In the Fall They Leave, page 23
Two soldiers stumble onto the deck. “Mein Gott!” one says. “You’re a clumsy oaf!”
“And you’re not?”
They slash at bales, shout insults, and berate the pilot for having such high stacks.
“Get up there,” the taller one orders, “and throw those top bales down.”
The pilot, gesturing, tries to explain that there’s not enough room on deck.
“Then in the water, dummkopf. Either they go or you.”
Rudi appears on deck holding a bottle of wine and two mugs. His voice guttural, he tells them they’re working too hard. They should sit and take some refreshment. There is German cheese and bread! Come! Rest! Eat! Who is here? Just us! So now, have something!”
Below deck Marie-Thérèse is shaking. She wishes he hadn’t done that.
Soon both soldiers are following the domineering but motherly hausfrau down into the galley, where she tells her daughter to serve the deserving warriors of the Fatherland. Left arm held against her side, Frau Stiller hums a tune while pouring wine into mugs, humming that becomes “Ein Prosit.” Soon they’re all the best of friends—soldiers, pilot, deck hands, mother and daughter—standing and holding mugs, swaying to the tune and toasting cheer and good times, the barge tilting a little from side to side as night comes on and other barges line up, waiting their turn.
But then, shouting. “What is this? What is this? Up, out of there! Gelb! Fichte!”
The singing stops. Gelb and Fichte regard each other. They look toward the sleeping alcove, then scan each other’s face. One shakes his head.
“I will count to five and then begin shooting. Eins…zwei…drei…”
The taller one pulls the small one toward the stairs. “He probably will anyway,” he says under his breath. The smaller one’s rifle, catching against the steps, impedes their progress.
At vier, they’re on deck, facing three aimed rifles.
“You are all under arrest.”
They lead Gelb and Fichte away. The rest are taken to a guardhouse. An officer with a quivering triple chin asks why they detained his men.
“Kommandant, excuse me,” the pilot says. “They were hungry and wanted some of our cheese and bread, so of course we gave them some
“And too much drink.”
“They also wished it.”
“Where are you going?”
“To Antwerp, to deliver the wool. A few mills remain open, sir.”
“And then?”
“We take hides to Bergen op Zoom, Kommandant.”
“And after that?”
“Sir, we return with flour and coal for the Fatherland.”
“Who are they?” He gestures.
“The elder is our cook. The younger is her daughter, sir.”
“You have a hag for a cook. I hope the food is better.”
“It is mostly bread and cheese. Sometimes a boiled egg.”
“If that is all, why do you need a cook?”
“She has been our cook since my father piloted our barge.”
“In fact…” The officer is scrutinizing Rudi. “I have received a report of someone like her on the riverbank at Brussels, someone who attacked one of our guards. What a coincidence. Give me your ship’s log.”
The pilot returns, accompanied by a soldier.
“Ah. I see you were in Brussels at the time of the attack.”
“She can hardly walk, sir. And she hurt her arm recently.”
“She came up those stairs fast enough. Frau Stiller, allow me to inspect this arm of yours.”
“Sir, may I say something?” Marie-Thérèse asks.
“Speak.”
“We had to help her up the stairs. My mother is a patriotic German. I am as well. She is German through and through.”
“As you are?”
“I am German, sir. Yes.”
“All the same, let me see your arm, Frau Stiller.”
Marie-Thérèse unbuttons Rudi’s coat. The arm is bandaged from wrist to upper arm with tea-stained bandaging. The officer strikes the forearm with his fist, and Rudi falls to the floor in a faint. A soldier rolls him onto his back.
“So. It is hurt.”
“She broke it in a fall.”
“Now you will have to reset it. Hardly worth the trouble.” His boot strikes Rudi’s torso. “And these.”
Another officer enters the guardhouse and shouts at the kommandant, who apparently is not a commander. “There’s a line extending a kilometer at least! What’s the matter with you! Everybody off schedule because of you idiots! Go,” he orders the pilot. The officer who arrested them opens his mouth but then closes it.
