He drove alongside the river, avoiding the Old Town. It crossed his mind that Maman might be somewhere on Rue Michelet: he would not have wanted her, prisoner or no, looking out at him just now. He could not help feeling, now that turning home he thought about her, that she was enjoying her captivity. She would be counting on her domination of her son to insure the safety of René. Perhaps, if she had seemed to be enjoying herself too much, they would have dumped her home this morning.
The fear of that possibility became so vivid that when he reached the house he had the woman wait in the car a moment while he went up to see. There was no one and no new message. Going down through the garden, he glanced surreptitiously at the windows of the nearest neighbor. The drapes were drawn. They always were on the Moissac side.
“Now, madame, if you will come with me please, I will ask you to wait for me in the house. My mother is not home, but you will be more comfortable there than sitting in a public place in a hot automobile. I will not be more than an hour. I know how anxious you are to return to your husband. And I know how anxious he is for your return.”
“They will have gone on by now,” Gabrielle said.
“We shall follow them.”
It seemed most plausible, the way he said it, and seeing the man in his own garden, stooping to pull up a weed as he came along the walk, made of him a human being, that and the mention of his mother. She was further reassured, going up the walk, when she saw a little grotto to Our Lady among the marigolds and lupin.
Moissac said, not going into the house at all himself, “Perhaps you will be good enough to look in the larder and put together a lunch we can take along with us. There’s bound to be something there.”
But in the house alone, hearing only the buzzing of flies and the droning of bees about the honeysuckle bushes at the window, and no sound at all from the clock which had stopped at a quarter past two, she thought again about his having called her Madame Daridan. Or had she imagined that he said it, so thinking of herself at that very moment? Which was a sin. Or the very gravest of temptations. The trouble was she had no real measure of what was evil, except in herself. It was a peculiar thought, but she sat down at the scrubbed, bone-white kitchen table to think about it when it occurred to her: Christ and all His saints were human. Why wasn’t the devil human also?
27
PEBHAPS HE SHOULD NOT have left her alone. But he had to leave her alone: it was part of the ceremony, that she be allowed a kind of retreat, a time alone in a Christian house. It was also necessary that she be there when he returned because she wanted to be there. Alone now she was free to run. There were people enough in St. Hilaire to hide her. A call to Gaucher would probably arrange the matter. And if she did not love her husband, she would run. It was essential to the ceremony that she be given that choice first, and then the other choice.
He went to the prefecture and cleared his desk of an accumulation of paper-work, forms and counterforms, reports in triplicate and quadruplicate, all requiring signatures and stamps and seals, and not an item among them that would stir the republic a jot if it had not been prepared. That was not true. It was part of the fabric…a shoddy fabric. What was it Maman had said? She was talking of self-pity. She was right. The shoddiest. He was done with it. All done with it. He glanced at the clock over the door. The allotted hour was almost up. The very hair on his head seemed to bristle. He had never felt more alert, more in control.
He went out and chatted at the desk for a few minutes just to prove his command of himself. Finally he stopped at the prison annex to the prefecture. René was its only occupant at the moment. Moissac gave the jailer the money out of his own pocket and instructed him to see that the prisoner was served the best luncheon available in St. Hilaire.
28
GABRIELLE, HAVING GLIMPSED in the room off the kitchen the ivory crucifix above the bed, was drawn toward it as a moth to flame. She did not pray. She merely sat on the edge of the blanket chest and gazed at the crucifix until at last she said, You must speak to me, Lord. I don’t have anything to say. But she heard nothing.
Not that she expected to hear the word of God, only to be moved toward self-expression for being herself so utterly empty. So many things had cancelled one another out, like a game of Trafalgar, checks and zeroes. You did not put things off in the religious life: tomorrow never brought again today’s opportunity. Which was not to say that failing today, you could not try again tomorrow. Slowly, slowly, her self-contemplation deepened: to know yourself could not be sinful: what else could it mean, to examine your conscience? Therefore to blame yourself, having no real guilt: was this less a sin than to excuse yourself having guilt? Guilt—it was a word itself to think about. Every time Marc heard it he would almost gnash his teeth. And that brought her thoughts to Marc: would she ever be able to get him entirely out of her mind? Not so very long ago, in school, she could remember—not in school, it was her sister on the way home from school—saying she thought she was in love. How do you know? I’d die for him…Lord, I must think these things unless you turn my mind to other thoughts. So her mind proposed one thing and then another, but never once focusing on where she actually was—or on what lay immediately before her for which she was subconsciously trying to gather strength.
Moissac returned. She heard the car, then the slamming of its door and his step on the walk. She waited in the kitchen, watching him come up the walk. She wondered why she was not afraid. Or were there kinds of fear as there were kinds of love? Unrecognized, or but dimly so. She did not like to think about Monsieur Moissac. She knew that. He was ugly-looking, for which no man could be blamed. And having refused to blame him for being something that might have frightened her, she had conquered fear. So simple. It was the same with Moissac as it had been with Artur, the dwarf, when she had permitted him her hands and danced with him.
“No lunch?” he said, coming in and removing his hat and coat, and hanging them behind the door.
