A Country Road, A Tree (16 page)

What error?

And where is Suzanne? He grabs his coat and heaves it on, but then stalls. If he goes out looking, he might miss her, and then where would they be? She’d be here waiting for him while he was dodging round the streets and friends’ apartments, while the Gestapo were putting on their gloves, straightening their caps and getting in their cars.

Time. Happening everywhere and all at once. It is a bastard for that.

He chews at a hangnail, pulls it off between his teeth. His finger bleeds.

Suzanne. Come on, Suzanne. Come home.

—

“They’ve taken Germaine too, and Legrand.”

“Christ.”

“We are betrayed.”

Suzanne’s face is open as a wound. It doesn’t bear thinking about. Perhaps their names are also on the list. Perhaps the Geste are already on their way round here. He goes over to the window, peers down at the street. And even if they are not yet on the list, then they will be soon. So many friends arrested. A dark room; chains and pliers. None of it bears thinking about, and yet all of it must be thought.

“Anybody out there?” she asks.

“Not a soul.”

He realizes now what it was, that error that must be corrected. It is the misapprehension under which they had been living all along—that they could just go on like this, that it would continue. They had not realized that the world would one day just crumple up and blow away. But the apartment is made of paper, and the streets are botched-up stage-flats and the wind blows right through it all and it creaks and strains. It’s not safe here. It never was. That’s what they must correct: their deluded sense that things will just go on.

“Do you think Alfy would…?”

His stomach heaves. Yell my name the first chance you get, Alfy old son, spill the fucking beans, cough it all up. Give ’em chapter and verse, inside leg and shoe-size, before you lose a single fingernail on my account. Don’t you take one cigarette burn for me, God love you. Alfy. God love you.

“No. I don’t know. But he’s only one. So.”

“We have to warn everyone,” she says. “Everyone we can. And then we have to get away from here. I’ll run round to Hélène’s.”

“I’ll phone Jimmy and the others.”

“Watch what you say.”

“Of course.”

She shoulders her bag. He crouches to knot a broken bootlace.

“Have you any change?” he asks. “I gave my last to the telegraph boy.”

She fumbles in her purse, tips coins into his palm.

“Be careful,” he says.

Suzanne opens the door out on to the dim landing, then pauses on the threshold and looks back at him, in all this rush and fluster, as he gathers up his things.

He raises an eyebrow at her. What?

“I keep wishing you had not come back,” she says. “I wish you weren’t here, you know. Every moment. But I still don’t want you gone.”

—

He huddles in the telephone booth. It smells of polish, tobacco smoke and other people. He dials number after number. Number after number rings out unanswered, in rifled apartments with overturned desks and papers half-burned in the grate, where the rugs are rippled by struggles, by sliding feet; its ringing can be heard on landings, where a door, forgotten in the tussle, has been left ajar.

He asks the operator for the number Jimmy the Greek had given him. Only for emergencies. He listens to the clicks and fuzz on the line. Then it rings.

The phone rings and rings and rings and rings. And there is no reply.

And then a clatter at the other end—the mouthpiece lifted.

“Hello?”

“It’s me.”

No reply to this.

“The Irishman.”

The stark insufficiency of that pseudonym. He can hear Jimmy’s breath on the mouthpiece, listens for a click, a hum, some indication that the line is being tapped. No code, no fucking code; how can they have got this far without a code? What he would give now for a word that to just the both of them meant,
The Gestapo are on to us, destroy the evidence, get your things together and get away.

There is just the thin glass panel between him and the lobby. The concierge is very carefully not looking at him, very deliberately not noticing. She is pushing a broom around the floor. He clears his throat, speaks into the receiver.

“I telephoned to let you know, my friend, I find I am very busy at the moment.”

Jimmy’s voice comes intimate and soft. “What a coincidence. So do I.”

“And I think I must expect to be so for the foreseeable future, so I shall not be available—”

“I believe that will be much the same for me.”

“Many of my acquaintances are also very busy at this time.”

Another pause. “Mine also.”

“Well, until we are more at our leisure, then.”

“Yes,” Jimmy says. “Until then.”

“Goodbye,” he says. “Good luck.”

