Idly he looked again at the names in his notebook, thinking he might be able to fill in the blank spaces, remember a name that had so far escaped him, when he heard a new sound in the square. Six men, one with a tall ladder, the others with shorter ladders, stepladders, two apiece, entered the square. Two uniformed guards followed the men, the guards’ arms weighted down not with machine guns but with coils of rope. The Belgians were workers, laborers from the village. Marcel's father (Marcel's father?) was the man carrying the longest of the ladders. He was dressed as Jean had often seen him—in a blue overall, a pair of clogs, and his navy cap. Monsieur Delizée walked with the ladder to the eastern side of the square, along which were terraced buildings, with shops on the ground floor, apartments on the first story. All along the front of these apartments were shallow, wrought-iron balconies—wide enough for a woman to hang out a wash to dry, wide enough in summer for tubs of begonias and geraniums. The ironwork of these balconies, intricate and detailed, was thought in the village to be among the town's better features.
Marcel's father stopped, his ladder horizontal. A guard gave a command in German, then in French. Reluctantly, Marcel's father slowly righted the ladder, leaned it carefully against the iron-work of the first balcony. The guard spoke to Monsieur Delizée, handed him a heavy coil of rope.
With growing comprehension and horror, Jean watched the father of his best friend climb the long ladder with the coil of rope.
“We were near the signal crossing when they picked us up. We had nothing on us. Twenty minutes earlier, Antoine had delivered a package of propaganda leaflets to … well, you don't need to know to who. They were after Léon, really—and he knew it. We knew it. I think they've thought for a while now that he was, you know, leaking things he heard at the hotel. They put us in a truck. We knew the guards—all of us. They were all right with Antoine and me, you know, because we have the livestock, and they've had our meat, and perhaps they were thinking there might be, in this, a favor somewhere, but Léon, what did he have to offer? Léon was coughing badly, he does this when he gets nervous, and besides he hasn't been well, hasn't been well at all, and Antoine and me were looking at each other over his head, and I knew we were thinking the same thing. Léon was not going to get out of this.
“So then we were driven to the school. Inside the school there was … it was … In the classrooms, there were the children's drawings and their papers up on the walls, and oh the floor and on the desks there was blood, spatters of it, the way it spatters when you've hit a calf before slitting its throat. In some rooms, there were old women huddling with their husbands, Monsieur Claussin and Monsieur Clouet. I saw Risa with her baby. But I could catch only glimpses, because they hurried us to a separate classroom—even though you could hear. It made you want to shit what you were hearing.
“And then an officer introduced himself—he was known to Léon and to Antoine,” but not to myself, and while he was telling us his name, a guard, from behind, hit Léon such a blow, a whack with his truncheon, that Léon fell over sideways and one of the lenses of his glasses shattered. So I reached over to get him, and I was hit, too, but I was bending, and the stick hit me on the side of my face, but it didn't knock me down. So I stood up. And they started on Léon first; he was the weakest of the three of us and would break first, they reasoned, and they told him they knew he was with the Maquis, and they wanted to know what we were doing at the signal crossing, where we had been and were going and so on, and Léon, who was sitting at a child's desk, put on the glasses with the shattered lens and looked up. I’ll never forget this. He began to read the signs that the teacher had put on the walls for the children. ‘Jean is eating an apple.’ ‘Michelle is playing with the cat.’ He spoke the words very slowly and distinctly, like a student learning to read. This made the officer furious. He yelled at Léon to stop, and Léon did, but as soon as he was asked a question, he would begin to read the signs again in the same voice. ‘Jean is eating an apple,’ ‘Michelle is playing with the cat.’
“Antoine, who was frightened for Léon, said Léon There were ways to answer questions without making the Gestapo angry. We'd talked about this before. But Léon, you see, he knew he was going to die, he'd seen it as we'd seen it, and he hated them so much he wouldn't even give his
own
name when, of course, they knew it.
