He had stood off to one side in the shadows, watching as she turned the truck around in the dark. He remembered the trip from her house to his, when her body had shaken so violently she was barely able to manage the gears or the clutch. The back road they had taken was badly rutted, the ruts frozen into ridges and heaves, and he knew the truck bed, thrusting and shaking over the uneven surface, had to have been an agony for the American. Driving away from Jean last night, Madame Daussois had turned on the- lights only when she was a good hundred meters from the place where they had parked. They shocked Jean, their sudden brightness, illuminating each tree, casting harsh shadows that moved, and he felt anxious, as though a search beam had fallen suddenly upon her. He bit the inside of his cheek. He waited untilhe could no longer hear the motor of the truck before he started up the long dirt drive to his own house. “Benoit.”
Jean turned at the voice. Pierre Albert, a year older than Jean, stood close to him, tossing a wooden ball from one hand to the other. His eyes were narrowed. Pierre's cousin, Jan, had been a saboteur with the Maquis in Charleroi and had been shot by the Belgian SS when caught in the basement of his flat with explosives. Pierre never tired of telling the story-as though the heroism of his cousin conferred upon Pierre an honor he himself had earned.
“You got the stick.”
Jean said nothing. Marcel looked anxious. Pierre was a bully, and Jean knew that Marcel was afraid of him.
“For what?”
“You know for what,” Jean said, now painfully forcing his rigid fingers into the pockets of his trousers.
“So why weren't you at school?”
“I was sick.”
Pierre sucked his teeth. He closed one eye.
“My father says he knows where the Americans are.”
Jean said nothing. He doubted that Pierre's father knew where any of the Americans were. Or if he did, that he'd have told his son.
“I saw the plane myself,” Pierre boasted.
Again, Jean was silent He did not remember seeing Pierre in the pasture. Telling Pierre Albert he was a liar, however, would only make things worse.
Marcel shifted his feet, looked as though he would like to join the other boys at pitch-the-pebble. “Come on, Jean,” he said.
Pierre turned and sneered. “Where are you going?”
Marcel stopped his retreating movement. Pierre looked back at Jean.
“So you were sick,” Pierre said.
Jean stood still, didn't answer him.
“You know where I think you were?” Pierre asked, tossing the ball so that, as it descended, it barely skimmed Jean's face. Jean refused to move.
“I think you were sneaking off to St. Laurent to tell the Germans, that's where I think you were.”
Jean opened his mouth to protest—this he would riot allow! But before he could speak, the bell rang loudly in the courtyard, momentarily surprising him. He heard Marcel's sigh of relief.
Pierre thrust the wooden ball inches in front of Jean's face. Jean heard the hated words as the older boy turned his back and ran.
Fils du collabo.
Claire knelt beside the airman. She took her scarf from her head, opened her coat. In the candlelight she could see the man's face for the first time. He looked oddly peaceful, as though he were merely sleeping. He was twenty-one or -two, she guessed. The light made shadows of the bones of his face, the shape of his mouth. There were cuts on his forehead and cheeks, and his mouth was badly swollen. Briefly, she ran the back of her fingers along the side of his cheek. As she sometimes had for the others, she wondered who might be dreaming of this man even then, which mother, which woman loved him, prayed for him, received his letters, counted the days until he might come home. If he did not regain consciousness— and she felt no certainty that he would—she would never know. She unzipped the flight suit to the middle of his chest, felt with her fingers for the chain. She held his identification disc in her hand, the metal slightly warm from his skin. She dropped the tags to the stone floor. She wanted to scream. The magnitude of the carnage was stupefying. She thought of the boys barely men who died unthinkable deaths far from home; of the men and women of her own country tortured to death simply because of the accident of their birth. No matter how long she thought about it, how deeply it had entered her life, how long it lay in her house, she did not understand how this thing had swept over them, how their lives had been forever altered. And if there ever came a time when she might understand what had happened to the Belgians, to the people of her own village, she would never be able to fathom why young men came from so far away to defend a country about which they knew nothing. Some of the soldiers she had tended had not known before the war that Belgium even existed. They could not accurately locate her country on a map. Belgium meant nothing to them—nothing real, nothing substantial—and yet they continued to come. And continued to die.
Henri returned from parking the truck behind the barn, bringing with him the sharp chill of the frigid night. Claire looked up at her husband from the stone floor on which she was kneeling Henri's face was drawn, gray, exhausted. There was grime in the creases of his skin. He'd been stunned when, just minutes earlier, he'd bicycled into the gravel drive and found his wife in the truck bed with an injured airman. She knew that he was afraid of this work, that he was afraid of the presence of the foreign airman in his home. And yet he had never turned a soldier or a Jew away. He had never refused a request from the Maquis.
“I’m going for Madame Dinant,” he said from the doorway.
Claire nodded. She wanted to tell him to go upstairs to bed, but she knew that was impossible. The airman couldn't be left alone, and Henri would be able to bicycle to Dinant's much more quickly than she could.
“Tell her to bring plaster and morphine,” she said. “And tell her …” Claire looked toward the ceiling of the kitchen. “Tell her that the old woman is dying.”
