Transgression (14 page)

“Well, that settles that,” André said, slipping her money inside his pocket.

Adele began to pull on her raincoat.

“Where are you going?”

“Anywhere but here.”

André brought the roll of money back out. “I’m not a robber. Did you think I was a robber?”

Adele snatched it out of his hand before he could change his mind.

“That won’t last long.”

“Long enough.” Adele put the money back inside her raincoat.

“You still need a job. I’ve helped lots of girls from the country find work.”

“I’m not from the country.”

“Are you from Paris?”

“No.”

“Well?” André walked over to a neutral corner and sat down on top of a garbage can as if to say, You can leave any time you want, I’m not stopping you.

“You still need a job. You don’t have to do it forever. Just for now. A room comes with it. You can sleep in as late as you want. And there’s no danger. A doctor comes to examine all the girls once a month. That should please you. The only problem is, you look like a hard case right now. It would be best if you stayed here for a day or two, until the swelling goes down. Are you as young as you look?”

“I am not a whore.”

“Who said you were? I didn’t say you were a whore. I just said I could get you a job in a brothel. That’s completely different.”

Adele could feel her knees beginning to bend without her permission. The room swayed.

“You need a drink,” André said. He got off his garbage can, rummaged around in a pile of clothes and pulled out a bottle half full of a colourless liquid. Twisting off the cap and trying to look sympathetic, he carried the bottle over to Adele.

“What’s in that?”

“When I have the sniffles, it makes me feel better. Why don’t you sit down?”

Adele felt for the pink chair.

“Just try it.”

Adele reached out for the bottle and took a sip. It was bitter. It burned going down. It tasted faintly of plums.

“Have another one.”

“It’s too strong.”

“I’ll have one.” André retrieved the bottle and took several gulps. His prominent Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. He closed his eyes. “Excellent,” he said.

Adele sat down. “What is it?”

“Eau de vie de mirabelle.”

“That’s what I thought. Plum liquor. My father, the doctor,” Adele said pointedly, “drinks eau de vie on occasion.”

“Does he?” André began to sink down as if someone unseen had loosened his strings. He landed on the floor. Adele could see his bony white knees poking through two holes in his pants. “Suddenly everyone’s been in the Resistance for the past four years, blowing up bridges and assassinating Germans, and to prove it, they’ve been running around beating up girls like you. Are you absolutely sure you wouldn’t like to work in a safe and beautiful brothel?”

“Will you be paid a fee if I do?”

“Perhaps.”

“You’re unspeakable.”

“Then don’t speak to me.”

Robber came out from under the table and put his head in André’s lap. André took another drink. His Adam’s apple bobbed. He shuddered.

“I’m meeting someone,” Adele said.

“Oh?” André replied.

“We arranged to meet in Paris. It’s just a matter of time.”

“Good,” André said pleasantly.

They sat in silence for some time. “What kind of dog is that?”

“A water dog. I found him in the river.” André put the cap back on the bottle.

“How did you find him?”

“We were unloading a boat. I heard a sound like a cat and I turned my light on. There were five puppies, four lying on the seaweed, dead. He was washing around in the water mewing.” André looked at her more closely. “Don’t be sad, Adele. There are hundreds of girls just like you. You haven’t done anything wrong.”

Adele clenched her jaws. Her head began to hurt again. “What do you do for a living?”

“I’m in merchandise. Not me, but I work for people who are. I do whatever they want me to do, more or less. No violence, though. I hate blood. I really do. You have no idea how upsetting it was for me to have to look at your head.” As if to prove how upsetting it had been, André took the cap off the bottle again and had another drink.

“You said you were a collaborator.”

“Well, it was difficult to work with the Germans, they’re so honest. Mainly we do our work in the black market. We have a whole new source of supplies. I’ll show you.”

André levitated off the floor and crossed the room to open a small wooden door. Robber trotted out. André beckoned for Adele to follow.

When Adele got up off the chair, she had to hold on to it a moment longer for support. She walked out into a narrow white-washed stone hallway. André was unlocking a set of iron doors at the far end. He and Robber disappeared inside. A light went on.

Adele stepped through the doors into a large vaulted cellar piled full of crates that looked just like the ones in the redheaded soldier’s truck.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
was stamped all over them.

