Transgression

A
burst of pigeons flew up off the narrow cobblestone street, cleared the roof of the nearest building and scattered across the grey sky. Hands fleeing in front of the Germans, Adele Georges thought to herself. It was a futile gesture; they’d already been chopped off.

Adele was given to such thoughts and visions. They visited her mind, filled her eyes, sometimes invited, sometimes not, but always more vividly than she’d expected.

“Adele is blessed with an imagination that would rival Dante’s,” her father had remarked many times. “She’ll be a great artist.”

“She’s empty-headed” this from her mother. “Any absurd idea can fly in there and find a home. She should live in the real world.” And on the tip of Madame Georges’ tongue, “And so should you.”

During the first weeks of the Occupation this hand story had swept the country but it had turned out not to be true. The Germans were not cutting off the hands of hundreds of young men to make a future resistance impossible. Nevertheless darkness had come to France the year before, and death, and mind-numbing fear.

Adele walked on toward the Domestic Population Bureau of Information and took her place at the end of a long queue. The line shuffled slowly and silently ahead. Finally she reached the open door. Rising up on her toes, she could see a Wehrmacht officer in his field-green uniform talking to an old lady. She wondered if he was wearing one of her trousers. She thought it was quite possible, because that’s what she did every night now, sit in a long
dimly lit room in the middle of a row of rough women and sew seams on an endless procession of Wehrmacht pants.

The queue divided into two beyond the doorway, the right tributary heading off toward another officer. Unlike the Wehrmacht man, this one was sitting rigidly at his desk, his eyes fixed on a tall, frail-looking individual who was standing in front of him kneading his cap in his hands. His uniform was black.

Adele’s body went rigid.

Just that morning, René had screamed at her not to go to the Domestic Population Bureau of Information.

“It’s a Wehrmacht office,” she’d stubbornly yelled back. “They don’t know anything! Besides, I have to!”

Adele aimed herself at the tributary to the left. After another half-hour of shuffling, she sat down and asked her question.

“Perhaps your father is dead,” the middle-aged officer replied in a reasonable tone. “So many soldiers couldn’t be identified.”

“Yes.” Adele was trying to keep her voice low without whispering, so that the young SS officer sitting only twenty feet away wouldn’t overhear, but wouldn’t become suspicious either. “But my father wasn’t a soldier. He was a doctor. He was serving in the medical corps.”

The man smiled sadly at the naiveté of this remark, particularly coming from such a diminutive and sweet-looking girl. It was all Adele could do not to spit in his face. She hated him, she hated every German on the face of the earth. She kept her expression set and blank.

“How old are you, dear?” he asked in his raspy French.

“Sixteen.”

“In time of war, front lines collapse back on themselves, even safe positions can be over-run. Bombs fall, shells explode. You say your father was stationed near Arras?”

He was still speaking kindly enough. Tears, unplanned for and unwanted, burned in Adele’s eyes. “That’s the last we heard from him.”

The officer reached for a cigarette and lit it. “Very high casualties there. And it wasn’t until after the Armistice was signed that we allowed French authorities on to the battlefields. Many weeks under a very hot sun,
a hundred thousand French soldiers strewn everywhere. Very difficult to identify.”

“We have heard that a million of our soldiers were taken prisoner and transported. We think our father is in your country.”

They felt the SS officer’s eyes fall on them at the same moment. The older man shifted in his chair. “Why haven’t you made inquiries to your own authorities?” he said more sharply.

Adele leaned forward–there was no stopping now. “We have. Every week for months but they have no information about prisoners in Germany. They said we should come here.”

Adele could see the young man rising like a black cloud in the corner of her eye.

“May I ask this young lady a question?” He had excellent French.

“Certainly, Captain.”

Adele looked up.

The young man’s pale eyes were fixed on hers. “Tell me, why did you wait so long to make this inquiry?”

“We were waiting for our father to return home. We hoped he’d just been wounded.”

“How long did you wait? Two months? Four?”

He sat down on the corner of the desk. His black pants, flaring out at the thighs, were tucked neatly inside the tops of his gleaming boots. Adele tried to concentrate on the seams.

“We made repeated inquiries, we went to our town hall, we wrote to hospitals, to the special centres of information in Paris. No one’s lists are complete. They always say we have to wait for more information to come in.”

“So you find no information from French sources, but you hope for the best, that your father has been transported to Germany. And now, almost a year later, you come here to inquire if this is indeed true. I ask you again, what took you so long?”

“We were told complete lists of prisoners would be made available to our officials, but to this day they have not been made available. We waited and prayed.”

The young SS captain stared at her in silence.

Adele examined her bruised hands and broken fingernails.

“What is your father’s name?”

“Henri Paul-Louis Georges.”

