Transgression (11 page)

The young widow was standing over her. “Stay down where you belong,” she said, but the massive woman had reached her and, grabbing a handful of Adele’s hair, yanked her up on her feet.

“Buttercup,” she said.

She began to drag Adele through the crowd. The young woman followed along. “My husband was killed in Charleville-Mézières! In Charleville-Mézières, I tell you!” she screamed. “Make way for a whore of a German cunt! Make way for a filthy Boche cunt!”

The men stared and gave way but the women didn’t. They surged forward, a terrible light in their eyes, eager to see the whore. Adele tried not to be there. She tried to go somewhere else in her mind.

The big woman thrust Adele through the door that led outside. A crowd pushed out after them. The woman marched her across the footbridge, still holding her by the hair, forcing her up on her toes. A larger crowd was waiting on the other side. Adele could see two women down on their knees but she didn’t recognize either one of them.

A mass of people began to walk through the acrid haze left over from the bombs, picking their way around scattered debris, moving under flickering, uncertain street lamps.

“Oh, Butter, Butter, Buttercup,” the massive woman kept saying, yanking Adele back and forth from time to time as if she were afraid Adele might fall asleep.

The marchers became silent. Soon all Adele could hear was the shuffling sound of what seemed like hundreds of pairs of feet. People began to run out of their homes and gather in the dark to watch. Adele could feel a warm liquid trickling down between her legs.

She was in her father’s garden, though she couldn’t see him. He must have been keeping busy though, because it was in good order and all the flowers were in bloom. She was sitting on the wooden bench that rested against Old Raymond’s cottage. It was always pleasant sitting there, the air sweet and drowsy-making, the sun radiating warmth off the stone walls. Old Raymond sat beside her on the step. She could see his lined velvety face. He held a frightened bird. He was smoothing its feathers with his broad finger. Adele set her mind to examining every feather, every ruffle and distinguishing mark, every flash of reflected light.

She couldn’t stay there. Angry faces were intruding. Filthy words. Faces and words, coming closer, pressing forward. Someone threw a punch. It grazed her face. Someone spit. It hit her.

A woman carrying a child had positioned herself in the middle of the street. She stared at Adele as Adele was being dragged by. It was the spidery woman.

Adele began to pray. She prayed for everything to be over. She prayed for God to swallow the world. She prayed to be dead.

The procession turned a corner, marched into the main square and pushed into an even larger crowd. It seemed that half the city was there. Lucille Rocque was there, sitting on a chair and holding her cut hair in her lap. When she looked up at Adele, Adele could see that a swastika had been painted on her forehead and had run down her face like a stream of black tears.

The big woman pressed Adele down into another chair and backed away, playing to the crowd, wiping her hands on her dress as if to get rid of all traces of disease. Adele’s underwear felt soaked. Her dress, no doubt, was soaked through, too. Everyone would know.

She looked around hoping there was no one she would recognize and no one to recognize her, but she knew that there would be, some of them would, the only daughter of dear Dr. Henri Paul-Louis, who had delivered their children, who had supported their workers’ politics, who had gone missing in action against the Germans.

A man began to shave her head, pressing her face hard against his stomach. Adele could feel the cold metal humming against her skull. Her hair began to fall past her eyes.

Someone somewhere began to pound a drum.

A woman came forward and painted her skull in a cold, wet criss-crossing.

Someone began to bang on a tambourine.

The man lifted Adele to her feet. She could see the others now, perhaps fifteen in all, freshly shaved skulls startling white, new swastikas gleaming.

A corridor opened up through the middle of the crowd. The women walked toward it as if they knew what they had to do, as if they’d known that this would be what they would have to do for a long time.

Adele walked toward it.

The drum and tambourine continued to bang and clash. Bang and clash. And another sound. It started low, a kind of hum, rising to a sigh, an abandonment, a throaty whine until all the crowd began to groan and sway.

A woman punched Lucille in the face. Lucille fell down. A man emptied a pail of kitchen slop over her head. The groan rose to a wail. The rest of the women kept walking. Adele kept walking. The crowd surged forward, plucking at the women’s clothes, pulling, tugging. The women pulled back. The crowd roared. A man grabbed Adele by the throat, a woman ripped at her blouse. She could feel hands everywhere, she stumbled, felt herself being dragged over the cobblestones, spun around, her clothes pulled away, her underclothes ripped away.