He sets the mouthpiece down on the stand, rests his forehead against the panel above. He lets a breath go. Then he fumbles in his pocket for more change. He begins again to dial.

—

He closes the apartment door behind him and it is sugar-glass. It is barely there at all.

“Suzanne?” He hears the shake in his own voice.

She clips down the steps from the mezzanine, her coat on, piled clothing in her hands, shopping bag on her shoulder. No time for courtesies, endearments. She sets the folded clothes on the arm of the sofa, says, “Where’s your bag?”

“Eh?”

“You know, that dreadful old satchel thing of yours.”

He finds it—he didn’t know she didn’t like it—hanging on a peg underneath his other jacket. He hands it to her. She slides his manuscript from the drawer into the bag.

“I was too late,” she says over her shoulder.

“What?”

“They’ve got Hélène.” She turns back to him. Her eyes are brimming, but she is still all briskness. “The Geste were there, in her apartment, when I arrived.”

“Jesus.”

He moves towards her; she just shoves his bag into his hands.

“But they let you go…,” he says.

“I played the innocent. I said I had called round to see about her cat.”

“Oh God, that bloody cat.”

She lifts the pile of clothing from the arm of the settee. “I sorted this for you. Underwear, sweater, shaving gear.”

“Thanks.” He just stands there, holding his bag in a bundle, feeling the weight of his manuscript.

“Clothes. Now. Please.”

Yes. Of course. He opens up the bag so that she can stuff them in.

“Are you going to be all right in those boots?” she asks.

He glances down at them. “The others are worse.”

“Right then. Well. They’ll have to do. Come on.”

He follows her out on to the landing. He fumbles with his keys, turns back to the door. He locks up. His hand shakes. His face feels tight and hard. He wonders if they will ever be here again. They head down the stairs. Brisk, light, but deliberately not running. They might pile straight into the Gestapo coming up to find them. They must not look as though they are trying to escape.

“We’re popping out for a stroll, we’ll stop at a café,” she says back over her shoulder. “Tell yourself it’s an ordinary day.”

Their hands skim down the bannister.

“Where will we go?” he asks. “Do you have any notion?”

“A friend of mine; he’ll help us.”

“What friend?”

Even in all this, that little sour twist of jealousy. They’re in the lobby. She drops her voice still further, speaks over her heaving breath.

“You’ve met him, at those evenings. Michel. You remember?”

He shakes his head. Maybe.

“It’s what he does. He helps people.”

Right. He holds the
porte cochère,
peers out. The street is clear. She ducks through; he follows. He offers his arm and she takes it. The door slams shut behind them on the lobby and the staircase spiralling up seven floors to the flimsy door locked on silent space and the dust falling on books, and on the floorboards, and on the heavy dark hand-me-down table that Nora Joyce had given him, on
Mein Kampf
and his battered coffee pot and his ashtray dusted with tobacco ash, and the drooping canvas tent and the Turkish rug.

They walk along the street together, their arms linked, carrying shopping bag and satchel, as ordinary as the day itself. They don’t know where they’re going, but they go.

Part Two

Purgatory

CHAPTER TEN

PARIS

August 1942

The grandfather clock ticks. One weight sinks, its chain mumbling through blunt teeth, teasing cogs around. Somewhere in its innards something clunks and shifts, and it begins to chime the quarter-hour.

Which makes it a quarter past three.

He fans his toes, flexes his ankles.

Which makes it a quarter past three, on Friday, the twenty-first of August, nineteen forty-two.

If the clock is right.

He rolls his head softly side-to-side. He can still make these small movements. And while he can, it seems important that he does. When he turns his head to the left, there is light pouring down through a knothole, and beyond it shafts through the gaps between the boards, where sometimes dust too falls in tiny streams. When he turns to the right, there is a black rectangular patch over the floorboards, and this is the rug, which covers the loosened planks where they can clamber out, at those times when they can be out. There is all this, and there is the old man lying next to him.

He’s got used to the various and mingled smells by now. The old man’s and his own. He barely notices the body odour, the bad breath—it’s only when one of them lets out a particularly rancid fart—bad food, and the acid from not having enough of even bad food that makes your stomach eat itself and turns your guts to treacle—that a smell is particularly noticeable. Interesting, to see what one can become accustomed to.

