God Speed the Night

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “Yes.”

  “And he will be protecting the female of the species?”

  Moissac flushed to the roots of his hair. The German studied him for a few seconds. He leaned back then and said as though unleashing a dog: “Go get them!”

  As Von Weber again hiked his cuff to look at his watch, Moissac got up. “But suppose it turns out that they are not Jews, Colonel?”

  Von Weber took his arm. “That would be a pity, but I have every confidence in that great nose of yours, mon préfet.” He walked him to the door of the Rotunda. “The court martial has acquitted Lieutenant Heinrich, by the way. The old woman was adjudged mad.”

  “I have said so myself,” Moissac said.

  “You would agree, then, a bullet was a mercy?”

  “I could not say that, Colonel, and long remain a peace officer of the republic.”

  “You could under the New Order. You ought to think that way, Moissac. It is a great tonic for men who are not sure of their own worth.”

  Moissac left Von Weber’s office in a state of high excitement, something he had not been able to conceal from the German so that he pretended it was the prospect of the hunt that had infected him. And in a way it was, but only in a way. Moissac could not account even to himself what was happening to him. He went out from the Hôtel de ville feeling in all ways the German’s equal, for which he supposed he would have to thank Von Weber himself. It did not even seem extraordinary to him that the colonel should treat him with such camaraderie.

  To Maman it seemed extraordinary that he should speak to him at all. “There will be something he wants of you, some dirty work.”

  “A policeman’s work. That’s all. Some people call it dirty, some duty. It has profited us, maman, and until lately you have praised me for it.”

  “I will not entertain the German in this house, Théophile. I will not cook for him.”

  “I have not asked it. I don’t intend to now, but if I did, I would expect you to do your duty too.”

  She looked up at him, the little black eyes trying to pry their way into his. “It is not the German we are really talking about, is it?”

  He did not answer. He could not meet her eyes. Instead he looked at the goose where she had hung it from the beam over the sink, naked as sin, stripped of its feathers.

  “Come, I want to show you something,” she said.

  She led the way through the house to the front door which was rarely used, overlooking the river. She opened the door. On the dark wood a huge scythe had been painted in white. They spoke simultaneously.

  “What is the meaning, Théophile?”

  “When did it happen, maman?”

  “Tell me what it means.”

  “There was a woman shot in the field.”

  “I know that. By a German. What does it have to do with us?”

  “She was a crazy woman, but the Resistance is making a martyr of her. That is their symbol now.”

  She gave up trying to get a direct answer from him and resorted to an old weapon. “You will have to paint the whole door white. And maybe yourself as well. A pretty sight.”

  He caught her by the wrist. “Don’t you make fun of me, maman. You have my thanks for what I am. I happen to like it just now.”

  As always when he asserted his will over hers, and he kept forgetting this until pricked by necessity, she gave way. She made her arm go limp in his grasp. “I have always liked what you are. That is why I get angry with you. You are not a collaborationist, and that is what they mean, isn’t it?”

  He let go her arm and closed the door. “I don’t know. I want a change of linen packed, maman. I may be going away for a day or two.”

  She began to rub her wrist. He had not held her that firmly. “Take me with you, Théophile. You need me to look after you.”

  “No, maman. It is not possible.”

  “It is not possible because you do not want me. You can’t even look at me. You hide your eyes like your father did. I used to loathe him for it.”

  “Why did you marry him then?”

  “Close the parlor door,” she said, and herself returned to the kitchen.

  Moissac closed it. Why they had a parlor he did not know, except to entertain the monsignor in. The monsignor, he thought, would wait a while for another invitation.

  Maman brought the plates from the warming oven to the table. She looked at her bony hands and twisted the wedding band, much too loose except that the joint was swollen so the ring would not come off. “He was such a pathetic man, always trying to please me. Never a complaint…”

  Moissac had thought she had chosen not to answer and he wished now that he had not started her on his father.

  “Like St. Joseph,” she said suddenly, and with a defiant toss of her head. “I have always thought St. Joseph pathetic.”

  “That’s enough, maman.”

  “I thought you’d say that.” She was enjoying herself. It happened the instant he reproved her. “Oh yes, a really pathetic man, pushed from one thing into another with no idea of what was going on.”

  He caught her by the elbows and shook her even as she had shaken him as a child. “Aren’t you afraid at your age to talk like that?”

  “Of course I’m afraid. That’s why I do it.”

  “I do not understand you.”

  “Nor I you, my son.”

  He had just removed his coat and sat down to the table when the telephone rang. He went into the vestibule and answered it. The call was from the prefecture. An answer had come from Paris: Jean Belloir and his wife had returned to their flat in Rue Vanquelin after several days’ absence. If further information were required, he was to so instruct.

  Moissac wished no further information for the moment. In terms of time it was just barely possible for the couple to have left the harvesters and returned to Paris: that this was not so was the first thing of which he had to be certain. He instructed the desk man to have René picked up that afternoon, and to have him available for interrogation on Moissac’s return.

  When he hung up the phone he saw Maman standing in the doorway. “So that was all Von Weber wanted from you, Théophile? The arrest of your friend.”

