21
… AND FAMILY AFFAIRS COMING TO MY KNOWLEDGE …
MONTDEVERGUES ASYLUM
28 SEPTEMBER 1943
02H10
“A girl’s got to live,” I told myself in the woods. If not for the trees’ spookiness — the moon throwing more shadows than light, fungus in the branches resembling carrion nests — I might’ve laughed at myself. Better than being appalled, held back by usual caution and sense.
Trust your gut, Sister would say. By now I had little doubt that Renard worked for the Maquis, though I suppose I’d suspected it all along. Was he hiding from the police? The Gestapo? Aiding the resistance, resisting Vichy and all its collaborators, balking at nothing to defend what he believed in, what many if not most of us believed in — an end to the occupation, the rafles, the war? He kept one hand in his pocket as I caught up. Good God, concealing a gun, was my first thought. Somewhere above us a bird hooted. I could have lied, made some excuse other than the fact that in another hour the guard locked up. I could’ve said I was doing nights and due for work. Would that I had been! I could’ve turned back — how would he stop me?
In the moonlight his face was grim and his hair a greasy thatch. He grabbed my wrist again, and for one truly awful moment I decided his wounded friend was a ruse. Did I look like the kind of woman he’d help himself to?
Renard grinned in my face. “You’d make a fine maquisard, I think.” And instead of pulling me closer — those gums, I was thinking, that mouth — he brought the dorsum of my hand — think of where it had been, that hand, wiping and scouring — to his lips. Their scratchy warmth oozed to my palm and carpus.
When he let go, I stumbled on a tree root. It would’ve been awkward, unseemly at that point to bolt — perhaps he’d think I was disappointed — so I fell in behind him, following a crooked path through the underbrush, at a safe distance of course.
Soon the glow of a small fire — the embers of one, that is — broke the darkness at the edge of a clearing. Someone huddled beside it, a boy or a very young man — it was hard to tell exactly, the way he sank into himself, nursing on a flask while he slouched against some toppled stones, what appeared to be the remnants of a little wall.
“How old is he?” I asked, having put from my mind whatever details Renard had divulged.
“Sixteen, seventeen.”
Peering up from his flask, the boy’s eyes roamed mine. Dark and fearful, their colour was indistinguishable. Something about his face seemed remotely familiar, enough that the feeling it gave me made it a little difficult to breathe. He’d been among the crowd that morning at the station, those young men being prodded and coerced with Gestapo rifles. My memory faltered. Was he the one
I’d thought of, whose mother had behaved fit to be tied? Looking away, flinching, the boy let out a curse. He scanned the trees. Was he on the lookout for something? Who knows what was lurking. His alertness, his unease — what a strange thing, youth, its innocence so easily spent, squandered.
Only then did I recognize that Renard had brought me, not exactly in a circle, but in a meandering loop that ended near the hospital’s cemetery. Through a scant border of trees, the field stretched seemingly forever under the chilly moonlight. Only a few of its stony mounds were marked with wooden crosses; most were left bare. I’d stumbled on it once during a walk and, struck by some of Head’s choicer wisdom — “Sometimes, Poitier, the body knows what the mind can’t, or refuses to” — had taken pains since to avoid it. Barren of names and dates, it has nothing to recommend it, nothing of interest beyond its occupants’ anonymity. As if they all died by their own hand.
The boy’s eyes had an unpleasant sheen. A sign of fever? The metal flask clicked against his teeth.
“He took a bullet. To his shoulder. Just a graze, the lucky little son of a bitch.” Renard sounded half gleeful yet shy, appealing to my know-how, or perhaps what he took as professional vanity. He was sweating rather heavily — perhaps he bordered panic. They say you can smell it on people. Up till now, in my experience it’s been true.
All the more reason for proper bedside manners. They hadn’t failed me yet.
“It’s all right. Now that I’m here, let’s have a look.”
Glowering, the boy looked away as he peeled off his jacket and shirt, both crusty with blood. An odour wafted up of ammonia, the bodily variety — the sweetish, peaty smell of poverty, of unwashed clothing, of some hovel having served as bomb shelter or foxhole. It’s a smell that doesn’t leave you. I recognized it from doing home visits while studying a unit in public health.
Renard stirred the fire’s coals with a stick and held it out, its burning tip providing the only light for an examination. Better than nothing, though it hardly helped matters.