Gabrielle had thought that they would go at once, but he sat down at the table in his shirtsleeves. “I am sorry, but I did not look, monsieur. I did not like to look.”
“You do not like to look at anything. I have observed that. Or is it only me you do not like to look at?”
“No, monsieur.”
“Whatever that means. I am wearing a clean shirt.”
She glanced his way to see him pluck at the sleeves, hiking up the cuffs. There were dark marks of sweat under his armpits.
“Come, madame, and sit down where you can hear what I have to say to you.”
Gabrielle sat on the opposite bench at the far end of the table.
“You are very modest, madame. It is becoming in a bride. And you are a bride after all, in spite of what the Belloir papers say. Do you love your husband?”
Gabrielle flushed, then shivered, for a feeling of ice had come over her, and her mouth was dry. It was hard to speak but she said, “Excuse me, Monsieur le Préfet, but I do not think it is your business.”
“Maybe you don’t think so, but I do. I am now making everything that is your business and your husband’s business mine. You see, I know enough right now about Marc Daridan to send him to a concentration camp, perhaps to his death. Quite probably that, or you would not be trying to reach the Spanish border disguised as Belloirs. Is that not so?”
Gabrielle sat silent, her hands clasped in her lap. Because he had commented on the downcast of her eyes, she fixed them now on the middle button of his shirt. It was a thin shirt and the hair of his chest shone darkly through it.
“On the other hand, there is no reason if I say so, for him not to make the border. I cannot take him there, but I can refrain from sending the dogs after him.”
This time in spite of herself she nodded her head a little.
“That’s better. There’s no reason for us to pretend that you are Madame Belloir any longer, is there?” When she did not respond, he said: “Answer me!”
Gabrielle moistened her lips and said: “I am
Madame Marie Belloir. I do not know the other name.”
“I see,” Moissac said quietly, “you are ashamed of being a Jew. I do not blame you for denying it.”
This time her eyes flew to his. “Christ was a Jew, monsieur.”
Moissac grinned, his yellowed teeth then parting as he darted his tongue between them. “Ah, but you weren’t long in denying Him. You must admit that thirty-three is no great lifespan for a man, eh? How old is your husband? Ten years left at most, I’d say. Suppose down through history every Jew was permitted to live only to the age of thirty-three? Now there’s an idea—you see, your husband’s not the only one who can make up a tale. Would you believe me, I’ve only just now thought about this. Every Jew must die at the age of thirty-three. Every male Jew, that is. Otherwise we might breed a race of giants, everyone like your husband. That simply would not do. No, we must saddle them with their aging crones, their matriarchs, their witches at the hearth. If I was not a religious man I could draw you a picture of hell, madame, for I can see it now in my own mind’s cauldron.”
Gabrielle again moistened her lips. “I will go and find something to make for lunch, monsieur.” She put her hands on the table, about to get up.
Moissac sprang to his feet, jogging the heavy table so that it must have hurt him. But he pounced his hand on hers. “Later, madame.” He held her hand down with a cruel tightness for a moment, then let it go. “I did not mean to touch you,” he said. “Not yet. What I mean to say is, please do not move until we have finished talking. What I want to say, I will say directly, for I am a plain, outspoken man…No, I am not that either.” He sat down again. He put his hands behind his head, tightening and freeing the muscles in his arms, his shoulders. “I wish you would catch fire for me again—the way you did when I said you were ashamed to be a Jew.”
He half-turned and pointed to the room where she had found the crucifix above the bed. “I want you to go in that room and take off your clothes and wait for me. It is a fine large bed.”
The words seemed very strange, but the idea must have already crossed her mind; that she did not know precisely what it meant or how he expected to achieve this thing was true. But this she did know: if he did not believe she was a Jew, he would not have dared to so approach her. She did not move. She kept her eyes on her hands where she had folded them on the table. “I do not understand, monsieur.”
“I want to fuck you,” he said.
And the word she did not understand, but she could not help but feel that having said it was a new agitation to him.
“But with your consent, madame. You must understand, I am offering you the life of Marc Daridan for the pleasure of your body. I am a man of honor. I am a man of religion, let us say that, and I will swear to you upon the Bible at the bedside there that your husband will go free insofar as my life can manage it.”
“If I do not consent?”
“It would be very bad for him, madame. Not merely the concentration camp as it would be for you, but the Milice, you see, are something else. I have heard that they put out the eyes of men who could identify their spies. You must admit, it is a fair exchange I’m asking of you.”
“Monsieur, if I was not a Jew, would you ask it?”
“How dare you put that question to me?” But even as he spoke, he knew the beginning of his supremacy: she had said the word, If I was not a Jew. He said almost tenderly, “You have a choice. You are not my prisoner. You may either go in and wait for me in the bed, or you may go out and wait for me in the car.”
Gabrielle sat quietly for a long-seeming time, the silence of which time broke only with the rasps of his heavy breathing. Then she got up. She did not speak until she reached the bedroom door. “Must I take off my clothes, monsieur?”
“No, of course not. I will take them off for you.”
