A Country Road, a Tree

by Jo Baker

  In the looped shade cast by the arches, he eases off his boots and socks and dips his feet into the stream. It is ice; it is vivid and it makes him gasp. His feet are all bones, bunions and blisters and ragged yellow nails as the water tumbles round them, and the one toe with the missing joint, as ugly as sin, and as human. He feels sorry for his feet; he knows what they’ve been through.

  And so one finds one goes on living. One makes slime and one drags oneself along through the world. Because life is an active decision now. An act of resistance. And there is a certain satisfaction in it. One lives, however hard the struggle, to spite the cunts who want one dead.

  —

  He walks the dry miles back to the house in silence, skirting Suzanne hunched between her beanpoles, climbing the stairs to his desk. He is already elsewhere. Later she clumps around below, indoors; later still he smells soup. He will go down in a moment. But his pen moves across the page, and two men are contained within barbed wire; they walk parallel, pacing, disconnected and close. Contact, human contact: they crave it, and they shrink from it.

  His pen spirals and loops across the paper.

  The sun sinks. Then there are voices. Speaking urgently and hushed.

  When he comes downstairs, parched and sore-eyed, the room is dim, the lamp not yet lit. It takes him a moment to see Suzanne at the table there, with her friend Yvonne hunched on the other side, her back to him, and Yvonne’s brother, Roger, standing in the open back door, smoking a cigarette.

  “It’s the professor,” Suzanne says.

  Yvonne turns round to look at him. Her face is blotted, swollen with tears. The professor is Marcel. Her husband.

  “What happened?”

  One of those half-breath silences, when someone has to say something that no one wants to hear again. “He’s been arrested.”

  He draws out a chair, sits down with them. He feels a rush of sympathy for Yvonne, for the children, for her husband who he’s never really liked.

  “What can we do?”

  Yvonne wipes her cheeks. “I don’t know that there’s anything we can do. He wasn’t wearing his star or carrying his papers. So.”

  “How did they know?”

  “He was denounced.”

  Roger speaks quietly. “We’ll think of something, Yvonne, don’t worry.”

  “I don’t see what there is to think of.”

  “Who denounced him?” he asks.

  Yvonne shrugs, fierce. “We supply fruit and flowers in Apt—I should have insisted that I go instead. But we got too used to being safe. We got to expect that things would just be all right. But someone must have guessed, or suspected, and then…” She shakes her head.

  It is late when the little group breaks up; it is an unhappy dispersal. They have arrived at no satisfactory conclusion. The professor can’t be proven innocent, since he can’t be proven not-Jewish. The only plan is that Yvonne assert her remaining rights as a Frenchwoman and a non-Jew; she must kick up as much fuss as possible, as though over some pet dog that has been impounded as a stray. Her man is not to be deported. If he must be detained, it must be in France. If she writes letters, makes appeals, makes a nuisance of herself, then maybe she can slow the deportation process, bog it down in paperwork, until something else happens and things change again. The war can’t go on for ever: Isn’t this what everybody says? That is the professor’s best hope, though it is a strange one to find oneself clinging to. That a French camp, like Drancy, with its unglazed windows and bare concrete floors, be considered a good. That his fate is just to wait there, as the war flares and fades around him.

  When Yvonne and Roger leave, he goes through the evening rituals, aware for once of what are normally unconscious acts. He draws the shutters, bolts them, his hands old and knuckly and looking entirely alien to him. He is conscious of the barriers’ flimsiness, the arbitrariness of the space that they contain. He is conscious too of other spaces: the road down which Paul Léon had shrunk and faded; the concrete and worn grass ringed around with wire and Alfred Péron staring at the sky; a sunless cube in the depths of the Santé where chains hang from the wall; a swaying carriage rattling off towards the east, packed with deported people; his own skull and its pool of darkness, the shiver that grows at the base of it and slithers up into his hair.

