An Owl's Whisper (32 page)

And inside,
Madame
Hélène, the plump, old
propriétaire
whom everyone kissed on coming in and again on going, was sovereign. Hélène, whose puppet-like face, with its hoary skin set off by thin red hair on top and garishly rouged cheeks on the sides, launched nary a ship. Hélène, whose hearty laugh, ever lurking behind the ivory cigarette holder clenched in her amber teeth, warmed as well as her stove’s fire.

Madame
Hélène took an instant liking to Eva and Stan. She mentioned an American boy she knew after the Great War, and maybe that had something to do with it. She always seated them in a stoveside booth, even holding it for their arrival. Hélène made them special dishes for lunch. After a week, she slipped Eva the key to one of the two upstairs rooms overlooking the
Place
. She was blunt about it: “For your lovemaking. You can’t very well spend your afternoons in his hospital bed, you know. Besides my rooms are famous, or perhaps, infamous.” Hélène leaned close to Eva and whispered, “This inn got its name in the Seventeenth Century, when people used its upper floor to watch the executions of murderers, rapists, and spies carried out in the
Place
.” She arched her eyebrows.

Eva’s only reaction was flinching at the word
spies
.

When she and Stan finished lunch, Eva used her finger to draw a heart in the moisture clouding the window next to their booth. She took out the old iron key Hélène had given her. It was black and heavy and it hung from her finger on a loop of cord. Eva swung the key as might a hypnotist, telling Stan with an enticing grin, “
Madame
Hélène invites us to take a view of the
Place
from upstairs. Come up with me and you’ll see something.”

Stan followed her through the door at the back of the tavern. They creaked up a narrow, steep set of stairs to the second floor. At the top was a long hallway, set off by a railing from an open storage area. The storeroom was dusty. Old furniture, pictures, and boxes were piled up. A large, orange-stripe cat crouched on one box and watched the couple pass. At the hallway’s end were doors. Eva went directly to the door with the brass numeral
2
. She gave the key to Stan, and he inserted it into the lock and strained to turn it. The lock groaned and finally disengaged with a clunk. Instead of a doorknob, there was a hinged brass ring. He lifted the ring and turned it, and the old door swung into the room. As it did, a flood of sunlight poured out, enveloping Eva in the hallway. Gray as the weather had been, the brightness surprised Stan. Eva looked so radiant, so fresh, he felt as giddy as he had the first time he saw her on that bicycle in Lefebvre.

Stan caught his breath. He bowed and showed Eva in. He stepped in behind her and looked around. With the rain stopped and the sky clear, the tiny room sang with sunlight. There was a small wooden table with a candle, an ashtray, and a bottle of wine and glasses. There was a bed, turned open in invitation. It was made with white sheets and pillows and a red and white checked duvet, and it had white metal frame. Between bed and table there was a handsome
Jugendstil
floor lamp. The walls had been papered long ago in white with blue pinstripes. Along one seam that paper had begun to peel, showing its baroque-style predecessor. Framed pictures of Parisian street cafés hung over the bed.

Eva took both Stan’s hands in hers and leaned back, letting her blond tresses cascade down. “Oh Stanley, isn’t it the sweetest little nest? And it is all ours for these days.” She pulled herself up. “Dance with me.”

Stan smiled at her playfulness and her beauty. “But there’s no music, hon.”

“We have the music in our hearts.”

Eva moved her left hand to Stan’s shoulder and she pulled herself close to him. “And so. One, two three. One, two three. One, two three.”

They swooshed back and forth through the room’s open space. After a minute and several near misses, they bumped into the floor lamp, sending it over. Stan caught it before it crashed to the floor. He set it right and bowed in apology. “
Pardon un gauche Américain, Mademoiselle.
”

Eva laughed. “Do you apologize to the lamp or to me?”

“If I offended you, lovely young lady, please accept my regrets.”

Eva peered into his face. “Stanley, nothing of you offends me. For me you are a prince most charming. You are my love.”

As if the air in his lungs had frozen, Stan was unable to speak. He pulled Eva close. His mouth fell on hers like a wave breaking on the shore. He pushed back a blond tress, and his lips brushed over cheek to ear. The lobe felt hot. Stan inhaled, and the ambrosial scent of her hair overcame him. He heard her breathing quicken. Felt her body going limp in his arms. Yielding. Welcoming. Asking. He held the back of her head and kissed her ear. Then his mouth slipped back to hers. After a moment, he pulled away. Pulled away because he wanted to see her lips, to drink in their shape, their color. To see her ears, her eyes. To see
her
, yielding, giving. To memorize it all.

Eva brought his lips back to hers. She kissed as if mouths were portals of the soul and a kiss might make their two souls one.

“I want to swim,” Eva whispered. “in the fragrant water. I want to swim in the fragrant water with you. I want to become as water with you.” She moved backward, imperceptibly at first, pulling Stan along. She moved them together toward the bed.

Stan looked at the bed over Eva’s shoulder. It was opened, welcoming, drawing them to it. He felt powerless to resist, even if he had wanted to, and the fire in his thighs and the certainty of his erection made clear that he did not.

When they were near the bed, Eva stopped. She looked into Stan’s eyes and smiled the warmest smile he could imagine. She removed her sky blue cardigan sweater, the one he said matched her eyes. The plainness of her white cotton blouse brought out the color of autumn flax, wind-caressed and fully ripe, in her hair. She unbuttoned and slipped off the blouse and undid the button and the zipper at the side of her skirt. She let it fall.

