Transgression (7 page)

A
dele didn’t return to the park for three weeks, or to Manfred. She went directly to work at exactly twenty minutes to ten and she stayed away from Simone, too. When her period finally arrived, it seemed like a last-minute reprieve on the steps of a gallows, it seemed like a bright red miracle.

Adele moved through a sea of votive lights and lit a candle at the foot of the Blessed Virgin. She pressed her forehead against the Virgin’s cool bare feet and prayed to be forgiven. She vowed never to see or even to think of Manfred Halder again.

She’d been living a kind of frozen terror. What in the world would she have done if she had been pregnant? There was nothing she could have done, and nowhere she could have turned except to the steep bank of the river.

A priest stepped into a confessional at the side of the cathedral. When he closed the door, it made a sharp sound like a gunshot in the huge vaulted space. It echoed around Adele’s head.

An old woman struggled to her feet from where she’d been praying and disappeared behind the velvet curtain on the other side of the confessional. Adele sat down on a pew to wait her turn.

The woman seemed to be taking a maddeningly long time.

Adele fingered nervously through her rosary, reciting her prayers. She closed her eyes, and as she prayed she could see the priest’s face behind a criss-cross of shadows, she could see a glint of light from off his glasses.

“Father, forgive me.” Perhaps he wouldn’t ask her to go into details. But he would. They always liked to question young girls about those kinds of things. “For I have sinned.”

The face in the confessional was Manfred’s now. It was Manfred. She touched her hand to the metal grille between them. She slipped her fingers through. She ached just to touch his face. “Manfred,” she said.

But it wasn’t Manfred. It was the priest again. “God knows your heart and your heart is Sin,” he said.

Adele put her rosary away and fled out a side door.

At six o’clock that same evening, Adele was standing in the doorway of an empty building on Ducrot Street, shivering in the cold and waiting for Manfred. A half-hour later she saw him walking from his work with a group of young soldiers. She stepped out from her hiding place.

Manfred looked shocked to see her, but pleased, too, so pleased and relieved his eyes immediately reddened.

All the soldiers stopped.

Manfred came up to her. She leaned against him. He wrapped his arms around her.

“Hello,” she said.

“Do you go over to Simone’s very often?” René asked.

He was leaning against the counter watching Adele scrub three potatoes. Every time he appeared and wandered about the house, he made her nervous. She had a stash of canned goods from the Wehrmacht hidden under an old coat in a corner of the root cellar right below his feet.

“I don’t have the time,” Adele replied.

René’s eyes fell on the plump potatoes, fat and juicy. They’d been stolen just the other night from Manfred’s pantry. Adele shifted a little, trying to shield them from her brother’s sight.

“Nice potatoes,” René said.

“I traded a sweater for them.” Adele sliced one and gave him a piece to distract him.

René stuck it in his mouth. “So you don’t see Simone very much any more? When was the last time?”

“I don’t know. Two months ago. Why?”

“I haven’t seen Edouard since we started fighting this war.”

“The war is over,” Adele reminded him. “Our so-called government signed a peace treaty with Germany, remember?”

Edouard was Simone’s older brother. René had been a friend of his, but not as close a friend as Adele had been of Simone. René looked at Adele more closely, as if he were making some kind of important assessment. Apparently she passed because he continued. “I guess their father is still making a lot of money.”

“Why does that matter?”

“Dirty money? Of course it matters. Have you seen anyone inside the house beside the Ducharmes? Anyone standing guard? You’d think the Germans would want to look after him, his plant does such important work.”

“How would I know? Why are you asking?”

“The least he could have done was refuse to co-operate.”

Adele turned to face her brother. “And then what? They’d have taken over his business, anyway, no matter what he did. He was just protecting his family.”

René smiled at her.

“René, the war is over.”

“You’re right. Where’s Mother?”

“She’s taken Old Raymond out for a walk.”

“I’ll go look for them,” René said.

Adele and Manfred strolled in among the trees at the far end of the park. The path was wet. Most of the snow had melted. Though they’d been seeing each other almost every day throughout the winter, they hadn’t discussed what had taken place in Old Raymond’s cottage and they hadn’t repeated it. It was always on Adele’s mind, though. She thought she knew why Manfred wasn’t pressing for more-he was afraid she’d disappear again
and this time she’d stay away forever. She loved him for thinking this, for putting her before what he must want.

