by Brian Hodge
How unlikely she would be doing this if other circumstances had asserted themselves. That Nomad was nothing as she’d imagined was a blessed relief. His ugliness and profound misery were easy to contend with, compared to the handsome face and shy, seductive demeanor that might have been his. And had he possessed these, had he been that Parisian artist in self-imposed exile? Perhaps she would still be making this trip to the rectory, though to instead confess and mourn her broken vows.
She banged on the cottage door, and when it opened, Father Guillaume stood as she had never seen him. He’d already donned his cassock, but had yet to shave. His thin-jowled face seemed to sag, his graying hair was still mussed from the pillow. And behind his round spectacles…
“Have you been weeping?” she asked.
“Yes.” He peered at her as if only now realizing who it was. “You’re out of breath. You too have heard?”
Giselle frowned. “Heard what?”
Father Guillaume waved it aside briskly, almost gratefully, and wiped at his eyes. “You’re out of breath. There must be a reason. Come in.”
She crossed the threshold and they sat at the scarred old table where the Father took his meals when he preferred to dine alone, with his Bible or his meditations. A fresh log was beginning to blaze away in the fireplace, atop old embers.
“The man who’s been passing his nights in our stable,” she began, “the one who’s done so much with the horses, and left so much firewood behind for his keep … he’s no longer a stranger. I’ve just now left a conversation with him that lasted though half the night. Father, he’s more deserving of our pity and our help than anyone I’ve ever met. Ever.”
Giselle recounted the long and sorrowful story, of one man created by another, then rejected not only by his creator but the whole of humanity, as well. Condemned by fate to wander for nearly two centuries, as he neither aged nor died, as people and their reaction to him never changed, only the world around them. And she thought of Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, of that immense paternal deity reaching out his muscular arm to touch the fingertip of Adam. What jealousy would Nomad feel were he to see that? And given paints and brushes, what would his own rendition look like: extended fingers become a clenched fist, with the back of the creator turned away in abhorrence?
When she finished, Father Guillaume slowly rose from the table, moved idly toward the fireplace where he warmed his hands and shook his downcast head.
“I’ve heard of … of it. I can’t bring myself to call it ‘him.’ And for years I thought the story itself was not much more than the product of a fevered mind.” He moved across the room to a cabinet of plain oak, very old. Here Father Guillaume kept his meager wealth of books: his Bibles and history, and old volumes by Aquinas and Spinoza and others. His finger glided over spines and he removed one aged volume and returned with it to the table.
“It’s a jumbled collection of letters and a journal and a recounting of much of that very story you just told, though in this case, from the pen of the supposed scientist, Victor Frankenstein. This part was written by an English sea captain named Walton who encountered the both of them on the frozen north seas. I found it not long after the end of the Great War, at a bookshop in London. I thought at the time I might send it along to Rome, so that it might be condemned for its blasphemies, its heresies, but I never did. I never in my most fantastic dreams believed it to be true.”
Father Guillaume lowered his head a moment, rubbing bunched fingers into his reddened eyes, then looked up. “You must drive it away, Sister. Tell it to leave.”
Surely her ears deceived her. Even so, not her eyes. The Father’s face was stern and unyielding. “Nomad is not an ‘it,’ Father, he’s a man. Maybe his beginnings were different than yours and mine, but he doesn’t feel any less. He doesn’t need love and mercy any less. On the contrary, he needs them even more.”
“He, then,” said Guillaume, harshly. “He is an abomination in the eyes of God! He has no right to exist!”
“But he does. No matter how quick you are to turn away, he still will be there.”
“This abomination you’re so quick to defend … it deliberately murdered a child in Switzerland. Maybe more than one.”
“And here at home,” she explained, “Gilles de Rais murdered many dozens of them. He went to his trial and execution repentant. Would you be the one to judge him beyond forgiveness?”
Father Guillaume simply glared, would not answer.
