God Speed the Night (13 page)

“You will know it, monsieur, and the people she helped.”

“Why do they live—men, women we had to coax, threaten, beg to save themselves? Why? Why should I live and Rachel die at eighteen years of age?”

“She had faith, monsieur. She would not have been afraid to die.”

“That is romantic, friend-sister. If she was not afraid it was because she did not believe she was going to die. Do you tell me you are not afraid to die?”

“I do not know. You are right. I do not know what it is to die because the one death I think so much about means life. Christ died to save men from eternal death.”

“Eternal death,” Marc repeated. “Christ died to save men…” He let the words trail off hoping to catch an association the promise of which, if he could but catch it, seemed relevant. He had it then. He began to hum softly. Then: “’Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. He hath trampled out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.’ It is an American song. I’ve forgotten…” Then he had that too: “’As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, His truth goes marching on.’”

“It is very beautiful.”

“What does it mean? Mine eyes have not seen the glory. No Jew’s have. We are still waiting for the Messiah.”

“But He has come, monsieur, and He was Jewish.”

Marc laughed aloud at the folksiness of it, the kind of confident persuasiveness that was meant to help him understand. “Forgive me, little sister. I cannot explain, but it is quite pointless, this conversation.”

“I know, monsieur, and it is wrong of me to speak.”

“If I converted to the faith, would that make it right for you to have spoken?”

She said nothing.

“Well?”

“You are mocking.”

“Do you realize, sister, that every time I ask a question you cannot or do not wish to answer, you say that I am mocking you? I am not. I could wish that I believed as you do, that I believed a flight of angels waited on Rachel to take her home to Abraham’s bosom—for she was good, if kindness is the measure of good and I feel it may be the only measure—I could wish I so believed, but I cannot.”

“It is enough to wish.”

“No. It is not enough to wish: that’s much too simple and utterly futile. I wish Rachel were still alive and in the clothes you wear. But one must somehow act, do, and wishing is not action. Prayer is not action.” He paused, remembering something strikingly close to the mood and the feeling of that moment. “Last night…” He repeated the words marveling that so little time could encompass so much change. “Last night when Rachel lit the candle she said the prayer and I responded, just saying, Amen. And then I tried to make it seem of no importance, that I really was not participating. Tradition, I said, and Rachel said, It is enough.

“And that is how we’d have gone on, wandering until we reached wherever we were to go, she with faith and I dogging along in the tracks left by tradition. Which in itself is strange for me. If I believe in anything it is only the now, the existence within the moment. But to live, a man must have a place. Isn’t it strange? For all the slaughtered Jews in history there was place enough to bury them, but for the living, not a place at all.”

He was touching on something that had disturbed Gabrielle during the night: there had come to her mind with great vividness the face and gestures of a nun who had once taught her Christian doctrine. She remembered the nun’s saying with a kind of spitting zeal, for the spittle gathered in the corners of her mouth when she was excited, “And from that day forward, the Jews were condemned to wander the face of the earth forever, a cursed race with no country of their own.”

“There has to be a place,” Marc said. “If graves can be carved from the earth, why not a country? Will you say Amen to that, little sister?”

“If it is God’s will,” Gabrielle murmured.

“Be damned to you and the will of God,” Marc said, and went from her as far as the confines of the loft would allow. In
a
little while he came back. “I’m sorry I said that. I forget that to you all good things are done by the will of God.”

“And some bad things, monsieur, though it must grieve Him.”

Marc studied her face in the shadows: he thought she had aged overnight, but so had he. “There is this we both believe in, friend-sister, our freedom to choose. However narrow the alternatives may seem, there are choices to be made.”

“You will go on, monsieur?”

“It is my duty.”

Her eyes seemed very bright in their brief meeting with his. She bowed her head.

“You are giving thanks for that?”

“Yes, Monsieur Marc.” She did not look up.

“Amen,” he said and reached out his hand, intending just to touch hers where they were folded upon one another on the table. She snatched them away and buried them in her lap.

