God Speed the Night (20 page)

“Where is he? Your father, I mean.”

“He’s in America. But my mother—I do not know. My father left in time and my mother was to join him, but the Germans came too soon. It was the same with Rachel’s family; all except her were taken. She was in school at the time. Afterwards her teacher found a hiding place for her.”

“Some of you will be together again—in the Holy Land.”

“That would be fine,” Marc said with something less than conviction.

“Do you not love your parents?”

“I love them.” Again the tentativeness. He did not want to lie, but neither was he likely to be able to explain that what he felt was duty, and even that did not seem to relate to family or to have any emotional components to it. It was simply that he had chosen to live and the family relationship was part of what survived in the choice. Someday perhaps he would feel some deeper attachment to people; it might come with a deeper sense of self—if that came ever.

“Perhaps I will be a pioneer,” he said, wanting to give Gabrielle the satisfaction she deserved.

She smiled. “You will be a farmer because you are a farmer today.”

“Thank you.”

“I do not tease you,” she said. “When you are working in the earth you will know what it is to love it, to love animals, to love God.”

“I will know what it is to love, isn’t that it?”

Suddenly she was shy of him again. “Yes, monsieur.”

“Jean,” he said and wagged a finger at her. He pointed to where the horse-drawn rack was coming for them, picking up Jacques and Philomène, Thérèse and Philippe first. The latter two, Marc had learned, had closed their grocery shop to return to the land for this little while. There was among all the older members of the group the sadness of having, by necessity or folly, given up their birthright to the land. “You make earth sound so beautiful,” Marc said, “I could almost forget how terrible it has become in the custody of man.”

Again she had to sort his meaning from his words. She almost always liked the words.

Jacques offered a hand to each of them down from the rack.

“We’re full of blisters,” Marc said, and to Gabrielle: “Turn around, your back to the wagon.” She obeyed. He put his hands to her waist and lifted her up. She went stiff, but she did not reject him.

“Wouldn’t it be grand to go swimming?” Jacques said, “or to lie down in a trough of water. Preferably with a woman.” He nudged Philomène, whose long legs were swinging from the rack. “Have you ever made love under water?”

“Do you take me for a guppy, dear?”

“A mermaid, a beautiful mermaid who I’d like to meet at sea during my next voyage.”

Gabrielle tried not to listen.

“Are you a sailor?” Marc asked him.

“I was. I gave up the farm for the sea, but now where is there a ship for a man to sail on out of France, except to Bocheland? And I’ll not go there if I can help it.”

“That’s where my husband is,” Philomène said, “so just shut up.”

“Sorry, my dear. There is no safe conversation.” He leaned forward to look past Marc. “How is the bride?”

“You know,” Marc said, “we’ve been married over a year.” The Belloirs had. “I don’t know how you got onto the bride and groom business.”

“Well, if I’d had to guess at the matter, I’d have said you weren’t married at all.”

“Marie living in sin?” Philomène crowed. Her voice penetrated Gabrielle’s wall of protection.

“You’re right, you’re right,” Jacques said.

Thérèse leaned across her husband who had stretched out between her and Gabrielle. “Where were you married? Monsieur comes from Paris. I can tell by his accent, but not madame.”

“We were married in Paris,” Marc said. “To what church did we go after the courthouse? They are all the same to me.

“Ste. Geneviève,” Gabrielle said, “the patron saint of Paris. She saved the people from the Huns fifteen hundred years ago.”

Jacques heaved a great sigh. “It is too bad she died so soon.”

Everyone laughed and then fell silent. A couple of minutes later Jacques spoke again. “They say Mussolini is out of a job.”

Philippe sat up, wriggling his hips to get more comfortable. “He has no need to worry. Pétain will make him premier of France.”

In the courtyard the threshing machine was still going, two wagonloads of sheaves left. The chaff swirled about like yellow snow, and a great mountain of straw was yet to be bailed. Artur, almost black with grease, jumped up and down on the platform, waving to them. It had come as a surprise to Marc that the dwarf was a fine mechanic; as Jacques said, the only really necessary man on the team. Along the platform, bag after bag of oats was being sewn up by a woman of the farm.

