Transgression (30 page)

“Why not?”

“Because.”

Dorothy reached for one of her cigarettes. She lit it up. “Why?”

“Because of him. I can’t be around him.”

“Well shit, Adele, why don’t you just come out and say what’s on your mind?”

“Did he tell you Alex had to hit him? Did he tell you why?”

Dorothy got up from the table, her face flushed now, her movements no longer languid. “I don’t give a shit why. I don’t want to hear stories, I don’t want to hear anything. Shut your mouth or get out!”

Adele turned and went back out the door. Five minutes later she came back in and asked for her sewing machine. Dorothy nodded but didn’t help.
She leaned against the wall, her arms firmly crossed, smoked a cigarette and watched Adele struggle across the kitchen carrying the machine.

“I’ll say one thing for you, you sure have one hell of a nerve, Frenchie,” Dorothy said.

Later that morning Adele walked down to the factory and asked the foreman if he could drop off her share of the piecework at her house from now on. He said he guessed that would be all right.

Adele had made up her mind. She was feeling quite fierce about it. Johnny Watson was not going to defeat her.

When it had become obvious that Johnny had moved in next door, Alex went over to talk to him. He came back and told Adele that he’d made it clear that he didn’t want him speaking to Adele or getting anywhere near her. Johnny had promised that he wouldn’t. And Johnny had said that he was deeply sorry for any misunderstanding.

“There was no misunderstanding. I understood everything,” Adele said.

“I know. He touched you.”

“Doesn’t that make you angry?”

“Yes. Of course it does,” Alex said.

Johnny began to haunt her. He’d stand in Dorothy’s backyard and stare at her kitchen window for the longest time. He’d make a big show of staying on Dorothy’s property whenever he saw Alex, pretending to shout hello over an invisible fence. He took her place with George, the youngster rarely came to visit her any more. But the worst was having to walk down to the privy at night, hurrying through the dark, flinching at every noise. She resisted using a commode, on principle. She made Alex install a huge bolt on the inside of the privy door.

Adele’s front room filled up with boxes of unseamed socks. She worked furiously during the day and sometimes long into the night. She didn’t want to fall behind what Dorothy was doing.

One day she and Dorothy happened to go out into their backyards at the same time. Dorothy waved hesitantly toward her. Adele, caught off guard, waved back. Dorothy smiled and went back into her house.

Johnny began to give Alex a ride downtown. He’d back off Dorothy’s lawn, stop in front of the house and honk the horn.

The first time he did that, Alex looked out the front window and then back at Adele. “I gave the guy eighteen stitches and cracked a bone in his nose. What do you think?”

Adele didn’t know what to reply. It was a long walk down the back hill to where Alex worked. The summer was still boiling hot. It was a longer walk home. Against her better judgment she said, “All right.”

The next day Dorothy crossed over into Adele’s yard to show her where there used to be a vegetable garden, lost in weeds now, just in case she was ever thinking of putting in another one. Adele wasn’t. A few days later, in the middle of a rainy afternoon, Dorothy rapped on Adele’s back door. She was carrying a bottle of rye and two glasses in her hand. Adele felt she had to invite her in. The subject of Johnny never came up.

Mrs. Wells was Adele’s only other visitor. She dropped a letter off one day that had been delivered to her house for Alex. It was from the Melmac company, Adele could tell by the printing on the envelope.

As soon as Alex arrived home Adele put it in his hand. The company had had a change of plans. They’d decided to expand into south-western Ontario after all and wanted to get started in time for the Christmas season. They wanted Alex to come to Toronto right away for an interview.

Alex gave out a whoop and lifted Adele up in his arms. “At last! We got a break! A break! A break!” He rushed to get out his papers and pencils and sat at the kitchen table adding up columns of figures. He wouldn’t hear of Adele serving him supper. Instead he insisted they eat out. They walked over to the restaurant near the railway crossing hand in hand. As soon as they’d returned and closed the outside door they made love. They didn’t even make it as far as the bedroom. Alex didn’t use a condom, and Adele didn’t complain.

