A Country Road, A Tree (22 page)

They pause at the field gate; the
passeur
says something, but it is not quite catchable: a flash of teeth, then this, which he does catch: “Stay low, tread softly, keep quiet.”

Then the fellow slips into the darkness and they follow. The ground is rough. The
passeur
keeps slipping in and out of sight, as if he is a magic trick: now you see him, now you don’t. It makes the heart lurch and hammer, makes the senses strain. Then there’s movement, and there he is again, and the skin flushes and the nerves sing out. And underneath it all is the insistent throb of disquiet, of what do we know about any of this, after all? He could be taking us anywhere, he could melt away at any moment. He could lead us right to the Gestapo for the money and the pleasure of watching the arrest. If one man can do a thing like that, so could another. It has become, after all, something that people do.

He is thinking this as he shuffles along, bent almost double, creeping like a toad in the shadow of a hedge. Suzanne, ahead, is a low and silent shape; he can’t even hear her footsteps. There is a blond expanse of stubbled field to his left. When a foot strays off the worn-bare path, the cropped stems prod and spike his boot soles. It is a useful reminder of the straight and narrow.

At the corner of the field, they scramble through a gap in the hedge. Beyond, the world is different: the Indian corn still stirs uncut in the breeze, whispering and musty. The path continues on, a narrow pass between the stems.

“…silence absolute…,” the
passeur
is saying. “…close now…”

He is ushering them by; he brings up the rear, and it’s worse then, the sense of fumbling blindly into darkness, through the dry stalks, into who knows what.

Footfalls. The sound of boots on a metalled road. There’s torchlight broken into bits by the wicker-weave of the hedge. They hunker low, silent, breath heaving; and then the boots go crunching on, and the light is past and gone.

His heart hammers. His breath is shallow and it hurts. The
passeur
makes a low sound, impatient, subtle, and so they creep on. And everything now seems condensed; everything seems bristling and stark. The grey silk of the corn, the creak of boots, the night air on his face, the smell of rot, the stars above. His calves ache, his thighs ache. Night birds call, clouds bundle across the sky. Down in the mud, they edge onwards, creeping towards a different, deeper darkness.

The little party huddles up against a fence; branches creak in the wind. Whispered instructions: they climb the fence in turn, and on the far side gather under the cover of the trees. No moonlight here; pitch black. With a click of the tongue, the
passeur
leads them off again, this time walking upright along what seems to be a proper path, instinctually known. It is strange to go upright now. The eyes adjust; he can pick out branches against the sky, slender tree trunks.

But then off to the left, there’s movement, noises. He stops, bristling, breath caught, and then it’s just rustling, snuffling. A badger, or a hedgehog perhaps, making its way through the fallen leaves. And they carry on, treading through the darkness, hands raised against the whip of unseen branches, moving through an entirely different world.

Then the darkness begins to thin; tree trunks are grey against the sky, and the
passeur
’s shape moves across the lightness, and then Suzanne’s, and they are out at the far edge of the woods. A stream murmurs to itself; it catches moonlight. Single file, they follow its course upstream, walking between the woods and the water. On the far bank lies the open countryside of the Free Zone.

He sees the moon’s reflection on the water. The white disc struggles to disperse and then shivers itself back together, then breaks apart again. He slows, stands, watches. The stone, the water, the moon; he sees himself like Friedrich’s painted men, transient, contemplating the enduring, changing, ancient moon. But he is staring downward here, not up towards the heavens. He closes his eyes.

The schoolgirl limps on raw feet.

The
patron
opens his tobacco pouch.

Paul Léon shambles down the rue Littré.

The priest slides past him on the stairs.

Alfy Péron’s blunt fingertip taps a five-hundred-franc note.

Mary Reynolds ushers him in.

Marcel Duchamp lifts his knight.

Lines crease round Jeannine Picabia’s eyes.

He opens his eyes again, and the reflected moon breaks, resolves, and breaks, and this is the lie of it, the willing delusion—there is nothing eternal here. Given time enough—and time just keeps on ticking by—even this will cease. The water wears the rock, the rock crumbles, the water dries, the moon itself will fall to dust and there will be no one left to contemplate it.

