Transgression (6 page)

“That’s what I told him.” René smiled at her warmly now, a brother’s loving smile. “I’ll find other work somewhere else.” He touched her hand. “I’ll keep helping out. I know it’s difficult for you here.”

“I’m all right,” Adele said.

René nodded. He put the cigarette in his mouth and started to search in his pockets for matches.

Adele got up from the table hoping the kettle had already started to boil. She felt desperate to turn her face away.

N
o one in Rouen had ever experienced such a cold winter, at least that’s what people were constantly saying.

The Wehrmacht were everywhere, bundled up in their greatcoats, faces swathed in scarves, their breath billowing into the crystalline air.

Soulless beasts from some ice-filled hell, they’d brought this winter with them. That’s what the women at the factory were muttering, and with such a ring of certainty there could be no possible doubt about it.

The massive woman who sat next to Adele and tirelessly stitched buttons on the nightly parade of Wehrmacht pants thought Adele was shy because Adele never joined in any of their conversations. She teased her about it and called her Buttercup. The woman working on Adele’s other side, all bony arms and legs, her sharp nose almost touching her sewing machine in near-sighted concentration, allowed that she was just as shy as Adele when she was Adele’s age. It took a husband and five children for her to get over it.

“A man’s big sausage is the best way to get over shyness,” the huge woman agreed.

“Tsk tsk,” the spidery woman replied.

“Big hard sausage,” the huge woman repeated, smacking her lips and looking at Adele.

All the women close to them laughed. The spidery woman crossed herself. Adele continued sewing seams, trying to keep them straight. Not saying anything. Not giving anything away.

Adele and Manfred sat on the swings in the park. Even in the dark they could see the river, frozen solid, stretching out whitely. No one could remember the river ever having been completely frozen before.

Manfred tilted his face up to the sky, opened his mouth and caught a random snowflake. Adele laughed and did the same. It became a contest. They leaned far back, their mouths open, swinging back and forth. Snow began to pelt down. They lost count. Snowflakes landed in their mouths, on their eyes, on their cheeks.

Manfred caught her swing and drew her close. He took off his cap. They kissed and kissed. Manfred had snowflakes melting on his eyebrows, his eyelashes, Adele could see them. She put her hands up to his close-cropped hair. She could feel snow melting on her fingertips. She could feel Manfred’s hand slip inside her coat, press coldly against her breast, cover her heart.

“No,” she said, but without conviction.

His hand grew warmer there, and his fingers slipped under her bra.

“No,” Adele whispered again, but there wasn’t really anything she could do about it. Just stay there, lean against Manfred, kiss Manfred, and try not to think about anything.

Adele had brought Old Raymond in from the cottage, setting up a bed close to the stove in the kitchen, but his condition had not improved. He was breathing in shallow gulps now interrupted by long staccato bouts of coughing.

She sent Jean to the hospital to fetch a doctor. A half-hour later Jean returned with one in tow. He was young and looked exhausted. His diagnosis was pleurisy, his prescription bed rest along with the consumption of great quantities of hot soup and to wait for spring. By then, the pleurisy would either be better or it would be worse.

Adele could feel her blood heating up in outrage at such a cavalier bedside manner. Her father would never have been so off-hand. “Surely there must be some medicine.”

“What medicine? The Germans have taken the little we had and shipped it off to the Russian front. We take temperatures, we pat our
patients’ hands and advise the application of home-made compresses and soups.”

Old Raymond turned his face away and stared at the wall.

That evening, much to everyone’s surprise, Madame Georges descended the stairs and, instead of making a circle and ascending again, sat down beside Old Raymond’s bed. “You’re coughing too much,” she observed.

Old Raymond nodded. His face was a brilliant red, his brow beaded in sweat.

Madame Georges got up, prepared a cool cloth and put it on his forehead.

“I’ve been doing that,” Adele remarked, feeling defensive.

Madame Georges ignored her. “You’re very sick.”

Old Raymond nodded.

“Don’t worry, dearest,” she said.

Madame Georges took over the care of Old Raymond from that night on. She sat beside his bed and read to him. She made him tea when there was any, soup when Adele had something to make it from, and cups of boiling water the rest of the time. She laid an endless series of cooling cloths on his forehead and rubbed the inside of his wrists with her bony hands to coax better circulation. She got dressed. She brushed her hair.

