In the Fall They Leave, page 28
Madame LaBreque takes a long breath, then shuts her eyes but continues to dab at them.
Marie-Thérèse holds the glass to the woman’s mouth. “Please take some water, madame. You’ve had a long journey, with so much on your mind.”
“Merci,” she whispers, then wipes her mouth with the crushed handkerchief. “It is like going through another death. Perhaps because we are older now, everything is so much harder. But you are young. It will be better for you to have them. I don’t know how much longer we have, Monsieur LaBreque and I.” Her mouth trembles. “I do not know how much more of this life we can take.”
“Why don’t you close your eyes for a few minutes and rest. Let me see what Herr Bruning has written.”
It would only make it worse, Marie-Thérèse thinks, for her to know how her own heart has just been broken.
My Dear Nursing Student,
I have done what you asked me to do—for better or worse. Now it is for you to decide what is next. I have seen for myself how well the two children are doing. They were nicely clothed when I visited and obviously have been eating well. They both attend school and seem very bright. They told me they have been learning about baking gateaux and pastries. Madame and Monsieur LaBreque appear to deeply care about them. To spare the children pain, I did not reveal anything about you. But the baker and his wife told me the children believe that you perished in prison.
I told the LaBreques that you are to have the final word regarding the children. I have learned, you see, what you did for them when they first came to your clinic and how attached they were to you. This is all a tangle and I apologize. I should tell you that I also spoke with officials at the Office for Refugee Affairs in Brussels.
No one has come forward to claim the children, and since they are well settled with the baker and his wife, the official seemed satisfied. Evidently, the orphan situation is difficult and though the citizens of Brussels have been welcoming, there are only so many families able to take in refugee children now.
If you wish the children to be brought to you, tell Madame LaBreque. She knows how to contact me, and I will see to it that all is accomplished. Or, I can also arrange, instead, for their periodic visits. But then this may put the children in the position of having to—or wanting to—decide between you and the LaBreques.
I don’t know which course will be best for everyone. I am out of my depth here but at least am on the way to relearning civilized behavior.
Warm regards,
Otto Bruning
Somewhere nearby, thunder. To Marie-Thérèse, it always sounds like siege cannons.
I should have gone back and tried to find them. Somehow. Taken that chance. Otto Bruning’s letter falls to her lap. To ask the woman for more time to decide will just prolong her agony…and her own.
From the office window, she observes a wall of blue-gray storm cloud in the west. She turns. “Will you promise me one thing, madame? Will you promise that if you and Monsieur LaBreque become ill or incapacitated and can no longer care for them, you will have them brought to me in Rotterdam?”
“Oh, mademoiselle, merci! Merci! I promise. And Monsieur LaBreque will promise. Oh, God bless you. He will. He will for sure. I will write it down.”
Marie-Thérèse doesn’t know if she’s referring to Monsieur LaBreque or to the Almighty. She stands and embraces the woman, assuring her that all will be well.
Then Marie-Thérèse watches her hurrying, with her parasol, to the waiting car. But just as she reaches it, Marie-Thérèse has a piercing thought. “One moment, please!” she calls, and hurries to the car.
Fear reclaiming her features, Madame LaBreque has paused and regards Marie-Thérèse while the driver holds open the door.
“Madame, you must do one other thing for me, please. You must tell them I’m alive and working in the Netherlands, in a refugee camp. I cannot bear to have them deceived. I cannot deceive them! If they ever learn that I’ve been alive all this time, living a life apart from them and not contacting them, it might seem the deepest betrayal and will be shattering, for I promised to take care of them. Do you understand, madame? It will be terrible after all that’s happened to them. Janine might not remember so much, but Elli surely does. It might do great harm. I’m not putting it well, but surely you can see how they’ll be hurt by the deception. Yes, they can stay with you and monsieur as I’m certain they’ll want to. But please tell them that you found me and that we talked. Tell them the whole story. That I escaped from prison and am safe here but can’t return to Brussels just yet. Tell them they may be able to visit me here one day.”
