“If there had been customers I would have said what my husband told me to say.” Gabrielle spoke with a deliberateness that made it seem by rote. And rote it was, her having particularly rehearsed the words “my husband.” “For my twenty-first birthday I wish to have a photograph to send my parents in Marseille.”
René nodded and rubbed his hands together. “We shall take that picture first. It is my pleasure to serve you, madame,” he said with some cheer. He expected to be paid for the photographs.
He led her through a neat but shabby shop, past the counter with its samples of his portraits. “Weddings and First Communions, what would I do without them?” He posed her first in a chair against a courtyard backdrop, draping her round with black velvet and insisting that for the portrait she must remove the scarf from her head. “We must be as authentic as we can. For your parents you would want as chic a picture as possible. Yes?”
She said nothing, removing the scarf.
René straightened her shaggy hair with his fingers. By her stiffness he might be applying a match to it. “Weddings and First Communions,” he repeated, hoping to relax her, “it would seem to me the occasion would be its own celebration and therefore memorable. The taking of a photograph should be an event in itself.”
Quickly then, having glanced again at the identity shot he would be replacing, René bade her put on the scarf and stand against a silvery screen. “I will need an hour, and as steady a hand as I can manage.” He took her to the front of the shop. “It is better that I lock the door so that no one walks in on me. Come back when you see that the door is open.”
“Yes, monsieur.”
Gabrielle walked along Rue de Michelet until she came to a shop advertising dresses and lingerie. A bell rang as she opened the door. A mannequin stood, hand extended; a sign propped in the fingers told the price and the number of ration tickets. Gabrielle was a second or two realizing that it was not a person but a dummy on which hung what seemed to her an enormously expensive dress. A woman came from the curtained room at the back.
“It is beautiful, is it not, mam’selle?” She corrected herself: “Madame.” She had seen the ring on Gabrielle’s finger. She calculated the customer to be a girl from the countryside, newly come in town to work, conscripted perhaps to the box factory. She would have ration coupons galore. “It is worth every coupon in your book. What else do you need if you have a dress like that? You could go all week in your shift and wear that on Sunday and be the envy of every woman in church…”
Gabrielle listened without understanding. Or, more precisely, she could have understood without listening. She did not like the sales person. With her cheeks rouged and her lips painted, the woman was as false as the dummy. When she finally paused, Gabrielle said, “I would like to buy a nightgown, madame. It must be cheap and large and have long sleeves.”
The woman batted her eyes, to what purpose Gabrielle had no idea. “It is a gift perhaps for someone older?”
“Do you have such a garment, madame?”
“I do not know that such a garment exists. Perhaps if madame would tell me how much she wishes to pay…”
“I have enough money,” Gabrielle said. She had no notion in the world how much money a nightgown should cost, but Marc had given her five hundred francs and that seemed a lot of money indeed. She did not intend to spend half of it.
On the hunch that this was a strange, shy girl who had been married off to an old man with money—and who in such bloom would not under the circumstances conceal herself as much as possible?—the proprietress ventured: “I have remembered something that might just suit madame. Please be seated for a few minutes.”
“I must hurry,” Gabrielle said, wanting only to be out of the shop as quickly as possible.
“Believe me, madame, he will have a glass of wine and forget the time.” She laid her hand with the painted nails on Gabrielle’s arm. Gabrielle felt her muscles grow taut but she did not pull away from the touch. She smiled as falsely as the woman. And when the woman left her, Gabrielle said, “Forgive me, Lord, but it will help me save his money and he needs it.”
She sat down and calmly watched the shopkeeper go to the cupboard at the back wall and fumble through the garments stacked there. It was essential to the bargain, Gabrielle felt, that she not take her eyes off the woman, that she advance the position she had established by the fact that she had money. And that became something too that she wanted to think about later: there was in this a personal lesson for her on the merits of poverty, and the reason therefore it was part of religious commitment.
The woman brought a large white, if yellowing, garment and shook it out of its folds. It was a beachrobe left from the happier days when the better class of people from St. Hilaire went to the sea in August. Gabrielle was satisfied in the roughness of the towelcloth and the fact that it buttoned from throat to toe. The woman held up the dolman sleeves and Gabrielle was reminded of angel costumes in school pageants. The woman began to unbutton it. “You will see in the mirror how becoming it is, madame. Beautiful lines, and white. It is very chaste, no?”
“I will take it,” Gabrielle said and rose from the chair.
Without batting an eye this time, the woman said, “Very good, madame. I will even find a box to put it in. That will be four hundred francs, madame.”
Gabrielle said, and with aplomb equal to the shopkeeper’s, “I will not take it, madame. The price is too much.”
“Then I will sell it to you at a loss, madame, for I shall never have a customer to whom it is more becoming. Three hundred and fifty.”
“I will pay you two hundred.”
“Mon Dieu! Madame would like me to make her a gift of it!”
Gabrielle smiled. “That would be very kind.”
“Two hundred and fifty. You have your ration book?” She chipped the words with the precision of a stone cutter, and Gabrielle thought that would be the substance of which her heart was made.
