Transgression (2 page)

T
here were dead children hanging in the woods.

At first Madeleine hadn’t noticed them because it was wet over there and full of mosquitoes and she was concentrating on finding the cows, and then she’d seen them. Three of them. They had looked like dried bunches of grapes.

“You remember how Father and Andrew and Uncle Matt strung up the pig last fall?”

Jenny had nodded.

“And you remember how Uncle Matt hangs up ducks in the garage to ripen them?”

Jenny had nodded again.

“That’s what she was doing. She was ripening them.”

“W-w-why?” Jenny had been afflicted with a terrible stutter since she’d learned to talk.

“You know why. She eats them.”

Jenny’s breath had caught in her throat.

“She looks for ones she can catch. Lame ones and half-blind ones and ones who can’t hear so good. Ones who are defective.”

“D-d-defective?” Jenny had said.

Two months had passed and Jenny had almost forgotten her big sister’s story when Madeleine came into the bedroom they shared and caught her. “What are you doing looking at my things?” Madeleine screamed.

“I’m not hurting anyth-th-th-th…”

Thing,
Jenny raged in her head,
thing.
But the word wouldn’t come out of her mouth.

“Stay out!” Madeleine snatched back her small cedar chest full of dirty jokes and notes from boys and other private treasures.

“I was just looking for the c-c-c…”
Coins,
Jenny wanted to say,
the coins from Great Britain Grandma Jenkins gave you,
but she found it particularly difficult to speak when she was caught red-handed.

Her sister gave her a violent push. “Why don’t you just g-g-g-go outside and g-g-g-get lost?”

Jenny ran through the back kitchen, past the lilacs and the privy and headed out into the buzzing sun-scorched world.

She made up an escape plan as she ran. She knew what she’d do–she’d cut through the woods to the other side and wade through Mr. Timmon’s oat field to the road. It was just a short walk from there to the trestle bridge. The railway under the bridge was on an up-hill grade that slowed the trains down to a walk. This was where the farm boys gathered in the warm summer evenings to ride the freights all the way to the Township Line. This was where Madeleine would sit on the railway bank and watch them. Sometimes, if she was in a good mood, which was rare, she’d let Jenny watch, too.

Jenny began to wonder if she was strong enough, if she could run fast enough through all the steam and noise, if she was tall enough to reach the bottom rung and haul herself up on the iron ladder and ride past the Township Line, past everything and away from everyone she ever knew.

She could still hear Madeleine taunting her and it wasn’t the first time, either, it was about the millionth. She would do it. She would hitch a ride on a train. She’d run away.

And then she remembered the story.

The wagon trail she was walking along had disappeared into a towering mass of trees. Everything was still. There wasn’t a hint of a breeze. She could skirt around the woods, but it would take longer and it was swampy at the one end. Her father’s wagon trail was dry and ran almost perfectly straight through to the back field.

Jenny stared at the opening into the woods.

If the witch did live in a deep cave under a tree, as Madeleine had said, maybe she was asleep. It was the middle of the day and it was scorching hot. Hell’s own kitchen, her father would have said to her. If he had been standing there beside her. If he were holding her hand.

The longer Jenny stared at the opening, the more tempting it became. Her heart raced. It would only take a few moments and she’d be through. The lane soon narrowed and darkened. She began to walk up on her toes like a water bird, ready to take flight at the crack of a twig, at anything. She could hear the lonely clang of a cowbell somewhere. Her father was over at Uncle Matt’s, three miles away, helping out with the threshing. So was her big brother Andrew.

Dark corridors opened up on either side of her. Vines hung down from dead trees. Jenny kept her eyes straight ahead. A shadow was moving somewhere, it was moving toward her. She began to run. Something was running between the trees, she could hear some horrible, panting noise.

Jenny flew out of the woods and into her father’s back field. Stubble began to cut into her bare feet. She slowed down, stopped.

There was no creature standing on the trail behind her, nothing to be seen at all, just the still green woods and the cloudless, sun-seared sky.

Jenny picked her way carefully across the stubble toward Mr. Timmon’s oat field and began to rethink this idea of running away. Maybe she’d just hide under the railway bridge all night instead. Everyone would be scared out of their wits. Everyone would be searching for her. Her mother would be turning insane. Her father and Andrew would be running around in the dark. Madeleine might even feel sorry for what she’d done.

Ahead of her, puffs of dust began to rise in the air like small explosions. She’d never seen anything like that before. They were rising out of the weedy fenceline between her father’s field and Mr. Timmon’s. She went up on her toes again. Another puff of dust. She could see something moving, a shifting of light, a copper-coloured rustling.

Jenny stepped closer. Something as startlingly white as a snake’s belly flew up in the air and then fell back down again. Jenny stuck her foot out cautiously and parted the tall dusty grass. One of her mother’s hens was staring up at her. She recognized it right away–it was the one whose eggs
she could never collect, the one who’d chased her across the barnyard on numerous occasions. It bobbed its head and again something white flew up in an explosion of dust.