29
SHE MADE NO SOUND, no sound at all even when it must have been most painful, and when to have heard her cry out in pain would have helped him. And so he had to help himself with every lewd name that he could conjure and prefix all of them with Jew. Thus was it consummated.
When at last he rolled the stone weight of himself from off her, she lay in a kind of sick fear, not of him, but of the emptiness, the wetness, and the smell, as of earth at first, and then, she knew, of blood. She was afraid to go from the bed for fear of what might happen to her, standing. And so she lay, her hand between her legs, holding herself as though it were still possible to put back something that was no longer in its place.
He sat up on the side of the bed, a fat, hairy, heaving hump of a thing, and looked around through swollen eyes to where the cream-colored limbs were crimsoned and Maman’s sheets blotched and soaking. He sat and stared at the hands and the hair and the blood and tried to think what it could mean that she should be a virgin. Was the Jew impotent? What else could it mean? He remembered her fists in her husband’s face, them beating against his breast for having taken her from the dancer where they had fallen upon the floor together.
He began to laugh, laughter such that he needed to contain in his hands, covering his mouth, for there were sobs in it, great joyous sobs. He, Moissac, had succeeded where the Jew had failed! He had consummated the marriage act of the tall, muscled, virile, blue-eyed Jew. That he had done: his triumph was marked in blood.
He did not touch her. He did not stand up until he had gathered his shabby bathrobe from the floor and wrapped it round him. He went to the wall at the head of the bed and straightened the crucifix where it had gone awry. Her eyes followed him. He stepped back and pulled the quilt over her to hide the filth of it all. “I will bring you warm water,” he said, and motioned to the washstand. “You will feel better afterwards. Dress quickly and we will leave as soon as you are ready.”
They had driven twenty kilometers and still she had not spoken: it was as though she had been stricken dumb. He stopped at a farmhouse where, before the war had changed so many things, he and his colleagues on the force had come for a Sunday’s hunting. He was able to buy dark bread spread with pâté and a bottle of wine which he brought back to the car. She would not eat.
“You’d better keep it and take it with you,” he said, and folded two slices of the bread into a sandwich. “When did you plan to go?”
She did not answer.
“Look, madame. Théophile Moissac keeps his word. I will not interfere. I will punish no one, not even René. Do you understand?”
“Yes, monsieur.” Finally, words.
“You ought to thank me,” he said with self-conscious irony. He was sitting at the wheel of the car. He maneuvered round so that he could watch her face.
“Thank you, monsieur,” she said in the same monotone, and continued to stare ahead.
“I mean for everything.”
She turned and looked at him, her eyes wide and frank and saying something, but in a language he could not understand. He did not have to: that little triumph would last him a while yet. He made himself comfortable for driving and turned on the ignition. “What will you tell your husband?”
“Nothing, monsieur.”
“But when he finds out…Some day, you know?”
After a moment she said, “I will tell him what he will believe.”
Which, Moissac thought, was the way and wisdom of all women, to tell a man only what she knew he would believe.
30
BEFORE NOON THE HARVESTERS had arrived in Lacroix, forty kilometers on, a village from which the oak forests could be seen patching the hillsides like the shadow of clouds; beyond, dimly, rose the high mountains. The children came out to see the combine and the tractor and the van of workers as though it were the circus that had come to town. The threshing machine did resemble some huge, lumbering beast, and when it was set up quay-side by the river, for the grain was to go directly to the mill upstream, and its grain spout lowered to the barge, a child called out that the tin beast wanted water.
This village too had its medieval aspect, dominated entirely by the
châtelain who also owned large holdings in the cork-oak forests. As soon as the harvest was in, the men of the village would go into the woods for the beginning of the bark-stripping season.
Marc, arranging the loading of the grain, which would go that night to St. Pierre-sur-1’Adour, arranged to also travel there on the same barge. It would wait for him until ten p.m. He had confided in Antoine after they left Champs des Corbeaux, Antoine already suspecting Marc’s purpose. He foresook Michèle that afternoon to work alongside Philomène and Céleste, one or the other of whom, he told Marc, ought to be able to ride the night through with the prefect of police.
As the afternoon lengthened and Marc calculated the time it should have taken Moissac to drive to St. Hilaire and thence to Lacroix, and that time passed by an hour and then another hour, he wondered if he would ever see Gabrielle again. Then the car came, Moissac parking in front of the water fountain. And Gabrielle had come back.
Marc stayed at his place with the grain chute, but he watched her step from the car and pass among the wagons and along the dock toward him. She walked, he thought, as a woman might who carried something on her head, a carefulness that without the burden had the appearance of great grace. Moissac had stopped at the fountain for a cup of water. Jacques came down and took the grain chute. He called out to ask how Jules was.
Gabrielle answered, speaking to Marc: “We left him at the hospital. That’s all I know. He would like Antoine to keep his guitar and bring it to him.”
Marc signaled Jacques to say that Jules was all right, which was not necessarily so, but he jumped down beside Gabrielle to speak to her before Moissac came up. “You’ve been gone for a long time.”
God Speed the Night Page 20
