“You must—”
“I’m sorry—”
They spoke simultaneously. She raised her eyes to his.
“The situation in the village is very grave,” she said finally. She stopped fingering the button, put both of her hands in her lap, calmer now that she had made the decision to tell him.
“For all the days since your plane is falling, there are German soldiers surrounding the village, and three of them are watching the plane. And these are old men, harmless. I think it is not very important to be watching this plane, yes? We have spoke of this already.”
Ted nodded.
“But there is some person who is killing these old men. An assassin. And the Germans, they are very angry. It is their punishment in Belgium and in other countries to make the reprisals. I have heard of this.”
“Reprisals,” he repeated.
“The Gestapo have come into the village and they are taking people from their houses, even old men and children, and putting them in the school. And everyone is thinking that the Gestapo will kill a precise number of Belgians for the punishment. It is for the fear. To make the fear.”
He nodded slowly.
“And in the village, there is no one. Everyone is hiding in his house or is taken already, and there is a silence I have never heard.”
He waited. She put her hand to her temple, let her fingers comb her hair behind her ear.
“Where is Henri?” he asked.
She lowered her head. “Henri is not coming since the night. He is sent for in the night by the Maquis, and I do not know where he is.”
Ted closed his eyes and laid his head back against the wall.
One moment of indecision, a single moment of indecision, and how many deaths?
If only he had not throttled back.
Two dead immediately. And who stood innocently beneath the bomb load? Then three old Germans, and now what would the total be? A precise number, she had said. Of hostages.
“Tell me where the bomb fell,” he said. He instinctively doubted that now she would lie to him.
She looked away for a moment, then returned her gaze. “They are falling in Gilles, forty kilometers east.”
“In Belgium?”
“Yes.”
“A village?”
“Yes.”
“In the village?”
She was silent.
“What if….,” he asked, thinking. “What if you took me to the school and offered to exchange me for the hostages. It might work. They want the pilots. It's common knowledge.”
She seemed to think for a long time, as though searching for the words she wanted.
“In this war,” she said slowly, “there is no bargains. They will take you and also the others. You are not living with them as I am. And then they will come for me as well, and Henri.”
“No,” he said, forming a plan. “You'll leave me somewhere. Somewhere exposed, and they'll find me and take me to the school, and I’ll persuade them.”
“You will be tortured,” she said.
“I don't think so. They want the officers out of combat, but they don't kill them. They'll send me to a prison camp in Germany. Trust me. They treat officers differently.”
“You will be tortured,” she repeated knowingly. “And you will not be able to stand up in the torture, and you will have to tell them of me and Henri, and if we are denounced, perhaps we will have to speak of others….”
He raised his hand to silence her, put a” finger to his lips. Below him he could hear footsteps, a low voice calling.
Someone is here,
he said silently. He mouthed the words in an exaggerated manner, hoping she would understand him.
She listened herself, heard the muffled voice. It sounded male, but not like Henri's.
She scrambled at once to the opening of the armoire. He heard footsteps on the stairs, then a tentative voice.
“Claire?”
Claire, he could tell, had crossed to the other side of the room, doubtless to draw the visitor's eyes away from the armoire.
“Bastien,” Claire said with surprise.
Ted heard the rapid French of the visitor. Claire interrupted him, and spoke herself. There was another exchange, as though Bastien were giving instructions. Ted heard the opening and closing of drawers. Then he heard what seemed to be a series of questions on Claire's part, and Bastien's answers. The next sound Ted perceived was that of Bastien's footsteps moving away from Claire, out of the room and down the wooden stairs.
The bedspring creaked with weight. Either she was sitting on the bed or was lying down. He strained to discern her movements, her breathing. He wanted to call to her, but he sensed that she would come to him when she was ready. For ten minutes, perhaps more, she seemed to be motionless. Then he heard the bed creaking again, footsteps coming toward him.
She opened the armoire, spoke through the wall. He couldn't see her, but he could hear her well. Immediately he noticed that her voice was huskier. She had been crying.
