Transgression (18 page)

Over steaming bowls of soup and chunks of bread, Char told Adele about her large family. Despite living in only three rooms, they all got along with each other. This seemed highly unlikely to Adele.

“And your parents? Do they live in Paris? What are they like?” Char asked.

“They’re dead.” The words seemed to come out of Adele’s mouth of their own accord. “My father died in the first month of the war. Near Arras. He was a doctor in the medical corps-I don’t know where he’s buried.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Adele.”

“My mother died of shock.”

Char’s mouthed dropped open a little. She looked dismayed. “That’s so awful!”

“Yes,” Adele said.

“No wonder you had to look after your little brothers. Where are they now?”

“At an uncle’s.”

As soon as she returned to her room at the hotel, Adele crossed the hall to the toilet and peeled off all her clothes. She looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair was curling into its usual black mass of contradictions. No one had remarked on its shortness. It now covered the nape of her neck and her ears. It also covered the scar on her forehead. It looked almost normal.

Adele sank into a tub of water as hot as the hotel could muster and stayed there until another resident rapped on the bathroom door and told her she was taking too long. Back in her room, she checked a map she’d bought at the station in Paris. Weimar was more than two-thirds of the way to Dresden. It seemed a miracle.

Adele sat in the middle of the bed surrounded by the books and pamphlets Char had given her. She knew at some point she would sneak away from the Red Cross and walk alone through carnage and death toward Dresden. French but no longer French. Anathema to both sides. Perhaps she’d be stoned. Or hung inside some broken building.

Adele curled up on the bed. She thought of Char, her self-confidence, her free-limbed gait. But then Charmaine Blanchot was a good girl.

She would have been a good girl, too, if she hadn’t met Manfred Halder. She knew why she’d said that her father was dead. To think that he was alive and that he knew who she was was unbearable.

Adele could hear music coming from the street below. People were still celebrating. She sat up and picked up one of Char’s books. It seemed to weigh more than Simone’s books all put together. She opened it up. The words shifted and fell off the page.

At five in the morning Adele woke up. She looked out her window toward the courtyard across the street. It sat empty under its lonely lamp. Char had warned her that the trucks would be taken away to a staging area and not to think that she’d missed the convoy.

She tried to read Char’s books again. Light began to creep into the sky. At half past five she packed up her suitcase.

Adele crossed the street and sat on the steps of the Red Cross building. After a while some young workers she recognized from the night before began to arrive. They had their Red Cross caps on and canvas packs slung over their shoulders. Adele knew her cardboard suitcase looked stupid. She knew she looked stupid. The others nodded at her but no one came over to talk.

Char was one of the last to arrive, carrying an extra-large pack and striding purposefully into the courtyard. She glanced around the assembled crowd. Adele knew who she was looking for but he hadn’t arrived yet.

Char came over to her.

“What should we do with your books?” Adele asked.

“We can leave them here once Maurice unlocks the door.” Char took another look around. “How’d the reading go?”

“I didn’t get through everything.”

“Of course not. Not even Madame Sarraute could expect that.”

Two personnel carriers rumbled into the courtyard. The young man from the night before came running through the gates and despite being late was the first to climb into the back of one of them. Char climbed into the back of that one, too. “Come on, Adele,” Char urged from one of the two benches inside, “hurry.”

Adele reached out for the metal railing and pulled herself up into the truck.

“Adele Georges,” Char said, “this is Pierre Savard.”

“I’m pleased to meet you,” the handsome Pierre said. He held out a smooth white hand from across the aisle. “You’ve decided to come with us.”

“Char is the one who made this possible,” Adele replied, lightly touching his hand and trying to deflect his attention to where Char obviously wanted it to go.

Char smiled. “Not me. You did it yourself, Adele.”

“I hope you won’t be sorry,” he said.

It took an hour to reach the staging area, a factory with only two walls left standing and gutted by bombs. The personnel carriers pulled up in front.
The three trucks from the night before along with two larger ones were lined up waiting.

The young workers clambered off the benches and out the back of the carriers-it was a last chance to stretch their legs.