Sister’s words came back: By touch, Nurse, sometimes we see what otherwise might get missed. I don’t know why, but I felt clumsy and awkward touching him, probing his skin. It was like giving my first needle, or shaving my first surgical patient, or the first time I shouted “ten,” the code for an emergency in Lyon, a cardiac arrest.
Predictably surrounded by contusions, the wound had suppurated, but as far as I could tell it was fairly superficial and showed no damage to the muscle. It was too late for sutures, and I said so, but with some antiseptic it would perhaps heal all right on its own. Still I felt oddly helpless.
“I’ve nothing to clean it with. Without supplies there’s not much I can do.” I held my hands out, surrendering. The boy’s eyes followed them to my pockets, where I found a couple of centimes, which I pressed on Renard, instructing him to get his friend something to eat.
The boy’s expression was more worrisome than his wound, his wary smile full of mistrust.
“I’ll be back,” I promised against all good sense.
Renard eyed me with surprise, even satisfaction. “My brother’s boy, a nephew, sort of. His father would thank you, if he could. Raised the kid as his own, him and his wife. Like their own little Moulin, a proper hero.” He smiled grimly. “They had some kind of arrangement. She wanted a kid, see. My brother’s wife, a Jew — she was.”
“Where are they now, the parents?” It pained me to ask. Renard shook his head, gaping at me as if I were stupid, then gazed at the woods. “You might guess.”
“Bear with me,” I said, words no different maybe from Sister’s Wait on the Lord or We’ll see.
***
IF I HURRIED, I might make it through the gates in time to fetch the requisite supplies. I slipped past the gateman with easily fifteen minutes to spare. With any luck at all, Night would be napping, and sure enough, she was snoring away in the near dark, sitting up at the desk but otherwise dead to the world. Getting past her was no problem, though I did encounter something unusual. The door to the supplies room was ajar, which of course made getting inside that much quicker.
The autoclave needed emptying and tweezers and bandage scissors were in extremely short supply. A quick search turned up not a single clean pair, which was odd but not completely unusual. When things get hectic on the wards at night there’s no one to pick up the slack; one felt, feels, a certain amount of sympathy for Night, who does her best, or claims to.
Aware of the clock’s ticking, I was forced to pillage a sterile pack for its instruments as well as adhesive tape and gauze. The large bottle of rubbing alcohol on the shelf was almost empty. Rather than searching for a smaller container to take the remainder in, I found a vial of potassium permanganate, a worthwhile antiseptic in a pinch, and wrapped everything in a clean hand towel which fit nicely under my sweater. Of course I’d take the cost of these items out of my pay, “for furnishing first aid to the dorm,” perhaps, and at the first opportunity settle with Secretary.
The snoring out at the desk ceased. There was the sound of a little commotion, the rustle of Night getting up from her chair — and then, oh my nerves, the sound of her screaming. I dropped the supplies as if they were scalding. I was no longer thinking of excuses, there were no excuses, not for my being there.
But Night didn’t ask. Her screams were hard to distinguish from those of the various guests’ who, awakened, may never go back to sleep. She was kneeling at the utility closet — normally empty — where something red was spilled on the floor. Nazi red, was all I could think, the red of those flags we keep seeing everywhere, red with black in the shape of an amputee spider —
Then I saw inside the closet. Saw the pooling blood, and the patient — blessed God, a girl we’d all thought was doing so well, the one with the funny sayings about living — slumped there. Both her carpal regions were sliced open.
***
NEEDLESS TO SAY I only got out of there now.
Nobody asked what I’d been doing on the floor after my shift. Head, summoned from her room, even commended me for being there and promptly calling the orderlies to remove the body.
Now that I’ve finally got this all down on paper, I’m going to take a good long soak; but before that, a drink of the wine that the orderlies, good as they were, left on the desk for us. Night has sworn off all alcohol, or so she said, pushing the bottle at me. So here it is on my dresser. I have to be up in a few hours but don’t care.
My improvised sterile pack is here too — a lot of good it will do now. In the chaos of Head storming onto the floor in her nightdress, I didn’t know what else to do but slip it under my waistband. It escaped her notice — I suppose I’ve got so thin it hardly looked like padding.
“You,” she said. “I suppose we can give you a half-hour’s grace to sleep in. Don’t worry if you’re a minute or two late coming back in the morning.”
It is more than a little alarming, though, how one small slip, one transgression — one tiny breaching of rules — leads to another, and another. It is a slippery slope. So, despite the hour, I will not take Head up on her concession, and make every effort to be there on time.