For Adele, it was enough just to walk beside him, hear his sweet voice, hold his hand, kiss his warm mouth. He was a strange drug, so powerful he even made her forget her great guilt, at least for the time she spent near him.

Manfred reached into his coat pocket and pulled out something and handed it to her. It looked like a large gold coin except it seemed too light and its gold was just bright foil. Or like a brightly wrapped chocolate wafer.

Adele peeled off the covering. There was a balloon inside.

Moonlight filtered through the stark leafless woods. Remnants of snowbanks marched up the steep dark hill. The air felt warm and cold all at the same time and smelled like primeval mud, like the world just waking up.

“That is a condom,” Manfred said.

Adele stared down at it. She’d heard of condoms before, though she’d never seen one.

“Do you know what it’s for?”

“Yes.”

“It’s to keep the…”

“Shut up,” Adele said, her emotions racing, her head swimming. She walked on through the trees.

Manfred followed her. “What do you think of it?”

“I don’t think of it,” Adele replied.

Manfred caught up to her and closed his hand over her hand. “I think of it all the time.”

Please God, don’t let me do this, Adele thought.

Manfred began to kiss her, his hand slipping inside her coat, trailing down her stomach.

She could feel tears burn in her eyes.

“If you don’t want me to…” Manfred whispered.

Adele was shocked to feel how urgently her body had responded to his slightest touch. How immediately. Completely. “If you do anything more, I’ll run away forever this time,” she said.

Manfred groaned and kissed her tears. “If you don’t want me to,” he repeated, breathless.

Adele kissed his lips-they were wet and salty now. She held on to his face. He touched her between her legs, the most gentle touch. Her knees gave way.

“I don’t want you to,” Adele said, and reached down and touched him where he was already hard, where she knew he was already aching as she ached.

She knew she was lost.

After that night, they made love whenever and wherever they could, in the woods, on the park’s cold bench, in the long grass beside the river when the warmer weather arrived. Manfred seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of condoms, and Adele kept up to him, loving him hopelessly, giving herself to him with a kind of blind and fatalistic abandonment.

One spring night as they were walking along the top of the stone wall overlooking the river, Manfred announced that he had a plan.

The warm air was full of strange and exotic smells Adele couldn’t identify. Barges visible only by their running lights were moving along the far shore.

“What plan?”

“We will run away together.”

Adele jumped down from the wall and began to walk away.

Manfred caught up to her. “I am perfectly serious,” he said, and with one motion took off his army cap and flung it into the night sky. “I have retired from this war.” It sailed back toward the river and disappeared into the darkness.

Adele ran back to the wall and looked down into the swirling water.

“Do you see it?” Manfred asked.

“You stupid dumb ass!”

“Good. You don’t see it.” Manfred started unbuttoning his jacket.

“Stop!” Adele grabbed his wrists. He freed himself. She seized his lapels and forced his jacket closed. “You’ll be punished even for a missing cap. Do you think you can go back to your barracks naked?”

Manfred struggled with her for a little while, gave up and rested his face against her face. “Adele, listen, we must run away. There is nothing else for us to do.”

“Run away?” Adele repeated, and again, “Run away?” as if he’d just
suggested they take a stroll to the moon. “How?” She knew there could be no answer. There was no possible answer.

“I will tell you. Bring some of your brother’s clothes to this park. He has some clothes left in your house. Yes?”

No, Adele felt like saying, even though René had left some old clothes he’d outgrown. She didn’t reply.

“Bring some pants, a shirt, boots, a coat. We can hide them in the trees. In the middle of the night I will come here and exchange my uniform. We will disappear from this place before anyone is awake. We will travel to the south.”

“Yes? And how will we live?”

“We will work on farms.”

“Haven’t you forgotten something? You’re a German.”

“Only if I open my mouth am I a German, and I can assure you that I will not. I am your half-wit brother. I am a mute. You must do all the talking for me.”

Dear Jesus, Adele thought to herself.

“We are searching for our father,” Manfred went on, “that is why we are travelling. Don’t you see? You will do all the talking.”

What Adele saw was nothing but scenes of disaster no matter which way she looked. “Manfred, my family depends on me for almost everything. They won’t survive without me. Bibi and Jean are just small. You know this. I can’t just leave!”

Manfred looked away. After a while he nodded. “Yes,” he said with a sigh, “of course.” He gazed off across the river, dappled shadows and watery light rippling over his face. “You are a good person. This is what I would expect you to say.”

