Escape From Paris (14 page)

He uncorked the apple brandy, took a single mouthful, slowly let it seep down his throat. His eyes closed. He slept lightly, waking several times to lift his head and listen. Maurice had said he would come back. Jonathan was sure Maurice meant what he promised. Had the boy been arrested? Or had the search by the Germans frightened him? What was it he had said? That he couldn't take Jonathan home because his father was so “bitter.” What did that mean?

Jonathan finally sank into a deeper sleep just before dawn, but he woke at the first thinning of the darkness. He crawled out from beneath the bridge and pulled up to his feet. The dry creek bed was not the most direct route to the woods. The most direct route was through chest-high grasses. A careful man could walk through the grasses, step lightly and leave no trail.

Jonathan couldn't walk. He had to crawl and that would trample a nice wide swath that would catch the eye of even the most incurious passerby.

Jonathan eased back down to the ground and began to crawl up the dry rock-strewn channel, pulling his bad leg along. His elbows and sides began to ache from bumping over the pebbles, some as large as baseballs. It took more than an hour to reach the edge of the woods. He rested for a long time, let the sweat cool and dry. It was dim in among the trees, dim and safe like an empty country church with the sunlight piercing the thick canopies of leaves on a slant like light coming through high deep-set windows.

Dim and safe and silent.

He found a good branch almost at once. Lightning had shattered an old oak, wrenching it almost apart, thrusting one immense limb down into the ground, breaking a half dozen branches into pieces. This branch hung from the limb jammed into the ground. Jonathan pulled and it came away, trailing a long piece of bark. The joint end was about three inches in circumference. He hacked off enough from the other end to form a rough crutch about five feet tall.

It only took him only ten minutes to hobble back to the bridge with his new support, though he could already feel the rub beneath his armpit. He would have to try and shape the top of the crutch better, but, by God, he could move. He was impatient to go but he realized he would have to stay on a road. He couldn't strike out across country on a crutch. On a road, there would be laborers or travelers. Or soldiers. Even without his tunic, he was obviously in uniform. He would have to wait until dark when he could hide if he heard others coming.

He didn't permit himself to think too far ahead. The “others” on the road might easily be German soldiers. Would more than likely be German soldiers. But he had to take a chance. He might as well be in a prisoner-of-war camp as stay beneath the bridge.

Somewhere down that road, though, he would have to take another chance. He would have to ask for help. He had no idea where he was. In Northern France, but that was all he knew. He had no money, no food, no papers. He would have to trust to his luck.

He spent the afternoon, an afternoon that passed slowly in the heavy summer heat, trying to make the armrest of his crutch more comfortable. He hacked about on the Mae West but his knife was not sharp enough or strong enough to penetrate the rubbery covering. Finally, he took off his tunic, cut one sleeve off and wrapped it around the top of the crutch.

Twice he lay back against the bank and looked up at the bridge and listened. Once a horse trotted noisily across. The second time a wheezing charcoal-burning truck labored by. This road wasn't heavily traveled. But it was traveled.

Four o'clock. Five o'clock. Six o'clock. As soon as it was dusk, he would start.

He heard the clatter of the horses' hooves first, then the creak of a wagon. It was getting darker. He was impatient for these late travelers to be on their way, to leave him with the road empty and dark ahead.

The wagon reached the bridge, stopped.

Oh, hell. But it wouldn't be Germans. Not in a wagon. Why had a wagon stopped? He sat up with the stirring of hope, began to twist to get awkwardly to his feet, all the while reaching for his makeshift crutch.

“Lieutenant, it's me, Maurice,” and the boy ducked beneath the bridge, carrying an armful of clothes.

Jonathan was sweating and sick to his stomach by the time he struggled into heavy gray trousers. The upper part of his leg was terribly sore to touch, but he didn't need Maurice's whispered pleas for speed to prod him. If a patrol came through the woods, found the stopped wagon, it would investigate. Jonathan stripped off his tunic and his shirt, put on the cotton pullover.