Everyone fell silent. Everyone shuffled back a little.

Adele crouched down on the road.

She could hear the sound of someone approaching. She could feel a cold boot push against her side, forcing her over slowly and firmly.

Adele rolled over on her back, exposed for all the world to see.

A
man had been shot, execution-style. Jack considered this bit of news.

“How do you figure?” Jack said.

“Close up, back of the head, blew out a piece of skull just above his right eye,” Harold Miles replied.

“Really,” Jack said.

He could feel the weight of his own revolver resting on his right hip, and he could read the young detective’s mind like a newspaper. Who in that town would be more able than a rogue cop to manoeuvre someone into a position of helplessness, maybe hand-cuffed and down on his knees? That would explain Jack’s interest in the dead man once the tell-tale finger showed up. That would explain his attempt to destroy evidence, or maybe his attempt to move the body to a safer place.

“That’s interesting,” Jack said, unsnapping his holster and pulling his revolver out.

Harold Miles’s eyes opened a little wider, but that was all.

Jack turned the long-barrelled revolver over in his hands. “What kind of weapon was it?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“But you know he was shot close up?”

“Two or three inches away. Powder burns.”

“Surprised you could tell, the corpse being as far gone as it was.”

“Not that difficult. It looked like someone had sprinkled some pepper around the entry wound.”

Jack held out his revolver to the young detective. “Want to test it?”

Miles hesitated but just for a heartbeat. “Of course not.”

Jack smiled. “I understand, detective. Everyone’s a suspect at this point. No offence taken.” He slowly put the revolver back into its holster and kept smiling. He knew he had to be very careful now. The game was on.

Jack watched from a distance. Miles had gathered a small army together. A line of slow-moving men worked their way through the trees and bushes and along the riverbank by the empty grave, looking for the murder weapon.

The river had filled up from yesterday’s rain, and the water was rushing by mud-coloured and angry-looking. Two cops stood waist-deep in it, bracing themselves against the fresh current, searching the bottom with long-handled rakes.

Jack made a half-circle around the search area, walking through the trees to the river’s edge. No one seemed to pay any attention to him or even notice he was there. He began to plow through the tall grass downriver. He stepped over freshets, waded across an over-flowing creek. His feet were wet again. So were his pants.

Jack stumbled, almost pitched over on his face. He was trying to go too fast over the rough ground. And he was feeling a bit light-headed, too. After the meeting with Harold Miles, he’d allowed himself only two hours of fitful sleep.

The mayor had called just as he was leaving the house to let him know he’d had a talk with Miles, too. “We’ll let the OPP handle everything from now on. That’s the protocol, isn’t it, Jack?” the mayor had said.

“Whatever you say,” Jack had replied.

He was in a race, that was the thing. He had to keep pressing on. The sky was washed pale by the rain. The heat of the past few weeks had disappeared. The river was gurgling and swishing by.

What did he know that Miles didn’t know? Not much. He knew the thin line of blue clay between the heel and the sole of the dead man’s shoes hadn’t come from the reddish mud in the grave. But Miles would have noticed that, too. He wasn’t stupid.

Don’t make that mistake, Jack said to himself, and then again, so it would stick. Don’t underestimate Harold Miles.

That was Jack’s problem. He knew it. His wife had told him enough times. He underestimated people. His own son, for one.

Jack stumbled again, touched down on one knee, struggled back up on his feet. “Goddamn it to hell,” he said.

He had to calm down. He could feel his heart racing.

“What do I know that Miles doesn’t?” This time he asked the question out loud. The river seemed full of voices. Jack was ready to listen.

Execution-style. Execution-style.

That was the key to the whole thing. Jack had known this as soon as the young detective had opened his mouth. But of course Miles knew this, too. He just didn’t know enough about the town to know what he knew. Not yet.

A bullet in the back of the head. Seemed just the kind of summary punishment you might expect from the DPs, given who those people were, given what they must have experienced.

