The Silent Hours

by Cesca Major

  He holds up a long line of fabric, like a man’s belt, made of some kind of thick black material, with long, thin wires protruding from it at regular intervals, little grips on their ends.

  ‘We tighten it with this new-fangled Velcro, you see – we simply attach this to a limb and it can administer a short, sharp, small charge. The voltage is very low, so there is no danger of it doing any damage or causing you too much pain.’

  I’m not bothered by pain.

  ‘I would first like to try it on your thigh, as this area has the most padding, so to speak’ – he glances at me apologetically – ‘and you shouldn’t find it too onerous on a small charge.’

  He coughs lightly after this announcement, trying to act the professional, but I imagine in this setting that he is feeling a little out of his depth. Perhaps in his treatment room on a sterile table but here, in a house of God, it must feel bizarre.

  I begin to lift up my skirt so that he can manoeuvre the belt around my leg, and he moves towards me with it.

  He notices the scar immediately, his hand wavering over the gouged-out hole where once my flesh had been above the knee. He says nothing and I relax back on the bed, relieved.

  He wraps the belt around my other leg and attaches the wires to my skin. They are like little metal pincers, the flesh pulled together in their cold grip. Without any warning, my leg spasms and I feel a short, sharp pain that runs through my body, making me gasp.

  Doctor Taylor looks up quickly, hearing this new noise – a cry. He waits a few seconds. When I don’t speak, he simply apologizes to me and another surge runs through my body. This is more painful, and before he lets me pause for breath, another surge rips through me.

  My heart is pulsing, sweat has formed on my top lip. I am clutching at the bedclothes and I am making noises, not words, but a jumble of sounds, and the doctor looks momentarily encouraged.

  It continues on my thighs, my lower legs, around my arms but, as the charges fire through me, this brutal treatment seems to prompt nothing further. I repeat the same noises, almost used to the pain; I feel, as the electricity runs through me, like I am being switched on, shocked into something new.

  I don’t know how many moments have passed, I have slumped further down in the bedclothes and can feel the dampness in the roots of my hair. I am breathing heavily and then, finally, it is over. A sigh and a satisfying rip, and the Velcro comes away and he loosens the belt from my left arm.

  Doctor Taylor deflates, dropping onto the stool by the bed, his mouth turned down at the corners. I am used to seeing the same expression on the face of his French counterpart – nothing has worked, once more.

  He tries to make amends: instructs me to wash my face and cool myself down, pointing at the oak chest of drawers in the corner where a porcelain bowl of water stands.

  I get up, a little wobbly, the red marks on my skin unsightly reminders of what has gone on. I deserve the marks and the pain. He can’t do it: I am a lost cause. I hobble over to sponge my face.

  ‘I’m returning to England tomorrow,’ Doctor Taylor says, as he packs away the belt. He looks about the room, eyes not lighting on anything in particular. ‘Somehow I thought, well …’ He peters out, and I feel sorry for this man who has travelled so many miles to be this disappointed. ‘I will make my recommendations. The sisters here believe you will be better served in Toulouse, but …’

  He slowly and carefully packs away the rest of his equipment into zipped compartments inside his bag, wiping many of them with a clean, white handkerchief, like a mother cleaning the grime from the faces of her babies.

  ‘What happened to your leg? Were you shot, madame?’ he asks.

  I shift uncomfortably under his gaze and then give him a small nod of the head, down, to the side: a yes, a no. I don’t remember, although something is breathing close, threatening.

  He doesn’t look surprised. ‘It looks like a … but who would shoot you?’ he asks himself.

  I close my eyes, suddenly nauseous.

  He rests a hand on my shoulder. ‘I can help,’ he says, fresh urgency in his voice, ‘I want to help.’

  Unpleasant images push at the edge of my mind. The doctor’s question, the red marks on my skin that smell of burning, skin singed, that cloying smell.

  It is in the room with me now, my breathing quickens, my stomach lurches, breaths coming faster.

