Transgression (4 page)

A
dele had never seen such a tall man in all her life. When Lieutenant Max Oberg stood up to receive her, his sandy hair brushed the ceiling of his windowless office, and when he sat down after reading Manfred’s introductory note, he seemed to do so in stages. He had a long face the shape of a prow of a ship, and his eyes were small and set close together, which gave him a kind of perpetually perplexed look. Anyway, he seemed perplexed now. He put the note aside.

“Is Manfred your friend?”

“No.” Adele felt a sudden hot glow in her cheeks. “He just knows my situation. He wants to help.”

Lieutenant Oberg nodded. “Yes, that would be our Manfred all right.” He fell silent, looking at the other papers Manfred had placed in the envelope, shuffling through them with his large freckled hands.

Adele studied him. He looked like a kind man, as Manfred had said.

“He has set me a very difficult task. No one knows just how complete our lists are, but my guess would be that we have the names of only one out of a hundred of your soldiers, of which there are a million and a half being held in Germany.”

Adele kept her eyes on Lieutenant Oberg and clung to a diminishing hope.

“Why this slowness in processing, I have no idea. Perhaps our officials are slow because it doesn’t really matter. Soon all these soldiers will be set free. And your father,” he glanced down at the papers again and said in his
almost perfect French, “Doctor Henri Paul-Louis Georges, among them.”

He looked up at her and smiled. A small, careful smile for such a tall man. He pressed a button on the top of his desk and almost immediately a woman in a grey uniform came in.

“We’ll check our records now, if you can wait.” He handed the papers to the woman and gave her a brief instruction. She nodded and went out the door. “I will also telegraph a few people back in Germany. Perhaps someone is sitting on a complete list. Who knows? I will inform Manfred immediately, if such is the case.”

“Thank you so much, Lieutenant Oberg,” Adele said.

Oberg nodded. “Perhaps it is deliberate.”

“What is?”

“This use of psychology. I can’t believe that they’re so slow because of inefficient organization. They must see an advantage in sustaining uncertainty here in France. After all, it has been over a year.”

“Who are ‘they’?”

The lieutenant looked a little surprised.

“You said ‘they’,” Adele added quietly.

“We. I meant to say we, of course. From the very beginning, the Party has employed psychology in the most up-to-date manner.”

Oberg shifted in his chair, picked up his pen. He tapped it against the desk and smiled at Adele again, a less careful smile this time. “I can see why you and Manfred are friends.”

Adele had worn her best suit and the blue shoes that matched, even though they pinched her feet. They were pinching her feet now.

“Did Manfred tell you that he’d shot himself?”

“No.”

“Only slightly but it was enough to get him out of active duty.”

The phone rang. Oberg picked it up, nodded, put it back down. “The name Georges appears only once in our lists, Pierre Jean Georges, Infantryman, Third French Army, captured at Verdun.”

Adele shook her head. Her father wasn’t at Verdun, and anyway if he’d wanted to hide his identity why would he give the Germans his correct surname? She felt suddenly hopeless. The small windowless room trembled.

“I will wire an inquiry to my contacts in Germany.”

Adele nodded and whispered a thank you.

“This is all I can do,” Max Oberg said.

The interview was over.

It was the lack of motion and sound that Adele had noticed when she’d first arrived that morning. Now, suitcase in hand, she noticed it again. Rows of flags emblazoned with swastikas waved gently from grand buildings as far as she could see but only a few vehicles were making their way along the Champs-Élysées. No bustling crowds, no shouts, no displays of Parisian temperament.

Adele looked at her watch. A train left for Rouen at 2:20 p.m. daily. Lieutenant Oberg had kept her waiting for some time. It was too late now.

Adele sat down on a bench in a small park. After a while, she took Manfred’s map out of her purse. For some reason the sight of his straight pencil lines, his crisply drawn arrows, his street notations gave her a feeling of comfort. But her father remained lost. He remained a fleeting ghost.

St. Augustine Street turned out to be only a few blocks away, and Madame Bouchard’s house seemed decent enough. Adele climbed the steps and knocked on the door. A middle-aged woman peered out. Adele could hear German voices chatting somewhere in the deeper recesses of the house.