A garter snake, she thought, but it seemed too stubby for a garter snake. Whatever it was, it had disappeared into the grass again. The hen began to peck and peck.

“D-d-damn you, g-g-go away!”

Jenny kicked at the bird. The bird shied off a few steps. Jenny knelt down and parted the weeds. The thing the hen had been worrying was puffy and milky-looking, its one end rough and black. She picked up a twig and poked at it. The thing rolled over, dragging something behind on a long sinuous thread, something thinly curved and as shiny as coal.

A faint smell, both sweet and repugnant, reached Jenny’s nostrils. And now she knew that Madeleine’s story had been true. And now she knew that the witch was close by.

She was looking down at a finger.

A
dele queued up in front of the Domestic Population Bureau of Information again, since she couldn’t see how she could make things worse. She wondered if they’d already looked up her father’s name, if they knew where he was being held.

And she wondered if they knew who he was.

Henri Paul-Louis had been a Democratic Socialist. His patients knew this, because in mid-treatment or even in mid-trauma he’d often engage them in annoying political discussions. All Rouen knew this, too, because in the elections of 1936 he’d been the campaign manager for one of the party’s local candidates. When the Front Populaire won and Leon Blum formed the government, Henri Paul-Louis had declared it the happiest day of his life. He’d made this declaration, not to his political cronies, but at the family dinner table. It had come as a shock. Adele had immediately thought, What about me, what about when I was born, weren’t you happier then? And Adele could tell by the sour look on her mother’s face that she was thinking similar thoughts. Twelve-year-old René, however, had nodded wisely. He, too, was deliriously happy that the Socialists had won.

But what if Adele’s inquiry had caused a curious official to check their father’s name against some political list? What if the list recorded
Henri Paul-Louis Georges, Socialist and political organizer,
which would mean Bolshevik to the Nazis, which would mean he’d become a political prisoner and no longer be under the protection of the conventions of war? They would
torture him as they did all their political prisoners and when he had nothing left to tell they would kill him.

This possibility had terrified Adele as much as it had René, but finally she’d convinced herself that even the SS knew the difference between a Socialist and a Bolshevik, and as far as being a Socialist went, her father hadn’t even been a member of Leon Blum’s government. He’d simply been a supporter as millions of others had. How else could Blum have won the election? The SS weren’t running around persecuting everyone who had ever voted or worked for the Front Populaire.

Adele had tried this Socialist vs. Bolshevik line of reasoning out on René one night. She might as well have been talking to a stone.

The queue to the Domestic Population Bureau of Information seemed even slower than the previous day. Finally Adele reached the open door. A different Wehrmacht officer was sitting behind the desk to the left. The desk to the right was unoccupied.

Adele’s body unclenched.

She gave her father’s name once again. The new officer didn’t seem forewarned or suspicious. He got up from his desk, pulled a thick ledger down from a shelf and began leafing through it. Adele’s cheeks felt hot for no good reason. She looked around. A German clerk was standing at the back of the office looking at her. He seemed very young, almost as young as she was. And then he smiled.

Adele could hardly believe it. She turned away.

“There is no such name as this on our lists. Perhaps you will come back in two weeks.” The officer sat back down at his desk.

“Thank you,” Adele said, and keeping her face down so she wouldn’t look at the young clerk again, even by accident, she escaped out the open door.

Adele saw girls with German soldiers all the time, standing in crowds together on street corners, or being overly noisy and obnoxious at the back of buses, arms around each other, mushy kissing, shrieks of laughter. Empty-headed girls with bullet-headed Boche soldiers. Everybody hated those girls.

She hurried along the street toward her home. She didn’t bother announcing her arrival, because for the last year her mother had taken to her bedroom and had remained there unresponsive.

Like everyone else in town, the Georges family had fled before the German advance and had straggled back only after countless Stukas had screamed over their heads and Panzers had rumbled by and an endless procession of grey trucks full of double rows of soldiers had over-run them. Pushing open her broken front door, Madame Georges had discovered that her silverware had been stolen by local thieves. All Henri Paul-Louis’s medicines had, too, and every scrap of food in the house. These final insults had seemed a small thing to Adele compared to the hardships they’d endured during the weeks they’d spent wandering the countryside, including having to abandon the family’s touring car, but they had broken Madame Georges’ spirit. She slept her days away and in the evenings she wrote letters to ever more distant relatives, informing them that the Georges family of Rouen was husbandless and starving and needed immediate assistance. So far there’d been no replies.

Adele closed the back door. She climbed up the stairs, walked as silently as she could past her mother’s closed door and sprawled across her bed.

A shaft of sunlight pierced her dormer window and fell on a picture of a boy sitting on a grey-dappled rocking horse. He was dressed in some kind of shiny blue material–perhaps it was meant to be silk. He was staring over his shoulder at Adele. He’d been staring at her just like that for as long as she could remember. She didn’t particularly like that picture. He seemed too old to be on a rocking horse for one thing. Once she’d taken it down and put it in the back of her wardrobe but her mother had hung it up again.

