A Country Road, a Tree

by Jo Baker

  The little man clambers up a few branches and then stops, and shakes his head at the notion that he might go any higher. A pat on the shoulder, and then the reach and swing that is so long ago and so familiar, the memory buried in his muscles and his nerves. Even the sting of the palms. He remembers that.

  Perched high above, his back to the trunk, astride a beam, he tucks his dark muffler over the pale line of his shirt collar, tugs his sleeves down over his cuffs; they are more grey than white but they would still show up in a flashlight. He hooks his arm around a higher branch, tucks his bag close and ducks his nose down into his scarf. It’s all right, actually.

  Across the woods, saplings and undergrowth shiver with movement; he can hear the crunch and thrash of men through the brushwood; flashlights swipe across the dark.

  He chews at the inside of his cheek. He closes his eyes. Takes himself away to this: the white road gleams under the travellers’ ragged feet, and the dun field glows, and the sky above is a translucent slate-blue; the delineation brisk, the outlines strong; the whole thing is as luminous as a stained-glass window. The light of that other world beyond shines through for Rouault, as it cannot shine for him.

  When he opens his eyes again, he can still see the bundle of the man below him, clinging to the trunk like a fungus.

  The dark gathers; it rises from the earth like groundwater. Above, the stars prick through. It’s getting cold. He shifts, resettles himself. He eases out the ache in his neck. The wind stirs the tree, and the branch heaves and the trunk sways and the leaves rustle and clouds scud across the sky. The voices come and go. The dogs are distant, then nearer again. He dozes, wakes. Suzanne will be annoyed. He lays his cheek against his arm and dreams.

  He falls, arms spread, through the painless brush of branches and the soft caress of twigs and needles, and it is all perfectly pleasant while he falls, but when he hits the ground he will be dead.

  He blinks awake. His eyes open on the drop: fifty foot to the bare ground. He has slumped forward in his sleep, his whole weight hangs from that one arm. Between him and the root-troubled earth is the hunched form of his friend, still clamped to the bole. It’s lighter now; the night is fading into day and they are both still there. Still ticking on.

  He shifts his grip, struggles himself up. His arm has gone to sleep and his chest aches. He clambers down until he is alongside his friend, one hand on a higher branch, one foot dangling, perched neatly.

  “How’s it going?” he asks.

  The man peels his face from the trunk; he blinks. His cheek is printed with bark. He smells musky. He doesn’t speak.

  “You stiff?”

  A slow blink. The fellow’s eyes are glazed; he doesn’t seem to be taking anything in.

  “All right, old chap. Help you down. If you could just—”

  But his friend just lays his face against the trunk again, and does not move.

  But it is really, really time to go. Before the early-morning dog-walkers notice them; before the search party turns up and has another go. What to do? He climbs down one branch so he is below now, and turns his face away from the smell of urine.

  “Just give me your foot, there’s a good chap. Just in my hand.”

  The man shakes his head.

  “Come on now; it’s a simple affair. I used to do it all the time as a boy; I bet you did too.” This is something of a lie: he climbed up trees all the time. He rarely had to trouble himself with climbing down.

  The voice is tacky and dry. “I don’t like heights.”

  “I know, I know, I see that. But…” The boot in his hands now. “Try.” He coaxes the boot off the joint of branch and trunk where it is wedged, and pulls it lower. His friend remains stiff and resistant.

  “All right?”

  “No.”

  But the foot shakingly descends.

  They inch their way, foothold-handhold, foothold-handhold, down to the lowest bough. He drops loosely to the ground and turns to coax the smaller man to drop; he staggers backward with him in his arms.

  “And there we are. Terra firma.”

  The man looks around him vaguely. He rubs his face, digs at his closed eyes. “We’ll go…we’ll go to…the hotel.”

  “One moment.”

  Leaving his friend there by the sycamore, he strides off into the bushes, unbuttons, and pisses long into the mulch.