Afterwards Alex went back to his calculations and Adele sat down in the front room to work on her socks. Shortly after midnight Alex said goodnight. Adele looked in on him. He was sprawled out naked across the bed, the fan whirling away, hugging his pillow. The Melmac Man, Adele thought. The sheer bulk of him shining in the dark made her smile. She closed the door softly.

It was one o’clock. Since she didn’t feel tired, she decided to work a little longer. The familiar whirr of the sewing machine weaved and drifted
through her thoughts. Alex will be a great salesman. They’ll move away from Johnny Watson and rent a house with a basement and a furnace and an inside toilet. She’ll walk to the hospital and make inquiries about becoming a nursing assistant.

The curtain on the front window lit up.

On their way home they’d noticed some lightning off to the east. Every once in a while a quarter of the sky had whitened in a great blotch. Alex had called it heat lightning and said because it was heat lightning it wouldn’t rain.

But now Adele could hear individual drops of rain hitting the roof. She could hear approaching thunder. She continued to work. Rain began to clatter down. The lightning grew brighter outside her curtain, the claps of thunder seemed closer.

Adele’s work light flickered and went out. Her machine whirred one last time and died. She sat there waiting to see if the power would come back on. It was pitch black in the room. Lightning flashed again and for a moment she could see the piles of cartons. The space heater. They disappeared again. The rain thundered down.

Adele got up and opened the curtain. It was just as black outside as inside. The street lamp across the street had gone out. No lights in any of the neighbours’ houses. No lights anywhere.

Another flash. She could see water pelting past her face like a silver screen. It went dark again. Another flash. Adele peered out through the rain.

A man was standing in the middle of the road.

Adele froze. She waited for another flash. It arrived like a blinding spotlight. The man was gone.

Adele hurried to the front door and pulled it open. The street lit up and then plunged into darkness again. She splashed out onto the road. Another flash and a row of houses came and went. Adele began to run, certain she was about to crash into something unseen. Lightning flashed. The street appeared in stark relief. She aimed herself down the middle of it, and everything went black again.

She ran until she reached the main road through the Junction. She could see the man splashing away toward the railway tracks. She began to run after him. The man stopped.

Adele could see him, and then she couldn’t see anything, and then she could see him again. He was wearing some kind of tweed jacket, drenched now, hanging heavily off his narrow frame. She approached him. He was holding his one shoulder higher than the other, as if he were trying to protect himself from something. His dark hair was roughly cut.

She could see the bones in his face, his ghostly white skin. She came up to him.

“Adele,” he said.

She leaned against him and he put his arms around her and her legs gave out and she sank to the road. The man did, too, and they huddled there in the streaming rain.

The headlights of a car swung out of a side street and swept slowly over them.

“Manfred,” Adele said.

I
t was after eight o’clock in the evening and the police station was empty and so was the town hall. Jack had sent Jock White home, saying he’d work a double shift since he hadn’t been as consistently available as he should have been over the last little while. Jock had looked both surprised and grateful-no one liked pulling the long night shift.

Jack turned the weapon he’d fished out of the river over in his hand.
Parabellum Luger.
Under the lamp on his desk, he could see the name etched in the black steel just above the grip. He slipped the empty eight-cartridge magazine back up into its hollow handle. It made a satisfying metallic click as it locked into place. Five live cartridges lay on his desk, 9x19mm, pressed into their brass cases. Jack figured that would make the pistol approximately a .38 calibre, not quite as powerful as his weapon but more than adequate to do the job.

It felt balanced in his hand and surprisingly heavy. It had the look of an efficient machine.

Jack pointed the gun toward the front door. He pointed it up toward the mayor’s office.

There was no way Miles was going to get his hands on it, no way he was going to hear anything about it. No supper meeting for Miles. Besides, it was way past supper time.

Jack opened his weapons’ drawer, slipped the Luger inside, put the five cartridges in with it and locked it up.

