‘I know.’
‘And you can keep a secret?’
‘I love secrets.’
Shaking his head, he slowly says, ‘That’s not what I asked you.’
The wall of reserve finally collapses. And it is deeply thrilling to hear it crash and fall. Has he even noticed, she asks herself, that he’s just said tu? It is a wonderful thing, this line between the two ‘you’s. And for a moment she feels sorry for the English. They don’t have it, and they’ll never know that delicious moment of straying from one into the other. And it is while she is contemplating, feeling light, intoxicated, that he takes her hands, inclines his head towards her and kisses her on the lips. Not a long kiss, but long enough.
When it is finished, she looks at him with a hint of a smile. ‘Well, it had to happen.’
‘I’m married.’
‘I know.’
‘My wife is ill.’
‘I know.’
He looks around the street, distasteful, yet almost mundane words forming on his lips. ‘Parkinson’s disease. It is an awful thing to watch.’ He swings back to her. ‘I nurse her when I can. I care for her and never want to hurt her. Or leave her.’
‘I would never ask you to.’
‘It is best to say these things now,’ he says, with the air of a man who has said them before and been here before.
‘And you have a mistress. I know it all. And your wife knows it all. Does she not?’
His eyebrows flicker. ‘Perhaps.’
‘Perhaps.’ She looks down pensively, only just noting that they are still holding hands. ‘Even if she doesn’t admit it. Or want to. I understand the situation.’ She looks up. ‘And you and I, we do understand each other.’
‘And you,’ he asks, ‘you have a lover?’
‘I did, until a little while ago.’
‘So you don’t see him now?’
Dominique waits, almost playfully, before replying. ‘Her.’
‘Ah.’ He stares at her as if upon an unfolding mystery. ‘Curiouser and curiouser.’
She grins. ‘Indeed.’
This time when they kiss it is longer, and when they withdraw she can almost see the wooded foliage of the forest around them as she tells herself she’s never kissed an owl before. For that is what it feels like: his eyes, his eyebrows, the beak of his nose, his feathered arms around her. Not quite human. Neither of them.
They step back from each other. He checks his watch, then speaks with his everyday voice. ‘Can we meet tomorrow? I’ll give you the manuscript.’
‘Where?’
‘Not the café,’ he says, eyeing her intently. ‘You understand this is dangerous?’
‘Yes,’ she says impatiently, ‘I understand. Where then?’
‘There is a church,’ he says, pointing back to where they came from. ‘Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin. Tomorrow,’ he says, looking down at his watch again. ‘What time can you be there?’
‘Evening mass?’
He laughs. ‘Do us good.’
With that they turn round and stroll quietly back towards the boulevard Saint-Germain. For a quarter of an hour or so they say little or nothing, occasionally touching hands, but not holding. And when they reach the metro she waves as he descends, watching him turn with the merest gesture of a farewell.
* * *
If he is an owl, a forest creature, what is she? It is a question that preoccupies her as she walks back along the boulevard to her apartment. Some sort of hunter? A cat, perhaps. Like Shadow. A cat that sleeps on the sofa in the day, and transforms at night. One that slips out into the forest, snaring whatever the forest throws up, but who has met her match in the owl. A bird not to be messed with. Just as the owl has met its match in this half-wild cat. The cat defers to the owl, the owl to the cat. Each of them hunter and hunted. And happily so.
At the Odéon she takes a short cut through the Luxembourg Gardens, German flags raised over what is now Luftwaffe headquarters, two officers in the distance, out smoking and strolling the grounds of the Palace with an unquestioning sense of possession. And why shouldn’t they? They exude victory, and she belongs to the country of the weak. The vanquished. Only now she can do something. Not simply look on. And rather than hate them, these officers so casually strolling in her gardens, she now looks upon them with the indifference of the hunter: the sheer exhilaration of having joined, of having been inducted into the secret society of the underground, of having met her match, two forest creatures together, energising her every step.
