Obedience (2 page)

The following morning, weary, Bernard sat for a moment on the flat wall that ran out to the henhouse. The sun was low behind the convent, trapping her in shadow. She dipped her head into her hands, and her veil fell thickly about her. She sat very still, doing nothing. God railed.

Since she was a girl, for every waking minute of every day and throughout her dreams, Sister Bernard had
been pestered by the voice of God. He commented on everything she did, from the most intimate of habits to the most routine of chores. He was often taxing and abusive, always uncompromising. He disliked sloppiness, and was particular about clean shoes, stockings without holes, and the quantity of toothpaste squeezed onto the brush. His vengeance was swift and loud and stupefying. In the terror of it, her head would fill with the roar of Him until her eyes smarted. Only many hours later would a note of birdsong or the purr of a car engine creep back to her, wary. She could never hear her own voice above the din.

‘Sister Bernard?'

There was no sign that she had heard. The other nun leant forwards and gently touched the sway of her veil.

‘Sister Bernard?'

Bernard lifted her head this time, blinking. She was surprised that the soldier was not there. She was not sure where she was. All she could be sure of was the smell of cut grass and frying garlic, and she put her hand to her mouth.

‘Are you quite well?' The other nun leant forwards, her words slow. ‘The girl is here – Severine.'

The woman was of Bernard's age. She held a bundle of baby and stared at Bernard from behind the other nun, her face stupid and blank. Bernard concentrated for a moment on the rise and fall of her nausea; she stood, shaking herself.

‘Yes. Thank you,' she said, frowning at the way things were settling back to normal.

‘I'll leave you then, shall I? For a moment.' The nun smiled. ‘I'll leave you,' she said again.

It was against the rules. Given over to God, the nuns were supposed to have forgotten their families and their
friends in the greater vocation of religious life. Earthly ties should have been broken. But there had been no way of keeping Severine from Bernard. She had come silently and irregularly, waiting for long hours on the convent steps or by the kitchen door. They had tried explaining things to her, or shouting; they had shooed her away with the stray cats and once Mother Catherine had brought a great flat dish of holy water to fling at her, an exorcism. But she had always come back, waiting for Bernard without a sound.

Bernard went slowly to Severine and kissed her in greeting, stepping beyond the shadow to where the grass lay in the sun.

‘Come on.'

Severine looked long at the nun, expressionless. Then she held out her hand and Bernard took it. They went together up along the wall. Swallows looped out of the open-sided barn, cutting across the dark beams where the last trusses of onions were hung. A pair of fat ducks limped into the shade of the spreading fig tree. Where the path narrowed, the two women dropped hands, waddling instead in single file, their clogs clicking out of time as they slowly followed the track past the pigsties to the far vegetable garden. Lines of sticks cast criss-cross patterns on the flat earth. Shoots pressed upwards in exact rows. God's complaints were muted here, unalarming.

They looked down at the baby. Its head was small and its skin yellow, the lines around its mouth unfinished. It did not open its eyes.

‘I have brought you something, Sister,' Severine said quietly, her words careful. She shifted the baby onto one arm and reached into a pocket. When she held it out to
Bernard her face was too expectant. ‘I saved it for you, this time.'

It was the baby's umbilical cord, shrivelled now and dried out, twisted and brown, like a shaving of something.

‘For luck,' she said, shifting the weight of the baby again. Bernard took the cord carefully and turned it over in her hand.

‘It's kind,' she said.

The baby stirred. Bernard watched as Severine pushed her finger at its mouth, quietening it. But when Severine began a moment later to unbutton the front of her blouse, Bernard turned away. She did not see the baby pushed against her friend's breast, its mouth slack on the red nipple. She looked out instead to where the white cattle were grazing, and she put the present into her pocket, letting it fall deep inside, feeling it, a talisman.

‘You're well?' Bernard asked, still turned away. ‘You're all well?'

There was no reply for a long while.

‘Oh, he won't…' Severine said at last. ‘He never,' she added, defeated.

Bernard heard the rustle of clothing. She turned back; the baby was lying flat again across Severine's arms.

