by Anita Shreve
“There is a woman,” the officer said wearily, “a Claire Daussois. Did you by chance ever meet her?”
He knew, thought Ted. He didn't want an answer because he already knew the answer. He merely wanted to see Ted's reaction. And then Ted had another thought, simultaneously, one that made him want to vomit.
They had her.
“Claire Daussois,” the officer repeated. “Did you know her?”
Ted didn't trust his voice. He hated the way her name sounded on the man's tongue. He wanted to tell him to shut his fucking mouth. Instead, he sat back, deliberately tried to cross his legs in a casual pose. He stuffed his trembling hands into his pockets. He forced himself to look toward the window and to whistle. Glenn Miller. “In the Mood.”
“Let me put the question to you another way, Lieutenant Brice. I think you knew both Monsieur and Madame Daussois rather well.”
For the first time since being captured, indeed for the first time in the entire war, Ted felt himself suffused with rage. The heat and the color had now come into his face. He didn't now care what Claire had done or not done. It would not be he who linked her to the escape route, or who confirmed that link.
But the rage quickly gave way to an almost paralyzing ache. He forced himself to whistle another tune. “Hot Chocolate.” Duke Ellington. He jiggled his foot nervously to the beat. He sat there, in his trapped nonchalance, desperate for a word of Claire, but he couldn't ask. It was possible he would never know what had happened to her. He thought suddenly of the story Claire had told him of Léon Balle—his recital of the children's reading lessons.
“For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow,” he began. “For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim….”
He could not go on. He folded his arms in front of his chest, pressed his lips together.
The officer looked momentarily confused. Then disgusted. He stood.
Take him to the doctor, the said quietly to the sentry.
He vomited into the toilet, the first toilet he had seen in weeks. There was no food in his belly now; his body simply wanted to heave itself inside out. He wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve. Outside the stall, the guard banged impatiently and mumbled something in French.
Ted stood up, opened the stall. They were in a different part of the prison, the infirmary if he had to guess. Beyond the stall, he could hear water falling. Showers. One of the guards handed him a towel, a small bar of soap, pointed in the direction of the rushing water.
Barely knowing what he was doing, he stripped off his clothes, left them on the floor. He entered the shower room, dimly aware of other men who seemed too absorbed in the pleasure of the shower to notice him. He turned on the water, warmed it up to tepid. Performing a set of motions learned long ago, he lathered his body, scrubbed his hair. His right leg, he noted from a far distance, was withered at the shin. With his mouth open and his eyes closed, he let the water cascade over him and down his throat. He stood motionless until another naked man, nudging him aside, pointed to an exit door.
He dried himself, put on the clothes folded neatly on a table. More khakis. Too small. He wondered briefly what had happened to their owner. Shot? Shot down? Escaped to England?
The moist air from the shower room momentarily cleared his chest. He breathed deeply for the first time in weeks. He was led to a long line of men sitting on a narrow bench. Thirty, maybe forty men. At the end of the bench was a door, into which the men, one by one, disappeared.
There was some talk, a ripple along the water (cat's paws, Frances used to say). He could not understand any of it.
How many dead now? he wondered. He tried to count. Two in the plane. Three guards. Ten hanged. And who else? Nineteen? Thirty-five? Fifty-five? In the end, didn't it come down to numbers? That was how they tallied it at base: Four planes missing. Twenty-seven dead. Twenty-four missions, one to go. He slid along the bench with the other men.
Today he was going east into Germany. Don't bail out over the Germans, they told you at briefings, you'll never get out. Well, that was all right He hoped only that some asshole of a group captain didn't try to get them to dig their way to France. He just wanted the Germans to park him somewhere, leave him alone. He needed a deck of cards. He needed a drink. He wondered if the prisoners at the Stalag would have the means to make a homemade booze. A hundred and fifty proof. Lethal. Didn't seem likely. He'd heard the stories: After a while you stopped fantasizing about sex, started fantasizing about food.