When Henri left, the room was still. She could hear the clock tick and looked up at it; it read one-fifteen. She removed the pilot's leather helmet and put a pillow under his head. His hair was the color of sand, and matted flat. She examined the rest of the flight suit. One trouser leg, the right one, was soaked in blood near the foot.
Claire stood and removed a pair of long shears from her sewing drawer. She bent over the American flyer. Her hair, unrolled, fell like sheets at the sides of her face, hampering her vision. She made an impatient gesture, swinging her long hair to one side, and, tilting her head just slightly to keep it there, she began to cut the man's trousers, starting at the ankle.
The shears were dull against the leather. Bits of sheepskin, dirty with blood, came away in tufts, and began to make a pile surrounding the man's leg. When she reached the wound, she felt a sudden nausea and had to swallow hard. The skin of his calf down to the back of the ankle had burst open like an angry blossom. As delicately as she could, she picked off dried pieces of fleece from the open wound. She heard a sharp intake of air, looked quickly at the airman's face. The skin had gone gray. He was awake now and was watching her.
“I am sorry if I am hurting you,” she said in English.
He shut his eyes briefly, and exhaled slowly, trying to control the pain. The wound was exposed now to the air.
“You are safe now. You are in Belgium,” she said softly. She whispered the word again, and then again. Belgium. Belgium.
She studied him. The color was not returning to his face. Claire noticed a day's growth of beard. He shook his head slowly. She didn't know if he meant to say they were not safe, or if he did not believe he was in Belgium. His eyes closed again, and he lay back against the pillow^
Thérèse Dinant had not slept since the previous night, but, unlike Henri, she showed no signs of fatigue. She walked noisily into the house, as if all rooms in Belgium were open to her.
“We treat the aviator first,” Dinant announced, as though there had never been any question. Claire knew the aviator would be a priority: Save the airmen at all costs. But it w
as also triage. Tend to those who had the best chance of life.
“What is the man's name?” Dinant asked.
“Lieutenant Theodore Aidan Brice,” Claire answered.
“The pilot, then,” Dinant said absently.
In the warmth of the farmhouse kitchen, Dinant stripped off her coat, but she kept on her kerchief. Her face was reddened and dry, with fine hairs on her cheeks. She wore a long, black cardigan and gray knit stockingsthat accentuated her sturdy legs. On her feet she wore a man's clogs. Dinant worked without preliminaries and with dispatch. She had been with the Croix-Rouge and subsequently with the Maquis since its inception in 1940, and lived alone in a small terraced house in the village. She was as large and as strong as a man—larger even than Henri. She was perhaps only thirty, Claire thought, but she was of a type that had looked middle-aged for years.
Dinant injected the airman with morphine, then cut away the rest of the flight suit. She wanted the pilot naked, she explained, in order to make sure there were no, other wounds. A bullet wound in the back, under a shoulder blade, might go unnoticed in an unconscious patient. Claire and Henri did as they were told, together undressing the airman, rolling him over for Dinant's inspection. Claire was sweating in the heavy wool coat, but could not remove it altogether. Antoine, Dinant had told them, was coming soon to collect the schoolbags, and there had been no time to put a dress over her nightgown.
Dinant told Claire and Henri to keep the man on his stomach and pin his wrists down, avoiding the hands if possible, but if it became necessary, to sit on the pilot's hands. In a rudimentary English she told the pilot that what she was about to do would hurt, but she would be quick.
The pilot, drifting in and out of consciousness, raised his head and shoulders when Dinant began to treat the wound. Henri held the pilot's shoulders; Claire put her hand to the airman's mouth, and he bit the soft pad at the inside of the thumb. When that moment was over, a moment even the morphine couldn't touch, the pilot's forehead fell down onto the blanket. His skin was a terrible color.
Claire helped Dinant to roll the plasters around the man's calf. The bandage stretched from the sole of the foot to the knee. Only his toes, white and waxy, were exposed.
Her hands covered with blood, Claire became aware of another presence in the room. Antoine Chimay had entered the Daussois kitchen without a sound. Such stealth, even grace, in a large, rotund man was always a surprise, and came, she knew, in Chimay's case, from his years with the Maquis. He wore a dirty woolen coat and knitted gloves from which the ends of the fingers had been removed. Without taking off these gloves, he pulled a crumpled cigarette from his pocket, lit it in the corner. The smell of the tobacco produced in Claire a sharp and intense longing.
“Will he live?” Chimay asked Dinant.
It was a dispassionate question. Claire heard the note of weariness in Antoine's voice. The downed pilot was, for Chimay, merely a package, valuable to be sure, but nevertheless a parcel to be sent to England as soon as possible so that he might return to combat.
Antoine was there, Claire knew, not only to collect the schoolbags, but also to interrogate the airman. He might already have obtained information from the other airmen who had been found, but he would want especially to talk to this officer, when Chimay had as much intelligence as he could gather, he would send a message, in code, back to England, via a radio he kept in a suitcase under the hay in his barn. That message, in turn, would be forwarded to the crew's base. Until the survivors had safely returned to England, however, the aviators would be listed officially as missing in action.
