A Country Road, a Tree

by Jo Baker

  “Be careful,” he says. “Please.”

  They clasp hands. Paul gives him a smile and turns away, and ambles off. The stooped pale shape diminishing down the dim street, under the grey August sky.

  —

  It is the fascination of disgust, the way his attention is fixed on her and her lips as they move. The disgust of the green and pink twist of mouse innards left on the doorstep, the slime-thick hair teased from the plughole, the way that nails sink into the flesh of an overlooked pear. The lips forming on the words: those sales métèques. With their dirt and disease and lice and their disease and their dirt and their scheming, and their insistence on being where they are not wanted, their insistence on just being.

  He turns himself away, watches the posters as the wind tugs at their corners. The easy lines of a dancer’s leg, the yellow and blue of a southern beach. Fresher, more recent layers of the palimpsest: children clustered round a stolid man in uniform: Populations abandonnées faites confiance, it reads, au soldat allemand!

  The queue shuffles itself forward. He turns his collar up against the wet and tugs his hat brim down and shuffles forward too. His boots are leaking, unrepaired; his feet squelch.

  Look at us, mugs that we are, queuing for hours in the rain, and in August, would you believe it! Dreadful summer that it’s been. And even then the bread not what it was.

  Sawdust in the flour, her friend says.

  Chalk.

  Bad year for the grain.

  But in the camps, oh ho, they just get everything handed to them. Out at Drancy and at Royallieu. They don’t know how lucky they are: three meals a day, all the bread they want, nothing to worry about, not like us. They don’t know they’re born.

  Bad year for the grain, in that all the grain has been carted off to Germany. Bad year for the potatoes. And for the wine. And for the coal. He has a choice, of course; he doesn’t have to stay and listen to this. He could just step out of the queue. He could just walk away. And he could have a good go at tearing that poster off the wall as he passes. He could just keep on walking, walking like he used to, the long miles winding into the mountains, the wide spread of silence, with its markers of distant birdcalls and a farm-dog’s bark and sometimes a solitary car, the wind in their ears and their feet planted one after the other on the macadam, and then gravel, and then narrow trails of worn earth. The escape up to where everything was fresh and clean and clear.

  But now the war is everywhere and he cannot walk away.

  And—this of course bears consideration—Suzanne will tear strips off him if he comes home without their bread.

  So he turns aside, his back against the wall, and smokes a cigarette. He thinks, you shall find out how salt is the taste of another man’s bread, and how hard is the way up and down another man’s stairs.

  Dante is a consolation.

  —

  “But. No.”

  Suzanne’s lips are compressed and her face is tight with distress. She nods. It’s true.

  “But how did it happen? When?”

  “There was another round-up this morning. He must have thought it was safe to be out, that it was all over and done with. So many people must have thought as much.”

  “Christ.” He sits down. “Where’ve they taken him?”

  Suzanne shakes her head. “Drancy, maybe?”

  The world can collapse to this. To the inside of a truck, rattling across the cobblestones of Paris. To the crowded precincts of a camp. To the locked door and the barbed wire coiled across the sky. And the vile ignorance of fellow citizens, who begrudge you even this.

  “How’s Lucie?”

  Just another shake of the head.

  His jaw is tight, his teeth stinging. He can feel the pressure of Paul’s hand in his, the lightly worn intelligence, that civility. The stooped figure diminishing down the street. They can’t do this. How can they do this? It’s just ridiculous, to lock up Paul Léon. It is an outrage. He’s on his feet, rebuttoning the coat he hadn’t yet removed, and is heading for the door.

  “Where are you going?” Suzanne blinks at him, her eyes big and wet.

  “I’ll go and see Lucie.”

  “What can you do?”

  “I’ll find out.”

  —

  Lucie has been crying. Her eyes are puffy and her mouth is smudged, but her face has been washed and powdered and when she speaks her voice is careful and measured. She holds herself erect.