André and Robber were busy climbing to the top of the pile. “American quartermasters are much easier to deal with than German ones,” André called out. “They understand what life is all about.”

The two of them, man and dog, sat down on the topmost crate with the same happy expressions. It almost made Adele want to laugh. “Are you supposed to be showing me all this?”

“I wanted to. I think we could be friends.”

“I have to go back now.” How long had she been away from her window ledge? Manfred could have come and gone.

Adele turned quickly, and the room tilted.

“You’re too weak to go back.”

Two days with almost no sleep and no food, yes, Adele thought. “Do you have anything to eat?”

André grinned down at her with his crazed marionette smile. He opened up his arms to encompass all the crates in the room.

A
dele sat in the pink chair while André heated up a can of American stew on his battered hot plate. She ate it out of the can and fell asleep before she was finished. When she woke up, she was lying on the bed under a faded quilt.

The little wooden door opened. André and Robber came in. “Good morning,” he said.

“Is it morning?”

“Nine o’clock.” He came over to the bed and lifted her bandage up a little, took a look and made a face. “The thing is, you need stitches.”

“I don’t need stitches,” Adele said. Something about the confidence of André’s touch alarmed her. She felt under the quilt to see if her clothes were all on and all in the right places.

André noticed. He looked slightly hurt. “Robber and I slept in the other room.” He picked up the kettle and drifted over to the sink. “I’ll make some tea.”

“Then I’ll have to leave.”

“To meet your friend?”

“Yes.”

André turned on the tap. A trickle of water came out and splattered into the kettle.

As they drank their tea, Adele thought about the day ahead. She decided to change her strategy. Instead of sitting on her window ledge for most of that morning, she’d watch for Manfred at the end of the street where there was a cluster of shops. She thought she’d be less conspicuous waiting there.

She fashioned a new arm sling out of one of André’s shirts, having fished it out of the pile of clothes on the floor. Apparently there were two piles, one for dirty clothes and one for clean but she couldn’t tell the difference. André didn’t complain even when she began to cut it up. She left for St. Augustine Street. At noon André showed up with Robber and gave her some bread, cheese and a piece of spiced meat. When she thanked him, he shrugged and went away.

Adele began to walk the length of the street again. The same boys began to follow her again. She walked away from St. Augustine Street until they gave up, and then she came back and stood by the shops. When it started to get dark, she moved to her familiar ledge under the stairs. She huddled there all night. Manfred did not appear. By morning she felt half-frozen and could hardly stand. By noon the taunting boys were back again.

To get rid of them, Adele had to walk a long way away from St. Augustine Street. She sat down on a bench in a tiny park. It looked barren, the grass brown and dry. Exhaustion crept over her. The air felt cold and gusts of wind blew through the trees, rattling the leaves.

Adele got up and crossed the park to a screen of bushes growing along someone’s garden wall. She pushed between them and sat on the ground. The cold was a shock-it crept all through her. She pulled the extra socks out of her pocket and put them on her hands. She leaned back against the wall. Cold knifed through her raincoat, and her head began to throb again. She could hear the wind high up in the trees. She looked up. The branches were tossing, tossing.

By the time Robber found her, the daylight was fading and Adele was still curled up beside the garden wall. The dog bumped her face and tried to lever her up with his muzzle. She could see André ambling his way across the park toward her. From her perspective, he looked like he was defying gravity, walking like a large fly along an upright wall of grass.

Adele sat up.

André was wearing a frayed tweed overcoat that he’d obviously found somewhere, or stolen, because it didn’t fit. It stopped well above his knees, which were still peeking out through the holes in his pants.

“I guess you haven’t found your lover yet,” he said.

Adele barely reacted. Horizontal collaborator. Of course he knew. He’d seen her shaved head.

“There’s not a German soldier for a hundred miles except for the dead ones,” André said. He squatted down beside her and balanced there, all legs. He took a bottle of plum liquor from inside his coat and offered her a drink. Adele shook her head. He took a gulp from the bottle. “That job offer we discussed. It’s still open.”

Adele got to her feet and began to walk unsteadily across the park. André and Robber fell in step beside her.

“You’re still not interested?”

“No.”

At the street, Adele turned left.

So did André and Robber. “Where are you going now?”

