Half in shadow a novel, p.28
Half in Shadow: A Novel, page 28
She pats his hand.
“You will be fine,” she says to the dying man. “You will see your family again.”
“In heaven, not too soon hopefully,” he says drowsily, before she has lost him to sleep where he twitches from bad dreams.
Xavier and Arthur have been helping carry men from the hospitals before they are shipped to the east. It is dangerous work. They had paused again for a couple of weeks after the disaster at the border, now the queue to leave is growing long.
Arthur has been wonderful company, and when she is not working with him, she is thinking of him also. He has taken over the print room entirely, and he is strong enough to carry some of the injured who are resting there.
Arriving home, Josephine is greeted with the smell of baking. Eugène has brought Gisela flour, eggs, and sugar, and she is making a cake to celebrate Yves’s birthday. Her mother appears content today. Her heart seems stronger. It seems that the demands of Grace and her losses have given Gisela more purpose, and she has put some of her own sad thoughts on hold.
Grace has lost the bounce in her step. She was told that her mother is dead, and her father is in prison. They told her much of the truth, but she is too young to understand all of it. They have warned her to be careful she does not talk about her parents with anyone. Josephine is worried about sending her across the border to an orphanage where she will know no one.
“It gives me joy to bake something again,” Gisela says. “No tears today. I know they are watching.”
She smiles at Josephine, who gives her mother a hug.
“Besides, it keeps Grace busy, too.”
Josephine has been unable to convince her mother to leave. The last attempted smuggling was almost a complete disaster, and she is not sure her mother, with the persistent cough in her chest, could make such a trip. Eugène had to smooth things over with Herbert’s family, with money, though there is no certainty they can trust them.
Eugène pores closely over a newspaper like a bloodhound with a scent. He has always been eccentric, but this has manifested into something more intense. Josephine wonders if his underground work is now an addiction rather than a purpose.
“Benôit has been sent to a prison in Liège for the crime of espionage,” he says. “There is no word on a trial or the details. But if they are aware of his connection to Vivienne, then it is prison in the east, at the very least.”
Josephine is thankful that Grace is upstairs in the room they share.
“Can we visit him?” says Gisela. “Perhaps take his daughter.”
“Only if you want to be followed from that point, Maman.” Eugène puts the paper down in disgust. “I will be looking for somewhere else to operate a safe house, where you, Josephine, and Grace can move to also.”
“Why, Eugène?” says Gisela.
“There are too many who know the house on the canal. And now some that carry a grudge against us also.”
Xavier and Arthur enter, bringing a bottle of wine Xavier was given as a gift and more candles since the electricity is once again off.
Arthur wears a bright-white shirt that Josephine has lovingly laundered, and his face is cleanly shaven. She thinks how handsome he is, square shoulders, neck long, and eyes of brown that burn gold from the candles. Introductions are made, questions are asked by Gisela. Small talk, talk of family.
Xavier opens the bottle and pours when they are seated around the table.
“To Yves and Papa and all the people who couldn’t make it,” says Eugène, raising his glass.
“Santé!” says Gisela. Clink, clink.
A look between Arthur and Josephine, connected briefly by glass. She can see something far ahead: bright, airy hallways; meadows; warmth.
In bed Josephine can hear Eugène breathing heavily and her mother’s soft snores. And she is aware of Arthur, down on the bottom floor, who will sleep only hours before he retreats like a bat to his cave. Everything feels right and wrong at the same time. There is too much to worry about and no time for anything. War is stupid.
She wishes she were still working, still bringing in money. Jobs are scarce. The Métropole has not called her back, and she is frightened of enquiring there, of being conspicuous to Germans now.
Outside her window, she can see Arthur smoking a cigarette. She sees the tip of it burn and fade. She puts on her dressing gown and steps quietly down the stairs.
Xavier is on the couch, eyes closed. She opens the door to the rear patio and slides to sit beside Arthur on the bench. The waft of tobacco smoke tickles her nose.
“Would you like some?” he says quietly, handing her the cigarette, his features growing more distinguishable as her eyes adjust to the night.
She nods her head.
She takes the cigarette, draws on it, and hands it back. She doesn’t much like smoking, but it is something to share, to be closer to Arthur.
“What is it that you want to do after the war?” he asks.
“I want to do what I did before.”
“Photography?”
“Yes,” she says, then shrugs because that is only part of it. The part with her father and Yves she can’t have back.
“And you?”
“I have no idea,” he says.
“None at all?”
He draws back deeply on his cigarette.
“Do you want to try and work things out with Harriet?” she asks tentatively.
He is thinking deeply.
“Jack was her life. She had no other, really. I was there to make it happen for them . . . Not that I am complaining. I can just see things better now. We needed each other until we didn’t.”
“I’m sorry,” Josephine says. “It can’t have been easy for either of you.”
“She left me . . . after Jack, though I think it was over long before that, if I am honest with myself. She blames me for Jack’s death, and she rightly has a point. I think back to the things I could have changed, where it was exactly that I let him down.”
He reaches down to stub out the cigarette on a paving stone, then clasps her hand.
