Delicate Edible Birds

by Lauren Groff

  There was a fillip of sulfur and light as Parnell lit two cigarettes and placed one between Bern’s lips. In the flare, Bern saw Viktor’s eyes watching her in the rearview mirror and the pink rolls of the back of Frank’s neck. Then the match went out again, and in the darkness she was no longer flesh, only the bright, hot smoke in her lungs.

  It was all over. They had awoken in the middle of the night to unnatural silence, and rose to an abandoned hotel, the door of each empty room solemnly thrust open, the beds identically smooth. In the breakfast room, the geranium’s soil was damp and their coffee was hot on the sideboard, but there was no one there but them. They were journalists; they had seen Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Belgium; they knew what this meant. They hurried, and Viktor somehow procured the jeep, and Lucci bicycled off for the photo. Just an hour, murmured the little Italian and sailed off bravely toward the invasion while Frank spluttered and fussed and Viktor grew stony and Parnell rolled cigarette after cigarette, each as perfect as a machine’s. They waited in the jeep and they waited.

  Now the street gleamed with richer light, but still, no Lucci. Bern sensed the tarry massing at the edge of Paris where the Germans were undoubtedly pushing in, and felt a wildness rise up in her. But there was Parnell’s hand on her thigh, squeezing, and she was grateful, though comfort like this was not what she was hungry for. She had to do something; she wanted to shout; and so she said, voice low and furious, Fucking Reynaud. Fucking Reynaud, handing the city over to the Germans. A real man would stand and fight.

  In the rearview mirror she saw Viktor wince. Bern was the first woman he’d ever heard curse so, he once told her; to him, he said, it was as if a lily suddenly belched a terrible stench. From the looks of him, it seemed impossible that he’d never heard a woman curse. He was Russian and massive, had a head ugly as a buckshot pumpkin. One imagined that had the serfs never been liberated, he’d be a tough old field-hand today, swinging scythes and gulping vodka like water. But, in fact, he was the son of some deposed nobleman and spoke perfect tutor English and governess French, and was known as a reporter whose prose was as taut and charged as electric wire. He had shadowed Bern since the Spanish war. There were times she was sure that his silent presence had saved her from some vague danger. She knew she should resent it, but the way he looked at her, she couldn’t.

  Viktor, darling, she said, a serrated edge to her voice. Is there a problem?

  But it was Frank, with his Kansas drawl, who said, If Reynaud fought, my dear, poof, up in smoke goes all your precious architecture. All the civilians, smithereens. He did the sensible thing, you know. Paris remains Paris. It’s what I’d have done.

  It’s cowardly, spat Bern.

  Frank rubbed his fat hand over his head. Oh, Bernie. Don’t you grow tired of being the everlasting firebrand? And where the hell is that little Eyetie of ours, that’s what I want to know. Let’s give him ten more minutes, then scram.

  Bern bristled. There weren’t enough female firebrands in the world as far as she was concerned, she said; Lucci was the best damn photographer in this damn war; and why the hell Life magazine paired Frank with Lucci was beyond her when Frank could barely write a story without bland-as-buttermilk prose. God knows she herself, by far the better journalist, even if she was a girl, had to bend over like a goddamn contortionist for Collier’s even to get to tour the front lines.

  But Frank wasn’t listening. Viktor, we better get going, he said. Germans catch us, you know where you’re all headed. Me, I’m the only one who’d go free.

  Parnell rubbed his handsome forehead with a knuckle. What do you mean, Frank? he said softly.

  I know it’s hard, but make an effort, Parnell, said Frank. Viktor’s a Commie, Orton’s a Jew, you’re a Brit, and they probably wouldn’t let Lucci go, what with his wife causing all that trouble down in Italy. I’m inoffensive. He gave a snort-laugh and turned around, his face set for Bern’s attack.

  There was a pause, then Bern said, softly, Good God. Parnell gripped her thigh to hold her back, but the truth was that she was glad for this argument, for the dirty distractions of a fight, for just now two planes with swastikas on their wings roared overhead into the fields south of them, then separated, curved about, poured together like water into water and came back over the jeep. The journalists, despite themselves, cringed. In the silence of the planes’ wake, Bern took a breath, ready to lash some sense into Frank. But she didn’t have the chance because Parnell, his voice slipping from its cultivated heights back into its native Cockney, said, Bloody hell, if it isn’t Lucci.

