Resistance
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 1995 by Anita Shreve
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
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Originally published in hardcover by Little, Brown and Company
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First eBook Edition: April 2006
ISBN: 978-0-316-04570-4
Contents
DECEMBER 31, 1943, TO JANUARY 7,1944
R
ESISTANCE
“From the first sentence, Anita Shreve draws in the reader with the quiet poetry of her narrative voice….
Resistance
is a turn-off-the-phone, put-the-kids-in-bed-early, stay-up-till-two-in-the-morning-on-a-work-night reading experience.”
—Mary Gillis,
Detroit Free Press
“In beautiful, unpretentious language, Shreve embarks on a complex journey exploring the human spirit…. In
Resistance,
passion is heightened, courage is found, commitment is tested. Suspense, story, and character are mastered. The result—from its grasp of the darkness of war to its acute understanding of love and an unexpected eroticism—will send shivers up and down readers’ spines.”
—Nancy McAllister,
Columbus Dispatch
“Shreve is an intelligent, powerful writer.”
—Rebecca Radner,
San Francisco Chronicle
“Reminiscent of Helen MacInnes's
Assignment in Brittany
and Erich Maria Remarque's
Arch of Triumph.
… Here's to Ms. Shreve.”
—Rollene Saal,
New York Times Book Review
“With deceptive simplicity and superb control, Shreve evokes the impersonal horrors of wartime and its heartbreaking personal tragedies.”
—Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
“Lucid writing and a suspenseful plot make
Resistance
a thrilling read.”
—Chattanooga Free Press
“A beautiful novel…. Anita Shreve writes with a practiced perfection that gives brilliance to a stirring adventure tale.”
—Barbara Hodge Hall,
Anniston Star
“Anita Shreve's perceptive novel relates a simple story set in terrible times in a clear dispassionate voice…. Her respect for her characters is striking, as is the meticulous attention to detail…. I reached the last chapter with hungry eyes, wanting more.”
—Danielle Roter,
Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Shreve's prose is as gentle and dignified as the affair she describes.”
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“With her signature spare prose and skill at spinning a taut tale, Shreve's characters spring to life as she evokes the fear, pain, and longing of their desperate situation….
Resistance
has all the authentic passion and intensity nestled in beautifully written prose. This is the real thing.”
Dianne Bock Stern,
White Plains Reporter-Dispatch
A Wedding in December
Light on Snow
All He Ever Wanted
Sea Glass
The Last Time They Met
Fortune's Rock
The Pilot's Wife The Weight of Water
Where or When
Strange Fits of Passion
Eden Close
For our fathers who flew in the war
T
HIS NOVEL IS ENTIRELY A WORK OF FICTION, YET IT
would not have been possible without the help of the following individuals: Marlyse Martin Haward, Andre Lepin, and Rosa Guyaux, who shared with me details and anecdotes about Belgium during World War II; John Rising, Chief Pilot of the Collings Foundation, who checked over the flying sequences for me; George Cole, who took me up in his plane; and, in particular, Mable Osborn, who gave the seeds of a story. I would also like to thank my editor, Michael Pietsch, and my agent, Virginia Barber.
Finally, a necessary word about the Belgian surnames. I have used, for the most part, surnames that were or are prevalent in southern Belgium. Just as the novel is fictional, however, so are the names that are attached to the various characters. I mention this because the period about which I have written is a sensitive one, and my use of certain names is not meant in any way to confer honor upon, or castigate, any Belgian families.
10 November 1993
Gentlemen,
INAUGURATION OF A MONUMENT
TO YOUR FLYING FORTERESSE B 17
On Thursday next December 30, our association will inaugurate a monument in rememberance to your aeroplane fallen down on 1943 december 30th at the Heights nearly our village.
It consists in a marble block extracted out of our village quarry on which a stele with the following inscription will be fixed.
Homage à nos alliés
Le 30 décembre 1943 vers midi s’ écrasa à 500 m d'ioi la forteresse volante américaine Woman's Home Companion
Equipage
Pilots: Lt. T. Brice
Co-pilote: Lt. W. Case
Navigateur: Lt. E. Baker
Bombardier: Lt. N. Shulman
Ingénieur: J. McNulty
Ass. Ingénieur: E. Rees
Radio: G. Callahan
Ass. Radio: V. Tripp
Mitrailleur: L. Ekberg
Mitrailleur: P. Warren
Delahaut, le 30 XII 1993
With this letter, we would like to invite you and your wife to be present at the inauguration. It will be a pleasure for us to offer you a lodge in Delshaut.
If you are still in contact with the other members of the orew, please will you make them known they are also welcome. Send us their address so we can invite them officially.
Meanwhile, Gentlemen, please agree our best rememberance.
Jean Benoît
T
HE PILOT PAUSED AT THE EDGE OF THE WOOD, WHERE
already it was dark, oak-dark at midday. He propped himself against a tree, believing that in the shadows he was hidden, at least for the moment. The others had fled. He was the last out of the pasture, watching until they had all disappeared, one by one, indistinct brown shapes quickly enveloped by the forest.