They all washed at the pump and Marc treated with salve and bandaged the worst of the blistered hands. That much medicine he was competent to practice.

A thick soup and good wine along with the best bread Marc had had since the beginning of war were served them by lantern light in the courtyard, and after it a pudding with a treat of treats, thick cream. The
châtelain
himself came round and bade them eat well. He was a different man in jodhpurs than in dress suit. He sat among the workers and drank the wine he served them.

Jules tuned his guitar and strummed a melancholy improvisation. The lovers, Antoine and Michèle, kissed uninhibitedly. Marc glanced at Gabrielle and caught the flutter of her eyelashes as she closed out the lovers. She missed very little, he thought, swiftly taking in that which she proposed thereafter not to see or hear. Was it perhaps the sweeter for the briefness of the savoring? But that was not the point. The point was complete denial. Such a shame, the waste. Philomène began to sing. Nobody really wanted to sing at first, but she had an
agent provocateur
of a voice: you wanted to pitch in to help get the tune to wherever it was she was trying to take it. The music might be melancholic but the theme was militant. Marc had heard it before, but he could not remember where. Suddenly Antoine sang out, words different from those of Philomène. He had a fine tenor voice that nobody had heard till then. Philomène and the rest faded their voices down to a hum.

Marc was not likely to forget that moment: this frail man whom only in the field had he observed to be lame, sitting upright, his hands clasped between his knees, rocking himself slowly while he sang, and for the moment entirely separate from the woman.

“Si me quieres escribir

Ya sabes mi paradero….”

Marc recognized it as an anti-Fascist song of the Spanish War. Antoine’s eyes shone with a wistful zeal, and the lamplight caught the changes in a face that was alternately old and young. He was singing of what would have been a sadly glorious time of his life. Marc thought about what it meant to survive, defeated. Men always expected victory, though not a one existed to whom defeat was not ultimately inevitable. Thus, he mused, the myth of heaven. Resurrection. Immortality. The final justice.

The women picked up the rhythm with the faintest clacking of castanets. The song was familiar to most of them as a Spanish folk song. He heard Gabrielle humming. He wanted to go closer, the better to hear, but he dared not, knowing she would stop. It was a high, sweet sound. Philomène, also hearing it, coaxed with her hands. Gabrielle parted her lips to smile and the voice escaped. There was to the sound such poignancy and—the word he was so loathe to use—purity, that he was swept into that feeling of protectiveness again. She did not need his protection. He needed hers, and more than protection. What he was taking from her was her sense of purpose for him. All day, whenever they had rested together, she would ask about the place where he would go, the kind of soil, what it grew, the people, the language. It was a pure and unironical truth that telling her he found more purpose of his own than he had had even with Rachel. Much more. Rachel had conjured for him. Now he was the conjurer, and he was beginning to believe in his own magic.

The Spanish song ended and Antoine fell back, his head finding the lap of the waiting woman. Marc was filled with a great sadness for them, the homeless lovers, their haven in wandering. Almost without intent, he began himself to sing, a wordless song to which the sound
tum-bah
set the rhythm, and which everyone took up and repeated while he went on with the melodic chant. Again, the song came from his student days, from a singer he had all but forgotten though the melody had haunted him and he sang with the fervor of one who wishes to believe but cannot. Everyone wanted to know the song’s origin, particularly Jules who proposed to know it before he went to sleep that night.

“All I know,” Marc said, “it is Palestinean. Arabic perhaps, possibly Hebraic.”

“Ay, ay, ay,” Jacques said. “It is sad enough for that.”

The
châtelain
arose from the circle. “I bid you goodnight, friends, and an early departure in the morning. You have worked well and I have no complaint. Sing now, if that is your pleasure, but for God’s sake, remember, a German patrol passes this way three times a night.”

There was no more singing. They would travel with the dawn wherever possible during the harvest, and the dew would be dry in the fields when they reached them. Those with sleeping bags unfolded them in the open courtyard. The
châtelain
locked the gates to the yard himself.

Those with blankets, Gabrielle and Marc among them, went into the loft where the fresh straw was still settling. The darkness, relieved only by the shafts of moonlight, made separation easy. From the moment they left the others, Gabrielle began her night’s silence. She heard him speak, but did not answer and he did not speak again.

