She did not like to think about what happened to the Allied airmen when the Germans had captured them. She knew they were sent to Breendonk in Brussels, or to similar Belgian prisons in Antwerp and Charleroi. Some were tortured by the Belgian as well as the German SS. Those who survived considered themselves lucky to be deported further east into Germany, to the Stalag Lufts there. Claire had heard about the English pilots at the beginning of the war who had had their eyes put out and had been buried without coffins in the cemeteries near Breendonk. There were members of the Resistance whose ghastly task it was to locate the graves of these unlucky airmen, dig them up, and give them a proper burial. All over Belgium there were graves of unknown soldiers.
Chimay left as silently as he had come. Dinant stood and walked to the sink. She washed the blood from her hands. “You can finish this,” she said to Claire. “He needs water and to be bathed. No food until midday. Any sign of infection, send Henri to me at once.” She dried her hands on a towel. “The old woman is upstairs?”
Claire nodded. Dinant left the room with her bag, and Henri for the first time that night sat down. Claire suspected that her husband had had nothing to eat since noon.
“I saw the wounded American,” Henri said. “The one we found near the plane.” His face was ghostly with the memory. He put his head into his hands. “Dinant had him on the table in the kitchen when I went to fetch her. I’ve never seen …”
“Henri, go to bed,” Claire said quickly. “You have to sleep. I can manage here, and tomorrow Antoine may come again and need you. Do you want any food?”
Henry shook his head vehemently. “I couldn't eat,” he said.
“Then do as I say.” Claire had seldom spoken to her husband in such a sharp tone, but she knew that if she didn't he would not move. That he had seen something terrible she did not doubt. Only sleep might put the images at a bearable remove.
Henri rose slowly from his chair. “I’ll just sleep on the sofa in the sitting room,” he said. “If you need me …
When Henri had gone, Claire rose and washed her hands at the sink. She filled a large kettle with water, set it on the stove. The man on the floor groaned. When the water was boiling, she added it to cooler water she had already poured into a basin. She unwrapped a small bit of soap, real soap, not the black soap made from ashes. She brought it to her nose and inhaled its fragrance. She set the basin on the stone floor.
By the fire, Claire hesitated, then rolled the airman over. He did not seem to waken, but some color had returned to his skin. She cradled his head and washed his face and neck, his chest and the hollows beneath his shoulders. She wet a sponge with warm water and let it run over him, soaking into the towels she had put at his sides. He was more muscular than she had imagined, but his pelvic bones were sharp in the firelight. Gently, she rubbed away the dried blood that had matted the sworls of dark hair on his good leg. She filled and refilled the basin with clean, warm water.
Theodore Aidan Brice.
She said the name aloud. A man was in her kitchen, on her floor, and she knew nothing about him except that he had flown a plane and landed in her village. The man might die in her kitchen, and she would know nothing more about him. On the floor beside him were his possessions—a photograph of a woman, his identification tags, his escape kit, a crumpled pack of cigarettes. The flight suit itself, or what was left of it, would be burned or buried. She wondered if he was married to the woman in the photograph—a pretty, dark-haired woman who looked very young. But then she thought not, because he had no wedding ring. One English airman who had thought he was dying had given his wedding ring to Claire to send back to his wife when the war was over. Claire had refused to take it, assuring the airman he would live. She learned, later, that he had died soon after leaving her home. She wondered where this pilot was from—America was so vast. She wondered, too, what he would sound like; she had not yet heard him speak.
The morphine, as always, was miraculous. She had never ceased to be moved by its power, by the way it could transform a face, remove years, give beauty to the wounded. Pain twisted a man's features, made him ugly; but the morphine erased the pain. The American's face in repose was open—not severe, hot pinched. She had seen his eyes only briefly—when he was conscious and had looked at her. They were startling, a remarkable sea green with flecks of gold. His mouth was broad, even when asleep, and she had a sudden vision then of what he might look like someday, after his lips had healed. She glanced at the place on her hand where he had bitten her. There were still faint teeth marks on her skin.
“Too late.”