  The doctor is looking at me and makes me start as he asks, ‘May I?’ He is perched again on the stool by my bedside and reaches forward, gesturing at my notebook.

  I look at him with wide eyes, returning myself to my body and this moment and then acquiesce, turning to pick it up and then place it in his hands.

  I can still smell the burning and I will myself to focus on the doctor’s movements.

  He examines the book, then flicks through the notes, past the answers I gave him before, to the rest of the book. He turns the pages quickly, and then back again, examining my strings of nonsensical words. Paragraphs that start and then end in a nothing. Names I know and moments that have flooded back to me. A jumble.

  The little book must seem as mute as me, as much of a mess.

  On the back pages I have scrawled, doodled, thoughtless shapes and words, an old habit I had in the shop when waiting for customers to decide what they wanted. The doctor notices, holds each page up to his face, studying them as if they are ancient paintings inside an Egyptian pyramid, trying to decipher a meaning.

  I draw bells, silhouettes of a face – a woman – over and over, branches of trees in winter; a myriad images. The doctor pauses, looking intently at the top right corner of the book, leaning towards it to scrutinize it from only an inch or so away, turning it, mouthing the letters of a name I have written so many times before as he does so.

  He looks up at me, his mouth open, and then almost to himself he states, ‘Isabelle.’

  I start, as does he; we both meet in the same moment.

  ‘Isabelle,’ he says again. He abruptly stands up as he does so.

  He is leaving, he is deep in thought but he is walking towards the door to leave me to myself and my thoughts and this small cell.

  ‘The chap,’ he says, quietly, as he turns at the door, ‘the chap that I lived with during the war. His name was Sebastien. He loved an Isabelle. An Isabelle from Oradour.’

  I watch his lips form more words but can’t hear them. He is muffled, speaking from a distance as if he has already left the room.

  An impossible statement.

  He searches my face for a response and, as he looks at me, a hundred other faces seem to flash before my eyes. They are flooding into the tiny room with us, crowding us, the doctor almost lost in their noise. Faces of villagers and customers and refugees and Vincent, Paul, Isabelle. They are swarming into the room and they are all looking at me, waiting on me.

  The doctor turns his back to me once more, lifts the latch on the door, his bag over one shoulder. As he pulls open the door my unfamiliar voice stops him. My voice. One word.

  ‘Wait.’

  SEBASTIEN

  The water slops over my feet but I barely register it. We only have a butler’s sink in the flat so lumbering up the stairs, splashing water, is not uncommon.

  Edward calls to me as I slam the door behind me with a foot: a letter has arrived. I rest the bucket down slowly, breathe out. Edward is holding it out to me from the doorway of the sitting room. I take it from him. He nods.

  I recognize Jean-Paul’s distinctive handwriting on the envelope and tear open the letter with my thumb. He talks of the recent landings in France, the excitement as it seems the Allies are making headway. My eyes scan the details. He talks of sand testing, of floating harbours, the scale of this war. He doesn’t mention my parents. Hasn’t mentioned them for months.

  In the last paragraph one word stands out. Oradour. It’s just an aside, a brief com
ment about atrocities in the Limousin region carried out by the Germans on their way north: a hundred men killed in Tulle, and then in his careful round hand I read: ‘and a nearby village of Oradour has been wiped out.’

  My eyes hover uncertainly over the sentence, as if I have imagined it, created the word Oradour because I’d been thinking so much about her.

  Edward is there, watching me read, his eyes enormous behind the thick lenses, a questioning look on his face: too polite to interrupt, already assuming the worst. Everyone does now.

  I gabble in French, he is shaking his head, doesn’t understand. I fall into a chair. ‘Oradour, it’s … Wait, I …’

  How could we not have heard if something had happened?

  I get up, the letter still clutched in my hand and race to where we keep the heap of daily newspapers, the Mirror, the Herald, all there in a pile by the fireplace, ash lightly coating the surface of the first one as I move down the pile checking the dates: 6 July, 3 July, 27 June … Nothing before then, and no mention in them, I’m sure.