At first, Jean and Bibi were confused. They stood in the hallway and stared at their resurrected mother. Then they dared to creep closer. Finally they sat on the floor beside her and leaned against the hem of her dress. Once in a while, in the middle of reading some passage or other to Old Raymond, she’d reach down and twirl her fingers absent-mindedly in their hair.

“I’m glad you’re feeling better,” Adele said to her mother one day.

Madame Georges was standing in the little room off the kitchen searching through some old magazines for anything she hadn’t read before. She looked up and regarded Adele for a moment with her remarkably opaque eyes. Adele had always regarded her mother’s eyes as slightly strange, but over the past year they’d got worse. She couldn’t see into them any more-it was like looking into a mirror.

“One gets used to widowhood,” her mother said. “You miss the physical comfort, of course. I’m sure you must find that, as well. Don’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

Her mother smiled. It was the most terrible smile Adele had ever seen. “I know what went on,” she said.

Adele couldn’t reply. She couldn’t find the words, nothing to express the gushing wound, the devastation she was feeling. What in God’s name was her mother talking about?

All Adele could think to do was to walk away.

It had begun to snow again. It snowed all that day and into the evening. Adele made supper in a trance. No one seemed to notice. She cleaned up afterwards and then slipped unseen out the back door. She had to pick up the potato sack full of coal and two cans of bully beef that Manfred had promised to steal that night from his billet on Ducrot Street.

When she pushed open the gate, Manfred was standing there. This was not possible. He was supposed to hide the sack and leave. That was their arrangement. They met only in the park. Nowhere else. Ever.

“Hello,” Manfred said, the word a puff of frost floating in the air.

“What are you doing here?”

He didn’t answer.

Adele looked in a panic up and down the dark lane. Manfred tramped across the snow and held her against his great army coat. He pressed his icy face against her cheek, her hair, her neck.

“What’s the matter?” Adele whispered.

“I could not stay away.”

“But you have to!”

“All I can think of is you.”

Adele relented a little, leaning against him. “All I can think of is you.”

“I love you,” Manfred said, almost sobbed, kissing with lips that felt unnaturally warm despite the frigid air.

Manfred had never said those words before. Such words. Adele felt as fluid as a sea, a warm sea rushing in. “I love you, too,” she said, and instantly thought of her mad mother. “I love you,” she whispered, but it sounded like a cry.

“Where can we go?” Manfred’s eyes looked enormous in the dark, his lips a startling red, his beautiful face suffused with some kind of soft-glowing agony. “Where can we go?”

Adele pushed open the door that led into Old Raymond’s cottage. It was as dark and cold as a cave.

Manfred began to unbutton his greatcoat. He opened it and they pressed together and began to kiss again. Adele could feel his hand moving outside her clothes, slipping inside her clothes, touching everywhere.

Although she’d successfully avoided thinking about it, she’d always known that the preceding days of kissing, embracing, touching, trembling would inevitably lead to this, and now it had. She must stop it somehow.

She could feel Manfred lift her up as if she weighed nothing at all, and then let her down again on Old Raymond’s mattress. It felt like being put on a patch of ice. She’d only thrown a sweater over her shoulders for the short run out for the potato sack.

She began to shiver. She watched the dark wings of Manfred’s coat open and spread above her. A giant bird. A winged god from Dresden.

He slipped out of his coat, and half-resting on top of her and half beside her, he pulled the coat over both of them. Now they were hidden from everyone. Adele closed her eyes. Soon she felt Manfred’s hand again, and his hungry mouth, and now she knew with a fateful certainty that she wanted his hand, wanted his mouth. It was hopeless to fight against such feelings, hopeless to struggle against such an over-whelming, exquisite thing.

It didn’t surprise her when it hurt, it just made her more aware of what he was doing, what they were both doing. She bit his ear in token reprisal, she scratched his neck.

And it didn’t really hurt all that much, either, or for all that long. Manfred trembled, moaned, froze in mid-air as if he’d been transfixed by an invisible arrow, and then slowly sank down on top of her.

They lay quietly for some time. Adele began to feel a raw hurting between her legs and something trickling, warm and wet, as if they’d melted something down there in all their exertion. They’d melted together, slippery and warm.

