Transgression (21 page)

It stood there exhausted, its legs splayed out a little. Adele could see now that it wasn’t Robber. It had the same whiskered, hairy face, but it was slightly smaller and it had mange. A patch of bare grey skin ran across its flank and down its back leg. She could see that it was shivering.

Adele began to cry.

I
t was obvious to everyone except Adele that she could no longer look after the children. Her voice shook when she talked. Her hands shook.

Char spoke to Maurice, who spoke to Nurse Sarraute, who brought another Red Cross worker up to the children’s barracks to replace her. She insisted that Adele spend the night in the nurses’ residence. Obviously Adele hadn’t been sleeping, so she gave her something so she could sleep. Adele was surprised by this, but she didn’t argue. She did what Nurse Sarraute told her.

That evening Maurice climbed up the dormitory stairs to see her. Adele was sitting by a window looking over the lights of the camp.

“Can you continue with your work?” he asked.

Adele thought about this for a long moment. She shook her head.

“You did an excellent job. I am so very pleased with you.”

Adele closed her eyes.

The next day Nurse Sarraute accompanied Adele back to Strasbourg. She made it clear that she wasn’t making a special trip just for her–she had to return anyway.

After two days of mostly strained silence, they rattled back across the Rhine. As soon as the empty truck reached the first busy intersection, Adele asked the driver to stop. She told Nurse Sarraute that a girlfriend of hers lived nearby, and she wanted to spend some time with her. Adele picked up her suitcase and opened the door. She climbed down from the truck and was surprised to see Nurse Sarraute following her. They stood on the street together, the truck idling noisily.

“Don’t be disappointed in yourself,” Nurse Sarraute said. “It was unconscionable of Maurice to put you in such a situation. The truth is you surpassed our expectations.”

Adele didn’t feel a thing. “Thank you, Madame,” she said.

“There are so many jobs to be done right here in Strasbourg. When you feel up to it, you must come around to see us.”

“Yes, Madame.”

“Why don’t you keep this?” Nurse Sarraute put her hand in her pocket and pulled out Adele’s grey cap. Adele had left it lying on the bed in the dormitory.

“Thank you.”

Nurse Sarraute climbed back into the truck and Adele walked away.

She still had some money left from Paris hidden in the lining of her suitcase so she took a small room in the first
pension
she came to. It was at the back of the house and overlooked a walled garden.

Adele put her suitcase down and lay on top of the bed.

It seemed to get dark very suddenly. She wasn’t sure whether she’d fallen asleep or not. She could hear someone climb the stairs and pass her door. She could hear another door opening and closing. She wondered how long it would take to die if she just lay there, getting thinner by the day, drifting. Her new landlady would be sure to come tapping. “Are you still in there, dear?” she’d say.

Manfred was dead.

Adele got up and dragged the dresser in front of her door. She pulled down the blind and lay down on the bed again. She went over some other ways she might kill herself, faster ones. She could buy a rope and hang herself, she could buy rat poison, she could buy a knife, get in a bath and slit her wrists. She could jump from a high building. She could walk into the Rhine. There were so many ways.

Dresden had melted, Manfred was dead, and she couldn’t touch her feelings. Just a terrible weight in the centre of her chest. And in her soul. And some kind of pain that seemed to be nowhere in particular and everywhere.

Adele got up again and pulled the dresser aside. She went down to the street and found a place that sold liquor, where she bought a bottle of
eau de vie de mirabelle. She returned to her room and drank until the pain went away and she passed out. The next day she went to a café around the corner and ate some bread and cheese. She returned to her room and finished off the bottle.

She continued living this way for several days, eating very little and drinking a lot. She avoided thinking about anything. She avoided looking at herself in the mirror.

One day she realized she was out of money. She walked down the hall and drew herself a bath. She made it as hot as she could. Steam covered the mirror, dripped off the walls. Without taking off her clothes, she slipped under the water. She could feel her hair fanning out, her stupid hair. She opened her eyes. The ceiling above her rippled, it looked like it might dissolve. She was standing outside the world looking through a window. The room was full of water now, the world was filling up. All she had to do was take a deep breath and drown. Her father was there, his face was right in front of her. “Don’t, Adele,” he said.

