Even as Moissac had himself suspected.
“But if you say he was not, Monsieur le Préfet, who can say who he was?”
“I did not say so. They do not report to me.”
René said nothing.
“Nor I to them unless I have to. Gaucher should be more careful.”
“Of what?”
“His place is suspect. It is on the Gestapo’s list.”
“I shall tell him you said so, Théo.”
“I know you will. That is why I’m telling you. Théophile Moissac is not the bastard you all think he is.” “I shall tell him that also.”
13
THE NIGHT NURSE, SUMMONED again to the surgery for an emergency, went in the middle of preparing the injection Dr. Lauzin had ordered for Rachel. In great pain and craving water, Rachel fought crying out for as long as she could. Then the subconscious prevailed.
The old man praying before Our Lady of Perpetual Help heard her cries. He made his way to her bedside.
“Water…Please, water.”
He hobbled down the hall to his own ward and got the glass from his bedside table. He borrowed the tube from the glass of the sleeping man in the next bed and brought Rachel the relief she craved. He supported her head while she drained the glass. He felt much better himself for having performed the charity and went back to bed knowing that he would sleep at last.
Within a few minutes Rachel was nauseated. She managed to edge herself to the side of the bed, but retching violently and now delirious, she flung herself from the bed. The wound opened.
At ten minutes to eight that morning Reverend Mother was summoned again to the hospital, but by the time she arrived the patient had died.
14
“NOW I HAVE THOUGHT of what may have happened.” Marc sat up and swung his feet to the floor. When dawn had come up full he had blown out the candle and removed the blackout curtain, letting in such light as could at least make shadows. These he had watched crossing the roofbeams as the traffic wakened in the street below. “Rachel has converted,” he said with a mock heartiness. “She has run away from me to the convent, and when she is well again she will seek the veil. Is that what you call it, seeking the veil?” He stretched to his full height, stood on tiptoe, and touched the beams. The tension broke for the moment.
“No.”
“Taking the veil. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“You are not serious?” Gabrielle said.
“No. I am not serious.”
The silence again, the stifling silence, more suffocating for the medley of noises drifting up from Rue Louis Pasteur. Gabrielle continued to gaze through a large knothole that itself was the shape of an eye.
“What do you see, friend-sister?” Through the night he had tried many ways of addressing her, none of them comfortable.
“I am not looking to see. I am watching particularly.”
“Ah, but you are seeing nonetheless. Close your eyes. You are able to tell me several things that have passed. Is that not so?”
She closed her eyes. “A chestnut horse like Poirot; Père Duloc with the children for First Communion instruction. And some soldiers. I did not want to see them, but it was all right.”
“It was all right,” Marc repeated.
“I mean I thought of something else—of other soldiers.”
“Is that what it’s like, being a nun—always thinking of something else?”
“Something else than what, monsieur?”
Marc threw up his hands. “It was you who said you thought of something else, seeing the soldiers.”
“I thought of the soldiers at Calvary, and then of the soldiers burning Joan of Arc.”
“They merely lit the fagots. It was the Inquisition that decreed her death.”
“They didn’t have to light the fagots,” Gabrielle said.
Marc cocked his head and looked at her, trying to make her return his gaze. She would not. “What about your vow of obedience? A soldier takes it too, you know.”
She thought about that for a moment. “Maybe he did not want to be a soldier.”
“In which case would the vow not count?”
“I don’t know. I only know I want to be a nun.”
Marc sat down at the table and then got up immediately, exploding: “Christ! Why don’t they come and tell us something? Why don’t they come for you?”
“They will when it is time. Or I shall go.”
“You cannot!” Marc said irrationally. “Not until Rachel returns. For her sake, not for mine. Oh, yes, for mine as well,” he amended. “I want to live and I’m afraid to risk the daylight. Before Rachel I risked it many times. Now I no longer want to risk it. Love should not make cowards of us, little child of God.”
“It isn’t cowardly to want to live.” Gabrielle gave up her vigil and returned to the table.
“I suppose not—no more than it is brave to want to die.”
“Please don’t talk about death any more,” she said, and then, “unless you want to.”
“All right, I won’t. In the concentration camps, I’ve heard, they don’t speak of death at all.”
“We speak often of it, but as a friend,” she said.
“So I have observed,” Marc said cuttingly, after which neither of them spoke again for a long while.
Gabrielle had commenced praying the hours past with the six o’clock striking of the Angelus bell. Although she prayed silently, the pantomine accompanying it set Marc’s nerves on edge, the breast thumping, the up and down on the knees, the signing of the cross. He tried to counterpoint it in his mind with such ritual as he remembered from his childhood, his grandfather touching the mezuzah at the door, the philacteries the old man strapped upon his arm, and sitting sheva himself when the old man died. His skinny buttocks numb, then prickly, and his neck prickly with the wailing of his grandmother in the other room, and the sing-song prayers of the minyan he had put on his shoes and gone from the house leaving one place vacant out of eight. “I do not believe,” he said when his father had come after him. “Neither do I, my son, but it is our tradition, and without it we shall lose our Jewishness.”