All, that is, except for the two on the ground, one dead, one dying. He could no longer hear the gunner's panicky questions. The cold and the wound had silenced him, or perhaps the morphine, administered by Ted's frozen fingers, had dulled the worst of it. Dragging his own wounded leg through the battered bomber, Ted had reached the gunner, drawn to him by the pitch of the man's voice. He had separated the gunner from the metal that seemed to clutch at him and pulled the man out onto the hard ground, still white with frost even at noon. The wound was to the lower abdomen, too low, Ted could see that at once. The gunner had screamed then, asked him, demanded, but Ted looked away, businesslike with the needle, and whispered something that was meant to be reassuring but was taken by the wind. The gunner felt frantically with oily fingers for the missing pieces. The pilot and the navigator had held his arms, pinned him.
Possibly the gunner was dead already, he thought at the edge of the forest. There was too much blood around the body, a hot spring that quickly pooled, froze, on the ground. The other man, the rear gunner, the man who was undeniably dead, dragged also to lie beside the wounded, had not a scratch on him.
Ted slowly tilted his head back, took the air deep into his body. As a boy he had shot squirrels in the wood at home, and there were sometimes days like this, days without color, when the sky was oily and gray and his fingers froze on the 22.
The plane lay silent on the frosty field, a charred scar behind it, the forest not forty feet from its nose. A living thing shot down, crippled now forever. A screaming, vibrating giant come obscenely to rest in a pasture.
He ought to have set fire to the plane. Those were his instructions. But he could not set a fire that might consume a living man, and so they had gathered all the provisions in the plane and made a kind of catafalque near the gunner, whom they had wrapped in parachute silk, winding sheets, the white silk stained immediately with red.
Soon people would come to the pasture. The fall of the big plane from the sky could not have been missed. Ted didn't know if the ground he sat on was German or French or Belgian. It could be German, might well be German.
He had to move deeper into the wood. He hesitated, did not want to leave the plane. He felt, leaving it, that he was abandoning a living thing, an injured dog, to be dismembered by strangers. They would take the guns first, then the engines, then every serviceable piece of metal, leaving a carcass, a dog's bones.
Gunmetal bones. A plane picked clean by buzzards.
One's duty was to the living.
Ted might have aborted. He was allowed to abort. He knew the mission was not a milk run, that they were going into German territory, to Ludwigshafen, to the chemical plant. And he had felt unlucky without Mason, his navigator, whom he had found drunk in a hotel room in Cambridge with his English girlfriend. When Ted had entered, the room had been heavy with the smell of gin. A bottle was nearly empty on a side table. Mason had looked at Ted and had laughed at him. Ted had thought then, abort. A missing navigator was a bad omen. They had flown eleven missions together, had sometimes come under heavy fire, but there had been no serious injuries, no deaths. Abort, he tried to tell himself; but at dawn, when the thin, wintry light had come up over the landing field, and he'd looked at his plane, he could not make the decision to abort. Mason was replaced. A capable man but a stranger. Together they had pinned the arms of the gunner, looked into each other's eyes.
But had the missing piece of the crew fatally altered the mix, in the same way that an error in the mix of the fuel, too rich or too thin, could also be fatal? Had unease over the missing navigator made Ted hesitate even a second when he should not have hesitated, or made him act too quickly when he
should
have hesitated? Had his belief in bad omens clouded in some indefinable way his judgment? Case, his copilot, was right. They should have ditched. But he couldn't, and it was no use pretending he could.
Twigs crackled. Ted tried to stand, leaned against the rough bark. He had dragged himself out of the clearing, his right leg wounded inside his flight suit. When he stood, the pain traveled up his thigh. He embraced the tree, his forehead against the bark. A sudden sweat broke out on his face from the pain. He bent over quickly, heaved onto the frozen leaves. He might have saved a needle for himself, but he was afraid that he would crawl into the forest and freeze to death while he slept. He knew he had to move deeper into the wood.
Today was his birthday. He was twenty-two.
Where did the gunner's dick go? he wondered.
He turned to look at the plane once again, and from his full height he saw what he had not seen before: In dragging himself to the edge of the forest, he had made a path in the frost, a path as clear and distinct as a walkway shoveled in snow. He heard the first of the muffled shouts then. A foreign voice. He dropped to the ground and pulled himself away from the pasture.
The boy reached the Heights before Marcel. Jean dropped his bicycle, his chest burning. He gulped in the icy air and stared at the plane on the dead grass. He had never seen such a big plane, never. It was somehow terrifying, that enormous plane, unnatural here. How did a machine, all that metal, ever get up into the sky? He approached the plane cautiously, wondering if it might still explode. He heard Marcel behind him, breathing hard like a dog.
Jean walked toward the bomber and saw the bodies, the two men in leather helmets, one man wrapped in a parachute. The white silk was bloody, drenched in blood.
Jean spun and yelled at Marcel: “La Croix-Rouge, Marcel! Madame Dinant! La Croix-Rouge!”
Marcel hesitated just a moment, then did as Jean had asked, unwilling yet to see exactly what his friend had seen.
When Marcel had gone, Jean walked slowly toward the plane. For the first time since he'd seen the giant, smoking surprise drop suddenly from the cloud cover, he could breathe evenly. He was chilled, the sweat beginning to freeze inside his pullover. He hadn't thought to fetch his coat before racing out of the school to head for the Heights.