by Anita Shreve
“Too late.”
Claire looked up from her crouch on the floor. Dinant stood in the doorway. “She's dead,” she said. There was little emotion in her voice. Claire imagined that Dinant, who had seen the worst of it, who had tended the boys who had been tortured, had come to see each death as merely another failure.
“I will tell Bastien,” Dinant said. “He will come and will know what to do. And when he comes, he will help you and Henri carry the American into the hiding place. Every minute the pilot is exposed here, you are at risk.”
In the Daussois kitchen, Claire thought, Dinant was a field officer, clear-headed, her orders precise. The war was being fought in kitchens and attics all over Belgium.
The pilot slept for hours. In the afternoon, Claire climbed the stairs with a cup of thin broth made with marrow bones. There was just enough room in the hiding place for her to sit, her legs folded under her. For some time, she watched the American, watched his eyes move beneath his veined lids, watched his body quiver and twitch, as if in his dreams he were still flying. She watched also the snow that dusted, then accumulated upon, the small rectangle in the ceiling. As the snow thickened, the light in the crawl space diminished, so that it seemed milky in the small room, the pilot's features less distinct. She thought of the old woman, of how she had lain there and died, of what thoughts and dreams she must have taken with her. Hers was a death that must be laid at the Gestapo's feet, Claire thought, as surely as if they had shot her in that chimney.
From time to time that first day, Claire said the pilot's name aloud, to waken him, to summon him to eat. Theodore. And when he finally opened his eyes, the broth was nearly cold.
His hands were swollen and stiff and incapable of holding the bowl without spilling it. He was able to lift his head only slightly. She fed him with a spoon. It was an imperfect arrangement, and sometimes the broth spilled over his lower lip and onto his chin. She used the cloth in which she had wrapped the hot bowl to wipe his face. His thirst was keen. He asked for water when he was finished, but when she returned with the water, his headagain lay against the pillow, and his eyes were closed. She waited beside him.
Perhaps she dozed. A shadow moved across the opening to the crawl space.
“I might have been a German,” he said harshly. Antoine was standing in her bedroom. He meant the open armoire, the attic room clearly seen. He meant she should be careful not to stay too long inside* the attic. She crawled back into her bedroom.
“He's sleeping,” she said.
“We'll have to waken him,” Antoine said. Claire thought of protesting, but knew that Antoine would ignore her.
She was not certain that Antoine, with his pink bulk, would be able to squeeze into the small opening at the back of the armoire; nor was she sure he would find room to sit beside the pilot once he'd managed to get inside. But as Claire waited just outside, she heard two voices— the crude English of Antoine, who often impatiently called to Claire for a translation, and the barely audible murmur of the American, who tried to answer each question. She heard the words flak, control cables, Ludwigs-hafen. Antoine told the pilot that a man named Warren had died from his wounds, which did not seem to be news to the American, and that men named McNulty and Shulman had been captured by the Gestapo, which was. The rest of the crew, said Antoine, were hidden by Resistance workers in the area. One man's arm had been shattered.
Antoine, satisfied with the interview, wedged himself back through the armoire. When he stumbled to his feet, his face was scarlet with the effort. Claire stood as well.With his bulk and height, Antoine seemed enormous in the small bedroom, his head bent under the slanted ceiling.
“We must move all the Americans through the lines as quickly as possible,” Antoine said.
“I’m not sure he—”
“It's too risky here for any of them. The Germans know the pilots are hidden.”
Claire looked away.
“We'll prepare a passport. We'll need a new photograph taken.”
Claire nodded. The photographs the airmen brought with them were almost always useless, though the airmen never seemed to know this. When the air crews had their evasion photos taken at base, each man borrowed a white shirt and tie for the picture, which was supposed to make a pilot look like a civilian. The difficulty was, however, that since all of the men used the same tie, the Germans could not only identify the bearer of the photograph as English or American, but could tell which bomb group the man belonged to.
