A Country Road, A Tree (30 page)

The first shots jolted him out of sleep; the second burst made him register what had smashed his sleep apart. They seemed close, but the way that the sound would bounce around the valleys, bluffs and outcrops here made it hard to tell what direction they had come from. Sten gun, he’d have laid money on it, set on automatic: somebody was making very free with their ammunition. He reached out for Suzanne, but Suzanne wasn’t there; of course, she was staying with Josette and Henri, so he just lay sweating, alert, listening to the birds cawing to the sky and the empty echoes down the valley, waiting for whatever happened next.

Nothing happened next.

So he got up, crossed to the window and opened the shutters. In the pre-dawn blue, there was just the pale road and the dark trees and the burnt-paper scraps of birds settling back into their roosts, so he closed the shutters and pulled on his shirt and trousers.

He was downstairs when the milk cart rattled past the front of the house, going at an unusually brisk trot. He trod into his boots, drew the bolts and headed out into the lane. He glanced in both directions, but there was nothing going on, so he went a little way into town at a tired amble, keeping to the shadowy edge of the lane beside the sprawling wild roses, under pollarded limes. The dash of a rat made him jump, but that was that.

The town itself was peaceful: just the early-morning unshuttering of shops, the bakery glowing, the scent of bread making his stomach clutch. So he turned back and headed the other way, out of town, passing the front of the little house and on towards Anna Beamish’s, and still there was nothing to be seen in the raising light but the dusty road and the trees and the dry grass and the snails trailing their way across the verges and weighing down the stems. Back to bed, then, if nothing’s doing. But then a farm cart came trundling round the corner, down past the side of Anna’s place, and the horse jibbed and sidestepped, and it was all the driver could do to keep the old cob steady, and they clattered on past him, and the driver had his gaze fixed dead ahead and didn’t even nod.

And that was when he peered along the lane and saw the soldiers.

They were a grey heap up against Anna’s fence, but he brought himself to move towards it. Then there was the smell of blood. He stared down at stockinged feet, a hand curled in the dust, the dark inside of a fallen-open mouth. Skin was pale blue; blood was black; a button, though, caught the morning light and glittered.

He stands now, and he looks, and his tongue presses against the back of his teeth, and a tooth gives, and it hurts, and he stands, and he looks, and he stands, and he looks, and the dogs are barking.

And then someone comes out of Anna’s house. He hears the door go. The dogs come tumbling with her, beside themselves. The door falls shut.

“Is it yourself?” she calls.

He nods. His gorge rises. They are in trouble now.

She comes striding down the path towards him, the dogs barking and twining around her ankles; she’s knotting the cord of a tartan dressing gown.

“For God’s sake,
whisht,
” she says, and scoops up one of the creatures and holds it to her.

“We heard,” she says. “But we thought it best to stay inside. One thinks one should telephone to someone. But who does one telephone these days?”

“There are two—” The words stick in his throat; they have hooks. He turns back to look at the heap. “Bodies.”

“Definitely dead?” She peers over the gate; her question’s answered. She puts the dog down again and slips out to join him, leaving the creatures there to yap and whine. “Damn damn damn damn damn.”

She frowns, scans up and down the road. Death itself has become contagious; they could catch it here themselves. “We’ll have to do something.”

“Call the priest?” he suggests.

“If they get taken into town, the whole place would be implicated.”

They stand in silence.

“We came through a town,” he says, “where there’d been reprisals.” The woman with the frozen eyes. The man with a hole in his cheek, his jaw on show.

“We can’t just leave them lying here,” Miss Beamish says.

“No.”

She becomes brisk. She’s off back through her gate, yelling at the dogs, striding up the path, while he stands there with the dead. Up at the house, the other Suzanne is trying to get the dogs indoors. Voices are raised over their barking:
What is it? Oh Good God, what are we going to do?
He looks at a foot, the hole where a toenail has scythed right through the wool. The soldier’s gaiters are lying loose on the dust nearby. The killers took the boots.

It’s early yet. The road is quiet. Few people pass this way. They might get away with it.

Anna rejoins him. She has thrown on slacks and a polo-shirt and brings two garden spades, sloped together over a shoulder. She has also brought a bottle.

“My pal suggested this.” The bottle is lifted for inspection. Brandy.

