God Speed the Night (12 page)

“Let us go then.”

“No, monsieur. It is not safe.”

“It is absurd to say now what is safe.”

Gabrielle tried to think of a way to persuade him. “It is not safe for me,” she said.

Marc was too distraught even to try to understand. He looked back and, seeing the board dangling, tried to put it in its place again. The nails were bent. He let it fall. “It does not matter.”

“It does matter, believe me, monsieur. But it is better that we stay away from the window until it is dark. Someone might see you trying to fix it now.”

“So much the better.” After a moment he looked up at her. “Did you recognize the sisters?”

“Yes, monsieur.”

“It happened?” He gestured vaguely toward the street. “It was not…I am not dreaming?”

“No, monsieur.”

“During the night I kept thinking every once in a while, I’ll wake up.”

“I saw the procession as you did, Monsieur Marc, and I heard the passing bell. It tolled nineteen strokes.”

He seemed about to smile. “But Rachel was only eighteen, friend-sister.”

Gabrielle said nothing.

Slowly he understood. “You are nineteen?”

“Yes.”

“And it is you they are mourning?”

“I think it is so, yes, monsieur.”

He leaned his head back, twisting it, his hand at his neck. The numbness was going away. “Let them mourn for a little while. I shall go out then and tell the truth.”

“Those who matter know the truth, monsieur.”

“I need to know it, and I shall only know it when I have told it myself. My wife is dead. My wife—the word was not even real to me yet, the newness of it.”

He sat down on the bench and Gabrielle, for the first time moving toward instead of away from him, sat opposite. For a long time he stared at the opening in the back window he had made to read by. “I want to think of you, friend-sister, and I cannot. I want to think of her and I cannot. Only of myself, of the uselessness, the absurdity of being me. The Resistance man that was here last night was right about the pride. Before…I got into trouble…I’m going to tell you something about Rachel in a minute, but this comes first…before I got into trouble, I used to think about going out into the streets in Paris, particularly I wanted to go into the Champs-Élysée where the Germans promenade, and I wanted to say to everybody, I am a Jew. But that was because I did not want to be a Jew. It was not that I was ashamed of it: there were many of us at the University who felt this way: it was a matter of getting rid of something old in ourselves so that we could be what we are, what we would become, aware only of self. It was not that we denied the blood of our forefathers, only its relevance to what we are. Then came the Nazis and the only relevance to them was the very thing we had cast off. Now it has become the only relevance to us. Do you understand?”

“I am trying to, monsieur. I think I do a little.”

“To talk, to be alive, what is it?” He looked at his hands and turned them over, then back and over again. Then, “What is more beautiful than a child skipping down the street?”

“Please, monsieur, go on. I would like to know about you.” This was not entirely so, but she wanted him to keep on talking for his own sake.

“I could have left France long ago, but I didn’t want to. Many times I could have gone, because with the Occupation I went to work with an organization to try to get all the Jews out of the country before it was too late. I had friends in the Resistance who helped us. It was a mission of mercy, wouldn’t you say, to get them out? And yet I hated every man I saw across the border safely. Why? Because I felt in my heart that Frenchmen despised him, and despising him, despised me. I would not go myself. And when one of the Resistance leaders in Paris asked me to do a most dangerous assignment—to pretend I was a Nazi and get certain information for them—I embraced the opportunity. To prove what? That I was not a Jew? Or that I was?

“Afterwards, when I had failed my mission and the Nazis wanted me so that I had to run for my life, I said all this to Rachel one night, hiding with her. And she said to me, ‘But Marc, you
are
a Jew.’ And suddenly I understood: until I became a Jew, I could not be anything else.

“It was time for Rachel to go also from Paris. She knew Hebrew and Yiddish and there was getting to be a legend about her, for she had persuaded many people out who would rather have died where they were than start again another exodus. We were married—a week ago today, I think. And we would have gone to Palestine. Or tried to. I told you that, I think.”

Gabrielle nodded.

