Transgression (15 page)

There were blood splatters on his coat and on his hand where he’d tried to stem the flow. “I knocked one of them over,” he said.

Adele sat on the floor beside him, soaked the edge of a towel in the water and washed off his hand and dabbed at his face.

“And then I tripped.” He held up his other hand to show her a scrape as proof. The top of his nose was also scraped. “If it hadn’t been for Robber, I wouldn’t have gotten away.”

“Good Robber,” Adele said.

Robber seemed subdued and hardly managed a wag of his stubby tale.

“He bit one of them. If they catch him, he’s dead.”

“And what if they catch you?”

“They’ll put me on trial with all the others. The black marketeers. The collaborators. Maybe they’ll shoot me.”

“You’re just a petty thief, André. They won’t shoot you.”

André looked slightly insulted. “They might.”

“How did they find out about you anyway?”

“They found Monsieur Talleyrand’s American Army rations.”

“Monsieur Talleyrand?”

“He’s the big man.”

“How did they find the rations?”

“That remains unexplained.”

“Did they catch Monsieur Talleyrand?”

“No. He’s after me, too. And all the people who work for Monsieur Talleyrand. It’s not a good situation.” André began to feel in his overcoat for his bottle of eau de vie. He found it, propped himself up and took a drink. “They think I informed the police about their hiding place.”

“Why do they think that?”

“I have a theory.” André seemed to be feeling better. He crossed his legs and offered her a drink.

Adele took the bottle and drank deeply. Over the past weeks she’d developed an appreciation for his cheap eau de vie, for the warm fire it invariably spread through her body and particularly for the dreamless sleep it seemed to produce.

“There’s a certain police inspector who is in Monsieur Talleyrand’s pay. I believe he’s the one who accused me of going to the police and trading information for money, and now you see, all those crates are in the hands of the police. Do you think the police will return them to the American Army or Monsieur Talleyrand. Ha! They will sell them themselves. Monsieur Talleyrand will receive nothing.” André looked frightened. “Francois Savard. He fell out of favour with Monsieur Talleyrand. Do you know what they did to Francois?”

“Don’t tell me,” Adele said.

“They cut out his eyes with a pen knife.”

Adele put her head close to his. “They won’t find you here,” she whispered. “You can stay here as long as you need.”

André was watching her face closely.

Robber crept over and put his head in Adele’s lap.

“You, too,” Adele said.

That night Adele slept on her mattress and André slept under his coat on the other side of the room. Robber curled up by the door, intent on listening to all the comings and goings in the hallway.

Just as Adele was about to fall asleep, André said, “Guess what?”

“What?”

“My real name isn’t André Dupont.”

Adele felt a foreboding creep through her. She was awake now. She waited for him to say his real name. He didn’t. “What is it then?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can you not know?”

“The nuns picked out a name.”

“You were brought up by nuns?”.

A frosty glow came through the skylight. She could see the outline of André’s dark figure lying across from her but she couldn’t see his face.

“André Dupont was a thirteenth-century friar. Franciscan,” he said.

“You were an orphan?”

“You have to have parents to be an orphan. I was a foundling. Just dropped out of a tree like a pear.”

“How did that happen?”

“How did I drop out of a tree? I’m not fishing for sympathy.”

“How did the nuns find you?”

“Sister told me I was found on their doorstep wrapped in a blanket and with a little wool hat on. Sister was very young and very beautiful.”

“She was?”

“Yes. Sister Marie was. Sister Agnes wasn’t. She was old and a dragon. She told me I’d been found under a wooden box in an alley. Of course I chose to believe Sister Marie until I was about the age of seven. That’s when I discovered she’d told all the other children the same story. Each one of us had arrived on their doorstep with a little wool hat on our heads.”

“I’m sorry,” Adele said.

“I’m happy for the way it happened.”

“Why?”

“I have no ties or obligations like I would have had if I belonged to someone. There’s all sorts of things you have to do and all sorts of things you have to feel. What if your mother dies?”

