A Country Road, a Tree

by Jo Baker

  “Schubert,” he says. “Rast.”

  “Oh, yes,” she says. “Shut up.”

  The song sings on in his head. After a while her breathing changes. He unbuckles his bag and drags out his spare sweater. He drapes it over her. The moon rises. He considers it. Closes his eyes and summons up an image: Caspar Friedrich’s Two Men Contemplating the Moon. The slumped tree, bare of leaves, its furred roots exposed as it slowly sinks towards the earth. Massive rocks, parched grass; in the sky a white disc misty, radiant. The two figures, stick-supported, lean on each other. The ancient moon, the ancient rocks, the failing dying ancient tree. The men for just a moment paused to look, to see, as if to give all this meaningless nature meaning.

  He finds, in his pocket, that little pebble from the beach at Greystones. He tucks it into his mouth and sucks on it, and the hard thing brings water there.

  —

  The cold wakes him. His eyes open on to blackness and he can’t make sense of it. Then he sees the stars. He feels the press of the earth against him, pushing at his heels, heaving up against his shoulder-blades. His fingers twine into the cold grass, his nails dig into the ground; he is clinging on at the spin of it, the stars hurtling past, the giddy distances, the sick rush of a fairground ride, sticking him flat-backed against this cold earth. Then it thuds right into him: time, the present moment, here. He sits up, drops the stone from his mouth into his palm and retches.

  “Is that you?” she asks.

  He spits, swallows. “Usually.”

  She fumbles for him in the darkness; her hand is cold on cold skin, the wire and gristle of his arm. She sits up beside him.

  “Is he here?” she asks. “Did he come?”

  They sit, side by side, stiff, dew-damp and cold. The sky is faintly light now. The slight tree is silhouetted against the blue.

  He says, “I don’t think he did.”

  After a while, she asks, “What time is it?”

  He lifts his wrist and peers, but can’t make out the hands. He lifts it to his ear and hears it ticking. She shuffles closer, hungry for warmth. He slips his sucking stone back into his pocket and plants a blind, awkward kiss—it lands on unwashed, dirty hair.

  “What’ll we do?”

  “We’ll go back to that hayrick, try to sleep through the day.”

  He feels the movement as she nods.

  “We’ll be all right there. No one will be needing any hay yet.”

  She sniffs.

  “And then Monsieur will surely come tomorrow.”

  “It’s tomorrow now.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. It can’t go on like this for ever,” he says.

  “No. We’ll get to Roussillon,” she says.

  After a moment, he says, “I think it’s getting lighter.”

  She twists to see the paling sky behind her.

  “We’ll pass that field again,” she says. “We can get some of those carrots. You liked the carrots.”

  “They were better than the turnips.”

  “In a little while.”

  “Yes.”

  “When there’s light enough to see by.”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll go then.”

  “Yes. Time enough till then.”

  And then there’s a sound.

  “Hush.”

  Footfalls. Movement in the hedge shadows. Skin bristles.

  “Is it you?” he calls out into the darkness. “Hello there! Is that you, Monsieur?”

  The figure stands against the pre-dawn sky. He’s just a boy. His socks are crumpled down and his jacket is too big for him. He glances off along the lane. He says, “Come with me.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CROSSING

  October 1942

  Figures stumble out of the shaft of daylight and into darkness, blinded by the difference. The door falls shut behind them and they confer in unself-conscious voices, oblivious to the company.

  “I can’t see a thing. Is that you, Sylvie?”

  “It’s Agnès, Pascale. Here, take my hand.”

  He clears his throat out of politeness. They freeze, fall silent, peer ineffectually around.

  Then Suzanne says, “Good day.” And they soften at the sound of a woman’s voice, return the greeting uncertainly.