  Reaching round for the last shutter, he is leaning out into the empty night and is caught by the wide silence here. He feels observed. He goes to bolt the door. They have never been safe here, he knows; they had just failed to notice the danger. All it would take is a few guns, a few dogs, and the crows will be dealt with. Will be cleared entirely from the woods.

  He climbs the stairs, rubbing at the back of his bristling neck.

  She says, “I thought you would have heard us.”

  “I was working.” He unbuttons his shirt, lifts it over his head. His shoulders ache.

  “I thought you would have come down.”

  “I did come down.”

  Her lips twist.

  “You could have called me,” he says. “If you’d called me I would have come.”

  She blinks and looks away.

  “Forgive me,” he says.

  “We don’t all have your excuses. We don’t all have your consolations.”

  He slings his trousers over the back of the chair, shakes his head, not understanding.

  “Disappearing for hours like that.”

  “I don’t disappear.”

  “Even when you’re here, you’re not really here.”

  She turns down the wick, blows out the flame. He climbs into bed beside her in the darkness. She shifts on to her side, away from him, dragging the blankets with her. Her breathing changes.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “The war will end,” she says. “We wait for that.”

  “We have to do something.”

  She makes a muffled noise. He looks at her dark head on the pillow.

  “I can’t just wait,” he says, “to see what happens.”

  She hefts the covers up over her shoulder. “Didn’t you learn anything from last time? Wasn’t that a big enough disaster?”

  After a bit, he gets up and smokes a cigarette at the window. Miss Beamish’s house is unlit, but the windows catch a little moonlight. Beyond the road, the wind stirs the trees, and far away, over the treetops and across the valley, a light shines on the mountainside in contravention of the blackout. It flickers, flashes. It could just be the play of branches across a window. Or it could be that a message is blinking out into the darkness, that some kind of meaning is offered up into the night.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE VAUCLUSE

  April 1944

  Easter Sunday. There’s a run of farmers, tired women, slow-voiced farmhands, sleepy kids, down either side of the trestle table. It has been a warm and pleasant day, when you could slip into the delusion that, all around, the rest of the world went on just as it used to do. A haunch of pork has been roasted and demolished; scraps lie on the platter and from time to time someone helps themselves to a bit of cooked-crisp skin or a flake of meat. The talk hooks and twists itself together round him, and it is practical and about things and people he doesn’t know. He sits back from the table, a little out of the way, cradling his glass of wine. Suzanne sits in, her elbows perched, chin on hands, head tilted, engaged in a diagonal conversation with a woman further down the table.

  “You know the family out at Saint-Michel?”

  The fellow speaking to him is tipped back in his chair, leaning past the back of the man between them. He’s familiar, but then country folk are like that. The same few people swirling round and round and bumping into each other like flotsam in a whirlpool. The fellow sits with shirtsleeves rolled; his jacket is hanging from the back of his chair.

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Terrible business.” The fellow offers a hand. “I’m Bonhomme,” he says. “I’m a friend of Monsieur there, your employer.”

  “The family believes
the denunciation came from Apt,” he says, keeping his voice low. They are in good company here, but one must not make assumptions.

  The fellow tilts his head. “It must have.”

  He wonders at the certainty. And then he remembers where he’d seen this man: the back room of the post office, pocketing a sheaf of letters, the postmistress’s anxious look on noticing that they were observed. He was going through the mail. He must have been weeding out denunciations, betrayals, reports to the authorities. They could all of them have been informed on many times over, but the words not allowed to hit their mark.

  “You keep busy, then?” he asks.

  “There is always much to do.”

  As they talk, a moth bumps at the candle-lamp, and he thinks of all those letters written, their earnest treachery, their interception and curtailment. The flames that do not catch.

  He doesn’t notice Suzanne watching them, her eyes narrowing.

  Bonhomme wafts the moth away, tilts the candle-lamp and opens it to light his cigarette, then closes the lamp again before the moth can blunder in and immolate itself. He speaks casually, but very low. “Are you looking for more work?”

  “I have enough to get by.”

  “Getting by,” Bonhomme says, “is just the half of it.”

  “And the other half?”

  “One must add something. Contribute.”