  —

  They scuff through the dawn streets. He is unkempt, unshaven, self-conscious and on the qui vive and trying not to look like it. The other fellow is shuffling along half a pace behind him, walking stiff-legged because of his damp and chafing trousers, and he can’t be made to keep up. He’s muttering to himself now, and from time to time waving an arm: we go this way; I think it’s this way—no, I don’t know. Oh shit, I don’t know, what are we going to do…?

  It’s not good, wandering. One may walk, of course, but one must have a purpose to one’s walk. The tramps have all gone; the flâneurs have given up. One walks to get where one is going, or one stays at home. Which is why the two of them—he a great gangling streak of piss, his friend a waddling puddle of it—make as conspicuous a couple as Laurel and Hardy in these Paris morning streets, and are drawing almost as much attention from the street-sweepers and the bin men and the delivery boys.

  They find a café just off the rue Grenelle and order coffee. He mentions the inconvenience of having missed the last train home the previous evening: it really breaks his feet, you know. His friend just drinks his barley coffee in hot mouthfuls and won’t be coaxed into better spirits. Hotel, wash, a change of clothes and a comfortable bed; a good sleep; feel so much better after that. No response beyond a blink, a nod. They settle up, and they stumble out again into the cold daylight.

  “Now then, my friend, not far.”

  But what if Suzanne is gone? And what if she is still there, and furious with him?

  —

  The hotel is the kind of hotel you’d find on any street in Paris. The paint is faded and peeling, and the windows are filmed with street dirt. A thin woman in a dull dress slips in behind the counter and opens up the register; a girl pauses with her broom to watch them pass. She sucks a finger.

  His head is swimming with fatigue. His eyes feel as though they have been sandpapered. The woman hands him a form to fill in. He takes the stub of pencil. He can’t remember what his name is supposed to be.

  The little man shuffles up beside him, licks his lips. “Your papers.” Meaning, the new name is there and he can copy it.

  He fumbles his card out and lays it open on the counter, facing the receptionist. He reads his new name upside-down, licks the pencil tip and glances down the list in the guest book—and there it is. Suzanne’s handwriting; a new faked name. Signed in yesterday and—he scans across the column—out again early this morning. While he was swilling ersatz coffee in that steamy little café, she was taken on somewhere else, Lord knows where. When he finally catches up with her, she is going to be so cross.

  He prints; he signs. What to do now? How does he go about finding her?

  “D’you have any matches?” the other fellow asks, out of nowhere.

  He frowns round at him.

  “Matches. You used to see them, didn’t you, in places like this? Bowls full of matchbooks, just lying out on the counter. And sweets sometimes; heaps of bonbons.”

  He slides the guest book over. “I’ll give you a light in a minute.”

  “Your room will be on the fourth floor,” the woman says. “It’s nice and quiet.” She turns back with the key, then barks past them, “Marthe, don’t stand around gawping. Hop to it, girl!”

  The girl jumps. She shunts the broom along.

  —

  They climb long slow stairs to their room, getting lightheaded with the climb. But the room is a room, and so much better than a tree for being comfortable in. It is full of light. They close the shutters, and close the windows, and close the curtains, and shut the daylight out. He unlaces and pulls off his boot
s. He sinks back on one of the narrow beds; it creaks and sags into a pit.

  His friend perches on the end of the other bed, nearer the window. The counterpane creases under his weight. He is still wearing his damp trousers. But he is busy smoking now. He finishes his cigarette and lights another from the glowing tip of it; smoke spools upward, oozes from his lips. You’d think he didn’t know about the rationing. The little man is smoking as though there’s no tomorrow.

  He, though, just lies back on his bed and looks up at the ceiling, with its faint repeat of embossed diamonds and flowers, and conserves his energies and his cigarettes. He counts the dead flies in the frosted-glass lampshade.

  “Do you know where she’ll have gone, Suzanne?” he asks, after a while.

  The man shifts a little on the bed. “Someone will contact us.”