  “Do you not think there is something for which to arrest him, maman?”

  “There is always something for any man. If that wasn’t so where would the martyrs come from? Men make martyrs. They are not made in heaven.”

  “You are in a strange mood, maman. It is a shame I have to go so soon. Put up some soup for me and let it cool.” Moissac glanced at himself in the hall mirror, wishing he had shaved more carefully. He lingered, studying his face. It was the dark beard as well as the nose.

  “What do you see, Théophile? Open your eyes and look well, my son. Then tell me what you see and you will feel better.”

  “I feel just fine. Please, maman, the soup.”

  A few minutes later she watched him pour wine from his glass into the soup. “You will not permit me to go in the car with you?”

  “No. I do not know what may happen or when I will get back. I will send someone to paint the door.”

  “I will paint it.”

  “If you like.”

  “I do not like, but I will do what must be done.”

  “Leave it. I will probably be home tonight,” he said, exasperated at her melodrama. “You sound as though I were going away forever.”

  “That is how I feel. But that is because I want to feel that way. I admit it. Self-pity is an overcoat you slip into very easily in old age. It is a shoddy fabric, but no one cares. Everybody knows they won’t have to wear it for long. I will pack your valise now.”

  23

  MARC AND GABRIELLE HAD worked apart that day. It was Gabrielle’s wish and Marc had responded by assigning himself to the machine, working at the grain spout, filling and replacing the bags. In fact, he had placed himself as far apart from her as possible, behavior he recognized as more becoming an adolescent than a man three days widowed.

&
nbsp; The morning’s move had brought the harvesters twenty kilometers closer to the border. The patrols were more frequent, the examination of papers more careful despite Colonel von Weber’s promise of non-interference. Marc, working near the dwarf, where he pranced and danced over steps and platforms like Quasimodo in the tower of Notre-Dame, found his nerves on edge by the end of the day. Artur delighted in announcing the imminent arrival of a Nazi patrol by jumping up and down on the iron seat atop the thresher and shaking his fist in the air. Then at the last minute, Marc cursing at him, he would plop down on his plump little backside and bury his legs from sight. Between them, Marc and Jacques, who was hauling the grain from machine to storeroom, composed a litany of abuses which delighted the dwarf. He begged them remember and write them down for him…A two-stemmed mushroom, sawed-off and hammered-down, Napoleon the half…

  When the machine was silent at last and Marc could shake the dust from his head as from a mop, he went out from the yards of this estate called Champs des Corbeaux, and stretched himself on the ground where he could look down to the far fields and see the others starting in. The marquis, their host-employer, saw no reason to send a horse to carry men and women who, he said, were better able to carry his horses. They were a sorry lot to look at, his half-dozen horses, but an old man who had long worked on the estate, told Marc that the master had sold his good ones to the Germans at a fine price. Marc prophesied a thin soup and watered wine. So he fed himself on the setting sun. He could not get enough of sky. He rolled over on his back and stared up at it trying to fathom its depth for stars.

  She had wanted to stay apart from him so that she would not need to talk, of course. Or was it that she could no longer bear the nearness of him as he was finding hers too painful, being that near and no nearer? He turned onto his side and watched her come, the last and most solitary, not only alone but with the mists of evening threatening to overtake and vanish her. On the next day, according to the map, they would come into a more hilly terrain, and within two days they would near the mountains, and after that day’s work the harvesters would swing away in another direction. Two days.

  Gabrielle saw him and raised her hand. Marc rose from where he lay and all the weariness flowed out of him as he ran toward her, leaping with but a touch of the hand for balance over the stone hedge. And yet she did not speak when he came abreast of her, nor even look up to meet his eyes, nor let him take the pitchfork from her.

  And so they walked, side by side, up the lane. It was not enough, Marc thought, but it was something. At the end of the lane they found the St. Hilaire prefect of police waiting for them. He offered his hand to Gabrielle as she came over the stile. Now she gave the fork to Marc, and at the last moment, her hand into Moissac’s. His was as soft as putty and as coldly moist. In the days when hands were meaningful, such a hand would have made her uncomfortable, making her think of dead and slimy things. Once as a little girl she had dreamt of hands, hundreds of them floating in the pond without arms or bodies or meaning. “They intend you no harm,” her father said, so that she must have told him of the dream or wakened crying. She remembered saying, “But what will the people do without them?”

  Marc took his time getting over the stile. After the day’s encounters with the Nazis, Monsieur Moissac was even more difficult to deal with. The Nazis were strangers, Moissac a native. Nor did the policeman’s greeting reassure him.

  “Your father asked me to give you a message, young Belloir.”

  “I hope no one is ill.”

  “Who would be ill?”

  “People when they get old are often ill,” Marc said.

  Elusive as a fox, Moissac thought. “He said to tell you that the cow had calved, a fine bull calf.”

  “Thank you,” Marc said. “I am glad to know it. It is good news, Marie.”

  Gabrielle was not sure: was he asking her to respond? She did know why a farmer would rejoice in a good bull. “It will be good for the herd, is that not so?”