Char opened up her pack and lifted out two large boxes of pastries, courtesy of her mother and her great-aunt. It didn’t take long for everyone, including the drivers and mechanics and the nurses to gather around. Nurse Sarraute marched up to Adele. “Put this on,” she said, handing her a grey cap.

Adele pulled off her purple beret. She was sure her hair looked wild.

“Go on,” Nurse Sarraute said.

Adele put the Red Cross cap on. Her thick hair resisted.

“You’ll have to pin it.” Nurse Sarraute’s face softened for just a moment. “Do your best,” she said.

The convoy rumbled across the Rhine. Adele was sitting opposite Pierre Savard again, holding on to the railing behind her for support, her new cap perched precariously on the top of her head with the help of two borrowed pins.

Pierre leaned across the aisle. His hair was curly and so black it looked blue. His skin was absolutely smooth and cream-coloured, his eyes green. He had perfect teeth. His chin was strong, too, but his bottom lip stuck out a little like a petulant child’s. This one flaw came as a relief to Adele.

The truck rocked crazily.

“It’s a pontoon bridge,” Pierre shouted at her. “It was built by the American Army three months ago.”

Adele nodded.

“General Patton pissed off it. Did you see the photograph?”

Adele gave him a look.

“No, really, it was in the papers,” Pierre said.

At first the road into Germany reminded Adele of the road between Rouen and Paris, except for all the people walking along it, streaming toward the French border and the checkpoint the trucks had just passed through.

“Workers,” Pierre told her, “forced labour. They’re coming home. Some aren’t French citizens, though. They’re afraid to go back to their countries because of the Russians.”

Char joined in. “They’ve been displaced from their homes, their families, their whole lives. There are refugee camps all along the river. Everyone has to be processed.”

Adele nodded and watched the ragged line of men recede behind her. The convoy began to wind its way through a string of German villages. Some of the larger buildings were roofless and windowless, but as in France the general shape of each community remained intact. Women were sweeping the streets, men were shoring up walls and stringing electrical lines from house to house. A hot wind was blowing dust everywhere.

Deeper into Germany, in the larger towns, the scale of the destruction increased. Men and women and groups of children began to appear from crevasses and crude shelters looking like Bedouins in a desert. No hands were held out, no shouted requests for food. They stood on the piles of bricks and the ridges of debris watching the trucks pass by, their faces the colour of ash, their clothes dust-caked and unravelling.

When they reached Stuttgart, it wasn’t there. A vast plain of chalky rubble had replaced the city. The occasional church spire or wall stuck out like grey fingers of warning.

The trucks stopped. The three nurses and Maurice Cailloux had been riding in the cabs of the two leading trucks. Maurice climbed down and called out for the young workers to join him. The nurses stayed where they were.

The air was hot. The smell of death was overwhelming.

“This is central Stuttgart,” Maurice announced.

Iridescent bloated flies swarmed all around them. Obese rats waddled across the bricks and stones. They scuttled past the workers’ shoes, they slipped down into holes and crevices.

Adele knew what lay beneath her. She could see it as clearly as if she were looking at a photograph. Acres of lightless caverns. Broken chairs. Windows. Vast storehouses of decaying men and women and children.

“Take a moment to look around. I want you to remember Stuttgart when we reach Buchenwald,” Maurice said.

“Why?” Char was holding her nose and looking with a kind of desperation up a hill of bricks and splintered boards.

“To see what God has put up with,” Maurice said, “on all sides from this terrible war.”

Adele’s eyes were running from the horrendous stench. She could feel Nurse Sarraute watching her.

“I don’t understand,” Pierre said. His face looked blotched and flushed like a spanked child’s.

The young workers held their hands over their mouths and noses and gazed across the chalky plain. They might as well have been standing on the moon.

“It’s not possible to understand,” Maurice said.

“T
hey sure made a mess,” Jack said to Joe Puvalowski, looking over the boards and clothes and tin cans strewn across the slope, at the awning and the opening into the ground, “those other policemen.”

Joe nodded. He knew what was coming.

