Sins

by Gould, Judith

  These thoughts of revenge were sweet. At the moment, they were the only way she could fight the Boche, the only way she could vent her fury and hatred.

  When the doors of the chateau banged shut behind her and Edmond, she had waited until they were out of earshot before she gave Edmond Maman's ring. She explained to him how Catherine had slipped it under the lampshade, and how she had managed to snatch it up without being seen. He clenched his hand fiercely around the little band of gold, and then he slowly opened his fingers one by one, looking down at the ring as if it might disappear at any moment. On a sudden impulse he brought it to his lips and kissed it reverently.

  Then his face darkened. His arm was trembling as he raised it and flung it high into the air. The ring flashed once before it disappeared in a distant clump of bushes.

  Slowly Edmond dropped to his knees. He pressed his cheek against the frozen ground, and his body heaved with pain as he wept aloud. Hélène stood there helplessly, unable to comfort him. She could feel the tears running down her cheeks. She wondered what she had done wrong.

  Just as the last light of day faded, they came upon a clearing. It was like a narrow, dark valley cut out between the pine trees, and a pair of gleaming railroad tracks ran along it. They followed the tracks for a while and spent the night alongside them in an unheated tool shed. Edmond managed to jimmy the door open and they sat down on pieces of equipment, leaning back against the walls of the shed as they ate the rest of their champignons. They were ice cold and the chill hurt Hélène's teeth, but once she chewed them well, they seemed somehow warmer. At least they soothed the gnawing emptiness in her belly. Then they cleared a bit of floor space, made a makeshift bed out of pieces of tarpaulin, and curled up together to go to sleep.

  But it was an uneasy sleep. As soon as she shut her eyes, the bad dreams began. She dreamed of Paris, but it was not the Paris she knew. This was a grotesque, nightmarish world of distortion in which Sacre Coeur was stretched out of shape into an evil black minaret, the Seine was like an ocean, and all the bridges were gone. The wide-open Place Vendome was threateningly cramped and dark, like some medieval alley, and the Bois was filled with treacherous cliffs and monstrous trees that had massive gnarled roots. Then Saint-Nazaire entered the dream, and that was strange, because it looked exactly like the beautiful Paris she remembered. And then there was a terrible noise. The earth shook, the buildings trembled, and Saint-Nazaire tumbled to the ground. She awoke suddenly, sweating profusely.

  It was the middle of the night and a train was roaring past outside. So that was why I dreamed of an earthquake, she thought with relief. The entire shed was shaking. She got to her feet, stumbled over to the door, opened it a crack, and peered out. A blast of icy air rushed past her. The night was pitch black, and the locomotive spewed showers of reddish sparks high into the sky. This hellish spectacle frightened her so much that she quickly shut the door, huddled close against Edmond's warmth, and closed her eyes. Before she knew it, she was asleep again. And the dreams continued.

  This time she was in a pitch-black wide-open space. All around her she could see sparks glowing in the distance. Then she realized that they were slowly moving. . .steadily approaching her. As they got closer, she saw that she had been mistaken. The sparks were actually white-faced Boches brandishing cigarettes. In horror she watched as they closed in on her. The nearer they got, the hotter the heat of the cigarettes felt. She tried to draw back, but she was surrounded. They pressed closer. Closer.

  And suddenly they lunged forward, their cigarettes searing her skin and burning deep into her flesh.

  She began to scream and scream and scream, and Edmond was saying: 'Hélène! Wake up! Wake up!' Then she felt his hands shaking her awake. 'Wake up!' he said. 'Wake up! You're having a bad dream.'

  She opened her eyes and clung to him tightly, still trembling with fear. He stroked her head reassuringly. It was morning already. Outside, the light was soft and gray.

  After she calmed down, they ate some more champignons. Then they continued walking westward along the railroad tracks. They still had no idea where they were. Only that they had to head west. Always west. Every so often they would hear a train approaching, and whenever they did, they quickly fled out of sight and stayed behind the trees, waiting until it chugged past. Hélène noticed that most of them were freight trains, long serpentines of boxcars and flatcars loaded down with heavy machinery.

