God Speed the Night

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  He lingered cautiously before running down the ramp, and then again within the shell of stone before going up the steps. There, to the purpose of accustoming his eyes to the denser darkness, for only speckles of moonlight found their way through the turret windows, giving light no brighter, nor more constant, than the flickering of fireflies. He trod against the camionnette near the foot of the stairs and identified it by touch. The recognition set his heart pounding against his ribs. The police used such a vehicle. He waited, listening. Only the gentle sloshing of water in the cavernous well of the mill. He went up slowly, then hearing a moan from above, he abandoned all caution.

  He could have cried out in relief, seeing the two nuns where he had expected the police, but the relief passed quickly and a kind of outrage came over him, as though he had discovered them in some ancient and obscene ritual with Rachel their victim. She was stretched prone on the table, her clothes parted breast to thighs. The nun in black bent over her while the grey one held the candle. Brief as the association was—and reason banished it at once—it left him mute and feeling separate even, or especially, from Rachel. He approached them silently until the grey nun saw him and made a little noise of alarm.

  The black one did not lift her hand from where it rested on Rachel’s abdomen, the gold ring with its cross of Christ on her finger glittering as with a life of its own. Go, he wanted to say. Give her back to me and leave us. Instead he said what they must have known far better than he knew: “My wife is ill.”

  “Very ill, monsieur.”

  “I am grateful to you for coming.” He said it: why or how did not matter.

  Rachel opened her eyes and found him. There was no terror in them. She put out her hand to him. When he took it, she said, “Oh, Marc, I am so sorry. I tried to make it go away.”

  “I know.”

  The nun in black said, “It is necessary for madame to go to a hospital, monsieur. The infection will spread quickly and the appendix—who knows what will happen?” She pulled Rachel’s clothes down and took away her own black shawl with which she had covered Rachel from her thighs down.

  “How long do we have, Sister?”

  “Only God can tell time under these circumstances, monsieur. She must go at once.”

  “She cannot.”

  “It will pass,” Rachel said. “The pain will pass.”

  “I have brought you aspirin,” Marc said.

  “She has already had aspirin, monsieur. It cannot heal and very soon it will not even help the pain. You must understand.”

  “And so must you!” Marc said. Then, “Forgive me.” He glanced at Gabrielle. “The grey sister will have told you we are Jews.”

  “They know, they know,” Rachel said.

  “It is why we came, monsieur,” Gabrielle said. “Sister Agathe is our infirmarian.”

  Rachel was trying to get up. Agathe restrained her. “Better to lie where you are for now, madame.”

  “There must be something you can do for her,” Marc said, and then, as though to persuade Rachel in their presence was the easier way to persuade them, he told her: “I have found Monsieur Lapin and he will come here. Soon we shall have new papers…”

  “How soon, Marc?”

  “I do not know how soon! Perhaps tomorrow. How can I know except to beg him on my knees to make it soon?”

  She smiled a little and squeezed his hand to quiet him. “Do not be so troubled. When they come, you must go on, Marc, and when I can I will come to you. I will find you…”

  “I will not go without you.”

  Her face seemed to stiffen like a plaster mask before his eyes. “Then I will die tonight. You have always said it is the only important choice we have.”

  “No, Rachel.” He knelt down to be close to her. “The more important choice is to live.”

  “God in heaven,” she cried, “why do you permit us to be so tortured?”

  Sister Agathe paused in the turning down of her sleeves over the white cuffs of her undergarment. She looked at Gabrielle, being herself touched for the first time beyond the medical urgency of the situation. Gabrielle still held the candle, having nowhere safe to put it down. She knew well that Sister Agathe had taken every step reluctantly; nor had she spoken once to the novice except to give directions in the examination of the woman. God make her see, had been Gabrielle’s constant prayer from the moment Reverend Mother bade them go. That the woman should now join a kind of prayer to hers seemed an answer to her own.

  “There has to be a way,” Agathe said almost serenely, “and therefore we must find it.”

  Marc raised his head from where he had bowed it near Rachel’s.

  “You have identity papers?” she asked.

  “We have our own, but they are passports to a concentration camp.”

  Agathe drew her dark brows together. “Is that worse than death, monsieur?”

  “I have heard that it is death, but I would choose it if it were the only alternative.”

  “And the papers you are waiting for?”

  “False papers which will say that we are merely French.”

  “No great honor under the circumstances,” Agathe said so that Gabrielle knew she too had now embraced the spirit of Sister St. André. It made her bold enough to speak where she was not likely to in the presence of the older and professed nun. “If we took madame to the hospital ourselves, Sister, would they ask such questions?”

  “To be admitted,” Agathe said, “she must have identification. Otherwise they would ask more questions, and they would question us.”

  Gabrielle groped for her pocket and drew from it the folder with her own card of identity. What she really wanted to see was what an identity card looked like, what information it required. She had never used it, and her own feeling of identity was bound up entirely with the religious life and the habit of her order. Yet the instant she brought out the card she and the others, save Rachel, knew that they had found the way.

