Anita Shreve

by Resistance (v5)

  The first was the most tentative, the most chaste, neither “knowing the other. All around them there was a sense of urgency, as though they might have only that one time, as though any minute they might be found in their lair. He remembered having watched her all through the night, waking her with the touch of his finger outlining her mouth. Oddly, she seemed already to know that he would touch her. She pulled his neck slightly toward her, and he knew by that small gesture that they would make love. Beneath the coat, she was wearing the ivory nightgown. He slipped the thin straps from her shoulders and looked at her breasts. She wouldn't touch his clothes (was that because they had once belonged to someone she knew?), and waited for him to half undress himself. He remembered that there was nothing coy or hesitant about her. He kissed her, and he knew he would never forget the relief the kissing brought him. Her skin was smooth—buttery was what he kept thinking—and he felt, under the nightgown, the nightgown raised now to her hips, the wonderful curve of her side, her rib cage to her legs. She never spoke. It had been a long time since he had been with a woman, and he was afraid that he might ruin it for her, but together they had found each other. He recalled the exquisite mix of fear and happiness, an odd sensation he had never experienced before. Just a few hours earlier, they had nearly been caught by the Gestapo. He was never so keenly aware of time as he was that night, of separate minutes, seconds, and all that could be felt during each. Afterward, he didn't want to sleep. He had the sensation that if he did, he might miss something important. He wrapped her again in her coat, a kind of cocoon. Her hair was tangled, and her bare feet protruded from the hem. He held her while she slept. He remembered clearly that when she opened her eyes and saw him with her, she smiled. Before he could speak, she took his hand and, unexpectedly and thrillingly, put her mouth on his fingers. It was the most sexual thing that had ever happened to him, and even now the image had power over him: He couldn't picture her mouth on his fingers without almost immediately wanting to make love to her. As he did then, again, before he himself finally slept.

  He had memories now, a hundred memories in twenty days. It seemed extraordinary to him that the happiest days of his life, all twenty of them, had occurred within this house, within this war. He thought it possible these had been Claire's happiest days as well. He knew he made her happy, he was certain of that. Though she seldom spoke to him of what it was they were doing, there was now a contented gesture she made of arching her back, running her fingers up through her hair and shaking it out. Sometimes when she did this, she turned to him and smiled. He loved watching her do this when she was naked, her breasts rising with her arms.

  For two days after the Gestapo came, they hid in the attic room, emerging only briefly for necessities. Most of that time he held her against him under the comforters. She seemed to have a great need to sleep. They spoke little, sensing perhaps that this interlude was fragile, and that anything, the wrong word, the wrong memory, might shatter it. On the third day, when they had not eaten in twenty-four hours, he could see that Claire was feeling light-headed, stumbling almost imperceptibly as she got up from the floor to put on her dress. He caught her by the arm. He told her he would go out to get them food and water. She shook her head and asked him, Are you mad?, and said she would go, she'd been planning it. With his leg still a handicap, he could not argue. He remembered the hours she was gone as an agony. Every new sound, every creak in the old farmhouse, made him think they had her. Using the forest route she'd relied on earlier, she had reached Madame Omloop's. She'd returned to the house, finally, with meager rations and horrifying news: Ten villagers had been hanged; thirty-seven had been deported east to prison camps. Many had been beaten, including Jean Benoît, the boy who had found Ted in the woods.

  Ted held her as she wept. “I know these people they are hanging,” she said quietly. “I am knowing them all my life.”

  He put his hand at the back of her head and pressed her face into his shoulder. His own anger made his chest tight. He had hated the Nazis, had sometimes been terrified by them in the air. But even then he had not truly understood the ugliness that was at the core of this war. Apart from a brief glimpse of a face behind a cockpit window, he had never really been forced to see the enemy. The planes provided a kind of buffer. It wasn't just the metal; it was the deceptive sense that the air war was a game—a game of skill and wits. He knew pilots who spoke almost reverently about the German aviators with whom they skirmished in the air, it was easy to be lulled into thinking that like minded men were fighting with one another. But here, on Belgian soil, in a village where ten innocent hostages had been hanged, there was no buffer, no illusion.

  “I think we should get out of here as soon as possible,” he said. “I think we should try to get across the border.”

  She drew away from him, averted her eyes. “No,” she said, “is not possible now” She wiped her cheeks with her fingers and shook her hair out. “And also,” she said, clearing her throat, “I am hearing that it is not me the Gestapo are wanting. It is Henri. Is better for us if we stay here and are quiet.”

  He couldn't persuade her, and with his leg still badly weakened he couldn't force her to leave. She was stronger than he was. Even so, it was five days before she dared to venture out again. This time they lay together and talked.

  “Do you have other family in Delahaut?” he asked her one morning.

  “They are moving just before the war to Charleroi. My mother is frail now, and I am last of eleven babies.”

  “Eleven children?” In his family, there had only been the three: Frances, Ted, and Matt, and at times that had seemed a lot.

  “Yes, is crowded with many children when I am growing up, but some, they are already old and having children of their own and I am aunt to persons who are older than me.”