Soon a sail is raised on the River Escaut, under a near-full moon, its silver bits scattered over the black plain.
In the barge’s cabin, Marie-Thérèse examines Rudi’s chest. Ribs are certainly fractured but not, she hopes, fully detached.
“Is the pain bad?”
“No.”
Clearly a lie.
“I think we’ve used up our luck,” he whispers. “I’ll try to get across myself. The border will be the worst, especially if guards hear of what happened in Brussels…and know our descriptions. That was stupid of me and so was offering them wine. I apologize. If they arrest me, you will be as well. We’ll both be charged with treason. We must not travel together any longer. Get off in Antwerp, change your appearance, and find another barge. Or a different route altogether.”
A change in plan at this point won’t be safe, Marie-Thérèse is thinking. The network itinerary and contacts have all been prearranged. And she alone knows the right code words and gestures that will get them to the farm outside of Rotterdam, where he’s to work as a laborer until after the war.
“But how will you get there on your own?”
“If I’m lucky enough to get across, we can meet later at that farm. Please, Marie-Thérèse, don’t return to Brussels.”
“I have to get the children.”
“Use your contacts to get them out. Don’t risk your own life. Don’t go back. As for that farm, I can get there if you tell me the right words and the persons to look for.”
He wants the code words. He will remember the contacts.
“You don’t trust me? I will never lie to you, Marie-Thérèse, just as I would not spy on her. Please believe me. Remember our plan? It still may work.”
London—with the girls. And if being there proves too difficult and her family too resistant, well then, America. Somehow it had seemed possible. Something an English novelist wrote comes to mind. It’s not true that love makes all things easy; it makes us choose what is difficult.
Despite all misgivings, she gives him the codes. She describes the contacts.
Embracing her as best he can, he begs her not to go back…for any reason. He tells her he loves her and that she must live. “We will meet at that farm. And we will get the children somehow if you don’t first. Go, Marie-Thérèse. I will wait for you there.”
She leaves the barge at Antwerp, and on the wharf, slips into a labyrinth of stacked baled wool. Could she find passage on another barge or ship heading to Rotterdam? How to explain? And her papers are wrong. Who will take her and risk imprisonment, or worse? In a secluded corner, she removes her outer clothing and with the skirt rubs at her face and teeth. She tidies her hair and hides it under a different cap she’s stowed in a pocket. Then she gathers a few chunks of broken bricks and sinks her fishmonger costume, watching as bubbles rise up through turbid water. From the cloth bag attached to her thigh, she extracts several German marks.
All but obscuring the river are barges and tugs, trawlers and freighters and sailing ships, their masts glinting in the sunlight. Gulls shriek. Wind carries the scent of water and the calls of dock workers, the chinking of winches and chains and the subdued roar of steam-powered machinery in the distance. She walks east, just another hausfrau off one of the barges, going to the Grote Markt.
Asking directions in Flemish, she finds her way to the central train station, where she leaves the heat and wind for a lofty hall filled with soldiers and the ubiquitous stretchers and stretcher bearers. In vain she scans the sellers of goods. No one resembles the woman and her husband who’d conveyed her to their farmhouse in January.
A train will be leaving for Rotterdam in forty minutes, but there’s the problem of travel papers. Another for Brussels will leave in thirty minutes. She thinks she can manage that one, with some flustered explanation about returning for proper papers.
The thought that she just may have ruined everyone’s life at the clinic, as well as her own, is so terrible, she has to blank it out.
Haze
Thunder breaks over the city and rain fogs the air. In parks and along streets, trees whip back and forth, limbs splintering, and branches falling on wrought-iron fences and café tables. Vehicles throw sheets of water to either side. She waits in a café, its electric lights flickering. Out on the sidewalk pedestrians are dashing about, some charging into the café. At a lull in the storm, she goes back out. There are no trams, so she runs through a litter of branches and green leaves pasted to sidewalks and floating in puddles. Soon there’s another frenzy slashing at everything. The force of it seems to reduce all things to objects no more significant than the tree limbs and leaves underfoot.
