A Country Road, a Tree

by Jo Baker

  “Eh?”

  “You know, that dreadful old satchel thing of yours.”

  He finds it—he didn’t know she didn’t like it—hanging on a peg underneath his other jacket. He hands it to her. She slides his manuscript from the drawer into the bag.

  “I was too late,” she says over her shoulder.

  “What?”

  “They’ve got Hélène.” She turns back to him. Her eyes are brimming, but she is still all briskness. “The Geste were there, in her apartment, when I arrived.”

  “Jesus.”

  He moves towards her; she just shoves his bag into his hands.

  “But they let you go…,” he says.

  “I played the innocent. I said I had called round to see about her cat.”

  “Oh God, that bloody cat.”

  She lifts the pile of clothing from the arm of the settee. “I sorted this for you. Underwear, sweater, shaving gear.”

  “Thanks.” He just stands there, holding his bag in a bundle, feeling the weight of his manuscript.

  “Clothes. Now. Please.”

  Yes. Of course. He opens up the bag so that she can stuff them in.

  “Are you going to be all right in those boots?” she asks.

  He glances down at them. “The others are worse.”

  “Right then. Well. They’ll have to do. Come on.”

  He follows her out on to the landing. He fumbles with his keys, turns back to the door. He locks up. His hand shakes. His face feels tight and hard. He wonders if they will ever be here again. They head down the stairs. Brisk, light, but deliberately not running. They might pile straight into the Gestapo coming up to find them. They must not look as though they are trying to escape.

  “We’re popping out for a stroll, we’ll stop at a café,” she says back over her shoulder. “Tell yourself it’s an ordinary day.”

  Their hands skim down the bannister.

  “Where will we go?” he asks. “Do you have any notion?”

  “A friend of mine; he’ll help us.”

  “What friend?”

  Even in all this, that little sour twist of jealousy. They’re in the lobby. She drops her voice still further, speaks over her heaving breath.

  “You’ve met him, at those evenings. Michel. You remember?”

  He shakes his head. Maybe.

  “It’s what he does. He helps people.”

  Right. He holds the porte cochère, peers out. The street is clear. She ducks through; he follows. He offers his arm and she takes it. The door slams shut behind them on the lobby and the staircase spiralling up seven floors to the flimsy door locked on silent space and the dust falling on books, and on the floorboards, and on the heavy dark hand-me-down table that Nora Joyce had given him, on Mein Kampf and his battered coffee pot and his ashtray dusted with tobacco ash, and the drooping canvas tent and the Turkish rug.

  They walk along the street together, their arms linked, carrying shopping bag and satchel, as ordinary as the day itself. They don’t know where they’re going, but they go.

  Part Two

  Purgatory

  CHAPTER TEN

  PARIS

  August 1942

  The grandfather clock ticks. One weight sinks, its chain mumbling through blunt teeth, teasing cogs around. Somewhere in its innards something clunks and shifts, and it begins to chime the quarter-hour.

  Which makes it a quarter past three.

  He fans his toes, flexes his ankles.

  Which makes it a quarter past three, on Friday, the twenty-first of August, nineteen forty-two.

  If the clock is right.

  He rolls his head softly side-to-side. He can still make these small movements. And while he can, it seems important that he does. When he turns his head to the left, there is light pouring down through a knothole, and beyond it shafts through the gaps between the boards, where sometimes dust too falls in tiny streams. When he turns to the right, there is a black rectangular patch over the floorboards, and this is the rug, which covers the loosened planks where they can clamber out, at those times when they can be out. There is all this, and there is the old man lying next to him.

  He’s got used to the various and mingled smells by now. The old man’s and his own. He barely notices the body odour, the bad breath—it’s only when one of them lets out a particularly rancid fart—bad food, and the acid from not having enough of even bad food that makes your stomach eat itself and turns your guts to treacle—that a smell is particularly noticeable. Interesting, to see what one can become accustomed to.