“I thought not,” she said gently. “Then please … why not extend the same mercies to Nomad? He’s certainly had none of the advantages of an aristocrat who should have known better.”
“But his birth was more atrocious than that of the most lowly animal.” Father Guillaume pushed away from the table with a groan of misery, and despite the disappointment, she felt mostly pity for him. What had he endured to leave his mind and heart so closed on some topics? “Very well — he’s done no one any harm in the weeks since he first came to hide here. I suppose it would be unchristian to drive him away. But Giselle … please keep him out of my sight. And if he wishes to go, don’t discourage it.”
She winced. “You have no more charity for him than that?”
“On the contrary. I think it’s far more than he’s accustomed to.”
Oh, but the Father’s arguments were slippery ones. Certainly she’d pushed her luck challenging his authority to the degree she had. At least there was something to build on, and perhaps over the next few days his heart would soften.
She readied to leave, then stopped at the door, remembering. “Father? Why were you weeping when I first knocked?”
He stood in the center of his cottage, looking lost within his cassock. He seemed to want anything but to answer. Finally, “Did you hear the motorcar just before dawn?”
Giselle shook her head. “Nomad and I, we were deep in our conversation…”
“A cousin of Henri Sanson, driving in from Nantes to bring Henri the news. Henri came to me … and I should think that most of Château-sur-Lac knows by now.” The Father shook his head and sought his chair. “The Allies have invaded North Africa. Germany has decided to break the terms of the armistice … and occupy all of France. The war? It’s come home, Giselle.”
Her knees weakened at the threshold, and she steadied a hand against the doorjamb. What a fragile cloak was security. It felt as if, for two-and-a-half years, they of the interior had made their own separate peace, then lived much as before. Ripped away, now, and they had no promise of anything. Only this: Their lives as they knew them were all but over. And how would they be treated by those first troops of the occupation who came down into their shallow valley to claim it for their own?
At the moment, she felt suddenly as if she had more empathy with Nomad’s life than that brought by hours of conversation. She now understood how it must feel to await a life of indignity and loathing. This country knew already, even if it had come before her time: The German army made harsh masters.
“I’ll toll the bell,” she said. “We should all gather. We should pray.”
“Yes,” he murmured, and nodded. “Yes. We should.” He drew a long breath that trembled with impotent rage. “What anyone prays for silently, in their own heart, is between them and God. But I will have no one in my church praying for a single German … unless it’s that he find his way back to the border. Or an early grave.”
She thought to argue — didn’t Germans too have immortal souls? — but the urge passed after a moment. His rebuttal would be swift — the Germans had forfeited their souls the day they decided to invade Poland — and would leave no room for objections.
So she instead left, for the church, for the rope, for the clarion bell that would unite them all. If they no longer had peace during war, they at least had each other.
While Nomad, it occurred to her, had no one.
*
It came, soon enough: the war.
More planes overhead. On tranquil mornings
and still evenings and moments during the day when cows fell silent and conversations ended, from the roads just beyond the valley came the sound of mechanized caravans. The low mingled rumble of engines and rolling tires and the crushing tank-treads of the Panzer divisions … these would drift down the gentle slopes on crisp November air, like the first drafts of a wind that would soon turn bitter and furious. It was, Giselle thought — and Sister Anna-Marie agreed — almost worse this way than if the Germans had arrived in the village immediately. They had no faces this way, no eyes to beseech in hopes of finding pity. They could only be imagined, and invariably imagination conjured ogres in uniform.
This climate of fear … in it, did Nomad feel more at home?
Giselle had been forced to lie to him to spare his feelings, telling him that Father Guillaume soon would meet with him, but that he was ailing, and for now it took all his strength to give heart to his parishioners. Nomad did not question, and from her lips, at least, the lie was believed.
