“The name of your plane …,” she said from the pantry.
“Woman's Home Companion,“ he called in to her.
“On the side of the plane,” she said, “is a picture that is making the men laugh, and when I am asking, they are not telling me.”
When she returned to the kitchen, the pilot was smiling to himself. “Someday I’ll tell you,” he said. “But not tonight.”
“Before you are leaving?”
“Yes. All right.”
She cleaned away all traces of the meal, put the razor and the soap in a drawer, hid the dirty clothes and the towel beneath the bedding in the basket. She scattered the remaining coals in the hearth. She took her coat from the hook, then drew the blackout curtains so that they were in total darkness.
“You do this every night?”
“I am being careful every night, but this night my husband is telling me to be the best careful.”
“The coat is…”
“So they are thinking I am leaving.”
“Have already left. That's why you don't lock the door?”
“Yes.”
“And if they come?”
“They are not come.”
“Then why…?”
“Is habit.”
She stood beside him in the darkness.
“I am putting my hand here,” she said, touching him lightly on the elbow. “I am seeing the house even in the dark, yes?”
She guided him through the rooms to the staircase. He felt his way up, maneuvered his way into the bedroom. The moonlight through the open windows gave them some light.
“Chilly in here,” he said.
“I am having the windows open before so the air is clean.”
He stood over her, a large presence in the small room. He had braced himself with one arm against the slanted ceiling.
“Claire…”
Instinctively, she stepped back, felt with her own hand for the post of the footboard of the bed. The bed was now painful to her. Too intimate, too reminiscent of the acts the American had overheard just hours before.
“Claire, you shouldn't put yourself at risk for me,” he said.
She shook her head and turned away. She laid her coat over the footboard.
“I am doing this many times,” she said as casually as she could, folding and then refolding the coat. “Is nothing.”
She watched him turn, move aside the coat hangers, open the false back of the armoire.
When she was certain that the small trapdoor was shut, she walked to the armoire and leaned her head against it.
The beer had made her not sleepy, but rather restless. What sleep she had managed to get since she undressed and slid into the bed was fitful. Her dreams fled behind heavy doors before she could catch them.
Perhaps she was afraid. Alone in this house. She wondered where Henri was at this very moment. Was he cold? Had he eaten? Did he have a bed to sleep in, or was he, too, hiding on the floor of someone's attic? Ought she to have gone with Henri? she asked herself. But wouldn't he be more at risk with a woman in tow?
She pulled the comforters up around her bare shoulders. Henri gave off heat. When he was not in the bed, she needed extra blankets. She thought of Leon with his shattered glasses. Was he dead now? Beaten to death and taken away? What was it like, precisely, to be beaten to death? Which blow actually caused the death, or was it that the whole body, at one particular instant, simply gave up? And what of Therese and Emilie? Would they be sent to Ravensbrück, where she had heard they sent the women? No one really seemed to know for certain. If a villager was taken away, it was never officially stated where he or she had gone. And Claire personally had never heard of anyone returning from the concentration camps. Although if that were true, how then did any of them know there was a Ravensbrück, a Buchenwald, except for the stories that came down the line? There must be paperwork, of course, but the paperwork would not tell the stories she had heard—terrible stories she could barely take in. Being sent east to Germany was to be sent into a fog, a terrible, thick fog in which no one was ever recognized and from which no one ever seemed to return.
The fast crunch of tires on the gravel made her sit up quickly in the bed. She felt the tight, unnatural beat of her heart. She heard four doors open, precisely, then the slam of two.
At the first German voice, she catapulted from the bed, drew the covers over the pillow in one swoop, then frantically opened the armoire door. A small cry of panic escaped her. She swept aside the clothes, opened the trapdoor. Abruptly she stepped into the attic, startling the American, who sat up. She put a finger to her lips. His face showed his confusion, as if he thought he was still dreaming. She heard footsteps on the gravel, a knock, a shout in German. Sickeningly, she realized she had left the coat still folded at the foot of the bed. Scrambling in her nightgown, she crawled through the armoire into the bedroom, seized the coat, dragged it to the crawl space, hurled it inside. He pulled the armoire door shut, rearranged the hangers. She heard footsteps in the kitchen now—a murmur of voices, of commands.