Adele watched him. He looked like he was drifting away from her, moving down-river.

Sometimes after making love Adele would trace Manfred’s scar with her finger tips. The path the bullet had made ran from near the middle of his stomach almost to his hip, like an appendix scar except it was on the other side. It had become as familiar to her as everything else about him.

“Don’t do that again,” she’d whispered the first time her fingers had travelled that route.

Manfred had pretended she was referring to what they’d just done together. “We cannot do it just one more time?” But his eyes had told her the truth. He would do it again, if he was forced to choose between shooting himself or killing some faceless someone in an insane asylum war.

Now Adele took his hand and pressed up against him. “Manfred, when we were running from your soldiers, so many thousands of us, we had to depend on the farmers along the way. Even mothers with babies in their arms. Some were kind. But some stood at the end of their lanes and sold cups of water at one hundred francs a cup. These are the people you want to depend on to hide us and save our lives.”

“We will find the kind ones,” Manfred said.

“I can’t run away,” Adele whispered. “You’re safe here right now and we’re together. Things will change. We have to believe they will. We can out-wait anything.”

She looked up at Manfred.

His face continued to float away.

A
dele had just arrived home from work the next morning and was still thinking about Manfred’s desperate plan to run away, when Old Raymond told her the news. He had heard it from Madame Georges, who had been told by one of the neighbours.

Monsieur Ducharme had been shot. He was dead.

Adele sat beside Simone’s bed all that day and held her hand. She didn’t try to think of anything comforting to say because she knew by her own experience that there was nothing to be said that would relieve the hurt in her friend’s heart. Besides, Simone was receiving enough useless words of comfort from sombre relatives, priests, friends of the family, her mother to last a lifetime.

Candles were burning on the dresser. Shadowy figures came and went in the curtained and hushed room. Adele remained sitting there. She could see the limousine as clearly as if she were standing outside on the driveway looking at it, though it had been removed by the police the night before, as had the two bodies. Monsieur Ducharme’s and his German chauffeur’s.

The car shone in her mind. Monsieur Ducharme’s brains were splattered across its shiny surface like pieces of pink blotting paper. She could see René standing there.

Adele felt sick to the bottom of her soul.

“You are the lucky one now,” Adele heard Simone say, her voice faint and hoarse from all her crying.

“Why?”

“You can still hope to see your father.”

Yes. Her father. Better that her father be dead than come home to this. An assassin for a son.

And his daughter? What was she?

Adele looked at Simone. She was lost in her own misery again-her eyes looked drowned.

Nothing appeared in the local newspapers concerning Monsieur Ducharme’s death except a small notice that the police were continuing to investigate and had determined that the motivation was robbery. No one in Rouen believed this. Everyone knew Monsieur Ducharme had been executed by the Underground. It was meant to send a message:
The war continues.

Given the enemy’s over-whelming presence, it seemed more a piece of inconsequential street theatre, more a whimsical act than a serious action. A few hearts quickened with renewed hope, more were glad that Ducharme got what was coming to him, but most simply worried that such an affront would bring the wrath of the army down on the city. And it did. New curfews were enforced to the letter. Trucks rumbled through the streets at all hours. The SS escalated their random and terrifying midnight visits.

A month passed before Simone felt sufficiently recovered to return to school. Adele had kept her company as much as she could during this time, but now she avoided going over to the Ducharme house. It upset her to see the change in her friend. Simone wrapped herself in long silences. She rarely smiled and when she did it seemed to cost her a great effort. She walked more slowly than before and with her shoulders hunched over a little, as if she were protecting her heart.

Adele had waited for René to show up at the house but he hadn’t. She’d wanted to see his face, look into his eyes, she’d wanted to ask him a question. And then she’d wanted to strangle him.

Adele told Manfred about her suspicions. They were sitting on their bench at the far end of the park under their tree. It was her night off and they were ignoring the new curfews. The sky was full of stars.

She said she could both believe that René was capable of such a thing and that he was not capable of such a thing. She could hold these contradictory thoughts in her mind at the same instant. The only thing she knew
for certain was that somewhere inside herself she still loved her brother. She found that the strangest thing of all.

“What are we to do?” Manfred said. It didn’t sound so much like a question-it sounded like a prayer.

Later that night Adele woke up to see a light shining in her room. René was standing behind it, watching her.

