God Speed the Night (26 page)

“But with your consent, madame. You must understand, I am offering you the life of Marc Daridan for the pleasure of your body. I am a man of honor. I am a man of religion, let us say that, and I will swear to you upon the Bible at the bedside there that your husband will go free insofar as my life can manage it.”

“If I do not consent?”

“It would be very bad for him, madame. Not merely the concentration camp as it would be for you, but the
Milice,
you see, are something else. I have heard that they put out the eyes of men who could identify their spies. You must admit, it is a fair exchange I’m asking of you.”

“Monsieur, if I was not a Jew, would you ask it?”

“How dare you put that question to me?” But even as he spoke, he knew the beginning of his supremacy: she had said the word,
If I was not a Jew.
He said almost tenderly, “You have a choice. You are not my prisoner. You may either go in and wait for me in the bed, or you may go out and wait for me in the car.”

Gabrielle sat quietly for a long-seeming time, the silence of which time broke only with the rasps of his heavy breathing. Then she got up. She did not speak until she reached the bedroom door. “Must I take off my clothes, monsieur?”

“No, of course not. I will take them off for you.”

S
HE MADE NO SOUND,
no sound at all even when it must have been most painful, and when to have heard her cry out in pain would have helped him. And so he had to help himself with every lewd name that he could conjure and prefix all of them with Jew. Thus was it consummated.

When at last he rolled the stone weight of himself from off her, she lay in a kind of sick fear, not of him, but of the emptiness, the wetness, and the smell, as of earth at first, and then, she knew, of blood. She was afraid to go from the bed for fear of what might happen to her, standing. And so she lay, her hand between her legs, holding herself as though it were still possible to put back something that was no longer in its place.

He sat up on the side of the bed, a fat, hairy, heaving hump of a thing, and looked around through swollen eyes to where the cream-colored limbs were crimsoned and Maman’s sheets blotched and soaking. He sat and stared at the hands and the hair and the blood and tried to think what it could mean that she should be a virgin. Was the Jew impotent? What else could it mean? He remembered her fists in her husband’s face, them beating against his breast for having taken her from the dancer where they had fallen upon the floor together.

He began to laugh, laughter such that he needed to contain in his hands, covering his mouth, for there were sobs in it, great joyous sobs. He, Moissac, had succeeded where the Jew had failed! He had consummated the marriage act of the tall, muscled, virile, blue-eyed Jew. That he had done: his triumph was marked in blood.

He did not touch her. He did not stand up until he had gathered his shabby bathrobe from the floor and wrapped it round him. He went to the wall at the head of the bed and straightened the crucifix where it had gone awry. Her eyes followed him. He stepped back and pulled the quilt over her to hide the filth of it all. “I will bring you warm water,” he said, and motioned to the washstand. “You will feel better afterwards. Dress quickly and we will leave as soon as you are ready.”

They had driven twenty kilometers and still she had not spoken: it was as though she had been stricken dumb. He stopped at a farmhouse where, before the war had changed so many things, he and his colleagues on the force had come for a Sunday’s hunting. He was able to buy dark bread spread with pâté and a bottle of wine which he brought back to the car. She would not eat.

“You’d better keep it and take it with you,” he said, and folded two slices of the bread into a sandwich. “When did you plan to go?”

She did not answer.

“Look, madame. Théophile Moissac keeps his word. I will not interfere. I will punish no one, not even René. Do you understand?”

“Yes, monsieur.” Finally, words.

“You ought to thank me,” he said with self-conscious irony. He was sitting at the wheel of the car. He maneuvered round so that he could watch her face.

“Thank you, monsieur,” she said in the same monotone, and continued to stare ahead.

“I mean for everything.”

She turned and looked at him, her eyes wide and frank and saying something, but in a language he could not understand. He did not have to: that little triumph would last him a while yet. He made himself comfortable for driving and turned on the ignition. “What will you tell your husband?”

“Nothing, monsieur.”

“But when he finds out…Some day, you know?”

After a moment she said, “I will tell him what he will believe.”

Which, Moissac thought, was the way and wisdom of all women, to tell a man only what she knew he would believe.

