by Anita Shreve
“Daussois.”
The doctor's assistant held the door. Claire wanted to say, I too am a nurse. Was a nurse. In a corner, she saw a tall, dark-haired man in a white coat who had his back to her. The doctor.
The room was all white and glass and chrome with the brown leather gurney. Over the moveable cabinets were fixed cabinets with paned glass fronts. In some of them she recognized the contents: the instruments, the sizes and shapes of the plasters and dressings. There were two other doors to the room. One was unmarked; the other had a sign: Contagion.
The doctor was working with something Claire couldn't see; he seemed irritated and called to his assistant to help him. With a sigh of frustration, he told the assistant he had another syringe in the laboratory. The assistant went quickly through the door marked Contagion, closed it behind her.
The doctor seemed to have forgotten Claire's presence altogether. She looked quickly at the unmarked door, wondered where it led, how far she would get. She moved silently a step closer to the door. She watched the doctor raise a small vial to his face, tap it twice with his finger.
The door marked Contagion suddenly swung open, and the doctor's assistant walked through, holding a syringe. Through the open door, Claire could see a narrow hallway, and across that, another open door. She could see a doctor with a pince-nez and in front of the doctor, with his back to the door, a man seated at a table.
The man had his shirt off. There were no bruises or cuts on his skin. She saw the back of his neck, the line of his shoulder.
She sucked in her breath and took a step forward. How had he been taken? And when? If he was in Antwerp, didn't that mean he hadn't made it out of Belgium?
Something in her posture—a start, the hand on her abdomen—made the doctor who was examining the man glance briefly up at Claire. Mistaking her stare, he smirked, said something to his patient.
Ted turned around.
He looked at her, but he seemed not to know her Didn't he recognize her?
She took another step forward, opened her mouth as if to speak. The doctor behind Ted turned away, removed his stethoscope from his neck.
He was thinner in the face and paler. His eyes seemed somehow larger—translucent circles in beautiful shadowy sockets. Seeing him, she could finally remember what it was like to feel the skin on his face. His hair had been badly cut.
He did not turn away, but his face remained expressionless.
She wanted to hear his voice, to have some small indication that he knew it was she. She wanted to say his name.
He sat perfectly still, his body half-turned, his bare arm braced on the back of the chair.
She put her hand to her chest. In all the time since the door had opened, she had not drawn a breath.
Briefly—so briefly it might have been a baby's kiss—she put a finger to her lips, took it away.
Casually, her back to Claire, and remembering the door, the doctor's assistant reached over with her hand and pushed the door shut.
Claire closed her eyes, swayed on her feet. She put a hand on the gurney for balance.
He was gone, and she didn't know if he had seen her.
The trick God plays so that everything won't happen at once. Frances used to say that to him in answer to his endlessly tedious questions about time: How long until my birthday? How many days until Christmas? When will we be there—a long time or a short time? A long time or a short time. Twenty days or a thousand days. Yet an entire lifetime could change in a second. A catch in an engine, the giving of a name. He was not sure he understood time any better now than when he was a kid. Not so long ago, the thought of only four days was an agony, Now the idea of four days more seemed almost intolerable.
From his position on the bed, he could watch the day begin in increments—almost imperceptible degrees of light, until soon he would be able to discern the outline of the objects in the cell. A slop bucket. A chair. A pair of boots by the wall. He shivered on the cot, drew the blanket higher on his chest. He coughed hard, breathed deliberately and slowly to stop the coughing. They had made him wear a khaki shirt and pants. They wanted him to be an American pilot. He could not imagine how Belgian prison officials in Breendonk had come by American military khakis. He didn't like to think about it much.
They called him Lieutenant and asked about his plane and crew, but always he responded the same way—with his rank and his name and his military number. They threatened to beat him, but they never did. They appeared to be holding to a code that Ted could only guess at. At Breendonk, they had kept him in solitary confinement, withheld some meals and all medical attention, and woke him at all hours of me day and night to disorient him. Yet they never touched him except to take him to and from the cell. Occasionally they offered Ted cigarettes and lit them for him and asked him questions about the B-17 or the P-38; not, Ted thought, to elicit information, but rather in the same way two men might smoke and compare the features of a Ford versus a Chevy.
Had he kept track, he would know what the date was. But in the beginning, his anger and confusion were so great that the passage of time meant nothing to him. Now a single hour was among the worst tortures he could imagine—every minute anticipated, painstakingly observed, and noted in the brain. Then that minute passing to the next.
He rolled over onto his side. He thought, as he had thought a thousand times since he had been here, that an excess of time was not the worst torture he could imagine: The worst was not knowing.
Retreating footfalls behind him, he walked forward over rough field. The circle of light spun incessantly, beckoning him. In his hand, he held the chocolate bar. The documents and her scarf were in his pocket. Would he be expected to know his false name? he wondered. Would the promised aviators already be there?
When he was five feet from the circle, the light went out. Immediately, there were two men, one at each elbow. They guided him politely to the car, opened the door to the back seat, gestured for him to get in. In the car, behind the wheel, was another man. Ted saw, just briefly, the glint of a bar on a shirt under a nondescript raincoat. He thought quickly of the boy, Dussart, with his missing ear, his tone of voice with Henri. Ted knew then, processed the information in an instant. The knowledge hit him like a shell—once, hard and deafening. He bent slightly forward, put his head in his hands. He thought he might be sick.