Only after she had left the store and made a further purchase at the chemist’s shop did she contemplate the possible lack of charity in her own judgment of the woman. She would have to deal with her conscience later in that matter. Passing the photography shop, the blind on its door still drawn, she went on to the church of St. Sebastien near the railway station.
St. Sebastien was not among her favorite saints although she could not say why. She had never thought about him very much, and he should have been among those she admired because he was a soldier—if Marc had been right about her fondness for soldiers. Monsieur Daridan was not necessarily right: he only sounded as though he ought to be.
She tried to think of St. Sebastien and not Marc Daridan. It was not the saint’s nakedness that offended her, she was sure. Her dearest images of Christ were quite as naked. And Christ’s wounds, and those of the saints who suffered the stigmata—particularly St. Francis and Ste. Catherine of Sienna—were dear to her. She could put her lips to such wounds. Why not then the wounds of St. Sebastien, the arrow wounds of persecution?
Seeking to know more of the saint whom she seemed deliberately not to have known, she went to the literature rack in the church vestibule. She took a faded pamphlet of Sebastien’s life to where the light was best and read about the martyr who was twice left for dead and twice, once after death, attended by devout and kindly women to whose compassion his helplessness—and yet his dignity—recommended him. She thought at once of Daridan, and was almost as quickly stricken with the knowledge that under the guise of pious pursuit, the devil had presented her with temptation beyond any she had hitherto experienced.
She fled the chapel as though it were a charnel house. She would have walked on her knees, but the shoes gave pain enough for her to contemplate. To concentrate on pain until it came near pleasure allowed her to empty her mind of everything else, to open it once more, she begged, to a true and reassuring vision of the will of God. What came riding hard upon her thoughts was the wish for flight: he, the man she now feared to call by
name even in her own thoughts, he had said that if she were in trouble to go back…He had not quite said that, but everything within her said it now. The very clopping of the hooves of a carter’s horse rang out on the cobbles, “Go back, go back, go back.” And then at the head of Rue de Michelet she saw Father Duloc, the old priest, bringing back his flock of children from their morning trip to the infirmary. She had only to cross the street, confront him and make him see who she was, and he would take her home. But as she stood on the verge of running to him, a motorcycled patrol of helmeted Germans passed between them, six of them, before which the people in the street gave way, the repeated acceleration of the motors like the roar of beasts at their heels.
She turned back into Rue de Michelet, and when she reached it, she found the door to René’s shop open. His face was tense and his hand shaking as he gave over to her the identity card and the envelope with the Belloir work papers. “You have no sense of time, madame. Let me tell you, it is a terrible thing to do to someone whose life is balanced in the scale by time. Give me eighty francs and go from here now. Godspeed to the Jew. He will need it if he counts on you to tell time for him.”
“Thank you, monsieur,” she said and opened the string purse.
René went to the door with her more to the purpose of getting her out quickly than anything else. Thus he saw Moissac park the Peugeot across the street a few seconds before Moissac saw him and Gabrielle.
“Sweet Jesus,” René said. “Listen to me carefully, madame. The prefect of police is across the street. We shall tell the same story if we are questioned: when you return from the harvesting, I will have the photograph ready. Forget the money for now.”
Again Gabrielle said, “Thank you, monsieur.” Nothing more.
René watched her up the street and he prayed, although he knew that it was cowardly of him to do so, that Moissac would follow her. But the prefect came across the street and stood, without acknowledging René’s greeting, staring after the girl. The eyelids drooped down a little, concealing something, René thought. And knowing Moissac, he could suppose there was but one thing he would conceal in such a manner. René kept breathing deeply while yet holding his shoulders rigid. A few seconds more and he would be in control of himself.
Reaching the top of Michelet, the girl looked back as she was about to turn out of sight. She waved. René waved back and called out, “Good harvesting,” although she was probably beyond hearing. It did not matter: the masque was for Moissac’s benefit.
“So you know her?” Moissac said.
“I have just taken her photograph. Very soon now she will turn twenty-one years old, and oh, my friend, I wish that I were twenty-two.”
“You know her husband also?” Moissac said.
“No, I think not.”
“Let us go in your shop and see if you can’t remember him.”
It was almost noon when Gabrielle got back to Madame Fontaine’s. Suitcases and sleeping bags lined the walk and already from the upstairs windows bolsters and quilts had been hung out to air. A group of the men were at boules in the garden. Marc turned from watching them as she came up the walk. He did not come to her at once, but the players teased him all the same for having worried. The legend of bride and groom persisted.
The women were sitting, most of them crosslegged on the floor of the veranda, and one of them was selecting cards from a deck. Gabrielle wanted to slip by them. Oddly, it seemed to her, she was more afraid of the women than of the men. It was their voices probably. She could not get used to women speaking loudly. She had almost made it to the door when one of them arched her back like a dancer and with her outstretched hand caught Gabrielle’s ankle.
“Come and sit down and I’ll tell your fortune,” the card dealer said. “Michele, let her go. She looks like a doe with its leg in a trap.”
