Transgression (10 page)

A man, then, Jack thought.

“This stuff should be reasonably free of maggots.” Miles smiled at Jack. Jack didn’t return the smile. Miles flipped open the jacket. There was a label sewn inside. “Made in Toronto,” Miles said, “not bad quality. Nothing in any of the pockets, of course.”

Jack picked up the belt. It was worn and cracked and somebody had punched an extra hole in it some distance inside the regular holes.

“The pants are rough,” Miles said, fingering them, “worsted. Never were much. Worn down to nothing now. The shoes were half-decent, though, at one time.”

Jack put the belt down and picked up one of the shoes, the lace untied and hanging down, the black leather barely discernible below a smear of reddish mud. The lace was a make-shift length of sturdy twine. Jack turned the shoe over. More mud, and caught between the worn heel and the sole, he could see a thin bluish seam of clay.

“The clothes are cast-offs, in our opinion,” Miles said, “probably a charity case. You don’t know anyone around town who dresses like this, do you?”

Jack shook his head.

“A transient then,” Miles went on, “a hobo. Someone like that?”

“Hmm,” Jack said.

Miles began to put the clothing back into the satchel. “He was shot.”

“Was he?”

“Yes.” Miles’s alert blue eyes were even more so now, inquisitive, searching, staring directly at the chief. “In the back of the head. Execution-style.”

A
dele and Manfred walked hand in hand up the narrow road toward the village of La Bouille. His hand felt as rough as the scales on a fish. Adele had planned to admonish him immediately and severely for not writing, but she couldn’t. Not the way he looked. Not now. They walked along in silence.

Most of the couples turned in at the side of a rambling white-washed hotel, climbing down some steps to a large stone terrace that over-looked the river. Manfred and Adele followed them. The bright air was full of laughter. Nervous waiters ran back and forth. Girlfriends sat on boyfriends’ laps. Drinks were ordered, cigarettes were smoked, young children were lifted up and dangled over the smiling faces of their fathers.

Adele and Manfred sat at a small table on the edge of the crowd. Manfred lit a cigarette. His hands shook. Two of his fingernails were black and a thumbnail was missing. He ordered two glasses of beer.

Adele waited for him to tell her what had happened. She wondered how long she’d have to wait.

“They came for us in trucks,” Manfred finally said. “This was two days before we were to meet.” He looked apologetic. “I could send you no word.”

“I nearly drowned.”

Manfred looked surprised.

“The night we were supposed to meet. It rained.”

“I am so very sorry,” Manfred said.

“Why didn’t you write me?” She tried not to sound accusatory.

“I could not.”

“Why not? I was told you were in Russia, I thought you might be dead. How could you go away like that and only be forty miles away and not write?”

“It was dangerous.”

“Dangerous? Do you know what’s dangerous? Not knowing what’s happened to you and going mad, that’s what’s dangerous!”

Manfred glanced toward the other soldiers. “I apologize.”

“That’s not an explanation!” Adele shouted.

Manfred leaned toward her as if he were going to kiss her, his face only an inch away. “I could not write a letter, I was planning to run. The censors record all addresses. Once I disappeared, their records would lead to you.”

“So why didn’t you run? Why didn’t you come for me?”

“I could not. So many patrols, I did not think I could make it.”

“Then why didn’t you write?”

Adele didn’t know why she was going on like this, around and around as if she were stupidly stuck on one thing, like Lucille Rocque or someone.

Lucille was one of the girls sitting on a soldier’s lap. Her soldier, her famous Wilhelm, had coarse peasant features and a head that looked like a boulder. Right now he seemed very pleased with himself. Lucille’s lipstick was smeared all over his cheeks and mouth.

Manfred shifted back in his chair. He rolled his cigarette around between his ruined thumb and fingers. “Every day I thought, This is the day I go.” His dark eyes lit up for a moment with their familiar warmth and then the light went out again. “I shovel and build scaffolds and pour concrete up and down the coast. Sometimes I drive a truck. I have travelled many miles pursuing this new profession. Clerks are beasts of burden now so the real soldiers can reinforce the Eastern Front.”

He can’t do this work, Adele thought, he’s not like the others, he’s too intelligent, it’s too much for someone like him.

They strolled around the village arm in arm, wandering down the back lanes and along the riverbank. Adele worked at carrying on a one-sided conversation, telling Manfred about Old Raymond’s death and the arrival
of Madame Théberge and anything else she could think of and all the time feeling increasingly nervous about his long silences.