* * *
‘Here,’ he whispers, passing a manuscript to her, ‘here is the novel. And these,’ he adds, ‘are a little something else to deliver to this address.’ He writes a street and a postal number on a small piece of paper and gives it to her. ‘Remember it, then tear it up.’
They are sitting at the back of the church. It is evening. A mass in progress. And together they sit awaiting its conclusion: Jean taking in the wide stained-glass window behind the altar; Dominique looking down at the satchel into which she has placed both the novel and the other mysterious envelope. She guesses what’s in it. Pamphlets. Little firecrackers to awaken a sleeping people.
They sit in silence, the priest’s voice carrying over the heads of the patchy congregation, echoing in the empty spaces and passing under the arches and the bold white columns on either side of them. Not so much words as sounds. The effect of the echoes multiplying one voice into many; the Latin like some secret language. She could almost drift off.
Then she is aware of Jean taking her hand, the two of them kneeling then rising. The priest silent, the congregation either still kneeling in prayer or departing into the evening. And Jean and Dominique, like any couple heading for home after the evening service, walk slowly out into the street. He is still holding her hand. It is hazy, night not yet fallen. He quietly issues his instructions.
‘Go to the address. Drop the envelope in the letter box, then leave immediately.’
‘What are they?’
He shrugs. ‘Just the usual thing. You can look at them, but be careful. And do not linger when you deliver them. It is dangerous to hang about.’ He leans forward, about to kiss her, but noticing the passers-by, and clearly not wanting to draw attention, he corrects his forward movement.
‘I have booked a room.’
He doesn’t need to explain himself further. They understand each other. There is the slightest flicker of her eyebrows, a hint of a smile. ‘Good. For when?’
‘Tomorrow.’ He names the time and the hotel, not far from where they are now. ‘It is convenient? You can be there?’
‘Of course,’ she says, surprised, as if it were never in doubt.
‘This is our secret, is it not?’
She nods and watches him withdraw. When he turns, clearly on the point of retracing his steps and claiming that kiss they both denied each other, he whispers, ‘Go, while there’s still light.’
Then he is gone, out onto the nearby boulevard. Having memorised the address, and she knows the street anyway, she tears the paper up and drops the shredded pieces on the street. A breeze fans them into the evening.
She has no sooner turned a corner than she almost walks straight into two German soldiers. They have no rifles. They are going out, hair brushed, smelling of shaving lotion, possibly to a café or a show. They stop, taking her in. She freezes. As pitiful as the pamphlets may be, they are enough to get her arrested, even shot. The three of them face each other. They know, somehow they know. She is convinced of this. Hers will be the shortest Resistance career on record. But one of them, in playful, fluent French, asks her to come with them. They have no girl for their night out. Then he looks at her bag, for she has only just realised she is gripping it tightly, as if they were robbers, not soldiers. ‘What’s in the satchel?’
And without missing a beat, she hears her voice, but at the same time not her voice, the voice of an actor, casually saying: ‘Oh, just some anti-German pamphlets, and some occasional poems by Winston
Churchill. You wouldn’t be interested. Dreadful stuff. The man can’t write to save himself or England.’
The soldiers laugh. ‘I like you,’ the French speaker says. ‘Please, come and have a drink with us. Just one.’
There it is again, they want to be liked. New boys in the playground. And she almost could. ‘I’d like to, but I can’t.’ She pats her satchel. ‘They’re actually students’ essays.’
They bow, more courteous than any Frenchman she’s ever known. ‘Then we’ll leave you to your corrections. A pity. But think of us if the boredom becomes too great,’ they add, laughing as they leave.
And somehow she manages to laugh while continuing on her way, also acknowledging that in another time she just might have gone with them. But above all, she’s telling herself she was lucky. Not a good evening to be flirting with two German soldiers, however courteous they may have been, however touching the young man’s French conversation. Yes, she was lucky.