  I open one at random, as if the words might jump out. What does Jean-Paul mean by ‘wiped out’? I trawl through the papers as Edward stands there in silence, watching me, not sure what to do or say.

  Finally, he joins me and picks up a paper. ‘What are we looking for, Seb?’

  Was it really as Jean-Paul said? How? By bombs? A whole village? It seems an exaggeration, a typical war-time rumour, spread around and growing despite an absence of facts: like the sighting of German parachutists dressed as nuns; German soap made of human fat; every American soldier getting a free Ford when the war is won. Wars are rife with rumour and no one ever seems to know the truth. I remember seeing a newspaper headline back in 1940, on the eve of the defeat of France, which claimed our boys had never been doing so well.

  I send a telegram to Jean-Paul: Send more news Oradour. Have friend there. I return to our flat, at a loss with what to do with myself, spending the evening scanning the pages of the newspapers, my eyes aching from the effort as the sky darkens. I draw the blackout curtains, still reading by the single paraffin lamp in our living room.

  I pace the flat, and then, when Edward returns, practically leap on him to find out what he has learnt. He has asked around but no one has heard of Oradour. He has a journalist friend though, he assures me, a woman he met at a dance whom he could ask. He repeats my own hopes that it is an exaggeration, a wide-of-the-mark comment made without realizing the consequences.

  I soak in his words like a man parched of all hope, feeling the empty hole inside me gnawing, gnawing at me as the faces of my parents are joined by another face, a dash of olive coat.

  Edward’s hand hovers over my arm, pats me once. I don’t remember much of the rest.

  In the days that follow, Edward helps me discover as much as I can. Unlike my parents, we get somewhere and fast.

  The journalist rings her contact in the government who confirms that a small village called Oradour in France appears to have been targeted by a Nazi division on their way north. It is assumed the attack is in some way connected to Resistance work in the village, but I struggle to imagine the sleepy village of Oradour housing renegades.

  Where is she? I can’t picture her face any more. I squeeze my eyes tight and try to focus on a single image but my brain is panicking, can’t settle, can only see her looking frightened; and she has never looked that way before.

  I wait to hear Jean-Paul’s reply, impatient, short, prowling the flat unable to be still, to concentrate on anything. And when it comes, finally, I am waiting. I meet the post boy at the door, reach for the letter, say nothing and take it up to my single room, my palms already damp.

  Edward is out and I have the house to myself. Sitting on the end of the bed I take the envelope in my hand, feeling the bulk of a letter inside.

  I tear slowly along the top edge, careful not to rip the paper inside. One sentence leaps off the page: ‘They found bodies down a well, in an oven; it was a massacre.’

  He expresses his sadness at me knowing someone there. He is clear on one thing: there are barely any survivors. A few injured men, a couple of boys.

  The letter flutters to the floor at my feet and I sit, staring at the crumbing whitewash, in the full knowledge that the emptiness inside me is real; that Isabelle will never send me another letter. That it is all over.

  PAUL

  The afternoon sun is high in the sky, a few small clouds breaking up the blue. I think of Sebastien, awake now after an afternoon snooze and feel a lurch, want to bounce him on my knee, be rewarded with a smile, a giggle, a gabble of nonsensical words. I roll up the sleeves of my shirt; my arms are already turning brown.

  ‘When I talked about the village to the other men I used to tell them about the days we spent down here as children, skimming stones across the surface of the river. We stopped talking about things like that after a while.’

  Father nodded, briefly laying a hand on my shoulder.

  We are at the south end where the fields slope away to the river and all you can see when you look back at the village is the tops of houses, small and insignificant from our vantage point. There were moments where the world I had known became a foggy memory in my mind and my reality was the stark stone of the factory, the long lines of the machines, the stench. Now I am back here it is as if that was the dream and this the certainty. The village: same faces, new details perhaps. My family: the enormous hands of my father, his scuffed trousers, worn leather boots. The shop: sparser than I remember, Maman still perched on the stool by the till, leaning over marking the ledger with a pencil as if she had not moved in three years.

