“I understand. Does Christophe know you’re going to take his arm off?”
“Yes, but we’ve got him drunk. And that’s not the worst. You left two men dead at St-Felix. They identified Valerien, and the Gestapo went to his parents’ home with the Milice, and shot his father and his uncle. They left the corpses in the square at le Buisson and made the whole town file past the bodies. They can’t identify Oudinot because he didn’t have a head, but they took five hostages to Perigueux. All of them children. They say they’ll send them to the camps in Germany unless the English capitaine gives himself up.”
There was nothing he could say, and they stared wordlessly at each other for a long moment. Her hair was pinned up again, with loose tendrils spilling down. She dropped her eyes, and began to bandage his foot. She swallowed, and he understood the effort she was making to speak lightly. “When I’ve finished this, you can give me one of your English cigarettes, and then it will be time for Christophe.”
“Have you ever done an amputation before?”
“Not on a human being. But I read the textbook. The principles seem the same.”
She came back every day, and was cool and brisk with Manners, except when she was helping him learn to use the crutch. He had been embarrassed at having to be held up by the farmer when he wanted to go outside to piss and crap. Sybille had brought him an old chair that lacked a seat. She placed a chamber pot beneath it, and he practiced until he could hold the chamber pot in one hand and grip the crutch in the other as he lurched his way out to the dung heap without spilling a drop. It seemed a great achievement, and he was disappointed when Sybille treated it as a matter of course. But she was motherly with young Christophe, holding his one remaining hand and telling him how proud the girls would be to walk out with a hero of the Resistance. After the war.
“And the capitaine will come back from England in his luxurious automobile and take you and your ladylove to the finest restaurant in Perigord, and he will tell her how brave you were,” she said, smoothing the boy’s hair.
“I’ll have to get into training first,” said Manners jovially. “The way Christophe drinks, I’ll be under the table before I can tell her he saved me from the ambush. With my bad foot, I’d never have got away without Christophe helping me. It must be all that eau-de-vie he drinks. Never seen anybody who could hold his drink like Christophe.”
When the boy slept, she told him that the fishmonger had been shot after the Milice reported his van had been used in the escape, and his eyes surprised him by filling with silent tears for a man he had never known.
“It’s all part of the madness,” she said, and smoothed his cheek, as if for the first time he had aroused that tenderness she displayed to Christophe. His tears kept flowing. “We just have to survive it. We will survive it. There will be restaurants after the war, and you will take Christophe to a glorious, drunken dinner.”
“And I will buy you lingerie in Paris,” he said, forcing a smile. “From Lanvin.”
“Now I know you’re getting better,” she laughed, and left him. When she came back the next day, she brought him a collection of Mallarme’s poems, dressed his foot quickly, and said she had to leave. He felt desolated.
“I’m sorry, but you come way behind a pregnant horse in my priorities just now,” she said, ruffling his greasy hair, and then wiping her hand in a matter-of-fact way on her smock.
When she left, he took the scrap of soap, limped out to the yard, stripped and bathed himself from head to foot under the pump. He came back with a basin full of water, and washed Christophe’s hair as well. Then he took his Rolls razor from the small tin case that had been with him since Palestine, stropped it to sharpness, and shaved Christophe and himself.
Francois came later the same day, with cigarettes and a collection of De Maupassant’s short stories, and a bottle of cognac that he claimed had been liberated from a German canteen. There had been another parachute drop, and Marat had provided them with information about an ammunition train that they had derailed. They did not talk about the fishmonger, nor about the German reprisals. The war was going very well without him, said Francois, and when he left, he took Christophe with him, to shelter on a cousin’s farm.
Sybille did not come for two days, and when she did she was angry with him. “You have been trying to walk on this foot,” she accused him. “The cuts have opened again.”
“Not walking,” he lied. “I was using the crutch and I fell.”
“You’re a fool,” she said coldly, reaching for the iodine. “To think that you can fool your doctor.”
“That’s just it,” he gasped through the pain. “I don’t think of you as my doctor.”
“Because to you I’m just a vet,” she flared.
“Because you’re a woman.” He leaned back and closed his eyes, relishing the warm touch of her hand on his foot. He felt her hands stop their work. “Because you are beautiful and I want to be in your house watching you cook and listening to Jean Sablon on your gramophone.” There was a long silence, and she continued changing his dressing.
“You just say that because you enjoy my omelets and my music. You like to relax in my little fantasy world of the time before the war,” she said, her tone too forced to be light.
“No. I want it in the time after the war,” he said tiredly, despairing of ever reaching that deep melancholy within her. “Before the war, you belonged to someone else. I want you to belong to me. In the war, after the war, I don’t care. I want to belong to you.”
He opened his eyes and stared at her, and reached out to take her hand, not knowing if she would leave or dismiss him with a joke. Instead, her mouth worked as if she were about to cry but she left her hand in his. Suddenly he knew, and he felt a great tenderness as the conviction gripped him, that there had been no other men since her husband. And the private sanctuary of her room and her gramophone, which she had shared with him, was already a privilege.
“Seize life, Sybille, while we have it,” he said, knowing as he said it that this was what he believed in most of all.
“You are a fool of an Englishman. It isn’t that at all,” she said softly. “I am feeling very, very shy.”
“So am I,” he said. “Like a very foolish young boy.”
She put her hand to his mouth to silence him, gazing at him with a kind of fascination as if he had told her an extraordinary secret. Her hand moved to his cheek, became a caress, and she leaned down to kiss his lips. The kiss lingered and he stroked her hair, feeling the soft mass of it. She sat up briefly, and her breasts thrust forward against her white coat as she put her hands to her head to loosen some pins and the hair tumbled down. He stroked her breasts through the cloth; she shook her head to send her hair dancing loose about her face, and her face softened into a very secret smile and she helped him undo the buttons.
“Not before the war, and not after the war,” she said finally as they lay, spent and entwined, sharing one of the English cigarettes Francois had left him. “Just now. That’s all there is. Just a little time for us.”
CHAPTER 13
Time: The Present
The director of the Lascaux cave was waiting to greet them. He seemed to have been waiting some time. Awed by the eminence of his visitor, he had a fresh haircut and wore an obviously new shirt and tie. Alongside him stood half a dozen members of the staff, some of them from the duplicate cave for the tourists that lay farther along the hillside. There were guides and a gardener, an electrician and a woman who ran the refreshment kiosk. Malrand solemnly shook each of them by the hand, and Clothilde kissed cheeks with the guides. The director gave them each white coats, new hard hats, and plastic overshoes.