by J. R. Lonie
‘Bitte,’ he demanded. Eleanor knew the word meant ‘please’, as much German as she cared to know, but the tone said, ‘Get out of my way. Now!’ The German was again an ‘it’. Consumed by the nuances of her response – she really had become French – she hadn’t noticed she was still blocking his way.
She stood back. He stepped past her without a nod or word of thanks. Instead of moving up the corridor, as she expected, he slipped out the door onto the platform and away. She thought she might quickly use the lavatory, because it would be impossible before long. As she opened the door, it was pulled back hard against her. The Occupied sign clicked on, alarming her. Someone was still in there. Why and more to the point, who? Gestapo? The Sicherheitsdienst? More rationally, she realised that someone must have slipped inside while she was dealing with the German soldier. Still, with her nerves so taut, she pushed away up the corridor towards the far end of the carriage. Whistles blew. The train lurched into motion. People cursed as they were thrown against one another and grabbed at handles and pushed and shoved and shuffled until some decorum was restored, however ill-tempered.
The train heaved its exhausted way out of the station. Eleanor tried to settle herself and forget about the lance corporal and his Bocheness. She found not even a ledge to lean against, just the door to one of the compartments, which was full. Then the train ground to a juddering halt, shoving the sardines against one another with cursing and swearing and no sorries or I-beg-your-pardons to soften the irritation. Were they to be stuck here, not yet halfway out of the station? The locomotive whistle blew again, at least preparing the crowd for the jerking resumption of their journey. This time the train managed to pick up speed, if gradually, and they really were away. Eleanor had no time to settle, because a new crush of people came from both directions looking for seats that did not exist. A black-eyed young man, impatient and rude, swung her about as he barged through.
‘Damnation,’ Eleanor snapped in English and she grabbed at the handle of the compartment door to stop herself from falling. No one helped her but in the brief turmoil that the young man’s rough passage had caused, she saw a vacant spot on the ledge against the window. She grabbed it so fast and with such determination that none of the men dared try dislodge her. She reached for her cigarette case but it wasn’t in her side coat pocket. She checked the other side pocket. Gone. She knew it wasn’t in either of the breast pockets. She realised when and she realised who.
‘Ce malfrat maudit,’ she spat coarsely – that dirty thug – and went after him along the corridor, ignoring the curses and the swearing as she pushed people aside. She hauled open the door to the next carriage. It was as crowded as the one she’d just exited but this did not deter her. Eventually she spotted him up the corridor three cars along, as far as he could go, and what if the little shit wasn’t smoking one of her cigarettes. He hadn’t seen her enter, so she slid her way between the crush of bodies like a shiver bathed in oil, not even upsetting the fleas infesting the clothes of her fellow travellers.
When she reached him, she grabbed his wrist. ‘You stole my cigarette case, you damn thief,’ she accused him in very loud French. He pushed her away, calling her a putain, a whore. The people she fell against swore at her and pushed her back so she collided violently with the young man, knocking him hard against the window, which cracked although it did not give way. No one seemed at all inclined to help her. She saw the emergency stop cord, high on the corridor wall, and reached up to pull it, but her neighbour wasn’t having any of that. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ he growled as he grabbed her hand. Then he turned and with his right fist, he hit the thief in the stomach. ‘Give it back so we can get some peace here,’ he snarled inches from the face of the young man, who now gulped for breath. He wrenched open the young man’s coat. Instead of Eleanor’s cigarettes, he found a frightened black kitten.
‘No!’ the young man cried out and pushed Eleanor’s rescuer away, closing his coat protectively over the kitten. He reached into his outside pocket, withdrew Eleanor’s cigarette case and slapped it petulantly into her hand. ‘Va te faire foutre,’ he muttered. Fuck off.
‘You want a smack in the mouth, punk?’ the man said, holding his fist at the ready.
