by Anita Shreve
He wanted to cry. He began to think about the flyer's leg. It needed attention, a doctor or a nurse. What if it became infected and had to be amputated—all because Jean had brought the man to the barn and could not think of a way to get him out? What if the American died of the infection? Could a grown man die so quickly from a wound? And surely there was the loss of blood, too, and shock. In the darkness he saw the American's face. The man who had called himself Ted, who had no use of his hands, who had nearly smiled at their small triumph of communicating a single word.
The boy had said he would return. He had promised that. He had to get the flyer out of the barn before daybreak.
He held the sock to his lip, fighting off sleep. He stared into the absolute darkness of his tiny room. He made his eyes stay open, and he thought. After a time, he listened to the heavy tread on the stairs of his father's footsteps, heard the door to his parents’ bedroom open and close.
And when he had thought a long time, he sat up on the edge of the bed, threw the sock to the floor, and pulled his coat around him.
She was asleep or near sleep, listening still for the familiar sounds of Henri entering the kitchen downstairs. The scuffle of his boots. Water at the pump. A glass set on the table. She had waited up as long as she felt able, but then the chilly air had driven her to bed. Underneath the thick comforter, in her nightgown, she drifted between sleep and waking, wondering what had happened to Henri. She was not especially alarmed; it was not the first time he had been gone the entire night on a mission. But still she wished he had sent word to her somehow. She was concerned for the old woman who lay just beyond her wall, breathing irregularly now, refusing to eat, even to sip broth. Claire had wanted to bring the old woman downstairs, to lay her by the fire, but alone she couldn't manage her on the stairs. Instead Claire had piled blanket upon blanket on the frail body. But it seemed to Claire that she was merely burying the old woman, making it impossible for her to move.
She didn't have much hope for the old woman. Even if Claire could help her regain her strength, the Maquis would want the woman moved through the lines, the space cleared for the next refugee or aviator. Claire didn't even have the luxury of allowing Madame Rosenthal a room in her house. If she suggested it, Henri would tell her what she already knew. Madame Rosenthal was a Jew. A Belgian could not keep a Jew in a house. The punishment would be death for Madame Rosenthal and themselves.
But she was worried for Madame Rosenthal. Even under the best of circumstances, she guessed it would be difficult to make it across the French border, even more difficult to get to Spain. She thought of one story that had filtered back to her. In April, forty men, among them two English aviators who had been sheltered in Delahaut, had made it within twenty-five kilometers of the Spanish border. Ebullient after their harrowing journey, one of the Englishmen, while bathing in a stream, had begun a song in English. A neighbor, an old woman, heard the English words over the wall of her back garden. Tipped off by this collaborator, the Gestapo arrested the two English pilots, as well as the other escapees. Just a morning's walk from freedom, all thirty-two men were machine-gunned over a ditch, into which the bodies fell and were left uncovered as a lesson to the townspeople.
Claire sat up. She thought she heard a knock at the door. A short rap, then silence. A short rap, then silence. Instantly, her skin grew hot. She pushed the comforter off, and, forgetting her robe, ran downstairs in her bare feet to the kitchen. The stone floor was a shock to her body, the cold painful on her soles. She held her arms around her, stood behind the door. The rhythmic rapping continued. What time was it? Three, four in the morning? Had something happened to Henri, and someone had come to tell?
“Who is it?” she called from behind the door.
“It's Jean Benoît,” she heard in a quiet voice.
She heard the name, but it refused to register. Jean was a boy, only ten years old. She asked the question again: “Who is there?”
“Madame Daussois,” came the urgent voice. “Please, open the door. It's Jean Benoît.”
Claire opened the door. The boy was shivering on the doorstep. The icy air blew into the kitchen, and she beckoned to the boy td come inside. She shut the door. In the dark of the room, she could just make out his features. She drew on an old coat of Henri's that hung on a peg beside the door, and lit a candle on the mantel. The sight of the boy made her put her hand to her mouth.
His face was swollen on the side, a dark bruise beginning. His lip was split, and there was dried blood on his chin and cheeks. His coat was filthy, with bits of twigs and bark stuck to it.