Adele lurched up, gulping for air.

She sat there for a long time. She thought of the in-between men shuffling endlessly up and down the halls of the infirmary. She thought of Étienne, his starved face and random tufts of hair. His bright, lively eyes despite all he had seen, all he had suffered. And what had happened to her? Nothing in comparison. She looked at her dress clinging to her legs, her hands wrinkling in the water. She felt like a coward.

Adele changed her clothes and walked three miles to the train station and from there retraced her steps until she found the hotel she’d stayed at when she’d first arrived in Strasbourg. She crossed the street, walked through the courtyard and pushed through the doors.

A woman who looked to be in her sixties and who was dressed in civilian clothes was sitting at the front desk. Other women were working farther down the room at several long tables.

“My name is Adele Georges. I would like to work here. I have worked for the Red Cross before. I was in Buchenwald.”

“Adele Georges?” The woman had a pleasant face and the purest of white hair tied back in a bun. “Yes, I think I know the name.” She began to
look through a stack of well-worn cards. “Before Nurse Sarraute returned to Buchenwald she said to expect you. Here we are.” She picked out a card.

“How did she know I’d come back?” Adele was surprised.

“She didn’t, she just said she hoped you would. You can start off sorting those clothes donations.” She indicated two bulky cartons sitting by the door. “And making up relief packages, if you like.”

“I need money.”

The woman frowned. “I’m afraid this is all volunteer work. You should know that.”

“Until I find paying work, I mean. I wonder if you could lend me some money?”

The woman studied Adele for a moment. “How much do you think I should lend you?”

“Just a few francs. I need to eat. I think my landlady will give me some time on my room.”

The woman put Adele’s card carefully back in the box. “All right,” she said.

Adele dragged the cartons to the back of the room and began to sort through them. She tried to think of what to do next. She could get a list of tailors from someone. She could go from shop to shop and ask if they needed someone to sew. She separated the clothes into male and female piles. And adult and children.

Some of the clothes were nothing more than rags and they all needed washing. Who would give away such disgusting things? Who did they think they were giving them to?

“All these clothes have to be washed,” Adele yelled out, her voice ringing through the room, startling everyone.

Adele forgot to eat that night, even though she now had the older woman’s money in her pocket. She drank herself to sleep instead. The next morning it took all her strength to get dressed. She didn’t bother brushing her hair, but she went back to the Red Cross-she didn’t know what else to do.

Within a few hours Adele had washed the clothes that were washable from the previous day and had hung them out to dry on a line strung up for that purpose behind the building. When they were dry, she gathered them up
and brought them inside. She got out the ironing board and was almost through her ironing when she heard a pair of boots marching across the hardwood floor.

Adele looked up.

The big Canadian soldier from Weimar was approaching her. He had his soldier’s cap on at the prescribed regulation angle. He looked official and serious. When he saw that she’d noticed him, he took off his cap and smiled his broad open smile.

“Hello once again, Adele,” he said in his halting French.

“Hello.”

He glanced down at a page in a book he was carrying. Adele took the opportunity to study his soldier’s face. It seemed innocent enough, but then how could anyone tell?

“I am very glad to see you once again. I am sorry I upset you.” Again in painful French. It was obvious he had been rehearsing. There were several tabs sticking out of the pages of his book. “My name is Alex. Do you remember me?”

“Yes.”

Alex turned to another marked page. “Would you like to go to a store and eat?”

“Pardon?”

“Would you like to go to a store and eat?” His face flushed a little. He looked back down at the page.

Adele put her hand over the book and pointed up at a clock on the wall. It was only a few minutes past eleven o’clock in the morning. Besides, she was still feeling ill from the eau de vie of the night before. “No,” she said.

“Oh,” He said something in English that Adele didn’t understand. He smiled again.

Adele went back to her ironing.

Alex touched her bare arm. It felt strange to be touched like that. He was pointing at the clock and then he tapped his wristwatch. It had a small wire cage over the crystal. And then he pointed toward the door and nodded hopefully.