  There he was, tiny Lucci with the camera like a millstone around his neck, throwing down the bicycle so it clattered on the cobblestones, leaping into the jeep, saying, Gogogogogo. And Viktor threw the jeep forward even before they heard the drone behind them, and they shot out from the city onto the tiny dirt road as the motorcycles came around the bend. Two hundred feet apart and even from that distance Bern could see the stark black of the German officers’ armbands, the light-sucking matte of their boots, the glint in their hands from the pistols. Viktor cursed in Russian and spun the jeep over the dark and rutted road. Lucci was in Bern’s lap, hot with sweat and flushed and trembling; she frowned and kept her head down and watched the lace of his eyelashes on his cheeks. And then, over the roar of the engine and wind and pebble clatter, as the motorcyclists rapidly lost their grasp on them, falling back, Lucci opened his eyes and said, Oh, Bernice, in his Italian way, Ber-eh-nee-che; Oh, Bernice, I have it. The best photo of the war. Nazis goose-stepping through the Arc de Triomphe. You shall see. Oh, it is the sublime photo. Oh, the one to make me live forever, he said, and Bern couldn’t help it; she closed her eyes; she clutched Lucci’s thin shoulders and threw her head back. Hurtling into the steel-gray dawn, she laughed and she laughed.

  THE DAY WAS ALREADY full when they stopped in the hemlock copse. Bern was stretched over the hood, basking in the sun like a cat. They were waiting for Lucci to finish vomiting in the ditch; ten miles south of the city he had discovered that the Germans had shot through one of his rolled-up trouser cuffs, and he slowly unrolled the fabric and fingered the six neat holes. Turned green. Viktor had to stop the car. Now Parnell and Frank were smoking, looking back at the city behind them. For a moment, Viktor wondered if he could just take Bern and leave the rest behind; Lucci was all right, but Parnell and Frank he despised. Parnell for obvious reasons; Frank because he was a greasy toad. But he couldn’t; they were not far enough out of Paris for abandonment to be anything but cruel. The last bicyclists they had passed were now passing them and an old woman with a chicken under her arm hobbled by, the chicken’s head bobbing with each step. The Germans would be along soon. In the distance there were odd mechanical sounds.

  Viktor flicked his eyes over Bern. Though she was the most beautiful woman he knew, she was not a true beauty. He should know; he himself was a warthog, but he had grown up around swans, long-necked sisters with velvety eyes and a mother whose grace was so legendary that, among her three dozen rejected suitors in old noble Moscow, there were still men who wept when they remembered her. Bern was too dark a blonde and too light a brunette, devoid of embonpoint, her face hawkish with its aquiline nose and her mouth like a pink knot tied under it. Too thin, also; war whittled her down, though she was always hungry, always eating. Still, even though she was almost plain when she slept, when she was vibrant it would take a strange man to find her unattractive. In the sunshine she radiated; her hair turned golden, her eyes green, and her skin seemed to pulse with health. In the sunshine, Viktor had to hold his hands in his pockets to keep from grabbing Bern’s sole world-class attraction, her tidy rear, fleshed with a layer of smooth lard, firm and handy as a steering wheel.

  The day Viktor met Bern, she was twenty-two, climbing up the stairs of a Spanish hotel just after witnessing her first battle. Her face was pink, her eyes sparked angrily. She was trembling, and shook his hand hard to introduce herself, then said, Damn! I mean, damn! and went into her room
and tapped at her typewriter for an hour, until she came out to the veranda, where he was waiting for her and pretending not to. She thrust a piece of paper into his hands and demanded to know if it was good, because, you see, she was determined to be a war reporter, and she’d heard he was a good one. The man she came to Spain with, a lover, wasn’t worth his weight in pig poo, she’d said, and she had to learn from someone. Viktor read the article, and said it was a job well done, B. Orton: but what does B. stand for? And she said in her French horn of a voice, Ah, well, it means Bernice but it also means that if I can fool Collier’s into thinking I’m a man, I’m a war reporter for good, and don’t you forget it. And Viktor said, To be sure. And she said he better goddamn not because they were going to be buddies, watch out.