Maurice was scraping out a hole in the dry sandy soil, pushing in the Mae West and the remnants of Jonathan's uniform, spreading dirt to cover them, scattering stones to hide any trace of digging.

Maurice looked curiously at Jonathan's improvised crutch when they stood in the creek bed, ready to climb up to the road. Then he shrugged and helped Jonathan up through the dry prickly grasses to the wagon, talking softly all the while. “Your papers are in your pocket, the back left pocket. They belonged to my brother, Leandre. You are Leandre Martin and you were invalided home from Calais. You were in the fighting at Gravelines.”

Maurice boosted Jonathan into the wagon and ran lightly around to climb in on the other side. He took up the reins and the horse began to move. The wagon jolted on bare iron wheels. Jonathan gripped the wooden seat edge, shifted his weight, trying to find a comfortable position. The boy beside him didn't notice. He was too busy looking up the road and to each side, into the dark shadowy woods. “The thing is,” Maurice was explaining worriedly, “when we reach the barricade at the crossroads, don't say too much. Leave it to me. The Boche don't usually speak very good French. But occasionally one does.”

As the wagon creaked and swayed up the darkening road, Jonathan ran through his new identity in his mind. He was Leandre Martin. God, what a chance Maurice was taking, letting Jonathan use his brother's papers. If the Germans stumbled onto them, there couldn't be any way out. So, Jonathan had better know his story. He practiced out loud, speaking French, saying his little story over and over, a student with an exercise. “I am Leandre Martin. I am twenty-six years old and I live in the village of Ry. My father is Gaston Martin and we have the Martin orchards. I was wounded at Gravelines and invalided home before the war was over.”

Jonathan thumbed through the papers in the fading twilight. Identity card, discharge papers, ration books. “I thought your brother's name was Roger?”

“My younger brother, yes, was with me when we saw you in the sky.”

Jonathan looked down at the papers. “You have another brother then? Leandre.”

“He was seven years older than I. Nine years older than Roger. He was like my father, you see. Tall and very strong. He could work longer hours in the orchards than anyone. Roger and I,” Maurice shrugged, “we are like my mother's people, slender and dark.”

It was almost dark now, Maurice's face pale and formless in the dusk.

“He was wounded at Gravelines.” Jonathan didn't even make it a question.

“My cousin, Michel, brought him back. Leandre did not live quite a week.”

The wagon creaked slowly down the road which wound, a dusty gray ribbon in the twilight, alongside the groves of apple trees.

Maurice sighed. “It has almost killed my father. He used to be . . . such a big man. Do you know what I mean? A loud voice, a strong voice. Everyone heard him and knew who was coming. Now he does not speak for hours and he has grown smaller. He doesn't look so big in his clothes. At night he drinks and then he is angry.” The boy shot a side-long glance at Jonathan then fell quiet.

“He blames the British.” Jonathan said it gravely.

Maurice nodded. “He says it is all the fault of the English, that they made France get into the war and then, when the Boche came, the English left and Frenchmen died holding off the Germans while the English soldiers escaped.”

They rode a while farther in silence. “But you do not agree with your father, Maurice?”

“I do not know what is true, Lieutenant.”

A motorcycle popped in the distance.

Maurice lifted his head, listened. “But I know one thing, Lieutenant, I know who is taking our food and telling us where we may travel and hanging their flag from our city hall. And I know who is still fighting. I don't know anything about you, Lieutenant. I don't know what kind of man you are but I know if I can help you escape and you somehow reach England, you will fly again against the Luftwaffe.”

Fly again. Oh God yes, he would fly again if ever he reached England. The French boy was right on that. And he was desperately needed. How many planes had the RAF lost this week, this month, this summer? Too many. All the squadrons were down to bare bone. They needed every man, experienced, inexperienced, fresh, tired, it didn't matter. Maurice was right. They needed Jonathan, too.