  When he and Suzanne were led to the barn, it was barely morning; their eyes had less of an adjustment to make. The boy sloped off again before they could thank him. They saw the old fellow sleeping in the straw, who stirred and muttered but didn’t wake. Later, they were joined by two young men, who were anxious and taciturn and who huddled down in one of the milking stalls and talked only to each other; and then a middle-aged countrywoman, who took a seat on a hay bale, set her basket on her knee, leant back against the bare stone wall and promptly fell asleep. He wondered did the boy bring them, slipping away each time to find someone else before he could be glimpsed?

  By now the two of them feel like old lags, and that it is the done thing to welcome newcomers and put them at their ease.

  “All’s well,” Suzanne says, getting up and limping towards the young women. “Come in, get comfortable.”

  They settle down on bundled fodder. Clothes rustling, coats unbuttoned, bags dropped. And shoelaces stripped; the easing-off of shoes. War, it turns out, is dreadfully hard on the feet.

  “You’ll never get your shoes back on again, Pascale.”

  “Good. They’re evil. I hate them. I’ll walk barefoot to Avignon if I have to.”

  “You’d look well.”

  “You say that now, but just wait until—”

  The clump of leather hitting the floor, one and then another. A sigh, followed by a wincing exploration of sore places, blisters.

  “Anyway, we’re stuck here for hours. We know that much. I’m not keeping them on all that blessed time.”

  —

  Time passes slowly in confinement. Low conversations, card games, the drifting in and out of sleep; sunlight from a missing slate shafts across the floor, and softens, and goes blue.

  He must have been sleeping, because there’s a sweep of night air across his face and a slice of starlight that narrows, shrinks and disappears, and he shuffles up on to elbows. He blinks into the dark. Suzanne’s already up beside him, properly awake.

  “Is it—?”

  “Hush,” she says. “I’m listening.”

  The darkness seems fuller, more crowded. There’s a whiff of tobacco smoke, and then he spots the red coal of a cigarette and hears the voices speaking low, in the rolling wet accent of the region.

  A match flares and for a moment there’s a devil’s mask, heavy-browed and creased, and the light grows and is touched into a lantern, and it glows on other faces too. These are the passeurs. They are nameless. They belong to this place like the local stone.

  The lantern draws them from the dark—the girls, one of them limping and barefoot; her friends supporting her, their faces white; the old man, hunched and peering, scratching his groin; the young men approaching too, though wary as rabbits. Suzanne gets up, and he struggles to his feet, and they make their way towards the lamp, lame with wear.

  “That’s too many. I’d no idea there’d be so many,” one of the passeurs is saying.

  Around the lantern there’s a general sucking of teeth.

  “We can’t take them all at once, not across the fields.”

  “The girls can go in the car.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “In the boot.”

  “All three of them?”

  “It’s a big boot. We put the dogs in there all the time.”

  “They’re not dogs, though, are they?”

  “No, but it’s not like it’s the middle of summer. They’re not going to suffocate.”

  “He has a point. It’s not far.”

  The three girls stand, just in the glow of the light, in their knee-length skirts and broken shoes. The barefoot one lists slightly to one side. They have their jackets wrapped tight round them,
arms folded across hollow bellies.

  “Do you particularly object,” a passeur addresses them, “to crossing the border in the boot of this idiot’s stinking old Citroën?”

  The three of them look at him, long and blank. They’re barely more than schoolgirls. The barefoot one says, “That would be good.” And then the others nod along with her.

  Devil-face then turns to his companions. “Well. There we are, then.” Then back to the girls: “Better get your things together, my darlings. You’re with him.”

  —

  The passeurs are barely there; they are never more than parts, they exist as synecdoches: a glimmer of moonlight caught on an eye, the turn of a profile against starlight, a pale strip of neck above a dark coat collar. The talk too is scraps and shreds and it drifts away like ashes. He can’t put any of it—either what he sees or what he hears—together. He can’t make this cohere.

  They have been split into smaller groups like sheep by sheepdogs. The girls have curled themselves obligingly into the boot of the car; another party is heading further west across open country. There are patrols and posts on the roads, so their bunch is to go through the fields and cross where the border is more notional than concrete. It is a relief to be told what to do for a while. Not to have to make decisons. It is the relief of a pressure change, a different unease.

