These Good Hands

by Carol Bruneau

  If not for devotion, or some such weakness, I might have turned and run from what appeared next on the little rise just below the station. Armed men in uniform — two wearing swastikas, the rest a team of our Maréchal’s Milice — herded people into groups. Soldiers were forcing others aboard freight cars which stood at the platform. Southbound, were they? Since the bombings it was hard to think of anyone going to Marseille. Were these people being sent there to work?

  I noticed a young couple and their three little girls, a middleaged woman with what might have been her mongoloid son, and an elderly man with a cane. More remarkable were all the men, a restless, growing swarm of them. Just boys really, most of them hearty and hale-looking but for their gauntness, quite common now due to the shortages.

  The gendarmes were forcing everyone into lines, jabbing at people with their rifles. A peculiar, icy feeling climbed my arms. I couldn’t help thinking of the rafles we’d heard about in Lyon, the government rounding up the Jews wearing their yellow stars, sending them north — for their own safety, it was said. But there wasn’t, or didn’t seem to be, a yellow star to be seen anywhere among these people. Ordinary Frenchmen by the looks of it. The ones who hadn’t yet been queued up huddled like cattle under trees.

  I told myself to keep moving, but too late. A fellow caught my eye, a civilian, rather handsome in a shabby, meagre way. Noticing me as well, he almost smiled, and I remembered what Head Nurse had said about our boys working in Germany for “decent” wages: “How lucky for them!” Making guns to use against our own, the orderlies said.

  At the end of one line was a baby-faced youth who couldn’t have been sixteen. Never mind Vichy’s laws of eligibility for “joining” work crews, Maréchal Pétain’s term for mandatory labour. Spotting me, the boy gave me a look as desperate as a guest’s, begging to be unshackled, as if I could help him. Desperate yet fresh-faced he was, except for a nasty gash near one eye, and able-bodied by the looks of him.

  Almost clinically, I watched a woman cowering against the station’s grimy wall. I didn’t wish to stare, but a panicky feeling kept me riveted. Muscling and shoving others into place, the gendarmes seized a boy and were strong-arming him into one of the waiting cars. The woman — his mother, I knew instinctively — kept wailing.

  For no good reason, images from Obstetrics for Nurses leapt to mind. Illustrations of breech and normal births. Buttocks and heads crowning. Babies’ bloodied ankles and scalps. Snippets of text, too, on administering scopolamine — invented by a German, so Germans mustn’t be all bad. The twilight sleep it induced geared to erase not the pain of birth, but pain’s memory.

  Bobbing in the crowd was a pretty green shape, a blouse I’d recognize anywhere; wearing it, the guest I’d come to know as Simone, the one who worked in the kitchen and laundry. Simone, a name that matched her pinched reticence. Now her shirt had a yellow star pinned to the front, the badge relegated only to Jews in the north, supposedly. Had there been some method, some purpose, behind Admin’s placements, working her to the bone? Punishment, or an effort to make her useful? I’d heard of this from the sisters: placements made in order to garner individuals a different kind of asylum. Instead of its usual blankness, Simone’s face had a stricken look.

  “Wait!” I heard myself stammer, but it was routed by orders as two soldiers manhandled the guest, dragging her by the arms and legs and pushing her into the last waiting car. Barely a second later, the whistle blew, and with a grinding shriek the train jerked from the platform.

  Behind me, a scuffle erupted. Officers shouted in German, which I understood enough of to guess that something unforeseen had happened. Had someone broken ranks and escaped? Two soldiers following a dog’s lead disappeared into the woods. Heaven only knows who’d got away. It struck me that the fresh-faced teen who’d caught my earlier attention hadn’t been among the final queues stumbling onto the train — at least, I hadn’t seen him there.

  Meanwhile, that poor mother slumped to her knees could’ve used attention, though her misery was of a type that few medicines could relieve. A shot of Veronal might’ve helped — hardly a drug I carried around in my purse! Before I could offer so much as a consoling word, a soldier who looked no older than those boys yelled at me to move on. Reluctantly, despite the sick feeling in my stomach, I did so.