“Right. I'll fly again, Maurice.”

The motorcycle roared up behind them, swerved to pass the wagon on the narrow road. Dust, thick and choking, billowed up, enveloping them. The motorcycle clattered on down the road, the rider not giving them even the slightest glance. Jonathan watched Maurice's face, and he was glad, suddenly, that he was not that German soldier. He hoped no one ever hated him the way Maurice hated the German, impersonally, implacably, not because of who he was but because of what he was. A conqueror. Maurice looked down the road, his face hard and angry, long after the motorcycle was gone.

The air cleared finally and the wagon kept on at its steady even pace. Jonathan began to relax.

“How are you feeling, Lieutenant?”

“Well enough.”

“Is your wound healing?”

Jonathan hesitated.

“Do you need to see the doctor?”

The tension in Maurice's voice was clear enough.

“It doesn't hurt as much,” Jonathan said slowly. “I think with a crutch I can get about.”

“The Boche have started to watch him, Dr. Morrissey. He will come, if we send for him.”

“No,” Jonathan said quickly. “Don't ask him. It's not that urgent.” Funny. He could remember slamming a classroom door on his hand at Oxford and the rush to get to the doctor's and the anxious care to prevent infection. His leg was a wretched mess above the knee but it wasn't at all urgent to see a doctor. The better to live longer. The sun was almost gone, only a faint wavering of pink and orange in the Western sky.

“The barricade's just round this bend. Leave it all to me.”

The wagon creaked to a stop at the crossroads. A sergeant stepped out of a sentry box. “Your papers,” and he peered curiously at them through the dusk.

Maurice pulled out his papers and Jonathan did, too, slowly, trying to look as though he had done it dozens of times as had all Frenchmen since June 21.

The sergeant turned his flashlight on Maurice's card, turned it briefly on his face, then reached out for Jonathan's card. Jonathan handed it over and found the brief brush of the German's hand against his unnerving. Then it was over and the wagon was moving.

Jonathan knew he was sitting rigidly, his shoulders stiff. He tried to relax. He wanted suddenly to look behind, to see if the sentry was watching them, but he fought the impulse away. He had made it past the first barrier. There would be many more on the road back to England.

Back to England. He was swept by homesickness, but it was anguish for an England that he would never see again, no matter whether he escaped from France. The England of unruffled peaceful days with everyone free to pursue his own vision, long walks on quiet Cotswold lanes, afternoons gliding over pond water as green and still as jade, days made up of small and simple rites, accepted then as normal and ordinary and unremarkable, recognized only now that they were gone as infinitely precious.

“Lieutenant.”

Jonathan's head snapped up.

“Round this bend and we'll be there. I'll take back Leandre's papers. You'll get others soon.”

There. Jonathan had no idea where he was. He had not even thought about their destination.

The cluster of brick houses turned their backs to the road and looked abandoned with no single flicker of light showing.

“Just past the oak tree, I'll stop for a moment. Walk into the passageway, between the high brick walls. The first door on your left, a huge wooden one, knock three short, one long. Mme. Moreau is expecting you. Remember now, the first door on your left.”

The poster was everywhere, plastered against walls and shop windows, wrapped around tall silver lampposts, one to a car in the Metro, slapped every hundred yards along the station wall.

Linda twisted in the packed corridor so that she would not be facing the poster, but the train slid to a stop, and through the fly-speckled window, clearly visible, eye level, she saw another one and read the harsh unrelenting notice again:

ALL PERSONS HARBOURING ENGLISH SOLDIERS MUST DELIVER SAME TO THE NEAREST KOMMANDANTUR NOT LATER THAN 20 OCTOBER 1940. THOSE PERSONS WHO CONTINUE TO HARBOUR ENGLISHMEN AFTER THIS DATE WITHOUT HAVING NOTIFIED THE AUTHORITIES WILL BE SHOT.