God Speed the Night (14 page)

“How much do you want?”

“Not a
centime,
but I have given you the name of a mountain guide. He will expect a great deal of money and you had better give it to him. It would be a great shame to escape the
Boches
and fall victim to a smuggler’s knife.”

“I have money,” Marc said.

René said, “Come, Madame Belloir.”

They sat upon the ground among the trees, the three of them, for a few minutes while Marc and Gabrielle rehearsed the things they needed to know by rote.

“It is possible,” René said then, “that you will encounter again our prefect of police and he will remember you from
Au Bon Coin
. You will say you came that night looking for the harvesters: they used to stay in Michelet—when all of us were innocent. This morning you will say, you saw the prefect of agriculture. Then you went home to bring your wife, home being the village of Fauré.”

“I understand,” Marc said.

“Moissac may be a patriot, but I doubt it. He is what the wind tells him to be, blowing him from place to place.
Mon Dieu
! I have just thought of something: did you deceive me with the photos of your wife?”

“When I gave them to you, it was necessary that her photos be on the documents.”

“It disturbs me,” René said. “I did not properly observe.”

“There was a certain resemblance,” Marc said, and though instinct told him not to, he nonetheless added: “The Jewish eyes, I suppose.”

René let a second or two pass before he said, “You do not have enough enemies, monsieur?”

“You are right. It was unnecessary for me to have said that.”

“But then again, it is not necessary that we be friends. What is necessary is that madame come to my shop—Number 12, Rue de Michelet—very early in the morning. There is no time now so we must chance the pictures. But tomorrow madame’s portrait must be her own. There is risk enough for everybody without that. Madame?”

Gabrielle finally answered. “Yes, monsieur?”

“Your left hand, please. Hold it out.”

Gabrielle obeyed.

“You must wear a wedding ring.”

“We can say that she lost it,” Marc said.

“Monsieur, there are things you will say which truth would only burden. Do you have your wife’s ring?”

“Yes.”

“Give it to madame and allow her the delicacy of explaining to her heart.”

Marc took the ring from his coin pocket and gave it into Gabrielle’s hand.

I am the betrothed of Christ, she said, but to herself only, and she slipped the ring on her own finger.

I
T WAS ALMOST TEN
when they approached Rue de Marseille just above the Old Town. They carried a blanket apiece, and Marc the valise.

“Marie, Marie, Marie,” he said.

“It is not so difficult for me. After all, I am Sister Marie Gabrielle.”

“And I am Jean. Come,” he whispered, “let me hear you call me Jean.”

“Jean…I had an Uncle Jean,” she said as in sudden discovery.

Marc said, “I don’t think you had better call me uncle.”

He saw a little flash of her white teeth, the momentarily irrepressible smile.

The lights were on full in Number 17. Men’s laughter crashed the stillness. It had been so long since Marc had heard it, ringing, hearty, unbrooked, that he moistened his lips with a kind of appetite. Gabrielle hung back. He wanted to give her his hand, to take her arm, something to temper the strangeness. It would have harmed more than helped.

He ventured, “They won’t pay us much attention.”

“I’m fine,” she said. “It’s only that there are sounds I am not used to any more.”

Two policemen drew themselves up as the travelers approached. There was the fragrance of wine in their manners and on their breath. Marc identified himself as a harvester and offered their identity cards. The examination was cursory.

“Go in, monsieur, before the feast is over.” The officer opened the door for them and pulled the bell cord that hung alongside it.

Marc’s quick impression was of a bordel although his experience of such was meager—the faded plushness that had never been quite elegant, the worn stair carpeting, the beaded curtains between the vestibule and a sitting room from beyond which came the talk and laughter, the tinkle of silver, the clatter of plates. Even the vestibule was redolent with the smell of roasted fowl and the pangs of a long hunger constricted his stomach. He was wrong about the bordel, he told himself at once, and the impression was typical of a Parisian venturing in a provincial
pension
. It was a new world to him as well as to Gabrielle. If it had been Rachel beside him, and there were times he almost believed it was and all the rest a dream, he would have said that this was the true beginning of their journey. He kept watching Gabrielle, the flight of her eyes at each new sound, the bird-like alertness.