Soon Bibi and Jean would be home from school. It would be time to try to scrounge something up for supper. This duty had fallen on her shoulders. Since the family’s return from the great exodus, all domestic duties had fallen on her shoulders.

For some annoying reason Adele couldn’t get the young German clerk out of her mind. She knew why. He might as well have reached out and touched her with a live wire of electricity.

All he did was smile.

Who was he, anyway? Who were any of them? They were just Huns, as scary and foreign as a herd of rhinoceros, always bleating on the radio about the glorious New European Order, unknowable creatures puffed up
in their various uniforms and marching past the towering spires of Notre Dame cathedral and through the narrow cobblestone streets with their brass bands blaring and their flags flying, the city’s fine old buildings suddenly smothered in black and red and white.

And this young man had smiled at her and it had hurt her heart.

It wasn’t as if boys her own age and even men didn’t pay her any attention. They did. More than she wanted sometimes but she’d never felt like she was being electrocuted before.

The house remained silent. Silence wherever she looked, in everything she saw. It rang through the house like a great lonely bell. Adele closed her eyes. Every day for a year now the front door was going to open. Every day Henri Paul-Louis was going to return home.

She began to bite at her ruined fingernails. She rolled over on her side. She stared at the rocking-horse boy. He stared back.

Adele tried to remember the young German’s face. Dark eyes. Hair shaved down to his skull, possibly dark, too. Most certainly dark, because his arching eyebrows were dark. Pale skin. Not very tall. Almost frail-looking, like some of the boys she knew who sat in coffee houses for far too long and smoked far too many cigarettes. Handsome, but it wasn’t that. The electricity was in his smile, a loneliness so directly communicated that she’d recognized it instantly. And longing, a searing longing for a different situation, as if he and she were part of the same heartache.

Adele closed her eyes again, squeezed them painfully tight as if to close out any more disgusting and dangerous thoughts. When she opened them, her father was sitting on the edge of a cot where her wall used to be.

His head was down, his shoulders were sticking out of a torn and muddy uniform. In the distance other prisoners were opening packages from home. Her father had none to open. No one knew where he was.

When Adele returned to the Domestic Population Bureau of Information two weeks’ later, her heart was beating too fast. She told herself that it was because she was afraid the SS officer would be sitting at the desk to the
right. He wasn’t. She told herself that it was because she was anticipating good news, that her father’s name had finally appeared on a list. But there was no good news, no news at all. She could try again in two more weeks if she liked.

The boy was still there, though, the clerk, the Boche. He was sitting at a long desk at the back of the room busy matching documents to towers of files. He didn’t look up this time.

Adele felt both relieved and disappointed. She wanted to see his face again, have him smile, test herself. She was sure there would be no effect this time. She had something to prove to herself and to her missing father, perhaps even to God.

She thanked the officer who was sitting in front of her, another new man. They must switch them all the time, she thought, and left. Less than a block away she felt a brisk tap on her shoulder.

“Hello,” the young clerk said, “do you have this moment?”

Adele was surprised not so much by his sudden appearance but by the almost overwhelming anger that welled up inside her. “I suppose I have to. Don’t I? I don’t have any choice. Do I?” Her voice rang through the street.

The young German was either hard of hearing or chose to ignore her tone. He came up close, as if trying to shield her from the stares of the people in the queue. He pulled out a crumpled package of cigarettes and offered her one.

Adele shook her head.

He turned a little away, struck a match and lit up a smoke. Despite his average height and the fact that she was looking at her feet, she could tell that she came up to only just past his shoulder.

“I could help, I would like very much.”

His French was ridiculous. “Help what?”

“My name is Manfred Halder. I live in Dresden. This is in Germany.”

Adele couldn’t keep her head down any longer. She looked up at him. “You’re living here now,” she replied darkly.

Manfred glanced along the street and back toward the open office doors. “I have only one moment. You are searching for your father.”

Adele’s heart jumped at this.

“This office is not good. It is provincial. You understand? Paris has everything.”

“What do you mean?”

“Paris. Everything is there. All major bureaus of information. I worked in Paris. Information is not shared. Communication is not good. We get reports that are not complete here. Old reports. No reports. It’s very bad here. Do you understand?”

“I think so.”

And then he smiled his sad, terrifying smile again. Adele could feel her body flinch.

“You must go to Paris.”

“Where would I go?”

“Yes, I will tell you. I will write a letter. I have a friend, an officer. He will search for your father. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“You come here tomorrow. I will give you a letter.”

“What time tomorrow?”

“Yes, I will see you at the door. I will have everything ready. I very much hope you find your father.”

Manfred Halder looked toward his office again and then with a quick nod hurried away. When he reached the open door, he turned back.

All the townspeople in the queue were looking in Adele’s direction. She knew what was expected of her: she should put on a sour face and turn briskly away to show that she’d been forced to communicate against her will.

Manfred pinched off the lighted end of his cigarette and tucked the rest of it inside his Wehrmacht jacket. He glanced at her one more time and hurried inside.

And then Adele turned away.