“What do you think he will do with me?”
He shrugged. “Guess.”
It was as though he had dropped a rock into her stomach. Which was worse, her fate or his indifference to it? Odette paced the cell, trying to imagine options. Was there anything she could offer the Kommandant? Would any negotiation be possible? Would he have any interest in the facts?
She knew the answer. She had witnessed the occupying army’s methods for four years. There were no exits, no escapes. To be suspected was to be guilty, and to be guilty was to be dead.
She must leave the cell, and town hall, and village entirely. Take the bag of cash hidden behind the stove, and at least until the end of the war, abandon the life she had known. But how? This guard was as simple as a pudding. She guessed his age at twenty, perhaps twenty-one. What did boys that age desire? She remembered all too well what they had desired of her, back in that day. With breasts developed larger and earlier than most, Odette used to joke that not a fellow in town could say what color her eyes were. Why would this guard be any different, except perhaps to feel more desperate after life in a garrison?
There was one move left to make, and if it failed then the game was over. Odette stood with hands on her hips. “Soldier, what is your name?”
“Kreutz.”
“Corporal Kreutz?”
“Private.”
“Well, Private Kreutz, I would rather not die as an example to scare my friends into behaving themselves.”
He opened the bolt on his gun, squinting into the opening. “So?”
“So.” She came to the front of her cell, leaning against the metal until the bars pressed her flesh. “So a woman would do anything to survive. You know that, I believe. In the end, this is what we can offer to save our lives. This is what we can give.”
Kreutz stared at Odette directly for the first time, her mannish body, her giant breasts, and he burst out laughing.
“Ha ha,” Odette said, tentatively.
But the soldier laughed easily, swinging his arms a bit as he swaggered over to the cell. “What are you offering?”
Odette swallowed hard. She had hooked him, that easily, but with no next step in mind, only to get the cell door open. “Does the captive dictate the terms of negotiation?”
“I don’t know what that means,” Kreutz said, still chuckling. As he reached the cell door, however, his face grew serious. “When I was ten my grandmother died, and I had to help my mother clean out her apartment.”
Odette was surprised by this turn, but she drew nearer. “God rest her soul.”
The guard made an annoyed face before continuing. “At one point I moved a table that had stood against the wall for as long as I could remember. Behind it I found a head of garlic, turned black. Who knows how many years the thing had been rotting back there?”
He leaned closer, hooking a finger over one of the cell bars, as though he were playing the low note on a harp. Odette moved across from him. “Yes?”
“That,” the soldier said. “That is what women smell like in your country. Unwashed. Disgusting.”
Odette winced, but the soldier had grown talkative. “And you?” He laughed again, rocking back on his heels. “Do you even have a sex in there, with all of that smelly garlic blubber? Ha.”
Odette felt a wave of shame the length of her body. How could she have forgotten that her mother was the only person ever to call her beautiful? Idiocy it was, to attempt a seduction. What had been impossible at twenty was doubly impossible now.
“You don’t have to be cruel,” she said, retreating. “I am still a human being, you know.”
He sneered. “I would rather mate with a dog.”
The woman curled up on her bunk, hugging her knees to her chest. No jail could equal the iron bars in the heart.
Kruetz returned to the trash basket and dropped in two fistfuls of papers. He bent forward as the flames turned his face yellow and then brilliant red.
The night was one long fever of hallucination. Emma saw jellyfish in the sky, their bodies like overturned bowls, their tentacles dangling. Next she dreamed of Mémé, who grunted like a sailor hauling anchor as she dragged a body across the barnyard and away. Where had a body come from, to lie in the dirt like that, and who had showed such inconsiderate manners to leave Mémé with the chore of removing it?
Lucid moments visited at intervals. When dawn came, so would the captain and his revenge. What wrong she had done him, Emma could not recall. It did not matter. He would kill her. He had pledged himself to it.
Emma did not dwell on her own extinction. It was difficult enough to breathe through a nose clogged with dirt and blood.
The Goat, Didier, that was the body. Now she remembered. Mémé had found the knife, too, wiping it on her sleeve before tucking it into the folds of her tunic. Emma heard the sound of splashing water. Opening one eye, the other apparently unwilling, she saw Mémé empty a bucket of suds against the side of the baking shed. Why was she washing those boards, how silly, while the water made a rivulet that flowed toward her, another bucket thrown and a little puddle began to form on the ground near her face, it made the shape of a paisley.
We are as temporary as clouds, Emma thought, lolling onto her back. Lovely and high and sunlit, then gone on the next wind to some other place and shape. Oh, the barn was dirty with Didier, that’s right. The mess of his execution. So much information in his final glance, too. And then she returned to the darkness.
A jolt of pain startled Emma awake. She sucked air, gasped, felt her lungs inflate as though she had exhaled hours ago, and it brought a sharp stab to all of her left-side ribs. Emmanuelle was not finished yet.
With her second breath came worry. If she died, who would care for Mémé, putting up with her stubbornness and calming her with tenderness? Who would straw the dough to make extra loaves? Who would bring Michelle her egg and Yves his fuel and Pierre his tobacco and more eggs to Fleur and her damaged mother, Marie, on and on, Odette, the priest, and Monkey Boy? No one. If you want to know your worth in this world, make a list of the people who will starve when you die.
Who should come to mind then, like a memory of school letting out on a child’s spring day, but Philippe. How she loved him, Emma admitted it now: his earnestness, his quiet voice, the inability to hide his desire. How they had wanted one another, of course it had always been mutual. It all seemed so small and young and long ago. How frightened they had been of each other. Now they both knew real fear, the ways it changed people, hardened them. Would the war grind all of Philippe’s innocence into dust, as it had hers?