“So the officer, his face was purple, he couldn't stand what Léon was doing. It was suicide on Léon's part, but it was beautiful in a way, too. And the officer screamed at the guards to tie our hands and take us to another room and then return, at least that's what I think he was saying, it was in German, but Antoine thought so, too, and we knew that if we were taken out, Léon would be tortured and killed right there. The guards began tying our hands behind our backs. Léon, who was coughing badly, looked up at us briefly and shook his head, as if to say, don't worry about me, don't think of me.
“And that was the last we saw of Léon.
“We got pushed out the door and down a hallway and shoved into an empty room, a smaller classroom with bigger desks, Monsieur Parmentier's room it was when I was a student there, and they tied us to the desks and left us.
“Antoine was on one side of the room, and I was on the other. He said, ‘Léon will die,’ and I said, ‘Maybe they'll just scare him,’ and Antoine shook his head. Then we struggled with the ropes for a bit, but I could not get free and neither could Antoine, but Antoine, who barely fit into the space between the chair and the desk, discovered something while he was struggling, and that was that two of the three bolts on the desk's pedestal had loosened. Later he said it was probably the work of a bored student. So Antoine began rocking back and forth violently arid thrashing about, he knew we only had minutes at best, and after a time the third bolt popped, and he was free. So he slid and walked his desk over to where I sat—it would have been funny maybe if it hadn't been so frightening, and actually I was so close to panic I did almost laugh, Antoine's face was bright pink and he was huffing and puffing like a pig—it has to be said—but he got himself at right angles to me, and We fumbled with each other's ropes from behind, both at once, then Antoine said to stop, it wasn't working, he said he'd get me free first. And that's what happened.
“When we were both free, Antoine put the desk back where it was supposed to be and put the bolts in and we took the ropes, so there wouldn't be any obvious evidence of an escape. Antoine was counting on the right hand not knowing what the left was doing in all the confusion, and that maybe the guards when they returned would think we'd been taken by other guards to another classroom. In any event, we opened a window and dropped out. I stood on Antoine's shoulders and closed the window.”
Henri shivered beside her in the bed in the dark. He was naked, but the shivering was from shock. He spoke nearly in a monotone, yet his voice was unsteady because of his shaking. She had put blankets on him and was holding him in the bed, but she couldn't stop his trembling. He had come into the kitchen just as the sun was beginning to set. She had nut her hand to her mouth and cried out when she saw the bruise on his face. He had stripped off all his clothes and bathed himself at the pump, waving her away when she tried to tend to the bruise. Naked, he had walked up to the bedroom, drawn the curtains and climbed into the bed.
“I can only stay a few minutes,” he said when he had told her his story. It was the most he had ever revealed of his experiences in the underground. “I’m going to have to go into hiding with Antoine for a while, until this thing with the reprisals is over. I’ve come for my papers and some money.”
She heard what he said, held him, and said nothing.
“You should know that they are taking women,” he said. “They have taken Emilie and Thérèse. And even Madame Bossart.”
“It's all right,” she said. “They won't come for me.”
“Claire …”
Henri began suddenly to make a deep, heaving, gutteral sound—an awful, rough sound—that frightened Claire and made her sit up in the bed. She thought her husband was about to be sick. Henri coughed into the pillow to muffle the terrible sounds of the crying. Claire, who had never heard her husband cry, lay down again and held him more tightly and thought of the pilot who was so near them, just beyond the wall. He must be hearing this, she thought.
“It's all right, Henri,” she said quietly. “It's all right.”
“No,” he said, stopping his crying nearly as quickly as he'd begun, wiping his nose on a pillow slip. “It's not all right.” His voice was thick and full of congestion.
He felt then with his hand for the hem of her skirt, raising it beneath the comforter so that he could put his fingers between her thighs. Without waiting for a sign from her, he snapped the garters of her stockings, rubbed his free hand hard along the length of her legs, rolling down the stockings to her ankles. He pulled down her underwear, so that it, too, was tangled at her feet. Raising himself onto his knees, he climbed over her. She looked for his face, but when it passed near hers, the room was so dark, she couldn't see him clearly. He bent his head into her neck, held the skin of her neck lightly with his teeth.
When she felt him coming, she shifted slightly, jerked her hips. He spilled himself onto her thigh.
He did not move or ask why.