‘Busy – busy at the farm.' Severine looked hard at her baby, pulling it close. In the brightening light, Bernard noticed new patterns of lines creased into her friend's face, the girl she had always known disappearing. ‘Couldn't come here, with it all. When there's no men. Couldn't come.'

‘It doesn't matter,' Bernard said.

‘No.'

Bernard thought about the soldier. ‘Have you seen the Germans?'

Severine nodded.

‘Have they come to the farm?'

‘No – not yet. It's too far. Too dirty.' Severine grinned. ‘Don't like the mud, do they? It keeps them away. Lets us get on with things, doesn't it?'

She seemed to want a particular kind of answer.

Bernard shrugged. ‘They come here sometimes,' she said. ‘They come to the convent.'

She wanted to say more; she thought she could find a way of describing her soldier. But Severine stepped across and put her hand firmly on Bernard's arm.

‘I see you in church,' she said. ‘On Sundays. Every Sunday. I wait for it.'

This did not seem new. Bernard hardly noticed what her friend had said; she did not see the way Severine's gaze seemed fixed on her, pleading.

‘I suppose,' she said vaguely, not knowing how to begin again, the thought of him so pungent.

Their lives had always been the same, commonplace and familiar, known to them both without thought. It was too hard now to find the things to say. The war had somehow crept upon them, tangling them in change, confusing and disorientating them. Everything looked as it had always done. The new vegetables pushed through the dry layer of bronze soil; the animals shuffled across the yard, unhurried. In the clump of trees beyond the wall, the song of a nightingale trembled and tumbled, remembered from years past, filling the air with the sound of old summers. But still nothing was quite settled. There
was a new strangeness to things, as though everything was a little brighter, sharper, louder. They had secrets, for the first time, and no way of telling them. So they stood together quietly at the edge of the ridged garden and the baby made soft noises. They bent their heads in the sun.

When the clock struck, Severine started.

‘Have to go,' she said. ‘Can't stay.'

Bernard nodded. ‘I'm pleased you came. Thank you.'

She watched her friend pick her way along the path and down towards the village. God was scathing about the idiot girl who had always followed Bernard around, the ugly bent-backed peasant. But Severine had always been in Bernard's life, constant and unobtrusive, something of a blessing, and Bernard felt the tug of momentary loss as she disappeared in the dip of the land. She put her hand in her pocket and closed her fingers around the tough string of the umbilical cord. No one had ever given her such a thing before.

Over the following three days, the soldier met Bernard twice at the wash house, once in the open street and once in the convent corridor. Once she glimpsed him briefly at the top of the narrow stone steps that led down to the village well, three of his comrades alongside him and a line of cattle ambling down towards the long troughs, their tails heavy in the air. But by the time she had scrambled down the hill, slipping on the new grass, there was just an old farmer swinging his stick at the last of the cows, his beret pulled low over his brow and a torn sack slung across his shoulders as some kind of coat. The soldiers seemed to have disappeared, as though they had never
been there. The farmer nodded at Bernard and moved on. Bernard looked around at the green snarl of hedges, the empty shadows of the sunken well and the closed houses at the edge of the village, and wondered for a moment if the soldiers and their war were nothing more than a mistake of hers, a bizarre dream conjured by her prayers, a mystical, unfathomable story like the ones they taught her at the convent.

But there were times when he took her hand, making everything suddenly real. The touch of him was unmistakable. When he reached towards her, Bernard could hear her heart pummel the woollen vest beneath her habit, and God was silent. It seemed miraculous. It astounded her that merely the sight of the soldier could somehow put an end to His ill-tempered prattle. Even the anticipation made Bernard's breath come quickly and in the ecstatic hours of the night, with God droning in her head, the thought heaved within her, making her hot and unsettled, flushing her cheeks with sudden excitement. By the end of the week, she could no longer still the tremble that was lodged around her heart and when she saw him turn the bend in the convent corridor, she found the rapturous words of the Gloria coming full chorus into her head as the clamour of God receded. She stopped, amazed that the skinny German could do this.

‘Do you want to have sex with me, Sister Bernard?' he asked in French, in a low tone. It was a phrase that had been easy to perfect with a little practice, and his accent was good. Bernard had no difficulty in understanding him.