And it is only as she enters a tangle of small streets that she realises her hands and arms are trembling. Another two soldiers, dull ones, and the joke wouldn’t have worked. That’s the thing about luck: you never know if it’s going to stand you up.
As she walks, the trembling subsides. When she arrives at the place – a small apartment building, a line of letter boxes at the front – she looks around. There are a few people about, a man and a couple of women, sharing a smoke. They pay her no attention, but she’d rather they weren’t there. And as much as she considers waiting for them to be gone, she also remembers Jean’s words: don’t hang about.
And so in swift strides, her whole body suddenly tense again, she approaches the letter box, removes the envelope from her bag, drops it in, then moves on just as quickly, as if just having dropped a note to a friend.
The man and the two women sharing a smoke don’t even notice, or don’t seem to, but as she reaches the top end of the small street she watches as one of the women breaks away from the group, walks up to the letter box and takes the envelope she has just deposited. And then she turns, this woman, noting the dark, indistinct figure of Dominique at the other end of the street, and may even have nodded before rejoining the group, and disappearing to wherever these people go.
Each of them emerges from the night and goes back to it, and Dominique imagines, one a clerk in the transport offices, another a baker’s assistant, or a perfume saleswoman who dispenses Chanel No.5 to rich German officers and their rich wives.
And as she walks back to her part of town, she tastes the sheer exhilaration of this new-found secrecy, this anonymity. This new intensity, this urgency that she now feels in everything. How odd that she should never in her life have felt so free as she does now in an occupied country. She could almost be happy: a happy prisoner, revelling in the liberation of the secret life. As though she were born for this life and this work and is only just discovering it. Name, Anon; vocation, clandestine.
3.
Dominique is lounging in a hotel bed, naked under the sheet. Jean is beside her. She is telling him about the games she played as a child. ‘In Avranches, where I lived with my grandmother. She was nice, but she was old. The garden was my refuge. I made castles under the trees and shrubs. Hidden from the house. The stories I lived out were all the same: always a prince, a stranger, leading me to a secret place. And I’d go willingly. Every time. Sometimes blindfolded, other times eyes wide open. I never questioned the prince or the handsome stranger. It was love like faith. Beyond questions. Like a nun,’ she adds, dwelling on the image of her childhood self, ‘to the flame of God.’
They have been in this room since six o’clock and it is now after seven: six until eight, the blue hours. When they entered the room and closed the world out, they stripped each other immediately. There was no gentle embrace, no lovers’ kiss, no princely courtesy, no maiden’s coyness. No pretence. This room, it was acknowledged without need of speech, was where pretence ended. He took her, she took him: the hunter and the hunted. It was almost brutal. They were true to their natures, creatures of the forest. The owl deferred to the cat, the cat to the owl. And the owl ejaculated almost immediately. It was all over in less than a minute.
Medieval love-making, she said later. For what the poems and tales don’t tell you is that the prince ejaculates into the princess almost on contact. And the love-making is over in a medieval moment. Now, she added, turning towards him on the bed, the watch still on his wrist, something a little more modern: the princess wants what’s hers.
And that was when the cat pounced – astride him in one swift movement, stirring him and whispering in his ear, her tongue on his neck – and slowly took what was hers. Whether her moans, when the time came, were heard in the hallway out there in the everyday world, she has no idea. She was somewhere else, or nowhere at all. No Dominique, no self, no mind, just wave after wave of oblivion. When she was done, he turned her round, on her knees, her face in the pillow, her arse in the air, and plunged into her, his hands cupping her breasts, squeezing her nipples with a pressure that was just short of pain, causing her to gasp and cry out, until he shuddered, before collapsing into a low moan that was barely human.
They cradled each other afterwards: his body limp, all passion spent for the time being; she wonderfully calm, almost serene, while aware of the slow trickle of his semen from between her legs onto the sheet. Now she wipes the flat of her stomach – sweat, semen and her own juices all mingling in her fingers – then runs her palm across his chest, the rich, sharp tang of sex in her nostrils, their bodies smelling of each other.