Josephine is thinking, piecing his life together, putting the facts in an order that she can visualise. She cannot say what it is like to lose a child, though she has seen the ill effects on Gisela and knows well of loss, too. Grief pushed her through a maze of confusion and guilt, and she has found her way out again. Grief still follows, waits for her sometimes, but it is only a shadow of what it was, which crosses her path occasionally and disappears again.
“Arthur, you can spend your life telling yourself that you are responsible and what you could have, would have done. But it helps no one. If we start apologizing now for things that have happened, then we will be apologizing for the rest of our lives. We will drive ourselves mad. Everything we do, every step we take affects someone else, just as every step someone else takes affects us. And it is simply chance that puts us in the wrong and right places at any given time.”
He is silent, his face so near to hers.
“And chance has brought us together, too,” she says.
Something clatters lightly inside the house, and they separate suddenly, then giggle like children who have been caught in the pantry.
Inside, Xavier is in the kitchen with a glass of water. He says nothing as they enter.
“Do you mind if I have one of those?” Xavier says, indicating the cigarette packet.
“Of course not.”
“I was thinking that perhaps you and Maman should leave here at the first chance we have,” Xavier says to Josephine. “We should get you out of Belgium.”
“Maman will never agree to it, Xavier,” says Josephine. “And neither will Gène. He needs me here.”
“There is no need for all of us to be in constant danger. We will make do without you.”
“But I can’t make do without you.”
She reaches up to kiss him on the cheek and listens to their low voices as she climbs back up the stairs.
34. FALLING
Arthur is in the print room. Eugène has gone to bed on the top floor. He had come home exhausted from travelling, muttered the reasons, then dragged himself up the stairs in heavy boots. Arthur can hear him softly grunting and purring in his sleep.
Arthur uses the magnifying glass as he carefully forges signatures on permits for new members of their line to travel between cities. He likes the work, and the smell of it also. Everything in the room reminds him of Josephine. He enjoys watching her work, absorbed by her tasks, and sometimes unreachable. She has an oval face, eyes large and fanned by thick lashes, and features sculpted evenly. She is pretty, but this is not what draws him. It is her selfless support of her brothers, and the people around her, that is deeply attractive. It is that she is questioning, thoughtful, and clever, that there are many sides to her.
Arthur finds himself thinking about Josephine during the night. Sometimes he will sit below the window in the quiet hours, when the distant guns and machines have paused and sounds echo off the night walls. He feels young again, hopeful in the silence, daring to ponder a future that includes her somehow. Then he will scoff and shake his head and tell himself to stop imagining. It is not like him to speculate so much, to have abundant time to do so.
You should have left when you had the chance, returned to your regiment, he hears Harriet say wisely: a face for his conscience.
It wasn’t that simple, he tells her inwardly.
She is not for you, Artie, he can hear her reply.
Josephine is late tonight. He worries whenever she is delayed. Relief when he hears a key in the door and the click of it gently closing, and he can breathe again now that she is here.
His heart quickens when he sees her commence the stairs, stepping down toward him. She wears a cardigan over a rust-coloured dress that finishes just above her ankles. She smiles at the sight of him. Her face is flushed, though he can’t tell if it is the cold wind, which has been pushing against the windows upstairs for hours, or she is trying to contain the same excitement. The same kind he feels when he first sees her foot on the top stair. Either way, he doesn’t care. He is glad she is there.
“Gène is asleep, I can hear.”
“Yes.”
“There is a dish, a stew, upstairs that Maman has sent with me. She is worried about Gène, worried he might forget to eat. She is worried about you, too. She feels she is contributing this way, she says. It is good when she is cooking or sewing, that is, when there is something to sew or cook with. Whenever Gène can bring something. And Grace, too, has given her purpose again.”
“Tell your kind mother I said thank you.”
“I will.”
She moves nearer, leaning over his shoulder for a close look at his work, her face only inches from his own. He has the urge to turn and kiss her.
“That is very good. I am a little worried you might steal my position here at La Vérité.”
“There is no danger of that. I am not as fast as you at typing, and I’m still a fledgling with my photographic skills, as you have seen . . . While I was waiting I wrote out in French for you several English articles.”
“Thank you. What is the news?”
She takes off her cardigan, and he can see the dress better, the bodice fitting tightly to her small body. It is new or an old one at least that Gène has probably found her in his travels. He is thoughtful like that occasionally, on his better days, when he is not scheming or worrying. He has been anxious and jumpy with Anja gone, and worse still since the night the smuggler was killed.
That Englishman has ruined everything! Eugène said about Gordon. Herbert’s son could give us up for reward now if he were so inclined. It has cost us more money! Money that we now don’t have for other supplies.
Herbert was crooked! said Josephine. He was keeping all the money as Arthur said.
Eugène punched the air in front of him with his fist to stress his point. You can’t negotiate with smugglers at the border. It doesn’t work like that!
The situation allowed for nothing else, defended Arthur. If Gordon hadn’t acted so quickly, we might both have been killed. I am not sure things could have been done differently. Always decisions are made in the moment and seconds between life and death.