  But they didn’t become buddies yet: he went off to a different section of the front and when they met up again, it was in a hotel right after Guernica and Viktor was having an awful time of it. He kept seeing flashes of things he tried to shunt away. Late at night he wept in the water closet, unable to stop himself; he tried to stuff his shirt in his mouth to muffle the sound, but couldn’t. For fifteen minutes, there were two dark shadows in the crack under the door, Bern’s feet, Bern’s head on the door, listening. When she came in and took off her blouse and hitched down her trousers and smiled up at him, he couldn’t think to say no.

  Afterward, he kissed the delicate slice of her chin under her ear and asked her to marry him. And she laughed roughly, gave him a tweak of the ear, and said, Oh, well, Viktor, dear, now you’ve made a terrible mistake, and vanished down the dark hallway. And so, to Bern, it had been a mistake; it hadn’t happened again. Instead, he’d watched time and again as she disappeared down other hallways with Parnell. And he had to swallow it because she was who she was, a woman so removed from the women of his youth as to be a whole new gender. In her every small movement she was the woman of the future, a type that would swagger and curse, fall headlong, flaming into the hell of war, be as brave and tough as men, take the overflowing diarrhea of nervous frontline troops without grimacing, speak loudly and devastatingly, kick brain matter off their shoes and go unhurriedly on. When he looked at Bern, Viktor saw the future, and it was lovely and clean and as equal as things between men and women, between prole and patrician, could be. And he also saw that any impulse to pin her down would only make her flitter away. Some days he hated her.

  He must’ve sighed, because Bern shielded her eyes with one graceful hand.

  Viktor, you’re wearing ye olde death-head again, she said. What’s the matter?

  But instead of saying, for the hundredth time, Oh, Bern, why Parnell and not me? or Oh, Bern, why won’t you marry me?, he gave a grimace and ground out his cigarette and said, We should be off, then, if we don’t want the Krauts to catch us.

  Now the others climbed up the embankment and Bern let herself slide off the hood, graceful, winking. Come on, chaps, she called out in her high honk. Vite vite. We’ve got to make it to Tours before the Nazis bomb the bejeezus out of it.

  IN HALF AN HOUR, the dampness had burned from the ground, and dust rose in a haze and saturated everything. The oaks that drooped over the avenue and the pocked road were so lovely in the dust-cloud they seemed to drip with honey. Strange, Parnell thought dreamily, that on a day like this there should be beauty left in the world. For a while they had been going increasingly slowly, passing thicker and thicker clumps of evacuees, whole families like packhorses, even the smallest pulling little red wagons full of bedding or small dogs or even tinier children than they. Terrible shame, he thought, terribly sad.

  But later he saw a number of parties in the fields huddled over blankets spread with food, picnicking as if the occasion were a merry one, and he murmured, How lovely, wishing himself out there, with his own little ones—how the girls would enjoy it!—and Sally presiding over it all with her neat sandwiches and birdly chatter about gardens and whatnot. He longed for home, longed for the house in London and his shoes shined in the morning and a proper cuppa. Looking out in the fields, he murmured again, Oh, how lovely, and hadn’t thought he’d said it aloud until Bern turned her head to him and snorted, They’re idiots, Parnell. Germans flew by they’d be blown to bits.

  He stared at this brusque American, appalled as ever. Then she softened and cuddled against him, a good kitten, and he reminded himself that she never meant it, not really. She talked a terrible hard streak but was a dear thing inside. Reminded him of Sally, in some vague way, not that Bern would ever do if he had a mind to introduce her to his wife. Sally was so peculiar in that way, refusing to take tea with so-and-so for somesuch reason or other, and he knew that Bern in his wife’s parlor would be a frightful thing; the snubbing going on over the tea and poor Bern never seeing it for a moment, honking on the way she does and getting on Sally’s nerves. It was odd, wasn’t it, how people changed; he was only a housepainter back in the day when he met Sally, and she didn’t hold it against him then, although she did make him take elocution lessons and become something. He was about to follow this thought into another daydream of Sally, young and naked and smelling of his house paints, when Bern interrupted, saying, So, did anyone think to bring food?

  There was a long silence, until Parnell, wanting to be helpful, said, Well, rather, I brought that half a can of petrol, you know.