Stan looked at her standing before him in her slip. Her talk of water made him marvel—of all the GIs around, an ocean of them, she chose a country kid from Hooker County. She chose him. “Let me catch up,” Stan whispered. He quickly removed his jacket, his tie, his shirt, his undershirt, and his pants.

Eva pulled the straps of her slip off of her shoulders. She purred an
I’m-yours
sigh and put her hands on Stan’s waist. Stan eased the slip down till it fell to the floor. He held her close and felt the hardness, the hotness of her nipples on his chest.

Eva slid onto the bed pulling Stan along. He slipped off her underpants and his own shorts. He kissed her lips, her ear, her hair, her eyes. They made love. The first time. Stan was amazed how natural, how easy, how right it felt. Afterward, he lay next to her feeling consumed, taken up in her. As if floating in warm, buoyant, intoxicatingly-fragrant water, he drifted off to sleep.

When he awoke, he saw Eva, wearing his shirt. She was writing at the table.

Stan sat up in bed. “Not writin’ a good-bye note, I hope.”

Eva looked at him. “Maybe…and maybe not.”

Stan was glad to see her grin.

“I’m just writing some lines about today,” she said.

“About us, today?”

“Maybe, and maybe not.” She grinned again. “When I’ve finished, you can see.”

Stan lolled in the bed. Five minutes later, she brought him the paper. It bore a dozen lines with words crossed out, moved, and new ones inserted here and there. “Before this, don’t believe I ever knew somebody who wrote a real poem,” he said.

“Mother Catherine loved poetry.” Eva gazed through the window as if seeing the sunbathed square could change the past. “She taught me.”

He kissed her hand. “I’d like to hear the poem from your lips. Will you read it out?”

Eva took the paper. She sat on the bed with her back to Stan and read.

Stan said nothing.

Eva turned to him. “It’s OK?”

“OK? Yeah, it’s OK.” Stan put his arms around Eva and kissed her belly. “Guess maybe I do know what you mean by fragrant water.”

Picnic

On February third Stan got rid of the eye patch. He still had a trace of blurred vision and light sensitivity, but his progress was definite and steady. He moved from the hospital to make room for casualties arriving from the fighting in Germany.

Pending reassignment, hospital administration billeted Stan in a boxcar converted into sleeping quarters for recovering GIs. Ninety of these boxcars were set out on rail sidings near the Guillemins train station in Liege. Each had eight double bunk beds, sixteen lockers, and a kerosene heater. There were mess cars and a shower unit with hot water. In February 1945 almost every one of the 1,440 bunks was occupied.

One evening when Stan returned from a day spent with Eva, a visitor waited to see him. It was Sgt. Waxman from the supply depot at Lefebvre.

Waxman was friendlier than Stan had ever seen him. “Stan, my boy, let’s go have us a drink.” They went to a small café just across from the train station.

When they had their beers, Waxman pulled out and lit a half smoked cigar. He held the stogie under his nose and inhaled approvingly, as if the aroma were lilac.

“So, how you doing now, kid?” Waxman asked.

“Not bad,” Stan said. “Things OK back at the depot?”

“Yeah, it’s real quiet now. Rumor is we’ll be moving up to Dortmund in Germany soon, but it ain’t official.”

Stan nodded. He knew Waxman hadn’t come by to discuss unit status.

Waxman looked around the café. He leaned toward Stan and said in a hushed voice, “Chandler, I gotta hand it to you. However you did it, you had it smack on about the Krauts and the depot.” Waxman pulled a wad of paper from his pocket—the one on which Stan had predicted the German offensive.

Stan’s right eyelid twitched.

Waxman continued, “On the Monday after you left, Thane Christie’s on duty, right? I’d told him to ring me if anyone he don’t know shows up.” Waxman relit the cigar. “So I gets this call from Thane. He tells me three fellas he don’t know just pulled up to the depot gate in a jeep. These jokers show him orders. They had GI unis and knew the day’s password—the challenge was
Spike
and the reply was
Jones
. Christie says they even went into singing a few bars of Spike’s song,
Der Fuhrer’s Face
. Laughing about it. So I comes over and asks ’em a few more questions. Most they know, a few they don’t. But it’s always one guy that’s answering. When he can’t tell me that B&D stands for Blanchard and Davis, I’d had enough. Called the security office to send up some more MPs. Next thing you know, big-time shooting busts out. Like the fuckin’ OK Corral. Christie gets the gate locked all right, but he takes a couple of slugs to the gut, poor old scottie. I held ’em off till the cavalry rides up. We kills two of ’em and wounds th’other. Corps G-2 takes him off for questioning and damned if he ain’t a Kraut commando! Shot the SOB as a spy that Thursday morning.”

The sergeant blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. “Never did find out how they got the papers, the uniforms, the jeep, the passwords. A couple others pulled the same stunt at the stone bridge in Lefebvre. Thanks to your warning, they was foiled, too.”

Waxman puffed again and moved his head even closer to Stan. “They was figuring on gassing their tanks with the depot’s fuel stocks and dashing over the bridge all the way to Antwerp. Kid, it was just like you called it.” He paused like it was Stan’s turn to talk.

Stan looked at his hands. “Sorry Thane got shot up. Good you were on the ball, Sarge.” He fidgeted. “Look, I gotta be gettin’ back. I’m supposed to in by 2100 hours.”

Waxman slid his chair close to Stan’s. “OK, OK. First tell me how you knew.”

“Aw, Sarge, I didn’t know. Probably was just a lucky guess. Think I had a dream or somethin’ about a Kraut attack. It seemed so real, I had to tell someone. I figured you’d laugh, so I wrote this.” He picked up the note. “Hey, I really gotta run now. Thanks for the beer.”