And Jack knew one other thing that Miles didn’t know, at least for the moment. He pushed on through the grass.

He knew where to look for the blue clay.

N
uns descended on Adele like a flock of grey birds, covering her in a blanket and leading her through the crowd while all the time remaining grimly silent, making it plain that they were simply doing their duty, distasteful as it was.

They covered up the other women, too, some similarly naked, others clinging to scraps of garments. Lucille Rocque’s face was covered in blood.

The nuns hurried them toward a parish hall on the other side of the square. A surly-looking group of men was already gathering by the door. A shaky old priest told the men to go home and ushered the women in. He locked the door behind them. “Fetch the charity boxes!” he cried out. His surprisingly vibrant voice rang through the bleak room. “Fetch some rags!”

Adele fell on the floor.

“Can’t you stand?” a sister asked. Adele didn’t answer. After a while, the nun went away.

Someone had wiped the blood off Lucille’s face. Both her eyes were swollen and from where Adele was huddled under her blanket she could see that Lucille’s nose looked almost translucently red.

Adele got up and sat down on a chair beside her.

“Fucking turd-eaters,” Lucille muttered.

Adele stared at her, not sure what she was talking about. Something terrible had happened, something unclear.

A young sister came along. She was handing out rags. “You must try to wipe off the paint. Scrub hard. You must pray to God that it comes away.”

Adele reached up and touched the top of her head. Her hand looked black.

“I can’t rub. My head hurts too fucking much,” Lucille complained. She began to dab at the top of Adele’s head. Adele couldn’t feel a thing.

After a while the old priest came along, dipped a rag in a bowl of wood alcohol and cleaned off the rest of Adele’s paint. Now and then he looked down at her. Adele closed her eyes. She had no idea whether the liquid felt cold or hot, whether it stung. She clutched her blanket close to her so that he couldn’t see anything.

“Confessions begin in twenty minutes.” His voice boomed out over her head as he addressed the room. “No exceptions. See that door? Go through it into the church!”

Adele felt his warm breath touch her ear. “In your deepest despair,” he whispered, “remember Mary Magdalene.”

Once he was gone, Lucille whispered, “Do you want to go to confession?”

Adele shook her head.

Some of the women began to file through the side door into the church. Lucille led Adele over to the charity boxes and held the blanket up as a screen while Adele dressed in the first thing her hands touched, a faded housedress spotted with bleach. It felt strange to be naked underneath the flimsy dress. She pulled on a pair of scuffed open-toed shoes.

“One more thing,” Lucille said and wrapped a paisley-patterned bandanna around Adele’s head. She covered her own bald and battered head with a lime-coloured hat.

They made their way to the back of the hall in small stages. The nuns were busy gathering up dirty paint rags and blankets and leading women to confession. As soon as they were looking the other way, Lucille unlocked the back door.

A soft light was just beginning to turn the sky pink. Adele could still smell the bombardment, she could see wisps of smoke still floating in the air.

They followed a path through the priest’s vegetable garden and crept behind the back of the small church next door. Some distance away, on a quiet side street, a man was standing under a tree. Groups of people were passing the front of the church along the square.

Lucille and Adele began to walk away down the side street, expecting to hear shouts, expecting to be chased and run to ground at any moment.

Adele dreamt of Manfred. It was winter and he was carrying buckets of steaming concrete through the wind and the blinding snow. His face was an icy mask. His hands were black.

Adele woke up and saw Lucille sitting at her tiny table in the windowless kitchen. She was on Lucille’s couch again. Her bandanna had come loose and was lying across her arm. She put her hand up to her head and touched the cool stubbly skin.

“It’s only a fraction of what’s happening to Wilhelm and Manfred right this very minute,” Lucille said.

Adele got up and stood by the kitchen door. Lucille was smoking a cigarette. Her one eye was completely shut. Blood encrusted her nostrils. Her nose had a white spot in the middle and was leaning over to one side.

“I think your nose is broken,” Adele said.

Lucille shrugged. “I’m not worrying.”