  And I the jeep, said Viktor.

  And I the stupendous photo, said Lucci.

  And I the water, said Bern.

  The back of Frank’s neck turned red, but he said nothing. Bad-tempered fellow, Parnell thought, but doesn’t seem to mean any real harm.

  Frank? Bern prompted sweetly, but he just turned and said, Darling, you being the only female of the bunch, I thought provisions were your field.

  Not now, said Lucci throwing his hands into the air, but Bern seemed too tired to curse Frank to hell more than a few times. Then she bent down and rummaged in her valise and pulled out a bottle of Scotch, brandishing it like a tennis victor with a trophy.

  Looks like a liquid lunch again, fellas. She grinned and cracked the seal with her fingernail. I liberated this from the hotel bar this morning.

  Now Parnell wanted to take her in his arms again. This was why he invited her into his bed every night, propping the picture of his family up on the windowsill first, a plea for them to forgive him the sin he was about to commit; this feminine thought for the comfort of others. He felt a bubble of elation rise in him as he took a swig of the Scotch; this is why the men were out here in the fields, fighting: for their women, for knitting and stews and flower arrangements, the wondrous small things that keep a fellow’s life pleasant. If he weren’t so blasted old, Parnell would fight for it, too. And Bern had a great womanly capacity for comfort, though she kept it hidden because she thought it made her seem like less of a chap than she wanted to be. Silly duck. She shouldn’t hide it; it was what he liked about her. He resolved to tell her so, maybe sometime when they were alone and not so pressed for time.

  Bathed in a warm dust and a warming buzz, Parnell drifted into a pleasant waking doze as they passed the growing numbers of refugees on foot, on bicycle, on carts pulled by peasant women like pendulous-breasted oxen. They went down that insignificant road from Paris until it emptied out, at last, into one of the major southbound arteries, to the northeast of Orléans and about sixty miles south of the city.

  It was then that, pulling out onto the autoroute, Viktor cursed and stopped the jeep, jolting Parnell out of his lovely trance. Before them roiled a scene of such chaos that they, all veterans of chaos, had to take a moment to sit, absorbing, before they reacted. For, instead of the neat, small clumps of refugees who had decided to take the small road they had just left, the autoroute was teeming, impossible: cars that had run out of gas were abandoned by the roadside, women in summer dresses had fainted in the heat and were fanned by wailing children, a teeming mass of man and mule and bicycle and machine was pulsing down the road as far as their eyes could see, and everywhere were wounded
people. An old woman, haute bourgeoise by her chignon and her gray silk dress, had a dried magnolia of blood blooming on her chest. Two men carrying a makeshift stretcher bore a tiny boy, waxen and still, with a tourniquet on his thigh and nothing where his knee should have been. Filling the air were the claxons of the few cars still running, hushed talk, a faraway keening.

  And, out in the fields beyond, as if this migration were not a hundred feet from them, the backs of an old farmer and his wife as they bent to pull weeds from their crop.

  Shit, said Bern, and she flew out of the jeep, into the maw of humanity, asking questions, scribbling answers. Parnell felt a tad sheepish: this was not his beat; the British people were under attack enough—they didn’t need more bad news. His orders were to write about resistance and bravery, not innocent civilians fired upon when they fled their homes. From where he sat in the jeep he heard bombed, machine-gunned, massacred, the airplanes strafing the émigrés about twenty miles south of Paris. Numerous dead. A two-week-old baby shot in the throat. An old man had a heart attack, seeing it. Parnell watched as under Bern’s pen the story formed, neat and relentless, threads ordered from chaos.

  Frank trailed slowly behind her, gleaning, having little success at asking questions himself: his French was poor, and people did not warm to him as they always did to Bern. Viktor glowered in the jeep, keeping it a meter behind Bern as she walked beside her subjects, protecting her; dear Lucci darted hither and thither taking photographs until he returned to the car to hide his face in his jacket, unable to see any more. For a while, Bern held a baby so its mother could shift her bundle, and she held it awkwardly. But Parnell wanted to tell her she would make a marvelous mother; as she looked down into its soft fist of a face, he knew she would. His admiration only grew when, after a while, Bern held the hand of the boy on the stretcher when he awoke and sobbed soundlessly in pain.