He slid his hands down between her coat and her shoulders. She let herself go—what was there to lose now? He caught her weight at her back and lowered her to the ground. Sharp, dead straw stalks dug into her neck and pricked the back of her head. She was aware of heavy clothes, an awkwardness, of a sharp wind on her thighs. He put his mouth against her ear, pressed her hard. She thought that possibly he was speaking to her, but she wasn't sure. He tried to shield her with Henri's long coat. It was a kind of tent, she thought. She hoped that he would bury her, that he would cover her with himself, that he would stay there with her for days while the clouds moved.
In the end, she risked the truck. They tried the bicycle, he maneuvering with the one good foot, pulling the pedal up with his toe when he lost his momentum, but the going was slow and cumbersome.
Returning to the house, they had been overtaken by a kind of recklessness. He wanted to go out, he said—just this once, to be with her, however briefly, in a public place. As if there were not a war, and they were just a normal couple. She could not refuse him—his mood was infectious—but she would not go into Delahaut, she told him. If he wanted to venture into a village, she would drive him through the woods to a neighboring town where they would not be as conspicuous as in her own.
Henri's long, threadbare coat made him feel as though he were hiding more than just his nationality; it cloaked him, he felt, in an awkward and unattractive guilt. He wished he had his khakis on. The pallor of his skin and the beret Claire gave him to cover his light hair made him look, he knew, years older than he was. He supposed this was a good thing. Claire sat forward on the torn leather seat, with its tufts of stuffing and wire coils. He liked watching the way the inside of her left knee was exposed under her skirt. A flowered kerchief was poised at the crown of her head and tied hastily around the heavy mass of her hair.
In the woods, the road was uneven and sometimes treacherous. Occasionally the ruts in the road made the cab of the truck bounce violently from side to side; reflexively, Ted put his full weight on his bad leg, and winced. The muscles and tendons were still raw. Even though the day was cold, he couldn't stop himself from rolling down the window. The fresh air was delicious.
“I had a woods like this near my home when I was growing up,” he said when they were well inside the forest. “I used to spend a lot of time there.”
“Alone?” she asked. “You are playing?”
“Usually alone. Sometimes with a friend. I had a BB gun—do you know what that is?—and I used to shoot squirrels and then skin them. Pretty awful, now that I think about it. Frances hated it. She used to squeal when I brought the skins back. I was twelve, thirteen maybe.”
“I am also,” she said. “I am playing in these woods as a small child. Very many hours I am alone here. But I am not hunting.” She smiled. “I am playing in … old stories?”
“Fairy tales?” he asked.
‘Yes, fairy tale.” She smiled again. “Beautiful stories of princess and bad wolves. You know these stories?”
He loved her smile.
“These stories,” she said. “I am never thinking of this before, but is not true, these stories. Yes, there are wolves, and they are eating children and women and men, but the ends are not happy. We cannot tell children these stories now. Is wrong.”
“We don't know that yet,” he said quietly, looking away from her and out the window.
“But, yes, we are knowing this. The old woman I am telling you they are beating and sending away? Is happy ending for this woman?”
She stopped the truck, the engine still running. “Is there,” she said, pointing to her left into the woods.
“What is?” he asked.”
“Is there you are found. The boy is telling me.”
Ted leaned toward her window, straining to see beyond the fencelike wall of trees. There was a small clearing fifty feet away, where the light seemed slightly brighter.
“I hid underneath a bush,” he said. “The boy found me there. He followed my tracks, I suppose. I was delirious. I remember opening my eyes and seeing his face. I had no idea where I was. Not even what country I was in. It's funny. When I was his age, I can remember tracking animals in the woods. Deer. I wonder if he thought it was an adventure. Tracking a soldier.”
“I think he is frightened,” she said.
“Yes,” he said, sitting back.
They emerged from the woods., The road was better here—past fields and some farmhouses.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“The village where I am taking you is Rance. Is not Gestapo in this village now, but still is very dangerous. In Belgium we have the people who are helping the Ger-mans, and we are not certain what persons are good and what are not. Is like the old stories, no? The animal in the sheep's skin?”
