God Speed the Night (25 page)

Please, God, make him stop talking like this.

“…A communist maybe. Maybe a secret Jew. You come on them once in a while, you know.” He saw her bow her head and bite her lip. He was satisfied then to concentrate on his driving. As he turned into Rue Louis Pasteur he began to sound the car horn regularly, clearing the road before him.

As soon as they stopped at the hospital entrance, Jules sat up and swung his legs to the floor. He looked out to see where he was. Moissac opened the car door. Gabrielle did not move for a moment, watching the boy.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “We’ll all come and see you when we come back to St. Hilaire, and you’ll be healed by then.”

“I’ll be fine,” he said. “It’s my left hand.” Then, “I shouldn’t have left it lying around.” He gave a short, hurt laugh. “Will you tell them I said that? Remember.”

“I’ll tell them.” She got out and beckoned him, coaxingly, to follow.

“Tell Jean. He’ll think it’s funny. And Antoine. He will really understand it. Antoine can bring my guitar. And if he wants to play it, tell him I said he could.”

At the desk when they asked for his identity card before allowing him to proceed up to the surgery, Gabrielle got it out from his wallet for him. The admissions clerk repeated the name as he copied it: “Jules Laffite.”

Sister Marie Gabrielle: Sister Agathe would have said it when the clerk asked the name of Marc’s wife, and somewhere the records showed Sister Marie Gabrielle to have died. As clearly as though he had human voice, the devil implanted the words on her consciousness: And so you are free, Madame Daridan.

But in fact it was Moissac who had spoken to her, using that name for the first time: “Let us go, Madame Daridan.”

She stood and watched Jules disappear with the attendant who brought the elevator down for him, Moissac waiting behind her. Marc had said, If you are ever in trouble…Marc was in trouble now, his identity known. But if that was so, why had he not already been arrested, or charged, or taken prisoner? The prefect then could not be certain. He would be hoping now to get his information from her, counting on a woman’s weakness.

“Madame Belloir!” he said in that voice that made the softest of words sound like a growl.

But he had called her Madame Belloir again, and so she turned and went with him out the hospital door and into the car.

Moissac maneuvered the Peugeot carefully past the cars crowding the driveway, all official vehicles of the Occupation, some medical, some military. He remembered that the second floor of the hospital was occupied entirely by the Germans. He stopped suddenly as an officer backed out of his car. He slammed the car door, saluted Moissac, and then stooped to look into the car at the woman as the prefect drove on.

“The Germans are everywhere,” Moissac said. “That was Captain Mittag of the Gestapo.”

Gabrielle said nothing at first, feeling that there was a threat implicit in the identification. Then, as she felt Marc would likely have done in the situation, she asked clearly: “Do you know him, monsieur?”

The boldness of it, the nerve, the calculated insult. And yet it only excited him more. He would not have wanted a wilted, beaten creature. It was one thing to go to a tired whore. This was to be something quite else. “Shall I say, madame, they have forced their acquaintanceship upon me?” There was an answer, Moissac thought, the woman remaining silent. If he could give such parries to his peers, they would no longer be his peers.

He drove alongside the river, avoiding the Old Town. It crossed his mind that Maman might be somewhere on Rue Michelet: he would not have wanted her, prisoner or no, looking out at him just now. He could not help feeling, now that turning home he thought about her, that she was enjoying her captivity. She would be counting on her domination of her son to insure the safety of René. Perhaps, if she had seemed to be enjoying herself too much, they would have dumped her home this morning.

The fear of that possibility became so vivid that when he reached the house he had the woman wait in the car a moment while he went up to see. There was no one and no new message. Going down through the garden, he glanced surreptitiously at the windows of the nearest neighbor. The drapes were drawn. They always were on the Moissac side.

“Now, madame, if you will come with me please, I will ask you to wait for me in the house. My mother is not home, but you will be more comfortable there than sitting in a public place in a hot automobile. I will not be more than an hour. I know how anxious you are to return to your husband. And I know how anxious he is for your return.”

“They will have gone on by now,” Gabrielle said.

“We shall follow them.”