It could be a coincidence, of course. Jack had pondered this. But who the hell would throw a perfectly good Luger away, and at that precise spot?

No. He had the murder weapon, all right, though any fingerprints on it other than his own would have been rubbed off on the river bottom a long time ago. Seventeen days ago.

A minimum of six bullets in the magazine and one fatal shot fired, or maybe seven bullets and two fired, or eight and three. Up to two rounds banged off while they were chasing him, then, the empty cartridges ejecting somewhere. And then the killing shot, the empty cartridge kicking out of the gun and sinking into the water. There was only one question left. Only one that counted. Whose gun was it?

Jack thought of Joe Puvalowski.

The sun had finally given up following Jack around and had fallen out of the sky. It didn’t seem much cooler, though. Jack drove up the hill to the Junction with all the windows in the cruiser rolled down, over the tracks, past the factory and continued on along the rough trail beside the railroad tracks.

He loved his Studebaker, he didn’t give a damn about the town’s cruiser. The headlight beams began to wave and jump around in the dark, the muffler bumped and scraped along the ground.

Hope it falls off, Jack thought.

Just before the DP camp he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. “Hello, Jack,” he said.

The headlight beams caught a scruffily-dressed man crossing the tracks. Jack braked and switched the spotlight on. “Get me Joe Puvalowski!” he yelled out the window. “Joe Puvalowski! Now!”

The man, caught like a fugitive in the harsh stream of light, looked gratifyingly frightened. He disappeared.

Jack waited where he was, switching off the spotlight but keeping the motor running and the headlights on. If Joe didn’t show, he’d walk up to the
camp but he’d prefer to have Joe sitting beside him in the car. From long experience he knew it would work better that way.

After a while Joe Puvalowski sauntered out of the night and peered in through the open window. His swarthy face didn’t look particularly intimidated. “You have our papers?”

“Get in.”

“Why is that?”

“Just to talk. We’re not going anywhere. That’s all.” Jack leaned over and opened the door, swinging it wide. Joe got in the car but left the door open.

“Excuse me,” Jack said, leaning over him and slamming the door shut. In the green glow from the dashboard, he gave Joe a dead-cold look. “I have something of yours.” He opened the glove compartment and pulled out the Luger.

Joe straightened up. “What is that?”

“Your gun, Joe. The one you used to execute that guy you didn’t like who lived in a hole in the ground.”

“You’re a crazy man,” Joe said.

“You mean he didn’t live in that hole in the ground?”

Joe hesitated.

“What part have I got wrong, Joe?”

Joe looked back out the window. Jack glanced past him. He was sure most of the men in the camp were standing close by. He couldn’t see a thing.

“Joe, where you come from, if I didn’t like what you just said, I’d shoot you right in the head and not blink. Wouldn’t I?”

Joe turned to look at him.

“It’s different here.” Jack turned off the motor and killed the headlights. He could barely see Joe now but he could hear him breathing. “In this country you want to get involved. That’s what we call being a good citizen. Tell me who used the gun, you’ll not only get your papers back, you’ll get a good job in town. I guarantee it.”

“This is not my gun,” Joe said.

Though Jack couldn’t see it, he could imagine Joe’s chin thrusting out, his hair beginning to shake in indignation, like always.

“Whose gun is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who was the man in the hole?”

Joe shifted around a little and then seemed to settle back against the seat. He let out a long sigh. “Not one of us. Not Polish. His accent not that good.”

A long, heavy silence.

Come on, Jack thought, come on.

“A German.”

“A German?”

“He said he’d been a clerk. That’s all, some minor clerk somewhere. We voted. He could stay, but he could not live with us. That was how it was decided. It was a wrong decision.”

“Why? Because of what happened?”

“Yes.”

“Is that all? Joe?” Jack waited.

Joe stirred a little.

Jack stopped breathing.

“There was a French woman,” Joe said.

A
dele held Manfred’s face in her hands. “Oh God.” She clung to him, kissing his mouth, his eyes, his nose. Their faces were wet with rain. It streamed down their cheeks, it was turning warm. Manfred touched her face.