Adele hadn’t thought about her mother for a long while.

“I’m as free as a bird,” André said.

André was afraid to be seen in the building so Adele had to let Robber out for walks. André wanted her to dye Robber’s hair so he wouldn’t be recognized. Adele said that in their squalid quarter there were any number of stray dogs that looked just like Robber. André said he doubted that very much, but since they didn’t have any dye on hand and since he wasn’t sure where she might procure some, the subject was dropped. Robber went out without a disguise. Nothing happened.

In some ways it was nice having André in her room. She fussed over the scratches on his nose and hand, fussed over the fact that he ate too little and drank too much, in fact was quite drunk most nights by the time he fell asleep.

And in some ways it wasn’t so pleasant. Though he didn’t know where to purchase dye, he did know where to send her to get eau de vie and soon Adele was spending half her money buying him a bottle almost every day. It wasn’t the money that bothered her, though. Sometimes he just got progressively sleepy but on a few nights he saw things that weren’t there. He said they were shimmering and beautiful. It was on those nights he would end up crying and Adele would have to hold his head in her lap and rock him to sleep.

And there was the question of modesty and the toilet. Adele was forced to use the hell-hole down the hall now, and when she dressed and undressed she had to do it under her blanket. André told her she didn’t have to dress and undress that way because whether she was nude or clothed it made no difference to him.

Adele asked him why he was always watching her then.

André said where was he supposed to look, it was such a small room, and besides, if he averted his eyes it would mean that he was attracted to her, but by looking at her, just as he might look at Robber or a chair, it meant just the opposite.

“I have no sexual interest,” André said.

“What’s that mean?”

“It means I have no interest in sex.”

“There’s no such thing.”

“Yes, there is,” André said.

Adele continued to dress and undress under her blanket.

One night when she’d had a few too many sips of eau de vie herself and was lying on her mattress staring up at the moon through the skylight, she asked André why he thought he was the way he was.

“What way is that?”

“No interest in sex.”

André was lying in his dark corner with his long legs flung over the seat of Adele’s only chair. He’d been complaining about a sore back. Adele could tell by her wrinkled blanket that he was making a habit of sprawling out on her mattress when she was working or when she was away at night waiting for Manfred.

“I know why,” Adele said, “because you didn’t have anyone to teach you how to love.” A quarter moon suspended itself just above the skylight. “You didn’t have a father.”

“You don’t know anything about anything.”

Adele waited for him to say something more but he didn’t. She felt ashamed. It was none of her business. Why was she trying to drag him into such a conversation? She knew why, because she felt like being cruel. It was January. The nights were freezing on St. Augustine Street. She had a room but Manfred wasn’t in it. Instead, André, the marionette, was in it.

“You’re wrong, you know,” André said. “I loved Sister Marie.”

A few clouds raced by. The moon seemed to be going a thousand miles an hour. The room and everything in it was going a thousand miles an hour. Adele stretched her hand out for the bottle and took another sip.

“One day she explained how the world worked.”

Adele was thinking that nothing tasted as good as plum liquor but you had to make sure you had enough of it. It was lighting little bonfires all through her blood.

“I went looking for her one day. Sister said to me, “Are you trailing after me again?” She was praying in her special place in the garden. She held my hand. She said that I was very precious to her. I said she was very precious to me. She said that when she looked at me she didn’t see me at all, she saw
the face of Jesus. It was the same with all the sisters. They didn’t see us, she said. They washed us and fed us to touch Jesus.”

The moon began to look a lot like Simone Ducharme. Adele could hardly believe her eyes.

“I left the orphanage then. I lived on the streets. I had to do a great many things on the streets. I can’t tell you what they were.”

“How old were you?”

“Ten.”

“How could you survive, how could you find work and food and a place to stay if you were only ten?”

“I can’t tell you.”

Simone Ducharme was flying through a veil of milky clouds. She looked serene. She was going a thousand miles an hour.

“I grew up knowing everything about everything. There’s nothing I don’t know, and now I prefer to live on the edges and regard the world and everyone in it with amusement and contempt.”

