God Speed the Night (9 page)

Moissac ran around the car but by the time he reached her, the nun had opened the front door and climbed in next to the driver’s seat. It disconcerted him that she should choose to sit there instead of in the back. Proximity made deference difficult. In fact, proximity made all his relationships difficult.

Reverend Mother gathered the folds of her habit around her ankles and said that it was kind of him to come for her, and at so late an hour.

“It is my duty as well as my honor, Reverend Mother.” At the wheel of the car again, and careful in shifting gears not to touch her, he said, “It would have been better to have called for the ambulance straight away.”

Reverend Mother did not say anything, weighing his words in the context of Sister Agathe’s cryptic message on the phone. She had assumed Agathe to have meant to convey that it was the woman they had visited who was now in the hospital surgery. But that Agathe wished Reverend Mother herself to come suggested an involvement Agathe and Gabrielle could no longer deal with themselves. Something else then crossed her mind: if Agathe was required to assist in the surgery, why had not Sister Gabrielle been the one to telephone?

“Mind,” Moissac added, “I would not presume to reprimand. I greatly admire such independence. And may I say now, Reverend Mother, I am sorry I was not able to do anything about the Jewish boy.”

Reverend Mother said nothing. He had called the boy “Jewish.” But that she had not been able to do anything for the child herself was at the root of her being on her present mission.

“What most people don’t understand,” Moissac said, “is that in wartime it is the obligation of some of us to remain at our posts no matter what our personal sentiments may be.”

It did not quite follow, what he had said, and she felt rather than understood his urgency to justify himself. But why with her? “We must do our duty as God gives us light to see it,” she said.

“Exactly, Reverend Mother. I am no soldier. I could not pass muster for the last war, much less this one.”

“One heard that the war would be over now for France,” she said, “but it would seem we are only beginning to suffer it. Do you think we shall be bombed as they were in the north?”

Moissac slowed down a little, the better to talk with her. After all, there would be nothing she could do at the hospital until after the nun was operated on. “Pardon me, Reverend Mother?”

She repeated the question, and told him of the devastation Sister St. André had described.

“That is the Allies. They will not forgive us for saving France.”

“And do you believe,
Monsieur le Préfet
, that France is saved?”

“The Germans love France.
They
will not destroy it. After all, they too are a Christian nation.”

“It is sometimes difficult to believe. We saw a woman killed today in her own field.”

“Their examples are ruthless. It is true. One woman’s death may save many, but mind, I do not condone it.”

“We hear of the atrocities, the concentration camps.”

“Much is rumor, I am convinced,” he said.

“And the persecution of the Jews?”

Moissac shrugged. “We too have persecuted them, Reverend Mother. It is their fate. There are the ruins of a synagogue in St. Hilaire, but even before the war a handful of Jews were all that were left. No more.”

Reverend Mother said nothing for a few moments, giving herself over to thoughts of the two nuns she had permitted an errand of mercy which had carried them far beyond the necessity she had envisioned. If they had confided in Moissac, she was reasonably sure he would now have told her so. Or he would not have spoken so of the Jews. But how had they managed without it?

Moissac, choosing the road that approached the hospital from the side of the town away from the canal, had done so in order that they would pass the checkpoint where the Occupation officers queried all who entered St. Hilaire. He drew up at the gate presently and touched the car horn. A German soldier came from the gatehouse and peered in at them.

“Prefect of police.” Moissac identified only himself.

The soldier saluted sharply and the gate was raised at once.

Moissac, driving on, confided to the nun, “You see, Reverend Mother, I consider every such salute collected from them a mark of French independence.”

The unfortunate man, she thought, trying so desperately to justify himself, to reconcile with his conscience what she supposed would have to be called his cowardice. She remembered then the wayside crosses she and Gabrielle had seen memorializing those who not merely did not condone, but had given their lives in opposition.

“The monsignor was saying at dinner the other night,” Moissac went on, “that if the Germans stay long enough in France we shall civilize them.”