B
EFORE NOON THE HARVESTERS
had arrived in Lacroix, forty kilometers on, a village from which the oak forests could be seen patching the hillsides like the shadow of clouds; beyond, dimly, rose the high mountains. The children came out to see the combine and the tractor and the van of workers as though it were the circus that had come to town. The threshing machine did resemble some huge, lumbering beast, and when it was set up quay-side by the river, for the grain was to go directly to the mill upstream, and its grain spout lowered to the barge, a child called out that the tin beast wanted water.

This village too had its medieval aspect, dominated entirely by the
châtelain
who also owned large holdings in the cork-oak forests. As soon as the harvest was in, the men of the village would go into the woods for the beginning of the bark-stripping season.

Marc, arranging the loading of the grain, which would go that night to St. Pierre-sur-1’Adour, arranged to also travel there on the same barge. It would wait for him until ten p.m. He had confided in Antoine after they left Champs des Corbeaux, Antoine already suspecting Marc’s purpose. He foresook Michèle that afternoon to work alongside Philomène and Céleste, one or the other of whom, he told Marc, ought to be able to ride the night through with the prefect of police.

As the afternoon lengthened and Marc calculated the time it should have taken Moissac to drive to St. Hilaire and thence to Lacroix, and that time passed by an hour and then another hour, he wondered if he would ever see Gabrielle again. Then the car came, Moissac parking in front of the water fountain. And Gabrielle had come back.

Marc stayed at his place with the grain chute, but he watched her step from the car and pass among the wagons and along the dock toward him. She walked, he thought, as a woman might who carried something on her head, a carefulness that without the burden had the appearance of great grace. Moissac had stopped at the fountain for a cup of water. Jacques came down and took the grain chute. He called out to ask how Jules was.

Gabrielle answered, speaking to Marc: “We left him at the hospital. That’s all I know. He would like Antoine to keep his guitar and bring it to him.”

Marc signaled Jacques to say that Jules was all right, which was not necessarily so, but he jumped down beside Gabrielle to speak to her before Moissac came up. “You’ve been gone for a long time.”

“Yes.”

“Did he question you?”

“I did not tell him anything. There were not many questions I could answer.”

She would not look at him at all. She had not wanted to return, Marc thought. His fantasies—and he had had them, hardly knowing it—were idle. He said, “Thank you for coming back.”

“When shall we go, monsieur?”

Monsieur again. “I have made arrangements to go up the river tonight on the grain barge. Why do you ask it? Because of him?”

“Because I can see the mountains.”

“Why does he keep following us? Do you know?”

All afternoon she had been thinking about the lie that she must tell him, the lie he would believe and therefore save himself, and ask of her no more questions. “It is not us he follows.” She watched his face until she saw the sad little smile that came after the first brief look of surprise.

Artur was waving wildly at her. He cupped his hands and called the name, “Marie, Marie, Marie!” When she looked up at last, he blew her a kiss. It was not easy, it never had been easy to pretend so much. Now only an act of will enabled her to make the little gesture that would satisfy him. She mimed the catching of the kiss mid-air.

She walked to the van and got her pitchfork. Then she rode into the valley with the next wagon that left the dock.

Marc went back to work, jumping down into the barge and spreading the grain with a shovel, and while he worked he thought about the blindness to the plight of his fellow voyagers that must be the greatest affliction of the refugee. And he remembered, thinking of this, his impatience with Rachel when she complained of the pain. Once more he felt the pangs of grief, having, just for an instant, an intimate sense of her and the way they were together that afternoon before she died.

Moissac sat outside the dockside bistro for a little while and watched the threshing while he drank beer. A great thirst had come on him. He saw Marc remove his shirt and work stripped to the waist, but only after his wife had gone to the fields. Hairless and pink, the virile Jew. What had she told him that he would believe? When Philippe rode in atop a load of sheaves, Moissac beckoned to him and ordered a pitcher of beer and glasses. Jacques came also on the motioned invitation, and Antoine, after Philippe had gone, all inquiring after Jules. Moissac promised to get word to them that night. Finally when there was a lull in the arrival of the wagons he poured the Jew a beer also. But the dwarf he could not bring himself to invite, not in daylight. Marc, instead of drinking his, carried it back and handed it to Artur. He came back expecting another beer. But then, why not? Moissac met his eyes: steel blue, Moissac could not get over it. Moissac let his eyelids fall to where they were comfortable. He gestured to Marc to pour himself the beer.