She tried to get him to move into the priory, where he could at least enjoy the warmth of a fire. They would fix up a corner for him, or perhaps a nook in the cellar. But no, he steadfastly refused, preferring to remain in the stable and the daily company of the horses who, he said, never judged or turned their eyes away or cried out at the sight of him. When parishioners came up the hill, from the sprinkling of cottages and farms below, to seek spiritual guidance from the Father or the sisters, he was careful to wear an empty grain sack, cut with eye holes, to protect them from a possible fright.
His was the life least changed by this shift in the tides of war, and Giselle tried to spare him an hour or two each day, simply to talk. He listened wonderfully, and spoke with a hesitant and self-conscious eloquence on more books than she could ever hope to read … Milton and Plutarch, Dante and Dickens, Descartes and Steinbeck and Twain. Of countries he knew, but little of borders. He crossed at timberlines and often didn’t realize he was in a new land until he overheard a new language spoken.
War? Nomad had lived through them before, and for him they were no different than peace. He was an aberration to invader and defender alike, and in that spirit, Giselle supposed, he lived under a constant declaration of war from all nations. Their talks opened more than her eyes, it felt as if they shed light into her soul as well…
Until at last the occupation came to Château-sur-Lac.
It was preceded by the sounds of battle, the fabric of the day rent by machine gun fire and the crack of rifles, the dull thud of grenades and explosions greater still. Two columns of ominous black smoke rose in the distance. A partisan ambush, no doubt. Prayers for its victory rippled through the village.
And went unheard.
The battered victors came over the hills and streamed into Château-sur-Lac, sons of the Hun from a generation before. Teutonic faces grimed with soot and sweat and blood; gray tunics and coal-scuttle helmets and high black boots; carbine rifles and Schmeisser machine pistols and potato masher grenades. And every man who had just lost a good friend to partisan fire had replaced him with a lethal anger burning in his eye. Peasant blood would run just as red.
Barely over twenty of them, all told: half a dozen surviving wounded, the rest able-bodied. Teenage boys fought alongside hard, seasoned veterans.
The villagers were rousted from their homes, forced to gather in the central village green, before the tiny cafe and bakery. A battered but still operable motorcycle came roaring up the hill to the church. Out of the sidecar leapt a private who rounded up priest and nuns at rifle-point, and began to march them back down to join the rest while the cyclist buzzed a circuit around rectory and priory and barn to make sure they hadn’t missed anyone.
The thought of Nomad, gargantuan child that he was in some respects, back there alone, elicited surprisingly little worry in Giselle. In his vast span of days on this earth, he had learned nothing quite so well as how to hide.
Pity the rest of them had not learned so valuable a skill.
They were gathered within a perimeter of uniforms. Some in tears, others in sullen quietude, most of the older ones calm and resigned, as ones who were watching history repeat itself. Father Guillaume moved among them, as did Giselle and Anna-Marie, but how much comfort could cold hands provide under the watch of muzzles colder still?
The officer who came striding forth from a tight knot of his men silenced them with a pair of shots into the air from his Luger sidearm. His face was tightly seamed. Prematurely graying blond hair strayed from beneath his helmet to cling wetly to his upper forehead. When he spoke, he had no need of an interpreter. His French was deliberate but no less understood.
“I am Untersturmführer Streckenbach,” he called out, “and you will give me all the cooperation due the Third Reich. Who refuses, will be shot. In a few moments you will be questioned and asked to surrender whatever weapons you may have in your possession. Who refuses, will be shot. Your homes will then be searched. Who is found to be lying … will be shot. Understood?”
Giselle stood with clasped hands and listened to the scarcely audible murmuring around her. How little malice the man actually spoke with. He might have been placing an order in the bakery.
“For tonight,” Streckenbach went on, “your home will be ours. We have just suffered the loss of our radio at the hands of some countrymen of yours. For their actions, I do not hold you responsible, unless you are found to have aided them. For your own actions, you will bear every responsibility. Until a messenger can be dispatched to send back new orders and evacuation for our dead and our wounded, you will accord us your hospitality.”
