Gabrielle tried not to listen.
“Are you a sailor?” Marc asked him.
“I was. I gave up the farm for the sea, but now where is there a ship for a man to sail on out of France, except to Bocheland? And I’ll not go there if I can help it.”
“That’s where my husband is,” Philomène said, “so just shut up.”
“Sorry, my dear. There is no safe conversation.” He leaned forward to look past Marc. “How is the bride?”
“You know,” Marc said, “we’ve been married over a year.” The Belloirs had. “I don’t know how you got onto the bride and groom business.”
“Well, if I’d had to guess at the matter, I’d have said you weren’t married at all.”
“Marie living in sin?” Philomène crowed. Her voice penetrated Gabrielle’s wall of protection.
“You’re right, you’re right,” Jacques said.
Thérèse leaned across her husband who had stretched out between her and Gabrielle. “Where were you married? Monsieur comes from Paris. I can tell by his accent, but not madame.”
“We were married in Paris,” Marc said. “To what church did we go after the courthouse? They are all the same to me.
“Ste. Geneviève,” Gabrielle said, “the patron saint of Paris. She saved the people from the Huns fifteen hundred years ago.”
Jacques heaved a great sigh. “It is too bad she died so soon.”
Everyone laughed and then fell silent. A couple of minutes later Jacques spoke again. “They say Mussolini is out of a job.”
Philippe sat up, wriggling his hips to get more comfortable. “He has no need to worry. Pétain will make him premier of France.”
In the courtyard the threshing machine was still going, two wagonloads of sheaves left. The chaff swirled about like yellow snow, and a great mountain of straw was yet to be bailed. Artur, almost black with grease, jumped up and down on the platform, waving to them. It had come as a surprise to Marc that the dwarf was a fine mechanic; as Jacques said, the only really necessary man on the team. Along the platform, bag after bag of oats was being sewn up by a woman of the farm.
They all washed at the pump and Marc treated with salve and bandaged the worst of the blistered hands. That much medicine he was competent to practice.
A thick soup and good wine along with the best bread Marc had had since the beginning of war were served them by lantern light in the courtyard, and after it a pudding with a treat of treats, thick cream. The châtelain himself came round and bade them eat well. He was a different man in jodhpurs than in dress suit. He sat among the workers and drank the wine he served them.
Jules tuned his guitar and strummed a melancholy improvisation. The lovers, Antoine and Michèle, kissed uninhibitedly. Marc glanced at Gabrielle and caught the flutter of her eyelashes as she closed out the lovers. She missed very little, he thought, swiftly taking in that which she proposed thereafter not to see or hear. Was it perhaps the sweeter for the briefness of the savoring? But that was not the point. The point was complete denial. Such a shame, the waste. Philomène began to sing. Nobody really wanted to sing at first, but she had an agent provocateur of a voice: you wanted to pitch in to help get the tune to wherever it was she was trying to take it. The music might be melancholic but the theme was militant. Marc had heard it before, but he could not remember where. Suddenly Antoine sang out, words different from those of Philomène. He had a fine tenor voice that nobody had heard till then. Philomène and the rest faded their voices down to a hum.
Marc was not likely to forget that moment: this frail man whom only in the field had he observed to be lame, sitting upright, his hands clasped between his knees, rocking himself slowly while he sang, and for the moment entirely separate from the woman.
“Si me quieres escribir
Ya sabes mi paradero….”
Marc recognized it as an anti-Fascist song of the Spanish War. Antoine’s eyes shone with a wistful zeal, and the lamplight caught the changes in a face that was alternately old and young. He was singing of what would have been a sadly glorious time of his life. Marc thought about what it meant to survive, defeated. Men always expected victory, though not a one existed to whom defeat was not ultimately inevitable. Thus, he mused, the myth of heaven. Resurrection. Immortality. The final justice.