“What was his occupation?”

“She says he was a medical doctor.” The Wehrmacht officer answered for her.

“It is always of interest when people seem slow to bring a name to our attention, particularly in a matter that seems so routine. We have to wonder why. But we have your father’s name now. Thank you.”

Adele nodded, got up and walked out of the Domestic Population Bureau of Information. She couldn’t feel her legs.

René was waiting for her, sitting at the kitchen table smoking one of his black-market Turkish cigarettes. His dark hair was uncut and wild-looking, his fingernails were black with grease, and he was trying to grow a beard. He glared at Adele through a cloud of blue smoke when she opened the back door.

René was older than Adele by only thirteen months but already her head barely reached his shoulder. For some infuriating reason her body was refusing to grow at an acceptable rate. Her hair was black and thick and wild about her head. They both had prominent eyebrows, high cheekbones, and the same dark eyes, though Adele’s eyes were larger and more luminous and projected an appealing vulnerability. With no effort at all they seemed to be able to draw all kinds of people to her. Adele and René had been in a heightened state of competition all their lives, whether it was to demonstrate who could balance a spoon on the end of their nose the longest, who could make the funniest remarks at the dinner table or who could deliver to their father the most impressive school report. After the first few grades, Adele wasn’t really in the running when it came to school.

“René has such a conventional mind,” Adele had remarked to her father one day in an attempt to account for why her reports were full of four point
fives and fives, while René’s reports glowed with columns of sixes. “I’m going to be an artist.” It had been a blatant attempt to use her father’s best thoughts about her as a defence.

Henri Paul-Louis Georges had smiled at this, though whether it was because he was slightly appalled or slightly amused, it was difficult to tell. No doubt his school reports had once glowed with straight sixes, too.

“Then you must decide what kind of artist you’re going to be-run-of-the-mill, like this report, or exceptional. Be exceptional, Adele. Become well-educated, think deeply on all things, and then turn and show the world its true face. Like Dante.” He’d smiled and squeezed her hands. “Dante aside, whatever you do, you must try your best to be of service to your fellow man. That’s the most important thing in life. Isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Adele had replied.

“Then you must acquire an education.”

Now Adele closed the back door and decided to ignore René for as long as possible. She put the kettle on to boil and began to rummage through the cupboards to see what Old Raymond, the family’s chauffeur when they still had their touring car, their gardener when they still paid attention to the gardens, had managed to buy with that day’s quota of food tickets.

She could hear her other brothers, Bibi the youngest at four, and Jean six, playing loudly somewhere in the house.

“So,” René said, “what happened?”

Adele looked into the tea jar. It had been empty that morning, but now there was a little pyramid of black tea leaves sitting in the bottom. God bless Raymond.

“What did you find out?” René persisted.

“Nothing.” Adele tried to sound as casual as possible. “This Wehrmacht officer looked up Father’s name. But their lists aren’t complete either. It’s very slow, getting information out of Germany, even for them. He said I should come back in two weeks’ time.”

René held his cigarette between his teeth and clapped his hands together in a slow show of appreciation. Adele knew her brother very well. The sound hurt her ears. She braced herself.

“Well done. Well done! And the SS officer, what did he say?”

“What SS officer?”

“You stupid little shit!” René yelled at her.

“Why did you follow me?” Adele yelled back.

René raised one of his greasy hands and rubbed it against his face as if he were trying to rub off her indirect admission of guilt. Adele could see a purple vein on his forehead pumping blood. He got up slowly and moved around the table. “I didn’t follow you. One of my men did.”

“Ha!” Adele retorted, her voice, she hoped, ringing with sharp scorn and ridicule. One of his men, what a dreamer.

“What did you tell the SS officer and what did he say to you?”

“He doesn’t suspect anything. They always ask questions, that’s all they do. They don’t follow everything up.”

René clasped the edge of the sink and closed his eyes. When he opened them again and turned her way, his eyes looked bloodshot. “Did you give him our father’s name?”

“What other name would I give him? What good would it do to give him a fictitious name, so we could find a fictitious father?”

René’s hand shot out, grabbed Adele’s thin arm and in one swift motion slammed her up against the cupboard. “I told you not to go there, I forbade it, and now you’ve given him away!”

“That’s all in your head! He’s waiting for us to find him. He needs us to help him. He needs to come home!”

“He’ll never come home now!”

“He will, he will, he will!”

“Murderer!” René’s mouth opened in a scream.

He let Adele’s arm go and leaned against the wall. He turned his face away and started to cry.

Adele couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d pulled out a gun and shot her. Great wrenching sobs shook his body.

Adele reached up to him, held his head. “René,” she whispered, “dear René.”

René pulled away from her and rushed out the door.