  She could be holed up in a basement, or in someone’s maid’s room, or be staring at the ceiling in a different hotel. She could be miles across town or she could be just a street or two away. Anxiety tugs out the knots and snags and smoothes over the roughnesses; it leaves things simple, easy, clean. Right now, even if she’s fuming at him, at this moment he would call it love.

  “Printer by trade,” the man says. “I was. Before all of this.”

  He lifts his head a little; chin compressed, he looks down the length of the bed at him. “Were you now?”

  “Posters, mainly. Handbills,” he says. “Circuses and fire-sales, concerts and lectures, all that kind of thing.” He lifts a hand, shows it. The fingertips are grimed and grey, the nails stained. “Mark of Cain,” the fellow says. “You can always tell a printer by his hands. Printers’ ink. Does not wash off. A trade will do that to you: it’ll mark you some way.”

  “Good work, was it?”

  “It wasn’t bad. Before the war.” He raises his shoulders. “Now it’s shit. It’s money and it’s a job and that’s not to be discounted. And it helps in one way because all the time I’m printing their devilry I look like I’m on their side. It’s cover. And maybe I do this in part because I must also do that. To redress the balance.”

  The monkey-clawed rabbis; the kind Nazi soldiers with children on their shoulders.

  “I had a copy of Mein Kampf,” he says, by way of consolation.

  The other fellow nods, understanding.

  “So what—we just wait?”

  “Madame downstairs—she’ll get word back that we’ve arrived.”

  “Oh.” He reconsiders the girl, the woman; remembers pale skin, fragile bird-bones.

  “Someone will come.”

  “Someone?”

  Then his friend turns away and lights up another cigarette.

  He lies back, hand behind his head. The bed, sunken and narrow, is nonetheless a marvel. He lifts a hand and looks at it. There’s a dent in the side of his middle finger where his pen rests, and his fingertips are slightly bent and flattened from thumping on his typewriter keys. That’s what a trade will do.

  —

  The day lengthens. It stretches and spools. He drifts in and out of sleep. There are daytime sounds from the street below—both French and German voices—and he is gone and back again, and there’s the chime of a municipal clock, and he counts the chimes and hopes that he missed a couple of the strikes in his sleep, since otherwise it’s only ten in the morning, even though an age has passed already in this room.

  The light sharpens and the shadows deepen; sun slices through the shutters and streaks the curtains. The man mutters under his breath and from time to time utters something out loud. The sound jerks him out of sleep, but he fails to catch the sense and he drifts again.

  Later, he wakes, and props himself up on his elbows. The man is still there, hunched on the end of the other bed. Another cigarette has burned itself to ashes between his inky fingers.

  He blinks at his watch, wipes his lips; they’re tacky with spit.

  “They should have come by now,” the man says.

  He raises the watch to his ear, listens to its tick, then winds it.

  “They should have sent word by now, at least,” the man insists.

  He sits up, swings his legs over the side of the bed. He rubs his forehead. “Did you sleep?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe they did send word. Shall I go and ask?”

  “She’d have come and told us. It’s the network. They’re blown, I reckon.”

  “No.”

  “Or they’d be here. That’s what I’m telling you.”

  “Maybe someone’s bike’s been stolen, or they’ve got a flat tyre. Or they’ve got lost. They’ve forgotten the address.”

  Out in the street, distant at first—rounding the corner and the noise increasing—the sound of diesel engines: two, three. The man stiffens; his eyes widen.

  “It’s them.”

  “No—”

  “It’s the Geste.”

  “No.”

  “I’m telling you. German car—two trucks. It’s the Gestapo.”

  He pushes up from the bed, springs jangling. And then just stands there. The noise gets louder, the vehicles approaching—and then passing, and rounding the corner, and gone. A breath released. The man crosses to the window, edges back the curtain. They peer down together through the closed shutters; their faces are raked across with stripes of sunlight. In the street below, there is quiet, not even a pigeon strutting. The passing-by has swept the place quite clear.