After a while Manfred said in his faltering French, “We cannot stay this way.”

“Manfred, how did you come here?”

Manfred began to get up. He lifted Adele up off the road. He looked around, took her hand and pulled her toward the tracks.

Adele let him.

They cut across an empty cinder yard and hurried toward the dark shape of some sheds. The lightning was receding to the west. The rain was beginning to ease. By the distant lightning Adele could see a row of bins and the glint of coal. Manfred stepped under a slanted roof and leaned against the rough board wall. Adele began to shiver. She had only a sleeveless blouse and skirt on and she was soaked through.

“This is a miracle,” Adele whispered.

“It’s just me,” Manfred said.

Adele snaked her arms beneath his jacket and held him tight. He was soaked through, too. “How did you find me?”

“Your friend Lucille. Remember? You gave her the name of your husband-to-be. You wrote it down if she ever wanted to write.”

“You went to Lucille’s after I was there?”

Manfred smiled. It was a smile to break someone’s heart. It was breaking Adele’s heart, anyway.

Adele rested her face against his chest. “I am married, Manfred.”

“Lucille told me what the people in Rouen had done. She told me how you’d been looking for me. This husband-to-be did not matter. I thought, what else could you do? You were only escaping.”

“And now? What do you think now?”

Adele could feel his rough hand touch her hand, she could feel his fingers brushing against her fingers.

“I think I was a madman in a madman’s dream. Go home before your husband misses you.”

“No!” Adele could feel her tears again. “No! You can’t do this! I will come back tomorrow, I will meet you tomorrow.”

“You cannot.”

“I will!” The desperation in her voice startled her. “Tell me where you’re staying, Manfred. Tell me or I swear to God I’ll kill you.”

He smiled again. “Where am I staying? Ah well, I have excellent accommodation.” Manfred looked down the tracks.

Adele knew where he was staying. “I will meet you there tomorrow.”

Before he could answer, Adele had pulled away and was running back across the cinder yard toward the road.

The street lights came back on before she’d turned the corner to her home. She hurried along praying to Christ Jesus and Holy Mother Mary every step of the way, praying that Alex had not woken up, that he had not seen her chasing after Manfred, that he was not standing by the door waiting.

She came in the back way. It was dark in the kitchen. She couldn’t remember if the light had been turned off before the storm or not. She could see a glow coming from the front room. She slipped out of her soaked shoes and walked down the hall. The fan was still whirling noisily in the bedroom. She opened the door. Alex was sprawled crossways across the bed, still hugging his pillow.

Adele went into the other room, pulled off her clothes, hid them under her dirty clothes pile and rubbed herself down until she stopped shivering.

She crawled in beside Alex. She had to lie crossways too, because she was afraid to wake him. The room felt cooler since the storm. She pulled a sheet over herself but left Alex naked and undisturbed. She lay there listening to his breathing. She tried to organize her thoughts.

The next morning Adele made Alex his usual breakfast and waited for him to go to work. Johnny honked his horn. Alex told her for the third or fourth time that he’d be calling the Melmac company as soon as he could from the public phone in the post office downtown.

“Wish me luck.”

Adele kissed him hard.

Alex’s blue eyes opened in mock surprise.

“Good luck,” Adele said.

He went out to meet Johnny. Adele watched the car disappear down the street. She waited to see if Dorothy might come over carrying her coffee mug and her cigarettes. She didn’t. Adele began to gather up some food to take out to Manfred. Just after nine o’clock the factory’s truck pulled up and delivered a supply of unfinished socks to both houses. She made herself wait until ten o’clock, when Dorothy would be sure to be immersed in her work.

The air outside felt heavy, almost steamy with floating layers of suspended mist. Adele hurried through the back streets with a sack of groceries over her shoulder, skirting puddles and keeping her face down. She cut through a field of weeds and began to walk along a rutted makeshift road beside the railway tracks.

