Transgression (23 page)

A
dele and Alex sat on the bench by the bus stop and made plans. The pages in the blue book flipped madly back and forth.

“You’ll want to get married in Paris,” Alex said. She’d already told him the same story she’d told Char about her parents. “So your brothers and relatives can attend.”

“My brothers are out of the country. They’re with my uncle. He’s a diplomat.”

“You’ll want them to attend, though.”

“It won’t be possible for them to return before you leave for England. It really doesn’t matter. I don’t want any relatives to attend.”

“Oh,” Alex said.

“We’re not close.”

Alex accepted this and explained that he would need written permission from his commanding officer to marry. Once he’d received this, he would travel back from Le Havre to Strasbourg. They could be married in Strasbourg, Char could be her bridesmaid.

“I don’t think so,” Adele said. The last thing she wanted was to have Char putting together a trousseau and organizing a luncheon. “We’ll get married where you are. In Le Havre.”

“All right,” Alex said. He told her that after the wedding he’d have to go back to Canada with his regiment. Adele would follow later, on a different ship. “I hear the ships are all fixed up nice for the brides. It’ll be fine. And I’ll be there when you arrive-I’ll meet you in Halifax.”

Adele nodded, though she wasn’t sure what he’d just said. It didn’t matter. She would make him happy. He would never be sorry about his decision, she swore to herself.

Two days later Alex left with his regiment for Le Havre. A week later a letter arrived saying that Alex had everything arranged. An army chaplain would marry them in two weeks’ time. He enclosed a money order in case she wanted to buy some clothes and for her train ticket to Le Havre. He’d already found her a place to stay. She could come now. Come soon, he wrote.

Adele stretched out and put the letter on the pillow beside her. She tried to imagine the mattress settling down from his weight, tried to imagine tipping toward him as she always did, his big friendly face right in front of hers. She could see him smiling. She could feel his love for her all the way from Le Havre. And her love for him.

That night Adele dreamed of Manfred. He was cradling her foot in his lap and painting her toenails a ruby red. He looked as young as he had that first day bending over his work at the Domestic Population Bureau of Information. His dark hair. Delicate arching eyebrows. Sweet beautiful face. Water was sloshing around her body. Steam dripped down from the walls. She could feel every stroke of the tiny brush. Her toenails gleamed.

“You found a most excellent room,” he was saying. “Do you like living together?”

Adele tried to touch his arm so he’d know how glad she was to be with him, but she couldn’t move.

“Do you love me?” Manfred asked.

Adele tried to speak but her mouth couldn’t make a sound. The water felt cold. It was creeping up her face.

The next morning Adele packed her suitcase, cashed the money order and caught a train for Le Havre. This time the tracks were uncluttered with people celebrating and the trip was speedy. The train pulled into Paris in the middle of the first night. All she had to do was wait for the connecting train to Le Havre later that morning.

Adele curled up on a bench inside the massive station, her suitcase safely beside her, and tried to sleep. She was facing a tall row of doors that led outside. She wondered what would happen if she pushed one of them
open. She wondered if André and Robber would be standing there. She knew they wouldn’t be. The Paris air would smell familiar, though, and her heart would ache.

She wondered what Jean and Bibi were doing. They’d be asleep, of course. It was the middle of the night. And her mother would be asleep. And Madame Théberge.

And René? Where was he?

And her father? How could she leave and not know whether he’d been released? Perhaps he was already home. What would it matter what he thought or what he might say? Just to know he was alive. It would mean everything. How could she leave forever and not know?

And there was something else. There had always been something else. It had been there from the first day Alex had walked into the Red Cross. It had followed her to work, ridden beside her on the bus, sat with her in her room and watched the garden disappear. A ragged, war-ravished, nagging thought. What if Manfred wasn’t dead? She had pushed this improbable possibility back down into the dark, rejected it each time it had surfaced, because Alex was her love and her escape.

Adele looked up at the milky glass dome high above her head. A bird was flying inside the building. It circled around and around.

Rouen looked half-asleep and in a grey mood when Adele climbed off the train. Clouds scuttled over the rooftops, and the light seemed diffused and murky.