  “Complicated.”

  “In Delahaut, the family is … mmm … superior? Yes? Family is most important. Our festivals are in the family. And many of us are relations to each other. I am cousin to Henri.”

  Ted, who had been lying by her side, propped himself up on his elbow. “Cousin? Is that allowed?”

  “Is far cousin, so is all right.” She looked away from him. She was naked under the comforter. He traced her hairline to her temple, then her ear, trying to think of how to ask this next question casually. He licked the whorls in her ear. In the end, he simply asked it.

  “Did you marry Henri for love? Do you love him now? The words came out more hurried than he had hoped.

  She looked back at him. They had never used the word love between them. Once she had said to him that she adored his face. But not love.

  “I know from very small child I am marrying Henri. It is not arranged, like in the old days, but is known. So I think that love is not so important in such a marriage, yes?”

  He almost smiled. Perhaps he did smile.

  “Someday, maybe, my mother is coming to my house and you are meeting her. She is marraine de guerre.“

  “What is that?”

  “She is godmother of the war.”

  “I don't understand.”

  “My mother, she writes to the Belgian soldiers who are in German prisons because they do not have anyone else to write to them. And when she does, after a time, they fall in love with her, and they are sending her love letters, and she is not young woman, seventy-three. I am loving to read these letters. Very sweet, no?”

  They talked about her childhood and his, about his Frances and her mother, about what it was like for him in England, about how she had hoped to go to university. They seldom spoke of the war itself except when it intruded upon them. And after the five days, she had to go out again. They had run out of food and water. That time she came back with the information that the Gestapo had retreated to St. Laurent, the extra reinforcements to Florennes. A strange kind of normalcy, she said, had settled over the village. Even the school had reopened, though she could not imagine how the teachers had managed to remove the bloodstains from the classrooms.


  He rounded the corner again, looked out the open window for Claire. He had promised her he would not leave the house. Sometimes at the doorstep she found packages of food: cheese, carrots, onions, sausage, loaves of bread, and other items—a bar of soap, a pair of socks, once even a pack of cigarettes they vowed to ration and then smoked ravenously in one day. These packages, Claire had explained, were offerings from villagers who, though they themselves were not within the Maquis, were nevertheless supportive of the Resistance.

  “They know I’m here?” he asked. “That you're hiding me?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Some.”

  “And aren't you worried about that? That you might be betrayed?”

  “Yes,” she said evenly. “I am always worrying about the denunciations. Is every day I am thinking this. But these people who are leaving the packages? I am believing that they are good people and are wanting to help us.”

  “Why would they do that?” he asked her.

  “You don't understand,” she said. “The Belgians, we think the Americans are … saving us. Are our saviours, no? The French”—she flip-flopped her hand—”maybe they are not so sure, but in Belgium we are sure.”

  He remembered being confused by this information. “But Claire,” he said, “how could you or anyone else possibly think me a saviour when I’ve been responsible for all these deaths?”

  “You are not responsible.”

  “Of course I am. There must be people in the village who hate the day the plane fell. Ten hanged? Thirty-seven deported?”

  “You are again not understanding. Sometimes in Belgium we are receiving … sometimes the English and American bombs fall on Belgium villages by … mmm… mistake? Or villages are bombed directly because there is German military base nearly to them, but the Belgians, we are understanding this. Without the aviators, Belgium is not ever returning.” Her hand fluttered and trailed away.

  Sometimes, within the packages, there were references to Henri: A bridge blown in Florennes; saboteurs at the dam in St. Laurent. There was never any message from Henri. Ted watched Claire carefully when she read these bulletins. She translated them for him and explained what they meant, but beyond discussing those few scraps of paper, they never spoke of her husband. Ted assumed that she had made a secret truce within herself, and he could only guess at its price. As for himself, he tried not to think of Henri at all.

  In the twenty days, the leg had continued to heal, Twice she had taken him outside at night, when there was no moon, and they walked together from the house to the barn and back again, exhilarating journeys for a man who had been kept in an attic. On the second night they did this, Claire found a message (in a precious tin of cocoa) that said the escape line had been partially blown. Claire was tight-lipped and frightened, and at first Ted didn't understand the full import of the message. That the local section of the main escape route was exposed and Ted would have to wait until another was put together struck him initially and selfishly as a wonderful and miraculous thing. He would be content, he knew, to remain with this woman for months, for years even, and he sometimes allowed himself to invent this as his future. But when she explained to him the significance of a blown line—the denunciations, the arrests, the torture, the further denunciations—he immediately regretted his earlier selfishness and became fearful for Claire. If Claire and Henri were a cog in the escape line, wasn't she, too, at risk of being denounced?

  For two days they had hovered near the attic, were cautious in all their movements, listened to every sound outside the house, waiting for another raid. In the subsequent days, however, he noticed that they had become less careful, talking long into the night at the kitchen table, the candle between them. Every evening, they listened to the BBC, a clandestine activity in itself, but even more dangerous since it prevented them from monitoring any unusual sounds outside the house. One night, he made her dance with him, despite his limp, in what he knew would be a comical spectacle had there been any-One to watch them. But it was enough just to hold her in that way and pretend that one day they might dance together in Paris or New York.