From the start they both understood that what would take place in this room, or other such rooms like it, would be governed by laws of their own making. One day, he the huntress’s quarry, cornered and trapped, the game up, nothing to do but surrender; another, she the god’s possession, utterly submissive and willingly so, to be taken as the god wills.
She is the first to rise, strolling naked around the small, sparsely furnished room, a sombre gaze falling on the bare light globe, the worn rug, the smoky cream walls.
‘Don’t you like the room?’ he says, watching her. ‘I can find another.’
She turns round to him, puzzled as to why he should even suggest such a thing. ‘It’s perfect.’
He smiles. ‘I thought so.’
‘I love cheap hotels. They’re drab and neglected and beautiful.’ She takes the room in. ‘The ashtray, the dusty water in the jug, the window,’ she says, pointing to a tattered curtain, ‘they cry out for care, don’t they? And don’t you love them for it? I will always be blissfully at home in cheap hotels. They are what they are. They have no pretence.’
He is staring at her, wide-eyed, that hint of the wild in his eyes, as she reaches for her underwear.
‘It’s later than we think,’ she says, then corrects herself. ‘For us, it will always be later than we think.’ Just as the wristwatch, she silently notes, for the first time and not for the last time, will never be far away.
He nods, and rises. Of course, the world calls. And soon the curfew will fall. They dress silently and are presently back in costume. Ready to reassume their everyday selves: mother, writer and occasional teacher; husband, publisher – yet all the time, under the blandness of their costumes, creatures of the forest, blending back into the unsuspecting world.
4.
The wall was blank last night but now, as she passes on her way to Gallimard, she is stopped by the sight of the eye-catching poster. The submissive whore called France surrenders willingly. Pétain, the pimp, watches on. The image is now common across the city, probably the country. Crude, but effective. Truth, she tells herself, is not the first casualty of war – subtlety is. Rise, the poster says. Rise from your shame. France is fighting!
She moves on, the lurid details of curling cigarette smoke and a German officer’s hat beside the reclining woman vivid in her mind. She hears a motor and turns to see a council van from which two workers leap and begin tearing down the off
ending poster. One of them, young, clearly relishing his work, tearing the distasteful image from the wall in handfuls, glares at Dominique as if to say get lost, go, before we drag you in for simply looking at this filth. In no time the poster has vanished, the van gone.
Filth. Smut. It clearly roused rage in the young man and, Dominique can’t help but conclude, scared him too. For as much as the prostitute is docile, there is also something deeply unsettling about her: as though, there in all her degrading submission, her casual audacity, there is this disturbing sense of power, an insolent cheek, that they can’t quite put their finger on.
The café called Hope appears before her and she thinks of her first meeting with Jean there: the jovial accommodating host, the poster, the reclining whore, smut and fear . . . all of which carry her to the front door of the publishing house. She clutches her satchel which contains the edited novel and announces herself at the desk: she is there to meet Jean Paulhan.
His office is tiny. She can’t believe that this is where he works. There is barely room for the two of them to sit down: he at his desk, the eternal cigarette burning in the ashtray; she squeezed into the small space between the front of his desk and the wall, thick with books behind her. She dares not move in case the whole wall comes tumbling down on her.
He is scanning the manuscript: nodding, smiling, then serious. Suddenly he looks up. He inhales from his cigarette and gestures at the wall behind her, holding up the edited pages as he does.
‘Do you know,’ he says, ‘who is on the other side of that wall?’
She shakes her head.
He drops his voice. ‘The house Nazi.’
‘There?’
‘Yes. It is a little game we play with the Germans. We allow them to have a good resident Nazi. He recommends good German books for publication: often objectionable, distasteful books. And then we publish exactly what we want. He is . . . what do they call it in English? . . . our display window. He allows us to publish enough of what we want. Mr Joyce, even. But not,’ he says, pointing to the edited pages of the novel in front of him, ‘Mrs N. For that we have Les Éditions de Minuit.’
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