Claire looked up from her crouch on the floor. Dinant stood in the doorway. “She's dead,” she said. There was little emotion in her voice. Claire imagined that Dinant, who had seen the worst of it, who had tended the boys who had been tortured, had come to see each death as merely another failure.
“I will tell Bastien,” Dinant said. “He will come and will know what to do. And when he comes, he will help you and Henri carry the American into the hiding place. Every minute the pilot is exposed here, you are at risk.”
In the Daussois kitchen, Claire thought, Dinant was a field officer, clear-headed, her orders precise. The war was being fought in kitchens and attics all over Belgium.
The pilot slept for hours. In the afternoon, Claire climbed the stairs with a cup of thin broth made with marrow bones. There was just enough room in the hiding place for her to sit, her legs folded under her. For some time, she watched the American, watched his eyes move beneath his veined lids, watched his body quiver and twitch, as if in his dreams he were still flying. She watched also the snow that dusted, then accumulated upon, the small rectangle in the ceiling. As the snow thickened, the light in the crawl space diminished, so that it seemed milky in the small room, the pilot's features less distinct. She thought of the old woman, of how she had lain there and died, of what thoughts and dreams she must have taken with her. Hers was a death that must be laid at the Gestapo's feet, Claire thought, as surely as if they had shot her in that chimney.
From time to time that first day, Claire said the pilot's name aloud, to waken him, to summon him to eat.
Theodore.
And when he finally opened his eyes, the broth was nearly cold.
His hands were swollen and stiff and incapable of holding the bowl without spilling it. He was able to lift his head only slightly. She fed him with a spoon. It was an imperfect arrangement, and sometimes the broth spilled over his lower lip and onto his chin. She used the cloth in which she had wrapped the hot bowl to wipe his face. His thirst was keen. He asked for water when he was finished, but when she returned with the water, his headagain lay against the pillow, and his eyes were closed. She waited beside him.
Perhaps she dozed. A shadow moved across the opening to the crawl space.
“I might have been a German,” he said harshly. Antoine was standing in her bedroom. He meant the open armoire, the attic room clearly seen. He meant she should be careful not to stay too long inside* the attic. She crawled back into her bedroom.
“He's sleeping,” she said.
“We'll have to waken him,” Antoine said. Claire thought of protesting, but knew that Antoine would ignore her.
She was not certain that Antoine, with his pink bulk, would be able to squeeze into the small opening at the back of the armoire; nor was she sure he would find room to sit beside the pilot once he'd managed to get inside. But as Claire waited just outside, she heard two voices— the crude English of Antoine, who often impatiently called to Claire for a translation, and the barely audible murmur of the American, who tried to answer each question. She heard the words
flak, control cables, Ludwigs-hafen.
Antoine told the pilot that a man named Warren had died from his wounds, which did not seem to be news to the American, and that men named McNulty and Shulman had been captured by the Gestapo, which was. The rest of the crew, said Antoine, were hidden by Resistance workers in the area. One man's arm had been shattered.
Antoine, satisfied with the interview, wedged himself back through the armoire. When he stumbled to his feet, his face was scarlet with the effort. Claire stood as well.With his bulk and height, Antoine seemed enormous in the small bedroom, his head bent under the slanted ceiling.
“We must move all the Americans through the lines as quickly as possible,” Antoine said.
“I’m not sure he—”
“It's too risky here for any of them. The Germans know the pilots are hidden.”
Claire looked away.
“We'll prepare a passport. We'll need a new photograph taken.”
Claire nodded. The photographs the airmen brought with them were almost always useless, though the airmen never seemed to know this. When the air crews had their evasion photos taken at base, each man borrowed a white shirt and tie for the picture, which was supposed to make a pilot look like a civilian. The difficulty was, however, that since all of the men used the same tie, the Germans could not only identify the bearer of the photograph as English or American, but could tell which bomb group the man belonged to.