Henri.
And Claire as well?
The man to his right took the chocolate bar from Ted's hand. In perfect, if heavily accented, English, the Belgian said: “You won't be needing this where you're going.”
“Where am I going?” Ted asked.
The man cleared his throat. He spoke as if he'd rehearsed his pronouncement.
“Lieutenant Theodore Brice, I am sorry to inform you that you are not going to France. You are being taken to Brussels.”
Ted thought he saw a slight smile, as if in satisfaction at having accomplished an important task for a superior.
They rode through the night, first on bad, unpaved roads, then on a smoother highway. The man besides him broke the chocolate bar in pieces, gave some to the driver and to the man at Ted's left. Had there been a sign, a clue? He tried to remember all of it, play it through like a film. He saw Claire's face in the truck, wet from crying, and her obvious relief. But then he saw her hand on Henri's arm, the intimacy of that gesture.
What had it meant, then, her loving him?
And what had she been about to say? I am … not what you think?
His mind looped and circled, reversed itself, took off. He couldn't put his thoughts into a logical sequence. He started again, played the film through. He saw every hour, searched every gesture. Beside him the two men spoke in a rapid French and sometimes laughed. They seemed relaxed and happy. His head spun, momentarily cleared, spun again. His stomach was hollow and nauseous—the kind of nausea he sometimes had emerging from the plane after a bad mission. It was the aftermath of shock, a shock you couldn't allow yourself to experience in the air. But it alw
ays hit you when you landed. Like Case, who got the headaches when his feet touched the tarmac. Where was Case now? Home? Out of the war with a shattered arm?
Had Henri been paid? Or had he done it for a cause, for a belief? Did Henri positively know that Ted and Claire had been lovers? Did he approve? Enjoy the irony of the aviator's guilt?
Along the way to Brussels, the driver stopped the car once so that each man could get out to piss. When the two Belgians guarding him left the car, the driver turned around and pointed a revolver at Ted. It wasn't six inches from his head.
He almost said, Do it.
For weeks he didn't care about his cell or time, in the same way (and yet its opposite) that weeks earlier he'd have been content to remain in the attic room forever. He wanted only to play the film through, over and over, again and again. He minded the interrogations not because he feared them but because they distracted his focus. He tried to remember how much he was supposed to tell his captors, what he was supposed to do to escape. Once, bitterly, he flirted with Henri's name and even with Claire's, stopping himself on the threshold of revenge. Some days he was certain she'd been in on the plan. The details and nuances could be put together just so to construct a plot. At those moments, he would see her canniness and instinct for survival as traits nurtured not by resistance but by pragmatism and opportunity.
Then he would remember the way she reached for his hand, put her mouth on his fingers, offered herself. Never again, he knew, would he be able to see something, taste something, and say, This is positively so.
After a time (weeks, a month?) he became ill. He had fevers and soaked the khakis. Then the damp in the cell set in and chilled him and made him shiver so violently he thought he might never get warm. He began to cough, and his chest seized up when he breathed. He felt as though there was something lodged inside his chest, an unfamiliar entity—as anger was; or bitterness.
At Breendonk they said they had no medicines for him and no doctor, but the interrogations stopped, and he was sometimes given dry blankets. He became delirious and spoke aloud to Frances and to the group captain, a man he'd barely known at base. He thought he was in Ohio, then in the air. Once he dreamed of finding Claire tangled in a parachute above the clouds. In another dream, Henri was beside him in the truck, whistling and smiling.
He drifted in and out of consciousness, recovered slightly, relapsed. He thought once he had been visited by an RAF named Bernie, an officer who still had his own uniform and seemed to swallow his vowels. This visitation had about it a quality that was unlike all the others, and so Ted thought it had probably actually happened. The RAF was solicitous and asked Ted what he needed; then he confessed he couldn't help the American much. He, too, was a prisoner. His crew had bailed out over, of all places, Brussels, and he'd been arrested immediately. He seemed fascinated by the story of Ted's crash, and, as the conversation progressed, pressed for more details about the damage to the plane, Ted's night in the woods, and his rescue by the Belgian Resistance. On the verge of confiding the tale of the boy who found him, Ted saw in the RAF’s movements (the too-casual way he lit a cigarette, surveyed the cell; and why wasn't the RAF frightened or his uniform dirty?) an overeagerness that set off a faint alarm. Or was he, Ted, becoming more and more paranoid, seeing betrayal everywhere, even where it couldn't be? He feigned sleep, heard the RAF sigh with exasperation, call for a guard. Ted never saw the man again.
He slept again with the blanket up around his ears. His sleep rose to the surface, floated near a state of wakefulness, sank again to a world without dreams, then rose again and dissipated like fog. He sat up finally, remaining still a moment to get his bearings. The cell seemed somewhat lighter now—he estimated the time at near eight A.M. Over at the door, the circular trap had been opened. A mug of tea, once hot, had cooled in its tin cup; two hard rolls were beside it. He bent forward, tested his legs, stood. He collected the food from the tray and returned with it to the bed.