He stepped back into the attic room, silently shut the false door. He lay down, rolled onto his back. Claire, sitting against the wall, had her fist to her mouth. She and the pilot watched each other as they listened to the raid outside their hiding place.
She closed her eyes only once—when she heard the first footsteps on the stairs. The Gestapo were making no attempt at stealth—their boots were rapid on the stairs, as if they were running. She heard one man, then another, in the bedroom. A whomp as something hard smacked down on the bed. The whoosh of comforters and sheets being thrown back. If they felt the sheets, she thought, they would know. A dresser drawer wrenched open. Clothes flung to the floor. She heard the clatter of her rosary beads. A man on his knees, shuffling—peering under the bed? Then another was at the armoire, his boots not two feet away through the wall from the pilot's head. Claire heard the opening of the door, the sweeping of linens and garments to the floor the poke of metal on wood, testing it. If the man saw, in the shadows of the armoire, the demarcations of the false back, Claire and the American would be found within seconds.
A tired voice. From the other, a note of weariness and frustration. The two voices sounded surprisingly young, not boys exactly, but young men nevertheless. She heard the bed creaking as if a man had just sat on it. A joke about falling asleep. A gruff voice from below with a question. A quick submissive answer. Again, the creaking of the bed as a man stood up. The retreat of boots. She waited. Only one pair of footfalls down the stairs. Why was the other man not descending as well? Was he looking for something? Could he see, from the head of the stairs, the outline of the attic door in the sliver of space behind the wardrobe? She heard the boots return to the bedroom, bit her knuckles hard to keep from making a sound. The man picked up an item of clothing from the floor. She could hear the swish of fabric—a faint and silken sound. Perhaps it was a slip, she thought, or her dressing gown. She did not hear the garment drop to the floor. Finally, footfalls on the stairs.
The American raised his head a fraction. She put a finger to her lips, left it there. He studied her face. A chair scraped in the kitchen. Water ran at the pump. The tread of boot heels on the stone. She heard the distinctive sound of a man pissing into a metal pot. Then the rattle of the glass panel in the kitchen door as it was shut. She counted carefully now. Two car doors opened; four closed. Unless they were trying to trick her, they had not left anyone behind.
Again, the crunch of tires on gravel.
She dropped her head and rested it on her knees. She hugged her legs.
“There were four of them?”
“Yes.”
“They've gone?”
“Yes.”
“You're positive?”
“No.”
“They were Gestapo?”
“Yes.”
“How can you tell?”
“Only the Germans have automobiles.”
“What did they say?”
/>
“I am not hearing all of it.”
“Anything?”
“They are saying I might be in hiding with Henri.”
“And?”
“One of them is saying he wants to climb into my bed.”
“That was when they were laughing?”
“Yes.”
“Will they come back?”
“Is possible.”
“Should we leave? Get out of here?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Is safer here.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“You're trembling.”
“Is cold.”
“Here, put your coat around you.”
She looked up. He was sitting, holding her coat open for her. She slid one arm into a cool sleeve, wrapped the coat around her nightgown, slipped the other arm in. She tugged her hair loose from the collar. His face was very near to hers.
“Stay inside here,” he said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Sleep here. They might come back.”
“I cannot do this. Is not right.”
“What's right is for you to be careful. Listen to me. You might not be so lucky next time.”
She thought about that. If she hadn't already been awake, would she have heard the car as soon as she did? Could she have reacted as quickly?
“I am just sitting here for a while. But you sleep.”
“Maybe we should sleep in shifts.”
She tilted her head. “I am not understanding you.”
