God Speed the Night (2 page)

“It will do you honor,” she said, avoiding a direct answer as to what she would serve. She was often mysterious in these matters, and most of the time he preferred it so: she did such wonders on their food coupons. It crossed his mind that the prefect of agriculture might be of the same opinion. He did not want him to be overly impressed. But how to say this to Maman he did not know. He tried to think of the right tack while he got the clothes brush and brought it to her where she was cutting the leaves from a head of cabbage. Maman dried her hands on her apron and took him out into the sunlight where she could brush him properly. She had, now that she was bending with age, to stand on the step in order to inspect his shoulders. She made a little clicking sound with her tongue while she brushed him.

“I am losing my hair. I can feel the sun on the top of my head,” he said.

“I can’t see where, but I will get more of the tonic.”

“Where will you get it?”

“Never mind.”

“The last you got made it fall out the faster.”

“Dead hair. You are healthier without it.”

He turned and looked down at her. “And handsomer, maman?”

“Handsomer than most,” she said, and he wondered if there were any more conviction in her words than there would have been in his, paying a like compliment to a shriveled old pouch of lavender like herself. Lavender and cabbage, lavender and garlic, lavender and sweat.

“There will be roast pork for dinner, my son.”

Moissac almost wished she had not told him. “Butcher’s pork?”

“I shall cook it well.”

“Which does not answer my question.”

“I have answered it,” she said. Then, turning back as she started into the house: “Rene brought it if you must know.”

He had guessed as much. Having removed Maman from the district of St. Hilaire known as the Old Town when he became prefect, he had thought she would make new friends. She had complained since his childhood—his father had been killed in an accident when Théophile was six—of having to live over a drapery shop. But now that she had the cottage she wanted with a view of the river at the front of the house, she rarely left the kitchen at the back, and the only new friend was Monsignor La Roque whom Moissac himself had cultivated. The only old friend who still came, but never when Moissac was home, was René Labrière, a jack of all trades who presently advertised himself as a photographer. Moissac followed his mother into the house. “I’m not sure René wouldn’t poison me these days if he had the chance. Did he tell you where the pork came from?”

She shrugged impatiently. “A pig. He took a wedding photograph. It was his payment. He did not lose money, bringing it to me.”

“I wouldn’t think he had. All the same, call the registry in my name and be sure there was such a wedding in the district.” Moissac knew he was making René and not the unrationed pork the issue. But he knew too that if there had indeed been such a wedding, his own conscience would be untroubled explaining their table to the prefect of agriculture.

Maman said, “Théophile, I cannot live with such suspicion. René was my friend when we lived in the Rue de Michelet. When you were away at school he brought me wood every day.”

“That was almost forty years ago, maman. We no longer live on Michelet. René does. I am prefect of police and he is a photographer when practically no one wants to get their picture taken. I will wait until you call the registry.”

W
HEN THE TRAIN JOLTED
to a halt on the plains above St. Hilaire, Marc Daridan came violently awake. He recognized no one at the instant of waking, not even the woman trying to hold him against her. The eyes upon him were the eyes of strangers, always the eyes of strangers and always fixed on his as though challenging his recognition: it was a repetitive dream that occurred when he was about to waken, the dream of faces, almost literal in its meaning, and this time it merged with consciousness, for the other passengers were staring at him.

“It is all right,” Rachel said over and over. Her voice and then her whole presence became familiar, and he knew at once why she was on the other side of the dream: they had married less than a week ago, and the dream had commenced before. “He has bad dreams,” she explained to the others in the compartment.

“Who does not?” a man said.

Marc turned to the window. Close alongside the train, their helmeted heads bobbing up and down, the German soldiers moved forward. The tremor of fear ran through him. Rachel said, “They are outside, we are inside.”

The man opposite overheard although she had spoken softly. “No, madame. They are inside everywhere.”

Marc looked at him: a mournful, sweating face. He was wearing far too many clothes for the summer day. He too was on a one-way journey, Marc thought, and his wife was trying to elbow him into silence.

