Obedience (14 page)

The soldier came back into the porch and wiped the barrel of his pistol on Bernard's habit before putting it in his pocket.

He spat something in German, dismissive, and picked up his bottle from the floor, swigging the remaining beer quickly and noisily. Then he put the bottle neatly onto the small table that was pushed back against the wall, took Bernard's face in his skinny hands and pinched her cheeks hard. He spoke to her, in French, but he spoke too fast, scrambling his vowels, and Bernard could not catch anything except the stale heat of his breath. She was frightened of him for the first time. His face did not look quite right.

‘Kids,' he said, more clearly, stepping back. He shrugged at her, a plea, his eyes on hers as though what she might say would matter.

But she could not think of anything to say.

‘I shall have boys only. Four sons,' he said.

‘We must accept God's will in these things,' Bernard replied, her voice stiff and small.

For a moment he snorted a laugh. ‘Is that what He says to you, Sister?'

He turned away and was leaving. She saw the unsteady grasp of his hand on the edge of the door.

‘You'll be a good father,' Bernard said.

He did not turn back. ‘
Ja
.'

‘Your sons will be strong.'

It was dark now. Bernard heard the click of his boots on the stone steps, and then silence. She had stayed too long. She picked up the bottle, meaning to tidy it away somewhere, but there was nowhere else for it to go and she put it back on the table. She brushed down her habit and her veil, trying not to touch the place where he had cleaned his gun. As she returned to the convent, rather than trying to come up with a convincing excuse for being late for prayers, she imagined the soldier's four sons. God grumbled.

Next time, when he saw her sitting on a stone that had fallen from the wall, only half-shaded, her face in the morning sun, he quickened his step, almost ran to her. She watched him come quickly up the side of the field where the hay was thinner, smiling, and as he came closer he put out a hand to pull at the stems which swelled towards him, presenting her in the end with a loose bouquet of floppy white daisies and tall clover and meadowsweet, ragged robin, seed heads and the light stalks of ripening grass.

‘We've got them,' he said, his breath coming fast.

She took the flowers and felt the immediate fear that they would die before she could remember what it was to have this kind of gift. She held them upside down, to let the moisture run to the heads.

‘Three of them. One or two got away. It was dark.'

The stone was not large enough for them both. She moved across onto the amber earth and he took her place. She reached out her arm stiffly so that the flowers would be in the shade.

‘We followed that nun of yours all the way. It was easy.'

‘I didn't know,' Bernard said.

‘It was only last night. Late.'

‘I haven't seen Sister Jean since evening prayer.'

He leant back. ‘She will be all right. We did not touch her.' He closed his eyes for a moment against the bright sun. ‘Silly old bitch.'

Bernard had heard a scream some time in the dark hours before dawn, but had thought nothing of it. The convent was not quiet at night. There was always the creak of pipes and floorboards, the scurry of animals and the wails and sobs of the nuns, noisy enough to interrupt the lamentations of Bernard's sleepless God.

‘Why did you leave her alone?'

He opened his eyes, surprised. It seemed obvious. ‘The Church. She belongs to the Church.'

‘Oh.'

Bernard looked away into the thick tangle of the field. A butterfly skimmed past, flashing yellow. He had closed his eyes again; was perhaps asleep. What Bernard said next seemed like a departure.

‘What does your name mean? Schwanz?' She took the bouquet back onto her lap and twisted at one of the petals, its colour crushing dark. ‘I like it. I like your name.'

The soldier sat up. ‘It is…' He shook his head. ‘It is German.'

‘Yes, but – doesn't it mean anything? Doesn't it have a translation?'

He did not seem to understand. ‘It is German,' he said again. He reached towards her and pulled at the fabric of her habit. He was wide awake, suddenly restless.

As he unclasped his belt she kept talking. ‘I don't know any German names,' she said. ‘Only French names, and names from the Bible. My name's a man's name. Do you like it?'

He had never thought about it. ‘Yes, I suppose.' And he pushed her back so that he could lie on top of her. She puffed at the sudden weight and the heat of him.