A face as comic as a pantomimist’s poked through the beaded curtains. His nose was red and his black hair tousled. “You are the Belloirs, no? You are not hungry? Come quickly, now.” He groped at the curtains, parting them in strands.

But at that moment Madame Fontaine herself came out from another door, this one onto the
petit salon
, where Marc saw briefly, as though glimpsing a room-within-room painting, the masters of the feast, the men of property, whose lands would yield the harvest.

“You are late, monsieur, madame.” She asked for their I.D. cards. She was an ample, florid woman, her bosom all but overflowing the bodice. Gabrielle’s eyes were briefly captive to it. The color rose in her face as she realized and looked away.

“We have walked a long way,” Marc said.

“Then you will eat. Everyone eats tonight!” She took their cards, and held Marc’s briefly under the light. To learn his profession, he realized. She said, “You will be busy. They need a doctor in attendance, that crew.” She locked their cards in a drawer with numerous others. “Please sign the registry, monsieur, and go in to dinner.” She raised her voice to the comic one, who lingered, draping himself with the strands of beads in the archway: “Monsieur Jacques! Take madame in.”

To Marc: “
Monsieur le docteur
and madame will have a room to themselves, at the top of the stairs, the third floor. For now, leave your luggage here by the desk.”

For the first time Marc realized the possible implications of carrying a medical student’s identification on such a project. He did not correct madame’s “
le docteur”
however, cherishing for Gabrielle what privacy the room at the top might provide. He hastened to catch up with her where she was being propelled—carried would almost have been the word—by the tall, gangling man with the sadly comic face. They reached the long table together, where all faces turned to them. The tall one introduced himself, but by one name only: “I am Jacques.”

Marc shook hands with him. “I am Jean, my wife is Marie.”

And pointing one by one around the table, Jacques introduced as motley a crowd as Marc had ever met: some there were who looked to be gypsies, but that was a kind of prejudice on his part. Nor should he have had anything against gypsies. After all, they ranked almost as high with Nazidom as Jews, but he tended to take everyone with a Spanish cast—Gascon, Basque, Languedoc—for gypsies; and there was also in his view of such countrymen the awareness of class: these were working people; even the students, mostly from Toulouse, were the sons of peasants—and the daughters. The names he might remember, given time: Philomène, a woman well over forty with great strong shoulders and a laugh that quivered the glassware; it was she Marc had walked beside, escaping the station with some of these very people; she winked at him, but said nothing of that encounter; there was Artur, a dwarf, who seemed to be proud to be one, for he hopped down from the chair and came to shake hands, and he only a head above the table; Antoine and Michelle, lovers, Marc pegged them at once, volunteering for these two weeks under the stars together…In time, given time, he would learn all their names. Given time: it was the byword of the refugee. He and Gabrielle took their places at the table. Madame’s serving girl brought them soup, thick bean soup with shreds of meat in it.

Marc inhaled the aroma, then took a spoonful. He turned to Gabrielle: “Bless the food, Marie, for it is good.”

Gabrielle gave thanks. He had made it easier for her to eat. She spoke not a word aloud and kept her eyes cast down.

The women opposite, Philomène and Céleste, who called herself an actress so that Jacques had introduced her as Céleste, the actress, nudged one another, watching Gabrielle. They mistook her carefulness in eating for the discrimination of class, Marc thought, which in combination with his blue-eyed fairness—from his Polish grandmother, he’d been told—and his over-refined features, could make their lot among this crowd a hard one. Add to that his own ineptitude with the pitchfork. Their harvest journey was going to be something short of a honeymoon. The irony of this comparison made him draw his lips into a tight smile. His eyes met Philomène’s. She smiled back at him and her chest rose with the sudden intake of her breath.

A man must use the talents he had. Marc said, “You are an actress,
mam’selle?
’

She shook her head.

Céleste said, “I am the actress.”

“And yet a harvester?” Marc said, giving Céleste his attention.

“My mother has a farm and I was raised on it. I am between engagements and it is healthful to follow the harvest.”