“I am sorry, monsieur. I know you did not mean evil.”

“What man thinks he does in his heart? Yet evil is done night and day. I am very tired. I’m going to lie down and try to sleep now. Yesterday…” He turned and looked at the bed in the corner beneath the eaves. “We have no choice of yesterdays, that’s certain. But if I had, it would have been just as it was for Rachel and me for a few hours yesterday. And for that, little Sister Gabrielle, I am profoundly grateful to you.

Gabrielle turned the chair so that its back would be toward him when he lay upon the bed. For a few minutes, discovering the sheen of a spider’s web in a shaft of light near the rafters, she was caught again in the daydreams of her childhood. She remembered catching grasshoppers and holding them until they spilled their amber liquid; she remembered burrowing into the haycock where the setting chicken had concealed her eggs, and the wild strawberries of May she also remembered. Then came that loveliest of all her memories, the herding of the cows and her most particular friend among them: she had sometimes lain crouched against the bulging warm belly protected there from the wind, and she had played her fingers over the silken hair in the hollow above the udder, and over the veins that rose like map markings in the udder itself which, as the day went on, filled miraculously with milk until by sundown it was spilling from the teats onto the back of her hand, and she had known then that it was time to go.

Gabrielle was recalled from her reverie by a sound from the bed. Marc lay face down trying to stifle in his arm the choking sobs: tears had come at last. In her own throat she could feel them too, salt and sear. A man’s crying was too terrible: she remembered her father’s when her mother died. Her mother she could not remember at all, only the high bed and its whiteness, and her sister following the priest with a candle, and most strongly, the horny palm of her father’s hand as he led her into the room.

At six o’clock she said again the Angelus, and toward sundown, vespers. Marc slept for several hours, but even when he wakened they spoke no more until darkness came and the street fell silent. He straightened the nails in the board and put it back in place. Then, dropping the black curtain, he lit the candle and got Rachel’s shawl from the valise. “You will feel better wearing this tonight,” he said. “Afterwards you can give it to the poor.”

They walked along the canal wall and out of the town by the road the procession had gone that morning. The hour was early, but the travelers few. Their one encounter with a vehicle was with a truckload of singing soldiers. Caught in the approaching headlights, Marc and Gabrielle merely stood aside.

“
Gute Nacht
,” the men called out and kept on singing.

“What has gone wrong with them?” Marc said. “From Brahms to the
Horst Wessel
. It would be ridiculous if it were not so terrible.”

Gabrielle offered up the pain from the shoes which did not fit her, but when she realized that she might blister her feet she took off the shoes and went on barefoot.

They moved from the road to the path that climbed up through the grove of wind-bent trees, even as the townspeople had approached the nuns’ cemetery that day noon.

“There is an iron fence,” Gabrielle said.

Marc had already seen it in the moonlight. “There would be only one new grave?”

“Yes, monsieur.”

He stopped among the trees. “I will be able to find it myself, then. Go, kind and gentle friend, back to the life you have chosen.”

“It is better that I wait until you go.”

Marc swung himself up and then vaulted over the fence. He waited hunched in the grass, and listened. There might have been peace the world over for all the sounds in that silvery moonlight: crickets and a distant owl hallowing the moon. Gabrielle followed Marc moving alongside the fence. When he stooped down and sifted the fresh earth through his hands, she knelt and, blessing herself, prayed for the repose of the girl she was finding it hard now herself to believe dead. Watching Marc dig a little furrow and empty into it Rachel’s hair, she thought about the word husband,
mari
, and bride, and why it seemed appropriate to call a nun the bride of Christ: truly a marriage sanctified in heaven and the only one beyond death’s touching.

Marc straightened up and stood at the graveside and looked up at the stars. He pointed his finger at one; then another, and another yet of them to the number of seven and called himself the eighth.