It seemed most plausible, the way he said it, and seeing the man in his own garden, stooping to pull up a weed as he came along the walk, made of him a human being, that and the mention of his mother. She was further reassured, going up the walk, when she saw a little grotto to Our Lady among the marigolds and lupin.

Moissac said, not going into the house at all himself, “Perhaps you will be good enough to look in the larder and put together a lunch we can take along with us. There’s bound to be something there.”

But in the house alone, hearing only the buzzing of flies and the droning of bees about the honeysuckle bushes at the window, and no sound at all from the clock which had stopped at a quarter past two, she thought again about his having called her Madame Daridan. Or had she imagined that he said it, so thinking of herself at that very moment? Which was a sin. Or the very gravest of temptations. The trouble was she had no real measure of what was evil, except in herself. It was a peculiar thought, but she sat down at the scrubbed, bone-white kitchen table to think about it when it occurred to her: Christ and all His saints were human. Why wasn’t the devil human also?

P
EBHAPS HE SHOULD NOT
have left her alone. But he had to leave her alone: it was part of the ceremony, that she be allowed a kind of retreat, a time alone in a Christian house. It was also necessary that she be there when he returned because she wanted to be there. Alone now she was free to run. There were people enough in St. Hilaire to hide her. A call to Gaucher would probably arrange the matter. And if she did not love her husband, she would run. It was essential to the ceremony that she be given that choice first, and then the other choice.

He went to the prefecture and cleared his desk of an accumulation of paper-work, forms and counterforms, reports in triplicate and quadruplicate, all requiring signatures and stamps and seals, and not an item among them that would stir the republic a jot if it had not been prepared. That was not true. It was part of the fabric…a shoddy fabric. What was it Maman had said? She was talking of self-pity. She was right. The shoddiest. He was done with it. All done with it. He glanced at the clock over the door. The allotted hour was almost up. The very hair on his head seemed to bristle. He had never felt more alert, more in control.

He went out and chatted at the desk for a few minutes just to prove his command of himself. Finally he stopped at the prison annex to the prefecture. René was its only occupant at the moment. Moissac gave the jailer the money out of his own pocket and instructed him to see that the prisoner was served the best luncheon available in St. Hilaire.

G
ABRIELLE, HAVING GLIMPSED
in the room off the kitchen the ivory crucifix above the bed, was drawn toward it as a moth to flame. She did not pray. She merely sat on the edge of the blanket chest and gazed at the crucifix until at last she said, You must speak to me, Lord. I don’t have anything to say. But she heard nothing.

Not that she expected to hear the word of God, only to be moved toward self-expression for being herself so utterly empty. So many things had cancelled one another out, like a game of Trafalgar, checks and zeroes. You did not put things off in the religious life: tomorrow never brought again today’s opportunity. Which was not to say that failing today, you could not try again tomorrow. Slowly, slowly, her self-contemplation deepened: to know yourself could not be sinful: what else could it mean, to examine your conscience? Therefore to blame yourself, having no real guilt: was this less a sin than to excuse yourself having guilt? Guilt—it was a word itself to think about. Every time Marc heard it he would almost gnash his teeth. And that brought her thoughts to Marc: would she ever be able to get him entirely out of her mind? Not so very long ago, in school, she could remember—not in school, it was her sister on the way home from school—saying she thought she was in love. How do you know? I’d die for him…Lord, I must think these things unless you turn my mind to other thoughts. So her mind proposed one thing and then another, but never once focusing on where she actually was—or on what lay immediately before her for which she was subconsciously trying to gather strength.

Moissac returned. She heard the car, then the slamming of its door and his step on the walk. She waited in the kitchen, watching him come up the walk. She wondered why she was not afraid. Or were there kinds of fear as there were kinds of love? Unrecognized, or but dimly so. She did not like to think about Monsieur Moissac. She knew that. He was ugly-looking, for which no man could be blamed. And having refused to blame him for being something that might have frightened her, she had conquered fear. So simple. It was the same with Moissac as it had been with Artur, the dwarf, when she had permitted him her hands and danced with him.