  She does her best to smile. She ushers him into the apartment, offers him a seat, has nothing else to offer. The children are not at home. Whatever else they are denied, they are still obliged to go to school.

  “I’m so sorry, Lucie.”

  In the sunny room of Shakespeare and Company, years ago: she was on Paul’s arm, her belly huge under a blue coat, and they were talking with Sylvia, and Lucie had laughed, he remembers the sight of her, and she had seemed almost luminous then, extraordinary beside her gangling husband. She’s a journalist, Sylvia had informed him in one of her gossipy confidences after the couple had left; she’s on the Paris desk of the Herald Tribune. And the husband has a couple of books under his belt too. Now the woman is creased and dimmed, her mouth twisted to a knot. And then her face crumples and she buries it in her hands. He reaches out towards her, then stops short. He tucks his hands between his knees, looks up at the unbleached square on the wall where a painting used to hang.

  “Do you know where they’ve taken him?” he asks.

  She wipes her cheeks, blows out a breath, composes herself.

  “Drancy. He’s been taken to Drancy.”

  It’s on the edge of Paris. A nasty unfinished little housing project that they have looped around with wire.

  “Have you seen him?”

  “I went out there, but they wouldn’t let me see him.” She rolls her lips in, biting on them; her eyes brim. “But I have heard that he’s been tortured.”

  “My God.”

  She closes her eyes; tears run. She shakes her head. “He’s done nothing, he’s got nothing to confess. If he could give them something, if he had something to give, then perhaps—”

  “Oh Lucie.”

  She takes a breath, swipes away tears again, making an effort to still herself. She says, “He’s quite weak, I hear.”

  “But you haven’t seen him?”

  “No. There’s a woman. She told me.”

  “Oh?”

  “She lives out there, near the camp. It’s just a shell, that place; there’s no proper food, everyone’s ill. But she says that if I can get a food parcel together, she can get it to him.”

  She pushes away a curl that has fallen loose. Her smile is brittle and it does not last.

  “So that’s something,” she says.

  He sits back. Blows out a long breath. Now, at last, there is something he can do.

  —

  The concierge peers at him, back again so soon. She is dark and squat and there is a fleshy growth on the side of her nose the size of a collar stud, which the eye snags on involuntarily; it must happen to her all the time because she doesn’t seem to take offence. She follows his passing with a blink and an upward tilt of the chin that he takes for approval. He’ll assume that she is decent. That’s all that can be required of anybody: decency. Everything else follows from that, or from its absence.

  His knock is followed by a moment’s anxious pause. But then there is the clack of shoes on the parquet, and the door inches open and Lucie’s pale face appears again: anxiety melts into bafflement. She opens the door wide and goes to usher him in.

  “I’m not stopping.” He holds up a grubby canvas shopping bag. “Just wanted to leave this.”

  The bag is shaped by tins and packages. A baguette pokes grey-beige out of it. She looks at the bag, the bread, at him. She doesn’t move.

  “Actually,” he says, and holds up a finger. “Two ticks. Suzanne will miss the bag.”

  He pulls out the baguette and the pack of cigarettes, and a tin of an
chovies and one of corned beef and a waxy block of cheese wrapped in paper. He passes the things to her, and she takes them off him to be helpful, filling her arms automatically, not yet really understanding.

  He bundles up the bag and stuffs it into a trouser pocket. “I’m sorry it’s not more.”

  The groceries are too much to hold—the baguette’s crushed under an arm, a tin is slipping. She tries to hand them back to him. He wafts the attempt away.

  “They’re yours,” he says.

  “No…”

  “It’s for Paul; for the parcel.”

  She shakes her head, a kaleidoscope shake, to make a pattern out of chaotic bits. “But. No. Because you need it yourself.”

  “Get it to Paul.” He gives her an awkward pat. “I’ll see you soon, Lucie.”