Eleanor told her saviour that wasn’t necessary, she had her property back, she was grateful for his help. She opened the case and offered him a cigarette as token of her thanks.
‘Christ,’ the man exclaimed, ‘American.’ He took one, then on second thoughts, added two more to his haul. He chuckled. ‘I’d be heading home too if I was you.’ Eleanor was comforted that at least her French hadn’t slipped in the encounter, that she’d been outed only by her Chesterfields. It was disconcerting, though, to hear her story moving along the corridor from lip to ear. ‘She’s a Yank. Getting out while she can. Did you see the cigarettes?’
‘Next time,’ she snapped at her thief, ‘ask.’
He ignored her. Worse, she realised, he didn’t do it actively or ostentatiously. To him, she’d become invisible. She removed her compact and, while dusting her face, she cast an already critical eye over him in the mirror. Since The American Woman, she’d considered herself – and was considered, at least in literary circles – something of an expert on his type. This was ridiculous, of course; unlike most of her characters, she’d conjured Yann up entirely from her imagination. If she’d based him on a real one, like this little creep, she wouldn’t have written a word.
His French, the little she’d heard, had been vulgar, and accented at that, although she couldn’t place it. He had the face of an elf, with elfish, slightly pointed ears, spawn indeed of Cain. Under the beret, stolen doubtless, his sandy hair was coarse and unruly and ill-cut, probably using sheep-shears. His eyes, though, they weren’t black at all but dark blue, like sapphires, somewhat spoiling her demonic image of him. His cloth knapsack was so small and meagrely packed, it could have belonged to his cat. She knew she was indulging her furies rather than exercising cool judgment. Apart from her cigarette, it was her only remaining pleasure.
Then the kitten poked its head out from his coat. His hard face softened as he stroked the little creature. That failed to wash with Eleanor, who didn’t much go for cats. Who did he think he was? Dick Whittington? Suddenly he caught himself in the mirror of her compact. In the blink of an eye, the smiling face went, he was an elf again, his sapphire eyes glinting a curse at her so fierce that she snapped her compact shut as her ears and face burned in embarrassment. Even then, she had to use willpower not to look over at him again. To distract herself, she focused intently on the cigarette case in her hand.
Apart from her memories and photographs tucked away in some album she’d long interred, it was all she had from her only legal marriage. Oh, there was her name – well, part of it, he was a Clarke, she was a Gorton, and there they were, engraved on the silver lid, her EG woven around his FC, making her Eleanor Gorton Clarke. Suddenly Fred’s face came vividly to her as he had been, young and so beautiful, lovely brown eyes, that strong chin, oh, and his dark, spiky moustache that prickled deliciously as he transported her with his tongue into delights that growing up in staid Providence had lamentably not prepared her for. He, who’d grown up as staidly as she, had learnt well from Parisian whores during the last eighteen months of the war. Better late than never, she thought and smiled inwardly. That particular talent, transferred to Yann in The American Woman, had helped earn the book its shady reputation, however poetically she’d disguised it from the censors. No wonder Fred hadn’t spoken to her, but she’d rarely given him much thought in the years since. She wondered where he was. Too old now for this war. She suspected he was probably trying to get back into it. He had a talent for adventure and none to write about it, a would-be-Hemingway. Mind you, she didn’t feel sorry for poor Fred. Fred came from plenty of money.
She cast a furtive look at the elf again but he was gone, leaving her unsettled by this brush with something she didn’t like and that she had let get the better of her.
Through the window, the last of Paris was passing by. She was able to see out by manoeuvring her head around; she dared not move her body or she’d lose even her standing room. What she saw was drab, hardly a streetscape to evoke deep feelings, but it tore at her heart and she fought tears. The enormity of what she was doing hit her hard. She was leaving her home. Would she ever be able to return? Would she even make it back to Providence? Visiting her family was one thing, living with them would be quite another. If she made it.
