God Speed the Night (8 page)

“Yes.” He remembered having used them to make the blackout curtain.

“We must cut off her hair, monsieur.”

In the remotest corner of the loft Gabrielle undressed in the ritualistic manner of her disrobing every night of her noviceship, removing first the white veil. The religious habit had become as protective of her as her skin, and for a moment, taking the crucifix from her cincture, she held it close to her as another woman might a lover’s hand to her breast. She put it down carefully, removed the cincture, and unfastened the long grey robe. She tried desperately to think herself back in the cell at Ste. Geneviève.

Not until she had put on the clothes of the other woman did she remove the coif exposing her head in what seemed the ultimate nakedness. She huddled in the corner, sitting on the down-turned bucket, her hands covering her head. Sister Agathe came for her clothes and took them. Only once did Gabrielle look to the others, hearing the snip of the scissors and Rachel’s protest. She remembered what might well have been her own last vanity, her long, dark hair. She yearned for it now as she had not since the first realization that it was gone forever if her vocation was a true one.

When the others had left—and they went without speaking to her—she came out to where the candle was burning. Another candle lay beside the glass in which it stood on the table. She looked down at the dark skirt which came to just below her knees, at the red silk blouse beneath which she could see the shape of her breasts, at her arms bare from the elbows, then down at the shoes, pumps with silver buckles. She stooped down and removed the shoes, setting them side by side beneath the table. She sat at the table and stared at the flickering candle. When she stared long enough it became a golden cross sometimes wavering in the draft, Christ stumbling on the way to Calvary. She put her arms on the table and her forehead on her arm and closed her eyes. She could see the afterglow of the candle and remembered the patterns and colors she had wrought from the darkness as a child by pressing her eyes tightly closed. She remembered the game she had played with her sister: “I see.” I see lilac blossoms…I see a kitten, his fur all ruffled…He has a thousand eyes…It’s a peacock’s feather…It’s the bottom of the pond where the frogs’ eggs are…It’s God’s eyes everywhere…

Marc returned. “They are gone,” he said when he had closed the door. “Do you know how far it is to the hospital?”

She could not speak at first. She shook her head and when he came near and looked at her she covered her head with her hands.

He crossed the room to the bedframe where his and Rachel’s valise was open, and took from it the blue scarf. He brought it to the novice. She put it around her head and knotted it under her chin.

“Thank you, monsieur.”

“My name is Marc—though what it will be tomorrow, God knows.”

“I am Sister Gabrielle.”

“Are you hungry…Sister?”

“No, thank you.”

“Sleepy?”

“No.”

She would not look at him. “Are you afraid?”

“A little, I think.”

“Of me?”

She did not answer directly. “I’ve never been afraid this way before, so I don’t know.”

He sat down at the table as far from her as possible and turned the chair so that he would not be facing her. He tried to think of things to say that might make his presence easier to her—and hers more real to him. He had known many waking nightmares, but none so unreal as seeing this strange girl in the clothes of the woman he had known as he had known no other woman. He said: “It has been so long since I was not afraid I’ve forgotten what that was like.”

Gabrielle stared at her hands. They looked large and raw without the sleeves coming down to cover the big-boned wrists, and the nails were dirty. She hid them against her breast, folding her arms.

“Is it a good hospital?” Marc asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t seem to know anything now.”

“Enough. You knew about this place, and to come back and help us when no one else could.”

“I didn’t
know.
I prayed.”

“It is a way of knowing,” Marc said.

He got up and went to where the hair he had cut from Rachel’s head was lying heaped on his white handkerchief, his only clean one. “There is a ritual in Orthodoxy—in Jewish tradition—in which a woman’s hair is cut off at the time of her marriage.”

Gabrielle wished he would not talk, not knowing how to answer him and unsure as well to what extent it was a violation of her rule to speak at all. The rule of silence prevailed within the convent from final meditation until after breakfast.

“She was very proud of her hair,” Marc said.

“So was I once,” Gabrielle said.