Adele walked over to the mirror hanging above the sink and looked at herself. It was a shock. Some girl with a bald head and enormous eyes was looking back at her. She could see paint gleaming in this girl’s pores like a plague of blackheads. Who was she? Not Adele Georges. Not a citizen of Rouen. Not French.

No one.

“It’ll grow back,” Lucille said.

“No, it won’t,” Adele replied. She huddled on the couch again. Her heart felt dead. Her skin felt covered in ice. Her lungs laboured to breathe.

Spat upon. That’s all she could get her mind around. Refuse. Waste. Anathema. Yes, that was the word Father Salles would use. That was the very word.

They hid in Lucille’s rooms all that day and at two o’clock in the morning Adele went home. The city had turned off all its lights. In the distance the
sky flashed and rolled with the thunder of heavy artillery. Evidently the Germans had not withdrawn very far.

Adele hurried through the empty streets guided by glimpses of rooftops and the ghostly shapes of trees that flickered occasionally out of the dark. She was still wearing the housedress and the paisley scarf. Lucille had given her a pair of pink panties several sizes too large. She had to pin the waistband, but still just the feel of them was a kind of comfort.

She knew that all that mattered was getting through the next two or three days because that’s what Lucille kept telling her. The madness out on the streets would dissipate. People would have to go back to thinking about themselves. Everything had been disrupted. There was no food, no work, no money. Bombs were falling.

Adele had remembered her cache of money behind the foundation stone.

“We’ll need it,” Lucille had said.

Adele crept up the back lane and pushed open the wooden gate. She looked toward the house. Each faraway flash seemed to move the house toward her and then it would recede into the dark again. She stood there for a long time watching it appear and disappear. She wanted her father. This emotion came in a rush and filled her heart.

She hurried through the garden but instead of stopping at Old Raymond’s cottage, she continued on toward the kitchen door. She could see that Madame Théberge had covered the inside of the windows with bedsheets in obedience to a black-out order. She wondered if Jean and Bibi were sleeping through all the bomb flashes, the far-off rumble of guns. She knew that they wouldn’t be. She knew that they’d be lying in their beds terribly frightened. They needed her.

Adele tried the door. For the first time in her memory, it was locked. She moved along the porch toward the window. A sheet was draped over it but it had been pulled aside. Her mother was standing there.

“Mother,” Adele said, and wondered if she could hear her through the glass and if she knew what had happened to her. Of course she would know. There would have been a rush to inform her. All the neighbours. Father Salles. And Madame Théberge went out every day to search the shops for
food, she never missed a day. Someone would surely have told Madame Théberge and she would have told her mother.

Madame Georges was staring at her as if she’d just stumbled on a burglar and didn’t know what to do. Adele could see her mouth working nervously, her thin fingers pressing against her cheek.

“Mother, please let me in.”

Her mother didn’t move and then she shook her head.

Adele took a step back, and as if she were a child again, as if she were showing off an accidental wound, she reached up and took off her bandanna.

“Go away,” Adele could hear her mother say, “get away from here!” Her mother reached up, closed the sheet and disappeared.

Adele went back to Old Raymond’s cottage. She knelt down, felt for the loose stone and pulled it out. Through the years she’d hidden everything precious in this hollowed-out spot–a toy she’d stolen from René, glass and paste jewellery, a photograph of a certain boy.

She felt in the dark for her small roll of bills, found them, put them in her dress pocket and without looking behind her, did what her mother had told her to do. She walked away.

Two other women from the excursion to La Bouille snuck up the stairs to Lucille’s rooms the next morning–Bridget the teenager, who now had two blackened eyes, and the woman called Maddy, carrying her sixteen-month-old daughter.

Lucille’s nose had turned blue overnight but she could still breathe through it. Bridget said that her father, on seeing her bald scalp, had taken her by the neck and had punched her and punched her. She gazed at Lucille’s nose and asked her if it was all right.

“It’s not broken,” Lucille said.

Over the next three weeks the women settled into a routine, with Lucille’s twelve-year-old brother arriving at odd hours to run errands for them and bring them scraps of food. Because the ration system had broken down, everything had to be paid for in cash. Adele had the most money so
they used her money to pay for most everything.