“That was Bastien,” she said. She cleared her throat.
“I heard his voice.”
“He is telling me that there is a woman who is coming here to tell me of the reprisals, but the Germans are capturing her.”
“I’m sorry.”
“And Henri is not returning for some days yet.”
“Claire, I—”
“And we are being very careful not to be found,” she said sharply, as though intending to end any further discussion about trading him for the hostages. “You will not be leaving here. The …” She seemed to be searching for a word. “The threads of escaping are too dangerous now.”
He smiled at the phrase, despite the import of her message. He wished he could tell her that he would take care of her, but both of them knew that he was useless—worse than useless, a burden. Were it not for him, he knew, she could flee the village. It seemed hideously ironic, that her life should be in jeopardy because of him. Oughtn't he to be protecting her, rather than harming her?
“What was in the drawers?” he asked.
“Clothes for Henri. Bastien is taking them to Henri.”
“What will you do now?” he asked.
She was a long time in answering him.
“We are waiting,” she said finally.
There was a name for it,
balustrade,
Monsieur Dauvin once said, but the boy thought of it simply as a covered walkway, with stone pillars and mosaic archways and long views down into the village square. It reminded him of pictures he had seen in the rectory, drawings of balustrades in walled gardens in Italian cloisters, hushed places where hooded monks walked and thought in silence. But this covered walkway, the boy's covered walkway, was at the top of the school, once a monastery, and access could be gained only from the deserted fourth floor. It was forbidden to go up to the attic, as the fourth story was referred to, because the floor and the ceiling were in such disrepair that the teachers worried for the safety of the children. The covered walkway, which was open to the square, was thought to be even more dangerous than the attic. The stones of the pillars and the graceful arches had worked themselves loose over the centuries. Merely leaning on the railing, which reached to the middle of Jean's chest, might cause the structure to give altogether. Several years ago, some fuss had been made over whether to repair the fourth story or raze the school altogether, but then the war had come, and all the laborers in the village had been immediately otherwise engaged.
Jean thought of the balustrade as his.
He came to this place often. He had removed the crosspieces that barred the door so many times now that the nails slid effortlessly in and out of their holes. He knew the route across the attic floor as a sapper might a minefield—which boards would give way even under a boy's weight, where to avoid the crumbling plaster chunks that dangled from the ceiling. He came here as often as he could manage. It was, within the school, his sanctuary. As was the wood when he was not in school.
All forays here meant some risk. At the least, a flogging by Monsieur Dauvin should Jean be discovered; an injury or a fall should he not be careful where he stepped or rested his weight. But this journey today was, by far, the most dangerous of all.
For the building was no longer a school. Nor was the church any longer a church. The sisters, in their white-winged cornettes, had fled to the adjacent convent to pray; Father Guillaume had not appeared since the Gestapo had entered the village. The classrooms of the school were now interrogation rooms; the school was a prison. All day, from his perch, the boy watched them come and go, heard, even through the three floors that separated him from the ground-floor classrooms, the muffled screams, followed abruptly by an uncommon silence, as though silence were the only way to survive.
The boy had known this all his life.
Earlier that morning, Jean had ridden his bicycle to school as he always did, but Marcel, whose house he daily passed en route, whispered frantically to him from an open window. Marcel, who was still in his nightshirt and who had not yet combed his hair, told Jean of the assassinations and of the reprisals, and that the school had been closed indefinitely.
Go home,
Marcel had whispered fiercely. It was rumored, Marcel added, that the Germans had brought in reinforcements from Florennes. The Gestapo were everywhere, like cockroaches. Jean, who had taken all of this in, thought it must have been Marcel's father who had said that, who had made the image of the cockroaches. Marcel was loyal, but he lacked imagination.
Jean left Marcel and rode to the dark safety of an alleyway. He was considerably closer to the school than he was to home; the ride to his father's farmhouse might, in fact, be more dangerous than remaining in the village. He could, he thought, seek shelter with Marcel: Madame Delizée would not refuse him. But the thought of being trapped all day (and all night?) in Marcel's cluttered and claustrophobic three-room apartment, where the indoor toilet seemed continuously to be backed up, made Jean shake his head quickly.