“Taking turns. I sleep for a while. Then I wake you and you sleep for a while.”
She pondered this. “Yes, all right. You are sleeping first.”
He shook his head. “Claire, I’ve been doing nothing but sleeping for days. Let's exchange places. You lie down, and I’ll keep watch. If I hear anything, I’ll wake you.”
She looked at him a long time. When he had gone to bed, he had taken his trousers off and folded them in the corner. Now he reached for them, awkwardly maneuvered each foot into the pant legs, pulled the trousers up and buttoned them. He moved away from the bedding, closer to the wall, and indicated she should lie down. When she hesitated, he put his hand on her elbow, to guide her.
Wordlessly, she lay down where he had so recently been. The pallet still held his warmth. She let him pull the comforters over her, and with her coat on as well, she no longer felt cold, and her shivering subsided. The linens smelled wonderfully fresh. From a sitting position, he reached over her and opened the attic trapdoor and then the armoire door a half inch.
“What is this?” she asked.
“I always crack the door a bit for air,” he said.
She thought about this, her thoughts floating and not sequential.
“Then you are hearing me in my bedroom,” she whispered.
He didn't answer her.
She fell almost at once into a dreamless sleep.
There was a stillness in her sleep, and he thought of this stillness as a kind of innocence. He had been watching her for hours. When the moon set, the outline of her face was barely discernible, lost to him. Now, with daybreak approaching, there was the slow seepage of shadowy light into the attic. Her face and mouth were again visible.
Her body was a comma, slightly curled, her hands folded into each other at the bottom of her throat. He sat against the wall, the bad leg outstretched, the good leg bent at the knee, on which he rested his forearm.
The suggestion of innocence had begun, he knew, before the sleeping. It had been there all along in her language—her throaty language with its halting phrases, its ungrammatical sentences, the poetry of her mistakes. Yet her language, he understood, was deceptive, not innocence itself, but an innocent facade. Were he to try to speak in her language, in French, he'd be taken for less than an innocent—an imbecile. And only he knew how deeply uninnocent he was.
Just as she was. He thought of the canniness of her judgment, the necessary wisdom of survival. No one in this country, and perhaps in all of Europe—except the smallest of the children—could be counted among the innocent, he thought. Simply to have known what they had been forced to know was already loss of innocence.
He wondered about the boy. The courage of that one particular child. Could he, Ted, at ten or twelve, have accomplished such a rescue, dared to attempt such a rescue? He would like to know what had happened to the boy: How would his family have fared in the reprisals? She spoke the word executions, and there was no poetic mistake in that word. She had known things from the very beginning, had given them to him sparingly.
He studied her sleeping face. Her hair had fallen across her forehead. Her mouth was slightly open. He had desired her since the first night she brought him to her farmhouse, but he didn't completely understand this desire. Why this woman and not another? The answer couldn't simply be that she and not someone else was here, because there were other women available, in England, when his physical need was keen—and yet he had not then felt such desire, not as he was feeling it now. He knew only that it was a strong, physical attraction, not entirely sexual, a desire to be attached to her, touch her. He desired all of this woman, particularly those aspects of her he didn't even know about yet. It wasn't simply her face, though he understood already he would never tire of her mouth; nor was it merely her body, which he had seen in her nightgown in the candlelight, saw just hours ago through the cotton of a similar nightdress before he offered her the coat. Nor was it only the timbre of her voice, rich and throaty, a voice that some times mesmerized him, that he could hear in his mind even now. Nor, even, could it be merely a combination of these physical attributes. (Or could it be? Was it possible that one particular constellation of features produced in another an unavoidable chemistry?) But his desire was more than physical—he understood that already. It embraced what she had not given him yet. He wanted more than just the halting phrases. It was as though he had been teased by the mystery of her language, by the very fact of this barrier, and now was destined to pursue a woman who could never be fully known, and thus would remain forever desirable.
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, proppe
d 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.
FEBRUARY 8, 1944
HE 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.