The seeping light brought to the surface, like a photographic image emerging in its emulsion, the outline of Stella and her smile in the wrinkled picture on the floor. He had betrayed his fiancée already, he knew, even though he had not touched this Belgian woman lying beside him. Simply to have admitted to his desire for this woman was to have betrayed Stella.
But he must force himself now to think of Stella—who
was
innocent—and of Henri Daussois as well. And he couldn't think of Henri without hearing the chilling sounds through the wall just hours ago—twelve hours ago?—when Henri and his wife were in the bed. He could not understand the story Henri told, but the meaning of the odd, choking sound and the coughing was unmistakable, as were the other sounds that followed, sounds that he would like to erase forever from his memory.
It was bad enough to think of betraying Stella, but the betrayal of Henri would be even worse. For all that Ted wished that Claire's husband would disappear, the inescapable truth was that Henri Daussois was someone who had helped to save his life and the lives of other airmen, who might even, at that moment, be risking his own life so as not to reveal Ted's whereabouts. To touch Claire, or even to have told her, as he did in the kitchen, that her voice was beautiful, was to have trespassed I against the husband and, indeed, against all the people who had conspired to try to save him.
He looked again at the small space in which he had been hidden for nineteen days. He heard again the German voices, the footsteps just beyond his head. At this moment, this attic was the only world that existed—a world he might be content to remain in forever. She had said
there are no bargains.
And he himself knew that the war itself had changed the rules, twisted them beyond all recognition.
He lowered his knee, shifted his weight slightly He reached over for the photograph of Stella, tucked it between the pages of the poetry book. He closed the book. He leaned onto his side, propped up on his forearm. His face was inches from Claire's. He studied her face, the shape of her head. With his finger, he traced the unusual outline of her mouth. The touch wakened her, and she opened her eyes. He put a finger to her lips—an echo of the warning she had made to him twice before.
She looked at him, didn't move.
“Do you understand?” he asked.
She hesitated, then nodded slightly.
He bent and put his lips to the skin of her throat. He rested his face there, inhaling her. Moving his arm, he reached for her hair, her heavy dark blond hair, and, as he had wanted to do for so long, he lost his hand inside its weight After a time, he sensed a small movement, then felt her fingers at the back of his neck.
He sat up then and opened her coat. He lifted a strap of her nightgown away from her skin. In doing so, he felt a strange mixture of peace and excitement. He had then an image of the hallucination he had experienced in the woods. He was on his knees, and he was unwinding a, woman.
H
E PEERED THROUGH THE GLASS, UNFASTENED THE METAL
rod, and opened the window. Though the air was still cool, he could smell the earth. He remembered spring in Ohio, when farmers emerged after long winters to till the soil, transforming a rocky, gray landscape into a rich, humpy black. But this, he knew, was merely a false spring, a tease. It was still only February.
He made his fiftieth circuit—past the door, rounding the table by the stove, over by the pump, past the dresser and the coat pegs, along the other side of the table, and back to the door. He estimated the circuit at twenty-eight feet. A hundred times, roughly half a mile. If she didn't return soon, he would start on the stairs.
He had been here more than a month now, twenty days since the house had been raided by Gestapo. Twenty days since Henri left and went into hiding with the Maquis. Twenty days that Ted and Claire had made love. Stopped in his circuit, as he was stopped every time he thought of them together, he believed he could remember distinctly every single day of the twenty, every time he had touched her.
