Transgression (8 page)

A dark shape loomed up in the rain. Adele reached out and felt a slippery chipped surface.

“Manfred! Manfred!” she called out.

Rain lashed against the warehouse and water ran off its swayed roof as loud as a waterfall. Adele felt her way around the corner to get out of the wind.

“Manfred!”

She stood in the teeming dark and listened for an answering voice. Every few moments she called out his name. Ice water streamed from her hair. “Manfred!”

Adele began to shiver. What if she had the wrong night? Or the wrong time? She called out again. The rain and wind seemed to snatch her voice away as soon as it left her frozen lips. What if René wasn’t guarding the factory tonight? What if he’d watched the Wehrmacht house on Ducrot Street, instead? He’d have seen Manfred leave. He would have followed him. Adele took a few steps out of her shelter, trying to see past the glistening curtain of rain in front of her. She waded into the weeds.

Manfred was hurrying through the streets and past the factory, she could see him in her mind. He was running down the embankment into the weeds. A shot echoed in the rain, a sheet of blood fanned out from his forehead.

“Manfred!”

Something seemed to move in front of her. A wave of rain swept out of the darkness. And then another wave.

Adele retreated back to the wall. She gave up calling. She had no idea how much time had passed. A half-hour? An hour? All night? She couldn’t see her watch. For all she knew, Manfred was lying dead in the weeds in front of her. For all she knew, he had changed his mind. He hadn’t come at all.

Adele didn’t return to the factory, and it was almost six in the morning by the time she reached home. Old Raymond was asleep by the stove. The sound of his breathing filled the shadowy room, coming in shallow and hoarse gasps like a child with the croup.

Adele walked along the hallway past the parlour. She crept up the stairs and into her bedroom. She fumbled off her wet clothes, crawled under her covers and curled up in a ball. She couldn’t seem to get warm.

By nine o’clock that morning, Adele was standing in front of the Domestic Population Bureau of Information. She hadn’t been there for a long time. She didn’t need to go there because Manfred would have told her any news if there had been any news to tell. All she wanted was to see him sitting safely at his long table working on his files. They wouldn’t need to exchange a word. He wouldn’t even need to look up. It wouldn’t take a moment.

The queue inched inside the door. Manfred was nowhere in sight. Adele couldn’t see any of the usual clerks, or any men at all. The room was full of uniformed women. Adele waited her turn.

“Corporal Manfred Halder?” A middle-aged officer was sitting behind the desk, her face almost perfectly round and apple-cheeked, her uniform dove grey, her cap secured by a long straight pin that pierced her tight blond hair.

“He’s a clerk here,” Adele said.

“I thought you said you were inquiring after your father?”

“Corporal Halder has been very kind to our family. He told us that he would get in touch with some office in Paris and report back, but I don’t see him.”

“Corporal Halder has been reassigned.”

“Where?”

The woman stared coldly at Adele.

“I’m sorry,” Adele murmured, “thank you.”

She got up and hurried out the door expecting at every step to hear a shouted order for someone to stop that woman, that spy. Spy!

Adele ran toward Ducrot Street. When she reached the house, a few uniformed women were coming out the heavy front doors talking among themselves.

“Do you speak French?” Adele asked the one in the lead. The woman ignored her and walked on. The second one shook her head. The third stopped. Adele was struck by how young she looked, no older than a schoolgirl.

“A little,” she said.

“Where are all the soldiers?”

The young German looked uncertain.

“Men,” Adele said, “all the men soldiers. Where are they?”

“Gone.”

“Gone where?”

“Gone to…” The girl searched a moment for the right word. “To Russia. To the Front,” she said.

J
ack and Brandy walked along the path through the woods together. Jack had tied a length of rope loosely around Brandy’s neck because the dog didn’t have a collar. For the first time that day, Jack was feeling slightly hopeful. Maybe the dog did know something.

At first, Brandy had headed for every tree, fence post and tuft of grass in sight, but by the time they’d reached the woods the dog had settled into a stiff-jointed, purposeful gait.