A VILLAGE NEAR NEVERS, BURGUNDY, GERMAN-OCCUPIED FRANCE, 260 KILOMETRES SOUTH-EAST OF PARIS
6.30pm, Tuesday, 9th December 1941
The bus groaned as it turned every corner, yet its passengers were mutely compliant when once the driver would never have heard the end of it – too slow, too bumpy, too crowded. Eleanor had been instructed by Maxim to take a bus from Nevers, south of Paris on the Loire, to a village, which, she had worked out, was well away from the demarcation line. Why not closer? she wondered, but too late, and anyway, what was the point? She was doing as instructed. Maxim had not informed her the only bus came into Nevers in the morning and went back in the afternoon, so until the time to depart she had moved from café to café, as much to escape the sleet and rain as to blunt her desolation over Hettie with the remains of her whisky. By then, two hours after the bus was supposed to leave, the skies began to clear.
Eleanor managed to find a seat. With her fellow passengers crammed so close to one another, you couldn’t have added a mouse. Despite the enforced physical familiarity, she’d sensed an invisible circle form around her, in which conversation was entirely absent. She was the outsider here. Everyone knew everyone. She could barely see through the smudgy window. Now and then she could see shapes against the pale waning moon, a church steeple, the top of a chateau, a village – never a light, not a one. It was as if they were driving through a dead landscape.
Some way into the journey, she remarked to her immediate neighbour that at least it was warm inside the bus.
‘You’re American!’ the woman exclaimed and, as in the train, news of her nationality spread from lip to ear, and while Eleanor felt the whole bus relax, she was again discomfited by having her cover so quickly blown. She really would have to be careful about her French. Now that she was going home, was her American self beginning to reassert itself? They knew exactly what she was up to. Lucky her for being able to get out. But you couldn’t be too careful these days, her neighbour said quietly. The Germans were planting people in buses and trains and in cafés, not only to pick off any fleeing Jews, but to eavesdrop. Unless you knew the person well, you kept your mouth shut. Even then you had to be careful they were a true friend, because someone might denounce you in revenge for some slight years ago. She offered advice about the German patrols, which were lazy because they didn’t like the cold. The colder the night, the less chance they’d be out and about causing trouble.
‘If only the war had started in winter,’ she opined as a corollary, ‘then we would have beaten the bastards. You’re our only hope,’ she said, patting Eleanor’s arm.
The weary passengers around her suddenly came to life, because the last gasping turn of the bus was onto the road into the village. She looked at her watch. Really, it had not taken as long as she’d thought.
For all the sudden if late conviviality inside the bus, the moment the vehicle stopped and the door opened, it emptied swiftly.
‘This is it,’ said the bus driver to Eleanor, who was the last to alight.
By then, her fellow passengers were shapes departing as quickly as they could through the shadows to the safety and warmth of their homes. The bus left with its lights out. She was alone. The silence folded in over her. With no streetlights, she could barely make out the houses ahead, though she figured the church steeple might indicate the square or centre of the village. She had to find the café called Excelsior, which seemed a rather grand name for what looked like a depot stop in the middle of the Canadian prairie. She hefted her rucksack and set out in the direction taken by most of her fellow passengers. Underfoot, the ground was wet and sloshy. She heard a car approaching, an unnerving experience because by now a car usually meant Germans. She stepped away from the roadway before the car’s lights could pick her out. It passed without revealing its identity. She watched its receding tail light. Soon it stopped. Its doors opened and shut. She heard voices, another door open and shut, then silence.