When it began to get dark, he led her up a winding laneway to a small stone inn poised above La Bouille. He’d already arranged for a tiny room on the top floor.

They had kissed only once, really kissed, strolling by the river, and then they’d walked on. It was as if they’d forgotten who they were.

Manfred climbed over the bed and pushed open the window. It was hot under the eaves, there seemed no air to breathe at all. He came back to Adele. He kissed her, the softest of kisses. They leaned against each other. Manfred began to undo the buttons on her blouse, gently one by one. It had been a year since they’d made love.

Adele began to shiver, really shiver, as if it were the middle of winter, as if she were freezing cold.

“Would you like me to close the window?”

“No.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

Manfred slipped out of his uniform and out of his underclothes. Adele smiled at him. This was gallant, he was going first. He wrapped his arms around her to warm her, she kissed his neck, he undressed her, he kissed her breasts, moved close against her. And it all became familiar again, it all became like remembering again, discovering and rediscovering and shattering again.

Adele and Manfred rested on the bed beside each other, sweaty now in the oppressive heat, listening to each other’s breathing slow down, become quiet, still.

Adele trailed her hand over his body. He was much thinner. She could feel each rib. She traced along his jagged scar. She kissed his chest, his stomach, came back up and kissed his stubbly chin. “Do you want me to tell you my plan?”

Manfred smiled. “I have been waiting.”

She told him about her Paris plan.

“How would I find you?”

“We’d have to trust Lucille Rocque. I would mail her a letter when I had a safe place in Paris and she would tell you.”

“What if she told Wilhelm instead?”

“We would just have to trust her not to tell him.” Adele shifted a little on her hip so she could see him better. “Manfred, when Lucille gave me your note, at first I thought you could wait for another leave and then slip away from here. La Bouille is outside the Forbidden Zone and so it should be easier, but I saw so many fortifications being built between here and Rouen. So many soldiers. I think you were right all along. You can’t escape.” She pressed her face against his neck. “It’s impossible. My plan won’t work.” She could feel the pulse of his blood against her lips. “Don’t even think about it, it’s too dangerous,” she whispered, not knowing whether she wanted him to risk it or not.

He pulled her closer. His thin sinewy arms. His bruised hands.

“I will think about it,” he said.

The next morning they went for another walk along the river. The sluggish water smelled more brackish in La Bouille than it did in Rouen; here it smelled of the sea.

“We stop our work to watch the aeroplanes.” Manfred was standing on top of a rock in shallow water. “They fly from England so very high. Do you see them in Rouen?”

“Yes.”

“They fly during the day now. Day and night. We hear that Berlin has been bombed.” He began stepping from stone to stone. “Hamburg. Cologne. Dusseldorf.”

Adele sat down on the riverbank. “People are saying that the war will be over soon.”

“What people?” Manfred put his arms out like a teetering bomber, balancing precariously.

“Everyone. At the factory where I work. In the queues. All we have to do is wait. Everything will change.”

“How do you suppose it will change? Do you think Germany will wave a white flag and that will be the end of it? Do you think Germany will not fight to the death?”

“I don’t know. I only know that we must make it our business to survive. You and me.” She looked away from him. She had no desire to pursue a conversation about war and desolation.

She could hear Manfred climbing up the bank toward her. When she turned back, he broke into his famous smile. He looked better today. His eyes had a stronger light in them. She knew it was only because of her, simply because she had held him, because she was there. It made her feel extraordinarily happy but it was such an enormous responsibility, too. It frightened her.

“I have been thinking of something all night to tell you,” Adele said.

Manfred sat down beside her. “What is that?”

“We are the New European Order.”

“Ha! We are?”

“Yes. Don’t laugh. Not what Adolf Hitler says. But you and I.”

Light was reflecting off the river, it was dancing on Manfred’s face.

“We will help to build a world where this can’t happen any more,” Adele said. “The two of us. French and German together. We are very necessary people.”

Manfred stared at the river. He tugged at some grass between his boots.

“This would be my dream, also,” he said.

That night Adele and Manfred went to a dance at the white hotel. Everyone was there, including Lucille and Wilhelm, and the bottle-blonde, who was in the company of a thin, ramrod soldier with a strikingly handsome face, and the fifteen-year-old clinging to a soldier who looked no older than she did herself. Heavy boots and small dancing shoes stomped out the time while a local band of nervous musicians tried to keep up to the barbarians.