The line moved, and he moved with it. An assembly line to Germany. He looked down the line; he was the only one in a uniform. Who were these other men? he wondered. What had they done? Hidden an Allied aviator? Distributed a few leaflets? Blown up a bridge?
He heard his name as if from very far away. The accent was like hers, and, for a second, a painful memory stirred.
He entered a room with a stretcher to one side. In the center of the room was a desk with a chair in front. Cabinets with medical paraphernalia were attached to the walls. To the right of the desk was a door open to a corridor.
A man in a white coat, with a stethoscope around his neck, sat on the edge of the desk. He appeared to be making notations on a clipboard. He looked up as Ted entered the room and, oddly, smiled.
“Lieutenant,” he said in very good, if accented, English. The doctor had a pince-nez at the bridge of his nose. It had been years, Ted thought, since he'd seen anyone with a pince-nez.
The doctor gestured for him to sit in the chair, which had been positioned sideways to the desk.
“This is merely routine,” the doctor said amiably. “A physical before sending you off. I see you're headed for a Stalag Luft. You'll like it better there. More like being in a barracks than in prison. And you'll be left alone. Pretty much. No more interrogations. You're the first American I’ve had in a while. You are American, I take it.”
Ted nodded.
“Here, stick this under your tongue. I’ll have a listen to your chest.”
Ted closed his mouth around the thermometer. The doctor bent to Ted's chest, put the stethoscope against his shirt. The doctor's mouth was a thin line of concentration. He repositioned the stethoscope. He did this repeatedly, then stopped.
He took the thermometer out of Ted's mouth.
“I think you'd better take that shirt off.”
The doctor scrutinized Ted's face and eyes as Ted removed his shirt. Ted laid it on the desk.
The doctor felt his neck, behind his ears.
“You've had some coughing?”
Ted nodded.
“Congestion?”
“Yes.”
The doctor bent again to listen to Ted's chest. He moved the stethoscope along the skin. He thumped Ted's back, which made him cough.
The doctor stood up, crossed his arms, studied his patient. “You should have seen a doctor sooner.”
“I tried.”
“It sounds like pneumonia to me. I’ll prepare an injection. Normally, I wouldn't suggest moving you, but I want you out of here. You'll die if you stay here,” the doctor added matter-of-factly. “I’m not promising it will be a lot better in the Stalag, but it can't be much worse. Well, look at that. Not bad, even without the hair.”
Ted glanced up, followed the doctor's gaze out the door and across the corridor.
Her hair, slightly damp, fell in jagged bits around her face. Her mouth was parted, one hand flat against her stomach. The thin shift she wore outlined the shape of her breasts and nipples. He saw the purple and yellow stains on her legs and arms.
A rush of heat moved from the center of his body to his skin.
Silently, he bellowed her name.
Her face was whiter than he had ever seen it, and so thin he could see the bones beneath the skin. She opened her mouth, and he thought she would speak to him. He willed her to speak, and then instantly willed her to be silent. He hooked an arm around the chair to anchor himself, to keep himself from catapulting across the corridor.
On
ly two, three seconds had passed.
But in those seconds, he had understood that he could not acknowledge her. For to do so was to convict her of knowing him. A death sentence. She would not be in this infirmary, he told himself, if she had already been sentenced to death.
His decision was immediate and agonizing. He could see she did not understand.
He wanted to cry. Even after all they had done to her, she was more beautiful than any other woman he had ever seen.
She took a step forward, put a finger to her lips.
It was a gesture he would remember all his life.
The door across the corridor slammed with a shudder.
A steady breeze made the new leaves turn their backs. Underfoot, the green of the pasture was uneven, with the onion grass sending up tall shoots. The boy laid down his bicycle. Bright reflections from the plane hurt his eyes where the metal had been scuffed shiny. With his hands in his pockets, he walked toward the plane, examining it as he went. It seemed to him a broken animal, an old dog, that had lain down to rest. Around the belly, dug into the pasture, weeds and wildflowers grew. The skin of the tail made a rat-a-tat-tat sound as it slapped against its frame.