“I wonder if we would have made it. I wonder if Rachel is right, if there will be a Jewish nation. I am not convinced; but I have come to think that only when there is such a nation, could I be a Frenchman again.”

“But would you want to be, monsieur?”

“That is what Rachel said, shall we want to? I hated her for saying it. I was not ready yet. And when I started to run, I kept thinking: they will shoot me in the back and it will be said that like all Jews I had to be shot in the back. Now I will stop running and meet them in the face.”

After a moment Gabrielle said, “You wish to be a martyr, but it cannot happen.”

Marc looked at her. Her eyes remained fixed on her hands where they were folded before her on the table.

“To be a martyr,” she went on carefully, “you have to believe.”

“And don’t you have to want to live?”

“I think that is so, monsieur, yes.”

“Then it is simple—I do not want to be a martyr.”

“Then why do you want to die?”

“Because life is meaningless unless we give it meaning, and I have none to give it now. But you are right, to die meaningfully one must also believe. Rachel believed. I only pretended.”

“And to believe we must love, I think,” she said.

Marc did not answer. He tried to think of love, of Rachel and his feeling for her which was as close as he had come to love.

Gabrielle said, “When I was preparing to enter the novitiate Reverend Mother wrote something in my retreat book which I memorized. Let me say it for you. ‘God gives us love, something to love He lends us, and when love has grown to fullness, that on which it throve falls off, and love is left alone.’”

“I shall have to think about that,” Marc said. “I shall have to think about it to try to understand it—and I will try because I know you would not have said it unless it had deep meaning for you. But I suspect it will be difficult without God.”

“God is love, monsieur.”

R
EVEREND MOTHER DIRECTED THAT
the coffin be placed in the vestibule outside the chapel’s great doors. Father Duloc who had followed the hearse all the way up the road remained at her request. He was an old man now and given more and more to the company of the children to whom in spirit, Reverend Mother felt, he had always been very close. He was the confessor of the lay nuns, but much loved by all the community. As on innumerable other occasions, for he was always hungry, Reverend Mother sent him to Sister Barbara in the kitchen. She then summoned the community to the common room.

The absence of Sister Gabrielle from her appointed place and duties had been observed, and when Reverend Mother and Sister Agathe had left the convent on receiving a call from the hospital, a prayerful vigil had commenced. Whispered rumors had spread, the worst of them seeming confirmed with the coming of the funeral cortege. Reverend Mother was aware of the sounds of sniffling as the nuns waited in silence for her sign to be seated.

“Dear sisters in Christ,” Reverend Mother commenced, looking down the two long rows of solemn faces which at this table were so often mirthful, “our beloved foundress, the blessed Marie d’Étienne, once said, ‘We shall not always be wise, for even the Mother of Christ could not always understand His ways. Therefore does humility the more become us.’ Sister Gabrielle is not dead. But she gave her identity to a Jewish woman in order that the woman might enter the hospital, and in the expectation that this would save her life. We consented, or would have consented, had word of the emergency been able to reach us. We do not wish to burden you with more than you need to know, for it may happen that the police or the Occupation authorities will question us. We shall try in every way to spare you such distraction, but we must all be prepared.”

The redoubtable St. André gave a nod of approval. It required an act of will on the part of Reverend Mother to control her irritation. “The Jewish woman died this morning, but her husband is still alive and in hiding. So we shall bury this unfortunate woman in a nun’s grave until such less troubled time when her people may claim her as their own. Her death has been publicly registered as Sister Marie Gabrielle.”

Certain of the novices bowed their heads as though at word of the death of one of them.

“I am sure Sister Gabrielle will return to us as soon as it is safe to do so. Whether or not this is so, our rules of silence and seclusion henceforth rigidly prevail. We shall not any of us again leave these walls by our own consent unless it is not to return.”

The older nuns who sat closest to her as in counsel nodded approval of this stricter construction of the rule. She would have to go far down the table to find a member of the community who would have countenanced Gabrielle’s mission in the first place. She considered her admission the humbling of herself before them: the manner of it, however, needed to be consistent with the maintenance of discipline among the entire community. “We wish now to consult our historian on the manner most fitting to the burial of someone of the Jewish faith.”