Adele sat up, her heart pounding so loudly she could actually hear it.

René was holding a candle. Adele could see where the wax had run down over his fingers. He must have been watching her for some time.

“What is it?” she whispered.

René just stood there.

“Why are you here? Are you all right?”

“It smells like a German whorehouse in here,” René said.

Adele got up on her knees and gathered her covers in front of her like a shield.

“You diseased cunt. You filthy cunt. May God in Heaven strike you down,” René said.

A hand clamped roughly over Adele’s mouth. She struggled and tried to scream. A muscular arm was clasped tightly around, drawing her back hard against a broad chest. She couldn’t see who it was, she couldn’t move or make a sound.

René came toward her, aiming the candle at her face. Adele could feel its growing heat.

“May our poor father be at peace. May he be dead. May he never have to look at you!” René looked half-mad.

He’s going to burn my eyes, Adele thought. She could see nothing but explosions of light, she could smell her singed hair.

Whoever was holding her let her go. She scrambled off the bed and into a corner.

A man she’d never seen before was regarding her with a kind of unnerving detachment. He was considerably older than her brother and was dressed in soiled coveralls like a workman. René leaned over her empty bed and held up the candle so the stranger could get a better look.

“I have a difficult problem,” the man said in a quiet voice. Adele could see that he’d taken off his shoes and was standing in his stocking feet. “René wants to kill your boyfriend.” He began to close the distance between them. “Your brother is an excellent soldier. He has more important things to do than eliminate a low-level clerk by the name of Manfred Halder who happens to work in the Domestic Population Bureau of Information and lives at 26 Ducrot Street.”

Adele could feel herself about to faint. The man reached out and grabbed her by her chin.

“Too many of Manfred’s friends know your secret. It wouldn’t take the SS any time to connect your dead little lover to you, and you to an avenging brother. And then what do you think would happen? They’d torture René, wouldn’t they? And when he talked, as he would eventually, what about the security of our future operations?” His fingers began to dig their way into Adele’s jaw. “I have given René permission to kill your German if you ever see him again. And then, in turn, we will have to kill René.” The man put his face close to hers. Adele could smell the faint scent of alcohol. His fiery eyes consumed her. “A high price for a snuggle, wouldn’t you say? I hope to God you understand.”

The man let her go and silently walked away and out the door.

René was still staring at her. He wasn’t looking so much deranged now, though. He looked more as if he’d just received a wound to the heart that was beyond repair. And then he followed the man out the door.

Adele stayed away from the park the next day. At three o’clock in the morning, she made her way between the long lines of working women and walked toward the toilet in the hallway. Instead of turning in, she ran down three flights of stairs and hurried along a narrow corridor toward the loading docks. If René were watching her every move, and she was sure he was crazed enough to do just that, he’d position himself near the bridge by the women’s entrance.

Adele slipped past the waiting trucks and disappeared into the dark.

The mansion on Ducrot Street looked fast asleep. All the windows were dark and only a single lamp illuminated the front door. Adele crept along the side of the building, picked up some pebbles from the drive and chose a window at random on the second floor. She threw a pebble at it. It fell short. She threw the whole handful and a few of them clattered sharply against the glass. A face appeared. Adele waved up at it. A young blond soldier pushed open the window.

“Manfred Halder,” Adele whispered up to him, “I must see Manfred Halder.”

The soldier studied her for a moment, then pulled the window closed again.

Adele backed under a tree and waited in the shadows for either an angry officer to come charging out of the building, or for Manfred. A side door opened and Manfred stepped out into the moonlight carrying his boots in his hand. Adele looked back up at the window. Three young soldiers were staring down at her.

Adele and Manfred hurried silently along Ducrot Street. When they reached the passageway to the abandoned house, Adele collapsed against him.

“What is it?” Manfred asked urgently. “What’s wrong?”

“We can’t see each other!” Adele was crying now. She had promised herself that she wouldn’t. She wanted to be firm. Determined. Sensible. “My brother’s found out about us. He knows where you stay. If we ever see each other again, he’s sworn to kill you. He has permission to kill you!”

“Permission from who?”

“The Resistance. The Underground!”

Adele expected Manfred to go deathly pale at this news. Instead, he smiled and looked hopeful. “Is this so?”

“Yes, it’s so,” Adele cried out. “It’s true, Manfred!” She felt like shaking him.

