“I don't know what has happened,” Claire said.
“The reprisals! My God! Do you not know about the reprisals?”
Reprisals. Claire now understood the eerie silence of the village. She thought at once of Henri.
“Reprisals for what?” Claire asked.
“Someone has killed the German guards who were by the plane. The Gestapo have taken nearly the entire village,” said Madame Omloop. “They have put everyone in the school. All the men and boys, and they are even taking women and babies.”
Madame Omloop's fear was electric, contagious.
“God save us,” Madame Omloop said. “It was a terrible day when that plane fell on our village. You must go at once back to your house, lock yourself in. Hide if you can.”
“Henri,” Claire said. “Henri has not come home.”
Madame Omloop looked at the younger woman. “Wait here,” she said.
In less than a minute the Flemish shopkeeper returned with three rashers of bacon, a large wedge of cheese wrapped in cloth.
“I have this food, and now it cannot all be eaten. Take this and go. Quickly.”
The alley past the cemetery led, Claire knew, to a footpath that soon entered the wood on its eastern side. It was a footpath she had sometimes taken as a schoolgirl— a shortcut between the village am the river, but normally a roundabout way to reach her house. It would mean that she would have to push the bicycle the entire way and that it might take as long as two hours to get home. But it would keep her off the main road. She walked briskly, trying to stifle her fear. The American would wonder what was taking her so long. She prayed that when she got back, Henri would be there to help her.
He waited as long as he could. He thought he might be able to manage it. He wanted to try.
He dragged himself through the attic opening and then through the armoire. Alone, on the floor of Claire's bedroom, taking in its contents for the first time, he turned and rose to the one good knee, looked for something upon which to brace himself. The footboard of the bed would work, he thought.
Not only was his right leg useless, he discovered, but his arms were also weak. He managed a standing position, holding himself against the slanted roof of the room. Gingerly, he put some weight on the bad leg, was answered immediately with a jolt of hot pain that made him dizzy. Hopping with the good leg and bracing with his hands, he made his way to the top of the stairs, and then with the aid of the bannister to the floor below. He leaned against the wall and rested. He felt momentarily light-headed. How was he supposed to plan an escape— or participate in an escape plan—if he couldn't even limp?
He made his way into the kitchen. There were details of this room he remembered. The stove, the wooden table. The cold of the tile floor. She had a radio here, he was certain. He'd heard it through the floorboards. Ought he to try to find it? Did it have a transmitter? On the table now was a loaf of bread. He was starving. What was taking her so long in the village?
He made his way to the privy and then returned to the kitchen, where he washed himself and enjoyed it, despite the cold. He wanted to linger in the kitchen, but he knew it wasn't safe. He took a slice of bread with him back to the attic room.
Whatever strength he had hoarded in all the days he had lain in the crawl space now was spent. He drifted between sleep and waking, surprised anew each time he opened his eyes and saw the sunshine in the attic garret. When he dozed, he laid his head back against the surface of the wall, almost spongy from its many layers of wallpaper. How old was the house? he wondered. A hundred years? Two hundred? He still had not got used to the idea that in Europe—in the English village where the bomb group was billeted, and now here in this tiny Belgian town—there were houses and churches, many in fact, that were centuries older than the oldest buildings in America. He thought of Mount Gilead, his hometown in Ohio, and of the farmhouse there where he once lived with his family, which was, at best, what?—a hundred years old? This building, the Daussois farmhouse, was ancient by comparison. The layers of wallpaper and paint told a story of their own. Whose stories? he wondered. What stories? Who had been hidden here?
She had left him a book, and sometimes he opened it and read a line or two of English poetry. She had asked him to explain some of the words and phrases to her, and had been perplexed when he had not known their meaning—not even in the context of the lines. “For rose-moles all in stipple …” He knew neither
rose-moles
nor
stipple
. He had tried to explain to her that his education had been interrupted by the war, though he privately doubted that even if he'd finished college, the words
rose-mole
and
stipple
would have come his way. His field was engineering. He had taken only one English course: a freshman composition class with a professor whose skin looked as dry as dust, and whose breath smelled of whiskey when he moved along the rows of students.