The convent historian, Sister St. Jérôme, sat in silence for a minute or two. Her scholarship in Greek and Latin was greater than in Hebrew, but her knowledge of the Old Testament was fair. “May we speak, Reverend Mother?”

“We have so requested. I should say that Father Duloc is with us and I am sure he will assist in such manner as we wish. It will be well for the people to see a priest present, and we have set the hour for burial at twelve today.”

“Then I should suggest the reading of certain of the Psalms which I shall mark for Father in the Psaltery.”

The old priest squinted and twisted his head with the glare of sunlight on the illuminated pages. The wind from the plains billowed his surplice and bent the tall grass round the gravestones which themselves had bent before the wind, as had also the gnarled trees by the fence. It was among these trees that twenty or so of the townspeople stood in silent attendance. They had come up the hill with the tolling of the convent bell, but not many had come, for there had been one funeral in the town that morning, that of the woman killed by the German soldier. There was also a rumor among those who had come that the novice had died of a mysterious disease which accounted for the early burial. If Father Duloc stumbled in the intonation of the Latin phrases that were unfamiliar to him, no one knew: he would have stumbled now and then on familiar ones as well.

…God hath spoken in his holiness.

I will rejoice, and I will divide Sichem, and I will mete out the vale of tabernacles.

Galaad is mine; and Manassas is mine; and Ephraim the protection of my head.

Judah is my kind: Moab the pot of my hope.

Over Edom I will stretch out my shoe: the aliens are become my friends.

Who will bring me into the strong city? who will lead me into Edom?

Wilt not thou, O God, who has cast us off? and will not thou, O God, go forth with our armies?

O grant us help from trouble: for vain is the help of man.

Through God we shall do mightily: and he will bring our enemies to nothing.

Father Duloc threw a handful of dust on the coffin. Reverend Mother threw a handful also. The community, as one voice, said three times: “
Requiescat in pace
.”

In the wake of Reverend Mother and Father Duloc the nuns filed back toward the cloister, leaving only two novices to spade the earth over the shallow grave. The mourners outside the fence began their trek back into the town, stopping to pray for a moment at the roadside place where the other woman had died. The scythe still stood to mark it. Overnight throughout St. Hilaire, crude drawings of the scythe had appeared, chalked on walls, smeared in mud on the public noticeboard the Germans had erected outside the
Hôtel de ville.

Moissac, returning with Maman to where he had parked the car near the convent gate, saw that someone had traced a scythe in the dust on the Peugeot door. He opened the door quickly so that Maman should not see and demand to know what it meant. She had eyes like a ferret, but at that moment she had chosen to head toward the convent. He caught her arm and moved her on to the car.

“Shall we not pay our condolences to Reverend Mother?” She would not let him go to a funeral without her.

“No. I have already done so.”

“Did we know the girl?”

“No, maman.”

“They have so many strangers now,” she complained as he tucked her skirts in round her legs. “I used to know every nun by name. Do you remember when we came for the plums at the end of the picking, Théophile?”

“I remember.”

He turned the car around and drove down the hill onto the highway. The first of the walking mourners had reached the site of the scythe. They did not raise their heads when he passed.

Maman twisted around in her seat to see what they were looking at. “What’s that, Théophile?”

“It is where the woman was shot yesterday. She was a crazy woman, but they will make a martyr of her.”

“Couldn’t we stop?”

“For what?”

“To pray for the repose of her soul.”

“We can go to the cathedral chapel later. You can light a candle for her.”

“But no one will know.”

“God will know,” he said.

“W
HEN YOU ARE GONE
,” Marc said, “then I will know that she is gone as well.”

“I cannot go until dark, monsieur.”

“I know. And when it is dark I will go with you for I want to see her grave. Then I will believe it. I will bury her hair as well and then there will be nothing to show that she walked the earth at all.”