Resistance (12 page)

So Matt couldn't be in the crowd, and in truth, when he opened his eyes, there $$s. no crowd at all, no one by his side. He seemed to be in a small portion of an attic, with the roof of the house slanting about five feet above his head. In this ceiling there was a rectangle open to the sky, through which he saw differing shades of gray, slow movement from one side to the other. Were there cluesin this movement, in the color of the sky? He tried to remember where he was, what had happened to him. There had been people with him, he was certain. He remembered a woman, a large-boned woman with a coarse face, who wore a kerchief tied around her head and who treated his leg after the morphine and wrapped it in wet bandages soaked with plaster. He felt the stab of pain, but soon it passed away, and he was floating. And some time after that he got the fever and began to shiver, and he begged for the morphine again, begged through the wall until the other woman came and put a cool cloth on his forehead and held his hand.

And with her hand clasped in his, he had drifted.

He propped himself up as best he could and lifted the comforter from his body. He saw that he was wearing a man's shirt that seemed to be too wide and yet too short for him, and a pair of trousers that lay loosely around his waist. Raising the comforter even higher, he noticed that the trousers were too short as well and exposed the skin above his left sock. Along the right leg, the cloth had been cut to the thigh to allow for a bulky bandage. He imagined that if he could stand, the trousers would drop from his waist.

When they cleaned the wound, he remembered, the younger woman had had her hair down in the candlelight, as she bent over him, pinning him down. A man's coat had fallen open, and under it was a nightgown that looked ivory in the flickering light. He remembered the shallow V of her clavicle, delineated beneath her skin. Her hair—a thick, silky, dark blond—was like a veil that hid her face, and he remembered, in his pain, his delirium, wanting to ask her to reveal her face, and not being able to form even the English words to his question.

But he had seen her face since. It was she who had been sitting by his side, he was certain. He remembered large gray eyes and a wide brow. Sometimes she seemed to be hovering over him, sometimes to be looking away. At other times she read while she thought he slept. The eyes were sad; her face was distinctly foreign. Something in the cheekbones, the shape of her mouth; the mouth, he thought, formed by the words of her own language, by their vowels, so that in repose, her lower lip thrust slightly forward. She spoke an English precisely her own, throaty with a heavy accent that drenched the words and made him think of bread soaked in wine. Interesting words and unexpected:
anguish, supple, garland.
And then words of her own, names he had never heard before:
Avram, Charleroi, Liège.

Her scent was of yeasty bread and violets. He smelled her scent on her throat when she leaned over him, a scent like the steam of baking bread. He saw the underside of her chin, the white of her wrists when they pulled away from her blouse. She reached across him, and in doing so, she lifted her face. He imagined her skin would feel like kid, soft but with texture. There was within him the faintest stirring of desire. He allowed himself to linger on the image of her body in her nightgown, though he sensed that this lingering would make him anxious. Her hair was cut just below her shoulders, the dark blond a color that changed with the light in the attic room, although most often when she sat with him, she wore it rolled. He realized with surprise that he had not even been told her name, or if he had, he didn't now remember it.

He thought it was a kind of anesthesia, the body's natural anesthesia, forgetfulness and sleep, but now, in the vacuum, questions were forming. What of the plane, and where were the men? Someone was dead, and someone was dying, though it had been perhaps days, and. the gunner would be dead by now, he was certain. Suddenly Ted was hot; a film of sweat was on his face and neck. All around him there were German pilots in their planes. Where were Case, Tripp, McNulty? Had anyone gotten away? Had he been told that some had crossed the border into France, or had he dreamed that? Where did the bombs go, and could he have made it to the Channel? Hesitation and indecision. He had to get word back to base. He was in Belgium. He remembered now the word
Belgique,
the boy's voice frantic and insistent, crowded with tears; and the word in English, the woman's voice, low and soothing, pronouncing the name of her country as if the word itself were sanctuary.