  “I’m supposed to be teaching you French,” she said.

  “I’m learning other things,” he said.

  In the daylight hours, he sometimes read to her from the book of English poetry or told her stories of the war as he had known it in the air. He tried to make these stories amazing or funny to please her and to make her smile. He was sometimes moved by how physically difficult her life was. When they thought it was safe and that the Gestapo were not, after all, watching the farm, he went with her to the barn and helped her with her chores: the milking, feeding the small herd, mucking out after them. Just washing the clothes took her nearly a day. He marveled at the large oak tub with the flame underneath it to boil the water, the wooden T-shaped fixture in the tub with which she agitated the clothes, the way she lay the clothes full of soap on the grass to bleach them in the light, and then rinsed them and pulled them through the wooden wringers. He watched her bake bread every day and was intrigued by the way she sliced the large round loaves: cradling the bread in her arm and slicing toward herself.

  And when she was not working or they were not reading or talking or listening to the radio or performing the tasks necessary for their survival, they made love. It pleased him how often they made love, and sometimes it frightened him. It was as though they both knew that what they had could not last. When he touched her, she never demurred, never pulled away from him. She seemed to have the same need as he, a need he did not now think of as physical, or purely physical. He thought of it rather as the desire to be known—the desire to know and to be known by the one person. Sometimes he was truly baffled that the one person should be a Belgian woman who was married to another man, a man critical to his own survival—and yet at other times he made himself believe that their loving was fated, as the fall of the plane itself may have been fated.

  Over the pump there was a small mirror in a painted frame (Henri's mirror for shaving, he imagined), and in his circuit, he stopped now to peer into it. He had lost perhaps ten pounds, and his face was too lean, almost hollow. He looked considerably older than he used to. He saw the foreign collar of the cotton shirt and looked down at the clothes he had become accustomed to wearing. His uniform had been burned; his dog tags buried. There was now no trace of Lieutenant Theodore Aidan ? Brice, except for the creased photograph of Stella, still within the pages of the poetry book. A picture he had not looked at in twenty days. He wondered if there were, in Belgium or France, American aviators who, stripped of their uniforms, had decided to remain missing, who might never emerge, even when the war was over. He thought of his navigator, AWOL in a hotel room in Cambridge. Would it be possible never to return? To meld somehow into a life here, assume a new identity—Pierre, or Jacques, or even Theo? The possibility of anonymity, of assuming another identity entirely, was momentarily delicious, and he toyed with it.

  But what then of Stella ? Or of Frances?

  He heard her bicycle on the gravel.

  Her shoulder was just inside the door, and already he had his hand between her coat and her blouse, lifting the coat up and off her shoulder. Balancing on the good leg, r, he had another hand-behind her neck. Impatiently he kissed her mouth, her ears, her hair. The packages she carried made sharp points in his ribs. He pulled away to see her face, and as he did so, he lost his precarious footing and fell with her against the kitchen door. The glass pane rattled so sharply he thought it would break.

  “You are surprising me,” she said breathlessly.

  Her face was flushed, the right side of her lipstick smudged into the corner of her mouth. He took her heavy hair into both hands and raised it up behind her head.

  “I worry for you every time you leave,” he said.

  Her eyes dropped, and he was instantly sorry he had said this, for he had caused the very thing he always hoped to forestall: the inevitable moment of fear or remorse that entered her thoughts, an
d realigned the features of her face, that took away the joy he knew he briefly gave her. She made a small movement with the packages, slipped out from under the fragile hold he had on her hair.

  He knew the route Claire had taken to Omloop's, could picture it clearly even though he had never been there, had never even seen the village, except fleetingly from the air. The long dirt road through the woods to the edge of the village, the high walls of the cemetery and the cobblestone alleyways, the village square with its fountain, the shop where Claire purchased food with her stamps, sometimes received messages.

  He studied the back of her coat as she took her parcels from the string bag.

  Something was wrong.

  He could see it: an indefinable stiffness in her movements; just as he could hear, in the hum of an engine, a catch, a misfire.

  “What was happening in the village?” he asked, keeping his words as casual as he could.

  “Is very …” She seemed to be searching for a word. “… quiet.”

  “Something's wrong,” he said quickly.

  She was silent, methodically removing and unwrapping the parcels from the bag. He stood by the door.

  “Claire …”

  Still she didn't answer him. Turning once, avoiding his eyes, she removed her coat, hung it on its peg. She bent to put the cheese and sausage in the icebox. She lifted a pear, a single pear, from the table.

  “Is poire …”

  “Pear.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is very rare, from Madame Omloop.”

  “Claire.”

  “Is Friday they are taking you.”

  She was wearing his favorite dress—a brown silklike fabric that drew the eye to her waist. The dress had shoulder pads and narrow sleeves, and the neckline was like that of a blouse, with covered buttons. Her hair had come loose on the right side, the careful roll of dark blond hair sliding lower over her ear.

  He closed his eyes.

  Friday. Four days away.