‘I'm named for Bernard of Clairvaux,' she said. But he was anxious now, preoccupied, and she did not receive a response. ‘I wanted to be Clare.' She shifted on the hard ground, trying to ease the rub of a pebble in her back. ‘Like Saint Clare, who sewed the altar cloths.'

Still he said nothing. He had his face buried now in the thick clutch of habit around her breasts.

‘But Mother Catherine preferred Saint Bernard. She had a picture of him, in a book.' Bernard still remembered his glowing Aryan splendour, tall and broad shouldered, fierce. She could not know how many hours Mother Catherine spent with the page open on her knee, the fervency of her prayer alarming her. ‘She showed me some things about him, historical things, writings and sermons. I couldn't understand them,' she said.

He was breathing fast. She could not be sure if he could hear her. She spoke more loudly.

‘My real name is Lucie,' she said, and the thrill of the confession split open inside her.

He pulled back, his face flushed. He rested on his knees, steadying himself. He seemed confused, discomfited.

He repeated the last word.

‘Lucie.'

It sounded foreign and fragile the way he said it. It had nothing of her in it.

‘No one calls me that now. I'm not Lucie any more,' she said.

He stood and started to brush himself down, rubbing hard around his knees and in the creases on his jacket. Then he stretched and turned to look over the wall. The field beyond was also full of hay, busy with insects, discordant. Bernard looked hard at his profile and felt so many things about him that she could not make sense of them.

‘Bernard and Schwanz,' she said. ‘It sounds nice.'

He spoke quietly. ‘But it is not right.'

‘Because it's two men's names? That doesn't matter. Not to us. We know the truth.'

He flapped his hand at something.

‘Schwanz.'

She said his name again very softly, the sound of it intimate and artless, pastoral, belonging there between them like the breeze in the long grass and the insects and the gentle movement of the leaves.

He started. He did not want her going on.

‘I think there's someone coming,' he said, straining his neck as though to look over the drift of hay.

‘Up through the bottom gate?'

He nodded. When he turned to her his face was fixed.

‘I will see you soon, Sister Bernard.' He set off briskly down the length of wall. Bernard slunk back low, hiding
herself behind the long grass. She took the wilting bouquet of flowers and held it close. She trembled slightly, waiting for the danger to pass, but it remained quiet; no one came.

She wished she had told him how she had managed the problem of having a patron saint whose chivalric heroism and medieval theological disputes intimidated and confused her. She wanted to tell him about the saint she had created, an entirely imaginary Bernard who at first had been simply someone amiable with whom to share a name, but who had, in time, acquired a body and a face, gestures that had become familiar, personal idiosyncrasies, freckles and moles and winks and farts, an extremely old man, wiry and gnarled, with silver hair and inexplicably squeaky shoes. Bernard rested against the wall where the soldier had been, and prayed for a moment to this man, a man of very few words, undemonstrative learning, unworked miracles, unregarded piety and undefined theology. When the voice of God came back to her, brusque and demanding, she repeated the prayers again, screwing the bunch of flowers in her hand in her desire to be heard. The petals fell across her lap.

T
he days were blue and airless, suspended in summer. The classrooms acquired warmth like glasshouses and everyone was restless. Sister Thérèse had tried being stern but mostly the girls had ignored her. They were loosening their clothing, lounging back in their seats, weary and hot. They looked and felt older than the young nun, in her first year of teaching, pacing up and down in front of them. Outside, the hay was high, and very soon they would all be out in the fields, the stems scraping at their skin, their arms and legs pricked and sore, working through the short nights in the glow of the moon, the freedom of it exhausting them. In anticipation, they dozed. Thérèse tried everything she could to rouse them. She scolded and blustered. She strutted, hurling questions, slapping her hand on her desk until her palm tingled. But they could not forget the heat. It curled around them. The girls hardly moved and Thérèse's desperate pacing slowed and finally stuttered. She stumbled, reaching out for her seat with one hand, her veil falling thickly about her head.

