirrels and then skin them. Pretty awful, now that I think about it. Frances hated it. She used to squeal when I brought the skins back. I was twelve, thirteen maybe.”
“I am also,” she said. “I am playing in these woods as a small child. Very many hours I am alone here. But I am not hunting.” She smiled. “I am playing in … old stories?”
“Fairy tales?” he asked.
‘Yes, fairy tale.” She smiled again. “Beautiful stories of princess and bad wolves. You know these stories?”
He loved her smile.
“These stories,” she said. “I am never thinking of this before, but is not true, these stories. Yes, there are wolves, and they are eating children and women and men, but the ends are not happy. We cannot tell children these stories now. Is wrong.”
“We don't know that yet,” he said quietly, looking away from her and out the window.
“But, yes, we are knowing this. The old woman I am telling you they are beating and sending away? Is happy ending for this woman?”
She stopped the truck, the engine still running. “Is there,” she said, pointing to her left into the woods.
“What is?” he asked.”
“Is there you are found. The boy is telling me.”
Ted leaned toward her window, straining to see beyond the fencelike wall of trees. There was a small clearing fifty feet away, where the light seemed slightly brighter.
“I hid underneath a bush,” he said. “The boy found me there. He followed my tracks, I suppose. I was delirious. I remember opening my eyes and seeing his face. I had no idea where I was. Not even what country I was in. It's funny. When I was his age, I can remember tracking animals in the woods. Deer. I wonder if he thought it was an adventure. Tracking a soldier.”
“I think he is frightened,” she said.
“Yes,” he said, sitting back.
They emerged from the woods., The road was better here—past fields and some farmhouses.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“The village where I am taking you is Rance. Is not Gestapo in this village now, but still is very dangerous. In Belgium we have the people who are helping the Ger-mans, and we are not certain what persons are good and what are not. Is like the old stories, no? The animal in the sheep's skin?”
“Wolf.”
“So you are being very careful and not speaking any word.”
“I promise,” he said, smiling slightly as if he had been scolded. He reached along the back of the seat, put his hand inside the collar of her coat. He touched the skin at the back of her neck. The gesture caused her kerchief to slip back over her hair. He leaned toward her, kissed the shoulder of her coat. Moving her arm, she gently nudged him away. She stopped the truck for the second time and turned to him.
“We are going back?” she asked.”
“No.”
“In one hour,” she said haltingly, “the village is empty, and there are no people in the café. If we are making this journey, we are making it now, or is…” She stopped, searching for a word. “… Fou.”
“Fou?”
“Madness,” she said.
He moved his body away from hers, but kept his hand on her sleeve. Anything to be touching her.
Rounding the corner of an alley, poised to enter the village square, Ted had his first misgivings. They had been walking as though Claire were on his arm, as though this were merely a midday stroll, but it was he who leaned his weight on her at each footfall of the bad leg. They were in shadow from a church, and he made her wait. He couldn't tell if she was frightened or not—nothing in her breathing or the touch of her arm betrayed her.
Across the cobblestones of this unfamiliar village was a row of shops with foreign words in beautiful script painted on the glass fronts. To the left was a school, with children's paper snowflakes still taped to paned windows. Just to the right of the shops was the café, where several green metal tables were scattered about near the door. Some of the tables were occupied with pairs of older women and pairs of men. He noticed that there were no couples, nor any young men. He tried to imagine how this cafe” might have looked a few years ago, but this thought, inextricably woven as it was with the possibility of having known Claire before the war, before she married, caused a painful tug inside his chest. Perhaps there'd have been a table of young men and women, drinking red wine, some rowdiness, a few songs badly sung. The cafe owner himself might have come out and joined the crowd. Someone would be clowning, trying to attract the attention of a certain girl. And he and Claire would be with them or apart, and would be touching, sharing the noon meal.