  ***

  THE EVENT ALL but sabotaged my morning’s pleasure. What was to be done about it, though? Send a letter of complaint to the Maréchal? I told myself — I made myself trust — that our patient, Simone, was going somewhere she mightn’t, wouldn’t, have to work quite so hard. Pointless letting what I’d witnessed ruin the entire day. But as I continued toward the village, I felt as though I were walking underwater, waves lapping overhead, clogging my ears.

  Not soon enough, signs of normalcy came in view. Little houses and shops, one selling dresses, another flowers, and a pâtisserie. All closed, sadly. If it hadn’t been a day of rest, one could have almost forgotten the war. A man walked his small white dog. A woman hurried past with her children, gripping their hands.

  Soon the church appeared, the church of Bon Repos. It was as ancient as the yellow dirt in the square surrounding it, where a monument to sons felled in the first war was draped with the Reich’s flag. Bells tolled, marking the beginning or the end of Mass. Elderly people trickled out, blinking at the brightness. I considered going in and kneeling, simply to collect myself; instead I circled the building and found a bench in the spire’s shade.

  It was a day made for leisure, though Montfavet was no Lyon. In the church’s dusty courtyard old men played boules, adjusting their straw hats against the pulsing sun. Across the square, under a café’s awning, a waiter lifted chairs from tabletops, shoved them into place. I had a strange hankering for a treat and felt for my money.

  Inside, men huddled at the bar reading newspapers on varnished poles. They barely glanced up when I placed my order. I found a quiet corner and picked at the croissant, nursing my café crème, feeling shy, even cagey, at being out in the world — its clumsy, glaring bigness, the café’s dimness small consolation. It was impossible not to think about what I’d seen, about Simone being taken away. At the next table a tired-looking couple conversed, sort of, evidently steeling themselves to visit the hospital — no other reason to come here. A daughter, I gathered, they were here to see their daughter, who had younger siblings. Who would be minding them?

  Such speculation occupied my imagination, but not for long. Obstetrics for Nurses reared itself again. The imagination has ways of making the unknown seem worse than it can prove to be, particularly in matters of the body, and the gruesome complications of childbirth are a prime example: 1) Placenta previa,

  2) toxemia, 3) prolapsed cord, 4) puerperal fever, 5) puerperal insanity, 6) hemorrhage. Not to mention 7) stillbirth, 8) craniotomy, 9) fetal anoxia, asphyxia, malformations, the failure to thrive. It’s a list that made me grateful for the crackling radio behind the bar, for the tinkling piano music — “Clair de Lune.”

  As the nuns say: despite the world’s evils, grounds exist for keeping up the spirits. One has to marvel at the fact that everyone breathing has made it through the birth canal, when even in this day and age the owner of said canal sometimes does not live to tell the tale. Though some things that happen, good or bad, are a matter of choice or attitude, birth comes down to luck.

  With more than enough change in my purse, I ordered a second café crème — an antidote for feeling restless — and asked to borrow a pencil. In my purse was a standard war issue card, purchased for Sister Ursula, to let her know I was settled. I scribbled my note to her, thanking her again for her recommendation, and found myself perspiring — with belated relief, maybe, a near overdose of wonder that I’d arrived in one piece, and that I was nursing mental and not maternity cases. I did, however, question why Sister had been so keen to let me go.

  I refused to give the rafle — because that was what I’d stumbled upon — another thought. Really, what could
I have done to stop it? I smiled encouragingly at the couple nearby, old enough to be my parents. The music broke off and a speech by the Maréchal came on, his keening old voice crackling over the airwaves to pitch his slogan, Work, Family, Country. As good a reason as any to go and pay the bill.

  Wandering out into the brightness, I found a tobacconist’s that happened to be open, wonder of wonders. I had enough for two stamps and a single cigarette, dear these days and in short supply, a treat to savour in my room. Wordlessly the shopkeeper counted out my change, a few centimes. I applied a stamp to Sister’s postcard, and opened my purse to tuck the cigarette into the case nestled there.

  The cigarette case. My souvenir, discovered all those years back in some grass under a tree. Sure it’s valuable, its finder had said. Using blades of grass, he and I drew lots for it. His lot was the longer so in effect he won, but after he had his way he said I’d “earned” it. A treasure, he called it. Talk about naïve.