“Pssst!”

He glances round. Suzanne waves him on with wide furious sweeps. He strides to catch up with her.

They cluster at the upended roots of a fallen tree. The trunk lies across the stream; branches stand like ski-poles, hand-to-hand. On the far side lie the raked lines of a vineyard. There’s a cluster of low buildings beyond that; the dwellings are in darkness, but the light is gathering at the edges of the sky. The far bank is the Free Zone. They still have some way to go on the other side before sunrise.

Suzanne does not look at him. She is seething with irritation. One would think, now, in the midst of all this, he would at least pay attention, could at least follow instructions. Her shoulders up, her back narrow, she treads across the tree trunk and it feels briefly like girlhood, gymnastics; she hops down on the other side. There she stands in the Zone Libre, while he still stands in the Zone Occupée, under the trees. She peers across as he makes the first tentative steps out on to the trunk, grasping for handholds. He follows her across, into this new place. They make their way through the fields, along the hedgerows and the ditches, in the cold breaking dawn.

—

His boots are worn to shreds. Her shoes are thin as skin. The autumn sun is too bright, too low, and they are walking directly into it, squinting and sore. He turns the pebble round in his mouth, slips it across his tongue to rest in the other cheek.

“I’m thirsty,” she says.

“I know.”

After a while she says, “I’m so thirsty.”

“You should get a sucking stone.”

“I don’t want a sucking stone.”

They come upon a fall of rocks by the roadside. She halts, sinks down on a boulder and rests her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands. She does not move. He waits, standing, for her to get up again; then, when she does not shift, he sinks down on his haunches beside her and waits like that for a while too.

“Are you all right?” he asks.

Silence.

“Come on, then.”

Silence. Then she shakes her head.

He glances off along the road, then turns to look back the way they’ve come. Then, fingertips to the ground for balance, he gazes at her hunched, exhausted form. They can’t stay here.

He gets up; his joints creak. He offers her his hand.

“Come on,” he says. “Hop up now.”

She just lifts her head and looks at him. These past days have transformed her. Her skeleton is making a show of itself.

“I thought you wanted to get to Roussillon?” he asks.

A blink, and nothing more. It seems she is beyond goading.

“Once you’re up and going, you’ll hardly notice.”

“Every whore of a step hurts. How could I not notice?”

He takes her hand then and hauls her to her feet. She protests, but stumbles up. He hooks her arm through his and they take a step.

“Tell me,” he says, “where does it hurt?”

She starts with her toes: the agony that is her left little one, the raw lump to which it has been reduced. The way her shoes pinch and rub, the way her socks are worn thin on the ball of the foot and the skin worn raw beneath as a result; how her ankles ache; how she has dreadful cramps in her calves, and terrible stiffness in her hip from sleeping on floors and the bare ground. He murmurs agreement and they take another step together; they walk on.

Soon the road begins to climb, a steady, fatiguing slog, and they fall silent once more.

“What about you?” she asks after a while.

“Oh, me,” he says. “You don’t want to hear about that.”

The two of them trudge on through the evening as it falls, and he tells her anyway, about his sore feet and his rickety knees and his burning belly and the twinge of his scar, and his backache and the nerve that fires off in his neck, and the boil on his shoulder blade, the poison of which is making his whole shoulder throb.

She nods silently and they walk on together, sticks and rags, a broken bundle, barely there at all.

The slow unpeeling of the road is a sticking plaster from skin. And each step is the point of severance, each step is to be steeled against and endured. As the light fades he watches his boots, wrecked, as they lump themselves forward, watches the ground as it lurches and sinks and swells away and back. His boots are coated in dust; they are bloody with dust. The dust is red.

In the low light, he lifts his head to see that the roadside banks are crumbling red earth. The cliffs above are veined with rust and blood. The road sweeps towards these cliffs, and as the road rises and lurches upward like a key change, the cicadas start to sing. And on the top of the cliffs, a little town grows like lichen on the blood-red rocks. They have travelled, through a rosary of days, through a decade of weeks, from one world into another. Roussillon.
Rousse:
of course it’s red.