Another man trod on their feet, trying to climb over the luggage to the window. “What are they looking for?”

Marc looked out again. The soldiers had squatted down, their rifles poised. “For the traveler without an
Ausweis
,” Marc said.

“Inside everywhere,” the man repeated.

“We are almost there,” the man at the window said. “I can see the spire of St. Hilaire.”

“You should have wakened me,” Marc said, leaning close to Rachel.

“You never sleep enough.”

“Never is too big a word. You haven’t known me that long.” He spoke lightly, wanting to forestall more tension if he could. He brushed her forehead with his lips.

The color rose to the pale girl’s cheeks. It pleased him to see it. It meant her fears were less than his, he thought, and he had mastered his before.

The woman opposite Rachel said, “You are just married, madame—monsieur?”

“No, madame,” Marc said. The papers they traveled on showed them to have been married for a year. The fact was their marriage had been a compact in the presence of a witness: there was no public record of it.

“Do not ask questions,” the woman’s husband said. “Leave the questions to the
Boches.
” He curled the sweat from his forehead with his fingers and whipped it onto the luggage at his feet. The splash of it crawled through the dust like something alive.

The man at the window stumbled back to his seat.

“There is no more conversation anywhere,” the woman lamented.

“Soon it will be different,” Rachel smiled at her. It was almost impossible for Rachel not to smile, Marc thought, and for just an instant he conjured a picture of what she would be like in the daylight of their lives if that time ever came: a laughing girl who loved the sun.

A whistle sounded, a gutteral command and the soldiers scrambled up the embankment. A moment later the train lurched forward. The soldiers waved. No one in the compartment waved back to them. Those with a view of the aisle began to grope in their pockets for their papers. The team of inspectors soon arrived, the French conductor, a German in the uniform of the French railways, and a national policeman. Marc steeled himself and watched what happened to the couple opposite who he suspected were also in flight. They were passed without question, their papers stamped for arrival at St. Hilaire. Marc gave over his to the conductor.

The German asked at once his military status. Marc was the only man under thirty in the compartment. He described another’s history. His identity card showed him to be a medical student. The German watched him closely, and in the midst of his recitation, interrupted. “Why do you travel now, monsieur?”

“It is between terms and we are permitted to go home to assist in the harvest,” Marc said.

“Let me see your hands, palms up.”

Marc showed them like a beggar seeking alms, but they were steady. “They will harden quickly,” he said.

The German moved on to the next compartment, the gendarme following him. The conductor returned the papers to Marc but without the terminal stamp on the travel permit. If the omission was observed by anyone except Marc it was not commented on.

A few minutes later the conductor returned alone, stuck his head in and announced, “St. Hilaire, the end of the journey. Everyone must exit forward.”

Over the grumbling of the passengers Marc asked, “Are we on time?”

“Monsieur, it will depend on what you wish to be on time for.”

The others laughed, but for Marc the words signaled his next move. While the other passengers gathered their luggage, Marc took the one small valise he and Rachel shared, moved into the aisle and kept the conductor in sight. He saw him try the water closet door, then presumably lock it. Marc moved quickly but not fast enough to pass before two nuns pushed into the aisle ahead of him, shepherding four small children. Time and eternity were but one to them. Marc followed on their heels. He slipped into the washroom and locked the door behind him. The stench was such that he breathed through his mouth, shallow gulps of the foul air. He used the valise as a table, and with his penknife, a blade honed to the sharpness of a razor, he removed his and Rachel’s photographs from the identity cards of a couple named Marie and Jean Belloir. He pocketed the photos and put the cards along with the travel permit—unstamped, so that it could yet be used by the Belloirs themselves—into an old envelope of the French railways.

He opened the valise, pried away the lining, and took from behind it his and Rachel’s own papers. It had been many months since he had used his, and Rachel’s was new, at least the photograph was, for she had grown from schoolgirl to woman since the Occupation. Both I.D. cards bore the Star of David.