She came in from the milking, washed her hands at the pump. She had seen to the herd, washed out yesterday's milk cans, poured the fresh milk into clean ones and left them, as she and Henri always did, at the end of the road for Monsieur Lechat to collect in his wagon. Lechat would take the milk to the shops and to various customers in the village. Sometimes, when Lechat collected the milk cans and left off the empty ones, he would leave a small sum of money in a metal box. It was what she and Henri lived on. Since the coming of the Germans and the decimation of their herd, the box held very little.

Henri had been gone since daybreak. He would not tell her where he was going, so that if she were questioned, she truly would not know. When Henri was gone, Claire saw to the chores. Regardless of the course of the war, the cows had to be milked and fed. More important, the appearance of seeing to the chores had to be maintained at all costs. The surest way to be denounced, Claire knew, was to draw attention to oneself. Any break in routine could rouse suspicion.

In itself, the work on the farm gave her little satisfaction. She was not like Henri in this. As a girl, she had not thought that she would spend her life as a farmer's wife. Before the war, she had imagined herself at university, in Brussels. Though she supposed now that she had always known that marrying Henri was inevitable.

In its own way, the coupling had been foreordained since she was in grade school, the two families well known to each other, tied to each other by several marriages and by blood. She and Henri were cousins, distant enough for the church to overlook the tentative blood relation. As though they had known, even as children, that a connection of some kind would be made between them, they had drawn together at family gatherings and at festivals to test each other out, to feel what might or might not be possible. And sometimes, if they met in the street, he would take her for a coffee in the café, and she felt important, in her schoolgirl's uniform, sitting with this man, who was then already, at twenty-one, twenty-two, a presence in the village.

They married finally when she was nineteen and he was twenty-seven, when the war in Europe was beginning. He had taken over his father's farm, and it was thought that Claire was old enough to marry.

On the marble mantel, beside the crucifix and the candles, was a photograph of Henri and herself on their wedding day. Henri, who was not much taller than Claire, wore a dark suit, and his hair had been brushed off his face with oil. It was summer, and in the photograph Henri looked uncomfortably hot. The suit was wool, the only one he owned. Claire had been married in a brown suit. She had sent to Paris for the pattern and had sewn it herself. Her mother had given her the pearl earrings and made the lace collar. No one made lace anymore, Claire thought, at least no one of her own generation. Her mother was nearly seventy-three now. She'd been fifty when Claire was born, the last of eleven children. In the wedding photograph, Claire had her hair rolled at the sides and in a snood at the back, and the hat she had splurged on to match the suit had a veil that covered her eyes. She was holding a bouquet of ivory roses with a satin ribbon that trailed down the front of her suit. Her lips seemed exaggerated with a thick, dark lipstick—as if she had not yet been kissed.

The stove was putting out a good deal of warmth—a heat that was designed to rise and permeate the stone farmhouse. Even on gray days, she thought, the room had a kind of inherent cheer. Wherever she had been able, she had placed color—the green-checked tablecloth; a hand-colored photograph of the Ardennes in spring; a blue glass vase, now filled with dried flowers, on the table. She prepared the bread and coffee to take to the pilot upstairs. It was past breakfast already, and Claire was trying to wean the pilot, who had been floating in a timeless vacuum, onto a schedule.

She set the tray on the floor of her bedroom. Immediately she became aware of a sound she had not heard before behind the wall. She stood a moment and listened. She thought it Was the sound of whistling. She could not identify the tune, but it was distinctly a song, not merely another set of meaningless sounds.

She crawled through the false back of the armoire. As soon as she had done so, the American turned his head to meet her eyes, stopped whistling.

“What is your name?” he asked.

Claire knelt motionless, unable, for a moment, to answer him. Though she had been waiting for this, the clarity of his question shocked her. She thought then that all the time she had sat with this man, she had not really believed that he would recover. She had imagined instead that he would linger for months or possibly years in a suspended state.

“My name is Claire,” she said.

He nodded slowly. “Yes, I remember now.”