Jack glanced down at him. How would you really tell what a dog was thinking? Some people claimed they could tell, at least with their own dogs. He’d never had a dog, or a pet of any kind. His father, a cobalt miner and as tough as they came, wouldn’t hear of keeping any animal in the house, it was damn foolishness and Jack had always felt the same way.

The closest his own son had come to having a pet was when he’d traded his bicycle for a rabbit. It was a deal only a moron would make and Jack had told him so. Nevertheless the boy had kept his pet in a hutch behind the garage. The arrangement had lasted only until the winter. The hybrid rabbit wouldn’t have survived outside and Jack wouldn’t allow it inside and he wouldn’t pay to heat the hutch, either. His son had to give it away. At the time, because the boy had ended up with no bicycle and no rabbit, Jack had thought he’d taught his son a valuable lesson.

The chief reached down and touched Brandy’s head. He wondered what he would do now if he had the chance to do it over again. He looked around
at the trees crowding in, the leafy vines hanging down, the mist scurrying through the uppermost branches.

What would he do if he had a chance to do it all over again? Such goddamn foolish thoughts.

Jack hurried along and soon he and Brandy were emerging into the clearing on the other side of the woods. They walked over to the spot Jenny had pointed out earlier that morning. Jack let the rope go and the dog sniffed along the fenceline.

“You were here a week or so ago. Remember? You were carrying that finger up to the house,” he said hopefully.

Maybe he’d carried it as far as he could stand and spit it out in disgust, Jack thought. Or maybe he’d got interested in something else, a jack rabbit or a fox crossing in front of him and forgot what he’d intended to do. Or maybe Jack himself was going crazy, pinning his hopes on a fucking dog.

He looked across the stubble field toward the railway cut. Beyond it, he could just see the top of a row of trees as the land fell sharply away toward the river.

Brandy was still plowing through the weeds in a kind of aimless fashion. Jack picked up the end of the rope again and yanked it.

“Where do you want to go?” Jack asked.

Brandy looked around for a moment and sat down on his haunches. Nowhere, apparently.

Jack began to go through all the possibilities again. The surrounding fields. Hidden somewhere in the woods. In an out-building maybe, an old chicken coop, an abandoned barn. In a ditch alongside the road. Or hit by a train, the body lying for a week near the tracks.

Or drowned in the river.

He hadn’t thought of that possibility before. He wondered why he hadn’t. Given what he knew, it made the most sense. For one thing that’s where the rats were. Admittedly most of them were massed downriver toward the town. Twice a week a truck would back up to the edge of a high cliff and cascade the town’s garbage down the bank and into the water below. But some of them must have ranged upriver as well just to get some elbow room. There were thousands of rats.

No one had reported anyone missing, man or woman, which fit if the body was a tramp’s. Jack wasn’t sure if the men out in the DP camp would report anyone missing. Probably not. Might not even know. They were on the move, too, hitching rides on freight trains and crossing the country looking for work, but for some reason a group of them had decided to settle down for a time and had built a makeshift camp just past the dump. They’d nearly given the mayor a heart attack.

“Do you think we should move them on?” he’d said to Jack.

“Can’t,” Jack had replied, “they’re outside the town line.”

He hadn’t wanted to move them on, anyway. Poor foreign flotsam left over from the war. Poles mostly. Hungarians. Survivors of some fearsome, faraway hell, half wild looking and haunted by secrets. He could tell by their eyes.

For chrissake, he’d wanted to say to the mayor, why can’t you allow them a little rest?

Jack started off across the field, dragging the dog behind him. When they reached the steep embankment down to the railway, Brandy seemed to pick up both interest and speed. He passed Jack going downhill and pulled him along a path. They crossed a double set of railway tracks and headed down into some trees, Brandy remaining in the lead.

In unison they stepped out onto a riverbank. The water was exceptionally low even for the end of summer and seemed to be at a stand-still. There were no sounds at all.

A drop of rain as big as a quarter struck Jack in the face. The surface of the water began to dimple in a sporadic sort of way. And still no sound. Jack stood there for a long moment in a cone of silence. He could have stayed that way forever.