  Without a word Agathe took the novice’s card from her hand, and the candle, and going to Rachel, she held the card near her face. Rachel opened her eyes. The dark eyes dominated both the face and the picture of the nun. Marc knew that as a nun Rachel would have immediate and the best of care. In Sister Agathe, the caretaker of the sick, the urge to save a life grew very strong. Her bond and Marc’s in this was immediate and fast. Both looked to Gabrielle.

  It was to her as though a glaring light were shone upon her, blinding and numbing her. She put her hand to the crucifix beneath the cincture—and felt nothing inside her, and in her hand nothing but a piece of crossed wood with a smooth, cold metal figure on it. No new burst of courage came to her, no inner reassurance that the voice of God was speaking through her; only a deep and terrible sense of abandonment.

  Marc, impatient as he was with all religion, nonetheless felt something of what it would mean to this protected child to shed the trappings of that protection. He thought then of what it would mean to Rachel to put on those trappings, Rachel, a child of that other religion. He turned his back on all of them and walked the length of the loft, away.

  Gabrielle saw the woman’s hand stretch out toward him and then fall limp at her side when he did not come back. She too felt abandoned, Gabrielle thought. “Is it possible, Sister?” she asked Agathe.

  “If we make it so. I can take her in the camionnette and you will stay here in seclusion until I have spoken to Reverend Mother.” She went to Marc. “You must explain to your wife what must be done. Do you have scissors?”

  “Yes.” He remembered having used them to make the blackout curtain.

  “We must cut off her hair, monsieur.”

  In the remotest corner of the loft Gabrielle undressed in the ritualistic manner of her disrobing every night of her noviceship, removing first the white veil. The religious habit had become as protective of her as her skin, and for a moment, taking the crucifix from her cincture, she held it close to her as another woman might a lover’s hand to her breast. She put it d
own carefully, removed the cincture, and unfastened the long grey robe. She tried desperately to think herself back in the cell at Ste. Geneviève.

  Not until she had put on the clothes of the other woman did she remove the coif exposing her head in what seemed the ultimate nakedness. She huddled in the corner, sitting on the down-turned bucket, her hands covering her head. Sister Agathe came for her clothes and took them. Only once did Gabrielle look to the others, hearing the snip of the scissors and Rachel’s protest. She remembered what might well have been her own last vanity, her long, dark hair. She yearned for it now as she had not since the first realization that it was gone forever if her vocation was a true one.

  When the others had left—and they went without speaking to her—she came out to where the candle was burning. Another candle lay beside the glass in which it stood on the table. She looked down at the dark skirt which came to just below her knees, at the red silk blouse beneath which she could see the shape of her breasts, at her arms bare from the elbows, then down at the shoes, pumps with silver buckles. She stooped down and removed the shoes, setting them side by side beneath the table. She sat at the table and stared at the flickering candle. When she stared long enough it became a golden cross sometimes wavering in the draft, Christ stumbling on the way to Calvary. She put her arms on the table and her forehead on her arm and closed her eyes. She could see the afterglow of the candle and remembered the patterns and colors she had wrought from the darkness as a child by pressing her eyes tightly closed. She remembered the game she had played with her sister: “I see.” I see lilac blossoms…I see a kitten, his fur all ruffled…He has a thousand eyes…It’s a peacock’s feather…It’s the bottom of the pond where the frogs’ eggs are…It’s God’s eyes everywhere…

  Marc returned. “They are gone,” he said when he had closed the door. “Do you know how far it is to the hospital?”

  She could not speak at first. She shook her head and when he came near and looked at her she covered her head with her hands.

  He crossed the room to the bedframe where his and Rachel’s valise was open, and took from it the blue scarf. He brought it to the novice. She put it around her head and knotted it under her chin.

  “Thank you, monsieur.”

  “My name is Marc—though what it will be tomorrow, God knows.”

  “I am Sister Gabrielle.”

  “Are you hungry…Sister?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Sleepy?”

  “No.”

  She would not look at him. “Are you afraid?”

  “A little, I think.”

  “Of me?”

  She did not answer directly. “I’ve never been afraid this way before, so I don’t know.”

  He sat down at the table as far from her as possible and turned the chair so that he would not be facing her. He tried to think of things to say that might make his presence easier to her—and hers more real to him. He had known many waking nightmares, but none so unreal as seeing this strange girl in the clothes of the woman he had known as he had known no other woman. He said: “It has been so long since I was not afraid I’ve forgotten what that was like.”

  Gabrielle stared at her hands. They looked large and raw without the sleeves coming down to cover the big-boned wrists, and the nails were dirty. She hid them against her breast, folding her arms.

  “Is it a good hospital?” Marc asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t seem to know anything now.”

  “Enough. You knew about this place, and to come back and help us when no one else could.”

  “I didn’t know. I prayed.”

  “It is a way of knowing,” Marc said.

  He got up and went to where the hair he had cut from Rachel’s head was lying heaped on his white handkerchief, his only clean one. “There is a ritual in Orthodoxy—in Jewish tradition—in which a woman’s hair is cut off at the time of her marriage.”