  Mademoiselle’s letter also blinked up at me from my purse. Was it also to be a kind of memento for its recipient? Except it carried only good wishes. What harm, mailing it? What possible harm? The directeur had given his blessing to dispose of it as I saw fit, more or less his go-ahead. What could possibly be wrong with an elderly patient sending her brother greetings? If I had a brother I’d do the same. Goodness, if I’d had any way of contacting the donor of the cigarette case, I might have tried at some point, just to know he walked the earth.

  I found the post office kitty-corner to the square and slipped Sister’s card into the outdoor box. What harm, I told myself. The banality of Mademoiselle’s letter was quite laughable set against other matters I’ve been privy to. A patient once disclosed in detail how he’d contracted syphilis, and I, though obliged to inform the authorities, agreed not to tell his mother. But the situation with Mademoiselle was, is, hardly comparable. No threat to public health, certainly nothing underhanded. The only wrong, surely, is holding those letters in the file, allowing the patient to believe all had gone unanswered. To mail or not to mail it. A choice as simple as breathing.

  I licked the stamp, pressed it on, and popped Mademoiselle’s envelope into the slot. Pictured it sitting atop Sister’s card. Somehow my purse felt lighter. Done. But I wondered a little about my remark to Sister about the Maréchal’s likeness being everywhere, a bland enough comment, as his bust’s sightless eyes peered down through the post office window. Perhaps he has more followers than we’d imagine — never mind the archbishop’s criticisms coming from Lyon, falling on deaf ears in the Vaucluse. Head Nurse isn’t alone in her adoration.

  ***

  HURRYING PAST THE station, deserted now with not a trace of the earlier goings-on, I tried not to think of Lyon crawling with Gestapo. But there were other things far less repugnant that still turned my stomach. Certain details in The Essentials of Pediatrics — please, let’s leave behind Obstetrics for Nurses — another field I might’ve entered but had taken pains to avoid, given the slight fear or discomfort I feel around children, particularly infants and toddlers, a distaste not for the patients themselves but their needs. Or maybe it’s the Maréchal’s talk of mothers being France’s salvation that continues to put me off. The way he places nursing second to motherhood in virtue.

  When I passed the little canal, I was suffering slightly from sunburn. I’d have liked to splash my face, except its water, a greeny blue-black nothingness, had an oily tinge, its cement banks thick with algae. The gateman glanced up from his magazine, waving me through, then watched as I passed. Only 15H44, hours of freedom remaining. Back in my room, I rearranged my textbooks — weighing down my luggage, how they’d screamed to be left for the benefit of Sister’s newbies — on the dresser. After, I took out the cigarette, but the heat and a wave of hunger — certainly not, heaven forbid, any fear of patients watching — kept me from lighting up. In the refectory they’d just be getting started on supper, today’s version of cabbage-dressed-as-mutton. An hour or two on my hands were opportune for reading Principles of Nursing; nothing one knows by heart doesn’t benefit from review.

  Reminders: 1) The science and art of nursing = practising decent, normal conduct in expression of decent, normal character. 2) Discipline is key, and 3) the development of sound attitudes and habits stem from a sound understanding of oneself. 4) A nurse is to be of all things a good, upstanding woman.

  It helped, of course, to imagine Sister Ursula’s voice stressing all that, her soft but penetrating voice issuing from a shapeless birdlike body. Her tutelage, of course, had pulled me out from under what Florence Nightingale and Maman Bottard might consider my lapse. Luckily my mother, having died when I was twelve, had been spared the shame, the embarrassment.

  My review complete, the cigarette beckoned. Fingering the dented, pitted silver of the case for the umpteenth time, I recalled the story the boy had concocted, quite shamelessly, about how the case had shielded its owner’s heart from a bullet. A soldier, he’d said. A hero like our dear doddering Pétain, I imagined, dodging Boche bullets in the first war! Chances are the yarn-spinner was a soldier now himself, not that it matters. Anyway, it’s a waste of time to speculate. Resisting the cigarette, I buried my nose in Nutrition and Disease till it was safe to visit the refectory without having to wait there.