  They pause at the field gate; the passeur says something, but it is not quite catchable: a flash of teeth, then this, which he does catch: “Stay low, tread softly, keep quiet.”

  Then the fellow slips into the darkness and they follow. The ground is rough. The passeur keeps slipping in and out of sight, as if he is a magic trick: now you see him, now you don’t. It makes the heart lurch and hammer, makes the senses strain. Then there’s movement, and there he is again, and the skin flushes and the nerves sing out. And underneath it all is the insistent throb of disquiet, of what do we know about any of this, after all? He could be taking us anywhere, he could melt away at any moment. He could lead us right to the Gestapo for the money and the pleasure of watching the arrest. If one man can do a thing like that, so could another. It has become, after all, something that people do.

  He is thinking this as he shuffles along, bent almost double, creeping like a toad in the shadow of a hedge. Suzanne, ahead, is a low and silent shape; he can’t even hear her footsteps. There is a blond expanse of stubbled field to his left. When a foot strays off the worn-bare path, the cropped stems prod and spike his boot soles. It is a useful reminder of the straight and narrow.

  At the corner of the field, they scramble through a gap in the hedge. Beyond, the world is different: the Indian corn still stirs uncut in the breeze, whispering and musty. The path continues on, a narrow pass between the stems.

  “…silence absolute…,” the passeur is saying. “…close now…”

  He is ushering them by; he brings up the rear, and it’s worse then, the sense of fumbling blindly into darkness, through the dry stalks, into who knows what.

  Footfalls. The sound of boots on a metalled road. There’s torchlight broken into bits by the wicker-weave of the hedge. They hunker low, silent, breath heaving; and then the boots go crunching on, and the light is past and gone.

  His heart hammers. His breath is shallow and it hurts. The passeur makes a low sound, impatient, subtle, and so they creep on. And everything now seems condensed; everything seems bristling and stark. The grey silk of the corn, the creak of boots, the night air on his face, the smell of rot, the stars above. His calves ache, his thighs ache. Night birds call, clouds bundle across the sky. Down in the mud, they edge onwards, creeping towards a different, deeper darkness.

  The little party huddles up against a fence; branches creak in the wind. Whispered instructions: they climb the fence in turn, and on the far side gather under the cover of the trees. No moonlight here; pitch black. With a click of the tongue, the passeur leads them off again, this time walking upright along what seems to be a proper path, instinctually known. It is strange to go upright now. The eyes adjust; he can pick out branches against the sky, slender tree trunks.

  But then off to the left, there’s movement, noises. He stops, bristling, breath caught, and then it’s just rustling, snuffling. A badger, or a hedgehog perhaps, making its way through the fallen leaves. And they carry on, treading through the darkness, hands raised against the whip of unseen branches, moving through an entirely different world.

  Then the darkness begins to thin; tree trunks are grey against the sky, and the passeur’s shape moves across the lightness, and then Suzanne’s, and they are out at the far edge of the woods. A stream murmurs to itself; it catches moonlight. Single file, they follow its course upstream, walking between the woods and the water. On the far bank lies the open countryside of the Free Zone.

  He sees the moon’s reflection on the water. The white disc struggles to disperse and then shivers itself back together, then breaks apart again. He slows, stands, watches. The stone, the water, the moon; he sees himself like Friedrich’s painted men, transient, contemplating the enduring, changing, ancient moon. But he is staring downward here, not up towards the heavens. He closes his eyes.

  The schoolgirl limps on raw feet.

  The patron opens his tobacco pouch.

  Paul Léon shambles down the rue Littré.

  The priest slides past him on the stairs.

  Alfy Péron’s blunt fingertip taps a five-hundred-franc note.

  Mary Reynolds ushers him in.

  Marcel Duchamp lifts his knight.

  Lines crease round Jeannine Picabia’s eyes.