The rumor was that tomorrow the Germans would come to dismantle the plane. He wondered if they'd hack it to death, and what tools they'd use. Everything that could be removed from the plane had already been taken. Only the carcass—dented, pockmarked, bent—was left. They were going to turn the pasture into a landing strip, it was said. German cargo planes. Jean thought the American pilot would probably shake his head in amazement to think that his emergency landing had led to this development. There was no telling sometimes how one thing led to another.
The pilot; was gone, and Jean didn't know where. He'd seen him in the square at Ranee, and the next day he'd heard that Madame Daussois had been taken. It wasn't known if the American had been taken with her, or if he'd gotten away. Jean hoped passionately that the aviator, with his ill-fitting beret and peasant's coat, had made it safely to Spain and beyond. Sometimes, when the boy heard the drone of a bomber, he looked up and wondered. Surely if the aviator flew over Delahaut, he would signal them somehow.
When the boy drew closer to the plane, he touched the wing with his hand. So much had happened since the plane had fallen a little over three months ago. He remembered the scar the plane had made that day; it was now just a wide nit covered with a mat of grass. He remembered the search through the woods, the shock of seeing the foreign pilot's boots. He thought it lucky that the crash had happened in the winter. With the new foliage, the boy doubted he'd be able to find a man now.
He rounded the nose, trailing his fingers along the metal. He was worried about Madame Daussois. Where had they taken her? And when would she be back? On most days he made it a point to ride by her house. The grass was beginning to grow over the foundation, and her bicycle leaned against the gray stone. The blackout curtains had not been opened and gave the house a gloomy look. The truck, the one that everyone knew she kept behind the barn, had been taken by the Germans. Jean was surprised they hadn't taken her bicycle as well.
He thought that when the war was over, he would ask Madame Daussois if he could live with her. She didn't have any children of her own, and he could offer to workfor his keep. He was a good worker, and he knew she trusted him. Maybe she'd been lonely without any children of her own.
But no matter what happened, he'd already decided, when the war was over, whatever the outcome, he was going to leave his father's home. If the Allies were defeated, living with his father would be intolerable; if they won, his father would be tried as a collaborator and probably shot. Jean couldn't bring himself to actually hope that his father would be shot; it was just that he thought he would be. In either case, Jean couldn't stay at home anymore. He'd see the war out, for his mother's sake, but that was all. She couldn't expect more than that from him.
He thought suddenly that the next time he passed the Daussois house he would see if he could find a scythe in the barn, cut the grass for her. Yes, that was a good idea. He'd keep the place up. On his own. She'd see then what a good worker he was. He might even begin today, after school.
He banged against the metal as he circled the plane. He wished the Germans wouldn't hack it up. It was a wonderful thing, the plane. He put his hands together in the shape of a bomber, the thumbs hooked together as a fuselage, the two sets of fingers the wings, and made his imaginary plane fly over Belgium, falter, loop low over the village, and execute a belly landing in a field. He separated his thumbs, put his hands in his pockets, and ducked around the tail. He ought to be getting back to school, he knew. Afternoon classes would begin soon.
But heading out of the pasture to fetch his bicycle, he stopped. He turned for one last look at the plane. He studied the cockpit with its smashed windshield. He thought about the waist with its exposure to the cold and to the German bullets. He tried to imagine being a gunner in that waist, or the pilot in the cockpit. Impulsively, not knowing quite why, he ran back to the plane and hoisted himself up onto the surface of the near wing. He turned, looked out over the pasture and toward the woods. The day was clear, but the young trees bent and dipped in gusts.
Jean carefully made his way to the tip of the wing, unbuttoned his jacket, and closed his eyes. His jacket filled and billowed behind him.