Closing her eyes, she saw a swarm of dancing coloured
dots. When she opened them, the dots were still there. She bent forwards, drooping her head over her knees, a flash of heat across her neck and face.

‘Are you all right, Sister?' chimed several voices.

‘Go back to work, girls.'

But Thérèse could not lift her head without the classroom sliding away from her and the silence she had won was brief. No more work was done. The girls began to giggle. She dared not raise her gaze from her knees.

‘Are you having a baby, Sister?'

The shock of it, icy, was a restorative. Thérèse forced herself to look up. Marie-Hélène, sitting in the middle of the back bench of older girls, was watching her with a curious expression of defiance and concern, refusing to drop her eyes to her desk, waiting instead for an answer. Thérèse, still faint, could not think straight.

‘Don't be stupid, Marie-Hélène. You're being childish.'

‘I was just asking, Sister.' The girl was calm. ‘I thought if you were having a baby, you might not be feeling well.' She smiled, first at the young teacher she liked so much and then around at the rest of the class, her grin stretching.

‘Nuns do not have babies,' Thérèse pointed out.

‘Some do.'

It was the animal smell of high summer, the heat, the sense of days that would never end. It made them go on, as if the rules were simply melting away. When the bell rang for the end of the class, Thérèse sat with her head in her hands as the girls filed past, not understanding how it had come about. It had been unwise, she knew that already. It had started something that could not be contained in the hanging heat of these uncommon days.

The ache of Thérèse's curiosity would not pass. School ended. Anvil clouds began to build in distant valleys, threatening rain, and the girls hurried home to change into their work clothes, coming out again quickly to dot the fields with smudges of colour, none of them ever quite alone. Thérèse tried to pray, but even long after dark the heat remained, suffocating her thoughts. She did not sleep.

Confused, she went to Mother Catherine the following morning, knocking on the study door shortly after dawn. Mother Catherine was old now, bent over with some kind of pain, unsmiling. Since the end of the war she had been almost silent, except in prayer or, like now, when one of the nuns came to her and forced her to speak. She did not eat in the refectory with everyone else; she did not go down to the church for Mass. She spent most of her time at the window of her study, her colourless eyes gazing out, looking for something. She did not turn from the familiar view now as she spoke to Thérèse.

‘You should not have let them talk about it, Sister. It's idle curiosity. Gossip. Wicked.' Sweat trickled from under her wimple where it was pulled tight to her hairline.

‘I'm sorry, Mother, truly. But what shall I say if it happens again?'

‘You will not let them speak in this way again, Sister.' The reedy frailty of Mother Catherine's voice was somehow cutting. ‘You need more discipline in your classes. If you cannot keep control of them some other job will have to be found for you. Perhaps you are too young.'

Mother Catherine turned finally from the window and peered at Thérèse, her eyes narrowed, looking for evidence of failure. She laced her fingers tightly together across her
body and Thérèse noticed, for the first time, how skeletal her hands were. Their papery blueness made her recoil; she stepped back.

‘There is no problem with my classes, Mother.' To be forced to spend her days closeted inside the convent was unthinkable. ‘But this thing, this idea, has taken hold of them. The best way for me to deal with it would be to refute what they are saying absolutely. When they come back from haymaking I could admonish them; I could send them to seek penance. That would be an end of it.'

Mother Catherine looked back at her and showed no sign of wanting to speak.

‘But can I do that? Can I say it's all lies, stupid, childish lies? Can I? I have to know, I have to know whether or not I can say that. And if I can't say it, I have to know what I can say, or it will come up again and again, with this class and with others.'

Rumours that Thérèse had hardly heard, whispered things half-known, became suddenly important. In the heavy heat, with the clasp of Mother Catherine's hands sharp before her, it all seemed to matter. It became something personal for a moment. In the few years that she had been at the convent, Thérèse had rarely spoken to Bernard, had barely noticed her in the bustle of shared life and the daily demands of her teaching. Even now, she could not clearly picture Bernard's face. But the stab of her curiosity was a physical pain, sickening, and it threatened to overwhelm her.