  He heads along the brown corridor and down the slow spiral of the wooden stairs, past the woman with the little button on the side of her nose, who, being decent, gives him a half-nod. He nods back and opens the door on to the street, the grey sky, Paris, straight on to the crunch of uniform boots and the skim of green-grey jerkins. He stands frozen. The soldiers pass as a chill in the air. When they are gone, he steps over the threshold, easing the little porte cochère shut behind him, and turns in the opposite direction, for no other reason than it is the opposite.

  He only once looks back, when he comes to the corner. The street is void, as though the people have dripped through the gaps between the cobbles and oozed into the cracks between the paving stones.

  His head swims; the street seesaws. His hand, when he reaches out for balance, has become his mother’s hand, crabbed and veined and shaking. He wants rillettes and cornichons, a boiled egg, a piece of bacon, a bowl of steaming moules. Bread and butter.

  He leans back against the wall. He’s sweating. Cold.

  A smoke.

  A smoke will have to do.

  He rifles for his cigarette packet, peers in at the remaining cigarette. Dry filaments of tobacco curl from the open end; the paper is ragged and softened. He looks at it for a long time. He touches it with a fingertip. Then he slips the packet back into his pocket. He pushes away from the wall and begins his long walk home.

  —

  “Here’s something you never see any more,” she says.

  He rolls his head round on the pillow to look at her, eyebrows raised.

  “Spoiled fruit,” she says.

  He studies her profile, the soft nap of her skin. Despite the lines at her eyes, there’s still something of the girl about her, even now, even in the middle of all this, with her hair all fallen anyhow, and her gaze vague and turned towards the ceiling and her thoughts freewheeling and ravenous.

  He wets cracked lips. “True.”

  “Or vegetables.”

  He nods.

  “Because you’d see it all the time, wouldn’t you, on a market day. There’d be bruised apples that’d rolled off a barrow. Or oranges, on the cobbles, burst open, wasps on them; kids would kick them around. Sometimes you’d see an old fellow, a clochard would be picking them up, stuffing them in his pockets. Fallen fruit, all bruised and gritty.”

  “I remember.”

  “But you never see that any more.”

  “No.”

  “Or the tramps, for that matter.”

  “No.”

  “They’re all gone too.” She considers this a moment. “The days when you could pick up an orange off the street, can you imagine? God, I’d love an orange. Even if I had to fight the wasps for it.”

  “Or the tramps.”

  She smiles. Her teeth show. Her gums are pale.

  “A bad orange is really bad, though,” he says. “I’d take a bad apple over a bad orange, any day.”

  “Depends how bad.”

  A long pause, in which both of them consider the relative merits of spoiled fruit. Then: “No one feeds the pigeons any more.”

  “One might, if one thought it might get one close enough to catch it.”

  A moment passes, and then she says, “Pigeon pie. I could eat a pigeon pie, couldn’t you? With potatoes in it, and carrots.” She still stares up at the ceiling. Her lips compress, her chin crumples.

  “Potatoes aren’t rationed yet,” he says.

  “But you can’t get hold of them anyway.”

  “Or carrots, or radishes, or turnips, they’re not rationed.”

  “I know.”

  A silence.

  “It will be all right…,” he says.

  She doesn’t roll her eyes. But she can’t stop herself from expelling a huff of breath, almost a sigh, and twisting her head round on the pillow to give him a long look.

  “I’m not that bothered anyway,” he says. He wets his lips again. There’s a sharp catch on the tongue there, and a taste of blood where the skin has split. His voice is dry too, and sounds dusty when he speaks.

  “I don’t expect you…,” he says. “Just because I…”

  She does roll her eyes now. Heaves up on to an elbow, the better to glare at him.

  “That’s not how it works,” she says. “Of course that’s not how it works. You know that. I’m not going to stuff myself with bread while all you’ve got to eat is turnips.”

  After a moment, he says, “Lucie was desperate.”

  She blinks, sighs, flops back down on her pillow. “I know.” Then she says, “I keep thinking of omelettes. What I’d give for a mushroom omelette. The kind where the mushrooms are cooked almost black and there’s that inky juice seeping out of it, and the eggs are a bit crisp on the outside, but still soft and oozy in the middle. You might get the mushrooms, if you were lucky, but where would you get the eggs for it now?”