She could not look at him, she could not think of a reply. The sense of things shrank away from her. Not
wanting to be delayed, the soldier put his request again, raising Bernard's chin with his forefinger so that she was forced to look at his smile.

‘You know my name,' said Bernard at last, trying to swallow the panic of her delight.

‘Yes.' He did not want to be tempted into trying out phrases he had not practised.

They both heard footsteps, further along the corridor; the soldier instinctively moved several paces away. Two nuns passed them, one fingering her rosary. Bernard could not be sure who they were; everything seemed unfamiliar, distorted. It could have been a reflection, warped somehow.

When the nuns had gone, he spoke urgently, with authority, knowing that he had a deadline looming.

‘You will come tonight at ten to the top henhouse.'

‘Oh no – it's too late.' Bernard pulled at the end of her veil with a frantic hand. ‘We can't leave our cells at that time.'

The soldier sighed and Bernard felt the strange ache of disappointing him.

‘You will not come?' Reworking the plan and afterwards learning the phrases to communicate it would mean an inevitable delay. He risked failing, and he had a sense of what the rest of the unit would say about him then and of how they would exclude him. He stepped towards Bernard. ‘You must come.'

She shook her head. The colour had left her cheeks now.

There was the click of shoes on the tiles, and two more Germans strode briskly along the corridor, seeming to fill it, smiling broadly at the soldier from a distance.

‘You must come,' he said again.

She fidgeted under his fierce gaze. ‘I don't… I can't.'

One of the other Germans spoke, pushing forwards so that he was close to her, stocky and immovable.

‘What do you think of him, Sister? What do you think of Schwanz?'

She was confused by the press of them around her, their unfamiliar smells pungent and their faces too large. But she caught the soldier's name, and she looked at him again, seeming to know him.

‘That's… that's your—'

‘Schwanz. He is Schwanz – that's his name,' the other German answered her, smiling. ‘And he really wants to meet with you, Sister.'

Bernard hesitated. The young soldier dipped his head, no longer looking at her, and the other two Germans grinned. When one of the nuns rounded the corner of the corridor and saw Sister Bernard looking up, wide-eyed, at the lanky soldier between his comrades she felt that something might be amiss. She came up and slipped an arm around Bernard's waist, above the belt of her habit. There was a moment's vacancy; then the soldiers bowed together in brief salute and left.

The nun dropped her arm.

‘He knew my name,' said Bernard very quietly, the marvel of it rooting in her.

‘Is that all, Sister? Did they want something?'

Bernard hardly remembered. She would never think about the soldier's request or its implications. She shook her head.

‘You should direct these soldiers to Mother Catherine.
They should not be alone here,' said the nun. She looked hard at Bernard, trying to make her words penetrate.

Bernard shook her head again. She could hear God coming back to her, protesting at a distance, and afterwards the bell for prayers. But nothing would quite settle and she did not know where she was.

Several days later, he tried again.

‘You can meet me in church,' he said when he caught Bernard on the way to the woodshed with a bundle of kindling. The sun was hot already, sliding off the redtiled roofs of the outbuildings and bouncing back from the mottled stones. He wiped his sleeve hard across his forehead, unused to the southern heat. ‘Tonight. I will wait.'

Bernard could not think of a reason why she should go to church alone.

‘I will arrange it,' was all he said, remembering to smile.

Bernard shuffled in front of him for the few yards to the lane. She puffed under the weight of the sticks. She expected him to laugh at how her feet turned out when she walked, the way the village children did, but he was silent and she took his reticence as a kindness.

Something was done and Bernard was told by Mother Catherine to collect the altar silver from the church for cleaning. She was given the key to the cupboard in the sacristy and told that she could be excused evening prayers if her errand took time. How this came about, she did not know. But on the way to the church in the late spring dusk she could hardly stop herself from running. The
light seemed sharp around her, making everything crisp and memorable and somehow new. The sky bent to her, expectant, and even God could not muffle the melodies of the world. When she pushed open the leather door into the dim nave, she expected something glorious to happen. She would not have been surprised by choirs of golden angels.