“But listen,” he said, “your brother might kill me anyway, whether we see each other or not. He’s already killed your friend’s father.”

“I don’t know that!”

“But there is no guarantee that even if we did stay away, your brother would follow orders. For the sake of the family’s honour, he might kill me anyway.”

“He won’t!”

“You don’t know that. You can’t possibly know that. You don’t know anything about your brother.”

This was true. Adele realized it with devastating certainty.

“Where is he now?”

Adele shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“What is he doing?”

Adele shook her head.

“Adele, we have to escape.” Manfred held her more tightly, pressing her against his slender body.

“You have to escape! You have to!”

“No. I will go nowhere without you. What’s here for you now? To be treated like filth under people’s feet? Everyone will soon know. Your brother knows. What kind of life is here for you now?”

Adele closed her eyes and buried her face in his undershirt. Even in the middle of the night he smelled like smoke. And he was right. There was no life possible for her. Not any more.

“We need a plan. Some good plan, that is all,” Manfred was saying, “nothing to do with farmers. What else? Think, Adele.”

Manfred wouldn’t survive if he tried to run on his own, she knew that. And if she did go away, perhaps it would be the kindest thing she could do. It would be a gift to everyone. Her mother was looking after Old Raymond. René would look after Jean and Bibi, he would take her place because that’s what their father would have wanted him to do. She thought she knew that much about him.

“Remember the old warehouse where we met that first day?” Adele could hardly hear herself. It was barely a whisper.

“Yes.”

“Meet me there. Meet me Thursday night. When you do, I’ll have a plan.”

“Adele,” Manfred sighed.

She could feel his hand in her hair. It felt as familiar to her as her own hand. “The middle of the night. Three o’clock,” she whispered.

She could hardly believe what she’d just said.

Adele arrived back at her sewing machine at ten after four.

The big woman looked up. “Buttercup? Did you fall down the hole?”

The spidery woman stopped her work. So did the women nearby, their clattering machines falling silent.

“I felt sick,” Adele replied, pulling a face she hoped made her look sick, “maybe from something I ate. I lay down in the storage room.”

“The foreman’s been looking for you.” The big woman’s black button eyes searched Adele’s eyes. Her meaty red slab of a face was on alert and terrifying.

“I could hardly stand up, my head was so dizzy,” Adele said.

The big woman leaned closer. “What are you going to call it? Herman? Dietrich? Gretel if it’s a girl?”

All the women burst out laughing, even the demure, spidery one.

Adele smiled wanly, prayed that the big woman was only making another one of her jokes and began to sort through the mound of pants that had piled up in front of her.

Three nights later, at ten to three, Adele got up from her sewing machine, walked calmly between the women and ran down the stairs.

“Mademoiselle, hello,” a flirty young man called out, doffing his cap. Two older men were off-loading a large truck. They turned to look and laugh.

Adele held her head high, remained aloof and crossed to the other side of the loading docks, pushing through a pair of swinging doors. She had no idea where she was going.

The inside wall of the hallway vibrated with the thunderous and sweeping din of unseen machinery. Bits of wool floated like snow in the air. She saw a small door set in the brick wall opposite and pushed it open. It was raining outside. The sky had been clear when she’d walked to work. Adele peered out into the murky dark. Rain streamed down through the yellow lamp lights into the truck yard.

If she got soaking wet, how could she claim she’d been lying down in the storage room feeling sick again? Her question had no answer.

Adele put her head down and ran across the truck bridge and down the path along the bank of the raceway. A streaming silver darkness greeted her. She slowed down and began to drag her feet along the cinder path so she
could tell where she was going. She looked back toward the factory. With all its lighted windows, it looked like an ocean liner disappearing out to sea.

The rain pelted down. Adele continued on, soaked through to her skin, going over her plan. She’d travel back to Paris and lose herself somewhere in its sprawling outskirts, she’d find an obscure room on a nondescript street and, under another name, secure work in a shop that wasn’t particular about identity papers. She’d often heard the women in the factory talk of such places. And then when it was safe, she’d send a note to Manfred at a post box in Rouen. The trains were always filled with soldiers on furlough. All Manfred needed to do was wait for her to mail him the Paris address and then on his next leave he could come to her. She would hide him in her secret room. René would never find them. The German army would never find them. Days would go by, nights and days stretching out forever. And they could forget everything.