“No lunch?” he said, coming in and removing his hat and coat, and hanging them behind the door.

Gabrielle had thought that they would go at once, but he sat down at the table in his shirtsleeves. “I am sorry, but I did not look, monsieur. I did not like to look.”

“You do not like to look at anything. I have observed that. Or is it only me you do not like to look at?”

“No, monsieur.”

“Whatever that means. I am wearing a clean shirt.”

She glanced his way to see him pluck at the sleeves, hiking up the cuffs. There were dark marks of sweat under his armpits.

“Come, madame, and sit down where you can hear what I have to say to you.”

Gabrielle sat on the opposite bench at the far end of the table.

“You are very modest, madame. It is becoming in a bride. And you are a bride after all, in spite of what the Belloir papers say. Do you love your husband?”

Gabrielle flushed, then shivered, for a feeling of ice had come over her, and her mouth was dry. It was hard to speak but she said, “Excuse me,
Monsieur le Préfet,
but I do not think it is your business.”

“Maybe you don’t think so, but I do. I am now making everything that is your business and your husband’s business mine. You see, I know enough right now about Marc Daridan to send him to a concentration camp, perhaps to his death. Quite probably that, or you would not be trying to reach the Spanish border disguised as Belloirs. Is that not so?”

Gabrielle sat silent, her hands clasped in her lap. Because he had commented on the downcast of her eyes, she fixed them now on the middle button of his shirt. It was a thin shirt and the hair of his chest shone darkly through it.

“On the other hand, there is no reason if I say so, for him not to make the border. I cannot take him there, but I can refrain from sending the dogs after him.”

This time in spite of herself she nodded her head a little.

“That’s better. There’s no reason for us to pretend that you are Madame Belloir any longer, is there?” When she did not respond, he said: “Answer me!”

Gabrielle moistened her lips and said: “I am Madame Marie Belloir. I do not know the other name.”

“I see,” Moissac said quietly, “you are ashamed of being a Jew. I do not blame you for denying it.”

This time her eyes flew to his. “Christ was a Jew, monsieur.”

Moissac grinned, his yellowed teeth then parting as he darted his tongue between them. “Ah, but you weren’t long in denying Him. You must admit that thirty-three is no great lifespan for a man, eh? How old is your husband? Ten years left at most, I’d say. Suppose down through history every Jew was permitted to live only to the age of thirty-three? Now there’s an idea—you see, your husband’s not the only one who can make up a tale. Would you believe me, I’ve only just now thought about this. Every Jew must die at the age of thirty-three. Every male Jew, that is. Otherwise we might breed a race of giants, everyone like your husband. That simply would not do. No, we must saddle them with their aging crones, their matriarchs, their witches at the hearth. If I was not a religious man I could draw you a picture of hell, madame, for I can see it now in my own mind’s cauldron.”

Gabrielle again moistened her lips. “I will go and find something to make for lunch, monsieur.” She put her hands on the table, about to get up.

Moissac sprang to his feet, jogging the heavy table so that it must have hurt him. But he pounced his hand on hers. “Later, madame.” He held her hand down with a cruel tightness for a moment, then let it go. “I did not mean to touch you,” he said. “Not yet. What I mean to say is, please do not move until we have finished talking. What I want to say, I will say directly, for I am a plain, outspoken man…No, I am not that either.” He sat down again. He put his hands behind his head, tightening and freeing the muscles in his arms, his shoulders. “I wish you would catch fire for me again—the way you did when I said you were ashamed to be a Jew.”

He half-turned and pointed to the room where she had found the crucifix above the bed. “I want you to go in that room and take off your clothes and wait for me. It is a fine large bed.”

The words seemed very strange, but the idea must have already crossed her mind; that she did not know precisely what it meant or how he expected to achieve this thing was true. But this she did know: if he did not believe she was a Jew, he would not have dared to so approach her. She did not move. She kept her eyes on her hands where she had folded them on the table. “I do not understand, monsieur.”

“I want to fuck you,” he said.

And the word she did not understand, but she could not help but feel that having said it was a new agitation to him.