“It’s all right,” Gabrielle said, and briefly smiled at her captor who released her hold, and with the sinuous movement of a snake—or again a dancer—writhed slowly into a sitting position, her blouse falling low beneath her shoulders and lower still to her breasts. Why she could not stop looking at her Gabrielle did not know: the other women seemed to think nothing of it at all.
“Sit down, my dear. A bride’s fortune is always happy. You do not need to be afraid.”
Gabrielle shook her head. Marc came up and put his arm around her. It was an iron band meant to sustain her. She permitted herself to be drawn against him, for all of the women now were looking at them.
“Why don’t you tell my fortune, madame?” Marc said.
“Mon Dieu, what I would tell you, monsieur, my husband would burn the cards.”
Gabrielle was able to interpret the laughter more quickly than the words themselves. Her eyes darted at the fortune teller: again it was shock she had not been able to conceal in time, but now the woman chose to interpret that glance to her own suspicions.
“Yes, my dear, my husband. Did you think you’re the only one married? You’re a little too good for us, aren’t you? A little too good to be true.” She threw down the cards. “I would rather tell the fortune of the bow-legged dwarf.”
Gabrielle felt the pound of Marc’s heartbeat against her arm. She pushed away from him and thrust the handbag and box into his hands. She turned to the fortune teller. “Please, madame, do tell my fortune. It is not so that I have such thoughts of you as you say. I cannot help what I am—but I am not what you say.”
It was not a very clear speech, but the earnestness of it even the fortune teller could not deny. Gabrielle pulled the scarf from around her head and sat down, also crosslegged, among the women. She pulled her skirt over her knees; it was full enough to touch the floor. The fortune teller raked in the cards, looking at Gabrielle all the while. “Mon Dieu, where did you get that haircut?”
“My husband cut it.”
“With his teeth?”
The others laughed and Gabrielle forced herself to join in. Philomène put her arm around Gabrielle’s shoulders. “We were all brides once, and it was the only time we were as beautiful as you.”
“Thank you,” Gabrielle whispered. She could feel her color, the blood warm in her cheeks.
But before the cards were dealt Madame Fontaine announced lunch, the last meal she would have to serve them, thank God, and Gabrielle was spared a public fortune. Marc held his hand out to her when she started to get up. She pretended not to see it. He touched her arm anyway when they started indoors. “You were a long time.”
“I almost went home,” she said.
“I kept thinking all morning that it would have been better to chance things as they were than for you to have gone out into the town alone.”
“It was better that I went alone. It is easier to get used to the difference that way.”
“Nothing went wrong?”
“I do not know for sure. I have the papers, but the prefect of police came as I was leaving. Monsieur René would have told him I was there to have a photograph made for my parents. And he did take such a photograph.”
Marc did not speak of it but as they took their places at the great long table with its four tureens of soup, he thought further about Monsieur Lapin who confessed to having chosen his own cover name. He was startled out of a grim reverie when Jacques, who had spent much of the morning trying to amend for last night’s wildness, banged his fork against his glass.
“Bread, soup, and wine, my friends. We should give thanks. Young Jean Belloir, will you say a blessing for us all?”
Marc hesitated in his demur. The only ruse he could think of was to propose that since it was Jacques’ idea, it should be Jacques’ privilege.
But Gabrielle spoke out almost instantly: “In our house I say the blessing. Jean does not go to church…” She made the sign of the cross as did everyone at the table except Marc. “Bless us, oh Lord, in these Thy gifts which we are about to receive from Thy bounty.”
All said, “Amen.”
Marc bowed his head.
20
MOISSAC HAD NOT EXPECTED such luck as to come on the little Madame Belloir leaving Rene’s studio. It justified his feeling that there was a connection between Belloir and René. He was more certain of it, aware of the little man’s struggle with his nerves. It was this that decided him to tackle René now, regretfully abandoning the opportunity to intercept madame and talk with her alone.
“You know her husband also, the stranger at Gaucher’s.”
René denied it. Actually, he was denying knowing that the man who had come into Gaucher’s was Belloir. Sitting on the stool behind his counter while Moissac occupied the one easy chair in the studio, René said, “Why should the name Belloir mean anything to me? The man was looking for the harvesters. Didn’t Maman say herself that they used to gather in Michelet?”
“You forget, René: when we spoke about him, you said you thought the man might be Gestapo.”
“Would that have prevented him from looking for the harvesters? I should think the Gestapo might be very interested in a crowd like that. I’ve heard there’s a dwarf among them. The Germans will say, French decadence.”
He had underestimated Rene’s cleverness. He said, “He is no one’s pet, the dwarf. And he deserves the worst that could happen to him.”
René avoided moistening his lips although they were dry as dust, and not to break a life-time pattern, he had to continue baiting this left-over bully from youth. “I would think the worst has already happened to him, being a dwarf. It is worse than a gypsy, as bad as a Jew.”
Moissac said, “Do you know the Belloir family in Fauré?”
“No. Should I know them?”
“Have you been in Fauré during the last few days?”
“It is a cursed village.”
“That does not answer my question, René.”
“No, Monsieur le Préfet.”
Moissac changed his tack. “What did you think of the little lady?”
“She is charming, but stiff as marble.”
God Speed the Night Page 14