Brandy was straining on the rope, anxious to move downriver. Jack gave him his head and followed through the chest-high grass. After a time, for easier walking they slid down the bank to the riverbed below. It was dry along the shore, the cracked pans of mud as smooth as concrete.

After a while, Brandy wanted to scramble up the bank again. Jack dropped the rope and hauled himself up the steep slope. It was easy to follow the silvery path through the tall grass the dog had made. Jack could
hear him somewhere up ahead thrashing in among some trees. The huge raindrops began to come down harder.

Jack stopped.

There was something suspended in the air, something faintly stirred up by the rain. He wasn’t sure what it was. He moved forward again, and now it wasn’t a faint intimation of something but the thing itself, over-whelming and invasive, so sweetly sickening and gag-inducing he could feel his insides begin to lurch.

Jack reached the edge of the trees. He could see the big dog crouched down out of the rain. He stepped closer. Something was on the ground. It looked like a pool of mud had erupted. His eyes began to run with tears from the smell and now he could see for a fact what he’d already seen in his mind, a swarm of white maggots, a puddle of greenish intestines and beside them and reaching out of the earth, a bloated hand.

It was missing two fingers.

T
he first week was the worst. Every inch of Adele’s body ached. She had to fight for each breath. She hadn’t known that love could be such a treacherous presence, weigh a thousand pounds, turn on you like a disease. In the past she’d let herself wonder just how deeply she loved Manfred. She had no doubt now. Two had become one, one flesh, one shattered heart.

Each day brought the same test of strength. Get up. Dress. Procure food. Cook the food. Go to work. Sit dazed in a dream space. Floating Wehrmacht pants. The distorted sounds of gossip and harsh laughter. Return home. Try to fall asleep.

She began to wait by the front door for the mail. Even marching through Russia, between bombs and bullets, Manfred might have a chance to at least scribble down a few lines she could cling to with all her might. This idea quickened her. It encouraged her to comb her hair, give some notice to the clothes she was pulling on, take at least a sideways glance at herself in the mirror. No letter arrived.

She felt nothing her hands touched, saw nothing her eyes saw, heard nothing that anyone said to her. She wondered if Manfred, in a fit of despair, had killed himself.

René stayed away. Adele didn’t know whether she was relieved or not. It meant no more accusations, at least for the present, but it also made it seem as if Manfred had never existed, as if nothing had happened to her and nothing had changed. Everything had changed.

The women at the factory had accepted her explanation for the night she went missing, that she’d become suddenly and violently ill, and frightened by it, she’d gone home. But as summer approached and finally settled over the town, it seemed to Adele that the women in the factory were looking at her strangely.

By the end of July, Old Raymond was feeling well enough to shuffle out of the house. Jabbing his cane at an army of waist-high weeds, he demanded that Jean and Bibi begin to pull them out. “Pull!” Old Raymond shouted and coughed and wheezed.

Startled, Jean and Bibi began to pull out fistfuls of weeds as if the old man’s life depended on them.

By the end of August he’d failed a little, but every day, weather permitting, he’d still totter outside and sit on an old painted chair under the grape arbour. Adele kept an eye on him from the kitchen window. It bothered her to see him sitting there, as if he were hiding from some hooded spectre he feared was about to call in at the house and ask for him by name.

Old Raymond was staring at his hands, turning them over and over, examining both sides as if they’d never cease to amaze him. Sun filtered through the vines and speckled his skin with spots of light. They used to be calloused, the fingers broad and strong. Now they looked soft and translucent, their backs laced with delicate blue veins.

“I’ll read your fortune,” Adele said, having come out of the house to sit beside him. She picked up one of his hands just to stop its ceaseless turning. “This line says that you were very foolish as a young man, Raymond, but that you are much wiser now.”

Old Raymond nodded as if this wasn’t news to him.

“This line says that you’re going to come into money soon.”

“Am I going to meet a woman?”

“Well, let’s see.” Adele picked up his other hand and pretended to study them both closely. “There’s a woman with dark hair.”