Almost immediately she could see Manfred standing in the distance waiting for her. He began to walk her way. His brown tweed jacket looked disreputable in the daylight-so did his pants and he was definitely carrying one shoulder lower than the other. Adele’s heart ached.

“Good morning,” he said, “what have you got there?” His smile was almost as boyish and just as heart-stopping as it had always been.

“Food. I thought you might want some food. I prayed to God all night, Manfred. I haven’t prayed for such a long time. I thanked Him that you were alive. I thanked Him that you found me.”

Manfred took the sack from off her shoulder. “I prayed, too. I am thankful that you have discovered such a good life.” Manfred looked down the
railway tracks as if he were expecting to see a train. “Thank you for the food.” He picked up Adele’s hand and held it. “You must return home now. It is not good for us to be seen together.” He dropped her hand and simply said, “Goodbye.”

Manfred began to walk back the way he’d come. Adele followed along after him.

“Go away,” Manfred said.

“Where are you going?”

“Back to where I live. I will be leaving this afternoon.”

“How?”

“By train. I have a reservation.”

“We have to talk, Manfred. You can’t come all the way to Canada just to say hello. You can’t just go away.” Adele caught up to him and took him by his arm. “You’re stupid, you know, if you think I’m just going to give up. Don’t you remember what I’m like? Don’t you remember anything?”

Manfred looked away. “I remember,” he said.

Adele continued to walk along beside him. “I looked for you for so long.”

Manfred didn’t reply and he kept his face away.

They walked together until they came to a path leading from the tracks. Adele could see a group of men dressed almost as poorly as Manfred standing on a slope in front of a collection of huts. They were staring down at her.

“This is where I live,” Manfred said.

The men began to walk toward them. Adele didn’t think they looked very welcoming. A short older man with bushy hair pushed himself to the front. “We don’t want trouble here,” he said in English.

Adele turned to Manfred and continued to speak in French. “What’s the matter?”

“You should go now.”

“Why don’t they want me here?”

“It’s not you they don’t want here,” Manfred said.

The older man came a step closer. “You go back to town. That’s a good woman. This is not a place for you.”

“I’m not leaving,” Adele said to Manfred.

Manfred began to talk in a language Adele didn’t understand. The bushy-haired man waved his arms around and spoke in the same language. The other men gathered around and continued to glower.

Manfred seemed to be staying surprisingly calm given the situation, Adele thought. She didn’t remember him being calm.

“Come on, Adele.” He took her hand and they began to skirt around the camp. He led her through a field of wild grass and up the side of a hill. Adele looked back. There were more men now. They were all watching.

Manfred stopped in front of a faded awning and pulled it aside. There was a dark opening underneath. “Socks only,” Manfred said, standing on a soggy piece of cardboard. He kicked off his worn shoes.

“What is this?” Adele said, and thought, Please don’t say it’s where you live.

“I’m staying here. Just for now.” Manfred knelt down and began to back into the hole, dragging the sack along after him. “If you don’t mind tight spaces you may enter.”

Manfred disappeared from her sight.

Adele looked back at the men. They were obviously waiting to see what she’d do. She pulled off her shoes and looked inside the hole. “Manfred?”

“Come on,” Manfred said from somewhere under the ground.

A light flickered down the passageway. She could see his shoes tied with odd looking pieces of twine. She could see his pant legs. Adele crawled inside.

Manfred was sitting on a pile of grass in a little room. Adele wiggled by his feet and sat down beside him. The grass felt soft and dry and smelled sweet. It rustled when she moved. A candle was flickering on a small plank shelf. Another plank held a few cans of food. An old coat was stuffed in one corner. Her sack of groceries was sitting on top of it.

“If that candle falls we’ll burn to death,” Adele said.

“It won’t fall.”

“I thought you lived with those other men.”

“As it turned out my Polish is not as good as I thought it was. Anyway, I am grateful to them for this place. They have much reasons to hate me.”

“But you didn’t do anybody any harm. You didn’t fight.”

Manfred’s eyes caught hers in the soft light. “Everyone fought. Back in Germany everyone did. Boys thirteen years old manned machine guns.”