He held a roll in one hand, the tin mug in the other. His hands seemed overly large on his thin wrists—the hands of a cartoon character. He wondered how much weight he'd lost since the crash—twenty, thirty pounds? He bit into the stale roll. The sun had etched a rectangle against the gray stone. Some days, from his bed in Breen donk, he watched the rectangle descend the entire length of the wall until it folded itself onto the floor.
He coughed, put a fist to his chest. If you loved a woman, and you discovered she was not what you thought she was in one particular detail—one particular important detail—did you no longer love that woman? He could never answer that question. He tried to make himself believe that she had known what Henri was about to do, and when he thought he was thoroughly convinced, he asked himself if he still loved her. And almost as soon as he thought about loving her, the entire construct collapsed, and he could not believe in her guilt. How intimately could a face lie and not, over a period of twenty days and nights, betray itself even once?
He replaced the empty tin and plate on the circular tray, picked up his boots. They were Belgian issue of indeterminate material, too small for him, but still preferable to walking the damp floor in stocking feet. His evasion clothes had been taken from him his first day in prison, and he had been wearing the same shirt and pants and socks for nearly two months. Socks. What he wouldn't give for a clean pair.
He put his hands in his pockets and tried to make a few circuits in the cell. The leg couldn't bear all his weight, and so he still limped. Several days after he arrived at Breendonk, a Belgian officer ordered the bandages removed. A laborer was sent in with industrial scissors and a small saw; Ted was certain the man would sever his foot.
After ten revolutions, he stopped at the bed, lay down flat, stared at the ceiling. He knew he tortured himself with images of Claire and Henri together. Perhaps they even talked about him. Henri must have known, must surely have guessed when he saw Ted and Claire in the truck. Had he forgiven her? Or worse, were the twenty days merely part of Henri's larger plan? He covered his eyes with his arm.
A neat click in the door made him turn his head. He waited for the circular tray to slide the mug and plate to the other side of the door, but instead the door opened. A figure beckoned to him.
He sat up, knowing he had no choice but to comply. With his limp, he left the cell, followed the guard along a series of corridors and into a room. A scrubbed green wall, a three-legged stool. Two large guards stood sentry by the door. The floor was wooden, and on it were bloodstains. An officer was sitting behind a clean metal desk. He gestured for Ted to sit.
The officer took off his peaked cap, put it on the desk. He removed a handkerchief from a trouser pocket, wiped his brow.
“You've come from Breendonk.”
“Yes.”
“You've been ill.”
“Yes.”
“You're better now.”
“A little.”
“You've eaten your rolls.”
“Yes.”
“You know you're being sent into Germany today. To a Stalag Luft.”
“Nope.”
“Do you mind if I ask you one or two questions?”
“Yes, I mind.”
“Lieutenant Brice. Your resistance and silence in Breendonk were useless. You are not in good health, which I regret.”
“Sure.”
“I could make your circumstances more comfortable. I could arrange for your release.”
“I doubt it.”
The stool was short, and Ted felt ungainly sitting on it, with his knees raised above his waist. There was no possible way to assume a dignified position. He wondered how long it would take the guards to get to him if he suddenly lunged at the officer and tried to snap his neck.
“Lieutenant Brice, do you know a”—the officer leaned forward to examine a piece of paper—“Henri Daussois?”
He sat perfectly still, knowing that by his lack of expression and his momentary silence, he was giving himself away. He felt the heat rise to the back of his
neck. He put the palms of his hands on his knees to steady himself. He tried for a tone of indifference.
“My name is Lieutenant Theodore Brice. My military identification number is AO 677292.”
“Yes, yes.” The officer fluttered a hand at Ted, as if having expected this reply, but disappointed even so.
Didn't they know it was Henri who betrayed him? Or did they know him only as a courier, and not as a double agent? Did they have Henri in custody, or were they searching for him?
Blood rushed to Ted's head, sloshed in his ears. He could sink Henri with one sentence—so easy, hardly any effort at all. He remembered how Henri handed him the chocolate bar in the darkness, making him. It would be a swift and sweet revenge. Almost certainly, Henri would be shot or hanged.
“Let me ask you again, Lieutenant Brice. And bear in mind that I might be able to arrange a release for you. Regardless of what you may have heard of the relatively better conditions at the Stalag Lufts, they are not places you want to be—particularly not with your health as it is.”
Ted closed his eyes. He felt his head spin as it some times did when he'd had too much to drink. He opened his eyes to stop the spinning, and he saw that one hand on his knee had curled itself into a fist. He extended the fingers and tried to relax the hand, but not before the officer had seen him do this.
“Lieutenant Brice, I do require an answer.”
His chest hurt. He coughed, again pressed his fist against his breastbone. He looked up at the officer. Yes, he could betray Henri with a sentence, but he wouldn't be able to stop the fuse once lit.
“My name is Lieutenant Theodore Brice,” he said. “My—”
“Please.” The officer cut him off. He rubbed his eyes. He put his fingers to the bridge of his nose.