  “Yes,” Marc said, but what the message was meant to convey to him he had no idea at all. American slang sometimes referred to the police as “bulls,” but it still made no sense, except to tell him that Moissac had gone to see the elder Belloir. And the fact that Moissac brought the message seemed to mean that Belloir had covered him. “I am most grateful to you, monsieur. I hope it did not bring you out of your way?”

  “On the contrary,” Moissac said, quite as amiable.

  “We ought to go up,” Marc said. “They will serve the meal soon and I doubt there will be very much of it tonight.”

  “I have been asked to dine,” Moissac said, starting up alongside Marc.

  “But with the marquis, so you will not need to hurry.”

  “I will eat at the harvesters’ table,” Moissac said. “I am a humble man.”

  Marc could think of nothing to say to that. He found himself again commenting on the meal and its provider. “I’m told the old boy is a miser.”

  “Your father made me a gift of a goose.”

  “Which one?” Marc said, an absolute inanity, he thought immediately, but he had done enough mumbling.

  The question, of course, threw Moissac off-balance. Indeed it made him wonder for the moment at the accuracy of his Paris informant. He said, “No. Not Monsieur Hercule.”

  Marc got off the subject. “Will you wish to wash up, monsieur?”

  “Thank you, but I will talk with madame.”

  “She too must wash,” Marc said. “We can all talk afterwards.” He nodded to Gabrielle to go.

  Moissac curbed his temper, but not his authority. “One minute, madame. You will tell me, please, why you gave me the wrong address of your family in Marseille.”

  Gabrielle said, trying to make her consternation seem surprise, “They are not there, monsieur? It will be the Germans then.”

  “Why should the Germans be interested?” He did not want to ask that. He had not even wanted to question the address yet, but the insolent husband had provoked him.

  “My father is a strong man,” Gabrielle said. Her father had been strong, and that day she had listened to the story of Philomène’s husband and the German labor camps.

  Marc said, “We plan to go to Marseille afterwards if we can get travel permits. It has been much too long, as we said yesterday, since Marie has seen her parents.” To her he added, “I think it is simply a matter of their having moved. We must not worry until we know for certain.”

  Again Moissac felt he could almost believe them. He needed more certainty, and until he had it, he too must be disarming. “You wonder why I checked the address, madame: the photographer you visited is under suspicion of black-market activities. It is my duty to check on him in every way possible.”

  Marc, leading Gabrielle to where the other harvesters were washing, considered the plausibility of Moissac’s backing down. Or was it the truth? Rene had said in the loft, stripping their ration books of coupons, that if he were picked up they would think him on his proper business, the black market.

  “Is it true, what he said about checking on Monsieur René?” Gabrielle asked when they were by themselves.

  “We must believe it,” Marc said, “until we know otherwise.”

  Her face had the glow of two days’ sun, and there were flecks of gold in her eyes. Marc said, “I don’t suppose I ought to say this to you, but I will: I missed you today.”

  “You must not say it.” Then, her eyes wide so that he saw the beginning of tears, “And you must not miss me. You must not!” She turned and ran from him.

  Moissac, watching covertly, was troubled again by his own deductions. Surely two people on the run would not quarrel at such a time. Something was not right in the way he saw them, but what? What? He decided to learn what he could by ingratiating himself with the harvesters. The young people would barely give him the time of day, but Jacques and Philippe were men who liked to talk. They sat on the lowest of the wagons, stretched themselves and watched the night come down on them. J
acques, reminded by the mists of a fog at sea, told of a phantom ship he saw come out of every fog, the same ship no matter where on the seven seas he was sailing. Philippe told of watch duty once in the army when a stump crept up like a wolf in the moonlight. Artur came and sat among them and Moissac tried not to see his legs. When the women came Moissac got down and helped Philomène and Céleste aboard. He then insinuated himself between them which made them giggle.

  The first stars had come out when the dinner-bell sounded, and the harvesters, as well as tenants and neighbors of the marquis whose grain would be threshed in the early morning, went up the graveled path to the chateau. It was a procession of some thirty people and they were led by a servant of the house with a torch.

  “It is medieval,” Marc said. “I’ve not been here before, if you know what I mean.”

  Gabrielle had rejoined him at the ringing of the bell. “I know.”

  “Will there be music, do you think?” Jules asked.

  Marc glanced back at him. “Where’s the guitar?”

  “I hid it.”

  “It will be a long walk if the marquis asks you to play.”

  “I do not intend to entertain him. He contracted to feed us, and we to do his field work only.”

  Marc remembered his rebellion the night of the feast at Madame Fontaine’s: that too now seemed a part of far history. Then as he stooped to enter the arched passageway that lead through the cellars and servants’ quarters of the chateau, a passageway lit by torchlight, Marc underwent an experience that shook him badly: he was afraid, but in the context of the Inquisition. It was such self-consciousness, such awareness of his Jewish origins as he had not experienced ever before. He hung back and Gabrielle turned to him, and what he remembered of her at that moment was also flame-lit and terrible: she and her partner leaning over Rachel, the sense of ritual somewhere deep in him as suggesting a life for a life, the primary sacrifice.

  “It is too terrible,” he said.

  “No. It is only strange to you. To me it is like going home.”