William McGivern - A Matter of Honor

“Must we be the prize in your contest for power? We march, we protest, thousands of us in Europe, from Sicily to Amsterdam. In Bremen, there were night-long vigils, people by the hundreds, praying on their knees with candles. Millions marching for peace, that is the will of the people. But can we change the man in the White House? Or the Kremlin? What more is wanted of us?”

She had put down her glass and sat staring at him, hands clasped in her lap now, watching him as if she expected an answer. In the curves of her face, the color high with sherry and emotion, and beneath the coiffed cap of her hair, he saw that her eyes were again like an eight-year-old, pleading and frightened.

“Marta,” he said gently. “I will try to understand. You don’t want to make the call to Alain.”

“You are wrong,” she said, standing. “I will call him now. We Belgians are not without honor. If it weren’t for you, le monsieur Scotty, I wouldn’t have a son to be frightened for tonight.”

As Marta talked on the phone in the hall, Weir paced the floor of the dining room, trying to drown out the sound of her voice with the shuffle of his slippers. He did not want to overhear. But the loose velvet scuffs with their soft chamois soles made him feel irresolute, almost old. With a spasm of irritation he kicked them off and put on his own shoes, still feeling the stiff dampness as he tied the laces over Emile LeRoi’s fine cashmere socks.

He positioned himself at the bow window and looked out past the courtyard to the farm buildings. Through the dusk he saw the storm clouds had parted for a thin moon, a light that glinted on the hedges, the cobbled courtyard and the dark mass of the plum orchard. The barn was as he remembered it, but freshly roofed and tuck-pointed, and beside it the tall lilac bush, graceful and bare now, just as it had been that winter night decades ago.

Marta entered from the hallway and came to stand close to him at the window. Weir put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to him, stooping to kiss the top of her hair. It smelled pleasantly of fresh air, wood smoke and sherry.

“I’m sorry for what I said a few moments ago,” she murmured. “Alain will be expecting you tomorrow, sometime before noon. He understands, he will be ready.”

Scotty Weir kissed her hair again and pulled her close to him, grateful for the warmth of human flesh. He felt a faint sexual desire, something he had never felt for Marta before, and he wondered if she sensed the shift in his mood.

“I was looking at our tree, the old lilac bush,” he said. “It is still where it should be. I have never forgotten it, Marta, but it’s strange how memory changes things. I had remembered the old bush as more full, and taller, reaching as high as the barn roof, in fact.”

He felt her intake of breath, then a tremor that passed through her body, an almost imperceptible drawing away from his embrace.

“I didn’t think you’d notice, Scotty,” she said. “It is a lilac tree, or bush. The first one, long ago, was a lilac vulgaris. My father told me it must be a sport, a stray seed that came in on the wind. He never remembered his parents planting it. It was just there .”

Weir stared through the darkness, straining for a better look at the tree. No, it was not as tall as it should be, and much slimmer than he remembered. Marta was saying, “I’m trying the species Leon Gambetta this time. It’s a double-flowered hybrid and does well in this part of the world.”

Weir withdrew his arm from her shoulders and turned her body so he was looking directly down into her eyes. “Let me understand you, Marta. Are you telling me that lilac bush out there is not the lilac bush we all looked at the night I killed the Germans?”

“It’s a lilac, but not the same lilac,” she said. “The genus Syringa is not all that hardy. Besides, lots of natural things have accidents.”

“What kind of accidents?”

“The first one broke apart when there was a sudden thaw one year and the snow fell off the barn roof. That was the winter mother died.”

“By ‘the first one,’ you mean our ‘miracle’ bush?”

“Yes,” she said. “The second one was doing very well, it had at least nine seasons. But it got a bacterial blight, little cankers that killed the stems. It’s a plant disease that begins with a P — Phytophthora is what I think the nursery man said.”

“You’re telling me now about a second lilac bush,” General Weir said carefully, his arms stiff at his sides. “I believe what you are saying is that we are not looking at th e first lilac bush, nor are we looking at the second ...”

“That’s right, Scotty.”

“And the winter I brought my wife here, when Mark had to stay in school, was that the original tree we looked at? Which lilac were we toasting when we all got drunk and sentimental and you brought out champagne?”

“What year was that?”

“You know goddamn well what year it was, Marta, and don’t give me any more double-talk about genus and blight spots. What tree was it?”

“That lilac was the third.”

“And this?”

She sighed. “Last spring and summer the flowers weren’t right. They’re supposed to grow in panicles, you know, almost like bunches of grapes, but there were just a few scattered flowers, pinkish, not lilac, and a really bad smell. There were little white meshes on the leaves, like tent caterpillars and...”

“Then this is the fourth lilac bush, a complete imposter plant, I’ve been looking at like a damned fool? And you let me make that jackass speech about ‘our talisman’?”

She shrugged and looked away from him. “I would have waited for spring, but when I got your letter that you were coming, I called a nurseryman in Liege. They cut down the diseased tree and softened the ground with steam hoses and things and planted the new lilac. In fact, they had to put it six feet back so it wouldn’t get tangled up with the sick roots. You’d never have noticed the change, Scotty, if it had been taller. It wasn’t a matter of money, believe me. That was the biggest lilac bush they had in the nursery.”

Tarbert Weir let his breath out hoping the release of pressure would soften the anger that seemed to be swelling in his chest.

“I don’t think I did wrong, Scotty,” Marta said softly.

He wanted to reach out to touch her cheek, to reassure her, to remember her as a treasured friend, but he felt dread at the thought of flesh on flesh. What else, Weir wondered, had they all been lying about...

“Of course you didn’t do wrong, Marta. It is a strange kind of falsehood you’ve kept alive over the years, but I love you for it. It’s what a frightened eight-year-old girl would do. It must have meant so much to you, that miracle tree.”

“Yes, yes, dear Scotty,” she said softly. “It did, it meant so much to me. But you — wasn’t it just everything for you?”

Greta stood at the stove, stirring a pan of cocoa. She wore a black crepe slip with thin gold-braid straps, gold mules, and her hair was piled high, tied back with a ribbon.

In the adjoining bedroom Duro Lasari stepped out of the shower, a towel around his waist. The bruises on his chest and groin had turned grayish yellow, the edges marked pink with signs of healing. The deep cut above his eye had healed but the hot shower had turned the welt an angry purple. A private’s uniform hung from a wall pole, a pair of regulation boots on the floor beneath. He would be making the return trip to Regensburg in a few hours; Strasser’s driver was coming by to take him to the bus depot. Strasser had made that decision in a drunken but defiant phone call to Pytor Vayetch last evening.