O

by Steven Carroll

  She nods in reply to the German, then, walking past him, leaves the church and steps out into the winter sunshine of the town square. Everybody going about their day. Nobody noticing the German flag above the town hall, everyone accustomed to the reassuring face of the Old Marshal looking down upon them. Not a uniform in sight.

  She waits at the bus stop. Through war and defeat the bus timetable has remained unchanged. In a few moments a small bus turns into the square and pulls up in front of her. Two women get off, Dominique gets on. Soon they are in the country, on the road to Granville. And from the moment she sits down she is heavy with tiredness. The previous night, the field, the plane, the torches – all come back to her with the haziness of scenes from a dream.

  Then, for the first time since the whole adventure began, she realises she is eager for her owl. Pain and pleasure mingle, separation and anticipation. For she has a story to tell and she now can’t wait to tell it to the only person she can tell. She has gone down the rabbit hole, into the underground world beneath the surface, and come back with a tale. She pictures Jean sitting and waiting for her in their room for their blue hours to resume, as arranged just before she left.

  She would dearly love to doze, anything to pass the time, but the journey is brief. There is no point. She will sleep on the train back to Paris. Just an ordinary journey. Nothing to fear. A relief. But when she steps off the bus at Granville station the memories of the night before rush back and suddenly she’s missing something she didn’t know she lacked.

  The engine, quite possibly the same engine with even the same engine driver, steams and stamps at the end of the platform. Passengers mount, guards and soldiers inspect identity papers. All calm and orderly, and Dominique makes her way to her carriage. Just anybody returning to the city after a visit to her home town.

  9.

  The room, their room – the bare globe dangling from the ceiling, the desk with their odds and ends thrown across it, the chair bearing their coats and scarves like a faithful butler – welcomes them back.

  The longing, the anticipation she felt on the train, all the way from Granville to Paris, exploded from her the moment they closed the door behind them. She threw her clothes off in a frenzy and dragged him onto the bed, tugging at his belt until his trousers were off and she could sink herself down on him. She wanted nothing but to fuck and be fucked, the tension of the last few days firing every thrust, their bodies smacking against each other, her juices and their sweat mingling, until an electric jolt exploded from her, running through her body, and he too shuddered into her, and they could fuck no more. They both lay back on the bed, Jean still in his shirt and tie, the shirt drenched, their mouths tasting of each other, their hearts gradually slowing. Both of them oblivious of the world out there. Only this was real.

  As Dominique, slowly, thoughtfully, rubs her belly and breasts, it seems now as if, in their frenzy, they became two other people entirely. They are lying in the bed, still and glutted, smoke like low cloud floating above them. No desire to speak, no will to. Eventually he turns to her and his voice is faintly intrusive, and part of her is wishing that their spent silence could have been sustained just a little longer.

  ‘Are you ready to tell me what happened?’

  Is she ready? She’s not sure but she will have to summon the energy. She owes him that. She begins as if describing events and characters in a film. That is how it feels.

  ‘There were moments when it was terrifying: on that field just after the plane had taken off, and we knew the Germans or the police must have heard and could swoop at any moment. But there was also something magnificent about watching that little plane disappear into the night.’ She pauses, dwelling on the image of Pauline in the cockpit of the plane.

  Jean looks at her, smoke rising from his ever-present cigarette. ‘They say she once doubled for Arletty.’

  Dominique ponders the statement and replies vaguely, ‘Arletty is just a movie star. With movie star beauty. This woman had something else.’ She stops, struck by a thought. ‘She had what I can only call “presence”. Like knowing somebody has entered a room without looking – because the room tells you. And it was wonderful to know that I’d helped put her in that plane and fly her out to safety.’

  He laughs. ‘You liked it.’

  ‘I loved it.’ Her tone is definitive, dramatically so. And she can tell he is not so much hit by what she has said as the way she says it. As if she has come back from a holiday outwardly the same, but changed. ‘We think we’re awake . . .’ She says, voice dreamy, wistful, removed. ‘But are we just sleepwalking?’