Everyone joined in the dance, whooping and whirling around the hall. It seemed to Adele that each set of partners was trying to make as much noise as possible, to demonstrate unbounded confidence to everyone else in the room, to chase away the shadows that seemed to lurk in all the corners.

Up to now, the only dances Adele had gone to had been patrolled by the nuns at her school. She and Manfred had never danced together before. They were awkward at first, but soon they were whirling around with the rest, Adele clinging to Manfred’s neck, concentrating as furiously as if she were in the middle of a spelling bee. And then they just melted into each other, and then they just danced.

Sometime after midnight the musicians got up the courage to sneak off into the night. A soldier older than the rest began to play an accordion. The men put their arms around each other’s shoulders and, swaying back and forth, sang patriotic songs and marching songs and songs of glory. Manfred joined in because he had to.

Adele stood in the crowd of women and watched him. Instead of good cheer and comradeship, foreboding began to fill the hall. Everyone had seen the bombers crossing overhead during the day and heard them droning by at night. And no response from the German side. Nothing.

After the singing was over, everyone got drunk.

Adele had never been drunk before. She couldn’t believe how dislocated she felt and how disgustingly sick she was on the way back to their room. They made love, anyway. They made love all night long, and in the first light of dawn they were still sprawled across each other’s bodies, fast asleep like two abandoned children on a raft at sea, their arms and legs entwined.

A
dele made friends with Lucille. They met twice a week at a café a few blocks from the city’s main square. She knew she was taking a risk, for there would be people in town who knew Lucille was one of those girls. In addition, she was hardly the discreet type, but Adele felt she had no choice.

Manfred hadn’t said that they should activate her Paris plan, but he hadn’t said they shouldn’t, either. Just as she was about to climb up the steps of the train to return to Rouen, he’d pulled her close.

“The New European Order may be here more quickly than you think,” he’d said.

“What do you mean?” Adele had whispered, trying to cling to him in the crush of the other women but she was pushed up into the train.

There was no news of the men all through the autumn. Nor in January. Or February. The pain came back. Adele walked in a daze through the snowy streets, pushed herself through her shifts during the night, barricaded herself in her room away from her mother and Madame Théberge during the day. On a rainy morning at the end of March, Adele came out of the factory and saw Lucille standing in the middle of the road.

“They’re working near Dieppe,” Lucille shouted at her, “they’ve got a two-day leave.”

Adele hurried up to Lucille and, taking her by the arm, swung her away from the other women. “What do you mean?

“They’re coming by train. The whole company.”

“To La Bouille?”

“No.” Lucille’s enormous eyes lit up. “Rouen! Here!”

“When?”

“Tonight!”

The same La Bouille crowd of soldiers and women gathered at a public hall on the edge of the city. There were long tables to sit at and copious steins of beer to drink and a waxed floor to dance on. A four-piece Wehrmacht band sat on a small platform at the end of the room and played four polkas and four waltzes in an unvarying cycle all night long. Adele recognized most everyone.

Manfred looked even thinner and more worn out than he had before, and he was either uninterested in dancing or he’d forgotten how. He kept losing time. He was too busy whispering in her ear about the planes. Fighter planes. They were appearing out of nowhere, coming in so low they were hardly above the ground, blowing up supply depots and bridges, roads, railroad tracks. The officers in charge were in a frenzy, driving the men on like slaves. They had to camouflage everything, sirens kept interrupting, they were constantly running into their bunkers and out again. And all the while the grey sea stretched out before them all the way to England like a silent threat. It filled their eyes.

The men had only one night to spend in Rouen. Lucille and Wilhelm invited Adele and Manfred and two of the other couples back to Lucille’s place. Manfred and Adele were the only couple who could communicate to any degree. The others shouted at each other in a babble of French and German.

The four couples, more than a little drunk and holding on to each other for support, started off into the windy dark. The men began to sing a marching song. Adele noticed that Manfred was at least one word behind the others. She wondered how drunk he was as he leaned against her-she was holding up most of his weight.

As they turned a corner, laughing and stumbling along, Adele saw a woman coming toward them. When the woman saw the soldiers, she pressed meekly against a wall to let them pass.

“Adele,” she said.

It was the spidery woman.

Adele turned her face away.

Lucille lived in three small rooms over an abandoned dress shop. She and Wilhelm disappeared into the bedroom. The cushions were taken off a battered couch and laid on the floor. Then the lights were turned off. Adele and Manfred somehow ended up occupying the couch, Adele lying under him against the bare springs. Manfred fell instantly asleep. Adele stroked his skull and listened to the muffled sounds of love-making. One of the women giggled. The other one began to cry softly.