  The old man has an enviable capacity for sleep. His breast, under his white beard, falls and rises softly. His face is fascinating: the way the skin slides from his cheekbones and forehead and gathers in concertinas at his ears, leaving the skull visible at the eye sockets and the bridge of the nose. Raising his head a little, he can peer down the length of their parallel bodies and see the old man’s feet, bootless, one yellow toe poking through a grey sock.

  Sometimes the old man snores. He lets him snore and does not nudge him.

  He can himself, sometimes, if he’s very lucky, drift out of consciousness for a bit. A swooping fall, a card-sharp rush of images, one replacing the other before any single one of them can be understood. Then he’s jerked back, blinking at the boards above his head.

  He raises his shoulders to his ears, the blades sliding up the boards beneath him and back down again, like failing wings.

  It is not so bad, not really. It is not so bad.

  Sometimes, when the old man is awake, he combs his beard with his fingers and mutters to himself. He’s Russian. What he’s saying could be prayers, or he could be telling stories, or he could simply be reminding himself of better days. But the old man has a listener, alert for patterns, names, anything familiar, trying to pin the sounds down into sense.

  He is learning Russian in the gap between the ceiling and the floor.

  It is not going quickly.

  But then there is no rush.

  It is a relief when the old man starts up his muttering. It helps to pass the time.

  Other things are passed too, down there between the ceiling and the floor. A bottle stands between them. She leaves it down there empty, retrieves it once it has been used. One unbuttons one’s fly and shuffles about and inches up on elbows and pisses with great difficulty, while the other fellow turns his head away, or is, often enough, already asleep. He finds that, all in all, he feels fondly towards the old fellow. He is a gracious pisser and a courteous sleeper; he does not fart as much as might be supposed. If one must have company, this is not bad company to have.

  There are also hours spent in the house itself, with the wireless on, the wife and husband home and nobody else expected. The old man sits in the corner by the grandfather clock, and he himself, a fifth wheel, tries to stay out of the way as well as stay away from the windows. This is when the day is done, the shops downstairs empty, and it is to be expected that there will be people at home. Even the slightest out-of-the-ordinary occurrence is questionable now. It only takes a word from a concerned citizen about strangers in the building, or figures moving around a supposedly empty apartment, and they are done for.

  So they talk in hushed voices; he stretches out his legs, eases the clicks out of his knees. They share their bad food with him. He joins them at the table for sulphurous stews of turnip and cabbage and beans. He eats little, is constantly hungry. Hunger is normal. You can get used to it, to its incremental twist. In hiding, he can no longer claim his rations, and beyond a little money for off-ration things like blood pudding and root vegetables, he has nothing to contribute here. He just consumes, and excretes, and is dependent on the family to deal with both. He feels the indignity of that; it renders him just animal.

  He shaves at the stone sink. He looks at himself in the scrap of mirror, at the angles of his bones. He’s no more than a few miles across town from his apartment, but it might as well be another country, since he cannot go back there.
He sees in himself now a quality of the patients he’d met at the Bethlem hospital, that time Geoffrey Thompson had taken him to look round. They’d roam the corridors, disoriented and hopelessly lost, but never more than a few yards from their beds.

  Geoffrey Thompson. How he’s getting on, now? He’ll be busy; he’ll be rushed off his blessed feet, now that the whole world has gone mad.

  He scrapes away the stubble, leaves his top lip unshaven. He is growing a moustache. It’s good to have a hobby.

  For Suzanne, he wishes daylight, air, the occasional cup of coffee. He wishes her to be safe. They have been separated, so as to be less conspicuous. They will be returned to each other when their new, fake papers have been achieved.

  He listens to the Russian but he thinks in French, in its uncompromising precisions, and in German, its words fitting themselves together like links in a necklace, and in Italian, which falls through his thoughts as smooth as drops of water. He strokes that new moustache and thinks in English too; his thoughts assemble themselves in its measured blocks. An English sentence is a brick. To build with, yes, a solid structure; something one can inhabit. But also a dividing wall, a closing-off; a limitation.