  She could be thinking aloud, talking to herself, as if he weren’t in the room. Without realising it, she’s shut him out. It occurs to her that he looks vulnerable.

  ‘I’ve never felt so alive.’

  ‘Never?’ he asks almost imploringly.

  ‘No,’ she says, with that same definite, thoughtful air. ‘I’ve been down the rabbit hole, and wouldn’t you love to see what I’ve brought back?’ Suddenly teasing him, eyes and voice steady, edging closer to him, tasting the tobacco on his lips. They are too tired, too spent, for sex, but not pleasure. She reaches out and undoes his tie then unbuttons his shirt, still damp, and strokes his chest and arms, then feels his lips on the wide coronas of her nipples. All frenzy gone, their caresses have the languid intensity of a dreamy, sweet ache. And like a dream, they seem to her to have entered another dimension. For it seems to Dominique, who is both lover and observer to the caresses, that there is now a presence in the room, all the more powerful for not being there.

  Then they are dozing, Dominique slipping in and out of a dreamy stupor. But the watch is never far away, and when they are rested and have come back to themselves it is the first thing he looks at. The blue hour is about to turn black. And she knows it’s not because of impatience or restlessness that he looks at his watch, but the opposite, because like all moments of deep, transporting pleasure, the blue hour is gone in what we call no time at all. That’s how it feels, this evening especially, that inside this room there is no such thing as time: at least not the time that clocks and watches keep. But all the same, the watch doesn’t stop.

  As she dresses she says, ‘I can see how it could become a drug. How you get to love it too much.’

  ‘That’s how people die. They love it too much. They make mistakes.’ He lets that sink in. ‘Be careful.’

  She knows he’s right, but at the same time there’s something curiously, disappointingly, conventional about talking like this. About the evening ending like this. Is she not a cat, after all, with a cat’s lives? Is he not an owl? Are they not wild? Are they not large? Have they not made this world-within-a-world together? One that defies time, clocks and convention? What is loving it too much other than what the world calls going too far, and are they not beyond that? For it is almost as though, for that moment, they spoke like a husband and wife.

  They close the door behind them. The laughter of a prostitute in the next room with one of her regulars follows them down the hallway. On the street they kiss, a formal kiss, and part: he to the company of his wife; she to an empty apartment, where she will replay and revel in the memory of having gone down the rabbit hole, gone underground.

  10.

  In the months following the journey to Avranches, Dominique writes reviews, teaches occasionally, visits her parents and her son in the country, meets Jean in the stolen seclusion of their room and distributes pamphlets to designated letter boxes. The new year has come and gone. Life continues in its set patterns. But for the first time since the war started she can see an end to things: the occupation, the crawling-spider flags and the cockroach soldiers. And in cafés and houses and parks there is quiet talk that the Germans are losing, even they know they are, and that the invasion is coming.

  But for all this there is a restlessness in her that wasn’t there before Avranches. Boredom, even. And with this, something reckless. She is crossing the boulevard Saint-Germ
ain. In her satchel she carries the usual pamphlets. There is a bitingly cold January wind blowing in from the north. She is freezing, hungry and unsettled. There is a café in a small street she passes through. On the blackboard on the footpath it advertises onion soup. She knows she shouldn’t. Knows it is careless. Cafés, she has been told from the start, are dangerous. Closed spaces. Nowhere to run. But something propels her in there where it is warm and out of the wind.

  She takes a seat on a cushioned bench against the back wall of the café, orders her soup and sits looking about at the other customers as she waits.

  It happens quickly. Almost on cue. A moment after sitting down in the café and ordering her soup, the door flies open, like a scene from a dark farce, and three French policemen enter.