  In the afternoon, the tracks brought them to a railway freight yard on the outskirts of a large town. There were quite a few signs around with the name of the town printed on them. At least now they knew where they were. Angers.

  The signal tower was built in the middle of the yard. It was thin and ugly and had huge windows at the top that went all the way around, giving a 360-degree view. Occasionally Hélène would catch glimpses of figures sitting behind the glass. Those were the controllers, directing the traffic.

  When they reached the far perimeter of the yard, where the maze of rails once again funneled into two solitary tracks, Edmond put a restraining hand on her arm.

  She stopped and looked at him.

  'What do you say we take a train?' he asked slowly.

  'You mean. . .actually ride on one?'

  'Yes. All we have to do is catch one heading west and hop aboard. A lot of them seem to stop up ahead, waiting for the signal to change. See?' He pointed to where a long freight train was halted, the locomotive looking like it was floating on a cloud of steam. As they watched, the signal changed and the locomotive chugged, wearily starting to pull its burden.

  Hélène looked back at Edmond. 'Would a train take us all the way to Saint-Nazaire?' she asked hopefully.

  He shrugged. 'I don't know. But they're sure to go part of the way, at least.'

  'And if they turn off somewhere and start going in the wrong direction? What then?'

  'Then we'll have to jump off.'

  Less than half an hour later they sat in a big boxcar half-filled with bulky crates, with the sliding door cracked partly open and the countryside flashing by outside. In the late afternoon they were shunted onto a siding somewhere and the train stopped. Hélène could see cranes swinging enormous tapered cylinders onto the flatcars at the rear of the train. These cylinders were of dark gray metal and sprouted sleek sharklike fins at the bottom. Edmond told her they were rocket bombs. The place was swarming with uniformed Boches. Some of them were slowly making their way from the rear of the train to the front, sliding open the doors of the boxcars and inspecting them.

  'They're headed this way,' Edmond whispered. 'Quick, we have to get off before they find us.'

  He pushed open the sliding door on the other side of the car and looked out. The coast was clear. On this side of the train there was no activity: a steep shrub-covered hill sloped up from the edge of the tracks. Silently he and Hélène hopped down off the train and scuttled uphill. For a while they walked along a plateau. Then abruptly they drew to a halt. They could go no farther. A sheer abyss plunged a hundred meters down to a dry, boulder-strewn riverbed. There was no way that they could climb down it, cross the riverbed, and then get back up the sheer cliff on the other side. They would have to find another way to cross it. A quarter of a kilometer to their left, a strange structure bridged the abyss. The top was level with the plateau, and trees and bushes grew up out of it, giving it a bizarre, almost theatrical look.

  Hélène pointed at it. 'What's that thing?' she asked.

  'An aqueduct,' Edmond replied. 'The Romans built them in order to channel water across valleys.'

  'It leads westward,' she noted.

  They headed toward it. When they got there, she froze. From far away it had looked delicate but sturdy. Close up, it looked ready to collapse. Stones were missing, the edges were crumbling, and there was no railing of any kind, just a low curb that barely came up to her ankles. The channel where water had once flowed was now filled in with dirt, and here the trees and bushes had taken root.

  Fearlessly Edmo
nd stepped onto the narrow aqueduct and started across. Hélène hung back, staring at it in apprehension. The aqueduct seemed to hang in space before her, devoid of any visible support. She turned sideways and looked down at the dry riverbed. That was a mistake. Quickly she averted her eyes.

  It was a long drop.

  Edmond turned around. 'Well?' he demanded. 'What are you waiting for?'

  'It. . .it looks awfully dangerous,' Hélène stammered in embarrassment.

  He stared at her for a moment. Finally he spoke. 'It's safe,' he said gently. 'It's probably stood here for over a thousand years. It's not likely to come tumbling down now.' He gestured for her to follow him. 'Come on.'

  Reluctantly she took a few steps. She realized immediately that it was even worse than she'd imagined. They had to pick their way carefully around the tree trunks and bushes, sometimes forced to stand at the very edge of the parapet.