  ***

  IN THE KITCHEN — the place where rickets and scurvy fight head to head with the Maréchal’s rules, our Maréchal, who fought hand to hand at the Somme, don’t we know? — the air was so thick you could barely see the steam curling up. The weekend cook was commanding the stove and a new girl diced turnips. The stool usually occupied by Simone held a sack of onions. A slew of women in hairnets, some from Pavilion 10, slopped food onto plates.

  I was helping myself when a little commotion interrupted the dishing out. The farmer was at the delivery door, arriving as he did each day for the slops, slops for his animals. Where normally he was quiet, he seemed upset, his agitation catching, of course, and jumping germ-like along the queue of workers assembling trays. Despite the cook’s shouts for quiet the place buzzed. The man kept throwing up his hands: “Not Simone!”

  Looking warily in my direction, the cook tried consoling him. “Yes, yes, and we’ve lost a good pair of hands. I did my best, you know. But when the men from the Milice came there was nothing I could — nothing anyone could do.” Eyeing me, she crowed at him, “You’ll have to come back, I’m afraid, after we’ve fed ours.”

  I managed to muscle in, avoiding the farmer’s eyes, his pained look. I wanted to tell them that I’d seen Simone being put on the train. I wanted to tell them, somehow, that she had looked calm, perhaps even glad to be leaving, embarking on a trip. A lie, of course, but I wanted to believe that she would be all right. I wanted them to believe it, wishing with all my heart to be able to come up with something — some comforting little story, that Simone’s family had been waiting at the station, there to take her home.

  Instead, I struck on a brainwave. Because people feel better when you distract them from their suffering, when you give them a purpose, however silly, I faced the man squarely and said, “Maybe you can help with one of my patients. A funny request. But seeing how you’re situated — on the land, that is” — I admit, I felt idiotic — “what are the possibilities of bringing some mud? Clay, I mean.”

  “To make mud pies, is it?” The cook smirked, before snapping her head around. None other than Mademoiselle had appeared, stumping in and flagging in the heat, the hair escaping her hat stringy with sweat. “Oh look, here to eat one is la duchesse, who’d have us all poisoning her.”

  The farmer’s reddened, beady eyes narrowed, and he found his voice — a voice shot with pity or nerves, who could tell? “I’ll be back this evening for your scraps.” And he promised to see what could be dredged up. “There’s clay in the riverbank.” The banks of the Rhône, he must’ve meant.

  By then, of course, all eyes were on my patient. Like a homeless person foraging for food, she lifted the lids f
rom this pot and that, not noticing me. I intercepted her at the vegetable bins, one of her hands curled around a potato. She reeled, catching her balance. In her other hand was a page torn from a magazine, the flimsy paper smelly and wet. Smoothing it out, she shook a carrot peeling from it and held it aloft. Whose eyes but Pétain’s twinkled back at us. A beardless Père Noël in a braided cap, his pale moustache gleaming through a grease stain. His cartoon bubble instructed citizens to go forth and multiply. Well, Mademoiselle wasn’t having any of it.

  “Who is this?” she demanded. “He thinks he’s as famous as my famous rat, the scoundrel?” Clutching the potato to her bosom, she shook her head, amused. Then, before I could stop her, she reached into the flour bin and dusted her face. “Beauty knows no bounds, Polange Soitier. You agree?”

  The cook was not impressed. “Remove her, please.”

  Replacing my unused plate, my appetite oddly sated, I escorted Mademoiselle back to the pavilion and to her room. Once there she clung to me, agitated about something, spooked even, yet stubbornly refusing to talk. 18H35, but it might as well have been the dorm’s Lights Out. The evening was no longer mine. “Did you mail it?” the patient finally blurted out, loudly enough to be problematic. It’s plain the walls have ears. But no point shushing someone who’ll only ask again, louder.

  “Yes, of course,” I said, being sure to whisper, “and I hope you hear back soon.”

  I0

  LUNATIC ASYLUM

  TUESDAY? AUTUMN? YEAR?

  DEAR C,

  It bears explaining. Manhood, womanhood — Monsieur unlocked the secrets behind each. In those days our work was joined at the hip, like Siamese twins. Mutual worship, sleight of hand. All we did together, a kind of alchemy — magic. Solid things giving shape to the invisible.