The women picked up the rhythm with the faintest clacking of castanets. The song was familiar to most of them as a Spanish folk song. He heard Gabrielle humming. He wanted to go closer, the better to hear, but he dared not, knowing she would stop. It was a high, sweet sound. Philomène, also hearing it, coaxed with her hands. Gabrielle parted her lips to smile and the voice escaped. There was to the sound such poignancy and—the word he was so loathe to use—purity, that he was swept into that feeling of protectiveness again. She did not need his protection. He needed hers, and more than protection. What he was taking from her was her sense of purpose for him. All day, whenever they had rested together, she would ask about the place where he would go, the kind of soil, what it grew, the people, the language. It was a pure and unironical truth that telling her he found more purpose of his own than he had had even with Rachel. Much more. Rachel had conjured for him. Now he was the conjurer, and he was beginning to believe in his own magic.
The Spanish song ended and Antoine fell back, his head finding the lap of the waiting woman. Marc was filled with a great sadness for them, the homeless lovers, their haven in wandering. Almost without intent, he began himself to sing, a wordless song to which the sound tum-bah set the rhythm, and which everyone took up and repeated while he went on with the melodic chant. Again, the song came from his student days, from a singer he had all but forgotten though the melody had haunted him and he sang with the fervor of one who wishes to believe but cannot. Everyone wanted to know the song’s origin, particularly Jules who proposed to know it before he went to sleep that night.
“All I know,” Marc said, “it is Palestinean. Arabic perhaps, possibly Hebraic.”
“Ay, ay, ay,” Jacques said. “It is sad enough for that.”
The châtelain arose from the circle. “I bid you goodnight, friends, and an early departure in the morning. You have worked well and I have no complaint. Sing now, if that is your pleasure, but for God’s sake, remember, a German patrol passes this way three times a night.”
There was no more singing. They would travel with the dawn wherever possible during the harvest, and the dew would be dry in the fields when they reached them. Those with sleeping bags unfolded them in the open courtyard. The châtelain locked the gates to the yard himself.
Those with blankets, Gabrielle and Marc among them, went into the loft where the fresh straw was still settling. The darkness, relieved only by the shafts of moonlight, made separation easy. From the moment they left the others, Gabrielle began her night’s silence. She heard him speak, but did not answer and he did not speak again.
She lay down with the new robe over her, but she had not undressed. She fought sleep, a harsh battle, sometimes having to dig her nails into her flesh. Finally, catching herself dozing, she managed to come wide awake only by irritating the blisters on her hands. The novice mistress would not approve: it was sinful to inflict self-injury. Wearily, she wondered if choosing among sins for the lesser of them was not in itself a sin, and then she wondered further if this very thought about the choices was not temptation: a new way of the devil’s, bidding her to sleep. And there was something further yet to be said for sleep: no matter how evil the dreams, one did not have to answer for them unless one dwelt upon them, waking.
When there was all of the stillness she expected of the night, accustoming herself to the whispers of the settling straw, she got up, left the white robe where she had lain, and went to a place where the boards were bare not far from the loft door. There she knelt and devised an hour of prayer and meditation, or as close to an hour as she could estimate, based on as many of Christ’s miracles as she could remember. Sounds intruded and were banished: the night-baying o
f a dog; someone’s snoring and spittle-spewing which sounded like the wash of the river repeating itself on the shore; the katydids, consistent as a clock, distractions all recognized and put out of mind, made one with her own beingness and the palpitation of night itself.
But then there came a sound she could not banish, a pulsing sound that had yet no noise in it, but seemed to tremble the very boards on which she knelt. She tried for recognition in order to then be done with it, animal, human…Then came the flash of recognition, the realization of its rhythm and her whole body began to throb, her mind to swim with associations. She clasped her hands to her head over her ears, but her own pulsebeat was suggestive and the throbbing took on color, red for passion, Passion Sunday, red for blood, Christ’s blood, blood-red tears, the menstrual blood, the poppies in the field, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the tongues and mouths of men, the furrowed soil, the slaughtered lamb of pascal, its wool red at the knife-tear in its throat.