In some dream-like contrast to the storm, ward C is quiet. Oddly, only four patients are there, the rest of the beds made up. “Where is she?” Marie-Thérèse asks Gauthier.
“Look at you! Go change. You’re getting the floor all wet. She’s away. Why are you back so soon?”
Once Marie-Thérèse found it humorous, how the absence of any German officer always restored Gauthier to herself.
“Do you know where she went?”
“No.”
“Why is it so empty? Where’s Quien?”
“Gone, and she followed him, probably.”
“She? Who did?”
“Get into your uniform. I need you in A.”
“Do you mean Liese? Liese left?”
“She’s gone and took her things. On the same day. One can only assume. The cook is gone too.”
“Amalia?”
“Do I have time for this?”
“Non, pardonnez-moi, Sister. I’ll change now.”
Her hands are shaking so hard it’s difficult to get out of her wet clothing. When she returns to the ward, she dares another question. “Are there any more here?” Gauthier hurls her much-used warning look and says nothing.
There are routine things to do, which sedate rampaging thought. A Frau Rukeyser needs fluids and repositioning and assurances that her daughter-in-law is unlikely to be stealing from the family business, a pension. A Frau Sternburg needs oxygen and to have her vital signs noted every twenty minutes. Her alveoli are congested. She confides that her husband died and her two sons joined the Allies, but she hasn’t heard from them in months, so they’re probably dead too, everyone dead. Marie-Thérèse holds the woman’s spotted and thickly veined hand. “It’s difficult to get mail through now, madame.”
“Stay with me awhile?”
She does while trying not to let her own dark scenarios consume her. When the matron enters the ward, Marie-Thérèse excuses herself. Soon they are in the matron’s apartment, the dogs at their feet.
She begins calmly enough but then becomes her own storm. Sobs gust. Words fracture. When she’s finally able to speak coherently, she tells the matron everything. “How many are still here, Matron?”
“One.”
“Can he walk?”
“Possibly in a few days.”
“Could you leave then? I know it’s a futile question, and leaving might look bad. But, please, isn’t there a way it could be accomplished?”
“There will be no need when the one leaves.”
“Yes, but if you stay, you’ll probably take in others.”
The matron edges back drapery and looks out into the street. “They’re there all hours now, by the light pole. Tonight, they’re carousers who’ve had too much drink. Sometimes they pretend to be workers staring at a crack in the pavement. No work gets done. So obvious.”
“Matron, you believed the lieutenant, but I…it seemed he wanted to save me. I had a strong feeling he might be a spy, after all, and that he’s going to betray us…well, except for me. I can’t shake the thought that it was his assignment to learn what he could about the network. I feel sick at heart and…terribly used.”
“He could not have planned the incident with the pail.”
“No.”
“He could not have anticipated that so-called kommandant.”
Marie-Thérèse shakes her head.
“And he was truthful about his father.”
“Yes, it seems so.”
“Mademoiselle, I do not share your suspicions.”
Yet that night the same nagging voice: Then why tell me not to return? Had she told him to do that, to get me to escape? These thoughts and a hundred others keep her awake. And anger—at both of them—anger alternating with shame and dread. It’s awful to think that now their only rational course is to wait and do nothing extreme because if the matron left, inexplicably left, with Marie-Thérèse and the children, the entire staff at the clinic would probably be arrested, including the gardener. It’s awful to think that her family has been waiting for her and no doubt sick with worry.
The abbey bell strikes four times. Her curtained window brightens with dawn.
Somehow the next day passes and the one after that. Another thunderstorm lashes the city, and afterward everything gleams. Jackie and Donnie splash through puddles, pausing every so often to drink. But Marie-Thérèse is always cold.