The old man has an enviable capacity for sleep. His breast, under his white beard, falls and rises softly. His face is fascinating: the way the skin slides from his cheekbones and forehead and gathers in concertinas at his ears, leaving the skull visible at the eye sockets and the bridge of the nose. Raising his head a little, he can peer down the length of their parallel bodies and see the old man’s feet, bootless, one yellow toe poking through a grey sock.

Sometimes the old man snores. He lets him snore and does not nudge him.

He can himself, sometimes, if he’s very lucky, drift out of consciousness for a bit. A swooping fall, a card-sharp rush of images, one replacing the other before any single one of them can be understood. Then he’s jerked back, blinking at the boards above his head.

He raises his shoulders to his ears, the blades sliding up the boards beneath him and back down again, like failing wings.

It is not so bad, not really. It is not so bad.

Sometimes, when the old man is awake, he combs his beard with his fingers and mutters to himself. He’s Russian. What he’s saying could be prayers, or he could be telling stories, or he could simply be reminding himself of better days. But the old man has a listener, alert for patterns, names, anything familiar, trying to pin the sounds down into sense.

He is learning Russian in the gap between the ceiling and the floor.

It is not going quickly.

But then there is no rush.

It is a relief when the old man starts up his muttering. It helps to pass the time.

Other things are passed too, down there between the ceiling and the floor. A bottle stands between them. She leaves it down there empty, retrieves it once it has been used. One unbuttons one’s fly and shuffles about and inches up on elbows and pisses with great difficulty, while the other fellow turns his head away, or is, often enough, already asleep. He finds that, all in all, he feels fondly towards the old fellow. He is a gracious pisser and a courteous sleeper; he does not fart as much as might be supposed. If one must have company, this is not bad company to have.

There are also hours spent in the house itself, with the wireless on, the wife and husband home and nobody else expected. The old man sits in the corner by the grandfather clock, and he himself, a fifth wheel, tries to stay out of the way as well as stay away from the windows. This is when the day is done, the shops downstairs empty, and it is to be expected that there will be people at home. Even the slightest out-of-the-ordinary occurrence is questionable now. It only takes a word from a concerned citizen about strangers in the building, or figures moving around a supposedly empty apartment, and they are done for.

So they talk in hushed voices; he stretches out his legs, eases the clicks out of his knees. They share their bad food with him. He joins them at the table for sulphurous stews of turnip and cabbage and beans. He eats little, is constantly hungry. Hunger is normal. You can get used to it, to its incremental twist. In hiding, he can no longer claim his rations, and beyond a little money for off-ration things like blood pudding and root vegetables, he has nothing to contribute here. He just consumes, and excretes, and is dependent on the family to deal with both. He feels the indignity of that; it renders him just animal.

He shaves at the stone sink. He looks at himself in the scrap of mirror, at the angles of his bones. He’s no more than a few miles across town from his apartment, but it might as well be another country, since he cannot go back there. He sees in himself now a quality of the patients he’d met at the Bethlem hospital, that time Geoffrey Thompson had taken him to look round. They’d roam the corridors, disoriented and hopelessly lost, but never more than a few yards from their beds.

Geoffrey Thompson. How he’s getting on, now? He’ll be busy; he’ll be rushed off his blessed feet, now that the whole world has gone mad.

He scrapes away the stubble, leaves his top lip unshaven. He is growing a moustache. It’s good to have a hobby.

For Suzanne, he wishes daylight, air, the occasional cup of coffee. He wishes her to be safe. They have been separated, so as to be less conspicuous. They will be returned to each other when their new, fake papers have been achieved.

He listens to the Russian but he thinks in French, in its uncompromising precisions, and in German, its words fitting themselves together like links in a necklace, and in Italian, which falls through his thoughts as smooth as drops of water. He strokes that new moustache and thinks in English too; his thoughts assemble themselves in its measured blocks. An English sentence is a brick. To build with, yes, a solid structure; something one can inhabit. But also a dividing wall, a closing-off; a limitation.