God Speed the Night (11 page)

“Yes, Reverend Mother, as secure as
he
is. But he is a man.”

“That is not my meaning,” Reverend Mother said briskly.

Agathe colored. She said, “She will have no identity card now except…” She nodded at Rachel.

“Then we must assume she is secure for the present.”

Another admission was taking place when the nuns reached the hospital entrance. A night-worker at the power station had badly cut his hand. He was hiding it from himself under his arm, but the blood was seeping through. When he glanced down and saw the red crawling stain, he crumpled to the floor at Reverend Mother’s feet.

Dr. Lauzin took off his coat again. “Get him up to the surgery. I’ll have a look at it.”

Sister Agathe half hoped he would ask her to assist him again, but he did not, and Moissac steered the nuns out of the building.

In the car Sister Agathe remembered the
camionnette
. Moissac had forgotten about it although he assured the nun otherwise. He drove past the railway station and stopped at the kiosk alongside which the
camionnette
still stood. Moissac called the prefecture from the public phone.

From habit of conservation he had turned off the motor and the car lights. He was about to leave the kiosk when a man on foot turned into the street a few yards away. It would have been impossible for him not to recognize René, his mane of hair as vivid as a white flag. Moissac waited. The nuns were silent. René, seeing the car, hesitated a moment and then came on, supposing the car to have broken down there. Moissac took his pocket flash out and waited in the kiosk, his finger on the switch. When René was abreast of him he stepped out and flashed the light in the little man’s face.

René brought up his hand hard so that the beam of light shot upward into Moissac’s own face for an instant. “You are a bastard, Théo.” He covered his shock with bravura.

“A man on the streets after curfew—I can be forgiven precautions.”

“I’ve been visiting a sick friend,” René said.

“Have you? So have I, my friend. I am driving Reverend Mother home from the hospital. Come with me and we can talk afterwards.” He moved to the car and opened the door for René.

“It is late, Théo. I am too tired.”

“Nonsense. I should arrest you for violating curfew.”

René, looking in at the nuns as he climbed into the car, remembered having called Moissac a bastard. “Excuse me, Sisters. I did not know you were in the car.”

“Where does your sick friend live?” Moissac asked, starting the car motor.

“It is old Brie at the end of Louis Pasteur. He had the priest tonight.” All this was so: René had covered his presence in the neighborhood with a late visit to the Brie home.

“It is time for him to die,” Moissac said. “He must be eighty.” He thought of Maman and fell silent for the rest of the way to the convent. No one else spoke either.

He returned to St. Hilaire by way of the checkpoint again. Once more the German sentry saluted and permitted him to pass without questioning either him or his passenger.

René thought how different it would have been for him alone, the questioning, the search. “Makes you proud to be a Frenchman, doesn’t it, Théo?”

Moissac ignored the shaft. “Who was the stranger who came into Gaucher’s as Maman and I were leaving?”

René gave a snort of laughter. “I was about to ask you the same thing.”

“What did he want?”

“Coffee. At least that’s what he asked for. It was Gaucher’s and my idea that he was Gestapo.”

Even as Moissac had himself suspected.

“But if you say he was not,
Monsieur le Préfet
, who can say who he was?”

“I did not say so. They do not report to me.”

René said nothing.

“Nor I to them unless I have to. Gaucher should be more careful.”

“Of what?”

“His place is suspect. It is on the Gestapo’s list.”

“I shall tell him you said so, Théo.”

“I know you will. That is why I’m telling you. Théophile Moissac is not the bastard you all think he is.” “I shall tell him that also.”

T
HE NIGHT NURSE, SUMMONED
again to the surgery for an emergency, went in the middle of preparing the injection Dr. Lauzin had ordered for Rachel. In great pain and craving water, Rachel fought crying out for as long as she could. Then the subconscious prevailed.

The old man praying before Our Lady of Perpetual Help heard her cries. He made his way to her bedside.

“Water…Please, water.”