“Wolf.”
“So you are being very careful and not speaking any word.”
“I promise,” he said, smiling slightly as if he had been scolded. He reached along the back of the seat, put his hand inside the collar of her coat. He touched the skin at the back of her neck. The gesture caused her kerchief to slip back over her hair. He leaned toward her, kissed the shoulder of her coat. Moving her arm, she gently nudged him away. She stopped the truck for the second time and turned to him.
“We are going back?” she asked.”
“No.”
“In one hour,” she said haltingly, “the village is empty, and there are no people in the café. If we are making this journey, we are making it now, or is…” She stopped, searching for a word. “… Fou.”
“Fou?”
“Madness,” she said.
He moved his body away from hers, but kept his hand on her sleeve. Anything to be touching her.
Rounding the corner of an alley, poised to enter the village square, Ted had his first misgivings. They had been walking as though Claire were on his arm, as though this were merely a midday stroll, but it was he who leaned his weight on her at each footfall of the bad leg. They were in shadow from a church, and he made her wait. He couldn't tell if she was frightened or not—nothing in her breathing or the touch of her arm betrayed her.
Across the cobblestones of this unfamiliar village was a row of shops with foreign words in beautiful script painted on the glass fronts. To the left was a school, with children's paper snowflakes still taped to paned windows. Just to the right of the shops was the café, where several green metal tables were scattered about near the door. Some of the tables were occupied with pairs of older women and pairs of men. He noticed that there were no couples, nor any young men. He tried to imagine how this cafe” might have looked a few years ago, but this thought, inextricably woven as it was with the possibility of having known Claire before the war, before she married, caused a painful tug inside his chest. Perhaps there'd have been a table of young men and women, drinking red wine, some rowdiness, a few songs badly sung. The cafe owner himself might have come out and joined the crowd. Someone would be clowning, trying to attract the attention of a certain girl. And he and Claire would be with them or apart, and would be touching, sharing the noon meal.
He took a step forward and kept his face averted when a stranger crossed his path. Even so, in the short journey from the alley across the square to the café, he sensed scrutiny. What was it that gave him away? he wondered. Was it his height? At the table, Claire gestured for him to sit sideways, so that his face was not in full view. He couldn't touch her, or even look at her for very long, and she had told him not to speak. A waiter came to the table as Ted was arranging his leg beneath it. The waiter spoke in rapid French to Claire, who answered him almost curtly. Ted's chair wobbled on uneven legs.
He allowed his eyes to meet hers—that watchful, lovely gray. A gray, he realized, he had seen before: the gray of the sun breaking through a low stratus. Looking past Claire, he noticed at the next table two elderly women dressed nearly identically in black cloth coats, black scarves, and sturdy shoes. Beside them, on the cobblestones, each had a string bag of parcels. One of the women, who had a large and livid bump at the end of her nose, raised her face and caught Ted's eye. Her neck was wattled and fell in a fold above the collar of her coat. Slowly, so as not to appear to be evasive, he slid his eyes from hers and studied the shops opposite. When Ted looked back toward Claire, he observed that the old woman was still looking at him. Worse, she was also talking to her companion.
Ted looked down at the table.
The waiter brought a cup of coffee for Claire, a tall glass of thin beer for Ted. He took a thirsty swallow and set the glass down. “I think we've been seen,” he said. “I’m sorry. This was a terrible idea.”
She made a small surprised movement with her hand. Her eyes, however, were expressionless.
Ted watched as the two old women gathered their possessions and slowly, leaning for support on the table, rose to a standing position. To his horror, the woman with the bump at the end of her nose approached Claire.
Leaning over Claire's shoulder, the woman in black murmured a few words. Claire kept her eyes focused on Ted and nodded, but said nothing. The woman straightened her back and, with her companion, made her way slowly across the uneven cobblestones. Claire waited until she was gone.
“The woman is wishing me the luck,” she said finally in an almost inaudible voice. Ted could hear the quaver in her words. “And to you, she is expressing gratitude.”