Manfred’s sleeping face looked as fragile as glass in the dark.

Adele thought about the spidery woman. It had been almost a year since the woman had left the factory. She’d been the only one who had shown any kindness to Adele, and Adele had often seen her touch the small crucifix she wore around her neck and kiss it. Her lips would move in silent Ave Maria’s while she worked.

Adele wished she could pray that the woman would continue to be kind but she hadn’t been able to pray for a long time. God could see the sin that was going on all around her in that beery, smoky room. He knew who she was.

Adele fell asleep. When she heard Manfred’s voice, she thought she was dreaming.

“Adele. We have no more time,” he was whispering, “Adele, wake up. We can’t trust Lucille.”

Adele opened her eyes. Someone was snoring loudly in the dark.

“We just don’t know what Lucille might do. We don’t know. I will run. I will find you.” Manfred was resting on his elbow looking down at her.

Adele touched his cheek. “But all those fortifications. The patrols. They’ll catch you.”

“They won’t.”

“And they’ll shoot you for being a deserter!”

“Shhh. No.” Manfred pressed down closer. “Go to Paris when you are able. Rent the secret room. And then go to St. Augustine Street. Madame Bouchard’s
pension,
remember? But don’t go inside and don’t let her see you. Whatever she might say about it, she’s still making money from Germans. She’s dangerous. Just walk past each day. I will know you are walking there. One day you will see me there.”

“I’m afraid for you.”

“Don’t be afraid.”

“When will you run? Don’t run from the coast. Wait until your next leave.”

“Yes,” Manfred said.

The next day all the company’s soldiers and all their girlfriends made their way to the main station in Rouen. A train was waiting to take the men back to their frantic labours on the coast. Manfred and Adele said nothing more about their plans but when they kissed goodbye, they pressed their mouths so hard together it hurt them both.

That night Adele walked slowly to her place at the long sewing tables. No one said a word. All the women looked just as they always did, even the huge button-eyed one and the new woman, the fierce blitzkrieg widow, her hair caught up in a net, her hands flying.

The spidery woman had apparently not been talking to anyone.

Adele spent the week trying to stay calm and plot her strategy. She needed to save money to rent a room. This was the first thing. The only problem was she’d been handing her pay packet over to Madame Théberge and holding back only a small allowance for herself. On the next payday Adele hid half her money under a loose floorboard in her bedroom closet. When Madame Théberge questioned her about this sudden shortfall, Adele told her that they were cutting back the rate of pay at the factory. The old woman’s shrewd peasant eyes looked straight through her.

She met Lucille at the café every other day, but there was no message from Wilhelm of an up-coming leave. She spent more time than usual with Jean and Bibi, joining in their imaginary games, racing through the house, putting head locks on them. They pretended to complain that she was hugging and kissing them too much. One day they asked her why she looked like she was about to cry. Adele got them both down and bounced their heads off the wood floor. “You see? I’m not,” she said.

On her next payday, she held back two-thirds of her money. When she gave Madame Théberge what was left, the old woman grabbed her by the collar.

“Give me the rest,” she hissed.

“Let go,” Adele cried, grabbing a fistful of the old woman’s black dress.

They stood there in the gloom of the upstairs hallway glaring at each other.

“I need it.” Madame Théberge gave Adele a shake.

“They cut our pay back again.” Adele twisted the old woman’s bodice.

“Liar.”

“Old bitch! Let go of me or I’ll fetch René and have him kick you out of our house!”

Adele wasn’t sure why she’d said that. René was the last person on earth she wanted to see, but it seemed to have the desired effect. Madame Théberge let her go, and Adele released her grip.

“And me, coming here, slaving to keep your family together. How can you treat a body like that?” Madame Théberge had softened her tone but her eyes were just as relentless as ever.

“You live here for free. Isn’t that enough?”

“What do you want with so much money?”

“What money? There is no money. They hardly pay us!”

The old woman regarded Adele for a moment. “You’re up to no good,” she said.

Adele brushed past her and hurried down the stairs.

That night on her way to work, Adele lifted up the floorboard and transferred her money to her childhood treasury behind a loose foundation stone in Old Raymond’s cottage. She knew that while she was away Madame Théberge would search her room.