“Yis-go-dal v’yis-ka-dash sh’may rabo

B’olmo dee-vro hiir usay, v’yamleeh malhusay…”

And on he went, saying into the night all of
kaddish
that remained with him of childhood’s rote: “Magnified and sanctified be his great name throughout the world which he hath created according to his will. May he establish his kingdom during the days of your life and during the life of all the house of Israel, speedily, yea, soon; and say ye, Amen…”

There was the slightest turn of his body with the last words, and behind him, hearing the word, Gabrielle repeated the amen.

As Marc climbed over the fence and dropped to Gabrielle’s side he saw the man coming out of the woods. He caught Gabrielle’s arm and turned her around so that they would confront him together. René took off the beret, identifying himself by the white hair, but he said bitingly as he came up, “And where from here, monsieur—madame?”

Neither of them could speak for a second or two. Then Marc said, “It is Monsieur Labrière.”

“Fortunate, is it not? Perhaps I am too cautious. I was waiting in the mill, taking no chance of leading anyone up to you, when down the steps you came like a pair of babes on their way to their grandmother’s.”

“My circumstance has changed since our last meeting, monsieur,” Marc said.

“I have figured that out for myself. A Jewish lady does not kneel and make the sign of the cross when she prays, even at the grave of a nun. And it so happened, the prefect of police picked me up last night when he was bringing two nuns back here from the hospital. But you should not have deceived me, monsieur, that this young lady was your wife.”

“We did not know then that my wife would die.”

“I understand, but you should not have deceived me all the same, for now we could be in a fine mess. This morning I contacted our people in Fauré and arranged that you should keep the Belloirs’ identities a few days longer. You are to join the harvesters tonight. We have fixed up papers that should be safe enough for that and the arrangement is made with the syndicate. You will be on your way well ahead of the Belloirs’ return. In three days’ time you will see the mountains, and some of them in Spain.”

“I am ready now,” Marc said.

“And you, madame?”

Gabrielle drew back a step, not sure of what he meant.

“She will go back to the convent from here,” Marc said.

René shook his head. “That is what I thought you had in mind. No, monsieur. It will not work. They are expecting a man and wife, Jean and Marie Belloir. You have one work permit between you, don’t you understand? It gives you the added cover of the wife. Do you think it is easy to pass someone with your history?”

“I am grateful, Monsieur Labrière, but it is simple. The harvesters are not going to wait for workers who do not show up. They will go out on schedule, and if you cannot provide me with other papers, I will leave St. Hilaire without them.”

“How far will you go, do you think? A man without an I.D. card, especially you, will not be long in getting your own back, and after it a bullet. It is a quick death, the firing squad, if that is what you wish.”

“You are cruel, monsieur,” Gabrielle said.

“If I am cruel it is to save his life, and if you are kind you will stay with him. I did not mistake you last night, my little peasant sister. You are no stranger to the harvest.”

“It is so,” she said.

“The gentleman-architect will not know a binder from a
gazogene
. If you have stayed the night with him, you can stay a few nights more.”

“Why do you insist, monsieur?” Marc said.

“Because it is a workable escape, if you will help it work.”

Gabrielle walked toward the fence, going apart from them. Why there was such stillness except for their voices, she did not know. The convent was in utter darkness. Not even the portress’ light was burning. It was as though everyone had gone away.

“I cannot ask it of the girl,” Marc said.

“If I were you, I would beg it of her. If I can tell her for a farm girl, a nun will know her for a nun, and we do not lack for convents in this part of France. When you are gone, she will not have far to go alone.”

Finally the men stopped talking. She could not pray, only the whispered, Thy will be done. She went back to where they waited. “I will go with Monsieur Marc.”

“There, monsieur. I have told you, it is the women of France who have the courage.” To Gabrielle, René said, “From here on you will call him Jean, and no more Monsieurs. And you are Marie, Marie Belloir. You will go back to the loft, sign your papers, and get your baggage. I have left two blankets for you. It will be a cold winter for me also if you do not make it. You will go at once to seventeen, Rue de Marseille, Madame Fontaine’s…”

While he instructed them, he worked an envelope from what Marc thought was an elastic truss. “Do you have money, monsieur?”