She lay down with the new robe over her, but she had not undressed. She fought sleep, a harsh battle, sometimes having to dig her nails into her flesh. Finally, catching herself dozing, she managed to come wide awake only by irritating the blisters on her hands. The novice mistress would not approve: it was sinful to inflict self-injury. Wearily, she wondered if choosing among sins for the lesser of them was not in itself a sin, and then she wondered further if this very thought about the choices was not temptation: a new way of the devil’s, bidding her to sleep. And there was something further yet to be said for sleep: no matter how evil the dreams, one did not have to answer for them unless one dwelt upon them, waking.

When there was all of the stillness she expected of the night, accustoming herself to the whispers of the settling straw, she got up, left the white robe where she had lain, and went to a place where the boards were bare not far from the loft door. There she knelt and devised an hour of prayer and meditation, or as close to an hour as she could estimate, based on as many of Christ’s miracles as she could remember. Sounds intruded and were banished: the night-baying of a dog; someone’s snoring and spittle-spewing which sounded like the wash of the river repeating itself on the shore; the katydids, consistent as a clock, distractions all recognized and put out of mind, made one with her own beingness and the palpitation of night itself.

But then there came a sound she could not banish, a pulsing sound that had yet no noise in it, but seemed to tremble the very boards on which she knelt. She tried for recognition in order to then be done with it, animal, human…Then came the flash of recognition, the realization of its rhythm and her whole body began to throb, her mind to swim with associations. She clasped her hands to her head over her ears, but her own pulsebeat was suggestive and the throbbing took on color, red for passion, Passion Sunday, red for blood, Christ’s blood, blood-red tears, the menstrual blood, the poppies in the field, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the tongues and mouths of men, the furrowed soil, the slaughtered lamb of pascal, its wool red at the knife-tear in its throat.

She heard the little choked-off cry—her own, or the woman’s? She felt the pain of sound-held-back within her throat, and the sobs she could not repress. She muffled them, her mouth deep in the flesh of her arm, and gradually she eased herself down prone upon the floor. There, sucking at her own arm for solace, she said in her mind again and again, Virgin Mary, Mother most pure, and eased her way past temptation into silence and finally, peace.

Marc, himself straightened within the poles of sound—he had been conscious of her every move, and theirs—felt his sweat grow cold. He knew what she had heard, that exquisite thumping of human pleasure, and straining for her sounds when the lovers were at ease, he knew that she was suffering as he was, the pain of which he could relieve them both.

He forced upon his mind the memory of her as she looked when the thought had come on all of them to pass Rachel as the apprentice nun. He cursed and tossed achingly, and became captive to a repetition of the incidents in that final day of Rachel’s life. His last image, as he passed into a dream-riven sleep, was of Rachel in coif and cambric. It was all so ridiculous, so goddamned absurd.

I
F THE LETTER FROM
Paris had not been removed from the plate where Moissac had seen it, he might not have contacted the
Sûreté
to inquire from a Paris source the whereabouts of Jean and Marie Belloir. He assumed the director of the post office in Fauré had given him a correct address for them, but as the morning lengthened and he received no reply to his inquiry of the night before, he wondered. He could not assume anything in this affair now. Little Madame Belloir, if that indeed was her name, had given him a false address for her parents in Marseille. And he might not have checked on that if he had not been making the other inquiry.

He would have liked very much to have an answer from Paris before going into Von Weber’s office, but none had come by eleven-five and he had been sent for at eleven-ten. It would take him a good five minutes to navigate the polished corridor.

“So,” Von Weber greeted him, “a tankful of gasoline for a security mission. Or were you pulling the wool over my eyes?”

“That would be difficult, Colonel.” “I am glad you think so. But all that gasoline?” “I was not sure I would get as much as I asked for.” Von Weber gave a dry laugh at such earnestness. “Tell me about this mysterious mission of yours.” He gestured Moissac into the chair beside his desk and dismissed his aide. Moissac began where, being Moissac, he had to begin, getting the dirty part over with first.
Au Bon Coin
was familiar to Von Weber so that Moissac felt there was no outright involvement of Gaucher on his part. He did, however, justify his own presence there by calling the colonel’s attention to German Intelligence reports on the bistro.