She hurried along through the familiar streets, her collar pulled up, turning her face away from anyone she passed. She hadn’t expected that she’d feel so afraid.

A new enterprise had moved into the empty dress shop below Lucille’s apartment, or what had been Lucille’s apartment over a year ago. A jumble of bicycles and bicycle parts was visible through the shop window. It was only seven-thirty, and the shop’s door was still firmly padlocked.

Beside the window, the outside door to Lucille’s stairway looked even
more worn and paint-blistered than before. Adele gave it a push and it swung open. She climbed the narrow stairs and knocked on the familiar door, anticipating all the while that she’d be confronted by a disgruntled stranger.

The door opened a crack. One of Lucille’s almond-shaped eyes peered out at her. “Holy Mother of God, I don’t believe it. Look who’s back.”

“Hello, Lucille.”

Lucille opened the door a little wider and saw Adele’s suitcase. “You can’t stay here.”

“I don’t want to.” Adele could see a man sitting on the couch wearing a pair of faded blue undershorts and nothing else. A skinny woman in a pink bra and white panties was standing right in front of him. Adele didn’t recognize her. The man was scratching his chest nonchalantly and puffing on a cigarette. He turned to look at Adele looking at him. The woman collapsed on the couch. Adele could smell the sweet, languorous smell of alcohol.

“Did Manfred ever show up here?” she asked, not knowing what answer she hoped for, but needing a final answer, nevertheless.

“You’re still not looking for him, are you? Christ, that’s pitiful.” Lucille let the door swing open some more. She was holding a faded dressing gown tightly to her neck-she looked naked underneath. “They’re all dead. Wilhelm and Manfred and all the rest. Anyway, they might as well be. They’ll never come back here.”

“I know. I just wanted to make sure.”

“Why would they come back here? The war’s over. It’s all over!”

“Yes.”

“Jesus Christ, Adele, haven’t you got over him yet?”

“I am over him, Lucille,” Adele said. “I just felt I needed to know.”

An older man, a hairy expanse of gut suspended over his rumpled pants, appeared in Lucille’s front room. He picked up a bottle from the table and disappeared from sight again.

“I have my own business now,” Lucille said by way of explanation. “You take advantage of whatever you can. Right?”

“Right.”

“I’m taking advantage of my reputation.”

Adele kissed Lucille on her cheek. “I’m so glad to see you. I missed you.”

Lucille’s face collapsed a little. “Where’s my raincoat?”

“I lost it somewhere.”

Lucille wrapped her arms around Adele. They hugged each other for a long time.

“I have to go back to work,” Lucille said.

Adele made her way down to the river. It was invisible behind a screen of mist, but she knew it was there. She could hear the deep sonorous horns of fishing boats and barges as they moved out of their moorings and felt their way along the far shore. The benches in the park were too wet to sit on. All the trees were silvery and dripping.

She walked down to the wall over-looking the water. Manfred had thrown his cap through the air at just that spot. “I have a plan,” he’d said. “We will run away.”

Adele shivered. She was only ten blocks from her house.

She looked down at Alex’s ring. It looked fragile on her hand, but it also looked like some kind of defence against the world. She decided to leave it on.

The back laneway seemed the same as always. So did the neighbours’ houses. Over the wooden gate, Adele could see that the vegetable garden had been recently cultivated, the flower beds weeded and in order, even the tangled masses of vines sprawling over the arbour had been pruned back.

She pushed the gate open and hurried through the gardens. Who had put everything in order? There could only be one possible answer. Henri Paul-Louis. She ran towards the porch and opened the kitchen door. A tall woman was standing at the sink washing dishes.

“Simone?”

“Oh my God,” Simone cried out, her eyes widening behind her steamy glasses in surprise.

“What are you doing here? Where’s Father? Is he home?”

“Oh my God,” Simone said again. Soap suds dripped off the pot she was holding up in front of her. “Adele. No. He hasn’t come home. No one knows.”

Adele could feel her heart falling, falling away. “No one knows what?”

“Anything. Anything more than before you left. He hasn’t been found. Oh Adele, my God, you scared me.”