Dinant shrugged, flipped her hand back and forth as if to indicate a fifty-fifty chance of survival.
“The wound is deep. There's tendon damage., He's lost a great deal of blood,” she said. “And there may be some infection. How he fares will depend upon how well he can fight that off.”
Chimay took a long pull on his cigarette, rubbed his forehead with his free hand. “When will he be able to talk?” he asked.
Dinant looked at the pilot's face, and shrugged. “Difficult to say. He will need the morphine for a day or two, and perhaps after that—”
“We can't wait that long,” Chimay interrupted. “I’ll return in the morning and try again.” He looked pointedly at Claire. “Where are the schoolbags?”
“In the barn, under the feed.”
Antoine turned and threw his cigarette into the sink. He leaned both of his hands on the lip of the porcelain. In the candlelight Claire could see only the man's broad back, his hunched shoulders. “The Germans have got two of them,” he said with disgust. Claire wondered if Antoine thought himself to blame, that somehow the Resistance had not acted quickly enough.
She did not like to think about what happened to the Allied airmen when the Germans had captured them. She knew they were sent to Breendonk in Brussels, or to similar Belgian prisons in Antwerp and Charleroi. Some were tortured by the Belgian as well as the German SS. Those who survived considered themselves lucky to be deported further east into Germany, to the Stalag Lufts there. Claire had heard about the English pilots at the beginning of the war who had had their eyes put out and had been buried without coffins in the cemeteries near Breendonk. There were members of the Resistance whose ghastly task it was to locate the graves of these unlucky airmen, dig them up, and give them a proper burial. All over Belgium there were graves of unknown soldiers.
Chimay left as silently as he had come. Dinant stood and walked to the sink. She washed the blood from her hands. “You can finish this,” she said to Claire. “He needs water and to be bathed. No food until midday. Any sign of infection, send Henri to me at once.” She dried her hands on a towel. “The old woman is upstairs?”
Claire nodded. Dinant left the room with her bag, and Henri for the first time that night sat down. Claire suspected that her husband had had nothing to eat since noon.
“I saw the wounded American,” Henri said. “The one we found near the plane.” His face was ghostly with the memory. He put his head into his hands. “Dinant had him on the table in the kitchen when I went to fetch her. I’ve never seen …”
“Henri, go to bed,” Claire said quickly. “You have to sleep. I can manage here, and tomorrow Antoine may come again and need you. Do you want any food?”
Henry shook his head vehemently. “I couldn't eat,” he said.
“Then do as I say.” Claire had seldom spoken to her husband in such a sharp tone, but she knew that if she didn't he would not move. That he had seen something terrible she did not doubt. Only sleep might put the images at a bearable remove.
Henri rose slowly from his chair. “I’ll just sleep on the sofa in the sitting room,” he said. “If you need me …
When Henri had gone, Claire rose and washed her hands at the sink. She filled a large kettle with water, set it on the stove. The man on the floor groaned. When the water was boiling, she added it to cooler water she had already poured into a basin. She unwrapped a small bit of soap, real soap, not the black soap made from ashes. She brought it to her nose and inhaled its fragrance. She set the basin on the stone floor.
By the fire, Claire hesitated, then rolled the airman over. He did not seem to waken, but some color had returned to his skin. She cradled his head and washed his face and neck, his chest and the hollows beneath his shoulders. She wet a sponge with warm water and let it run over him, soaking into the towels she had put at his sides. He was more muscular than she had imagined, but his pelvic bones were sharp in the firelight. Gently, she rubbed away the dried blood that had matted the sworls of dark hair on his good leg. She filled and refilled the basin with clean, warm water.
Theodore Aidan Brice. She said the name aloud. A man was in her kitchen, on her floor, and she knew nothing about him except that he had flown a plane and landed in her village. The man might die in her kitchen, and she would know nothing more about him. On the floor beside him were his possessions—a photograph of a woman, his identification tags, his escape kit, a c
rumpled pack of cigarettes. The flight suit itself, or what was left of it, would be burned or buried. She wondered if he was married to the woman in the photograph—a pretty, dark-haired woman who looked very young. But then she thought not, because he had no wedding ring. One English airman who had thought he was dying had given his wedding ring to Claire to send back to his wife when the war was over. Claire had refused to take it, assuring the airman he would live. She learned, later, that he had died soon after leaving her home. She wondered where this pilot was from—America was so vast. She wondered, too, what he would sound like; she had not yet heard him speak.
The morphine, as always, was miraculous. She had never ceased to be moved by its power, by the way it could transform a face, remove years, give beauty to the wounded. Pain twisted a man's features, made him ugly; but the morphine erased the pain. The American's face in repose was open—not severe, hot pinched. She had seen his eyes only briefly—when he was conscious and had looked at her. They were startling, a remarkable sea green with flecks of gold. His mouth was broad, even when asleep, and she had a sudden vision then of what he might look like someday, after his lips had healed. She glanced at the place on her hand where he had bitten her. There were still faint teeth marks on her skin.