The first was the most tentative, the most chaste, neither “knowing the other. All around them there was a sense of urgency, as though they might have only that one time, as though any minute they might be found in their lair. He remembered having watched her all through the night, waking her with the touch of his finger outlining her mouth. Oddly, she seemed already to know that he would touch her. She pulled his neck slightly toward her, and he knew by that small gesture that they would make love. Beneath the coat, she was wearing the ivory nightgown. He slipped the thin straps from her shoulders and looked at her breasts. She wouldn't touch his clothes (was that because they had once belonged to someone she knew?), and waited for him to half undress himself. He remembered that there was nothing coy or hesitant about her. He kissed her, and he knew he would never forget the relief the kissing brought him. Her skin was smooth—buttery was what he kept thinking—and he felt, under the nightgown, the nightgown raised now to her hips, the wonderful curve of her side, her rib cage to her legs. She never spoke. It had been a long time since he had been with a woman, and he was afraid that he might ruin it for her, but together they had found each other. He recalled the exquisite mix of fear and happiness, an odd sensation he had never experienced before. Just a few hours earlier, they had nearly been caught by the Gestapo. He was never so keenly aware of time as he was that night, of separate minutes, seconds, and all that could be felt during each. Afterward, he didn't want to sleep. He had the sensation that if he did, he might miss something important. He wrapped her again in her coat, a kind of cocoon. Her hair was tangled, and her bare feet protruded from the hem. He held her while she slept. He remembered clearly that when she opened her eyes and saw him with her, she smiled. Before he could speak, she took his hand and, unexpectedly and thrillingly, put her mouth on his fingers. It was the most sexual thing that had ever happened to him, and even now the image had power over him: He couldn't picture her mouth on his fingers without almost immediately wanting to make love to her. As he did then, again, before he himself finally slept.
He had memories now, a hundred memories in twenty days. It seemed extraordinary to him that the happiest days of his life, all twenty of them, had occurred within this house, within this war. He thought it possible these had been Claire's happiest days as well. He knew he made her happy, he was certain of that. Though she seldom spoke to him of what it was they were doing, there was now a contented gesture she made of arching her back, running her fingers up through her hair and shaking it out. Sometimes when she did this, she turned to him and smiled. He loved watching her do this when she was naked, her breasts rising with her arms.
For two days after the Gestapo came, they hid in the attic room, emerging only briefly for necessities. Most of that time he held her against him under the comforters. She seemed to have a great need to sleep. They spoke little, sensing perhaps that this interlude was fragile, and that anything, the wrong word, the wrong memory, might shatter it. On the third day, when they had not eaten in twenty-four hours, he could see that Claire was feeling light-headed, stumbling almost imperceptibly as she got up from the floor to put on her dress. He caught her by the arm. He told her he would go out to get them food and water. She shook her head and asked him, Are you mad?, and said she would go, she'd been planning it. With his leg still a handicap, he could not argue. He remembered the hours she was gone as an agony. Every new sound, every creak in the old farmhouse, made him think they had her. Using the forest route she'd relied on earlier, she had reached Madame Omloop's. She'd returned to the house, finally, with meager rations and horrifying news: Ten villagers had been hanged; thirty-seven had been deported east to prison camps. Many had been beaten, including Jean Benoît, the boy who had found Ted in the woods.
Ted held her as she wept. “I know these people they are hanging,” she said quietly. “I am knowing them all my life.”
He put his hand at the back of her head and pressed her face into his shoulder. His own anger made his chest tight. He had hated the Nazis, had sometimes been terrified by them in the air. But even then he had not truly understood the ugliness that was at the core of this war. Apart from a brief glimpse of a face behind a cockpit window, he had never really been forced to see the enemy. The planes provided a kind of buffer. It wasn't just the metal; it was the deceptive sense that the air war was a game—a game of skill and wits. He knew pilots who spoke almost reverently about the German aviators with whom they skirmished in the air, it was easy to be lulled into thinking that like minded men were fighting with one another. But here, on Belgian soil, in a village where ten innocent hostages had been hanged, there was no buffer, no illusion.
“I think we should get out of here as soon as possible,” he said. “I think we should try to get across the border.”
She drew away from him, averted her eyes. “No,” she said, “is not possible now” She wiped her cheeks with her fingers and shook her hair out. “And also,” she said, clearing her throat, “I am hearing that it is not me the Gestapo are wanting. It is Henri. Is better for us if we stay here and are quiet.”