Adele kissed Manfred’s closed eyes.

“I am sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be,” she whispered.

“Yes.” Manfred raised himself on one elbow and kissed her gently all over her face. “Forgive me.”

“There’s nothing to forgive,” Adele said, wishing that he’d just shut up about it. “Manfred, I have to go to work.”

Adele asked him to try to find the cupboard that stood near the foot of the bed. She knew that there was an old quilt in there. She told him that she wanted to stay where she was until he left. When Manfred asked why, she said she just did.

Adele could hear him fumbling around in the dark. Finally he came back with the quilt. When he picked up his coat to put it back on, she drew the quilt quickly over herself so he wouldn’t be able to see what he’d already felt.

Manfred crossed the room, opened the door and looked out. Past his dark shape, Adele could see tall dry stalks of flowers and a white patch of snow.

“Are you all right?” Manfred asked. She didn’t answer. “We will meet tomorrow?” He sounded a little uncertain.

“Yes,” Adele said.

Manfred hesitated as if he wanted to say he was sorry again, and then he went out, closing the door behind him.

Adele turned away and pressed her face against Old Raymond’s mattress. She’d betrayed her dear father, betrayed one hundred thousand of her countrymen slaughtered at the hands of the Boche, betrayed the nuns at school. And René. And God. Why hadn’t she stopped him?

Manfred would have stopped, if she’d just said something. He would have. But she didn’t say a word, not one word.

Tears began to run down her face. A voice in her head screamed for her to hurry into the house, run up to the toilet, clean herself, wash herself, kill everything inside. It sounded like her own voice. It sounded like a girl she didn’t know.

Adele curled up under the quilt. She could still feel Manfred’s whiskers rubbing against her cheeks. She could feel the weight of his body on hers. She pressed her face down hard against the cold of the mattress and tried to choke off a cry.

She had let a Boche fuck her.

J
ack stood on the steep approach, watching Clarence’s seventeen-year-old son pitch hay from the floor of the barn high into the mow. The day was airless, as hot as the one before even though the sky was hidden behind a low-lying blanket of grey. Everything felt pressed down. A storm would be a relief, Jack thought.

His pant legs and boots were smeared with mud from searching through the woods most of the day. His feet ached. He’d walked every field on the farm, the neighbouring farms, alongside the road, the railway track. Nothing.

“What’s your name, son?” Jack called out.

The pitchfork arced through the shadows in the barn, a load of hay was tossed neatly to the top of the mow, the pitchfork came down to rest against the boy’s slim waist. “Andrew,” he called back and swiftly dug the pitchfork into the hay again.

A demon for work, Jack thought to himself, doesn’t want to talk, doesn’t like me looking at him, either.

Everything depended on something else, Jack knew this. If this boy in front of him, the Broomes’ strong and handsome son, had killed a girlfriend, say, then he was acting suspiciously. If he was just a typical self-conscious farm boy, then he wasn’t. A farm boy trying not to look suspicious, which was making him look suspicious.

Jack’s own son was dead. Why was that? Because he was unfortunate enough to be in an infantry company chosen to prod the German defences along the coast of France. But why was he in the army in the first place, why
had he been in such a damn hurry to join up? After all, he’d had a wife and a little kid by that time.

Jack knew the answer. The answer was Jack. Everything depended on something else.

He looked back toward the woods. The clouds seemed to hang just above the tops of the trees. Steam rose up from the intervening field. Jack’s body felt as heavy as lead.

“Did you see it?” Jack said.

The boy stopped work again but still didn’t look at Jack. He stared at a spot on the barn’s hay-strewn floor mid-way between the two of them.

“What your sister found?” Jack went on.

Andrew shook his head. “I was over at Uncle Matt’s.”

Jack stepped up into the barn, stood there in the wide doorway. “Any idea where a thing like that could have come from?”

“No, sir,” Andrew said, still not looking up.

“No one’s missing from around here, are they, Andrew? No pretty young girl, say?”

Andrew’s head came up, his tanned face flushing even darker than it already was. “No, sir,” he said. He looked stunned, as if the thought had never occurred to him.

“That finger must belong to someone. We can agree on that much, can’t we?”

The boy nodded carefully. At that instant, Jack wished that he was his son. He wished that his son was still alive. The wish burned through his heart like a drop of molten iron.