“That would be your mother.”

“No,” Adele said quickly, “Mother’s hair is turning white.”

“Your mother is a wonderful woman.” Old Raymond’s anxious, rheumy eyes turned to look at Adele.

“Yes, she is,” Adele replied against her better instincts.

“She kisses me like a lover,” Old Raymond said.

Adele could feel her blood turning cold. “What do you mean?”

“Sometimes she rests her face against my face, sometimes she cries. Sometimes she kisses me.” He looked confused, as if he were asking her a question.

“I don’t know,” Adele said, getting up quickly and moving away. Small bunches of stunted grapes were hiding among the leaves. Adele reached up and touched one. “Raymond, when does she kiss you?”

“She comes into the kitchen at night. When you’re at work.”

“Do you think these grapes will ever get ripe?” Adele asked, afraid to ask anything else, and not waiting for an answer turned away and walked quickly toward the house.

Some days later Adele arrived home from work at her usual time. Old Raymond was still sleeping in the kitchen because her mother wouldn’t hear of him moving back to the cottage, even though Adele had become quite insistent lately that he should be moved.

Adele closed the door quietly. By the time it clicked shut, even before she turned to look toward him, she knew.

Old Raymond had worn his navy blue beret in bed all winter and it had become such a habit that even when the warm weather had arrived he couldn’t fall asleep without it. His beret was lying on the floor and his right arm was suspended above his head. It must have been resting against the headboard, or perhaps he’d reached up for some support at his very last breath and then during the night it had moved forward a little. With his wispy white hair standing up on end and his raised hand frozen in mid-air, it looked to Adele as if Old Raymond was waving goodbye.

Pain radiated from Madame Georges’ face, her body, in the air, it was everywhere palpable. Adele was stunned by it, her mother was bereft.

The evening before the funeral, the family sat together in the parlour beside Old Raymond’s casket. Jean and Bibi were dressed in the dark grey
suits they wore to Mass and looked almost civilized. Adele wore a navy blue dress close to the colour of Old Raymond’s beret. She’d picked it out of her closet on purpose. Madame Georges was dressed in black, her face as shockingly white as if it had turned to alabaster.

A few neighbours called in to sit with them, and Father Salles, their parish priest, always a jovial man no matter the circumstances, made everyone feel reasonably comfortable despite Madame Georges’ unnerving silence. Adele couldn’t take her eyes off her. This was the funeral she’d never had, Adele realized with some shock. This was Henri Paul-Louis’ funeral.

Adele had been expecting René to walk into the room at any moment. Surely her mother had managed to communicate the sad news to him, wherever he lived or wherever he was hiding. So far he hadn’t appeared.

Madame Georges was accepting her neighbours’ whispered expressions of condolences with strained tolerance. Sometimes she extended her hand in a stilted fashion and let someone grasp it. Her mind seemed shut down, though, Adele thought, her eyes that could look so hard and glittery at times, so insane, seemed expressionless. They caught the light from the candles but gave none back.

In the early days, when the family had first returned to Rouen after the German army had passed them by, her mother had roamed through the house restlessly and endlessly, so much so that her nightly promenades had become one of the routine sounds of the house, like rain tapping on the roof or the wind rattling Adele’s window.

One night Adele had decided to follow her.

Madame Georges was standing by the parlour window, her face stark and quite beautiful in the moonlight. She seemed to be gazing expectantly down the street, as if she were waiting for someone she was sure would appear. She touched Henri Paul-Louis’ chair, his disreputable, thread-bare, lumpy chair, the chair he’d collapse into every night after making his hospital rounds, the chair she’d kept threatening to throw out.

She ran her hands across the back of it and down its cool wooden arms, she pressed her body against it, put her head down, her hair tumbled loose.

Adele hadn’t been able to watch any more, she’d retreated back up the stairs. Now she looked at her mother sitting across the room and felt for the
first time in almost forever that she actually understood her. Their hearts had been similarly broken, the men they’d loved had been wrenched away from them in the same way, except that her mother had been driven mad by it.