He did not answer, knowing perhaps, she thought, she should not have spoken that way. He seemed a wise man in the way he said things, different from such men as she remembered…except the
cure
in the village where she had grown up. She tried to stem the memory, but it came welling up: he had been her guide and counsel until one day, sitting opposite her in the cold little office off the abbey sacristy, he had got up and come to her, and lifting her chin with his forefinger, frowning until she was terrified of him, he had bent down and kissed her on the mouth. She reached now for the crucifix, forgetting it was no longer at her waist.

Marc folded the handkerchief over Rachel’s hair and put it away in the side pocket of the valise. He set the valise on the floor and said, “You had better lie down here and rest even if you cannot sleep. I’ll stretch out on the table. I would leave you alone if I could, but I must stay until a friend comes.” He glanced at her. She was pale and immobile like a waxen doll. “Do you understand?”

She nodded. She did understand to some extent.

He came to the table. “If we put out the candle we can have some air in here. We can open the door.” He gestured her toward the bed, and taking off his coat he carefully folded it and put it at one end of the table to serve him as a pillow. “There is no blanket, but the flour sacks will cover you.”

“I would rather stay here, monsieur.”

Marc shrugged and took his coat away. Glancing down, he saw Rachel’s shoes on the floor beneath the table. “Don’t the shoes fit you?”

Gabrielle looked down at them, not knowing what to say because she did not want to offend him. “They have silver buckles,” she said.

To which he took offense anyway, or chose the biting retort to vent his diffuse anger. “There was a silver figure also on the cross my wife wore going out of here tonight, Sister.”

Gabrielle bent down silently and put the shoes on her feet again.

M
OISSAC WAS ON THE
verge of sleep when the telephone rang. He had been several times only to come fully awake again tormented by the recollection of one and then another of the day’s humiliations. He ran to the phone so that it would not waken Maman.

It was the night man at the desk of the prefecture. A woman identifying herself as a nun from Ste. Geneviève’s had phoned the hospital for an ambulance and the hospital had phoned the prefecture.

“So?” Moissac said.

“She phoned from Place de Gare,
mon préfet
, a public kiosk. It would seem she tried to take another nun to the hospital in a
camionnette
.”

“So?” Moissac snapped again.

“It is thought it might be a
Maquis
trap—to hijack the ambulance.”

“It is thought by whom?”

“By me,
mon préfet
.” The answer was almost inaudible.

“It would be easier to hijack an elephant. Order the ambulance to proceed and I shall go there myself.”

Moissac, having to dress, arrived at the moment they were lifting the stricken woman into the ambulance. He shone his torch about trying to be useful. The sick one was very young and a novice. He asked the older nun if there was any way in which he could be of assistance.

“The
camionnette
, monsieur, we must not lose the
camionnette.
”

He promised to have one of his men pick it up.

The ambulance driver said, “
Monsieur le Préfet
, we are going to need Doctor Lauzin.”

“I’ll bring him at once.”

“That will be the day,” the driver said and closed the ambulance door. Lauzin was the only really competent surgeon in St. Hilaire, and therefore the most independent.

Lauzin was also the town’s only declared atheist. He made it plain to Moissac on the way that he came because a human being needed him; he was in no greater haste because she wore a veil. Moissac hunched his shoulders and concentrated on the road. He had no wish to engage in an argument his friend the monsignor had been pursuing for years to no avail whatever.

“Eh, nothing to say in defense of your friends, Moissac?” “They are good women.” He remembered saying the very words to the Gestapo that morning.

“Because they are chaste? Is that what makes them good?”

Moissac knew he was being baited. “It must help,” he said.

“Help?
Mon Dieu
, what does it help?”
“Mon docteur
, I am a policeman, not a theologian.” “A splendid distinction, Moissac, but I have never known one who did not assume the prerogatives of the other.”

In the hospital Rachel was taken directly to the surgery. There was a moment, only a moment, in which Sister Agathe was left alone with her. She leaned close to Rachel while she untied the coif. “Sister Gabrielle?”

Rachel opened her eyes. Agathe nodded approval. “I will answer their questions, do you understand?”

“Yes…Sister.”

“We shall have you back with your husband in no time,” she whispered, “but you must not betray us.”

“I shall not betray you,” Rachel said.