He hid his bicycle behind a pair of dustbins, hugged the backs of the terraced houses, and ventured to peer into the village square, bordered on the north by the old school. The shades at the classroom windows had been drawn. Two armed and uniformed sentries stood at the door where normally Monsieur Dauvin waited to reprimand the tardiest of the students.
All the boys knew of the basement entrance. It was where the older boys went to smoke; the younger to play cards for centimes. From the basement, there was the back staircase, filthy and always smelling of stale cigarette smoke. The teachers never used the back staircase; they complained to Monsieur Chabotaux, the old caretaker, that dust caught at their trousers.
Jean crept into the darkness of the basement, heard from the floor above the occasional tread of heavy boots. Behind the boiler, the staircase began; it encountered on each level a heavy metal door. When he had climbed to the ground floor, Jean hesitated, put his ear to the door. There was behind the green-painted metal an odd sound, the low murmur of many voices, as though he were eavesdropping on the waiting room of the railway station at St. Laurent. The sound seemed benign and gave Jean the courage to continue up the stairs, but as he put his foot on the first step, he jerked his body. A scream had come at him through the door. Paralyzed, the boy listened as the terrible voice, a woman's, trailed off and was followed once again by the uncommon silence.
He reached the walkway without much trouble, but needed immediately to piss in the corner. He crouched into the opposite corner, where there was a bit of solid wall, perhaps three feet long, before the balustrade began. He pulled his coat around him. It was cold, but not as cold as it had been, and besides, Jean knew, the sun, which was bright today and unobscured, would soon warm his southern wall of the school.
He crouched or sat all day, peering around the wall only when he heard the clatter of a truck on the cobblestones of the square. First
there
were the Gestapo, who sprang with their machine guns from the truck. Then the back panels were opened, and one or five or twelve men and women, and sometimes children, stepped or were dragged from the interior compartment. Mostly the prisoners were silent, particularly the men, but occasionally a woman was crying, and sometimes the children were whimpering. Only Madame Gosset, who was, Jean knew, elderly and deaf, would not get out of the truck, possibly because she did not hear the commands, possibly because she refused, even in her frailty, to cooperate; and Jean was horrified to watch the Gestapo grab her by her hair, her bun uncoiling like a thin white rope as the pins popped and fell to the cobblestones. A guard jabbed her between her shoulder blades with the butt of his machine gun, Madame Gosset fell to the cobblestones on her knees and couldn't—or wouldn't—rise. She was dragged in that position by two Gestapo, who hoisted her weightless body by her armpits.
In all, he counted sixty-seven villagers who were taken into the school. In his bookbag he found a notebook and a pencil, and he recorded the names of all those he could recognize, so that he had entries that read this way. “Pierre Squevin and his family: his wife Marie, and a sister of the wife (?) don't know her name; and Georges, 17, from the pensionale.”
Fourteen villagers had left the school. Ten young men (Georges among them) were marched out, their hands behind their heads, and herded into the back of a van. The van left the square with two guards, but Jean could not hear from four stories up their destination. Three women had been let go—one was a woman with a baby. He watched the woman stand, dazed, at the bottom of the schoolhouse steps, then begin to scurry, hunching her back as if she might conceal herself and her baby, across the square to her house.
It had been an hour, at least, since anyone else had been brought to the school or anyone had left. Jean estimated the time at about three
P.M
. He was glad that soon it would be dark and he could retrace his steps to his bicycle. He had seen enough, recorded enough. He had not eaten since breakfast—a hard roll, a cup of bitter tea— though, in truth, the scenes he had witnessed and the sounds he had heard had intermittently stolen his appetite. The sun slanted over the village hall opposite—in another hour, it would fall behind the slate roof. When the sun set, his corner would lose whatever small warmth the stones had harbored through the day, and he would want even more urgently to leave.