“I need Monsieur Daussois,” the boy said in a barely audible voice. He cleared his throat.
She studied the boy warily. Everyone knew the boy's father was collabos.
“Who did that to you?” she asked.
The boy looked at her, did not answer.
“Was it the Germans?”
The boy shook his head.
“Was it your father?” she asked.
The boy seemed to hesitate, as if making a decision. Then he nodded once quickly. “I must speak with Monsieur Daussois,” he said. “It's urgent.”
The panic in the boy's voice sounded authentic, but even so Claire knew she must be cautious.
The members of the Maquis were always at risk. Sometimes the treachery was obvious; sometimes it was subtle. The Germans fed their own airmen into the system, men who spoke perfect English and landed on Belgian soil with American or English parachutes. They'd be sheltered, put through the networks, only, at the end, to expose all those who had helped them escape. The men and women who were captured would be tortured to reveal other names. Claire knew of men who'd been blinded or burned with electric prods. And then these men—and women—would be shot, or suffocated, and buried without winding sheets in shallow graves, where animals soon picked their bones. But this method of exposure, she knew, didn't always please the Germans. Sometimes they wanted the individual Allied airmen more than they wanted the networks. The Gestapo began then to infiltrate the networks with one collaborator along the way, one link in the chain, who could deliver, selectively, the most valuable of the Allied officers, so as not to cast too much suspicion upon themselves, and thus keep the networks open. After all, who could say for sure at which link an airman had been exposed? Always it was a tenet of the Resistance that each cell know only of the one directly before it.
“Why do you need him?” she asked, eyeing the boy closely.
He gave a long sigh. She could see that the boy was frightened. Frightened and hurt. His lip and the side of his face needed medical attention.
“I have the American,” the boy said simply.
At first she did not understand. How could a boy have an American? And then, meeting the child's shy gaze, she understood.
“Where is he?” she asked.
“I have hidden him in my father's barn. He's injured in his leg. I need Monsieur Daussois to help me get him out before my father goes into the barn in the morning.”
“Where did you find him?”
“In the wood.”
“And no one else knows?”
The boy shook his head.
She stared at the boy. Could she trust him? She wondered immediately how it was that the boy knew to come to her house and not another. This fact alone was alarming— were she and Henri known already to the Germans? Or was this a ploy, a way to identify a member of the Maquis? Yet she had believed the boy when he'd said it was his father who had hit him, split his lip.
In a small village such as Delahaut, she had learned, it was not possible always to conceal either resistance to or collaboration with the Germans. Certain collaborators were easily known—the Black Belgians, for example, men who wore black shirts and held positions of power within the occupational force, even occasionally replacing a Burghermaster. Then there were the women who went with German soldiers, accepted presents and money for their favors. In Delahaut, there were several, and they were regarded as worse
than whores. Claire had seen these women spat upon in the village streets by men and women, and she didn't want to think about what might happen to these women after the war.
But the members of the Resistance, unlike some of the collaborators, had to be extremely careful about inadvertently revealing their identity to anyone. Claire knew Henri and Antoine had taken a risk in removing items from the fallen plane while schoolchildren were able to observe them. But schoolchildren, she knew, more often than not, saw the Maquis as heroic, longed to grow up to fight within its ranks. No, the danger was seldom children; it was instead the men and women who might come to your house, share a cup of ersatz coffee with you by the stove, even express their hatred for the Nazis in your presence, all the while listening for a sound in your home that might be different from all the others.
Suddenly, she understood how the boy had identified her.
The Resistance operated cautiously, trusting as few people as possible, but there were some villagers sympathetic to the Maquis one had to depend upon. Omloop, for example. In Belgium, everyone was rationed. The daily ration per person was 225 grams of bread, three lumps of sugar, two small sausages, and half a kilo of potatoes. But those in the escape lines—the Jews, the Allied airmen, the Belgian boys fleeing the German work camps, the Maquis themselves—had no ration stamps. Obtaining food and feeding this small army was full-time work in itself. The Resistance therefore had to rely on sympathetic shopkeepers who would pad rations from the black market. When Claire went to Madame Omloop's, the shopkeeper, without saying a word, always gave Claire larger portions than her ration book allowed.