“She is very wise.”

“She is. She really is.”

They consider the men. Slavic, high-boned faces, one softer than the other, younger, with a scattering of freckles like a pancake. The eyes are open and they’re grey, and the corneas are creasing as they dry, and the flies gather to sip away the wet. The Armée de l’Est, serving here, were recruited from conquered countries; they were prisoners of war.

“State of them, poor lads.”

She hands him the bottle. He uncorks it, swigs brandy, hands the bottle back.

“Where’ll we…”

They glance around.

“Over there,” she says with a nod. There, the verge is wider. Wide enough for a grave.

They go past the bodies.

“Russians, do you suppose they are?” he asks.

“Could be. Could be Poles. Took their chances, didn’t they? Either this or a labour camp. You can see why.”

The other is darker and seems a little older than his companion, a little harder-looking. Sunburned.

Anna turns her face away. He follows her on to the wider scruffy margin before the trees. He wants to say something consoling, something useful. There is nothing consoling or useful to say.

Her voice is dry; he hears her swallow. “Here?”

“Here’s as good as anywhere,” he says.

They shunt their spades into the ground. They begin to dig.

—

It takes a long time to dig a grave. As the diggers sink lower into the earth, the inner surface grows blood-red, damp, veinous. Paler rusty topsoil trickles down inside. He turns his sucking stone over in his mouth, tucks it down alongside his back teeth; the nerves sing like wires.

After an hour or so, Anna clambers out, careless of her clothes, and goes back to the house. No one passes; no one comes to investigate the gunshots in the night. He is grateful for the isolation of their little houses, for the self-preservation that is keeping their few neighbours at a distance.

When Anna returns, the other Suzanne comes with her, frowning, worried, carrying two bottles of beer and a biscuit tin. They drink the beer and eat in silence, squatting in the dust. The other Suzanne offers to help with the digging, but there is no room really for another in the grave, so they wave her away; also, the fewer people tainted by association, the better. They swig more brandy, swipe at flies, and get back to their work.

They dig as the sun climbs into the sky and the heat grows, and the flies buzz loud and the smell gets worse. He runs with sweat.

“That’ll do,” she says, breathless. “Won’t it?”

They climb out.

He turns his face aside as he hauls the boy up by the armpits. He is much heavier than he looks. Flies buzz around him, but he no longer has a free hand to swat them away. Anna huffs down to grab the feet, and between them they lug him over to the edge of the pit. They lay him down beside it.

“How do we do this?” she asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Swing him in or roll him?”

Neither seems appropriate. They do not move.

“Right.” She bends to grab the feet again. “Come on.”

He just stands there.

“What?”

“I don’t like it.”

“No. I know. I don’t either.”

He hunkers down. They grab handfuls of grey-green serge, drag on limbs, heave and push. The body thumps over on to its side; a hand dangles in. They shove again; there’s a fall of dirt and the body tumbles and scuffs down the side of the pit. It lands awkwardly at an angle, feet higher than the head. The sides of the grave are too oblique, the base not flat enough for dignity; the boy’s neck twists back and he is profiled on the dirt.

The two of them straighten up. He’s about to wipe his mouth, but then lets his arm fall, shakes out unclean hands and wipes them one against the other.

“We’ve made a poor show of this,” he says.

“We haven’t much experience,” she says.

“I’ve only buried dogs before.”

“It’s not the same, is it?”

“No.”

They stand, looking down at the body in the pit.

“There’s the other fellow.”

They turn and go back, and lift him too.

By midday, the bodies are swallowed up and gone. All that’s to be seen is a darker patch on the pale earth, and that is drying out in the sun. They should not be left here. They should not rot into this red earth. Theirs should be the black tilth of home, years from now, decades on. Half a century or more, they could have had. They could have seen the next millennium in, if this century had not turned out to be the shambles that it is.

He wipes his face with his handkerchief and it comes away smeared with red. Anna’s grey Aertex shirt is powdered with red dust and patched with sweat; the sweat and dust make a red mask of her face. She sinks down on the edge of the road and just sits there in the dust. Her head hangs. He folds himself down beside her. He hands her the brandy.

“I’m too thirsty for brandy.” She uncorks the bottle, drinks anyway. “That was a bad thing we did there.”

He nods.

“I feel disgusting.”