The conductor tried the door and rapped three hard knocks.

“One moment, monsieur.” Marc was ready. He closed the valise and unlocked the door.

The trainman came in loudly abusing him for waiting until the last minute to use the cabinet. He closed the door behind him.

Marc gave him the railway envelope. “Thank you, monsieur. You have helped save my life.”

The trainman put the envelope in his pouch among the official records of the journey. “What do they want you for?”

Marc said, “I am a Jew for one thing.”

“What else do you need?”

“The
Milice
are also looking for me.”

“Nazi bastards,” the trainman said. “They are worse than the Germans.”

“Far worse. Do you know where I can find a Monsieur Lapin in St. Hilaire?”

“I would look first in what they call the Old Town. But watch yourself. The prefect of police is another bastard.” He opened the door. “Out, monsieur. Out!”

Marc had now to push his way among the crowd. He saw Rachel twist and turn, trying to watch for him. Alone and unburdened by luggage she had been shoved far ahead. He edged toward her. Everyone had too much luggage, particularly the nuns. There were several of them now and they were trying to get the children to hold onto one another’s hands. Refugees, Marc thought at once; even at that age they did not trust one another.

He reached Rachel’s side. She prisoned his hand between her arm and her breast as together they stared out at the shabby environs of the town. Some of the buildings had the look of being carried away, piece by piece. And it might be so, Marc realized, for he could see the torn plaster where iron-railed balconies might once have hung, and the unweathered places where shutters had been removed. Like other northerners before the whole of France had been occupied, he had cursed the south as the garden of Vichy, and he had shared in a cruel satisfaction when the
Boche
knocked down the checkpoints and moved in.

“Look!” a woman cried and pointed with a desperate repetition, her fingers against the glass. “The trees are gone from the promenade. They’re all gone.”

The barren stumps, two rows of them, looked raw and somehow obscene.

“Madame, so are the men,” an old gentleman said.

The whole town looked to be dying, the houses with their tall chimneys lolled against one another, the limestone yellowing, the roof tiles askew. Only the cathedral stood in high and serene arrogance, a Gothic invader where the Romanesque had ruled in humbler dignity. Once in his student days, before he had taken his certificate in architecture, Marc had wanted to visit St. Hilaire cathedral. Now he doubted he would ever see more of it than this glimpse from a train window, and it no longer mattered a whit to him.

The train, having only gained a little speed, slowed down again. He was better able to observe what he was sure was the Old Town. The cobbled streets were narrow, twisting into one another, and the two-story buildings hunched over the streets vaguely suggesting old men at chess.

The train rattled across a viaduct and abruptly they were in the station yard. The sweat went cold on Marc’s back. Nazis were everywhere, green uniforms and black.

“What does it mean?” Rachel whispered.

Everyone was asking the same question.

Marc studied the soldiers. There was something strange about them, something in their stance, in the quality of their alertness; he realized what it was. They were more concerned with a crowd of people outside the fence than with the train and its arrivals.

“It will not concern us,” he said to Rachel.

The train ground to a halt, the aftersounds of steam and air pressure like a vast sigh. Everyone pressed toward the platform. The passengers were ordered by the police, military and municipal, to proceed single file into the station building. Marc tested their vigilance by moving up alongside Rachel. He was ordered back into line. A few steps further on he bent down and, on the pretense of retying his shoelace, looked to see beneath the train to what lay beyond the tracks. A cement parapet. He tried to inquire of a French policeman why the people had gathered outside the fence. They were mostly women.

“Move on, monsieur. Move on.”

When all the passengers were out of the train, a civilian official came down the line with a megaphone and spoke to a section of the arrivals at a time: “Messieurs—mesdames, will those with harvest work permits kindly step out of line?”

Rachel glanced back at Marc. He shook his head. They no longer had such permits. He watched the straggle of workers, men and women, fall out and follow the official to where two policemen were waiting. They entered the building by the baggage entrance.