The boy arced his body and spread his wings. He jumped as far as he could go.
DECEMBER 30, 1993
HER VOICE LINGERED LONG INTO THE NIGHT AND STOPPED quietly, like a candle that had been pinched out, and he thought then that he understood, or imagined, how it must have been.
Between them on the table was an empty bottle of red wine, the remains of a simple meal, and an ashtray full of cigarette debris—hers. She had more or less chainsmoked the entire time she talked, and the air around them in her kitchen was faintly tinged with blue. Once or twice she had interrupted her story to leave the room; Tom didn't know where she had gone. And once she had stopped to put together the meal—bread, cheese, sausage, a plate of fruit. On the table there was an ivory lace cloth.
Her voice was easy to listen to—deep and steady and without drama. Most often she sat with her chin resting on the heel of her hand, her fingers and the cigarette held away from her face. She had pushed her sleeves up to her elbows when they sat down; her wrists and forearms were both thin and strong.
But it was her eyes that night that Tom noticed most. Large and pale gray—a gray he thought of as calm. She had ivory skin, and it seemed as though it would be powdery to touch. There were many lines on her face, but beneath the skin, her bone structure was distinctive, and it was not hard to see, as it sometimes was in older people, the younger woman she had been. Her hair was white and drawn back behind her ears. She wore a linen blouse and a gray cardigan that matched her eyes; her skirt fell just below her knees. She wore no jewelry of any kind. Her back was straight, and her posture made her look younger than he knew she had to be.
When he had sought her out just before the ceremony began, he had seen that she was not entirely surprised to see him—even though she started a bit when she first looked into his face. The ceremony was impressive and moving, he thought, particularly the flyby by the Belgian Air Force, and the priest making the sign of the cross on his father's engraved name. After the ceremony, she asked him to come to her house for a cup of coffee. And it was then, in her kitchen, with a weak sun slanting through the windows, that she'd begun her story—with her low voice and her accent.
She'd been talking for hours.
When she finished, it was some minutes before he could speak.
“Why did Henri kill the German guards?” he asked quietly.
She turned sideways in her chair, crossed her legs. She had one elbow on the table still; in her other hand, she held a glass. “I did not know th$$ until after the war. The war was terrible for Henri. He was afraid, as I am telling you. I think he wished to show to himself he had the courage.”
She took a small sip of wine.
“After the war,” she said, “I am discovering that when Antoine is escaped from The school, Henri is stopped. He is tortured, or I think he is threatened with the torture, and when he is let go and he returns to Antoine, he has … turned. Yes?”
“A spy,” Tom said. “A double agent.”
“Yes. He is making the bargain: His life and my life for the information.”
“You said there are no bargains,” he said quietly.
“Yes, and I am correct in this. The Germans, they shoot Henri before the war is over, when he has given them the pilot and helped to make the new escape line. And when he is not telling them where the pilot was hidden.”
“He never gave them you.”
“No.”
“But you were picked up.”
“Yes. For the interrogation. But I have not the execution.”
“You went to Ravensbrück.”
She was hard of hearing in her left ear, and when Tom spoke she turned her head so that her good ear was toward him.
“No. That day I am telling you of I am put into a truck. But this truck is last in the convoy, and is something wrong with it, and is not starting. So we are taken off and put back in the Old Antwerp Prison. I was very disappointed that day, but later I see that I am having the luck after all. I stay in Antwerp Prison for three months more, and then I am taken to Antwerp train station for the deportation, and at train station all the women I am with, we are let go. I have never know why.”
Tom looked around at the room they were in. The castiron stove was still intact, but the cabinets and appliances were white and new and distinctly European; they fit together like an expertly designed puzzle. The stone floor, he guessed, was probably the same as had been there in his father's day, and behind the white cabinets was a wallpaper with small bouquets in a seemingly random pattern. Had that been the paper when his father was in this room? On the marble mantel were a crucifix and two silver candlesticks.