“I do too.”

Anna raises the bottle. “To the end of all of this whorehouse mess,” she says. “To the end of this heap of fecking bollocks, this pile of whorish shit, because I have had my fill and more of it, so I have.”

The bundling forth of French and Irish swearing makes him smile, despite himself. She takes another slug of brandy. She goes to wipe the bottleneck, then, having nothing clean on her, not even an inch of sleeve, just hands it over as it is.

“To the end,” he says, and lifts the bottle, and the brandy burns and warms, and seems for a while to help.

—

That evening he has barely drifted into sleep before he’s jerked out of it like a fish on a hook. A whistle in the street. He slips out of bed, leaves Suzanne sleeping. Her lashes long, her hair tumbled and damp. He hadn’t known—or if he had, he had not remembered—that she would be there. Does it mean something that she is there?

From the window he can see a large group of
maquis
waiting in the street.

Someone yells up: “The sons of whores are on the run! Come on down. We’re to give ’em what for.”

He grabs clothes and boots, runs downstairs to join them. They march down the middle of the road in the blue evening; they talk, they laugh, they make themselves conspicuous. What, after all, do they have to hide? The balance of the world is shifting; everything is sliding and shivering and settling into different patterns once again. This is their land, this is their home; their noisy footfalls are reclaiming it. He finds himself watching their feet as they plant them on the grit; he watches the slow circle of the cycling boys’ legs and he cannot partake of their joy, their comfort, their sense of ease. He is looking out for German low boots on a farmhand’s feet.

The group clumps along the cart tracks; they pick up others at crossroads, they call at cottages; the crowd grows. They descend towards the main road along the valley floor, where an arms cache has already been dug. They drag away bushes; they unpack the wares, divvy up ammunition, pace out the gaps between charges and lay them. Bonhomme hands him a cold Sten and he hefts it in his grip and recalls the green wine bottle flinging itself in fragments up into the air.

Somebody is dishing out hand grenades. One is placed in his palm like an apple. He puts it in his pocket. It weighs his jacket down, makes it droop.

From the south comes the thud of shells, and distant gunfire. Aeroplanes grind invisibly across the sky. The Armée de l’Est is expected to retreat this way. It has tanks and trucks and artillery and an urgent need to be elsewhere. The
maquisards
have a few charges, a few rifles and a hand grenade each. They have their own self-righteous outrage to compel them:
la patrie, le terroir, la revanche.
He can feel none of this. We are fleas on a dog’s back, he thinks; the most we’ll do is make it stop and scratch.

He lays the rifle down beside him on the bank and it catches a guilty sheen of the half-light. The hand grenade lies cold against his thigh. His own blood throbs next to it. He supposes he will throw the thing, if he is obliged to. He is not certain that he can bring himself to throw it accurately. In the half-dark, there are shiftings and sighs. To the south, the skirmishing continues. Someone snores.

He drops off the edge of wakefulness and into harbour-water sleep, livid with dreams, with swaying treetops in blue sky, with the stomach-swoop of falling. He dreams his mouth is full of earwigs and he is chewing them up and swallowing just to be rid of them, but they are bitter and he spits and spits and spits, and still he cannot be rid of them. He runs a stick along the railings, and up in the Dublin hills they are blasting granite:
boom.

He wakes to the faint crackle of gunfire, the crunch of artillery. He gets up stiffly and stalks off for a piss. Someone smokes a cigarette. It is dawn already and it is cold, and if the Armée de l’Est did retreat last night, then they did not retreat this way.

“Here.” He slips his hand into his pocket, draws out the hand grenade and hands it back.

The
maquis
walk home in the early-morning cool, rifles shouldered. The boys are skittish, jostling; the older men tramp solidly and speculate. The Armée de l’Est must have got entangled with the Yanks, must be fighting harder than you might have thought conscripted POWs would fight. Or they must have taken another route, out towards Avignon or Aix. But this talk is soon stitched through with hopes for this year’s vintage, the promise of a puppy from the best gun dog’s next litter, a game of
pétanque.
He walks with them, but is not of them; the talk winds round him while he is silent, and his footfalls land on earth that was never to do with him. At his gate, he swings the gun from his shoulder and hands it back to Bonhomme. Who takes it and claps his arm and says, “Thank you, my friend.”