  —

  The chap has a mouse-brown suit and an old Mossant fedora gone dark around the band where he has sweated through it. His chin is shaven shiny. He hands over the new papers, then dabs at his forehead with a handkerchief; his line of work is enough to make anybody sweat. They step out into the corridor. He glances back—the apartment is empty for the day. The old grandfather is asleep beneath the floor. He closes the door behind him. He will not have the chance to say goodbye. To say thank you. For the bad food, and the floorboards, and the risk that they have undertaken on his behalf.

  He pockets his papers. They clip down the stairs and out of the doors into the street.

  “Where are we heading?”

  “Hotel in the Fifteenth.”

  “Will Suzanne be there?”

  A brisk nod. A gesture of impatience: they have to get a bloody move on if they are to get there before curfew. They also have to look as though they’re not in any hurry whatsoever.

  They are approaching a tram halt when they spot the gendarmes on board, checking papers; they duck down a side street. But then there is a checkpoint on the rue des Ombres, which they swerve again to avoid. There’s a long loop round through back streets and alleyways, and they find themselves in the leafy haut-bourgeois Sixteenth, not far from the Bois de Boulogne, where nobody is ever in a hurry, where women snuggle into their furs and feed their tiny dogs on black-market ham, and time ticks slow and weighs a ton, and half the apartments are locked up and empty, their owners gone to the country.

  He knows that they look very out of place indeed. In their worn and grubby suits they look like a couple of housebreakers. Unsuccessful ones.

  The shadows are long and the sun is low; the air is filling up with darkness like smoke.

  “Today’s Tuesday…,” he says.

  “Yep.”

  And so the world goes on, and time keeps passing. Tick-tock. Tuesday slides into Wednesday, and Wednesday crumbles into Thursday and for a good while Thursday seems solid and secure, but inevitably it too shivers and falls and Friday is triumphant, and what he really needs to do is notch it up, note it down, tick it off, keep a tally of the days, to notice time as it is passing, because he fears he is losing his grip on it, and there can be no break, no abeyance, no lacuna: time ticks by and it is their time, his and everybody else’s, and what they do in it, and with it, is not separate and distinct from before and afterwards; it is a continuation, and it must be acknowledged as such; time will have to be reckoned with eventually. And so he must check and clarify and notice. He will not let himself come adrift from it.

  They turn the corner.

  “Oh, the cow.”

  There’s a checkpoint. Police glance at papers, ask lazy questions of two plump matrons in their furs.

  “Nice area for it.”

  “Bluff it out?”

  Sucked teeth. It’s a risk.

  Their stride is already shortening, their pace slackening off. The matrons will soon be sent on their way: they can’t have anything to hide. There’s money in their purses; they’re wearing furs. Of course they’re law-abiding; the laws suit them.

  “C’mon,” the chap says, and they turn and cross the street. “We’ll head through the park.”

  —

  Between the trees it’s already so much darker. Gravel crunches underfoot.

  “Which way?”

  “If we head round to the Place de Colombes, then double back, we should be all right.”

  “Good. Come on.”

  The man’s really sweating now, trotting to keep up alongside his lope. The setting sun shafts through the trees, and over the open glades a faint mist rises. There’s just their ragged breath—he has no stamina nowadays—and the crunch of gravel, and birds settling in the trees, and something rustling through the shrubbery.

  “With any luck,” the man says, “people will think we’re out chasing whores.”

  “That still happens here?”

  “More than ever. If there’s any truth to rumour.”

  But luck is an unlucky word; said out loud it just dissolves. Because only a moment later they hear the dogs.

  Barrel-chested barking. A pair of them, at least; maybe more. These are not some sclerotic old pugs out for an airing. These are big dogs, hounds.

  “You hear that?”

  “It’s nothing.” They come to a fork in the track; he heads towards the left-hand path. “It’s not to do with us.”

  But a hundred yards further on, they hear the voices. Somewhere ahead and off to the right: between them and the maze of city streets. They are speaking German.

  “Last seen headed across the Place de la Porte…”

  They stop dead. He can feel his breath dragging in his chest. He presses a hand to his scar.