“Damn shame the way they took your landing papers away. Highhanded. I’ll get them back. All you have to do is tell me all about it.”

“About what?”

“About that dead man. But not here. We’ll go down to my office. We’ll write it out.”

Joe stuck his hands in his jacket pockets. He was going stony again. “Why us?”

“Because the dead man came from here. Didn’t he?”

“Why not you? Why not those police?”

“What about those police?”

“You want to ask questions? Ask yourselves. Always it is us.” And now Joe was shaking his fist, as he always seemed to end up doing, shaking it in the chief of police’s face. “Missing apples, chickens, we get blame! You know this. Wash on a line. They come to us. This time, no. No!” Joe’s hair shook, his jaw stuck out, he thundered. “We do not lower ourselves to touch such a man!”

Joe headed down the hill. “Ask yourselves, Mr. Jack!”

Jack stood there watching him. He’d forgotten his throbbing leg. He’d forgotten the grey sky, the railway tracks leading off into the distance.

Such a man, Joe had said.

The late afternoon sun was coming through the lace curtains and fossilizing Kyle’s memorial room in amber. Jack leaned against the door frame and looked over the table of photographs, the ribbons, the letters home to his mother.

He picked up the photograph of Kyle in his Royal Hamilton Light Infantry uniform. Twenty-four then. Twenty-seven at Dieppe.

Jack closed his eyes. It was as silent in his house as it had been in that hole in the ground. Despair was in his house, it was padding soundlessly from room to room.

Such a man, Joe had said. Ask yourselves, Mr. Jack, he had said.

Was the murderer some man from town then? Was that what he’d meant?

Jack had figured too much time had gone by, over two, maybe three weeks, more than enough for whoever had fired that shot to jump a freight and disappear. But if he lived in town, why would he run? He wouldn’t. He’d stay put, go to work, carry on just the same as before. Day to day.

Jack could feel his pulse quickening.

So the DP had gotten himself into trouble in town. Maybe he molested a child. That would fit with the other men not wanting to touch him. That’s what Joe had said. Bellowed it, actually.

Jack couldn’t get the idea of an execution out of his mind, though. It was possible someone could have snuck up behind the man or he could have slipped and been lying helpless on the ground, but all Jack could see was the man on his knees, his hands tied behind his back. And bang. Something military about it.

A soldier’s child had been molested? A soldier’s wife? Was that it? Or something else? Something to do with overseas and prisoner-of-war camps and someone recognizing the DP walking through the town as big as life. Something to do with military justice. Revenge.

Jack looked down at his son’s photograph again. All of Europe was shrouded in mystery as far as Jack was concerned. A mass of lightless flames. A terrible darkness. Kyle rotting on a beach somewhere, food for the seagulls, white bones now.

He held the photograph in an iron grip.

He tried to remember how long it had been since he’d visited his grandson. He couldn’t recall.

The Studebaker pulled up in front of the house. Jack sat there for a moment. No one ever used the front door, and now it was too overgrown with bushes to see it. The truth was, the house was in a condition of disrepair, sinking down into the uncut grass like it had given up.

Jack got out of the car. A kind of smoky dusk was settling down over the town. He leaned against the front fender. The air felt warmer than it had all day–it was going to turn back into a heat wave tomorrow. He could hear a radio playing from inside the house.

Jack walked around to the back and rapped on the screen door. He rapped louder against the sound of the music. Dorothy’s face appeared through the door like a face on a movie screen.

“Jack,” she said.

“Just thought I’d come over.”

She wasn’t opening the door.

“To see George.”

“All right. He isn’t here right now. He’s playing somewhere.” Her face disappeared.

Jack opened the door and walked up the two inside steps into the kitchen. Dorothy was already sitting at the table rolling cigarettes. She had a contraption that made six cigarettes at a time. Dirty plates were piled high in the sink, dirty pots on the stove. She kept her head down, her hair hiding her face. She picked up a razor blade and began to slice through a slot in the machine.

Jack turned the radio down. “You don’t mind, do you?”