  He nods slowly.

  Bonhomme looks at him. A long, assessing gaze. He says, “I think you will.”

  —

  The moon is bright and high as they walk home. The cicadas are making a racket. They climb the hill, following the path alongside the vines. They pass through trees, then out into a meadow, where the grass is long and cows stand and stare at them. Above, the sky is vast and bright with stars. Disturbed by their passing, moths rise from the grass, fluttering in ghostly white spirals. It’s beautiful; Suzanne feels this as gooseflesh on her arms and a lightness in her chest, at the loveliness of it and its fragility.

  He’s drunk, and so there’s no point talking to him. Hands stuffed into his pockets, he stumbles forward, leaning as though into a ferocious wind. The grass around his turn-ups goes hush, hush. And she knows that no good will come of talking.

  “You’re drunk,” she says, nonetheless.

  He considers this. “Yes,” he says.

  Never sufficient to just take a glass, a taste. Oh no. Heads together with that maquis leader all night. And now he is ripped to bits he’ll be as unshiftable as an oil stain. The carelessness, the risk; she can feel the fury swell. How dare he do this to them again now, when things are so precarious? No point even saying it. But.

  “You were talking to that man,” she says. “I saw you.”

  He stops now too, turns back to her. “So?”

  “He’s a maquisard.”

  “I believe so.”

  “I saw the way you were talking.”

  “You’re jealous?”

  “Name of God.”

  “Maybe we were talking about the weather.”

  She tsks. “You know nothing. You do not know this place. You have no idea.”

  “He says I’ll do.”

  “Do for what?”

  He shrugs. “Whatever’s necessary.” He walks on.

  She slumps with defeat. The night air is cool but she feels hot and unhappy and resentful and stuck, in the midst of all this mess, which has been piled so high around her that she cannot move a finger without risking more falling down on top of her. And he just keeps adding to the heap.

  But then there’s something else—a prickle between the shoulder blades, like being watched, which makes her whip round and search the darkness. He stumbles on, but then notices she isn’t following.

  “What?”

  “Ssh.” She scans the scrubby trees, the hazy night.

  “What’re you looking for?” He sways slightly, and rights himself. Even as she searches the darkness, she’s thinking, He is going to snore like a pig tonight. But then there’s another sound. So faint at first that it can’t really be heard.

  “I don’t know what you’re making such a fuss—”

  “Hush,” she says. “Shut up.”

  A low thrum, which builds and grows, and becomes definite and insistent. And is unequivocal.

  “Aeroplane.”

  The noise is huge, it’s bursting.

  “Christ—”

  Moonlight kicks off Perspex and gleams on the grey blur of the blades. They duck down into the grass. Buffeted with gritty downdraught, crouched low, she can smell the earth, and her own body, and the booze off him, and the sweetness of the crushed grass, and the trail of exhaust coming down on them from a different world. Then the plane is past, and it roars away, and the noise diminishes.

  They get back to their feet; she straightens out her skirt.

  “Was that an Allied plane?”

  “I think so,” he says.

  By now the aeroplane is reduced to a thrum in the air and a dark blotch that shrinks against the stars.

  “There must be a drop planned somewhere up the valley,” he says. He sounds almost sober now. Her throat constricts; she could cry. Really, if she just let herself, she could cry and cry and cry. Does he not see what a bloody slog all this has been? And now he’s going to throw it all up in the air again.

  “For God’s sake, please,” she says. “Please. Just wait.”

  She studies his face. The moonlight catching in his eyes. The starfished boy in tennis whites, the wounded man strapped down with hospital sheets. He was beautiful, he was brilliant, and he’d needed her. That’s what she’d thought. She had thought that it was love.

  “Well,” she says. “That’s that, then.”

  She wraps her arms around herself, turns away and stalks on. He follows. He could catch up with her in two paces if he wanted to. He could take her hand and slip her arm through his and, even now, he could comfort her. But what is there left to say? He is a disappointment to her; he’s a disappointment to himself. He just follows her on through the broken night.