“I know that, my dear. It is only that in the fever you might say something. You must think of yourself as Sister Gabrielle, and a novice never speaks as long as there is a superior present to speak for her.”

A consumptive-looking orderly wearing a stained white jacket that would have better become a butcher came in, clip-board in hand, and asked to have the patient’s identity card. Sister Agathe gave it to him. From it he took the statistics he needed, scarcely so much as glancing at the patient herself.

To Agathe he said, “You are the person responsible for—” he looked at the record, “—Sister Gabrielle’s commitment to the hospital?”

“I am the infirmarian of the Convent of Ste. Geneviève.”

“So that the patient’s progress will be reported to you.”

“To us, yes.”

“And the hospital charges, Sister?”

Sister Agathe had not had so much as a
centime
in her hand in twenty years. “You will discuss that with Reverend Mother, please.”

“It should have been discussed with Reverend Mother before you came,” the man grumbled, his pen hovering over the blank place in the form.

Agathe said, lifting her chin: “You may put down ‘pauper.’”

At the sound of the word Rachel opened her eyes.

“We
are
paupers. Poverty is one of our vows,” Agathe said firmly.

The orderly shuffled out. Agathe drew her first easy breath in hours. She observed the room, so cheerless, the walls a bilious green, shelves stacked with aluminum and porcelain vessels. There was a rolling case of surgical instruments. The sterilizer looked like a fish aquarium. Several doctors’ gowns hung on a rack, all of them having taken on the shape of the men who had worn them. The door to the operating room was open, a dark pit with the chrome of the equipment picking up glints of light like eyes in the night. She thought of her own infirmary, spotless white. And she thought of Reverend Mother who was to be wakened when she and Sister Gabrielle returned. She should telephone, but the very thought of trying to explain was more than she felt able to cope with at the moment.

A buxom and sullen nurse came, her eyes puffy from lack of sleep. She proceeded to prepare by turns the patient and the operating room. Agathe, despite her anxiety, was fascinated to see the equipment. After taking Rachel’s temperature, the nurse read it and handed it to Agathe. It registered almost forty degrees. She brought a hospital gown and left Agathe to undress the sick woman.

The moment Dr. Lauzin entered the room Sister Agathe felt confident. He went to the patient even as he removed his coat, dropping the coat on the floor when the nurse failed to take it in time. With two fingers he parted one of Rachel’s eyelids. She opened her eyes. He continued to study the eyeball. Then he stood back and looked down at her. “Well, well,” he said, “we shall have to see what’s inside you to stir up all this trouble in the middle of the night.”

Agathe liked him, particularly when he turned to her and asked, “Are you competent to assist me, Sister?”

“I’ve had nurse’s training and I am in the habit of doing what I’m told,” she said.

“That is a habit to which our regular staff is not particularly addicted. Good.”

She watched him explore the abdomen with fingers far more efficient than her own. “Is there a matter of permission to be got for the operation?”

She said, “I ought to telephone Reverend Mother in any case.”

“Then do so at once, madame. I shall want you in the surgery in a quarter of an hour.”

Sister Agathe went down to the admissions office to put through the phone call to the convent. Sitting in the dingy room with the orderly was the prefect of police. Moissac rose as the nun entered.

Reverend Mother came to the phone almost at once. She had been waiting for over three hours. It was five minutes past one.

“We are at the hospital, Reverend Mother,” Agathe said. “I am needed to assist the surgeon.” Then, because within the hearing of the orderly and the prefect of police she could not otherwise explain, she added: “Sister is very ill.”

There was a brief silence before Reverend Mother said, I see.

Moissac, coming close to the nun, said, “Excuse me, Sister, but if she wishes to come here I will bring her at once.”

Sister Agathe told this to Reverend Mother.

“Perhaps it is best,” Reverend Mother said. “I shall be waiting for him.”

R
EVEREND MOTHER HAD LONG
since sent the portress to bed, taking up the vigil herself. With the striking of midnight she had commenced to read her next day’s office. Then when Sister Agathe called she took her breviary to her cell and got her shawl. As soon as she saw the lights of Moissac’s car, she picked up the key from the portress’ desk and went out, letting the great door lock behind her.