Marc removed a board from the window to the north, one that he could replace before dark, and took a book to the light. After reading for a little while he sought again to make up to Gabrielle for his harshness. “Shall I read aloud to you? I’m afraid you’ll find it inappropriate—Stendhal’s letters—but it’s the only book I have.”
“No, thank you, monsieur.”
“If I could go out now and bring you a book, what would you want it to be?”
“Please do not make fun of me, monsieur.”
“That is far from my intentions. You must have had a favorite subject in school.”
“History.”
“It was one of mine—and of Stendhal’s, I should suppose by this. He was very silly about important people.”
“I love best the stories about the saints who did things, you know, like St. Ignatius Loyola who was a soldier first.”
“You’re rather fond of soldiers, aren’t you?”
“I’m not! I don’t mean to be. I don’t think I am.”
“But the Crusades and all that—they were admirable, weren’t they?”
“Oh, yes.”
He went back to his reading. She sensed just by something lingering in the air that he did not believe they were admirable at all. So she sat, her head bowed down and tried to remember the reasons she believed in them: it came down really to the rescue of the hallowed places from the heathen Turks, the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, the Holy City: it was much easier to think of Jesus Himself than of the Crusaders about whom she had never really thought at all, the entrance to the city on Palm Sunday with all the people coming out to follow Him, the children running after the donkey and His reaching down to them. His blessing of everybody, His touching of the unclean lepers. He was not afraid ever, except in the Garden when He was alone and foresaw Calvary while the disciples slept. And when
He woke them, He did not want them to be afraid either…Even when He arose from the dead and reappeared to them: Be not afraid…
It was the tolling of the bells of St. Hilaire that broke her meditation. As she listened there was a pause. Then commenced the solemn peal of the passing bell. She marked each stroke with her fingers on the table while she whispered, Requiescat in pace. There seemed a sudden silence everywhere, then in the stillness the metallic clatter of horses’ hooves in the street below. She went to the window and stood on tiptoe the better to see down through the small opening. Two horses, black ribbons flowing from their harness, drew the carriage on which the coffin rode, high and solitary. The driver walked alongside the horses, and behind the carriage Reverend Mother and Sister Agathe walked, their black beads in hand. Behind them a few people of the town followed, the women cowled in their shawls, the men bareheaded, and old Father Duloc had come out from St. Sebastien’s with the processional cross.
Everything blurred for an instant for Gabriel. She cried out, “Monsieur Marc!”
Marc came, throwing the book on the table. He stared at her and she gestured that he must look out. The sound he made when he saw the procession was like the moan of a wounded animal. He moved his head one way, then another, trying to see better. Then with his bare hands he ripped the board from the frame.
Gabrielle looked out with him. A platoon of German soldiers, approaching, quick-stepped to the side of the street, turned about-face, and remained at attention while the carriage passed. Marc covered his mouth with his hands.
“Poor man, poor man,” Gabrielle said. She lifted her hand but she could not touch him.
The soldiers resumed their march toward the station. Marc drew back from the window. He looked about him, bewildered, at Gabrielle as though he did not know her, then toward the door.
“You must not go out, monsieur. It will not help.”
He turned back to the window. The procession was leaving Rue Louis Pasteur. A moment later it disappeared from sight.
“What will it not help?” he said, scarcely audible.
There was no sign now on the street to show that the procession had passed at all. The blacksmith had gone back to his forge. A gendarme was pumping up his bicycle tire while two children watched. Then one of them skipped away. The bells of St. Hilaire had been silent for some moments, but in the distance the convent bell had taken up the tolling.
Gabrielle made the sign of the cross and began to herself, “Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord, Lord hear my voice…”
“Do not pray for her. Please.”
“I must pray, and God can make it fitting.”
Marc kept shaking his head. Then he asked, “Where are they taking her?”
“To the Convent of Ste. Geneviève.”
“Let us go then.”
“No, monsieur. It is not safe.”
“It is absurd to say now what is safe.”
Gabrielle tried to think of a way to persuade him. “It is not safe for me,” she said.
Marc was too distraught even to try to understand. He looked back and, seeing the board dangling, tried to put it in its place again. The nails were bent. He let it fall. “It does not matter.”
“It does matter, believe me, monsieur. But it is better that we stay away from the window until it is dark. Someone might see you trying to fix it now.”
“So much the better.” After a moment he looked up at her. “Did you recognize the sisters?”
“Yes, monsieur.”
“It happened?” He gestured vaguely toward the street. “It was not…I am not dreaming?”
“No, monsieur.”
“During the night I kept thinking every once in a while, I’ll wake up.”
“I saw the procession as you did, Monsieur Marc, and I heard the passing bell. It tolled nineteen strokes.”
He seemed about to smile. “But Rachel was only eighteen, friend-sister.”
Gabrielle said nothing.
Slowly he understood. “You are nineteen?”
“Yes.”
“And it is you they are mourning?”
“I think it is so, yes, monsieur.”
He leaned his head back, twisting it, his hand at his neck. The numbness was going away. “Let them mourn for a little while. I shall go out then and tell the truth.”
“Those who matter know the truth, monsieur.”