Rumors reach the wards. The architect Philippe Baucq has been exposed as the publisher of the underground newspaper La Libre Belgique. Hadn’t she noticed him on the rue de la Culture, near the clinic? Hadn’t she seen a copy of that newspaper in the matron’s apartment? Yes. And the matron burned it on the coals in her fireplace. Another rumor concerns a woman named Louise Thuliez. She, too, arrested and charged with being part of a treasonous ring now fully exposed.
Fully? Marie-Thérèse recalls the couple in their little farmhouse and says a prayer for them. And who has done all this exposing? Rudi? Quien? Liese?
She takes the Anatomy and the Obstetrics exams and passes. She also passes the dreaded bandaging practical examination. But exhaustion has drained away emotion, and these victories seem meaningless. Evenings, the sun lingering until well after ten, she is sometimes able to read to the girls and give them brief piano lessons.
Their one escapee is gone, or so she believes. The cellar empty, the attic—possibly—as well. And despite her frayed state of mind, work in the clinic helps. In a few weeks they’ll make the move to the modern and much larger clinic. All summer the gardener has been digging up roots and bundling them in cloth. Everyone is looking forward to the new clinic except Marie-Thérèse and the gardener. He doesn’t want to leave his roses, his vegetables. She simply wants to take her remaining examinations and leave with the girls. But it’s proving difficult to obtain travel documents through the official channels. She described the girls as her “charges.” The reason, she thinks, for the holdup. Or it could be something else. A thought best not dwelled upon.
For the most part, the summer days pass uneventfully, fading away as dreams do, good or bad.
But then, one August morning before dawn, the haze lifts.
Meeting Force with Force
At the banging and shouting, Marie-Thérèse throws clothing over her nightgown, jams on shoes, and opens her door but has to leap back. A soldier pushes it fully open, shattering the mirror on one of the wardrobes. In other rooms nurses are screaming and soldiers shout at them to be quiet. The one in Marie-Thérèse’s room overturns beds and desk chairs. Sweeps lamps from desks. Stabs at clothing in the wardrobe. Upends drawers. Kicks textbooks and papers aside. Then he orders Marie-Thérèse into the hall. Julia, still in nightclothes, is standing to one side of her open door, her face blank with shock.
This is what he knew.
“I must use the lavatory, please!” Marie-Thérèse leans forward, an arm across her abdomen and dry heaves over the soldier’s boots.
He shoves her toward the lavatory door. She locks it and runs water in the basin. Standing on the bathtub’s rim, she’s able to crawl out the window and drop a meter or so to the slightly canted roof over the back passageway. Then it’s simple enough to get to the opposite end of the four joined row houses, down a rose trellis, and into the back passageway through the garden door.
Just as the gardener, mattock raised, lunges at an officer. The iron blade of the garden tool gouges the man’s right arm, causing blood to shoot upward. Another soldier brings the gardener down with a bullet to his chest. Three others have the matron in their grip.
“I can help your officer,” the matron says. “He needs a tourniquet or he will die.”
And then she’s fashioning one. Another soldier, just arriving, appears confused at finding Marie-Thérèse kneeling over the gardener. He’s the one who searched her room. “You will want to question him,” Marie-Thérèse says. “Please let me get some medical supplies.” The wounded soldier curses, and the one who shot the gardener shoots him a second time. Frothy blood spreads over the gardener’s jacket as he tries to speak. Marie-Thérèse leans close.
He makes the same sound. It seems a name.
“Papa,” she whispers near his ear, “in the spring they return, the birds.”
She takes his bloodied hand as breath gurgles from his throat. After a few moments, she closes his eyes.
A soldier yanks her up and then across the street. The physical sensation of walking is absent. Some things are clear, others hazy: muted light, a long table, faces. She’s told to sit and does so but senses nothing. Part of her knows that she is in shock.