Adele didn’t understand. She shook her head.

Alex sat down on a chair and crossed his one leg, pointed to the door again, pointed to the clock, pointed to her.

He would wait for her. Outside. That’s what he was saying.

Adele smiled a little.

Alex smiled, too. His face seemed to hold a generous spirit, perhaps because of its broad boyishness. His cheekbones flared out in a not unattractive way. He stood up. He was almost twice her height and three times her width, but his size didn’t seem a threat. It had the opposite effect-it seemed reassuring somehow.

“Yes. All right,” Adele said.

Alex looked extraordinarily pleased. Before she could change her mind he turned away, walked past the other workers, past the woman at the desk and out the door.

Adele went back to her work and tried not to think about what she’d just said. She finished her ironing. She brushed several suit coats and pants. She decided to get a damp cloth and try ironing them. The next time she looked up at the clock it was almost one. She went into the toilet and looked at herself in the mirror. She tried to bring her hair under some control by flattening it with her hands, but it didn’t work. Her eyes looked so tired and desperate. Had they always been that way? She rubbed her cheeks and lips but she couldn’t coax any colour into them.

Why am I primping, she thought to herself.

She thought of Manfred.

She thought of her father.

Adele pushed out the front door, half-expecting the Canadian to have disappeared. He was sitting on the courtyard wall. They stood in the sun and looked at each other for a long time. He opened his book and began to fumble through the pages. Adele pointed across the street at a café beside the hotel. She walked across the courtyard and out the gate as if she were in a hurry.

After they settled themselves, Alex ordered a bottle of wine. With the first glass Adele’s hangover disappeared. Halfway through the second, she felt almost instantly drunk. The busy room seemed to be turning slowly. People floated by. The sun poured through the window.

Adele picked up his book. It said “French-English Dictionary and Common Phrases” in both languages on its bright blue cover.

Alex had taken off his soldier’s cap. His blond hair, though still short, was beginning to grow out a little. Perhaps because the war was over, Adele thought. She knew who he was. He was just a typical soldier trying his best to get a girl into bed. Any girl. Any bed. That’s what they did. And when that didn’t work, they’d rape you.

Alex touched her hand. He didn’t seem to have any inhibitions about touching, but as accessible as his face seemed to be, his touch felt complicated.

“You. Char and Pierre. To Strasbourg. Red Cross,” he said.

“So that’s how you knew where to find me,” Adele replied.

Alex began to thumb through the pages trying to figure out what she’d just said.

Adele wondered what Char and Pierre had told him. Particularly Pierre with his fabulous English. That she’d failed? That she couldn’t go on? That she was in a vulnerable state?

Adele ordered veal. It was the first substantial meal she’d had since the mess tent in Buchenwald. Alex ordered the veal, too.

He pointed to his book again, to the word for
relative, kinsman, one’s family,
and said, “Dresden?”

Adele nodded and looked away.

Don’t touch my hand again, she thought, please don’t touch my hand. He didn’t. When she glanced back at him, he was looking appropriately sad for her relatives in Dresden, and then she wasn’t so sure. For a brief moment his face looked haunted by its own thoughts.

After lunch Alex walked her back across the street to the Red Cross building. “May I see you again?” he said. He’d found this expression quite easily-it was one of the ones he’d marked in his pages.

It was a question to dread. Adele had been dreading hearing it for the last half-hour. And dreading not hearing it. What could she do with herself? She’d be loathed by anyone who ever found out what she’d done, who she really was. She’d be loathed by this man too, if he knew.

There was no answer to his question and there was no answer to her life. Adele ran up the steps and disappeared through the door.

She finished her ironing, her folding, her sorting and packaging. When she came out, Alex was gone.

She walked back the three miles to her room. She took out her bottle and sat on the floor by the window watching the shadows darken, the walled garden slowly disappear.

She tried to picture Alex reaching tenderly for her, but all she could see was the red-headed soldier, his face and hands, and feel her head smashing up against the crate.

“I can’t do this,” she said. The room was dark by now and no one answered.