  Gabrielle wished he would not talk, not knowing how to answer him and unsure as well to what extent it was a violation of her rule to speak at all. The rule of silence prevailed within the convent from final meditation until after breakfast.

  “She was very proud of her hair,” Marc said.

  “So was I once,” Gabrielle said.

  He did not answer, knowing perhaps, she thought, she should not have spoken that way. He seemed a wise man in the way he said things, different from such men as she remembered…except the cure in the village where she had grown up. She tried to stem the memory, but it came welling up: he had been her guide and counsel until one day, sitting opposite her in the cold little office off the abbey sacristy, he had got up and come to her, and lifting her chin with his forefinger, frowning until she was terrified of him, he had bent down and kissed her on the mouth. She reached now for the crucifix, forgetting it was no longer at her waist.

  Marc folded the handkerchief over Rachel’s hair and put it away in the side pocket of the valise. He set the valise on the floor and said, “You had better lie down here and rest even if you cannot sleep. I’ll stretch out on the table. I would leave you alone if I could, but I must stay until a friend comes.” He glanced at her. She was pale and immobile like a waxen doll. “Do you understand?”

  She nodded. She did understand to some extent.

  He came to the table. “If we put out the candle we can have some air in here. We can open the door.” He gestured her toward the bed, and taking off his coat he carefully folded it and put it at one end of the table to serve him as a pillow. “There is no blanket, but the flour sacks will cover you.”

  “I would rather stay here, monsieur.”

  Marc shrugged and took his coat away. Glancing down, he saw Rachel’s shoes on the floor beneath the table. “Don’t the shoes fit you?”

  Gabrielle looked down at them, not knowing what to say because she did not want to offend him. “They have silver buckles,” she said.

  To which he took offense anyway, or chose the biting retort to vent his diffuse anger. “There was a silver figure also on the cross my wife wore going out of here tonight, Sister.”

  Gabrielle bent down silently and put the shoes on her feet again.

  9

  MOISSAC WAS ON THE verge of sleep when the telephone rang. He had been several times only to come fully awake again tormented by the recollection of one and then another of the day’s humiliations. He ran to the phone so that it would not waken Maman.

  It was the night man at the desk of the prefecture. A woman identifying herself as a nun from Ste. Geneviève’s had phoned the hospital for an ambulance and the hospital had phoned the prefecture.

  “So?” Moissac said.

  “She phoned from Place de Gare, mon préfet, a public kiosk. It would seem she tried to take another nun to the hospital in a camionnette.”

  “So?” Moissac snapped again.

  “It is thought it might be a Maquis trap—to hijack the ambulance.”

  “It is thought by whom?”

  “By me, mon préfet.” The answer was almost inaudible.

  “It would be easier to hijack an elephant. Order the ambulance to proceed and I shall go there myself.”

  Moissac, having to dress, arrived at the moment they were lifting the stricken woman into the ambulance. He shone his torch about trying to be useful. The sick one was very young and a novice. He asked the older nun if there was any way in which he could be of assistance.

  “The camionnette, monsieur, we must not lose the camionnette.”

  He promised to have one of his men pick it up.

  The ambulance driver said, “Monsieur le Préfet, we are going to need Doctor Lauzin.”

  “I’ll bring him at once.”

  “That will be the day,” the driver said and closed the ambulance door. Lauzin was the only really competent surgeon in St. Hilaire, and therefore the most independent.

  Lauzin was also the town’s only declared atheist. He made it plain to Moissac on the way that he came because a human bei
ng needed him; he was in no greater haste because she wore a veil. Moissac hunched his shoulders and concentrated on the road. He had no wish to engage in an argument his friend the monsignor had been pursuing for years to no avail whatever.

  “Eh, nothing to say in defense of your friends, Moissac?” “They are good women.” He remembered saying the very words to the Gestapo that morning.

  “Because they are chaste? Is that what makes them good?”

  Moissac knew he was being baited. “It must help,” he said.

  “Help? Mon Dieu, what does it help?” “Mon docteur, I am a policeman, not a theologian.” “A splendid distinction, Moissac, but I have never known one who did not assume the prerogatives of the other.”

  In the hospital Rachel was taken directly to the surgery. There was a moment, only a moment, in which Sister Agathe was left alone with her. She leaned close to Rachel while she untied the coif. “Sister Gabrielle?”

  Rachel opened her eyes. Agathe nodded approval. “I will answer their questions, do you understand?”

  “Yes…Sister.”

  “We shall have you back with your husband in no time,” she whispered, “but you must not betray us.”

  “I shall not betray you,” Rachel said.

  “I know that, my dear. It is only that in the fever you might say something. You must think of yourself as Sister Gabrielle, and a novice never speaks as long as there is a superior present to speak for her.”

  A consumptive-looking orderly wearing a stained white jacket that would have better become a butcher came in, clip-board in hand, and asked to have the patient’s identity card. Sister Agathe gave it to him. From it he took the statistics he needed, scarcely so much as glancing at the patient herself.

  To Agathe he said, “You are the person responsible for—” he looked at the record, “—Sister Gabrielle’s commitment to the hospital?”