“Madame Bouchard?”

The woman nodded. A pair of sharp eyes studied her.

“I am looking for a room for the night.”

“Are your papers in order?”

Adele passed her identity papers through the open door.

Madame Bouchard glanced at them. “So you are from Rouen.”

“I’ve come to Paris looking for records pertaining to my father. He’s a prisoner of war. A Corporal Manfred Halder recommended your
pension.
I believe he stayed here.”

Madame Bouchard’s eyes seemed to grow even sharper. She moved aside to allow Adele into a gleaming front hallway. Short and round and
wearing a voluminous black dress, she glanced back in the direction of the German voices. “I remember him. The only one with a soul.”

Madame Bouchard led Adele up a series of steep stairs, puffing and wheezing all the way. The room Adele had engaged proved to be on the top floor and was very small and very warm and also very expensive, despite Manfred having been the only one with a soul. Madame Bouchard handed her a key, told her not to disturb the Germans and, with the same amount of puffing and sighing, began her descent.

Adele stood inside the doorway and stared at the iron bed. She wondered if Manfred had slept there. The emptiness of the bed seemed somehow the perfect evidence that he had. If that was the case, then she couldn’t use it.

She sat down on the one chair in the room. She could see his body stretched out before her, his dark hair, his eyes closed, hear the soft sound of his breathing. His hair was still wet from the rain.

She sat there for a long time, until the light began to fade outside the tiny window.

A week later at just past six o’clock in the morning, Adele was leaving work. She crossed the narrow footbridge that spanned the factory’s raceway. The air was cool and a soft mist was rising up off the water. Manfred Halder, dressed in his Wehrmacht uniform, was standing on the other side of the road.

Adele slowed down. The rest of the women coming off the night shift pushed past her. She came to a stop and tried to control her panic. These women couldn’t possibly see her meet a soldier. Military trousers half-seamed would be pulled away from her machine. She’d be bumped into, horrible notes would be stuffed into her pockets, terrible words whispered in her ears, excrement smeared on her chair. She’d seen all this happen to another girl, plump and red-faced and frightened.

Adele hurried off the end of the bridge and turned down a cinder path that led along the bank of the raceway. She came to the corner of the factory. She could see the path continuing on toward three abandoned warehouses.

Surely he’d know enough not to follow her. Surely he’d have at least some brains in his head.

She held her breath and turned around. The last few women were straggling across the bridge and none of them were looking her way. There was no one else in sight.

She kept walking along the cinder path. She didn’t know what else to do. Manfred had said, “I would like to apologize.” What could be more useless, more insulting, more obscene than to apologize for a slaughter, for a blood-soaked atrocity?

Adele approached the first warehouse. It looked medieval, its bricks chipped and blackened with layers of coal smoke, its roof swaying and covered in moss. She walked behind it and stopped. She could see where the raceway rejoined the river, splashing a little in its eagerness, dancing in the early morning light.

“Hello,” Manfred said. He was standing some ways off, almost lost in the sun and waist high in weeds. He stepped out on to the path. His pants and boots were soaked from the dew that was sparkling everywhere. “Why do you run away?”

“How do you know where I work?”

“I looked up in your file.”

“Leave me alone!” Adele turned to walk back the way she’d come and then realized she couldn’t. What if he followed her? She turned to look at him again. She had to put her hand up to shade her eyes.

“I think,” Manfred said, “if you had received good news in Paris, you would have told me. I am sorry.”

“I don’t care if you’re sorry.”

“You are a very rude girl.”

“I apologize if I hurt your feelings. You march into our country, you kill everyone, but I shouldn’t be rude.” Adele could feel her chin beginning to quiver.

“I thought to buy you breakfast,” Manfred persisted, “I know a café.”

“I can’t be seen with you.”

“It is dangerous?”

“It is disgusting!” She expected him to swear at her and walk away,
perhaps even strike her across the face. She wanted him to strike her across the face, that was exactly what she wanted him to do.