It seemed to Ted that his years of college occurred infinitely long ago—as though lived, experienced, in another lifetime, another age, or distantly in childhood.
Even Stella was fading in her detail. He could no longer summon the sound of her voice or her scent, and the image he had of her had gradually reduced itself to the single pose in the creased and worn photograph that Claire had placed in the palm of his hand. He fumbled for the picture, beside him on the floor. Dexterity had returned to his fingers; he could slide his nails under the photograph, lift it up.
Stella was sitting at a table in a restaurant. In the picture, it was always her smile he noticed first, no matter how many times he looked at the photograph. No one, he reflected, not a single person since he left America and entered the war, had had such an open and uncomplicated smile. She had her elbows resting on the table, and in front of her were several empty beer bottles—his and hers. She was wearing a white dress that was high at the neck and had short sleeves that seemed to flutter from her shoulders. Her hair was glossy, pulled back tightly at the top, with the sides long and curly. He studied the photograph and felt a sudden despair. Stella did not know where he was; whether he was alive or dead. No one back home knew. Already his mother would have received the telegram with the words
missing in action,
and she wouldn't know if her son was alive and in a German prison camp, or had been blown to bits in the air by a burst of flak. Bill Simmons, the postman, would have come with the telegram, his steps slow and deliberate, so that someone watching at the window would know even before he got to the door that he had a telegram. When the war had first begun, Ted himself, twice or three times, had watched Bill, in his uniform, make the long, slow journey to a fated front door. Curious, Ted had slowed his own steps, waiting for the reaction at the doorway. First the hand to the mouth, and then the wail the hand could not stop.
Now Ted would not slow his steps, would avoid at all costs seeing such a scene. He had witnessed enough benumbed and grief-stricken reactions to last ten lifetimes. And he now knew what was on the other side of those-telegrams—events the recipients couldn't see, couldn't even imagine, for they had no vocabulary, no internal photographs, with which to perceive such horrors. A gunner, alive, shot from his ball turret, falling to the ground, the arms flailing like a windmill; another gunner, his own, fumbling with oily fingers for the flesh of his body that was no longer there.
He put the picture facedown on the floor, lay back against the wall, and closed his eyes. Once a man had seen such things, he asked himself, how did he then erase them from his memory? He thought of the men who returned from missions seemingly unscathed—their footsteps still jaunty, eager for whatever small pleasures the base or the town could provide them, wisecracks spinning around their heads. Somehow these men had done what he had failed to do: They had had the same visions and had dismissed them. Or did they, too, have visitations in the night?
His stomach felt hollow. How long had Claire been gone? He had no watch, couldn't accurately even guess the time. The light had changed in the attic room. The sun now cast a brighter rectangle on the unslanted wall. He estimated the size of his lair to be seven feet wide and about eight feet long. He could lie down fully extended, but just. When Claire came, she had to wind her long legs beneath her skirt in order to sit beside him without touching him. He remembered the first day she came to him when he was alert and fully conscious, and her surprise at that, her awkwardness. Her legs were bare and thin; she folded them under her as though to hide them. She wore white ankle socks, odd-looking men's shoes he had not seen since. Her hair, he remembered, was falling from its pins, and there was flour on her apron and on her throat, just under her chin. She brushed the flour from her apron, but was unaware of the white dusting on her skin, and he found that somehow charming, mesmerizing—as though he had caught her, unsuspecting, in the middle of a private domestic act. There was, that day, no artifice about her, and as she talked—haltingly, nervously—he could not take his eyes from that white dust.
Her visits punctuated his days. He sensed, but couldn't be certain, that she came less frequently than she had when he was still not fully alert or well. Now she came only on missions—with a meal, with medicine, and sometimes to teach him simple French phrases, which he seemed to be particularly inept at mastering. No longer did she sit by him for indefinite periods of time, knitting or reading. He wished that she would. He could not define it precisely, but he knew that when he was drifting in and out of consciousness, and she was simply there, beside him, sometimes holding his hand, he felt safe.