She thought of the pilot beyond the wall. He must be hearing this, she was thinking.
Ten nooses hung from the balconies, ten stepladders beneath them. The boy watched Marcel's father drape the rope through the ironwork, expertly fashioning the nooses, as if this, and not carpentry, were his trade. The villagers who had been inside the school were Brought out into the square to be witnesses. From corners and doorways, a few other curious villagers joined the witnesses, so that by the time the German officer entered the square, there were perhaps fifty men and women on the cobblestones. There was among the villagers a quiet and anxious murmur. It was not clear yet who would be executed—but some of the women who had been inside the school and who had been let out and who could not now find their sons or husbands began to grow panicky, moving rapidly through the crowd, asking questions, receiving small, embarrassed shakes of the head in reply. The officer, whose name Jean did not know, stepped up on the small stone wall that surrounded the fountain in the center of the square. He read, in Walloon (for what good were reprisals if the people did not understand the reason?), the names of those who would be executed as payment for the assassinations of the three German soldiers. Jean was stunned to hear the name of the village Burghermaster, Jauquet, among the condemned, as well as a woman's name, Emilie Boccart. Several women in the crowd screamed and began to claw their way forward, but were held back by their neighbors, who knew that to confront the Gestapo was to invite a certain death for oneself. Jean watched as two Belgians led an elderly woman, who seemed overcome, quickly from the square.
The ten prisoners were led out, hatless and coatless, their hands tied behind their backs. Most of the prisoners had been beaten, and some had bloodstains on their clothes. The sun, slanting into the square and into the eyes of the condemned, harshly illuminated the black and purple swellings on the faces. Monsieur Balle, who looked to Jean odd and somehow naked without his spectacles and beret, had to be carried under the arms by two guards. The mother of one of the men rushed forward, screaming, to embrace her son. A guard hastily beat her back with his machine gun. She grasped the arm of another woman, then half fell, half staggered, to the cobblestones.
Jean picked up his pencil and tried to record the names of the ten condemned prisoners in his notebook: Sylvain Jacquemart, Emilie Boccart, Philippe Jauquet, Léon Balle, Roger Doumont … But Jean's hand began to shake so badly his penmanship became nearly illegible. Looking down at his violently shaking hand, the boy was suddenly afraid he might drop the pencil altogether, that it would slip through the pillars of the balustrade and clatter to the cobblestones, giving away his perch and catching the eye of one of the two dozen sentries surrounding the crowd with machine guns at the ready. Carefully, he put the pencil and notebook down, then slowly rose once more to peer around the wall.
The ten condemned were led to the stepladders, ordered to climb the steps. Monsieur Balle presented a problem, however, as he could not stand on his own. He was hoisted up the stepladder by an irritated guard, who held him in place like a marionette. The boy's eyes widened in disbelief as he saw that Jacquemart, in a bizarre twist of fate, would be hanged from his own balcony.
Father Guillaume, his broad priest's hat hiding his face, the skirts of his long robes sweeping over the cobblestones, stood before each of the condemned and made the sign of the cross. Only Balle, though he could not stand, summoned the will to resist this tainted blessing and spat at the priest.
At a signal from the officer in charge, sentries mounted each stepladder to place the nooses around the necks of the prisoners. Each guard then descended the stepladder and retrieved his machine gun. Jacquemart was looking for his wife in the crowd and calling her name; Doumont and Jauquet had their heads bent. Léon Balle was held up only by the noose itself. He seemed already to have lost consciousness. Emilie Boccart, startling the crowd, called out in her raspy voice,
Vive la Belgique!
The officer gave a command. At the signal, each guard jerked away a stepladder. There were gasps and wails from the villagers. The nine men and one woman were simultaneously hanged.
Jean watched as several of the bodies twisted and twitched. Shit ran down the trouser leg of Jacquemart and soiled his sock and shoe. Jean felt light-headed; he was certain he would be sick. The men who continued to twitch were beaten with machine guns by the guards. Jauquet's guard, infuriated by the Burghermaster's refusal to die quickly, sprayed the man with a burst of bullets, nearly severing the body.