Reverend Mother found Moissac’s insinuation of the monsignor’s views to bolster his own offensive, and she now suspected that neither he nor the monsignor had lifted a finger on behalf of the child. She said, “But you have already called them a civilized nation,
Monsieur le Préfet
.”

“Begging your pardon, I called them a Christian nation, Reverend Mother.”

“Ah, yes,” she said, “I see the distinction.”

Moissac glanced at her out of the side of his eye. He could see nothing but the tilt of her nose profiled behind the black cambric, but the tone of irony was unmistakable. The monsignor, on another occasion, had remarked in Moissac’s presence on the preference of the Sisters of Ste. Geneviève for the Jesuits over other orders of the priesthood. It gave them a certain independence, not to say arrogance, which he thought unbecoming in any women, much less in a religious community. Moissac at the time had felt flattered that the monsignor would speak so frankly in his presence. He now felt justified in delivering a little lecture.

“The nun was obviously ill, of course,” he said, “but at a time when any irregularity arouses suspicion…what I mean to say, Reverend Mother, the summoning of an ambulance to a street corner after curfew, and on behalf of a sister…” He was making a mess of it, his confidence diminishing with every word. “If you had called me I would have brought Dr. Lauzin to the convent. It would all have been so much more…dignified.” He was shocked with himself for having said it.

But Reverend Mother was not attending him at all by then. Her mind stayed with that first sentence:
The nun was obviously ill
…That, and a new understanding of Agathe’s message could mean but one thing: the Jewish woman had been admitted to the hospital as a nun.

“As it was,” Moissac went on miserably, building on the very premise he had himself dismissed, “it was suspected that the
Maquis
was trying to decoy an ambulance. They’ve done it before, using it then to transport explosives.”

“How daring of them,” she murmured.

“You are very unwise, if I may say so, Reverend Mother, to voice such sentiments. With me you are safe, but the Gestapo is everywhere. With them even I am not safe.”

“I admire courage,” she said.

Moissac construed the remark to his own needs, and therefore confessed himself humbly: “I do not have as much of it as I should like, but we must make do with what God gives us.”

Reverend Mother concealed her astonishment. This man, she realized, could justify anything. Knowing his own weakness, he called on God, not for strength but to justify the weakness. One could be sorry for him, but one ought not to be. Truly, one ought not to be.

N
EITHER MARC NOR GABRIELLE
slept, but they were long Silent each of them turning within for a more familiar companionship. Once during the early hours a barge passed on the canal and afterwards the waves slapped in measured strokes against the foundation. Even the candle trembled. Marc looked to the flame across the room. Like the breath of life it wavered. The image was so immediate in its association he groaned aloud.

Gabrielle raised her head, hearing him, and tried to think of some thing she might say in comfort. She could think of nothing. Her thoughts kept turning back to the illness of her father and the long vigils she and her sister had kept by turns at his bedside. She could see again the room, the uneven whitewashed walls yellowing with dampness, the windows looking out on the plains he loved. She felt again the longing for them which had almost overwhelmed her in the early days of her noviceship when, alone in her cell, try as she might to banish them, they prevailed. She had confessed herself time and again of the distraction, and on the advice of her confessor she had tried to use the memory, converting the golden plain to the desert where Jesus was thrice tempted and thrice repelled the devil. But for her they remained the plains of Agenais where, on the most vivid of days, she had gone out and gathered red poppies to brighten her father’s sickroom.

She bowed her head and tried again to pray.

The candle sputtered at the wick’s end and went out. “No!” Marc cried out.

Gabrielle continued to pray, now for the Jewish woman.

Marc got up and groped his way to the table. He found another candle and lighted it. “That will do us until dawn,” he said. “If dawn ever comes.”

Gabrielle glanced up at him, her eyes wide and dark like those of a cornered animal. Her lips continued to move faintly.

“Are you praying for her?”

“Yes, monsieur.”