She heard the little choked-off cry—her own, or the woman’s? She felt the pain of sound-held-back within her throat, and the sobs she could not repress. She muffled them, her mouth deep in the flesh of her arm, and gradually she eased herself down prone upon the floor. There, sucking at her own arm for solace, she said in her mind again and again, Virgin Mary, Mother most pure, and eased her way past temptation into silence and finally, peace.
Marc, himself straightened within the poles of sound—he had been conscious of her every move, and theirs—felt his sweat grow cold. He knew what she had heard, that exquisite thumping of human pleasure, and straining for her sounds when the lovers were at ease, he knew that she was suffering as he was, the pain of which he could relieve them both.
He forced upon his mind the memory of her as she looked when the thought had come on all of them to pass Rachel as the apprentice nun. He cursed and tossed achingly, and became captive to a repetition of the incidents in that final day of Rachel’s life. His last image, as he passed into a dream-riven sleep, was of Rachel in coif and cambric. It was all so ridiculous, so goddamned absurd.
22
IF THE LETTER FROM Paris had not been removed from the plate where Moissac had seen it, he might not have contacted the Sûreté to inquire from a Paris source the whereabouts of Jean and Marie Belloir. He assumed the director of the post office in Fauré had given him a correct address for them, but as the morning lengthened and he received no reply to his inquiry of the night before, he wondered. He could not assume anything in this affair now. Little Madame Belloir, if that indeed was her name, had given him a false address for her parents in Marseille. And he might not have checked on that if he had not been making the other inquiry.
He would have liked very much to have an answer from Paris before going into Von Weber’s office, but none had come by eleven-five and he had been sent for at eleven-ten. It would take him a good five minutes to navigate the polished corridor.
“So,” Von Weber greeted him, “a tankful of gasoline for a security mission. Or were you pulling the wool over my eyes?”
“That would be difficult, Colonel.” “I am glad you think so. But all that gasoline?” “I was not sure I would get as much as I asked for.” Von Weber gave a dry laugh at such earnestness. “Tell me about this mysterious mission of yours.” He gestured Moissac into the chair beside his desk and dismissed his aide. Moissac began where, being Moissac, he had to begin, getting the dirty part over with first. Au Bon Coin was familiar to Von Weber so that Moissac felt there was no outright involvement of Gaucher on his part. He did, however, justify his own presence there by calling the colonel’s attention to German Intelligence reports on the bistro.
“I would not for a moment suspect you of clandestine involvement,” Von Weber said. “Please tell me about these people—in a relaxed fashion. What are they like?”
Moissac colored at the solemn reassurance. “René Labrière is the man I know best. He is not a very important man—I am speaking now of before the Occupation…”
“The photographer. Why do you make a point of his unimportance?”
“I am trying to give you a full picture, Colonel.”
“Give me fact and let me decide its significance, eh?”
“Yes, Colonel. But I do not have what you would call fact: at the moment, I have only suspicions.”
“There must be some fact on which you have based suspicion,” Von Weber said with an edge that launched Moissac instantly into his story of the arrival of the stranger that night at Gaucher’s, the subsequent discovery of him with a bride among the harvesters, the coincidence of René’s presence in Au Bon Coin and Madame Belloir’s visit to his studio for a photograph to send to parents whose correct address she did not seem to have. He omitted no detail: Von Weber could well have intelligence of his own. Finally he described his experience in Fauré.
“What was the message old Belloir gave you for his son?”
“If the man is his son. The message was that the cow had calved, a fine bull calf.”
“Did you see it?”
“Beg pardon, Colonel?”
“Did you see the calf? Did you ask to see it?”
“No, Colonel. There would have been an excuse, I am sure. The message is code.”
“Excuses are as good as evidence. I should think as a police officer you would consider that gospel.”
“It is so,” Moissac said. “But I preferred to show no sign of suspicion to the old one. It is the young man from whom I wish to learn the meaning. Old Belloir is who he says he is, and he will stay where he is until he dies.”