  They immediately call for everybody’s identity papers. There are six, no seven, other customers in the café: some card players, a couple of students and a young woman seated alone. Dominique’s whole body is suddenly rigid. How stupid. How astonishingly careless of her. She is going to be arrested and jailed, or even die, for a bowl of onion soup! She can’t believe she’s done this, and for a moment it is not so much the fear and the danger that consumes her as amazement at her own stupidity. But for all that there is still a part of her that is thinking enough to act. And act quickly. While the police are preoccupied with the card players she snatches the pamphlets from her satchel and slips them under the cushion she is sitting on.

  The satchel, with a few student essays, rests beside her. She is contemplating what else might be in it when a figure appears before her and she looks up, fully expecting to see one of the policemen, but it is the waiter with her soup. Her soup, of course. She is sure she could barely swallow anything at the moment but raises her spoon all the same, and is amazed to discover that the soup tastes good. It warms her. Even relaxes her. She is about to be arrested and she is savouring the soup.

  It is while she is contemplating this, and the contents of her satchel, and whether the pamphlets under the cushion she is sitting on are properly concealed, that a policeman approaches the young woman, who is seated near her. The woman exhales cigarette smoke as casually as she can, but she’s frightened. It is in the slight tremor of her hand when she flicks ash into the ashtray. Dominique can see it in her eyes too, and so can the policeman. He seems to be enjoying it, for he lingers over her papers while the poor woman perseveres with her cigarette, blowing smoke into the air as if nothing at all out of the ordinary were taking place and he were a waiter taking her order.

  Dominique has time to study the policeman. There is something self-righteous about him that fills her with dread. He begins to shake his head. And with this the woman’s fear becomes transparent. Dominique can feel it even more than her own. The woman squirms in her seat, crosses her legs, then uncrosses them. The policeman looks at his colleagues and calls them over.

  He shows them the woman’s papers and all three examine the document, glancing at each other and slowly shaking their heads. They tell her to stand. She butts her cigarette. And when she stands, Dominique is struck by how petite she is. Not small, but frail. Almost a girl. Too young for all this. And Dominique would dearly love to sweep her under her arm and take her from the café, admonishing the police as she went for frightening the life out of a mere girl. But she sits mutely watching, as does the whole café: the card players looking up from their game in mid-move, the waiter leaning on the counter, the students twirling their coffee cups. All united in silence, as the young woman places the contents of her pockets and handbag on the table and the policemen rifle through her private things.

  And then, when they have finished almost playing with her, they tell her to put her things away and come with them. The woman falters on her feet, almost reels, and Dominique feels a wave of nausea pass through her.

  ‘Why?’ the young woman asks, terror as much in her voice as her eyes.

  The policeman brandishes her papers. The café is small, nowhere to run. Besides, there are three of them. She has no choice. She puts her coat over her arm, collects her handbag, and two policemen take her by the arms and lead her out of the café.

  And it is then, with the woman’s back to her, that Dominique sees the dark stain, the wet patch on the back of the woman’s dress where she has urinated. And at this point Dominique could scream, as the card players return to their game, the waiter resumes polishing the glasses, the students sip their coffee. All united in silence.

  The door closes and the young woman is ushered into a waiting car, considerately, even tenderly, and is driven off to her fate. Dominique rises, collects her pamphlets from under the cushion and puts them back in her satchel, ignoring the soup, from which she has taken one sip.

  * * *

  ‘We are weak! We deserve everything we get.’ Dominique is crying and screaming at Jean, at the room, at the whole city. Whoever hears, hears. What of it? Let them hear the screams she stifled in the café. ‘We are the country of the weak. We bow down to our masters. We deserve to be bowed. We deserve to be bound. We deserve to be beaten . . .’

  Her face is smeared with mucus and tears and the precious mascara that Jean somehow found on the black market for her birthday. She wipes her sleeve across her nose, her hands across her eyes, as her whole body goes into convulsions again and she doubles over with each convulsion as if about to break in half. Jean approaches her but she raises her hand, shouting ‘Stop!’