Madame LaBreque gets herself into the back seat of the car and raises both hands to her face. “No! They won’t want to stay with us! They will want to leave.”
“I think not, madame. They love you and love their work in the patisserie, and they’re going to school and have friends and have you both. No, they will not want to leave.”
“It will be easier the other way, mademoiselle. For them to think you are—”
“For now, yes. But what if I came to Brussels one day to get them after you could no longer care for them? Or someone brought them here? What would Elli think? It might break her heart, no? How would you feel in her place, madame?”
The woman is shaking her head, tears wetting her fingers.
Marie-Thérèse uses her nurse’s voice. “Madame, you know how much they’ve been through. They have a sense of life and will understand this, in their way. And they will appreciate honesty just as they appreciate your goodness. But if you don’t tell them about me and they later find out, they may turn against you. I don’t know but it seems possible. So be honest with them. If they wonder where you went, tell them, simply. If they don’t ask, still speak to them simply and tell the truth. I will give you a letter saying how happy I am that they are happy and learning so much. They will have both of us, in a way. Their world will be that much larger.”
Madame LaBreque lets out a great sigh.
Wind whistles in gusts. Marie-Thérèse asks the driver to wait for a few minutes.
In her office she writes:
Dearest Elli and Dearest Janine,
Yes, I am alive. I escaped from prison and many people helped me get to the Netherlands. Now I am so happy to know that you are both well and living with Monsieur and Madame LaBreque. I am also most pleased that you are learning so much at the patisserie and have been going to school. This is all wonderful news!
Dear girls, I have not forgotten you and now hope to see you one day soon for a good long visit. We will have our reunion after all.
Ever yours,
Mademoiselle Marie-Thérèse
She rushes through slanting rain to the car and hands the folded letter to the woman through the lowered window. Madame’s face looks scoured and bloated. She has her handkerchief in hand.
“All will be well, madame. You’ll see.” Marie-Thérèse hopes to believe this herself.
Thunder breaks overhead, but she stands there in the rain and wind until the car jounces out of sight. From the direction of the schoolhouse comes the sound of piano music. Running through puddles to her office, Marie-Thérèse recognizes the piece. It’s the lovely little Chopin Nocturne in E-flat Major but played presto, as if night lasts a mere minute.
A Rational Thought
Leaves fall like rain. The autumn sky is a gray slab or a roiled mass or vaporous with mist and fog. Then the heavy rains come, taking down the rest of the leaves. Marie-Thérèse isn’t sleeping well, the hours before dawn the worst, her body rested enough and thoughts forming, usually sharp-edged and scraping at consciousness.
And then, October 12, and Marie-Thérèse’s imagination presents it all, during those wakeful pre-dawn hours. The pockmarked prison wall. The blue suit and gray fur stole, the hair in its perfect coil, the blindfold in place, and a few meters away, the line of executioners raising their rifles. The eastern sky is pink. In imagination Marie-Thérèse halts the scene. There is a last-minute reprieve, thanks to all the international petitions. Or, failing that, one of the executioners lowers his rifle and shouts, “No!”—throwing everything into confusion; and then human decency and reason prevail. But no; instead, the others turn on that man and fire, and the traitor and his rifle fall to the ground. Then, a second order, and those others firing a second time, another rattling blast hanging in the air an instant before drifting away with the smoke from the guns. The figure in blue slumps forward and then to the stones. Without ceremony the body is conveyed to a burial ground outside the prison somewhere. Maybe there is a crude coffin. Maybe someone certifies death. A prison doctor, perhaps. Do they remove the blindfold? Maybe not. Without ceremony the box is closed and lowered into the earth. Dirt is shoveled in and then mounded up. Clouds overtake the pink light. Wind picks up. Yellow leaves tumble through the air, long slanting skeins of them, scattering over the graves of thieves and murderers and the fresh gravesite. Overhead, geese ride the north wind in their own long, wavering lines.
Almost as bad as the images are the what if thoughts in their excoriating loops. What if she had remained at the Académie? What if she had stayed in Rotterdam? What if she had been able to persuade the matron to leave? What if she had never met Rudi? What if, at this moment, she were a pianist? A real pianist? Living for music. And music living within her.