  —

  He walks with Bonhomme silently, out along a back lane for a few twisting hairpinned miles; they slope off down a woodman’s track that takes them past piled logs and blasted clearings of sawn tree-stumps, mud and abandoned brushwood. They carry on until they’re deep into the woods, where the track ends dead. From here all he can see is an untrodden sweep of pine-needles and a maze of rusty trunks, and glancing back, there’s just the rutted gash that they’ve come along. On the left there is a coincidence of gaps between the branches and undergrowth, which might just be a path. At first the signs are equivocal—a bent-back twig here, a scuffed patch there—but as the ground rises the path becomes a worn line through fallen needles, and foot-polished patches on bare stone. As he heaves his way up the final rocky scramble, red stone catches the sun and glows like coals. The rock is skin-warm, crumbling, and as he climbs, it stains his hands red.

  Bonhomme is bringing him to the maquis camp. It huddles on top of a bluff, deep amongst the trees. Faint smoke rises, but it is soon dissipated by the canopy. A lad nurses the fire, looks up warily; prone figures lie beneath a shelter of canvas and branches and do not move. Three bicycles lean together against a tree. The Boy Scouts, that’s what this is like. A summer camp set up in the woods.

  Bonhomme nods to the kid at the fireside, who is smoky-faced and looks exhausted.

  “We were on a job last night,” Bonhomme says. “The boys are tired.”

  They head on, across the top of the bluff, which is a shallow cup scrubby and soft with fallen pine needles.

  “If the Service de Travail Obligatoire doesn’t get the lads, they come to us; they can’t go home.”

  He realizes he’s seen the kid before somewhere. Around the town, serving in one of the bars, perhaps. The farmer draws a scrubby bush aside. There’s a small, dry space behind, with crates stacked inside; he drags one out, cracks it open, lifts out a weapon.

  “Ah y
es, now,” Bonhomme says, “this is last night’s haul.”

  He watches as deft hands twist the thing, click one part into another and offer the gun up to him.

  “Here. Take it. It’s not loaded.”

  It’s surprisingly light. He turns it round, looks at the gaping mouth where the magazine should go, at the grey barrel with its inner twist of mainspring; the stock is an empty metal frame. He tests the shift and clip of the safety catch. Even unloaded it’s an uneasy thing. It is cold, brutally simple.

  “You have some experience of guns?”

  “There was an Officer Training Corps at school, but I tended to stay away from all of that.”

  “Shame. This is a Sten gun,” Bonhomme explains. “Ugly buggers, but they do their job. Except when they don’t. Sometimes they jam. Which is a fucking chore. Oh, and then there’s this…”

  Bonhomme levers the lid off another box. A moment’s puzzlement in which it seems to be packed with fruit. Steely-green pineapples. The farmer lifts one, and it is a grenade, and he handles it as though it’s made of spun sugar.

  “You pull the pin out,” he says. “You don’t hang around. You throw the thing. You have four seconds.”

  He measures the time out, the beats of it in his head.

  “Four seconds and no more, because then the other guy would have a chance to pick it up and lob it back at you. So —” The farmer offers out the grenade; he looks at it. “Take.”

  He lifts it in wary fingertips.

  “Don’t worry,” the farmer says. “We’ve taken proper care of them; you can see they’re not degraded. They’re quite safe until you pull the pin.”

  He looks at him in disbelief. “We’re going to throw it?”

  “No. You’re going to throw it.”

  “Isn’t that a waste?”

  “The first time you do this, you don’t want it to matter too much.”

  —

  The firing range is off away from the camp and the store, down a separate gully leading off to the east, the steep sides acting as a natural buffer to noise. He sets the grenade down like an egg before attempting anything with the gun. Bonhomme demonstrates the shift and click that sets the Sten to semi-automatic. He takes the cold thing in his hands, and when he aims and squeezes the trigger a green glass bottle throws itself up into sudden fragments in the air. The noise is hard, the gun bucks in his grip and its heel knocks against his shoulder. It is nasty and efficient.