“You've seen me at Omloop's,” Claire said to Jean.
The boy looked down at his feet. When he looked up, she saw the confusion on his face.
“Monsieur Daussois is not here,” she said slowly. “He's out.” She left it at that. She looked toward the ceiling, thought of the old woman. “I can go with you,” she added. “Perhaps together we can move the man.”
Relief softened the boy's face. Claire put on her clogs, fastened her coat, and tied a kerchief under her chin. There was the old truck behind the barn, and the gazogene. Henri had said to use it only in an emergency. Could she get the gazogene to work? Could she and the boy crank the old Ford into life? She could see no other way. She hoped that the old woman would not call out to her while she was gone.
Jean, beside her, told her to turn off the lights and cut the engine while they were still on the lane and out of sight of his father's farmhouse. Quietly they opened their respective doors, got out of the cab. There would be snow in the morning, she was certain. She could smell it on the air.
The boy led, and she followed behind. She did not allow herself to think of the consequences of being caught at this. Occasionally, she had been asked to an-other house, to a terraced house in the village or to an-other farm, to nurse an injured airman or to translate. But on those trips, she had gone by bicycle, as almost every-one in the village traveled, so there had been minimal risk. A woman and a boy in a truck in the middle of the night after a plane had crashed in the village would be impossible to explain. Had the truck been spotted on the road from the Daussois farm to the Benoît farm? What time was it exactly, and how long did they have until daybreak? She cursed herself for not looking at the grandfather clock in the kitchen.
She sucked in her breath at the uneven squeal of the barn door opening. Beneath Henri's coat, she shivered in her nightgown. She could see nothing in the darkness of the barn, dared not move forward lest she stumble and fall. The boy touched her gently, and, holding her by the wrist, led her to the interior. She could smell and hear animals, but couldn't see them.
The boy tugged downward on her wrist and spoke to her. She knelt, put out her hands. She was kneeling on something soft, a mixture of hay and dried manure, she thought. Her hands touched the rough wood of a trough, the humpy shapes of potatoes.
She listened to the boy working quickly beside her. Once she heard him say, in a low voice, Jean. She was aware of the dull thud of the potatoes falling to the soft ground all around the boy. And then the boy stopped.
He reached for her again, this time for her hand. She let him draw her fingers over the trough and along the surface of the potatoes.
She felt the warmth of human skin, a man's face. And the boy beside her said a name.
DECEMBER 31, 1943, TO JANUARY 7,1944
THE COURTYARD BEHIND THE SCHOOL WAS A BLUR OF movement as boys in ill-fitting jackets and old wool pullovers played hoop and boules and pitch-the-pebble in the few remaining minutes of the dinner hour. Few of the girls had ventured into the cold; most of them had remained behind in the classroom with Madame Lepin, who was teaching them to knit socks for the imprisoned Belgian soldiers in Germany. Jean stood at the top of the steps and surveyed the scene. Marcel, who had been waiting for him to emerge from the school, spotted him first and called to him. At the mention of Jean's name, the other boys halted in their play, watched as he descended the stone stairs. An officially designated punishment, no matter what the offense, never failed to produce curiosity in the boys. Jean walked toward his friend.
“Jean,” Marcel whispered frantically. “What happened? What did Monsieur Dauvin do to you?”
Jean held out his hands, where the evidence was obvious. With an effort of will he made his hands remain still. The knuckles were swollen. On the middle fingers the skin had split, and there were slits of blood.
“The stick?”
Jean nodded.
“Better than the caning.”
Jean nodded again.
Marcel shook his head. “I didn't tell them,” he said, again whispering. “I know you said to tell them you were sick, but Monsieur Dauvin was so angry, I didn't dare speak.”
“That's just as well,” said Jean. “Then you, too, would have gotten the stick.”
“What happened to you, anyway?” Marcel asked. “Where were you all afternoon? Did you find any of the Americans?”
Jean looked beyond his friend to the place where a group of boys were playing boules. They played with a hand-whittled and sanded ball that wasn't perfectly spherical and wobbled in the dirt just beyond the courtyard. No one had asked him why his mouth was swollen or his lip was split when he arrived at school that morning. It wasn't the first time he had come to school in such a state; they knew his father often beat him.