  “A gorgonzola sandwich,” he says.

  She nods keenly, as though this is a particularly insightful observation. After a moment, she says, “We are in real trouble now, you realize.”

  “But what else could I do?”

  She parts her lips, is going to speak, because there are a few valid responses to this. But then he starts to cough. And doesn’t stop. He heaves himself up, away from her, his legs swung over the side of the bed, and he is curled over like a C, his backbone a line of knuckles, his belly hollow and his chest heaving. His scar slides and strains over his ribs; it’s livid against his white skin. Suzanne fumbles him a handkerchief and shifts round next to him, her hand on his back. He clutches the handkerchief to his lips. Gradually the fit subsides and he manages a shaking breath. He wipes his eyes.

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “I just need a cigarette.”

  She rubs his back. “I know.” They don’t have any cigarettes. “I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

  “Have we got any tea?”

  “I think we’ve got a little left.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Rest.”

  He eases himself back down as she gets up off the bed. She pads her way down to the tiny kitchen, and lifts tins from the cupboard, and puts the water on to heat. He lies and looks up at the ceiling, his breath raw.

  The way it nails one to one’s body, this dearth. A battle to think about anything at all beyond the discomforts of the flesh, a battle to do anything more than attempt to deal with its demands. Which is, presumably, intentional. A canny weapon, hunger, the way it turns one in on oneself.

  “It’ll get better,” Suzanne says. She hands him a cup of pale and milkless liquid. He shifts up on his pillows to take it from her.

  “Shamrock tea,” he says.

  “How’s that?”

  “It’s got three leaves in it.”

  She smiles.

  “What you’re doing,” she says. “For the Léons. I am proud of you.”

  He looks up at her. She strokes his shoulder, her hand cold over gooseflesh, her expression grave.

  “But remember, you, yourself, you matter too.”

  —

  The plane leaves are starting to turn and so are the maples, and a leaf drifts down, becau
se nobody has told the trees that the world has ended. The children’s Monday-afternoon voices twine into a thread as they walk in their shabby trails from school, ink-stained and bedraggled, their satchels swinging in the low September sun, because whatever children are used to is how things ought to be. Today, with its golden sun and its crisp air, brings thoughts of beginnings, of pencil shavings and new leather and ink on a fresh page, and this is cruel, because even if you could manage somehow not to notice, if you could skim over the posters and assure yourself they only advertise nightclubs and radio sets and soap, if you took off your glasses so that the boarded shop-fronts were just a blur, and the outrages daubed there were rendered soft and indistinct, and if you could step through the empty spaces in the street where there should be actual people, and do it without shivering, then all might seem almost to be well, and fresh, and hopeful. But the tumour’s already threaded into the flesh. It taints the blood, it poisons everything.

  He taps lightly on the Pérons’ door.

  “Alfy. Good afternoon.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Where to start. He jerks his head. “Come for a drink?”

  Alfy glances back into the apartment, calls out to his wife, “Back in a few instants, chérie,” and a reply is heard, though the words are indistinct. Alfy grabs a jacket and ushers him out.

  They walk briskly; they talk about the new academic year and some of the boys Alfy’s teaching, because of course Mathematics and French and Philosophy still go on, just as the leaves turn and fall and the earth spins round the sun. There are, of course, changes to the curriculum. Books are disappearing from the library. At the corner café they sit on the terrace. They lean in, heads together. The sun catches in their beer; it glows golden, cloudy.

  “Do you know about Paul?”

  Alfy glances round the nearby tables. An old lady in hat and fur coat on such a day is sipping crème de menthe, a small dog at her feet.

  “Yes,” Alfy says. “I heard.”

  “The idea of him. That civil, decent man. The very idea.”

  “I know.”

  “I wanted to find out. What I can do.”

  “For Paul?” Alfy says. “Maybe an appeal, if he is unwell…Perhaps his wife…”