She took a sip of coffee. Her hand was shaking. His glass was already empty, he realized. He wanted another drink. Badly. How could he have been spotted so quickly?
“We should go,” he said urgently.
She shook her head. “No. Is important we sit here calm,”
“How can it be so obvious?” he asked. “I felt it all across the square. Is it-my height?”
“Yes,” she said, considering him for a time. “That and other things I am seeing here and not in the house. See now, you are sitting sideways to the table, and your leg is folded over the other at your knee. Is very … elegant? But not so Belgian, I think. And your hands here.” She drew a line along one of his fingers with her own. She let her fingertip linger on his hand. “I am loving your hands, but they are not Belgian also.” She studied him. “And the sitting. Your back is bent in its chair.” She made a curve with her hand. “Relaxed, yes?”
“But not Belgian.”
“No, is not even the English. Just the American, I think. Even in the old coat and hat, you are looking American. And is your eyes also. Maybe now I think is your eyes first they are seeing.”
“Have you known many Americans?” he asked.
“Only one,” she said.
He felt a small worm of jealousy. “Was he a soldier? A pilot?”
She looked away from him. “Is two Americans the Maquis is finding with their parachutes in the north. They are being sent to me, and I am making the room ready. And then there is mistake, and the Americans coming to me are betrayed. One is shot in the head by Germans, and I have never see him. The other one I see. He is shot in leg. Not like you. Here.” She pointed to her thigh. “And the bleeding is terrible. And the American is dying that night in my house.”
Ted nodded slowly. He let the worm crawl back into its hole.
He turned his head and examined a row of baguettes inside the café window. What if the woman in black was a collaborator? He and Claire might even now be under arrest. The thought of Claire arrested and interrogated made him ill.
“Have you seen many people die?” he asked her.
She took a slow sip of coffee, replaced the cup in its saucer. “Some,” she said.
“Three, four years ago, would you have believed this?”
“Believed … ?”
“This.” He gestured to encompass the entire square. “The deaths. The fear. The not knowing if the guy sitting next to you is a traitor or a friend. The fact that one morning you can be talking to a neighbor, and that afternoon she is hanged—for no reason other than that she lived in your village.”
“We are knowing this war is coming for many years,” she said.
“The unthinkable becomes the thinkable.”
“Pardon?”
“One day, getting shot at in a B 17, or watching a friend die, or going without food is no longer the horror it used to be. In a way, it even becomes romantic.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head firmly. “Is never the romance. We are never forgetting what is for. You, perhaps, you come so far and is not war in America, is hard to know why we are wanting to fight so much.”
No, he thought, there wasn't a war
in
America, but Americans were dying all the same. He thought of his gunner—that awful, gaping wound. You could spend the entire war just thinking of that wound. The man's body, the center of the man, gone. And if you were the man's wife and remembered the man's body, how did you stand it?
But of course the wife would never know how her husband had died. She'd be told only that he'd gone quickly and hadn't suffered. If Ted were back in England, he'd be writing the letter himself.
One letter out of thousands.
One story out of thousands.
“l want to ask you a question,” he said. “It was a kind of test they put to us in flight training.” Her face, he thought as she cocked her head slightly, was intelligent, canny even, but essentially trusting.
“You're driving along a coast road in a jeep. You've got to get your crew to another base in order to fly a mission. It's a narrow road, one lane only, not wide enough for two vehicles. On one side, it's a sheer drop over a cliff. On the other is a solid rock wall.”
She nodded.
“You go around a corner, and suddenly you see that a schoolbus full of children is coming right at you. There's no time to stop, and the bus has nowhere to go except through the space where you are. One of you has to go over the cliff.”
She nodded again.
“What do you do?” he asked.
She rested her chin on her hand. She seemed to be staring at a point just over his left shoulder. He didn't know if she had entirely understood the question, but just as he was about to repeat it, she answered him.
“Is terrible question,” she said, shaking her head. “And is terrible answer. But I am understanding the answer in the war. The bus is going over the cliff, no?”