“Jean, what happened to you? What did you find?”
Jean slowly turned his gaze back to his friend. Marcel badly needed a haircut. Tufts of hair grew over his ears. Like his own, the boy's trousers were too short. “Nothing happened,” he said to Marcel. “I went back into the woods, but I couldn't find anything. When I got home, Monsieur Dauvin had been to see my father, and so he hit me.”
“Oh,” Marcel said. He looked disappointed.
Jean tried to put his hands into the pockets of his trousers, but his knuckles wouldn't easily bend. He knew that his fingers wouldn't work properly until tomorrow at the earliest. This was not the first time he had been rapped.
It was, however, the first time he had lied to his friend. But the lie had come immediately, before he had had time even to think about what he might say. Instinctively he'd known somehow that what had happened in the night was not to be shared with anyone. Not just for his own safety, but for Madame Daussois's as well. He could not forget the sight of her standing in her nightgown in her kitchen, nor the strength of her later in the night. She was beautiful. He was sure he had never seen a woman so beautiful, not even Marie-Louise, who was regarded as the village beauty, the village flirt. Marie-Louise stained her legs with walnut and painted a seam up the back in order to fool everyone into thinking she wore silk stockings. Jean was sure that Madame Daussois would never do such a thing. He would suffer a dozen canings for her if he had to.
In the darkness, he and Madame Daussois had together emptied the trough of potatoes, helped the airman to his feet. The American was dazed and weak—barely able to stand. Madame
Daussois spoke constantly to the man, whispering English words, so that she might calm him, help him to understand that she and the boy were friends. Jean replaced the potatoes in the trough. When he stood, he could not clearly see the flyer's face, but he could feel the weight of the man, feel the leather and then the fleece of the large open collar of his flight suit. The aviator weighed even more in his heavy flight suit than he-would have without it, but Jean knew that it was only the flight suit that had allowed him to survive. He had heard the stories of the flyers who had bailed out of their planes with electric suits, and who had frozen on the fields and in the woods before they could be rescued.
Madame Daussois in her nightgown and her husband's heavy coat, and Jean in his old jacket and hat, had wheeled the airman from the bam to the truck. Together they had lifted and pushed and heaved the man onto the truck bed, as if they were taking a dead animal to market. It was impossible to be silent in this effort, and with each grunt from himself or muffled cry of pain from the injured man, Madame Daussois, and then Jean, had looked instinctively for movement at the farmhouse. When they had the flyer finally in the truck, Jean had walked to the cab. He was about to hoist himself into the passenger seat for the ride back to Madame Daussois's house. It had not occurred to him that he would not go. How else.was Madame Daussois to get the airman into her house if not with his help? But Madame Daussois had caught up to him, put a hand on his shoulder. He argued then, whispering as fiercely as he dared, trying to persuade her of his usefulness, but Madame Daussois would not be moved. She didn't look hard, not like Marcel's mother, for example, but she was. Of that he had no doubt now. Not like his own mother, who did not look tough and wasn't. He cringed when he thought about his mother, about the way she was afraid of her own husband.
Madame Daussois had insisted he return quickly to his bedroom. She said that if he was captured, he would not be able to withstand the torture, and in the event, would put them all at risk. For a moment, Jean had hesitated, thinking to defy her, unwilling to relinquish the airman. After all, if it hadn't been for Jean, the aviator would not have been found, might even have died in the night. Infact, Jean thought, he almost certainly would have died, or would have been found by the Germans. He remembered that his nose and eyes were running in the cold as he struggled with his own desires and fears. Finally, he shrugged and pulled away from Madame Daussois, saying not a word. He felt bad about that now. He had walked away from her in a sulk, when he had every reason to be grateful to her for having come to his aid when he had asked her. He wished now that he could go to her farmhouse and tell her that he was sorry for his behavior. He badly wanted to know how the flyer was, if he was still, with her, if he had been transferred elsewhere. He had seen the alarm on Madame Daussois's face when she realized that Jean had guessed she was with the Resistance. He wanted to reassure her that her secret was safe with him, that no matter what happened he would tell no one of last night.