“And you are Theodore Aidan.”

He laughed. “No, just Ted.” He looked at the coffee and the bread on the tray as if observing food for the first time.

“Is that coffee?” he asked.

“It's not real.”

She made her way to her usual spot beside the pilot's bedding. She wound her legs under her as she always did, but this morning the gesture seemed awkward, and her legs felt too long and ungainly. Before, she had sat with him with her hair down, in her robe if necessary, giving little thought, no thought, to how she was dressed or how she looked. The pilot, in his transcendent state, had seemed disembodied, not a man actually, but rather a casualty, a patient in the most objective sense, a thing to watch over, a task that defined her days. But now that he had returned to his body? could speak, could ask her questions, he seemed another entity altogether.

For the first time since she had begun tending him, she became acutely aware of how crowded the attic room was, of how difficult it was to sit without somehow touching his bedding—with her knee, with her foot. She drew herself together more tightly. She had dressed hastily after waking and had rolled her hair ineptly, thinking it unlikely that today she would see anyone from the village. She had on a gray wool skirt that stopped at her knees, and rode above them when she sat. She was wearing a white long-sleeved blouse with padded shoulders, and over that her apron. She had white socks on her feet and shoes with leather uppers and wooden soles, ugly shoes, work shoes. Her legs were bare. She had forgotten her lipstick. Loose strands of hair hung at the sides of her face. Impatiently, she pushed them away.

“It's ersatz coffee,” she explained. “We are not having real coffee since before the war.”

She handed him the bowl. She watched as he took it, focused on the task of holding the bowl with both hands, brought it to his lips. He took a small sip.

“It's awful,” he said, smiling at his success.

She gave him the dark bread from the tray. He experimented with his fingers, distant tools that were wayward and seemed not always to obey his command. Several of the fingers were bandaged still, and the skin was shedding itself from the pads of the last three digits of his right hand. He could hold the bread when the roll was large, but fumbled with it when he had only a small piece left. She caught it on the comforter, held it to his mouth.

She watched him chew the bread.

“Is this your house?” he asked.

She nodded.

“What day is it?”

“It is six, January.”

“Then I’ve been here …”

He seemed to be calculating.

“Seven days.”

“And all that time …”

“You have been here, on this bed.”

He sat up sharply. “I have to try-to contact the crew.”

She pushed him gently on his chest. “Is done,” she said. “Your crew is knowing where you are.”

“Some of the men in the plane died,” he said.

She nodded. “Two. One is dead already when your aeroplane crashed. One is … died,” she corrected, In the night of the crash.”

“And the others?”

“Two are taken by the Germans. We think to Breendonk first. This is a prison near Brussels. And then after Breendonk?” She held her hands open as though to say no one could be certain where in Germany they might be sent.

He looked away briefly. “Do you know their names?”

“They are called McNulty and Shulman.”

The pilot closed his eyes and nodded.

“Is story of your friends McNulty and Shulman,” she said. “When they are first captured, the Germans are offering them cigarettes. But the Americans, your friends, they are turning their heads to the side and not taking them.”

The American smiled briefly. “And there was a man called Case. He was shot in the arm. Do you know where he is?”

“All the other men are sent into France, and are now trying to reach Spain. The man you are speaking of, his arm is very badly broken. It is said that he is minding that he will not be able to play
base ball.
Yes?”

The American smiled again. “That's Case. He signed with the Boston Braves just before the war. Bad break.”

“Yes, the break is bad,” she said, agreeing with him.

“No, I meant, bad luck.”

“Ah. Yes.”

“We were on our way to Germany,” he said.

She nodded.

“To bomb a chemical plant,” he added. “I’ve said this before?”

She nodded. “There is a man here, from the Resistance. He is asking you questions about your plane, to send a missile back to England.”

“Message,” he corrected.

She smiled with embarrassment. “Message. My English is very bad.”

“Your English is very good. And I told him about the mission?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know where the bombs fell?” he asked quickly.