“To find a room. I will get a respectable job and I will watch for Manfred every night.”

“Good for you. You’ll become famous. People will write songs about you.”

“Shut the hell up,” Adele said.

André and Robber continued to walk along beside her. “The thing is, I need money.”

Adele gave him a look.

“For the room last night, you see. And for the food.”

“How much?”

“All you have.”

“I need it. I can give you half.” Adele fumbled in her pocket for her roll of franc notes.

André sighed. “Giving your money away just like that. You see? You can’t look after yourself, you’re a simpleton from the country.”

Adele began to walk away again.

“You’re different from what I expected,” André said.

Adele turned back. “What do you mean, different from what you expected?” For the first time since she’d been forced to meet him, André seemed unsure of himself.

“You’re a bird of a different feather, that’s all.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

André shrugged his bony shoulders. “I can get you a room.”

“Yes. And a doctor comes with it every month.”

“No. I don’t mean that. Forget that. This is different. I’m talking about a private room in a suitable building.”

Adele gave him a long look. “Suitable for what?”

“For a young woman in your situation. That’s all,” André said.

André and Robber led Adele through a series of narrow streets into an increasingly gloomy maze. Buildings leaned uneasily against each other, the narrow roadway tilted downward at an increasingly sharp angle. Adele could smell a familiar pungency in the air not unlike the park in Rouen, but here the river’s hidden presence was much stronger. Drying seaweed and slops. Decaying fish in standing water.

They turned a corner into a small square. Shop stalls cluttered the way and though it was almost dark and there were no street lamps, crowds of people were still milling about picking over the few articles for sale, bargaining in languages Adele couldn’t understand. They looked darkly foreign and hungry and took no notice of the tall man with the wispy clown hair or the girl with the head wound or the scraggly dog.

André opened a battered door into a tall wooden building. The air inside smelled of everything imaginable. Adele stood in the dark foyer and tried to separate them out. Cabbage. Urine. Spices. Mould. And most pervasively, the thick smell of cooking oils.

“Give me your money,” André demanded.

Adele handed over her small roll of francs. Shouts and screams were coming from somewhere above their heads.

“Stay here.” André and Robber disappeared up the stairs.

Three young dark-skinned men with black liquid eyes burst in through the door joking and laughing. As soon as they saw Adele, they came to a stop and brazenly took in her pale face, her bruised forehead and bandages, her stained, bulky raincoat. They ran up the stairs in a torrent of foreign words and laughter.

A plump potato-faced woman came through the door carrying something very large wrapped in a cloth bundle. She gave Adele a furtive look and clattered noisily up the stairs in wooden shoes.

People kept coming and going until Adele began to wonder if André had gone out a side door with her money. Just as she was sure he had, Robber appeared on the stairs. André was looking down at her from out of the dark. A tiny woman was standing beside him, barely visible.

“Madame says that everything is settled,” André announced, “top floor.”

Adele began to climb the stairs. The higher they climbed, the stronger the smells.

“You’ll like this place,” André said.

The room had a skylight of four dirty panes of glass supported by a rusting iron frame. Adele loved the skylight. Everything else was a disappointment. For one thing the skylight was the only window in the room, and it looked like it leaked because rivers of brown stain ran across the ceiling and down the walls. Pieces of ancient wallpaper clung precariously to yellowed plaster. There were no closets, just two hooks screwed into the back of the door. A small cupboard painted a faded yellow sat in one corner and an intricately wrought bronze light fixture, looking like it had been stolen from a better building, stuck out of a wall. The only other attraction was a stained mattress lying on the floor.

“For the mattress you pay extra,” the woman said in a startling loud, guttural French.

“No, thank you,” Adele replied.

“Filthy woman.” Her dark eyes blazed.

Adele’s heart shrank.

“Not you,” André said, “she means the woman who had this room before you.”

Adele looked back down at the stained mattress.

“No,” the woman said, shaking a brown admonishing finger in Adele’s face.

“I don’t want the mattress,” Adele said, “I’m a seamstress.”

“Follow now.” The woman left the room and headed down the hall. André unfolded himself and landed on the floor by the cupboard.

Adele’s new landlady stopped at a door with a hole bored through the middle of it the size of a man’s fist. She swung it open. A thick wave of revolting smells went up Adele’s nose.