Dorothy shrugged and made four more passes with the razor blade. Six cigarettes rolled out of the machine. She picked up one, struck a match and lit it. Smoke drifted in the air.

He always felt awkward in her house, the rooms were too small, the ceilings too low. “When’s he get home?”

“When the street lights come on.”

“They’re on,” Jack said.

She looked up at him. Her hair had a honey-coloured cast to it. His grandson’s hair was darker. He didn’t look a lot like her, not so far, anyway. George had a thin, pensive face like Kyle’s. Dorothy’s face was fleshy, almost bruised-looking, but not unattractive. In fact there was something about it that was downright seductive. Kyle hadn’t been a complete fool.

“Do you want a drink, Jack?”

Jack could see she had one for herself. She hadn’t bothered to turn on any lights. It was more than half-dark in the room.

“Sure.” He hadn’t eaten all day. He hadn’t even thought about it until now.

Dorothy got up and went over to the sink. A bottle was sitting there. “Rye and water okay?”

“Skip the water.”

“All right.” She reached into the cupboard for a glass, picked up the bottle. “Why don’t you sit down?”

Jack sat down on a kitchen chair opposite her side of the table and facing a little toward the back door.

“How’s Ruth?” Dorothy asked.

“The same. Well, worse.”

“I’ve been meaning to get over to see her.”

“Right. She’d like that.”

Dorothy handed him almost half a glass of rye and sat down again.

“Cheers,” Jack said and reduced the rye by half in one long drink. When he put down the glass, Dorothy was staring at him.

“What’s the occasion, Jack?”

“What do you mean?”

Dorothy picked up her glass and sipped at it. She lifted her smouldering cigarette from the ashtray and took a puff. “I haven’t seen you for such a long time. That’s all.”

“Oh?”

“Last Christmas. You came over with Ruth.”

Last Christmas, Jack thought, Jesus. “I guess that’s why.”

“Why what?”

“Why I’m here.” Jack tried his pleasant smile on her. She always seemed a little uneasy around him, he didn’t know why. He’d never given her any trouble, not even when she’d got herself pregnant so Kyle would have to marry her. He was only twenty-two. She was all of twenty-eight. Ruth had almost had a fit.

“She’s just a factory girl,” Ruth had said. And then the baby had come and Ruth had changed her tune. She was crazy for the baby. And then Kyle went way. And then he was dead.

“Are you busy these days, Jack?”

“What?” Jack had been drifting.

“You must be.”

“Why?”

“A body was found, wasn’t it? Out on the river? Everyone’s talking about it.”

“It’s out of my jurisdiction. I called in the Ontario Provincial Police. They’re looking after it.”

“Do they know anything?”

The screen door opened and closed with a slap, and nine-year-old George was standing on the steps to the kitchen.

“Your Grandfather Cullen is here,” Dorothy said, though this seemed obvious enough to Jack. In fact her announcement was down-right irritating.

George’s hair was sticking up, his face was shiny. He’d been running and he was still trying to catch his breath.

“Hi there, George,” Jack said.

George stood there looking a little startled and slightly perplexed, an expression not unlike one of his father’s. He stared back at Jack.

“Say hello,” his mother said.

“Hello,” George said.

“You’re not running from anything, are you, George? You haven’t done anything? I don’t have to arrest you, do I?”

George shook his head. He crossed the room and circled well around Jack before dashing down the hall.

“Come back and talk,” Dorothy yelled after him.

“I will,” George said from somewhere.

“He’s getting his new baseball glove to show you.” She didn’t sound particularly convinced of it. “He’s crazy about that glove.”

Jack nodded.

“Show your grandfather your baseball glove,” Dorothy called down the hall.

Jack looked back toward the screen door. Why the hell had he come over in the first place? He couldn’t actually remember.

“The man was murdered, wasn’t he?”

Jack nodded. It didn’t surprise him that everyone in town was talking about it, with Harold Miles setting up shop right there in the Arlington Hotel and his men all over the goddamn place.

“They don’t know anything,” Jack said. He looked back at Dorothy.

Once again and with some intensity, she was staring at him.