“André?”

“What?”

“Is your back sore?”

“Yes.”

“You can come over here.”

André crawled over to her.

“Lie down beside me,” Adele said.

André stretched out on the mattress. Adele rubbed his back. “Does that feel better?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry for everything that’s happened to you,” Adele said. Simone Ducharme was peeking through the skylight. Snow was falling inside the room.

“You don’t know what happened,” André said.

“Try to go to sleep, André.”

Adele curled up beside him. André remained stretched out, motionless, and they slept like that all night long.

In the morning Adele went to work. That evening she took her familiar place on St. Augustine Street.

The night was cold and she soon got up because she was freezing. She walked down to Madame Bouchard’s and stared at the closed front door. And she had a revelation.

Adele rushed back to her room in the teetering old building. André had to unbolt the door–he hadn’t expected her to return so soon. He was in his underwear and looked half-drunk and half-asleep. She’d never seen such a baggy pair of underwear or such a pair of long skinny legs in all her life.

“Put your pants on.”

André stood there scratching his head and looking around for his pants.

“Manfred should have been on St. Augustine long before now. But if he had to leave Paris because it was too dangerous to stay, he wouldn’t have left without telling me what he was doing.”

“But he couldn’t tell you what he was doing if you weren’t here,” André reasoned, coming somewhat to life. Robber was using his pants for a bed. André pulled them out from under him.

“That’s right. That’s absolutely right. And the only person we have in common in all of Paris is…?”

André staggered a little, trying to put on his pants. “Is what?”

Adele’s face seemed transfused with light. “Madame Bouchard! There’s a note waiting for me at Madame Bouchard’s! I know there is! Why didn’t I think of this before?”

André kept his face turned away.

Adele went on. “Manfred said she was too dangerous but if he was desperate enough he would have had to trust her, anyway. She said he was the only one with a soul!”

André sat down on the chair. He was beginning to look distraught. “When are you going to see her?”

“As soon as it gets light.”

“Don’t do it.”

“I have to!”

“Manfred is still right. She made a lot of money off the Germans. All her neighbours will know this. She’ll be living in fear. She’d never be stupid enough to hold on to a message from a German soldier. She’d use her head, unlike you. And if you knock on her door and ask her that question, she’ll
turn you in to the local vigilantes!” André was shaking. His face had gone completely white.

“What is it?” Adele asked.

André put his head down between his bony knees. “Manfred didn’t need to leave a message with Madame Bouchard. You and Manfred have someone in common besides her.”

Adele touched André’s wispy hair. Her fingers were trembling. She touched his shoulder. “What do you mean?”

“How do you think I knew where to look for you? How do you think I knew who you were?”

“You took off my bandage.”

“No,” André said.

Adele couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t breathe.

“He paid me to watch for you. It was too dangerous for him.”

“Oh God,” Adele said. She could feel her whole body begin to tremble.

“This tall German officer, he arranged for Manfred to hide in a house owned by Monsieur Talleyrand. Unfortunately you were late and didn’t arrive before the Germans had to leave. His friend was going to get him back into Germany. That was the plan. Easier planned than done, don’t you think, in all the confusion and bombing?” André looked up at Adele–he looked almost hopeful.

Adele sank to the floor. “Why didn’t you tell me he was in Paris? Why didn’t you tell me he was alive?”

“I don’t know that he’s alive.”

“But you didn’t tell me anything.”

“I needed you to stay here. I wanted you to stay. At first it was business. And then, it wasn’t.” He dared another glance at Adele. “You missed him by several weeks.”

“You didn’t tell me!” Adele screamed.

André got up and began to circle the room. He walked across the mattress and around the chair and table.

“When did he leave Paris? In August? That’s months ago. Months and months! When were you going to tell me?”

André walked across the mattress again in his aimless journey.

“You betrayed me!”

André let out a moan. “But I love you.” Huge tears trickled out of his eyes and ran down the grooves in his face. They wet the corners of his mouth.