  Suddenly she stopped in her tracks. Her head was spinning crazily. It was impossible for her to go on. She would never get across this way. Not with her sanity intact.

  Edmond turned around again. 'For God's sake, Hélène!' he called over his shoulder. 'Come on. Don't you want to get to Saint-Nazaire?'

  That did it. She forced herself to look her fears in the face. Slowly she began to follow him again. Her hands were clammy and she found herself breaking out in a sweat. 'Just don't look down,' she kept repeating over and over to herself. 'It'll be all right as long as you don't look down!'

  So she kept her eyes on Edmond's back. She emulated his every move. When he skirted deep holes where the aqueduct had begun to cave in, she skirted them in exactly the same manner. When he climbed over piles of rubble, so did she.

  The wind was strong now. It buffeted them as it howled by, sometimes almost throwing them off balance. It got so strong that after a while they prudently dropped to their knees and crawled on all fours. Once her fingers dislodged a stone and it fell over the edge. For what seemed an eternity, she heard nothing. Then finally a faraway clatter. Slowly she crawled on.

  When they were halfway across, she could hear a train in the distance. She had to squint against the wind as she glanced over at the railroad bridge. From here it looked tiny, like a pattern of rusty toothpicks. As she watched, the front of the locomotive came into view. Slowly it chugged westward across the bridge. It must have been the very train they had abandoned earlier. It had boxcars followed by flatcars loaded with evil-looking cylinders. When the locomotive reached the middle of the bridge, some of the cars were still out of sight. It was a long train indeed.

  She stared at it wistfully, wishing she was still aboard. She'd have much preferred crossing the abyss in the shelter of a boxcar to having to crawl over the aqueduct.

  A moment later she took back her wish.

  It began with a droning in the skies above. She looked up. An airplane had broken out of the cloud cover and came swooping down toward the bridge. Suddenly tiny figures appeared to be swarming all over the train; it must have taken on a battalion of Boches. She heard the sharp cracking of gunfire and the chattering of machine guns. Then there was a shrill, ominous whistle.

  'Duck!' Edmond screamed. 'Lie flat and keep your head down!'

  Hélène did as she was told, but she kept her face turned sideways, toward the bridge. She saw that something had fallen out of the belly of the plane. Whatever it was seemed to float lazily through the air. It wasn't until a moment later that she realized it was a bomb.

  It missed the bridge and landed on the floor of the abyss. Suddenly the earth shook and there was a massive explosion. Debris and fire and smoke and destruction blew high into the air. Hélène let out a shriek. In the reverberation of the blast she could feel the aqueduct shaking. The stones under her actually lifted up and shifted. Then they finally settled back into place with an audible sigh. Before her eyes, a row of curbstones crumbled away and fell down out of sight.

  When the smoke cleared, she saw that the distant bridge was still standing, and the train continued to chug steadily across it. When they had seen the bomb coming, some of the Boches had hit the roof of the cars; now they were getting back on their feet. She could see one Boche hanging on to a girder of the bridge, his tiny legs futilely kicking air. As she watched, he lost his grip and fell down into the abyss, his body doing a wild spiral.

  Another airplane droned and broke through the clouds. She started to pray hysterically, but it didn't help. This plane, too, dived at the bridge, spit fire, and then dropped its bomb. There was another terrible whistling noise, and then the earth shook again. And again. And again. Debris was raining down all around her, and with each explosion the stones of the aqueduct did their terrible dance, rippling like a swift tide from one end to the other before settling back down.

  And then one of the bombs hit its mark. In a single frozen, blinding split second, the bridge broke in half. The train buckled gently like a snake in midair, and then it plunged headlong down into the abyss. Now came the worst explosions imaginable. One after the other, the rocket bombs went off.

  The aqueduct shook spastically. The stones rattled like millions of chattering teeth. Rocks and earth and pieces of the train rained down all around them. A section of twisted track shrieked through the air, landed not five meters away from Hélène on top of the aqueduct, and impaled itself on the stones like an angry, quivering piece of sculpture.

  Suddenly Hélène caught the smell of burned hair. It was a moment before she realized what she was smelling. Her own hair, singed by the distant holocaust.