“I wish I could.” He turned away. There was no place for either of them to hide. The room had become small and tight, it seemed, where when Rachel was with him it had been too large and they had hovered close to one another.

“Sometimes that is all God expects,” the novice said quietly.

“What God expects.” Marc weighed the words, not in mockery, but with a removed kind of wonder that the simple of heart could conjure a personal God responsive to their mere wish to have Him respond. He came back and sat down at the table. He covered his face with his hands.

Gabrielle, to brook the despair she felt to have come on him, said, “Where will you go, monsieur, when you are able to travel again?”

“I don’t know. First to wherever we can go, but some day to Palestine.”

“It is far away.”

“Not as far as Paris is for us now.”

“I do not understand.”

“I only mean that we can’t go back there.”

“Do you wish to?”

“No. And that is the truth.” He put his hands, a cradle behind his head. “I must learn first to make your kind of peace with myself.”

She glanced at him and away, not understanding.

“You are more Christian than you are French. Is it not so?”

“I am not Joan of Arc but I am French,” she said with a spirit that surprised him. Her eyes flashed as she spoke, then were lowered, and the color came to her cheeks. He had thought, insofar as he had ever thought about nuns at all, that they would be the runts of the litter, so to speak, the daughters least likely to find husbands, the shy, the crippled, the ugly ones.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I presumed into an area I do not understand.”

“What do you not understand, monsieur?”

“The…business of being a nun.” He simply could not be reverent about it.

She puzzled the word for a moment. “But you see, we do not engage in business. All nuns take a vow of poverty.”

Again he marveled at the simplicity, the directness, and what he could only call the openness. It stirred in him a feeling he did not want now that it was incumbent on him to seek his own safety, a kind of protectiveness. “What else do you vow to?” he said, more to reinforce his own skepticism than to bait her.

“Chastity and obedience.”

The abnegation of everything that gave life meaning. “Suppose,” Marc said, “you were commanded to do something you considered wrong. Would you obey?”

“I would not be so commanded.”

“How can you be sure? Are your superiors saints?”

“They are holy women—or want to be. They are wiser than we are.”

“How do you know?”

“I have faith in them, monsieur. We are not compelled to take vows when the time comes. I shall become a nun if I am worthy and because I wish to be one. I wish to serve God.”

“Not your fellow man? It seems to me they need your service more.”

She did not answer.

“Then you are here tonight in the service of God?”

“Yes. I pray that it is so.”

“And in obedience to whom?”

“Reverend Mother consented,” Gabrielle said.

“Did she also consent to…?” Marc, by plucking at his own clothes, indicated the exchange of garments.

“No, monsieur. I do not know if she would have consented. It may be that I have sinned. It may be I am sinning in talking now, for we have a rule of silence through the night.”

Marc did not say anything for a few minutes. The enumeration of sins was beyond his understanding or wish to understand. He looked at his watch. It was almost two o’clock. In bringing food and charcoal he had planned to boil water and do such cooking as was to be done in the dead of night. He set about it then, Gabrielle occasionally glancing at him, unable to entirely suppress her curiosity. He set half a loaf of bread and a square of cheese on the table, adding then a few plums over which he poured water when it boiled.

“Rachel and I decided that we would eat at night and fast in the daytime,” he said. “It is safer having the fire now.”

“I understand.”

He was afraid that she would refuse to eat, and somehow that would have hurt him in a way he did not now want to be hurt. Nor did he want to hurt her, absurd though he thought the affectations of the life she had chosen. The fact remained, he reminded himself, she had chosen it: she had made that point very clear.

He said what he hoped would be the most conciliatory of words to her: “You may bless the food if you wish, Sister.”

Gabrielle had indeed resolved to eat nothing, although the gnawing of hunger came with the sight of the bread; she had thought of Sister Ursula and her craving for food. Tentatively, following the practice of Reverend Mother at the refectory table, she made the sign of the cross with her thumb, just touching the crust of the loaf. She looked up at Marc, his scowl not quite banished before she caught it.