Antoine's breath, hovering over hers, stank of old garlic. For a moment Claire had the unlikely idea that he might move her toward the bed. Where was Henri? She was trying to think. She had known Antoine for years, since primary school, but she could no longer predict with any certainty how anyone she knew might behave. It was odd, she thought, how perfectly ordinary people, people who might not have amounted to much, people one hadn't even noticed or liked, had been transformed by the war. It was as though the years since 1940, in all their misery, had drawn forth character—water from theearth where none had seemed to be before. Before the war, she had not known of Antoine's stamina or his intelligence, yet because he had changed so during the war, she could not predict how he might act in other matters as well. She thought also, that had it not been for the war, she might never have discovered that Henri, for all his steadiness, was, in crises, physically afraid.
The American slept long into the afternoon and evening. His face seemed to possess, in his sleep, a curious detachment. Rarely had she seen such detachment on the faces of the other men and women who passed through her house. Too often, the particular horrors each had seen and witnessed, and sometimes been a part of, were reflected in their eyes, etched into the creases of their skin. Even on the faces of the young women and the boys.
The American slept so deeply that day she could not rouse him again, not even to give him the water he had asked for. She thought that perhaps he was hoarding his strength, hibernating through the worst of his ordeal. She had an image of him sleeping all the winter, like an animal, rising finally when the warmth came in late March or April.
But that night, as she lay sleeping in her bed, with Henri snoring beside her, she woke to a terrible sound behind the wall that frightened her. It was the frantic scrabbling of a man buried alive, trying to unseal his casket. She opened the back of the armoire, crawled into the darkness, felt the pilot's hands fly past her body, caught them. His skin was shockingly hot to the touch, and when she stripped off the comforters, she discovered with her own hands that his shirt and the bedding weresoaked. His body shook violently next to hers, and he spoke English words and phrases she strained to follow, to understand, but couldn't.
She lit a candle, held it near his face. His eyes were open, but as incoherent and as meaningless as his speech. She called to Henri, told him to bring towels soaked in cold water or in the snow. When Henri, in his long underwear, brought them to the attic room, and Claire laid them on the American's skin—on his chest, around his head and face—the pilot tried to fight her, to peel them, off, and Claire was astonished by the man's strength. Henri reached in to hold the American down. Claire spoke to the pilot constantly, in a low voice, repeating her words, a kind of incantation. Henri brought new towels when the pilot's skin had turned the cool cloths warm. The American begged for morphine. Claire put a towel between his teeth, which he bit like an epileptic until she had found the syringe and delivered the salve to his veins.
Claire fed the American cool sips of water, while Henri dressed and went for Dinant. The pilot was quieter now, but not yet sensible. Claire listened to him tell of shooting squirrels in the woods, of airplanes with threads attached falling from the ceiling. Once he seemed lucid and asked her name.
Once again, Dinant came with her medicines and her bag. Without greeting, the woman crawled into the attic and began to cut the bandages open, exposing the source of infection. The wound, a grotesque open sore, had festered. Dinant poured alcohol into the wound and cleaned it. The pilot moaned and lost consciousness. Dinant gave the American a tetanus shot, then fashioned adifferent sort of bandage, a partial closure held together with bits of cloth tied at strategic places. For days, it seemed, Claire sat with the pilot, who hovered between sanity and madness. The infection refused to heal, but did not travel. Dinant wanted the leg off altogether in case gangrene set in, but Claire, who knew a man with only one leg would not make it through the lines, held the woman off—just another day, she said; just another hour—a defensive line that seemed easy to breach, but proved, in the event, to be impregnable.
A hundred faces hovered over him, and in the crowd he searched for his brother. His brother was thirteen or fourteen and was wearing a red plaid flannel shirt. It was important to find Matt among the faces; there was something Ted had to tell him. But Matt couldn't be there, could he, because Matt had gone to war as well, and in the war had died in the water. The ship, the telegram said, sank in the Pacific when it was hit by a torpedo. The telegram didn't say if Matt was drowned in the darkness, or if, in the ferocious heat of midday, Matt let go of a bit of wood and dove into the coolness of the dark, beautifully colored water. Water and air. They were dying in all the elements.