I was working in wax. I’d blocked out the three figures and was beginning to concentrate on Katyana because I wanted to get her just right and I had this horrible feeling I’d forget what she looked like.
I’d decided to make the piece a little larger than the one I’d done of Nini. I worked in the kitchen and, as the days grew longer, threw myself into the sculpting and my vegetable gardens and the farm. My mother had returned, so that was good. Tommy would have a place to stay-at least a warning if things weren’t right. We had worked out a system for this, but still there had been no word from them. It was as if they had disappeared forever.
Then Dmitry showed up. I remember that it was Jean-Guy who came to tell me he was in the forest and wished to speak with me. I set the pallet knife aside. Marie was working in wax, too, and had got it all over herself. As I cleaned her off, I said to my son, ‘Take Marie and go and talk to Rudi. Keep him busy. Ask him to help you make a kite.’
‘But we made one last autumn? It was lost in the trees.’
‘Then get him to help you make another.’
Rudi … I was beginning to really worry about him. In his idle moments, our German guard would stray to the side door of the cellar and wonder about Collin. I knew that what I’d done plagued his conscience as it did mine. I didn’t want him to suffer, nor did I want him to give things away. Please, you must understand the predicament I was in. Rudi was my friend, but at the same time he was of the enemy.
I think Oberst Neumann was in the library, for it was a Sunday. I know his car was in front of the house. Schiller had been recalled to Berlin on urgent business.
The fresh newness of the leaves gave to the woods that smell of things growing. There was the sound of the bees, that of distant birds. All these things came to me, then on looking back, the sight of my courtyard and kitchen door down through the long tunnel of blossoming fruit trees. That delicate pink-and-white gossamer of the apple was like no other, that pure, strong white of the pear, just as distinctive. Pastoral, the way life ought to have been.
Dmitry was sitting on a boulder behind some others. There were two suitcases, one a little larger than the other, both of brown leather, not new, not old, but scuffed. ‘So you’re back,’ I said. ‘Where have you been all this time?’
The clothes were old and rough, an open blue denim jacket, a black turtleneck sweater, brown corduroys, and boots that had seen much walking. ‘Here, there, everywhere,’ he said. ‘Marseille, madame. I’ve brought you a little something you’re to take over to your mother’s for us.’
Why me? I wanted to ask, to say, Didn’t they tell you the Germans are here nearly all the time?
‘Your sister has asked this of me, madame. I’m only the courier.’
He indicated the suitcases. ‘It’s a British Mark II wireless transceiver, so you had better not let the Boche find you with it.’
‘British? How did you come by it?’
Those washed-out, grey-blue eyes took me in. ‘Felucca from Gibraltar to Marseille, the boyhood home of your artist friend Marcel.’
‘Is he also involved?’
Dmitry couldn’t help but see the worry I felt. ‘He and others. We have to use whomever we can, it seems.’
‘Just what do you mean by that?’
‘Only that Marcel Clairmont finds himself in the unique position of being able to help us. He has friends, as you know, and they … Why they have other friends.’
Smugglers. ‘Nini asked if you’d been in contact with me but she didn’t say why.’
Dmitry dug a hand down through the neck of his sweater and fished out his cigarettes. ‘Have we time?’ he asked, indicating the packet. He was tired and probably hungry.
‘A little,’ I said, and quickly filled him in on my situation. ‘I’ll leave something for you to eat in the potting shed, but come after dark. About ten. If I can be there, I will.’
‘The guns, madame. Janine has told me you uncovered my little cache. I need that Luger.’
For some reason, I shook my head-even now, after having thought about it so many times, I still can’t think why I refused. ‘They watch me all the time,’ I said. ‘I have to be so careful.’
He lit up, took a drag, passed the cigarette to me, and we shared that thing. I think I knew I had to, that it wasn’t just an act of friendship but one of trust. Though I didn’t inhale, it was the start of my using cigarettes, and very soon I found that they calmed my nerves and often gave me the opportunity to think things over.
‘Janine says you burned the papers I stole.’
‘It was for the best. Look, I couldn’t take the chance.’
‘Yet you kept the guns-still keep the Luger?’ Our fingers touched as he took the cigarette from me. ‘The transceiver is for the Polish one, madame. I gather among his other attributes, he insisted that he be trained in wireless work before the war.’
‘I really wouldn’t know. No one tells me anything.’
Dmitry set the cigarette aside on the edge of a boulder and stooped to spring the catches on one of the suitcases. ‘There isn’t room to hide these with clothing. This larger one is the transmitter, the smaller, the receiver.’
There was a varnished box of laminated wood in each suitcase. The larger one had a brown Bakelite panel with dials for coarse and fine-tuning, plug-ins for the earphones, and the Morse key, also switches and a six-volt battery.
‘Remember that if you’re caught with it, the Boche will know right away what it is, so you mustn’t tell them anything.’
This last seemed so obvious and yet how many times was I to hear it? Our little prayer for silence.
‘Get it over to the farmhouse as soon as you can. Be sure to let them know they mustn’t be on the air for more than a couple of minutes and that they must use different times of transmission-preferably early in the morning. Between two and four hundred hours. That way, there’s less chance of causing static in some villager’s radio. There’s also less chance of the Germans pinpointing the set.’
Dmitry closed the suitcases and handed them to me. I felt the weight-the larger was by far the heavier. ‘A little more than twenty kilos in total,’ he said of both, about forty-five pounds. ‘They’re too heavy to run with, so keep that in mind if you meet a patrol or have to go through a checkpoint. Don’t panic. Just bluff it out.’
He scraped the leaves away and, with a stick, drew a circle in the earth. ‘Paris,’ he said with a stab of the stick. ‘Nuremberg, Augsburg, and Brest. Wide scanners, madame. Cathode-ray tubes that sweep the air twenty-four hours a day to pick up clandestine transmissions. They get the larger fix on the set by a simple triangulation and notify the closer centres so that those can narrow down the location. Tell Alexis Nikolai Ivanovich that this thing is both friend and enemy. One can get lulled into thinking there’s safety once a link with the home base has been established. Tell him that it would be safest to move the set about rather than to transmit from the farmhouse. For your mother’s sake and for your own, as well as for the rest of us.’
‘You seem to know a lot about it. How is that, please?’
The Russian remembered the forgotten cigarette and blew the ashes away from the stone before carefully wiping out all trace of his little sketch and replacing the leaves. ‘I only know what I’ve been told.’
Had he used it himself? I remember thinking this at the time. If one could contact London with that thing, then Moscow was also possible. This thought worried me so much I reached for the cases. ‘I’ll leave something in the potting shed for you to eat. I won’t forget.’
‘There isn’t time. If you could have got the Luger for me, I’d have stayed.’
‘Then it’s good-bye until the next time.’
His grip was strong. He had such powerful hands. ‘When I get to Paris, I’ll tell your sister you’re okay.’