Adele passed the time standing in the kitchen staring in the mirror. The slightest covering of fine black hair was beginning to show, as soft as Maddy’s little girl’s hair. This seemed particularly strange to Adele. Her hair had always been springy and thick to the touch.

Early one morning the women woke to the sounds of shouting. They crept across the front room and, pulling the curtain a little aside, looked down into the street below. Some men were running past their building. Others were gathering in the middle of the street. A kind of rumbling thunder began to fill the air, it vibrated the walls and floor.

French flags appeared in the apartments opposite, people leaned out their windows, Lucille’s brother came bursting in through the door.

“What is it?” Lucille demanded.

“Soldiers!” He danced around the room. “Different ones, new ones!”

Adele could see a tank approaching along the street. Some boys were riding on the front of it and two young women were sitting on the edge of the turret beside a grinning soldier. Another tank appeared covered in flowers and excited youngsters. A jeep full of young women and soldiers passed by.

“Who are they?” Adele asked.

“Canadians!” Lucille’s brother yelled, jumping up and down on the couch and almost beside himself with excitement. “Canadians!” He opened the door again and disappeared back down the stairs.

“We’ve been liberated,” Maddy said, apprehension in her voice.

Bridget crumpled to the floor, tears streaming down her face. Lucille bolted the door and began to push the sofa in front of it. Maddy picked up her child and retreated into Lucille’s bedroom. Adele remained by the window, looking down into the street.

The party lasted for three days, at least as far as the women could tell and from Lucille’s brother’s daily reports, but none of the celebrants came looking for them. It was as if Lucille’s rooms were empty, as if they didn’t exist.

On the fourth day Adele came in from the kitchen to make an announcement. “Manfred would have run away as soon as the fighting started,” she said. The rest of the women were sitting in the front room in a cloud of
cigarette smoke discussing their changed circumstances. Maddy’s child was entertaining them, banging a spoon incessantly on the bottom of a pot.

“He’ll be in Paris. I’m meeting him there,” Adele went on.

The women looked a little startled. They glanced at each other. “No one could have gone anywhere in all that fighting, Adele,” Maddy said. “Besides, the Resistance is everywhere now. It would be impossible to hide.”

“Everyone’s carrying guns,” Bridget added.

Maddy picked up her child and settled her on her lap. “Just pray that he stayed with the regiment and that they managed to retreat safely. I pray that’s what Ernst did.”

“Jon would have stayed. He said he was looking forward to a fight. Better than building scaffolds every day.” Bridget puffed furiously on her cigarette.

Lucille’s round face looked suddenly flushed. “Why do you think Manfred would have run?”

“Because I asked him to.”

All the women looked at Adele.

Lucille’s face turned a darker shade. “You asked him to?”

“He hates war. It makes no sense. Or do you think it does?”

Lucille got up off the couch.

“The best thing to do,” Maddy said, “is stay where we are and pray that Germany surrenders.”

“We could pray that Germany wins,” Bridget said.

“No, we can’t pray for that.”

“But if they win, they’ll come back to us. If they don’t, who knows what will happen? You don’t know what will happen. No one knows.” Bridget looked close to tears again.

Lucille’s voice sounded harsh and dangerous in the small room. “Wilhelm didn’t run. He’s not a deserter. Do you know what I pray for? I pray that most of the men weren’t asked by their girlfriends to run away and leave the rest to be slaughtered.”

“Manfred is in Paris,” Adele said.

It all made perfect sense. Manfred had been poised to run on his next leave anyway, so why would he have stayed when the fighting started? And
in the confusion, amid all the exploding fire and smoke and terror, who would have cared about one soldier? He would have moved at night and hid during the day.

That’s as far as Adele wanted to think. That’s all she wanted to know. He had kept his end of the bargain. He had gone to Paris.

Adele picked up some scissors, walked over to her bedsheet where she’d left it crumpled in a corner and began to cut off a long strip.

“What are you doing, dear?” Maddy asked.

“Making a bandage.” Adele carried the strip into the kitchen and, checking herself in the mirror, began to wrap it around her head. It was a struggle, trying to make it look like a dressing on a wound, trying to cover every inch of her bald head.