“I need to know it, and I shall only know it when I have told it myself. My wife is dead. My wife—the word was not even real to me yet, the newness of it.”
He sat down on the bench and Gabrielle, for the first time moving toward instead of away from him, sat opposite. For a long time he stared at the opening in the back window he had made to read by. “I want to think of you, friend-sister, and I cannot. I want to think of her and I cannot. Only of myself, of the uselessness, the absurdity of being me. The Resistance man that was here last night was right about the pride. Before…I got into trouble…I’m going to tell you something about Rachel in a minute, but this comes first…before I got into trouble, I used to think about going out into the streets in Paris, particularly I wanted to go into the Champs-Élysée where the Germans promenade, and I wanted to say to everybody, I am a Jew. But that was because I did not want to be a Jew. It was not that I was ashamed of it: there were many of us at the University who felt this way: it was a matter of getting rid of something old in ourselves so that we could be what we are, what we would become, aware only of self. It was not that we denied the blood of our forefathers, only its relevance to what we are. Then came the Nazis and the only relevance to them was the very thing we had cast off. Now it has become the only relevance to us. Do you understand?”
“I am trying to, monsieur. I think I do a little.”
“To talk, to be alive, what is it?” He looked at his hands and turned them over, then back and over again. Then, “What is more beautiful than a child skipping down the street?”
“Please, monsieur, go on. I would like to know about you.” This was not entirely so, but she wanted him to keep on talking for his own sake.
“I could have left France long ago, but I didn’t want to. Many times I could have gone, because with the Occupation I went to work with an organization to try to get all the Jews out of the country before it was too late. I had friends in the Resistance who helped us. It was a mission of mercy, wouldn’t you say, to get them out? And yet I hated every man I saw across the border safely. Why? Because I felt in my heart that Frenchmen despised him, and despising him, despised me. I would not go myself. And when one of the Resistance leaders in Paris asked me to do a most dangerous assignment—to pretend I was a Nazi and get certain information for them—I embraced the opportunity. To prove what? That I was not a Jew? Or that I was?
“Afterwards, when I had failed my mission and the Nazis wanted me so that I had to run for my life, I said all this to Rachel one night, hiding with her. And she said to me, ‘But Marc, you are a Jew.’ And suddenly I understood: until I became a Jew, I could not be anything else.
“It was time for Rachel to go also from Paris. She knew Hebrew and Yiddish and there was getting to be a legend about her, for she had persuaded many people out who would rather have died where they were than start again another exodus. We were married—a week ago today, I think. And we would have gone to Palestine. Or tried to. I told you that, I think.”
Gabrielle nodded.
“I wonder if we would have made it. I wonder if Rachel is right, if there will be a Jewish nation. I am not convinced; but I have come to think that only when there is such a nation, could I be a Frenchman again.”
“But would you want to be, monsieur?”
“That is what Rachel said, shall we want to? I hated her for saying it. I was not ready yet. And when I started to run, I kept thinking: they will shoot me in the back and it will be said that like all Jews I had to be shot in the back. Now I will stop running and meet them in the face.”
After a moment Gabri
elle said, “You wish to be a martyr, but it cannot happen.”
Marc looked at her. Her eyes remained fixed on her hands where they were folded before her on the table.
“To be a martyr,” she went on carefully, “you have to believe.”
“And don’t you have to want to live?”
“I think that is so, monsieur, yes.”
“Then it is simple—I do not want to be a martyr.”
“Then why do you want to die?”
“Because life is meaningless unless we give it meaning, and I have none to give it now. But you are right, to die meaningfully one must also believe. Rachel believed. I only pretended.”
“And to believe we must love, I think,” she said.
Marc did not answer. He tried to think of love, of Rachel and his feeling for her which was as close as he had come to love.
Gabrielle said, “When I was preparing to enter the novitiate Reverend Mother wrote something in my retreat book which I memorized. Let me say it for you. ‘God gives us love, something to love He lends us, and when love has grown to fullness, that on which it throve falls off, and love is left alone.’”
“I shall have to think about that,” Marc said. “I shall have to think about it to try to understand it—and I will try because I know you would not have said it unless it had deep meaning for you. But I suspect it will be difficult without God.”
“God is love, monsieur.”
15
REVEREND MOTHER DIRECTED THAT the coffin be placed in the vestibule outside the chapel’s great doors. Father Duloc who had followed the hearse all the way up the road remained at her request. He was an old man now and given more and more to the company of the children to whom in spirit, Reverend Mother felt, he had always been very close. He was the confessor of the lay nuns, but much loved by all the community. As on innumerable other occasions, for he was always hungry, Reverend Mother sent him to Sister Barbara in the kitchen. She then summoned the community to the common room.
The absence of Sister Gabrielle from her appointed place and duties had been observed, and when Reverend Mother and Sister Agathe had left the convent on receiving a call from the hospital, a prayerful vigil had commenced. Whispered rumors had spread, the worst of them seeming confirmed with the coming of the funeral cortege. Reverend Mother was aware of the sounds of sniffling as the nuns waited in silence for her sign to be seated.
God Speed the Night Page 9