But at least I wasn’t a coward.
And I experienced love. Deep love.
And deep sorrow.
Her very bones seem heavier. Which is odd, because she feels so empty.
Most of her time is spent at the camp, where Karena often searches her out and begs for help with a particular piece. Time and time again Marie-Thérèse will reach across the keyboard and still the girl’s flying hands. At first Marie-Thérèse thought it was just nerves, and she saw herself in Karena, her younger self. But then she decided no, not nerves. The girl plays as a starved person eats.
On a clear, cold morning in December, people are entering the infirmary red-faced and huffing. Most have on a motley assortment of clothing donated by the aid societies. Marie-Thérèse has been getting reports of influenza cases, which are making her anxious. The infirmary won’t have enough isolation rooms, should the situation develop into an emergency. She’s at her desk, looking over plans for a new addition, but every so often her thoughts stray to the matron and how she’d been overseeing plans for the new clinic.
Someone taps on the glass of her open door, and she raises her head. This man appears to be a seaman in a heavy wool pullover and trousers. An eye patch covers his left eye. That side of his face is concave and misshapen.
“Please, come in,” she says. “How may I help you?”
“You don’t recognize me, Fräulein?”
Fräulein. She studies him.
“You are…Private Kohnert?”
“You remember my name! I’m flattered. Though now I’m Lance Corporal Kohnert. And you, of course, are Fräulein Hulbert, who once attended me at a Brussels clinic.”
Slowly, she moves her hands to her lap and then safely under the desk. “Have you…are you a deserter, corporal?”
“No. I’ve come with sad news, I’m sorry to say.”
Standing there, in front of her desk, he tells her that Lieutenant Rudolph Fischer was executed for treason. “Word has been circulating through the ranks, Fräulein. We were all told of his attempted desertion and subsequent execution, so that we would think twice before considering such an act. There has been something of a plague of desertions.”
For Marie-Thérèse, the lance corporal’s words take on the quality of distant echoes. Only the last few become clear. “They’d had reports of some fraudulent fishmonger and daughter and pieced it together after he was determined to be missing from your clinic.”
Skepticism blocks horror. It might be some trap. He wants her to admit it, she thinks. As the matron was tricked into confessing.
“And how did you learn of this, corporal?”
With his right hand, he makes the same swiping impatient gesture he used at the clinic. She recalls picking up his notebook from the floor and then not knowing what to do with it.
“As I explained, Fräulein. Our officers made sure we learned of it…lest we stupidly entertain similar notions.”
“Did he…confess?”
“They said he had.”
They tortured him. She closes her eyes a moment.
“With your severe wounds, corporal, you might have been sent home. And yet—”
“They need men.”
“But here you are, in civilian clothing, in another country, and you obviously spent time tracing me. You must think that I was that supposed daughter.”
He looks down at her desk then at her again. “Your name was mentioned, Fräulein. Also, I later heard of your remarkable escape from prison. A number of prison officials and guards were punished for that.”
She thinks of the serving girl, Monica, who’d broken the rules by speaking French, and hopes she hadn’t been among them. “You’re taking a risk now. How were you able to cross the border?”
“I’m on leave. Finally! It wasn’t difficult to get travel papers to visit my brother in Amsterdam. And not so difficult to find you…just a matter of a few inquiries.”
“And you have such a brother.”
“You don’t believe me, do you? You think this may be some deception. I assure you it isn’t. If I may offer advice…it’s unwise to remain here. At least apply for citizenship if you haven’t already. And possibly change your name.”
“Lance Corporal Kohnert, forgive me, but I do have doubts. At the clinic you were rather…truculent. You demanded a different nurse. You threw your notepad at me, do you recall that? So why should you, of all people, make such an effort to come and tell me this when you might be in Germany or with this brother of yours? What if someone traces you here? You yourself might be accused of treason.”