“Thank you, monsieur.”

“It is nothing.”

Moissac, his eyes level with the Jew’s waist, lowered them, and he thought about the mark of the Jew and wondered if that might affect their potency, the circumcision badly done. He shuddered at the thought of the operation and looked about to throw his mind entirely off that track. There atop the machine, Artur was pouring the beer over his head.

Moissac watched him for a second, then glanced up to see the Jew shaking his fist at the dwarf. Moissac burst out laughing. He put down his own glass and clapped his hands, applauding. To Marc he said, “What does he do ordinarily, a carnival? Sideshow?”

“He’s a mechanic,” Marc said. “Otherwise he is a fool.”

“So. Who is not?”

“Your health, monsieur,” Marc said and drank the beer.

Moissac just sat nodding, his eyes half-closed.

M
OISSAC TOOK THE JAILER’S
key and went in himself to where René was lying on the bench. The moths circled thickly around the naked light bulb. The whirr of their wings and the burble of the urinal drain were the only sounds in the place his men called The Tomb.

“Wake up, my friend…”

“I’m not asleep.”

“…And let me tell you about the Jew.”

“I don’t want to know about the Jew.”

“They will go tonight, I think. I watched him on the barge—as though he owned it. That is how they’ll go. I’m not a policeman for nothing. And tomorrow on a coal truck into the mountains and there they’ll find a passer…”

Rene slowly sat up and looked at him.

“Or is that arranged already? Do not tell me. You do not need to tell me anything.” He put his hand on René’s thigh. “But let me tell you something: the woman, the bride…She was a virgin and she gave herself to me. I, Moissac, did the honors for the Jew.”

René, slowly understanding, doubled in on himself and buried his hands in his face. His shoulders shook, his whole body rocked to and fro.

“Yes! Go ahead, my friend, and laugh. Why not? This time I’ll laugh with you.”

René took his hands away and there was something wild in his moist eyes. Then he said: “So it was a triumph! You finally found a woman you could take, Moissac, a woman you could…”

“She gave herself to me, René! The Jewess gave herself.”

“The Jewess is dead. She’s buried in the nuns’ graveyard at Ste. Geneviève. You had yourself a nun, you pig…”

Moissac felt it like a blow at the back of his head that numbed his neck and spine. The cell was tilting and he could not stop himself from falling until his knees hit the stone and then his hands, and he had to stay in that position or pass out altogether.

“She gave her name and clothes to the Jewess to get her into a hospital where the Nazis have the second floor. Remember, Théo? You picked me up that night with the Reverend Mother in the car…”

It came back to him, all, kaleidoscopically, the
camionnette
on Louis Pasteur, the sudden funeral and the nun, the shyness of the woman with the man. “Let me be, René. No more! For Christ Jesus’ sake, no more…The doors are open. Go. Leave me.”

René got up. “I gave her to you, Théo. In the end I gave her to you. I made her go with the Jew to keep him safe.”

Moissac beat his fists on the floor of the cell. He began to retch and René went out quickly and closed the prison door behind him.

A
GERMAN PATROL, TWELVE
men in all, sat at the quayside bistro, their rifles leaning against the stand for bicycles. They ordered beer and used the
pissoir
while Marc and Gabrielle watched from among the bales of straw. The engine of the barge was stoked, the charcoal smoke fouling the air. One of the Germans went down to the dock and ordered the bargeman to proceed. He spread his hands, then shone his torch on where presumably a valve refused to work. The bistro owner came out and pleaded with him to pole the barge away, but very soon the Germans took their guns and left.

The bargeman collected his fee and the refugees buried themselves to the neck in grain.

“At least we can see the sky,” Marc said.