And there are more men among us than women, Marc thought, but he nodded agreement and turned again to Philomène. “Then you sing?”

“How did you know?”

He made a gesture using his own chest, to indicate awareness of her splendid bosom. She lifted her wine glass to him and, about to drink, slopped a few drops on that ample bosom. The man next to her laughed aloud. She flipped the last of the wine into his face. The dwarf clapped his hands for joy.

Jacques cried out, “What a waste of wine!” but he was between Philomène and the man, Félix, in one long stride, the wine carafe in hand. He refilled both their glasses—and insured the peace.

One of the students at the end of the table tuned his guitar.

Madame Fontaine brought a large wheel of cheese and quartered it at the table. Her red-faced helper, who did everything at a trot, brought Marc and Gabrielle a platter of roasted fowl, understandably now in shreds and pieces, but who could care? and potatoes. Jacques filled their glasses.

“Give up the harvest, Jacques. You must stay and be my host,” madame said.

“Alas, I have signed a contract,” Jacques said, “but I shall remember in the fall.”

Marc passed the cheese. It went hand to hand, no plate, each taking his own knife to carve a piece for himself. Marc sipped the wine. It was not bad, though he would venture to say they were drinking better in the
petit salon
. His first hunger tempered, he sat back and looked over Madame Fontaine’s decor. A Moorish influence: the heavy use of timber, archways, the graceful iron sconces on the wall. The door of several carved panels separated this large room from the smaller dining salon which he had seen from the vestibule. He would have liked to see that setting again; and as though to oblige him, a moment or two later a man slid open the door and came in.

Jacques lifted his glass to the gentleman and said, “Monsieur Dorget, the minister of agriculture.”

The man, dressed in a dinner jacket that no longer could meet across his cummerbund, held up his hand in demur. “Please, please. It is trouble enough to be prefect of the department.” He was a shy-looking, if burly, man. He stood for a second or two, his finger to his lip as he thoughtfully looked around the table. “You have not starved either, I see.” Then, indicating with his finger—just a flick of it to Marc: “Monsieur Belloir.”

Marc rose from his chair and went to the man. The prefect of agriculture offered his hand, and although they had not met before, he said, “It is nice to see you again. I am glad you and madame are able to complete our group.” He addressed the others then also: “We’ll make a good team, is that not so?”

It was an invitation to come alive, to volatility. The response pleased him, a vigorous assent.

Under its cover he said to Marc, “You have your work permit, yours and madame’s?”

“Yes, monsieur.”

And to the others again: “Didn’t I hear a guitar? Our hosts wouldn’t mind a serenade. I think you’ll agree, they deserve it.”

Marc was able once again to observe the other dining party, all of the guests in dinner jackets, save one in the purple garb of the Church, substantial men, high-complexioned now. The table shone with silver, and the glassware had its own song. The wine was in bottles and not in carafes, and there was fruit piled high—Spanish oranges, the apples and plums of Agenais. One knew this feast to be traditional, and indeed it was not hard to transpose these very men with their counterparts in a group portrait hanging over the buffet, seventeenth-century men in ruffs and doublets with their broad-brimmed hats somewhat askew.

Again the dwarf was clapping his hands.

“I knew I was wise to sign him on,” the prefect said and nodded to Marc to return to his place.

Gabrielle glanced up at him.

“It will be fine,” he said, “but you must eat more than that.”

“Couldn’t we take it with us?”

Marc laughed aloud. “Yes, inside us,” he said, and set to his own food with a will.

The guitarist gave one loud strum. But instead of making music, he said defiantly, “I do not play for Vichy.”

The government official, not a large man in any flamboyant way, ambled the length of the table and stood, his arms folded, looking down at the youth. “Play for yourself, my young fool. Or else do not play ever. If Vichy is listening, so much the better that they hear only music.”

Meanwhile Jacques had begun to snap his fingers, rhythms Marc associated with Spain more than France. Softly Jacques whistled a beguiling tune to coax the others, and because the dwarf broke the rhythm with his off-beat clapping, one and then another of the men strengthened it, tapping on the table. Philomène began to hum, then one man and another to sing. The guitarist was left to catch up.