He couldn't persuade her, and with his leg still badly weakened he couldn't force her to leave. She was stronger than he was. Even so, it was five days before she dared to venture out again. This time they lay together and talked.
“Do you have other family in Delahaut?” he asked her one morning.
“They are moving just before the war to Charleroi. My mother is frail now, and I am last of eleven babies.”
“Eleven children?” In his family, there had only been the three: Frances, Ted, and Matt, and at times that had seemed a lot.
“Yes, is crowded with many children when I am growing up, but some, they are already old and having children of their own and I am aunt to persons who are older than me.”
“Complicated.”
“In Delahaut, the family is … mmm … superior? Yes? Family is most important. Our festivals are in the family. And many of us are relations to each other. I am cousin to Henri.”
Ted, who had been lying by her side, propped himself up on his elbow. “Cousin? Is that allowed?”
“Is far cousin, so is all right.” She looked away from him. She was naked under the comforter. He traced her hairline to her temple, then her ear, trying to think of how to ask this next question casually. He licked the whorls in her ear. In the end, he simply asked it.
“Did you marry Henri for love? Do you love him now? The words came out more hurried than he had hoped.
She looked back at him. They had never used the word
love
between them. Once she had said to him that she adored his face. But not love.
“I know from very small child I am marrying Henri. It is not arranged, like in the old days, but is known. So I think that love is not so important in such a marriage, yes?”
He almost smiled. Perhaps he did smile.
“Someday, maybe, my mother is coming to my house and you are meeting her. She is
marraine de guerre.
“
“What is that?”
“She is godmother of the war.”
“I don't understand.”
“My mother, she writes to the Belgian soldiers who are in German prisons because they do not have anyone else to write to them. And when she does, after a time, they fall in love with her, and they are sending her love letters, and she is not young woman, seventy-three. I am loving to read these letters. Very sweet, no?”
They talked about her childhood and his, about his Frances and her mother, about what it was like for him in England, about how she had hoped to go to university. They seldom spoke of the war itself except when it intruded upon them. And after the five days, she had to go out again. They had run out of food and water. That time she came back with the information that the Gestapo had retreated to St. Laurent, the extra reinforcements to Florennes. A strange kind of normalcy, she said, had settled over the village. Even the school had reopened, though she could not imagine how the teachers had managed to remove the bloodstains from the classrooms.
He rounded the corner again, looked out the open window for Claire. He had promised her he would not leave the house. Sometimes at the doorstep she found packages of food: cheese, carrots, onions, sausage, loaves of bread, and other items—a bar of soap, a pair of socks, once even a pack of cigarettes they vowed to ration and then smoked ravenously in one day. These packages, Claire had explained, were offerings from villagers who, though they themselves were not within the Maquis, were nevertheless supportive of the Resistance.
“They know I’m here?” he asked. “That you're hiding me?”
“Yes,” she said. “Some.”
“And aren't you worried about that? That you might be betrayed?”
“Yes,” she said evenly. “I am always worrying about the denunciations. Is every day I am thinking this. But these people who are leaving the packages? I am believing that they are good people and are wanting to help us.”
“Why would they do that?” he asked her.
“You don't understand,” she said. “The Belgians, we think the Americans are … saving us. Are our saviours, no? The French”—she flip-flopped her hand—”maybe they are not so sure, but in Belgium we are sure.”
He remembered being confused by this information. “But Claire,” he said, “how could you or anyone else possibly think me a saviour when I’ve been responsible for all these deaths?”
“You are not responsible.”
“Of course I am. There must be people in the village who
hate
the day the plane fell. Ten hanged? Thirty-seven deported?”
“You are again not understanding. Sometimes in Belgium we are receiving … sometimes the English and American bombs fall on Belgium villages by … mmm… mistake? Or villages are bombed directly because there is German military base nearly to them, but the Belgians, we are understanding this. Without the aviators, Belgium is not ever returning.” Her hand fluttered and trailed away.