He suddenly craned his neck, scanning faces in the crowd. “Where is the priest … ah, there you are.” Beside her, Giselle felt Father Guillaume go suddenly rigid. “I wish to see you in a few minutes.” The lieutenant flicked one finger toward the door of the cafe, and in a moment a young private was at his shoulder to ensure he found the way.
Giselle met his eyes only once as he was led away from the crowd. The Father’s eyes, resigned and bitter, retained something crushed as well. Something broken that could never be restored. Did they kill priests to demoralize an occupied village? She prayed not. There was no need. Château-sur-Lac was full of compliant people.
She continued to pray until her concentration was shattered, as two soldiers departed on motorcycle and in sidecar, down the road and away to the west, buzzing like a horsefly until they were gone, simply gone.
*
Servant of God or not, Father Guillaume looked for things to hate about this man. This Hun. There was plenty to find. He hated the small scar that curled out from the corner of the left eye, hated the cleft in the chin. He hated the straight posture and the blue of his eyes and the gray of his uniform and the sharp tangy sweat-smoke smell of him, and most of all he hated the very fact of this man’s existence, and how they were now forced to breathe the same air in this rustic cafe. I can never eat here again, thought Guillaume. I’ll see him and smell him even then.
“You despise me,” said Streckenbach, “Your eyes make no secret of it, and I find it perfectly understandable. I don’t ask your goodwill, only your cooperation. Wine?”
He poured from a bottle and savored the bouquet and nodded quietly as Guillaume told him no. He then gulped like a Philistine at a stream and Guillaume hated that too.
“Occupying officers often seek out the mayors of the villages they enter,” the lieutenant told him. “That may be of value, but I find greater worth in men of God. You priests are natural born mediators, sworn to keep the peace. You know the hearts of your flock better than anyone. Better than I can ever hope to.”
Father Guillaume’s stomach curdled. “I’ll tell you nothing about a single one of them.”
Streckenbach refilled, toasted him ironically with the glass and poured it down. “Nor do I ask that of you. As I say, you hear their confessions and know their hearts. You know who lives peacefully, and you know who’s prone to impulsive behavior. What I require of
you is to keep them pacified, any among them with, shall I say, ideas.
“Regardless of what you may think of me and the army I serve, I have no desire to leave dead villagers behind. Whether or not I do, is largely your responsibility. Understood?”
Guillaume shut his eyes and nodded slowly and agreed. How sad a day this was, and would that he’d been born deaf so that he would not have to hear himself acquiescing like a toady.
“Dismissed,” Streckenbach said, and of course that was but one more thing to hate.
*
As they were his people, and he their shepherd, he went from home to home to comfort whom he could. Some families had been forced out and into the cottages of neighbors, as their own homes were appropriated for makeshift barracks and, in one case, a ward for the wounded.
The pile of confiscated weapons grew, with hunting rifles and shotguns and pistols, even implements of daily life on the farm such as pitchforks and scythes. Their lives were no longer their own in Château-sur-Lac, and even God seemed very far away.
Late afternoon, Guillaume left the heart of the village and trudged back up the hill to his church and rectory. For a minute, at the very least, he stood over and contemplated ruts dug into the earth by a heedless motorcycle. He stamped them flat, smoothed them over until no trace of tire remained, then bypassed both home and church. Onward, to the cool dim recesses of the stable.
He found it inside, that hateful thing whose very existence mocked the divine creation beneath its feet. It stood in one of the stalls, stroking the sculpted neck of one of the horses and murmuring into its ear. Beside it the beast looked like a Shetland pony to a normal man.
Such was his first sight of this abomination: the ghastly face, the gigantic stature, the clothing that looked crudely sewn together from existing garments to meet the task of covering its outsize frame. Guillaume saw, and could believe in devils.
“You came,” it said, like a child who feared to trust its own delight.