For the moment Adele didn’t know what more to say. She just stood there clutching her suitcase, feeling lost.

“René’s been travelling all over trying to find out about your father. He went to the mass graves near Arras and searched through a mountain of personal belongings they’d picked up off the battlefields. There was nothing of your father’s there, nothing to indicate one way or the other.”

Adele came into the room and sat down at the table. She could feel her hand twisting convulsively at her ring. It slipped off inside her pocket.

“He was looking for your father’s watch, or family photographs he might have been carrying, anything to prove he’d been buried there.”

Adele nodded.

“René says that when he can find time he’ll start searching again.”

“When he can find time?” Adele looked more closely at Simone.

Simone turned away and put the pot back in the sink. She splashed around in the water for a moment. “It came as such an enormous shock.”

“What did?”

“Everything. What happened to you. What you did. And that we were best friends and you didn’t tell me. You betrayed everyone and everything.” Simone kept her back to Adele. “Was he that German clerk?”

“He’s dead.”

Simone turned around. “I’m not judging you, Adele. At least, I try not to. I can imagine how terrible everything’s been. It’s just that I didn’t expect to see you. Not like this. The door flies open and there you are. I’m not prepared!”

“I’m not staying,” Adele said, “I have a train to catch.”

Simone sat down at the table. She dried her hands and picked up a package of cigarettes. She took one out and lit it up. Her fingers were trembling. “I heard what happened in the square. Your hair. The paint. Everything.”

“I don’t want to remember,” Adele said.

“No. I guess not.” Simone took another puff. “I’m sorry, do you smoke?” She pushed the package toward Adele. Adele pushed it back.

“No.”

“René got me started and I can’t stop.”

“Oh?”

“Your mother’s here.”

“I assumed she would be. And you’re what? The hired help?”

Simone’s cheeks reddened a little.

“I thought you’d be a nun by now.”

“Well, as it turned out, I didn’t have the aptitude for it.”

“How could you tell?”

Simone blew a stream of smoke halfway across the room. She pushed a stray bit of hair off her forehead. Her shoulders didn’t seem as hunched as the last time Adele had seen her. She’d gained some weight. “Well, I guess because of you. I was so shocked and I was so glad you’d been punished. I was thrilled, really. I really did hate you. And then one day I looked at myself and I realized how far away I was from that person I thought I might become. Full of sweetness and grace and all that. Actually, I knew I couldn’t make it.” Simone looked across the table at Adele. “I’m studying to be a teacher.”

“Simone, you’re with René, aren’t you?”

Simone examined her cigarette closely. She smiled. “Yes.”

Oh my God, Adele thought, and once again she could see pieces of Monsieur Ducharme’s brain flying through the dark.

“We don’t see each other that often, though. He’s very busy.”

“Are you in love?” Adele managed to ask.

“Collectively, you mean, or just me?”

“Collectively.”

“I don’t know.”

“Has he said he loves you?”

“Of course. It just takes getting used to, that’s all. I wasn’t exactly the most pursued person in our school. You remember that, don’t you? All the boys chased you. No one chased me. René’s the first one. And he’s so handsome and so worldly. I just have to trust myself. I’m foolish. I know.”

“I never thought of René as worldly.”

“He is now. So many things happened to him.”

“Does he talk about them?”

“Not really. He works in Paris. He works for the Department of Justice. He has his own office in the main building on St. Charles Square. I visited it.”

“My brother?”

“Yes!”

“How did that happen?”

“Because of the Resistance. Because of all the retaliation against collaborators. Summary trials and shootings and hangings.”

Adele felt a familiar panic.

“The provisional government had to regain control. They hired people like René who knew all the important people in the Resistance to try to restore order. René was a negotiator and now he has a good job there. They want to send him to law school.”

“Who do?”

“His superiors. He’s extremely busy, but he tries to come home every other weekend.”

“To see you?”

“And his mother.”

Adele had forgotten. She turned toward the hallway, half expecting to be greeted by two familiar, grinning faces. “Where are Bibi and Jean?” Adele got up from the table.