Antoine's breath, hovering over hers, stank of old garlic. For a moment Claire had the unlikely idea that he might move her toward the bed. Where was Henri? She was trying to think. She had known Antoine for years, since primary school, but she could no longer predict with any certainty how anyone she knew might behave. It was odd, she thought, how perfectly ordinary people, people who might not have amounted to much, people one hadn't even noticed or liked, had been transformed by the war. It was as though the years since 1940, in all their misery, had drawn forth character—water from theearth where none had seemed to be before. Before the war, she had not known of Antoine's stamina or his intelligence, yet because he had changed so during the war, she could not predict how he might act in other matters as well. She thought also, that had it not been for the war, she might never have discovered that Henri, for all his steadiness, was, in crises, physically afraid.
The American slept long into the afternoon and evening. His face seemed to possess, in his sleep, a curious detachment. Rarely had she seen such detachment on the faces of the other men and women who passed through her house. Too often, the particular horrors each had seen and witnessed, and sometimes been a part of, were reflected in their eyes, etched into the creases of their skin. Even on the faces of the young women and the boys.
The American slept so deeply that day she could not rouse him again, not even to give him the water he had asked for. She thought that perhaps he was hoarding his strength, hibernating through the worst of his ordeal. She had an image of him sleeping all the winter, like an animal, rising finally when the warmth came in late March or April.
But that night, as she lay sleeping in her bed, with Henri snoring beside her, she woke to a terrible sound behind the wall that frightened her. It was the frantic scrabbling of a man buried alive, trying to unseal his casket. She opened the back of the armoire, crawled into the darkness, felt the pilot's hands fly past her body, caught them. His skin was shockingly hot to the touch, and when she stripped off the comforters, she discovered with her own hands that his shirt and the bedding weresoaked. His body shook violently next to hers, and he spoke English words and phrases she strained to follow, to understand, but couldn't.
She lit a candle, held it near his face. His eyes were open, but as incoherent and as meaningless as his speech. She called to Henri, told him to bring towels soaked in cold water or in the snow. When Henri, in his long underwear, brought them to the attic room, and Claire laid them on the American's skin—on his chest, around his head and face—the pilot tried to fight her, to peel them, off, and Claire was astonished by the man's strength. Henri reached in to hold the American down. Claire spoke to the pilot constantly, in a low voice, repeating her words, a kind of incantation. Henri brought new towels when the pilot's skin had turned the cool cloths warm. The American begged for morphine. Claire put a towel between his teeth, which he bit like an epileptic until she had found the syringe and delivered the salve to his veins.
Claire fed the American cool sips of water, while Henri dressed and went for Dinant. The pilot was quieter now, but not yet sensible. Claire listened to him tell of shooting squirrels in the woods, of airplanes with threads attached falling from the ceiling. Once he seemed lucid and asked her name.
Once again, Dinant came with her medicines and her bag. Without greeting, the woman crawled into the attic and began to cut the bandages open, exposing the source of infection. The wound, a grotesque open sore, had festered. Dinant poured alcohol into the wound and cleaned it. The
pilot moaned and lost consciousness. Dinant gave the American a tetanus shot, then fashioned adifferent sort of bandage, a partial closure held together with bits of cloth tied at strategic places. For days, it seemed, Claire sat with the pilot, who hovered between sanity and madness. The infection refused to heal, but did not travel. Dinant wanted the leg off altogether in case gangrene set in, but Claire, who knew a man with only one leg would not make it through the lines, held the woman off—just another day, she said; just another hour—a defensive line that seemed easy to breach, but proved, in the event, to be impregnable.
A hundred faces hovered over him, and in the crowd he searched for his brother. His brother was thirteen or fourteen and was wearing a red plaid flannel shirt. It was important to find Matt among the faces; there was something Ted had to tell him. But Matt couldn't be there, could he, because Matt had gone to war as well, and in the war had died in the water. The ship, the telegram said, sank in the Pacific when it was hit by a torpedo. The telegram didn't say if Matt was drowned in the darkness, or if, in the ferocious heat of midday, Matt let go of a bit of wood and dove into the coolness of the dark, beautifully colored water. Water and air. They were dying in all the elements.
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 s
uit 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.