“Toilet,” she said.

The communal kitchen was at the other end of the hall. The small stove was covered with splatters of food; a garbage pail sat beside it full of grease. The tour was over. The woman disappeared.

Adele went back into her new room, closed the door and sat on the floor opposite André and Robber. “How long am I paid up for?”

“Two weeks.”

“How can that be?”

“It’s cheap, and perhaps I contributed a little something.”

“Thank you, André.”

André nodded.

“I have an electric plug over there.” Adele was beginning to feel slightly encouraged. “I could cook in this room. I could heat up water to wash in. I don’t need much. A small table. Two chairs. A bed.”

“Just in case your boyfriend shows up?”

“He will.”

André pulled his bottle out and took a sip.

“Do you think there’s a way to open that skylight for some fresh air?”

“I don’t know.”

“Could you take that disgusting mattress downstairs and give it to the landlady?”

André eyed it. “Yes.”

“We’ll need some kind of heater once it gets cold. Oh André, you don’t know. This is the secret room Manfred and I talked about. This is it!” Adele looked around, amazed more at the vision in her mind than the room itself. She got up and pulled out the drawer in the cupboard. Everything would need to be cleaned. “Who are these people who live around here?”

“Turks and Algerians were here first. Then Poles, Belgians, Dutch running from the Germans.” He paused. “You said you’re a seamstress. I can get you a job.”

“How?”

“I have influence.”

Adele turned and smiled at him, a radiant smile. “I’ve given you no reason to be so helpful.”

“That’s all right,” André said.

André kept his word. He found Adele a job in a small building that had once been someone’s house but now was owned by a textile factory. Foreign women sat at tables sewing elastic bands and ribbons and splintered pieces of whale bone into all manner of underwear and foundation garments. Apparently the foreman of the place had owed André a favour. All Adele had to do was be brave enough to go out in public without wearing an arm sling and prove to the foreman that she could run a sewing machine.

On her first day a supervisor asked her what had happened to her head. She was still wearing her head bandage. She told him the story that André had given her, that she’d been hit by the German sniper fire that had sprayed the streets during the early days of the city’s liberation. Her story swept through the building’s small rooms and soon all the women were nodding at her in approval.

Sometimes she’d work twelve hours, other times she’d come to the house at six in the morning to be told there was nothing for her to do that day. She continued to wear her bandage covered by a new scarf she’d bought at one of the stalls.

She purchased a used hot plate. André dragged in pieces of furniture he’d picked up from somewhere, including a cleaner-looking and wider mattress. The only time she used the toilet with the hole in the door was the quick moment it took in the morning to empty out a commode.

She lived for Manfred. She felt his hands helping her get up in the morning, he accompanied her to the house she worked in, he sat beside her. Whenever she worked less than twelve hours she huddled on the window ledge on St. Augustine Street. She reasoned that Manfred had been sick or he’d had an accident at work. That was why he hadn’t come for her and that was why he was sure to appear at any moment.

Winter arrived and she waited under different quarters of the moon. Sometimes the night sky seemed like hanging crystals and she could see to the end of the universe. Other nights clouds scuttled over the rooftops and snow fell. Every night felt endless.

One frigid evening Adele was sitting in her room staring at herself in a mirror. She knew she couldn’t go on wearing bandages forever and she did
have a persuasive white scar left over from the brick wall, but how could she explain her hair? She couldn’t believe how slowly it was taking to grow, it was only two or three inches long. Most women were wearing their hair gathered up high on the sides. Her hair was turning thick and wiry again. It looked like a short unruly hedge.

There was a furious banging on her door. “Adele, let me in!”

Adele put down her mirror and slid back the bolt. André was standing there, wispy hair standing up and blood running from his nose.

“What happened?” Adele cried out.

André didn’t reply. He made his way over to the far corner of the room, put his back against the wall and slid slowly to the floor. Robber limped in after him.

“André, what happened? Tell me! Did you have an accident?”

“The police are after me.”

Adele grabbed her cooking pot, hurried down the hall to the kitchen, and filled the pot with water. She had to knock to get back into her room, for André had bolted the door behind her. He took his time unlocking it and when she came in, he sank down on the mattress.