  Then there was silence, an intense, shell-shocked silence the likes of which she had never heard before. Slowly she turned her head and looked around. The spot the bridge had spanned was now three times the width it had been. Neither bridge nor train was anywhere in sight. What hadn't been blasted to pieces or scattered was buried under tons of rock and rubble.

  This was one shipment of rocket bombs that would never reach the coast, would never fall on the place called London.

  And then she began to whimper. Softly at first, increasingly louder, until finally her body shook uncontrollably and she started to weep. She wept for herself, for Catherine and Marie, for Maman. She wept for the bridge. For Paris. For all of France.

  Edmond crawled toward her. 'Are you all right?' he asked softly.

  She raised her head and looked at him through tear-streaked eyes. 'Yes,' she managed to croak. 'And you?'

  He nodded and shrugged. 'I've a few scratches, nothing serious.'

  It was a miracle. They had come through unscathed. Not very pretty, with most of their hair singed off and their faces beet red, but their hair would grow back and they weren't badly burned. Just superficially. Yes, it was a miracle.

  She stopped weeping long enough to dry her eyes and said a silent prayer of thanks. Then they lost no time crawling across the rest of the way. Now she didn't give the aqueduct a second thought. Her fear of heights was a small thing compared to what they'd just lived through.

  Five minutes later they stood on the far side of the abyss. For a long moment they looked around in silence. Then they continued walking.

  They had gone only a few meters when they were surrounded by a motley group of men pointing rifles at them. Hélène counted a dozen of them.

  Not again, she thought with a sinking feeling. Not the Boches again. Not after what they'd been through already.

  She didn't see the men lowering their rifles. She didn't notice the ragged clothing they wore or the strange assortment of weapons they wielded. All she knew was her hatred and her fear. It had been walled up deep inside her for too long. Now it burst like a boil. She flung herself upon the nearest man. She clenched her fists and furiously hammered him in the stomach. She kicked and clawed and bit. He stood there stonily, staring down at her in silence.

  'My God!' one of the others exclaimed in the soft speech of Touraine. 'She's a savage! An animal!'

  Savage? Animal? She whirled around. What did that idiot know? And why was h
e speaking such good French? And then it hit her. He must be a collaborator. She spat. Collaborators were even worse pigs than the Boches. Then she attacked him in a fury, beating him until she was ready to drop from exhaustion. When she looked up, she saw that he was looking down at her, not with pain, but in surprise.

  I'll make you hurt, you pig, she thought. I'll make you hurt good! She bent down, grabbed a big rock, staggered up, and began to raise it over her head. She was going to smash him with it. Smash him like a bug!

  Effortlessly the man reached out, took the stone out of her hands, and tossed it away.

  Suddenly she began to tremble. What was the use of fighting any longer? she asked herself. They were captured once again. And now she had no more energy, no more fight left in her. She was surrendering, and it hurt her more than she could bear. Especially with Catherine's and Marie's sacrifices having been in vain.

  Numbly she slid down into a sitting position. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She found herself howling like a mortally wounded animal.

  'We're your friends,' the stony-faced man said gently. He squatted down in front of her and looked her in the eyes. 'Where are you from?'

  She looked away in silence. They wouldn't get a word out of her. Not a single word. Even if they tortured her. Even if they burned her like they had burned Marie.

  'What about you?' she heard the man ask.

  'Paris,' Edmond answered. His voice sounded foggy and far away, as if in a dream. Things were becoming unfocused, focused, unfocused again.

  'Paris!' the man exclaimed. 'And you came all this way? Alone? What's your name?'

  'Edmond Junot.'

  'And hers?' He pointed at Hélène, but she couldn't see it. She was slipping into the unfocused zone again.

  'She's my sister Hélène. My other two sisters and our mother were carted off by the Boches. The Boches are looking for us everywhere. They claimed that we were kidnapped. We weren't! We killed some Boche, and now they want to kill us! Maman had a transmitter hidden in our house. That's how it all started. It was the right thing to do, having a transmitter, wasn't it?'