  He opens his eyes again, and the reflected moon breaks, resolves, and breaks, and this is the lie of it, the willing delusion—there is nothing eternal here. Given time enough—and time just keeps on ticking by—even this will cease. The water wears the rock, the rock crumbles, the water dries, the moon itself will fall to dust and there will be no one left to contemplate it.

  “Pssst!”

  He glances round. Suzanne waves him on with wide furious sweeps. He strides to catch up with her.

  They cluster at the upended roots of a fallen tree. The trunk lies across the stream; branches stand like ski-poles, hand-to-hand. On the far side lie the raked lines of a vineyard. There’s a cluster of low buildings beyond that; the dwellings are in darkness, but the light is gathering at the edges of the sky. The far bank is the Free Zone. They still have some way to go on the other side before sunrise.

  Suzanne does not look at him. She is seething with irritation. One would think, now, in the midst of all this, he would at least pay attention, could at least follow instructions. Her shoulders up, her back narrow, she treads across the tree trunk and it feels briefly like girlhood, gymnastics; she hops down on the other side. There she stands in the Zone Libre, while he still stands in the Zone Occupée, under the trees. She peers across as he makes the first tentative steps out on to the trunk, grasping for handholds. He follows her across, into this new place. They make their way through the fields, along the hedgerows and the ditches, in the cold breaking dawn.

  —

  His boots are worn to shreds. Her shoes are thin as skin. The autumn sun is too bright, too low, and they are walking directly into it, squinting and sore. He turns the pebble round in his mouth, slips it across his tongue to rest in the other cheek.

  “I’m thirsty,” she says.

  “I know.”

  After a while she says, “I’m so thirsty.”

  “You should get a sucking stone.”

  “I don’t want a sucking stone.”

  They come upon a fall of rocks by the roadside. She halts, sinks down on a boulder and rests her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands. She does not move. He waits, standing, for her to get up again; then, when she does not shift, he sinks down on his haunches beside her and waits like that for a while too.

  “Are you all right?” he asks.

  Silence.

  “Come on, then.”

  Silence. T
hen she shakes her head.

  He glances off along the road, then turns to look back the way they’ve come. Then, fingertips to the ground for balance, he gazes at her hunched, exhausted form. They can’t stay here.

  He gets up; his joints creak. He offers her his hand.

  “Come on,” he says. “Hop up now.”

  She just lifts her head and looks at him. These past days have transformed her. Her skeleton is making a show of itself.

  “I thought you wanted to get to Roussillon?” he asks.

  A blink, and nothing more. It seems she is beyond goading.

  “Once you’re up and going, you’ll hardly notice.”

  “Every whore of a step hurts. How could I not notice?”

  He takes her hand then and hauls her to her feet. She protests, but stumbles up. He hooks her arm through his and they take a step.

  “Tell me,” he says, “where does it hurt?”

  She starts with her toes: the agony that is her left little one, the raw lump to which it has been reduced. The way her shoes pinch and rub, the way her socks are worn thin on the ball of the foot and the skin worn raw beneath as a result; how her ankles ache; how she has dreadful cramps in her calves, and terrible stiffness in her hip from sleeping on floors and the bare ground. He murmurs agreement and they take another step together; they walk on.

  Soon the road begins to climb, a steady, fatiguing slog, and they fall silent once more.

  “What about you?” she asks after a while.

  “Oh, me,” he says. “You don’t want to hear about that.”

  The two of them trudge on through the evening as it falls, and he tells her anyway, about his sore feet and his rickety knees and his burning belly and the twinge of his scar, and his backache and the nerve that fires off in his neck, and the boil on his shoulder blade, the poison of which is making his whole shoulder throb.

  She nods silently and they walk on together, sticks and rags, a broken bundle, barely there at all.

  The slow unpeeling of the road is a sticking plaster from skin. And each step is the point of severance, each step is to be steeled against and endured. As the light fades he watches his boots, wrecked, as they lump themselves forward, watches the ground as it lurches and sinks and swells away and back. His boots are coated in dust; they are bloody with dust. The dust is red.