“My compliments,” Von Weber said with the benevolence of the schoolmaster meting out praise. “You have reasoned well.”
The colonel’s orderly brought aperitifs on a silver tray. Moissac was flattered, but as he sipped anis, he remembered Madame Lebel and Madame Lebel’s daughter, and the eerie lapse by which Maman lost track of a generation in time. For just a fleeting instant Moissac wondered if, twenty years from now, tasting anis, he would remember sipping it with a man he was trying on his soul to believe a benefactor of France, a German of class, family, and taste who sometimes treated him with a deference he received from no Frenchman.
Von Weber brushed the moisture from his lip. “Shall we speak now of the young Belloirs, if, since you question it, they are the Belloirs? If they are not, what do you see as their purpose?”
“They are very intelligent. Not like the others this year. There are not many students. I will say it, Colonel. Since I no longer suspect him of being a Gestapo man, it occurs to me they might be members of the Maquis. The harvesting would make an excellent cover for recruiting.”
“It is interesting that you equate intelligence with terrorism.”
“They are better educated, that is what I meant.”
Von Weber set his glass down carefully. He took off his spectacles, polished them, and put them on again. Moissac braced himself. “Let us reconstruct saying the couple are Belloirs. A medical student and his wife come home from Paris for the harvest. They cannot have been home in many months, and yet within a day or so, they set out among strangers to harvest the fields of strangers. Most curious.”
“My very logic.”
“Thank you, Monsieur le Préfet. And does your logic not suggest that if they are not Belloirs, they may be Jews trying to escape across the Spanish border?”
Moissac tried hard to control the muscles of his face. He did not dare to lie. “No, Colonel.”
“And yet it happens quite frequently, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes, Colonel. I am always alert to it.”
“To you they must seem very Aryan. You mistook him for a Gestapo man.” Von Weber sat and laughed silently. He ended it by rubbing his mouth with the handkerchief on which he had polished his glasses. He threw the handkerchief into the bottom drawer of his desk. Instantly, his orderly brought him a clean one. “Ah, Moissac, Moissac, love looks not with the eyes but with the mind.”
Moissac shook his head that he did
not understand, and shaking it, he felt the weight of his jowls.
“I am fond of Shakespeare,” Von Weber went on. “I used to teach school, you know. Have I told you that?”
“No, Colonel, but I have thought so.”
“And do you think I am right now about the Belloirs?”
“I do not think so, but it is possible.”
“What you mean, Moissac, is that you do not feel so.”
Moissac shrugged.
“Some men feel truth,” the colonel said, “and some men feel so much that is not true, the truth eludes them like a rabbit a St. Bernard.”
Even the choice of dogs in the comparison made him uncomfortable, Moissac having but the moment before felt jowlish.
“It would be pleasant for you perhaps if they were Jews,” the colonel suggested.
“I do not understand,” Moissac admitted again.
“Think about it: you are responsible to me for the clearance of all these harvesters. Is that not so?”
“In St. Hilaire, yes, Colonel. That is why I have consulted you.”
“In the district, Moissac. That is my jurisdiction. You will operate in liaison with Military Security, but that should not be too difficult…After all, your first suspicion was security, wasn’t it?” He sat thinking for a moment. “Do you enjoy the hunt?”
“Sundays, I do a bit. Yes, Colonel.”
“The wild boar is my favorite. You would have thought so, wouldn’t you?”
Moissac was not sure he was not himself being baited. He would not think a schoolteacher the likeliest hunter of the wild boar at all. He took a chance: the colonel did not have much more humor than he had himself. “Yes, Colonel. I would have thought that.”
“Why?”
“It is one of the oldest sports of aristocrats. Is that not so, Colonel?”
“It is exactly so.” Von Weber looked at his watch. Moissac started to rise. “Don’t go for a moment. I should suppose my ancestors would have hunted the boar through this very country. There is nothing like it, Moissac, except possibly what you are engaged in now. He’s a clever fellow obviously.”
God Speed the Night Page 16