Closer, she saw the car had stopped in the village square, which was more triangle than square. Along one side were stone houses behind little gardens, on another the church with its small bell tower, and on the other were darkened shops. But there was the Café Excelsior, the exception, as bright as Christmas under a simple pitched roof. The car, carrying no identification, was parked right outside. Inside, through the curved bay window, Eleanor saw a tall, elderly man removing his civilian coat, helped by a young officer and a soldier, both in the grey uniforms of the occupier. Her heart sank. No military marking on the car? They had to be Gestapo. Confirmation came immediately. The few locals who had been inside started to leave by the main door, which was in a recess by the side. If she went in, she’d be the Gestapo’s only company, not to mention a lone woman and an American. What to do now was perplexing. She looked at her watch. Over two hours until the nine o’clock rendezvous. She hoped they would have decamped by then, though by the look of things, that might be hope of the pious kind. She’d freeze waiting. She looked around. Her first impressions were confirmed. Everything was shut.
She noticed, though, that she was being observed from the little garden of one of the houses. The figure beckoned her over. Nothing to lose, Eleanor went closer.
‘Madame,’ the voice whispered through the dark.
Eleanor needed no encouraging. Her companion from the bus ushered her quickly inside and shut the door. ‘You can stay here until your guide comes,’ she said. ‘If you sit back here, that chair by the wall, those Boches won’t see you, but you’ll be able to see the café.’
Eleanor took the woman’s hand in both of hers, saying she was grateful beyond words, and that was the truth. ‘Oh, your hands,’ said the woman. ‘Come,’ she said and led her to a room with a sink and a large wooden tub and a boiler, which was still warm. She filled a pail with water and handed it to Eleanor. ‘The toilet is through there,’ she added and left.
Refreshed, Eleanor returned to find the woman had left her a cup of steaming soup. She thought of offering some money but had the good sense to offer cigarettes instead. ‘For your husband,’ she said. The woman looked at them and said blow her husband, she was keeping these for herself. She liked a cigarette every now and then and hadn’t had one now for weeks, and certainly not an American one.
She wished Eleanor good luck and said to let herself out when she needed to go. She went to the next room to attend to her family, who were curious about their visitor in the front parlour but were told to mind their own business and leave her alone. Eleanor sipped her soup and wondered how she would occupy herself until nine. The doorway into the parlour was curtained off, though the light from inside seeped through, just enough for her to read. She had packed her last book as proof of the life she was leaving in case she ever forgot or never came back. That was in her valise, which God, the French national railways or even the Nazis willing, was on its way to Lyon. She had her small King James Bible but was not in the mood for the comforts of her religion. That left Finnegans Wake in her coat pocket. ‘All right then,’ she said, prising it out.
riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
That was as far as she’d ever been bothered to venture. Now she persisted, telling herself not to worry that it didn’t make any sense word by word, or even sentence by sentence. ‘It’s not supposed to,’ Sylvia had said, ‘but a wonderful story emerges, of life and death and resurrection. Fin agains wake. Just let it
happen.’ Yes, yes, Eleanor thought, we’ll see.
Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passen-core rearrived from North Armorica.
Eleanor concentrated – quite an effort and quite absurd. An absurd book for an absurd situation, better at least than the alternative of internment or the despair of Hettie Rosen in the face of the Nazis.
Then she came to it. God’s response to the Fall.
Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk.
She heard Sylvia and she smiled. She missed her pal so much, she thought she might weep. To save herself, she pushed on.
of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy.
‘What?’ she said aloud. ‘What?’ And in the next paragraph, pftjschute and humptyhillhead and tumptytumtoes? She kept on for a couple more pages, but this wonderful story of a dream that Sylvia had promised was making even less sense than those Old Testament tales like Lot and his travails in Sodom with his wife and incestuous daughters. On that thought, however, she wondered if she’d uncovered some clue, if only in an abstract sense. The laughter of a child in the next room was decisive. ‘Only a child could read this,’ she said and set the book aside. She closed her eyes but did not go to sleep.
At five to nine, she got up to leave. The light in the parlour was out, the family presumably gone to bed. She let herself out as quietly as she could. The sight of the German car still parked outside the café kept the biting cold at bay only briefly. She hovered in the shadows. Would her guide or guides risk entering with the Germans there? If they did, and she was not there, that would be that.