“Manfred, how long have you been living here?”

“It’s not so bad as it looks. It’s cool in the day. It was dry last night.”

“How long?”

“Five days.”

It was impossible. Like an animal.

“I saw you last night. You and your husband.”

“Did you?”

“When you left your house together. And when you came back. You looked very happy.”

He was giving her one last chance. She had spent the night weighing everything, weighing her heart. She knew what she had to say. “Yes, we are happy.” The words seemed to tear at her throat.

After a moment, Manfred said, “I am glad.”

When Adele dared to glance his way, his eyes seemed full of light. “We should go back outside, Adele. The men might be getting the wrong idea.”

They sat on the grassy slope in front of Manfred’s shelter. Adele had made two cold roast beef sandwiches, the bread cut extra-thick and lathered in mustard. Manfred ate them both. A breeze had come up. It was blowing the grass in waves in front of them. The men had grown bored and had disappeared.

Adele nibbled on some crackers and a sliver of cheese to keep Manfred company though she didn’t feel hungry. She opened up a jar of her mother-in-law’s plum preserves. Manfred seemed to like them.

“You don’t smoke any more?”

“I would if I had some.”

“I will get you some money.”

Manfred shook his head.

“I am so sorry I was late getting to Paris!”

Manfred nodded. He gazed out across the countryside for a moment, and then he got up on his feet. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said.

They circled around the camp again, crossed the tracks and made their way down to the river. Manfred led her to a large slanting willow with a bough suspended over the water. Manfred walked out on it balancing himself. Adele
followed him. They sat down together. Manfred seemed pleased that she was there. Adele felt enormously pleased, too, that he was pleased. The river slipped beneath their feet.

“Manfred? What happened to your shoulder?”

“Shrapnel. Nothing to speak about.”

“No?”

Manfred shook his head. “No.”

“And after the war? What happened after the war?”

“I went home to Dresden. It was not good in Dresden. No one was there.”

I know, Adele thought, I know.

“I tried to cross into Poland. I had aunts and uncles in Poland. I thought perhaps there might be some small chance my mother and father had fled there. The Russians arrested me. Held me in a camp. One day they put me on a workers’ train to their country but I got away. I went back to Rouen instead.” Manfred broke off a small branch and began to pinch off the leaves. “After that I returned to Germany carrying your address in my pocket. There were Displaced Person camps everywhere. A very stupid idea struck me. I could pass for Polish. I could apply to come here.”

Light from the water was dancing on his face. It reminded Adele of La Bouille. We will be the New Europe, she had said. Some place deep inside Adele was bleeding. She could feel it. Manfred started to drop leaves into the river.

“The head man in the camp, he has English. We made a deal. He would go to the post office and find where Alex Wells lived, and I would leave this place. As it turns out you lived not far from here.”

Adele was fighting back tears.

“Your husband doesn’t know anything about me, does he?”

“No. Manfred, you can’t leave. You have to let me help you.”

“I don’t need you to help. Do you think I’ve survived this long, not to be able to build a life here in this land? Everyone has money here.”

“You don’t. Not right now. You can’t even speak English. I have money.”

“I don’t need any.”

Adele got up abruptly and almost fell in the water. She knew what she’d do, though, she’d return with every cent she’d saved from her piecework
and stuff it in his pockets. And wherever he went he’d have to write her. He’d have to swear that he would tell her where he was staying.

Adele climbed off the branch and hurried back up the slope to the railway tracks. When Manfred caught up, she told him what she was going to do.

He shook his head. “That’s not why I came here.”

“I know. It doesn’t matter.”

“I can’t do it.”

“For me, you can.”

“I cannot accept.”

“You don’t have to accept. Just wait for me!” Adele didn’t trust herself to kiss him. She turned and hurried away. When she looked back Manfred was still standing beside the tracks.

The sky had settled down so low it seemed to Adele all she needed to do was reach up to touch it. A random drop of rain fell on her face. She stumbled over some rough ground.