  “Do you know what they do if they get hold of you?” the man asks.

  He tilts his head. He has heard stories.

  The man nods slowly at something going on inside his head. He says, “When she was expecting our first, my wife wasn’t at all afraid. Our first child, I mean.”

  “Oh.”

  “She thought she could just, you know, stand it. That she would be brave and strong and that it would be all right. Second time, though, she was terrified. See, the thing is, you can’t imagine pain. You can’t foresee it. You think you can still be yourself, endure it and go on, but you can’t. Pain makes an animal out of everyone.”

  “You should sleep.”

  The man just looks at him. His eyes are red.

  “Really. It’d do you good.” He sinks down on his bed again and peels off his socks. They are stiff and stinking. He bundles them up and stuffs them into his trouser pocket. “Lie down, at least,” he says. “We just have to wait it out.”

  A long look, and then, “I don’t know how you can stand it.”

  “It’s better than the tree.”

  His friend blinks acquiescence. He leans closer to the window. Peers out again.

  —

  The hall is dim and stuffy and smells of old polish. It’s wearing on the nerves, of course it is, being stuck together like this. He leaves the other fellow to himself for a while.

  He finds the little room with its high cistern and dangling chain. Outside a fire-escape switchbacks down into the courtyard, past guano-streaked brick walls and a blanket-stitch of pipes. He runs a bowl of water, soaks his socks and rubs them with a slip of hard green soap. Sounds rise up from the yard below, bouncing and echoing in the shaft—women’s voices. The neighbourhood chars are lost in recollection. It’s almost pornographic. One lusts for vanilla sugar, for a coffee Liégeois, for, oh my God, warm June strawberries and cream; another craves savoury foodstuffs; the seashell salt of pistaches, slippery fresh oysters, a briny crumb of Roquefort.

  He leaves his socks marinating in the cloudy water. He unbuttons and sinks down on the lavatory seat.

  The problem is, of course, not just the fear; it’s also the being dragged out of normality. Sleep, yes, and space, and clean clothes, and food—all these things are reassuring because they suggest that everything is as it should be. He hopes the fellow’s sleeping by now. He’ll spin it out a bit, his absence. He’ll wash, and then he’ll go downstairs and ask if there is anything to be had. A fried kidney; a gorgonzola sandwich. Where would the old man have gone anyway after the Wake, where was
there left to go—the last book that Paul Léon had wanted, was there ever any chance of that?—but to the grave, God help him, and ill for so long too, permanently unwell, if only fifty-eight.

  He tugs a square of old newspaper from the copper wire and wipes, and stands and pulls up his breeches, flushes, buttons, dips his hands in the soapy water with the socks, and rubs and twists and rinses them and wrings them again and shakes them. He drapes them over a pipe while he strips to the waist, runs fresh water, douses his face, puffing at the cold. He rubs round the back of his neck and under his arms, and dries his prickling flesh with the crusted loop of hand-towel. The socks gather up what’s left of their wetness and drip it on to the tiles. He squeezes them out again into the basin.

  He is crossing the landing, barefoot, socks in one hand, boots in the other, when he hears the voices welling up from the lobby. Both are speaking French; one accent is German.

  Bare bony feet finned out on the worn matting, he stands stock-still.

  There are some rooms occupied, she is saying. There always are. She has a lot of businessmen here, up from the provinces. She always has had. They are busy men; they come and go. Sometimes they leave their keys, sometimes they forget. Men can be so careless; they have other things on their minds.

  “And there has been nothing of late that seems at all suspicious?”

  “Things are as they always have been.”

  “Of course. Because if there had been anything out of order, you would already have reported it.”

  A silence. It can only be supposed that she nods.

  “I shall need to see the register.”

  Upstairs, on the landing, he takes a step, breath held, towards their room. He thinks: fire-escape, courtyard, away along the back alley and put distance between themselves and the hotel. Where next, he doesn’t know. His friend will have some idea.