“The paper is weeks old now, but some of it is relevant,” says Arthur. “Another Allied destroyer sunk by the Turks, another zeppelin spotted over London. But this one I thought was important,” he says, tapping the handwritten translation he has prepared. “There is much debate on the other side of the Atlantic as to foreign participation in the war. Several politicians refusing to acknowledge the Belgian experience.”
She is shaking her head. “What about my experience? Is that exaggerated?”
“I think it would be a very good idea if you wrote about it for the newspaper. Doesn’t have to be long. There is not much in this one yet. The whole back page is free if you wish.”
“I am not the only one with a story. Other underground papers have printed plenty of accounts.”
“You are allowed a voice, too.”
She shrugs, hesitant, and he is worried he might have offended her, dredged up memories.
“One voice can speak for many,” he says coaxingly. “I believe it is important that those across the borders get to hear yours.”
“I’ll try.”
She wipes the printer rollers in preparation, then sits down to wind a stencil paper through the typewriter. He listens to her work behind him. It feels comforting to have her close, where he can keep a watchful eye, protect her if need be.
Arthur has finished most of his work and eyes it critically while drawing back on a cigarette. The tapping behind him is silent for a period; then Josephine winds the paper from the machine.
She places the typewritten page in front of him, and he picks it up to read. It is heartbreaking and honest, though it is not so much her story but a collection of thoughts, about broken families, missing family members, and her perspective on the war, how Belgians were betrayed and how they will be affected long after there is any end to the madness. It is about the soldiers she has helped treat, what they have suffered, what it will mean for the families they leave behind. He blinks rapidly and clears his throat of emotion as he stubs out his cigarette. He reads it again and turns to see she is sitting down facing him, waiting anxiously for his response.
“It is very good. It is beautiful.”
“It felt a relief to write it, to put it into words on a page. You were right to suggest it.”
“Perhaps the more we reveal, the more it is believed, and the only way the truth about the severity of this murderous conquest will not be diminished.”
She nods.
“You are very brave, your brothers, others,” he says. “Many would not do what you do.”
“Maybe others are more smart than brave,” she says, offering a small smile.
“Josephine, are you all right with all of this?” he says, looking at the work scattered across the room, at the huge responsibility she has been set.
She shrugs. “I try not to think too hard about it. There is no choice now.”
“Your country will be very proud of you when this is all over. King Albert should award you each a medal.”
She looks down, appearing uncomfortable with such a statement. It is not yet clear to him whether she is proud or not.
“I never really thought about my country before the war, about being patriotic, but it figures greatly in our minds,” she says. “Patriotism is a new form of currency that enables some to exchange with those they despised before. But this currency that binds us is created with the blood of so many. Is it worth it? I question myself constantly and wish that I’d been more grateful about my simple life before, which seemed at the time so complicated. I would gladly go back to a divided Belgium; I, like everyone else, I expect, would gladly go back to how it was.”
He is amazed at her wisdom and openness. She does not seem naive at all in many ways, perhaps with relationships, but certainly not at seeing a clear picture of the world. He is in awe and suspects she can read it in his face.
“And I will admit that I sometimes question whether we are truly making a difference, if we are simply helping the soldiers return across the border to ultimately die on the battlefield.”
He nods and looks down at his hands.
“Then there are the connections I have made,” she says. “The people I think about more than I should. People who have wrapped themselves around my heart.”
He looks up. She is standing now, with eyes that are glistening and inviting.
He stands, steps tentatively toward her. He puts his arms around her and draws her to him. There is no resistance. He leans down, kisses her gently, and her hands reach around the back of his neck.
There is a clanking and a cursing as a pan is dragged across the stove upstairs. They move apart, and then laugh softly, faces flushed.
“It seems the gods still don’t favour our togetherness,” he says in jest.
“No, it is just the interruption by one of my brothers as usual, coming between me and any other life I wish for,” she says playfully. “Eugène has obviously found Maman’s dish of food.”
He watches her move toward the printing machine to set the stencil. Arthur turns back to the desk, unable to concentrate on the next task now with her so close.
35. DANGEROUS LIAISONS
She lies in bed and presses her fingers against her lips, wondering how they feel to Arthur, what he thinks of her. Remembering the kiss from several nights ago makes her breathless and warm. She has only seen him twice since, and with others in the room, observing him surreptitiously with new eyes, with wonder and curiosity. Desire also. He had caught her watching him speak, examining his lips that are soft and full, and she had looked away startled at first then back again moments later to find his eyes still upon her, curious and searching.
She has never been so moved by anyone. There is an awareness of each other that is so strong it seems it is yelled across the table and visible to all who are there. She is almost afraid of her feelings, of her inexperience, of being alone with him. She has never been fully intimate, only kissing with her former betrothed in Louvain and Franz at the hotel and beside the river. They were uncomfortable moments in many ways. She could not sink into the idea of those men, could not block out misgivings when she was with each of them. She was playing a part, out of expectation more than anything. With Arthur, questions don’t plague her. She can even dream about him without guilt or fear or regret. There is no sense of possible treachery. Her father would have liked him. She is sure of it.