He took a step forward and kept his face averted when a stranger crossed his path. Even so, in the short journey from the alley across the square to the café, he sensed scrutiny. What was it that gave him away? he wondered. Was it his height? At the table, Claire gestured for him to sit sideways, so that his face was not in full view. He couldn't touch her, or even look at her for very long, and she had told him not to speak. A waiter came to the table as Ted was arranging his leg beneath it. The waiter spoke in rapid French to Claire, who answered him almost curtly. Ted's chair wobbled on uneven legs.
He allowed his eyes to meet hers—that watchful, lovely gray. A gray, he realized, he had seen before: the gray of the sun breaking through a low stratus. Looking past Claire, he noticed at the next table two elderly women dressed nearly identically in black cloth coats, black scarves, and sturdy shoes. Beside them, on the cobblestones, each had a string bag of parcels. One of the women, who had a large and livid bump at the end of her nose, raised her face and caught Ted's eye. Her neck was wattled and fell in a fold above the collar of her coat. Slowly, so as not to appear to be evasive, he slid his eyes from hers and studied the shops opposite. When Ted looked back toward Claire, he observed that the old woman was still looking at him. Worse, she was also talking to her companion.
Ted looked down at the table.
The waiter brought a cup of coffee for Claire, a tall glass of thin beer for Ted. He took a thirsty swallow and set the glass down. “I think we've been seen,” he said. “I’m sorry. This was a terrible idea.”
She made a small surprised movement with her hand. Her eyes, however, were expressionless.
Ted watched as the two old women gathered their possessions and slowly, leaning for support on the table, rose to a standing position. To his horror, the woman with the bump at the end of her nose approached Claire.
Leaning over Claire's shoulder, the woman in black murmured a few words. Claire kept her eyes focused on Ted and nodded, but said nothing. The woman straightened her back and, with her companion, made her way slowly across the uneven cobblestones. Claire waited until she was gone.
“The woman is wishing me the luck,” she said finally in an almost inaudible voice. Ted could hear the quaver in her words. “And to you, she is expressing gratitude.”
She took a sip of coffee. Her hand was shaking. His glass was already empty, he realized. He wanted another drink. Badly. How could he have been spotted so quickly?
“We should go,” he said urgently.
She shook her head. “No. Is important we sit here calm,”
“How can it be so obvious?” he asked. “I felt it all across the square. Is it-my height?”
“Yes,” she said, considering him for a time. “That and other things I am seeing here and not in the house. See now, you are sitting sideways to the table, and your leg is folded over the other at your knee. Is very … elegant? But not so Belgian, I think. And your hands here.” She drew a line along one of his fing
ers with her own. She let her fingertip linger on his hand. “I am loving your hands, but they are not Belgian also.” She studied him. “And the sitting. Your back is bent in its chair.” She made a curve with her hand. “Relaxed, yes?”
“But not Belgian.”
“No, is not even the English. Just the American, I think. Even in the old coat and hat, you are looking American. And is your eyes also. Maybe now I think is your eyes first they are seeing.”
“Have you known many Americans?” he asked.
“Only one,” she said.
He felt a small worm of jealousy. “Was he a soldier? A pilot?”
She looked away from him. “Is two Americans the Maquis is finding with their parachutes in the north. They are being sent to me, and I am making the room ready. And then there is mistake, and the Americans coming to me are betrayed. One is shot in the head by Germans, and I have never see him. The other one I see. He is shot in leg. Not like you. Here.” She pointed to her thigh. “And the bleeding is terrible. And the American is dying that night in my house.”
Ted nodded slowly. He let the worm crawl back into its hole.
He turned his head and examined a row of baguettes inside the café window. What if the woman in black was a collaborator? He and Claire might even now be under arrest. The thought of Claire arrested and interrogated made him ill.
“Have you seen many people die?” he asked her.
She took a slow sip of coffee, replaced the cup in its saucer. “Some,” she said.
“Three, four years ago, would you have believed this?”
“Believed … ?”
“This.” He gestured to encompass the entire square. “The deaths. The fear. The not knowing if the guy sitting next to you is a traitor or a friend. The fact that one morning you can be talking to a neighbor, and that afternoon she is hanged—for no reason other than that she lived in your village.”
“We are knowing this war is coming for many years,” she said.