They climb towards it.

It is small-windowed, shuttered, huddled tight, its back turned towards the world. As the two of them slog uphill, the wind grows sharper, more scuddy; it twists this way and then that; it’s in their faces, in their eyes, teasing out Suzanne’s hair from under her scarf, pulling at their jackets, stirring his beard, spinning leaves and seeds and bits of grass into whirlwinds and blowing dust into dry eyes, and it’s too much, really it is too much to contend with now, that the wind should blow full in their faces.

A church clock strikes the hour; the chimes are broken and scattered by the breeze. Suzanne moans in complaint and he nods in agreement.

They shamble past the front of the first house. It is locked tight; the iron homunculi that hold the shutters back during the day are fallen forward drunkenly for the night.

The road is cobbled now. There are sleeping shops, a fruit tree splayed against a wall; the ghost of a clematis climbs over a door; a cat ambles from an alleyway and stops to stare at them. There is a sign. An hotel. Hôtel de la Poste. He tugs on her arm, tilts his head towards the building. She nods. They stumble over the cobblestones towards it.

“We’re here,” she says.

“Thank God,” he says.

“Just don’t do anything stupid,” she says. “Don’t mess this up now, please.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

ROUSSILLON

October 1942

The day is white and full of clattering, talk: the walls strain and buckle in the wind.

The two of them lie side by side, still as figures on a tomb, socks and shoes pulled off, feet patched with blood and scabbed and stinking. The bed is narrow and their shoulders touch.

They breathe. Just for a while they are oblivious. The white light and the noise and the buffeting of the wind do not trouble their sleep.

When the sun eases in through the slots in the shutters, it makes her surface and she feels the press of her shoulder against his shoulder and she curls round on her side, putting space between them. Through the thin walls comes the sound of voices, of a radio, of footfalls, the chink of glasses and china. Mice rustle beneath the floorboards; they scamper in the ceiling. He breathes beside her; she sleeps again.

The sunlight fans across the floor and then begins its slow retreat. Shadows deepen and spread like floodwater.

In the evening, they stir and wake to a blue room, moonlight sliced by shutters. He eases on his boots, wincing, and stumbles out through the hotel yard to the necessary house. The little room is vertiginous and breezy, perched on the edge of a crevasse, a sheer stinking drop beneath.

She, meanwhile, limps out to the town square. She fills the washstand ewer at the fountain. The water plummets into the enamel and the spray touches her face and it is cool and sweet. There are lights lit at the cafés, and old men in blue work-jackets drink rosé and talk, and men in shabby city suits and women with faded feathered hats are out taking the air; they give her long low looks and walk on, and murmur with each other, knowing her for a newcomer and one of their own, but remaining discreet in case she does not wish to be acknowledged. And she, for now, is happy simply to be alone.

—

They take turns washing in cold water at the washstand. When they are done, she lifts down the bowl and soaks her feet.

“What,” he asks, “do you think of the place?”

She scratches at a flea bite, looks at him. “We know that it’s safe,” she says. “More or less.”

“There seems to be no plumbing to speak of.”

She shrugs. Does it matter? “What we need to do now is register at the Mairie. Once we’ve done that we can get our new ration cards.”

“We make ourselves official?”

“I don’t see that we can do otherwise, if we want to buy bread. We are in a separate jurisdiction now; we should be all right.”

He whistles out a breath.

“I can’t see them coming all the way here to look for us, can you? We don’t matter that much.”

—

He edges in behind her into the hotel dining room. It is packed tight, elbow-to-elbow. Jumbled with noise.

Madame shows them to a tiny table, and provides an off-ration stew of game and vegetables and barley. Globs of fat glisten on the surface. The meat falls to fibres on the tongue; the vegetables melt. It is impossibly good. They are rendered dumb by taste, by the dope of calories.

Suzanne does well; he watches as she does well. They are introduced to the people on neighbouring tables; she manages warm and easy conversation about nothing. He admires this as one might a coin plucked from an ear, or a fancily shuffled pack of cards. He can see that it’s done well, but can’t ever see himself mastering the trick.