She must be mad, Adele thought, to say the awful thing she’d said. What could have driven her to say it? What terrible will was driving her to destroy everything?

Simone came through the front door looking appropriately sad. Adele helped her off with her light coat, grateful that she’d come despite Adele not having made any attempt to see her in weeks.

“I’m leaving school,” Simone said.

“Why?”

“Everyone hates me.”

Adele didn’t ask her why she’d think that. Her late father was a topic Adele would just as soon avoid. “What are you going to do, Simone?”

Simone peered through her glasses toward Father Salles, who was comfortably ensconced in Henri Paul-Louis’ old chair and surrounded by a cluster of appreciative women. Simone seemed even more hunched over than the last time Adele had seen her. Her slim shoulders were sticking out of her dress.

“I’m thinking of becoming a bride of Christ,” she said.

Adele looked at her in amazement.

“What?” Simone asked defensively.

“Nothing,” Adele replied.

They’d spent half their lives ridiculing every sister who’d ever taught them, corrected them, pulled gum out of their mouths, cuffed them on the back of their smart-alecky heads.

“What kind? A teacher?” Adele asked, breaking their rule.

“No. Cloistered,” Simone said.

After Old Raymond’s funeral, Adele sought out Simone’s company. There was a comfort in being with her, a going back to an innocent time, as if nothing had actually happened. No René standing in the dark. No dead Monsieur Ducharme. No Manfred Halder.

One afternoon Adele found herself walking with Simone in the same park she and Manfred had frequented. They sat down on a cold bench, the one Adele and Manfred had made love on more than once, and looked out over the river. The view was achingly familiar to Adele. She wondered why she had led Simone there. She began to bite her fingernails.

“Why don’t you put salt on them?” Simone asked.

“I like them plain.” Adele stuck her hands in her pockets. “When are you going into a convent?”

“I don’t know. My mother’s against it. She doesn’t understand. Why do you ask? Do you want to get rid of me?”

“I don’t want you to go anywhere.”

They sat there a little longer looking out over the river. The air felt cold coming off the water. One day soon it would begin to snow. Adele would have to manage to get her mother and her two brothers and herself through another winter without Manfred’s help. No potato sacks half full of potatoes, apples, carrots, spiced beef, appearing against the back wall. No more coal.

“You don’t talk about René,” Simone said.

“No.”

“He wasn’t at Old Raymond’s funeral.”

“We don’t know where he is these days. We think he’s working somewhere outside Rouen. He doesn’t say where.”

“That’s mysterious.”

“Not really. He always manages to send Mother some money. It’s difficult to find any kind of work.”

“Yes,” Simone agreed. After a few moments of silence, tears began to trickle down Simone’s face. This was not unusual.

“Simone, don’t,” Adele said softly.

“I hate everything,” Simone wept, “I don’t know how to live in this world. People kill people. No one is left in peace.” She blew her nose. “The only way to live is away from people. You know those nuns that pray all the time? You send in requests to them and they pray?”

“Yes.”

“That’s as much as I can manage. I have a gift for prayer, I think. And it’s helping people, so that’s good, isn’t it? I’ve been reading my book of martyrs.
So often they say they’re overwhelmed by a distaste for this life and they’re eager to move on to the next one. I feel just the same way.”

Adele touched Simone’s hand. “That’s because you’ll meet your father.”

“He was a good man.” Fresh tears shone on Simone’s face. “He wasn’t bad!”

Adele was walking with Henri Paul-Louis under an avenue of trees. Above her, she could see every bright yellow leaf. She could see the sun streaming through. She could feel his strong hand holding on to hers.

“What’s better? To lead life with your heart or your head?” he asked. He was always testing her.

“Your head,” her eight-year-old self replied, thinking this was the answer that would best please him.

“No.”

“Your heart, then.”

Henri Paul-Louis smiled. “Both,” he said, “but in the service of other people.”

Adele was still sitting beside Simone. The river still looked like slate. Most of the trees were barren of leaves. The air felt even colder now.

“We have to try,” Adele said quietly.

“What?”

“To love this world.”