He hobbled down the hall to his own ward and got the glass from his bedside table. He borrowed the tube from the glass of the sleeping man in the next bed and brought Rachel the relief she craved. He supported her head while she drained the glass. He felt much better himself for having performed the charity and went back to bed knowing that he would sleep at last.

Within a few minutes Rachel was nauseated. She managed to edge herself to the side of the bed, but retching violently and now delirious, she flung herself from the bed. The wound opened.

At ten minutes to eight that morning Reverend Mother was summoned again to the hospital, but by the time she arrived the patient had died.

“N
OW I HAVE THOUGHT
of what may have happened.” Marc sat up and swung his feet to the floor. When dawn had come up full he had blown out the candle and removed the blackout curtain, letting in such light as could at least make shadows. These he had watched crossing the roofbeams as the traffic wakened in the street below. “Rachel has converted,” he said with a mock heartiness. “She has run away from me to the convent, and when she is well again she will seek the veil. Is that what you call it, seeking the veil?” He stretched to his full height, stood on tiptoe, and touched the beams. The tension broke for the moment.

“No.”

“Taking the veil. That’s it, isn’t it?”

“You are not serious?” Gabrielle said.

“No. I am not serious.”

The silence again, the stifling silence, more suffocating for the medley of noises drifting up from Rue Louis Pasteur. Gabrielle continued to gaze through a large knothole that itself was the shape of an eye.

“What do you see, friend-sister?” Through the night he had tried many ways of addressing her, none of them comfortable.

“I am not looking to see. I am watching particularly.”

“Ah, but you are seeing nonetheless. Close your eyes. You are able to tell me several things that have passed. Is that not so?”

She closed her eyes. “A chestnut horse like Poirot; Père Duloc with the children for First Communion instruction. And some soldiers. I did not want to see them, but it was all right.”

“It was all right,” Marc repeated.

“I mean I thought of something else—of other soldiers.”

“Is that what it’s like, being a nun—always thinking of something else?”

“Something else than what, monsieur?”

Marc threw up his hands. “It was you who said you thought of something else, seeing the soldiers.”

“I thought of the soldiers at Calvary, and then of the soldiers burning Joan of Arc.”

“They merely lit the fagots. It was the Inquisition that decreed her death.”

“They didn’t have to light the fagots,” Gabrielle said.

Marc cocked his head and looked at her, trying to make her return his gaze. She would not. “What about your vow of obedience? A soldier takes it too, you know.”

She thought about that for a moment. “Maybe he did not want to be a soldier.”

“In which case would the vow not count?”

“I don’t know. I only know I want to be a nun.”

Marc sat down at the table and then got up immediately, exploding: “Christ! Why don’t they come and tell us something? Why don’t they come for you?”

“They will when it is time. Or I shall go.”

“You cannot!” Marc said irrationally. “Not until Rachel returns. For her sake, not for mine. Oh, yes, for mine as well,” he amended. “I want to live and I’m afraid to risk the daylight. Before Rachel I risked it many times. Now I no longer want to risk it. Love should not make cowards of us, little child of God.”

“It isn’t cowardly to want to live.” Gabrielle gave up her vigil and returned to the table.

“I suppose not—no more than it is brave to want to die.”

“Please don’t talk about death any more,” she said, and then, “unless you want to.”

“All right, I won’t. In the concentration camps, I’ve heard, they don’t speak of death at all.”

“We speak often of it, but as a friend,” she said.

“So I have observed,” Marc said cuttingly, after which neither of them spoke again for a long while.

Gabrielle had commenced praying the hours past with the six o’clock striking of the Angelus bell. Although she prayed silently, the pantomine accompanying it set Marc’s nerves on edge, the breast thumping, the up and down on the knees, the signing of the cross. He tried to counterpoint it in his mind with such ritual as he remembered from his childhood, his grandfather touching the
mezuzah
at the door, the philacteries the old man strapped upon his arm, and sitting sheva himself when the old man died. His skinny buttocks numb, then prickly, and his neck prickly with the wailing of his grandmother in the other room, and the sing-song prayers of the
minyan
he had put on his shoes and gone from the house leaving one place vacant out of eight. “I do not believe,” he said when his father had come after him. “Neither do I, my son, but it is our tradition, and without it we shall lose our Jewishness.”