“I came because I know how hard it is to live in hope. Sometimes it’s agony. I thought you would prefer knowing.” At the door, he turns, hand on knob. “You may remember Gerhardt Haske? He had been bayoneted. He was my friend, and you were kind to him. My condolences, Fräulein Hulbert. I’m most sorry to have disturbed you with this sad news.” He closes the door with care.
Through the pane of glass, she can see him putting on his seaman’s cap and jacket and then winding a scarf about his neck. After he leaves, no one else enters the reception area, no one in German uniform. She takes slow breaths—one, then another, and still another. She tells herself that the pain is only the burning surprise of a gash parting flesh, muscle, and tendons. And then nerves simply conveying their futile messages from cell to cell. In time, the pain will end. And then, only its phantom will come to haunt. People survive pain. Some do. Private Schalk, the champion swimmer. Others do not. Yet their tragedies are catalysts in the equations, causing, possibly, some new and good rearrangement of matter. She forces herself to recall Madame Depage helping others get to lifeboats, which had been the case, as it turned out. But then the ship tilts, and she’s standing amid a tangle of rope. How many nurses will remember her courage and goodness and strive to emulate her generosity? There must be no bitterness, the matron reportedly said the night before her death. No bitterness. She tries in vain to moderate emotion. She must not be bitter. She must not brim with scalding hatred. She tries in vain to convince herself that some good might come of this moment. Above all, she tries to dispel the nightmare vision of Rudi being interrogated and beaten.
Impossible. The vision won’t dispel. Pain only claws in deeper.
Sometime later she’s able to walk to the door, bolt it, and return to her desk. She’s not aware of the wind, still whistling about the eaves and corners of the infirmary. The vision of Rudi being interrogated is losing its grip, for a different thought is forming. A perfectly rational thought. This thought, this decision, brings relief. She knows how she will do it. Morphine. Fast and painless. Painlessly she will thwart pain. Escape it as she did the prison. Otherwise, a prison of self-excoriation and despair. And that will be sinning, a lifetime of sin. Surely, God will understand. So will Our Lady and St. Gudule.
Making the plan feels constructive and positive. Tonight, after her assistant Inge leaves, she’ll gather what she needs. She will leave a note and then will lie down on the cot in the anteroom and say a final prayer. Then she will descend into pure sleep—and peace. At the moment of Judgment right after death, she will say, I did not want to commit the sin of despair. Marie-Thérèse draws a piece of paper toward her, and her fountain pen. Sentences flow until loud knocking causes her hand to spring away from the paper. She looks up, expecting to see several German soldiers about to burst through the door.
But it’s only Inge, skin flushed, eyes round and eyebrows raised. “Matron!” she calls. “Why is this door locked? Are you ill? Can you open it? We need you! It’s Deiter Jahnke. He’s having trouble breathing! Matron, please, we need you!” She keeps rattling the knob and knocking until Marie-Thérèse stands and goes to the door.
Later she will think that it wasn’t her assistant at all but St. Gudule in disguise, scattering the demons with her lantern.
Nocturne
Brussels, July 1920
In the Parc de Bruxelles, an avenue through beeches and oaks leads to a circular pool whipped into shivering wavelets by the wind. Marie-Thérèse pauses to watch the fluctuating play of metallic colors, the shimmer and opaqueness and illusion of depth. Then she walks on, passing broad cross avenues and narrower ones branching off in diagonals. At the opposite end of the park, there’s another pool, smaller than the first. Again she pauses to admire the play of sun and cloud on its fitful surface. The wind-filled crowns of trees sound like a rushing stream. On the lawn, squirrels dash about in wavelets of their own. She draws a deep breath and continues along a rose border, its blooms bright as paint daubs in the flashes of sunlight. An elderly man in dark blue, his jacket belted, stands clipping off withered blooms and putting them in a cloth bag hanging at his side. “Bonjour, monsieur,” she says. He partly turns, doffs his cap, and bows slightly. “Bonjour, madame.” The resemblance is heartening, though bittersweet. Still, she takes it as a sign and walks on, finally leaving the park. In the Place des Palais, she must hold her hat. Raised high over the Palais Royal, the colors of Belgium flap like a flame in the wind.