Instead, he smiled. “You remind me of Ingrid when she is difficult.”

“Who is Ingrid?”

“She is my niece. She is eight years old.”

Adele could feel her face go red. “Lieutenant Oberg said you shot yourself.”

“Did he?”

“Was it an accident or did you do it on purpose so you wouldn’t have to fight? If you shot yourself on purpose that makes you a coward, doesn’t it? And if it is against your principles to fight you should say so and refuse to fight, even if that means you’ll go to prison.”

“I was not wounded badly,” Manfred replied, somewhat beside the point. “I thought to make a very loud but wordless protest. In my barracks, every voice declares that what we do is just. Our generation will redeem the past. But I only hear madness in this. I do not want to be part of this.”

But you are a part of it, Adele thought, you are.

“You cannot say you are against war. There is no such thing as a conscientious objector in my country, only the grave for such people. You do not know this?”

And now he was looking at her with such intensity, such a lost loneliness, that Adele felt almost overwhelmed. She had to turn away. “I would have told you what happened in Paris soon enough. I have to visit your office to see if Lieutenant Oberg has sent any new information, don’t I?” Then she said, “Why are you interested in me?”

The question was out of her mouth before she even knew it was in her head, like a small bird flying before a storm. She had a quick vision of an outraged Simone Ducharme, her eyes widening behind her round glasses.

“Because I saw you that first time.”

Adele could hear him walking up behind her, his boots crunching down on the cinders.

“What first time?”

“When you were interrogated by the SS officer. You have to help me with this phrase. How do you say “‘such a large asshole’ in French?”

“Just like you said it.”

“I thought you were very brave. I admired your bravery very much. And I thought you were really, very, extremely pretty.”

In the not-too-distant past several boys had told Adele that she was pretty, and she’d supposed she was in some sort of way with her tangle of black hair going every which way and her large dark eyes, but all it had seemed to mean was that these same boys were angling to put their sloppy mouths all over her face and wiggle their hands up inside her blouse until she had to shout out as loudly as she could right in their ears, “Stop it!”

“There are lots of girls who will let you buy them breakfast. Or even just cigarettes and candy. And then let you do whatever dirty thing you want. Why don’t you find one of them?”

“Because they are not you.” Manfred reached out and touched her hand. “I have no one to talk to. Not like this.”

“Leave me alone.” Adele pulled her hand back. She walked over to the scarred brick wall. She could feel Manfred watching her. She touched the brick, and the soot of generations blackened her fingers.

“I am not your friend,” she said.

Adele knew that all she had to do now was walk away and whatever this was, at least it would be over. Nothing would have happened. “I have one best friend I can tell everything to,” she said, and immediately thought to herself, But not this, not this.

“You are very fortunate.”

Adele stared at the brick. “Where do you live?”

“In a house on Ducrot Street. There are many of us. We have cooks and housekeepers.”

“I live with my mother and my two younger brothers.”

“I know.”

“I am only sixteen.”

“I am nineteen.”

Adele turned toward him.

As she did, Manfred put his hands in his pockets, perhaps a gesture to quiet her fears. “I am an only son, an only child. When I lived with my parents in Dresden, I was very happy. But it is not good there now. My mother is
Polish and she is very afraid. She hears news about Poland from our relatives there and she has to remain silent. My father has to remain silent, too. Everyone is afraid.”

“I can’t have anything to do with a German soldier,” Adele said, “even a harmless one.”

Manfred smiled softly. “Yes.” And he kept staring at her with his dark deep eyes. “I should go back now before I am missed.”

“You should.”

“I could come and see you tonight.”

“No.”

“I have no one to talk to.”

“Why is that my problem? I can’t have anything to do with you.”

“There is a park near Ducrot Street, by the river. Do you know this place? What if I was to go there tonight? What if I was to sit on a bench there?”

“You’d still be lonely.”

“What time do you start work?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll be there at eight. I’ll be there every night at eight.”

Manfred began to walk back into the weeds. He waded toward a steep embankment and a road beyond. He made a wake in the dew. Iridescent insects whirled up in front of him. The early morning sun poured gold over everything.