Marc removed a board from the window to the north, one that he could replace before dark, and took a book to the light. After reading for a little while he sought again to make up to Gabrielle for his harshness. “Shall I read aloud to you? I’m afraid you’ll find it inappropriate—Stendhal’s letters—but it’s the only book I have.”

“No, thank you, monsieur.”

“If I could go out now and bring you a book, what would you want it to be?”

“Please do not make fun of me, monsieur.”

“That is far from my intentions. You must have had a favorite subject in school.”

“History.”

“It was one of mine—and of Stendhal’s, I should suppose by this. He was very silly about important people.”

“I love best the stories about the saints who did things, you know, like St. Ignatius Loyola who was a soldier first.”

“You’re rather fond of soldiers, aren’t you?”

“I’m not! I don’t mean to be. I don’t think I am.”

“But the Crusades and all that—they were admirable, weren’t they?”

“Oh, yes.”

He went back to his reading. She sensed just by something lingering in the air that he did not believe they were admirable at all. So she sat, her head bowed down and tried to remember the reasons she believed in them: it came down really to the rescue of the hallowed places from the heathen Turks, the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, the Holy City: it was much easier to think of Jesus Himself than of the Crusaders about whom she had never really thought at all, the entrance to the city on Palm Sunday with all the people coming out to follow Him, the children running after the donkey and His reaching down to them. His blessing of everybody, His touching of the unclean lepers. He was not afraid ever, except in the Garden when He was alone and foresaw Calvary while the disciples slept. And when He woke them, He did not want them to be afraid either…Even when He arose from the dead and reappeared to them: Be not afraid…

It was the tolling of the bells of St. Hilaire that broke her meditation. As she listened there was a pause. Then commenced the solemn peal of the passing bell. She marked each stroke with her fingers on the table while she whispered,
Requiescat in pace.
There seemed a sudden silence everywhere, then in the stillness the metallic clatter of horses’ hooves in the street below. She went to the window and stood on tiptoe the better to see down through the small opening. Two horses, black ribbons flowing from their harness, drew the carriage on which the coffin rode, high and solitary. The driver walked alongside the horses, and behind the carriage Reverend Mother and Sister Agathe walked, their black beads in hand. Behind them a few people of the town followed, the women cowled in their shawls, the men bareheaded, and old Father Duloc had come out from St. Sebastien’s with the processional cross.

Everything blurred for an instant for Gabriel. She cried out, “Monsieur Marc!”

Marc came, throwing the book on the table. He stared at her and she gestured that he must look out. The sound he made when he saw the procession was like the moan of a wounded animal. He moved his head one way, then another, trying to see better. Then with his bare hands he ripped the board from the frame.

Gabrielle looked out with him. A platoon of German soldiers, approaching, quick-stepped to the side of the street, turned about-face, and remained at attention while the carriage passed. Marc covered his mouth with his hands.

“Poor man, poor man,” Gabrielle said. She lifted her hand but she could not touch him.

The soldiers resumed their march toward the station. Marc drew back from the window. He looked about him, bewildered, at Gabrielle as though he did not know her, then toward the door.

“You must not go out, monsieur. It will not help.”

He turned back to the window. The procession was leaving Rue Louis Pasteur. A moment later it disappeared from sight.

“What will it not help?” he said, scarcely audible.

There was no sign now on the street to show that the procession had passed at all. The blacksmith had gone back to his forge. A gendarme was pumping up his bicycle tire while two children watched. Then one of them skipped away. The bells of St. Hilaire had been silent for some moments, but in the distance the convent bell had taken up the tolling.

Gabrielle made the sign of the cross and began to herself, “Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord, Lord hear my voice…”

“Do not pray for her. Please.”

“I must pray, and God can make it fitting.”

Marc kept shaking his head. Then he asked, “Where are they taking her?”

“To the Convent of Ste. Geneviève.”