Adele pushed through the back gate and walked toward the factory. The time had come for her to leave. She’d wait until the next day when the house was empty of Madame Théberge and her mother and Jean and Bibi, and she’d pack her clothes. She couldn’t stand to wait any longer.

That night seemed to take an excruciatingly long time but now, near the end of her shift, a feeble light was creeping in the long row of dusty windows. The sewing machines continued to chatter, the line of Wehrmacht pants continued to flow.

I’ll be in Paris by tonight, Adele thought to herself.

Manfred was just waking up. He pulled on his trousers, ducked through the low door in the concrete bunker and hurried along the sandy cliff toward the latrine. Out of the stuffy air in the bunker, the morning air felt chilly. He hunched his shoulders against it and glanced out over the water and wondered what Adele was doing.

The sky was white as milk. Far out, barely discernible, a black line stretched across the sea exactly where the horizon should have been. Lightning seemed to race along the length of it, and then race back again.

Manfred stood frozen in the expectant air until he heard the scream of the incoming shells and then he turned and began to run.

It seemed to him that he had a mile to go to reach the bunker. It seemed to him that he was running in slow motion, like a man in a dream.

Within the hour, everyone had heard the news: there had been a massive landing on a sixty-mile front from east of Cherbourg to Caen. The radio kept telling everyone to stay calm, that this was similar to Dieppe, that a glorious victory was assured, but the signals beaming out of England and being picked up by clandestine radio sets all over town were telling a different story.

The news flew through the streets and shops and factories. General de Gaulle had landed. The Free French army had landed. The British, the Americans, the Poles, the Canadians.

Adele’s first thought was to run to the coast and try to rescue Manfred. All the women felt the same way. They met at the dance hall that night. Babies were crying, a few two-and three-year-olds were running around. Some of the women sat off to the side wanting to be alone. Others stood in groups and whispered like mourners at a funeral. They all look stunned. They all looked terrified.

On the way home Adele came to a decision-she would stay where she was. Rouen was only forty miles from the coast, Paris was at least one hundred. She was sure that Manfred had already slipped away from the battle, and since it had only been a few weeks since his last leave he would assume that she was still in Rouen. This was where he’d come to look for her.

Adele continued to go to work every evening, and every evening she expected to see Manfred standing by the back gate, dusty and worn from travelling, perhaps even wounded. When the days went by and he hadn’t appeared, she began to fear that she’d made a terrible mistake. He must have assumed she was in Paris already, waiting for him, walking every day in front of Madame Bouchard’s
pension
. But she wasn’t. She’d let him down and now it was too late. There were no trains available to carry passengers anywhere. Every piece of rolling stock had been commandeered to carry German troops from the interior to the coast.

The horizon began to light up at night. It throbbed and flashed like a ferocious storm too far off to be heard. People stood on their rooftops to watch. German officials loaded documents into trucks, preparing to flee. Silent crowds gathered in the streets and watched. Some people dared to whisper the word liberation, though it still seemed like a far away dream.

One night bombs began to fall all around the city, blowing up the railroad tracks and bridges and roads, lighting up the cathedral and the river and the statue of Joan of Arc standing where, so many years before, she had been tied to a stake and burned. Adele huddled under her work table in the factory. The lights went out. Windows blew in. Everyone crept through the exploding dark and down the stairs to the first floor.

The bombardment lasted for three hours. At four o’clock, it stopped. At ten minutes after the hour, the lights miraculously flickered and came back on.

Adele blinked her eyes. It looked like it had snowed. Everyone was covered in plaster dust.

Some local men burst in, brandishing ancient rifles and shotguns and clubs. “The Germans are leaving,” they shouted jubilantly, “every last one! Running! Pulling out!”

One of the men scrambled up on top of a table. “Officers! Troops! Even the goddamn prefect of police, the goddamn coward!”

A great cheer filled the long room, an exaltation like a huge breath, a roar. And shouts and cries.

People began to kiss and hug each other. Someone started singing La Marseillaise and everyone joined in. No one had heard it in years. Men and
women began to scramble up on chairs and tables and on the top of the machines; women whipped their kerchiefs in the air, men flung their caps across the room.

Adele backed along the wall. She wanted to join in, too-it was her country, too, and she had suffered just as everyone had suffered-but something deep inside her chest was warning her to get out of there, get away.

She turned and walked as calmly as she could toward the loading docks. The massive woman who’d sat beside her was coming toward her, surging through the crowd. Adele didn’t know whether to run or to stop, and then it didn’t matter. Someone kicked her feet out from under her. She fell hard to the floor.