  The banks of the river are dried out, cracks appearing in the mud, lost in the long grass of the verge. I haven’t seen the water this low in years. Insects hover over the surface hopefully, and the leaves in the trees are perfectly still.

  ‘I used to walk here a great deal and think about you when we hadn’t heard in a while.’

  I feel touched by my father’s admission, not knowing quite how to respond, looking across the fields beyond, catching a scattering of men working the land in the distance.

  I go to speak, am distracted by a low, unfamiliar rumble that stops Father and me in our tracks. I turn to him at the same moment that he wrinkles his brow and looks towards the noise. In the distance, we can make out a convoy of vehicles throwing up dust into the air.

  ‘What the—?’

  The doctor’s motorcar is about the only one still serviceable in the village, the rest under dustsheets in garages or disused barns, waiting like so many people for the war to be over. I am about to say just this when I see them: the unmistakable shape of a convoy of German trucks. My stomach clenches and I turn to Father.

  ‘We’ve got to get back.’

  He nods.

  ‘I thought you said the Germans didn’t come into the village?’ I say.

  ‘They don’t – well, they haven’t.’

  Questions hammer through my mind. I speed up, walking quickly, nearly a jog. ‘Come on, Papa.’

  I feel a flood of shame as, for a fleeting moment, I think of per­suading Father to stop, to turn and run and hide. I won’t be sent back – I’ve heard of them co-opting other men to fight on the Eastern Front and I know I can’t go back there: the endless waiting for an end, the constant panic as planes drone overhead, searching out targets in their path.

  I am running now, my breath coming in short gasps. We hurry on in silence, craning our necks to see the last of the vehicles enter the village. There must be a dozen or more.

  When we reach the high street, we see that a couple of the trucks have stopped. Soldiers jump out of the vehicles, rounding up passers-by and calling for an identity check. We are all to go to the village green.

  Sweat has formed in pools under my arms as we turn down the street, our little shop up ahead in the distance, Isa
belle and Maman unaware of the commotion.

  A knot of tension releases as I hear the repeated instructions of the soldiers: an identity check. I avoid their eyes, look strong for Father as we walk side by side.

  ‘We’ll see if they’re there first,’ Father says. We both automatically cross the road to avoid an armed soldier. Father is unable to resist looking back at the man, younger than me – the unusual sight of armed soldiers in his tiny village.

  Madame Garande, carrying two bags, is rolling her eyes as she is swept up in a sea of teenagers who have all been herded from a football game, up beyond the telephone exchange. A few of the boys, flushed from the sun, have rolled their shirt sleeves up, their faces coated in a film of sweat and dust, eyes narrowed into slits behind the backs of the soldiers calling out their orders. One boy holds the football in the crook of his arm, jiggling it.

  In the distance I see a man arriving in the village on his bicycle, a soldier barring his way. He is clearly asked to abandon the bicycle and so it is left, propped against the wall of a shop. He is unable to put up a fight, doesn’t look back at the soldier who requested it of him. I feel humiliation for the village and our people, a loathing towards these men who can sweep into another man’s country and lay down these arbitrary rules: announce identity checks, disrupt the tranquillity of a village that has remained largely untouched by war.

  ‘Don’t,’ says my father wearily. My face relaxes as he says it.

  The soldiers are still driving through the village as people emerge from the other end of the high street, winding around the sides of the church to flood into the fairground, so that as I get closer, the sound of a hubbub of people all whispering conspiratorially hits me. Eyes search out family members and then flick constantly to the stationed soldiers lining the streets and edges of the green. Jaws are clenched, women clutch children to their sides, soothe and shush and look to their husbands for direction.

  I am searching for Maman, and Isabelle with the pram. The green is already bustling with people, the whole village and more congregating in the same place. I see the mayor with one of his sons, their faces relaxed in amongst the growing unease, and feel better. Father has seen them too and smiles in acknowledgment, moving across to greet them both, asks if they know what’s going on.