  “…must presume they entered the park.”

  He looks to the little man, who shakes his head; he doesn’t understand. “What are they saying?”

  He waves a hand to shush him, listening.

  “…start by the lake and sweep across. We’ll send the dogs round the other way.”

  The little man raises his hands, nonplussed. What to do?

  He finds himself in charge. A low jerk of the arm: come on.

  One of the dogs lets out a howl and others join it. Voices call back and forth between the trees. There are footfalls on the track behind them: more than one person, gaining on them.

  They peel off the pathway, duck under the low boughs, dodge between the trees. Fallen leaves, dry branches: the noise of their passing is agonizing. It is impossible, though, to go silently.

  They slip round the thick trunk of a sycamore and hunker down. The colour is seeping from the world.

  “Split up?” the man breathes.

  “Do you think?”

  “Halves the chances of being caught.”

  “Doubles it?”

  A dog bays; they flinch down, speak very low.

  “Closer.”

  “Think so.”

  “Have you got anything?”

  He doesn’t follow. “Cigarette?”

  “No. If they get their hands on you.” A heave of breath. “For that.”

  “Oh. No. Have you?”

  A nod. “I don’t think mine will stretch.”

  The man leans back against the trunk, his belly heaving like a frog’s, and closes his eyes.

  He, though, hunkered down in the fallen leaves, looks round him, rubbing at his arms. He feels the chill. He doesn’t want this. He can’t face this. The words feel childlike, Boy’s Own:

  “We could swim the lake,” he says. “Doesn’t that put dogs off a scent?”

  The man’s eyes open, his irises black in the half-light. “And if we got away from this lot, we’d just get picked up by the next patrol. Soaked through, in the Sixteenth.”r />
  “There is that.”

  Then eyes widen: boots thud past behind them along the footpath they’ve just left. They hold their breath. Just one man, going at a run; he’s gone, and the breath slides out of them again.

  “Have you got much you can give them?” the man asks.

  He swallows. “A bit.”

  “That’s the problem, isn’t it? People. People you can hurt.”

  “People are always the problem.”

  The fellow sinks down off his hunkers so that he’s now sitting on a root. He draws his knees up. The noise seems to be coming from all directions now, men and dogs, and with it the scrape of torch beams through branches, tree trunks, the failing light. They’re done for, surely.

  “I can’t see how we can be worth all this madness.”

  Still on his hunkers, he rests a hand, fingers tented, on the bole. He peers around through the trees; he glances back towards the path. They can’t move. They can’t stay where they are. They can’t both kill themselves, and he for one finds that he would much rather survive the night. Suzanne is waiting for him, and will be annoyed if he does not show up. So what’s left? The grained, elephantine bark beneath his fingertips. His eyes slide upward, through drooping branches and the fading rusty leaves, right up into the canopy of the sycamore. It is dim in the gathering dusk and still thick with foliage. Head tilted back, his balance fails and he has to steady himself. The set of his features changes; the lines shift around his eyes.

  He turns back towards the little man, taps knuckles against his arm.

  Eyebrows up, his expression: What?

  He jerks his head upward.

  The man twists his head to peer up along the rising height of the tree. His Adam’s apple rolls down then back up his throat. “I don’t like heights,” he says.

  He, though, unfolds himself, looks upward, dusting off his hands. A moment, then the other man gets stiffly to his feet. They stand side-by-side, a pair of schoolboys considering the climb. There are strong drooping branches, but they’re only low enough to get hold of at some distance from the tree, leaving one out, as it were, on a limb. Close to the trunk, nothing’s within easy reach, at least for the smaller man. So the only thing for it: back set to the tree, a cup made of his palms, he offers a boost. The other fellow swallows queasily, but sets a boot in the hands and is heaved upward. A grab for the lowest bough, a foot on his shoulder, then the weight is gone and the other fellow’s scrambling up amongst the branches. He leaps for the lowest branch and pulls himself up after, satchel swinging.