“Don’t you understand? He has butter. And there are packets of sugar in the bottom drawer of his dresser. Under a cambric handkerchief. Good God, I’ve seen them. Why doesn’t he let us have any? He keeps it locked. He’s sly as an eel. But I swear to you I’ve seen them.”
She drilled the words at me.
“It made the week go by. I couldn’t have stood it otherwise. On Saturday morning they stirred the batter. And they baked in the afternoon or sometimes in the evening, when they thought I was asleep. But I don’t sleep. Heaven knows how much they licked from the bowl before putting it in the oven. It smelled like summer. Knowing it would be there, on that sideboard on Sunday afternoon, made the week go by.”
She combed the rust-grey hair from her ears: “How dare he treat us this way? I want you to know I pay a great deal here. I could not bring the dresses. But you should see me in the bronze chiffon. And in the organdie. They are in the tallboy in my bedroom in Bruges. Oh I knew I should have brought them. I hoped I would be among refined people. I could no longer endure the things that came by in the canals. I watched at night. I saw what they were doing in the streets. So they came to demand my house. Did they take yours? But I mustn’t think of those dresses and the Persian shawl. Dr. de Veeld has forbidden me to think of those things. I have heart-flutters. I tell you that because you are a refined person. What right has he to treat us so abominably! Don’t you understand? There are squares of butter under his cambric handkerchief. We must help each other.”
Madame Alice turned away. Then she flapped back at me with a hoarse moan: “I’m hungry. Don’t you understand? I’m hungry.”
Sudden safety unnerves. During my first days at St. Aubain, I moved in a furry half-sleep. On the railway to Boston, Route 120 is the last stop before South Station where the chauffeur would be waiting for me in the old, gleaming Dodge. I knew he would be there, brushing the snow off my mother’s plaid blanket. And the Christmas holiday lay before me; an immensity of ten days in my own bed, with its stiff, fresh sheets, and the nutmeg grater, and the toboggan rides down Concord hill.
When the train pulled away from Route 120, I shut my eyes tight and pretended that we were going the other way, that my mother had seen me off, crumpling the wet handkerchief into her glove, and that I was heading back to Choalten. I hated the school with a hatred that still leaves me shaken. Thinking that the holiday was over, that I would, in a few hours, be back in purgatory, with its reek of sawdust and wet bath-towels, I drove myself to the verge of tears. In that instant, the conductor would sing out “South Station.” I opened my eyes and could see Oscar, silvery and smiling, lifting his cap. Before I knew it, I would be wrapped in the Shetland blanket, speeding home. The game made me limp with delight.
I played it now, in the stripped arbour and behind the kitchens. I imagined that the Gestapo was at my heels, that I was trapped in my room at Angers. I could hear the grating breath of their dogs. But when I took my hands from my face, there was only a garden and a gravel walk, or Dr. de Veeld looking past me from the window of his office. And far off, the widow’s voices of the bells at curfew.
A man with florid cheeks tugged at me: “The Owl has been croaking to you. You believe her, don’t you?” He stared with heavy scorn. “The woman’s sick. She never had a house in Bruges. It’s all lies. She worked in a hotel kitchen. Yet she acts as if she had rights around here.”
A thin trickle slid from his full, jeering lips. He could not retain it and his chin twitched: “But she’s telling the truth about the cake. Sometimes they made mocca icing, with candied flowers. In every second flower they put a walnut. Those of us who have some decency had worked it out. Whoever had a slice with a walnut one Sunday would take one without the week after. But not the Owl! She cheated like a scullion. She popped the thing in her rotten mouth before anyone knew what had happened. It made me ill. I wanted her to choke on it. I wanted it to stick in that scrawny gullet of hers. But why have they taken it away from us?”
He put his wet lips to my ear: “Speak to de Veeld. You’re new. He’ll listen. Why is he hoarding the butter and the sugar and the walnuts?” He gripped my arm. “I can’t forget the smell; it was all warm.” He gave a flustered laugh, but would not let go till his knuckles grew white.