  Stunned, he does as she commands and stands helpless before her. And it is then, tears still streaming down her cheeks, that she looks directly at him. ‘Yes, beaten! Each of us. So that we may feel our shame.’ She pauses, glaring at Jean. ‘Each of us. Don’t you see? It is the only way.’

  She stops, gazing silently at him: a silence that hangs in the air, going on and on, until she finally speaks again, softly and calmly. ‘Do it.’

  He looks at her, baffled. ‘Do what?’

  ‘You know,’ she calmly replies. ‘Do it. Take your belt, take it off.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘I am weak. I sat and watched while that poor woman . . . and I did nothing! Do it!’

  ‘No. Again, no.’

  She pulls her blouse off, her brassière, and in a moment she is standing before him naked from the waist up. ‘Do it! Give me my pain. Give me my penance. Release me from my shame . . . do it!’

  He stares at her, neither moving nor speaking. And she speaks with contempt in her voice: for him, for her, for the whole craven country. ‘Coward! Where is your strength? Your courage? Are you, too, weak? Do it, weakling! My god . . . we pretend, we deny what is happening under our noses, we don’t care how weak we are, or the depths we have sunk to. We sit and we watch and pretend that nothing is happening.’ She wrings her hands. ‘We must, we must have our weakness beaten out of us or we will never be strong again. We must feel our shame. Do it!’

  She falls to the floor, kneeling and weeping and shivering, from cold or sheer exhaustion she neither knows nor cares. ‘That poor, poor woman. She was young, a girl . . . and she wet herself, she wet herself! And we all watched and did nothing!’

  Suddenly Jean is kneeling beside her, taking her blouse from the floor where Dominique threw it and wrapping it round her as he warms her shivering shoulders. The guilt has been wrung from her, and she is almost calm. Eventually she looks round at him, wiping her eyes and nose. ‘What awful times. How awful we’ve all become. Except you.’ She reaches for his hand. ‘My poor Jean. Did I abuse you?’

  He shakes his head. ‘I’ve heard worse.’

  She smiles. ‘I don’t believe that.’ She slowly shakes her head, then rests it on the shoulder of her wise owl.

  Drained, the storm now passed, washed clean for the time, she fumbles with the clips of her brassière, buttons her blouse and, together, they climb onto the bed and lie back holding hands, fully clothed. She will remember this as the day they did not make love. When they simply lay there, in exhausted silence, holding hands, until the watch on Jean’s
wrist told them it was time to go.

  Walking home she passes the same café, the same blackboard on the footpath advertising onion soup, and looks in. The card players have gone, the café is full (the soup has done its trick, and she imagines that hers was poured back into the pot to be served up again). No sign that anything out of the ordinary took place.

  She thinks of the woman she knew only as Pauline, now over the sea. Over there in England, where, they are told in whispers by those who know or pretend to know, a giant fleet is assembling. And that the invasion is coming. This talk of liberation, whether true or simply rumour like most talk is, is becoming more common.

  She doesn’t care. If they come, if they don’t. If they all go on exactly as they are, what does it matter? We don’t deserve to be liberated: the country of the weak deserves only to be left to its fate.

  What would we be liberated from anyway? From ourselves? Our memories? Our weakness? So we can eventually tell ourselves lies about how brave we were – and believe the lies we tell ourselves? Or so that one day we might forget it all, forget these days as though they never happened and succumb to a collective amnesia? Or do our best to. Until everybody reaches a point of unspoken agreement never to talk of these years again.

  She stands staring at her apartment block, shrubs and leafless trees a ghostly white under the moon, occasional glimmers of light in the windows behind the curtains. All those lives behind them, shut off from the world. All those eyes that don’t see and don’t want to. All that forgetting. She sighs; perhaps one day we will all wake up and nobody will remember who we are or were. No past, no shame.

  Part Three

  Liberation

  Paris, 1944

  11.

  It has come, the very thing she and they – these swarming crowds – have longed for all these years. A moment of splendour and terror that leaves her trembling with tears.