Certainly she was different from any woman he had ever known. It wasn't just her accent, or the strange cut of her clothes, or her mouth with its upper lip that rose to a single point and her lower lip with its natural pout. It was a kind of self-containment. Oddly, she seldom smiled, and he was quite sure he had never heard her laugh.
Once or twice, her husband, Henri, had come with the meal, and these visits had been, because of their mutual inability to communicate, awkward and sometimes comical. Henri, on his hands and knees, pushing the tray forward, wanting, out of politeness, to greet the aviator in some way, reduced finally to gestures to the obvious tray; and Ted, embarrassed and feeling faintly emasculated, reduced as well to exaggerated nodding and smiling to convey his gratitude. Henri, he guessed, was in his early thirties. He often smelled strongly of beer and tobacco. And though Henri was never unpleasant, Ted had the distinct sense that Henri did not want him there in the attic room, that the pilot's presence was a burden he'd happily have done without. Henri's visits, mercifully, were brief.
He had now learned to distinguish Claire's footsteps from Henri's on the bedroom floor outside his lair. Many nights, Ted could tell, Henri did not come to the bedroom. He had never heard the couple making love, though he had imagined it in the way one did when one first saw the two partners of a marriage. He was relieved that he had not had to listen to such an intimate act. Perhaps his own presence just beyond their bedroom wall had inhibited them. Or possibly Claire and Henri no longer came together in that way. Ted had heard that in Europe arranged marriages or marriages of convenience were not uncommon. Or maybe Henri had a lover and that explained why he sometimes didn't return home at night to sleep with his wife.
But why was this his concern? He shook it off, feeling mildly prurient. What his hosts did, or didn't do, was their affair, certainly not his. It was the idleness, he reflected, the long hours without company or activity that had led his thoughts in such an unproductive direction. He needed to get outside, to regain his strength, to set off for France and make it back to England. Others had done it, he knew; it was not impossible.
He was aware now of a door somewhere below him opening and closing. Two muffled sounds, distant but audible. His hopes rose. He listened intently for footfalls on the stairway, for the opening of the armoire and the slip of coat hangers on the rod.
She was running on the stairs. He heard the tray set down, the outer door open. He saw, briefly, after she had opened the false back of the armoire, the dropping of a coat to the floor, an impatient swirl of headscarf. When she entered, her face was reddened—flushed, but also from the cold—and her hair was disheveled.
“I am apologizing,” she said quickly. “Madame Omloop was ill today, and I am having to find the sausage and the cheese in other places. And when I am returning home, the tire on my bicycle is lying down.”
“Flat.”
“Yes.”
He knew that she was lying. Her eyes slid off his face in an evasive manner. Her hands were shaking so badly he wanted to reach out and hold them still. He picked up the bowl of milk and brought it to his lips, all the while examining her. He put the bowl down.
“What is it?” he asked.
He watched her compose her face, that effort.
She shook her head. “I am not understanding you,” she said. She picked an imaginary piece of lint off her skirt. She was wearing a cotton blouse with a deep neckline, along which was a lace border. Her high color, however she had come by it, made her features particularly vivid.
“Something's wrong,” he said. “I can smell it.”
She looked up at him, puzzled. “Smell?”
“I can sense it.”
She shook her head again. “I am only being late, and is not good to have a bicycle that will not do what you want it to do. Is hard work in the cold, no? I am having to walk the bicycle much of the way.”
He reached for her hand in her lap. She snatched it away before he could touch her. She laid it at the bodice of her blouse.
“You're trembling,” he said. “You've had a bad experience. Tell me what's happened. You're beginning to scare me too.”
Her silence was so long he was certain he would have to repeat his demand. He hesitated, however, not wanting to drive her away. She seemed tightly wound, poised to flee, like the small animals he once captured and held in his palm. Her hand still rested on her blouse, and nervously, unaware of what she was doing, she worked one pearllike button—so much so that he wondered if she wouldn't inadvertently unbutton her blouse. Not once did she look up at him.