“Okay,” Jack said and turned away.

Jesus God, he said to himself as he walked half-blind down the barn approach. What the hell was getting into him these days? Betrayed by quick uncertain emotions. Whatever it was, he didn’t like it.

The chief of police strode across the farmyard. About ten that morning he’d driven up to the Broomes’ house and hidden his cruiser from prying eyes behind a hay wagon. Mrs. Broome and the older daughter were sitting in the kitchen working on some sewing, but he had no doubt the daughter, a saucy-looking little blonde, had been talking up a storm all the
previous day. He knew that he had only so much time before the news got back to the mayor and the rest of them. He could almost hear Mayor Westland now.

“What’s this about a finger, Jack?” he’d say, having summoned him upstairs to his office in the town hall. He’d never once visited Jack’s office in the basement. And he’d say, “We’ll have to call in the Ontario Provincial Police if there’s a body. That’s the rule, isn’t it? And what are you doing outside the town line, anyway, Jack? That’s not your jurisdiction, is it?”

Westland always gave directives with questions attached, so that whatever the ensuing results might be, he could never be held directly responsible. And the thing was, he was scheming to replace Jack with his nephew. Everyone in town knew that. It was all Jack could do not to lean over the mayor’s desk and throttle the little bastard.

Jack was the head of a three-man force. He’d hired Jock White because he’d liked him. He’d hired the mayor’s pea-brained nephew, Todd Westland, under duress. It had been a big mistake.

He needed to find the body, he needed to identify it and he needed to be half-way toward solving the thing before the mayor even thought of calling in the provincial police. It would be his case by then, he’d solve it and everyone in town would hold him a little in awe again, like they used to. And then let the mayor try to replace him.

Jack looked fiercely around the yard. He half-expected to see Jenny, but she wasn’t in sight. Earlier that day she’d walked between him and her father back to the neighbour’s fence.

“Right here,” she’d said, pointing to a spot in the tall dusty weeds and without a stutter to be heard. When they’d returned to the house, Clarence had said he had to go to town for something. He hadn’t yet returned. Jack was beginning to wonder if he’d snuck off to talk to the mayor.

The family’s old dog seemed to be waiting for his master, too, lying halfway between the stable door and the water trough and watching Jack go by. His name was Brandy. Jack had asked Jenny when he’d first met her, just to break the ice.

B-B-B…” Jenny had said.

“Brandy.” Her father had helped her out.

Jack hadn’t wanted the dog to mess anything up so he’d ask Clarence to lock him in the barn before walking back to the fence. He was out of the barn now, though, getting up and sitting on his worn haunches.

Jack walked over to the hay wagon, hitched himself slowly up on the edge of it and thought of Ruth. He’d visited her the previous evening, as he always did, sitting there watching the shadows creep across the hospital wall and trying to make a little conversation. He might as well have been talking to himself. She’d stopped responding about ten days before, though the doctor had said at the time that there was no physical reason for it. None of the nurses could get her to respond, either. She’d just closed down.

Once in a while on his visits, when it was almost dark, Jack would turn on a lamp and open a magazine for something to do, though he had no interest in actually reading. And every once in a while she’d groan sharply, clench her teeth, and Jack would lean over her, stroke her forehead, her hair.

“Ruth,” he’d whisper, “Ruth.”

Jack shifted on the edge of the wagon and tried to turn his mind back to the investigation. He was making a mess of it, stumbling around the farm like a blind man. Something was eluding him, but what the hell was it?

It had to do with the spot Jenny had pointed out. How far would a rat carry a chewed-off finger? That was the riddle.

Along the fenceline, for certain, or across Clarence’s field, or maybe the neighbour’s field, and from somewhere near the edge of the woods. But no farther. So where was the corpse? He’d been over all the nearby ground and most everywhere else within a reasonable distance, and no newly turned earth, no decaying smell, no suspicious mound anywhere. But what was a reasonable distance? Maybe he had the wrong animal.

How far might a weasel travel carrying the finger in its mouth? Or a fox?

Or maybe a bird flew off with it in its beak and then dropped it. A hawk, maybe? Crow? Owl?

Or a dog?

How far would a dog carry a finger?

Brandy got up and wagged his tail. He started to walk stiffly over to Jack. He looked for all the world like he knew the answer.