Martin Walker - The Caves of Perigord

“Jesus,” he breathed, tears leaking from his eyes as the pain dulled into a steady throb. “I could get interested in this medicine on humans,” she said casually. “The hardest part of being a vet is the way animals react so badly to pain, even when you’re trying to help them. People like you seem able to manage it better.

“It’s as well you’re here,” she went on. “The Milice are very keen on their guard dogs. I can come and go here as I wish, so it’s the nearest thing we have to a hospital. And thanks to the last parachute drop, I finally have some medical supplies. You must have been persuasive when you radioed London to send them.”

“How are the others?”

“We buried Maxim this evening. I can’t do much about stomach wounds. And I’m about to amputate Christophe’s arm at the elbow. I’ll have to do it here. You’ll have to help with the ether. Look.” She showed him the wire frame, shaped like a cup, and the gauze that fitted over it, and then showed him the tiny pipette with the rubber bulb that looked as if it had once been used for eyedrops. “I’ll give him the initial dose to knock him out, and then you must put two drops onto the gauze every twenty seconds, and make sure he keeps breathing. If he stops, take the mask off his face. Let him take two or three good breaths, and then put the mask on with another two drops. Understand?”

“I understand. Does Christophe know you’re going to take his arm off?”

“Yes, but we’ve got him drunk. And that’s not the worst. You left two men dead at St-Felix. They identified Valerien, and the Gestapo went to his parents’ home with the Milice, and shot his father and his uncle. They left the corpses in the square at le Buisson and made the whole town file past the bodies. They can’t identify Oudinot because he didn’t have a head, but they took five hostages to Perigueux. All of them children. They say they’ll send them to the camps in Germany unless the English capitaine gives himself up.”

There was nothing he could say, and they stared wordlessly at each other for a long moment. Her hair was pinned up again, with loose tendrils spilling down. She dropped her eyes, and began to bandage his foot. She swallowed, and he understood the effort she was making to speak lightly. “When I’ve finished this, you can give me one of your English cigarettes, and then it will be time for Christophe.”

“Have you ever done an amputation before?”

“Not on a human being. But I read the textbook. The principles seem the same.”

She came back every day, and was cool and brisk with Manners, except when she was helping him learn to use the crutch. He had been embarrassed at having to be held up by the farmer when he wanted to go outside to piss and crap. Sybille had brought him an old chair that lacked a seat. She placed a chamber pot beneath it, and he practiced until he could hold the chamber pot in one hand and grip the crutch in the other as he lurched his way out to the dung heap without spilling a drop. It seemed a great achievement, and he was disappointed when Sybille treated it as a matter of course. But she was motherly with young Christophe, holding his one remaining hand and telling him how proud the girls would be to walk out with a hero of the Resistance. After the war.

“And the capitaine will come back from England in his luxurious automobile and take you and your ladylove to the finest restaurant in Perigord, and he will tell her how brave you were,” she said, smoothing the boy’s hair.

“I’ll have to get into training first,” said Manners jovially. “The way Christophe drinks, I’ll be under the table before I can tell her he saved me from the ambush. With my bad foot, I’d never have got away without Christophe helping me. It must be all that eau-de-vie he drinks. Never seen anybody who could hold his drink like Christophe.”

When the boy slept, she told him that the fishmonger had been shot after the Milice reported his van had been used in the escape, and his eyes surprised him by filling with silent tears for a man he had never known.

“It’s all part of the madness,” she said, and smoothed his cheek, as if for the first time he had aroused that tenderness she displayed to Christophe. His tears kept flowing. “We just have to survive it. We will survive it. There will be restaurants after the war, and you will take Christophe to a glorious, drunken dinner.”

“And I will buy you lingerie in Paris,” he said, forcing a smile. “From Lanvin.”

“Now I know you’re getting better,” she laughed, and left him. When she came back the next day, she brought him a collection of Mallarme’s poems, dressed his foot quickly, and said she had to leave. He felt desolated.

“I’m sorry, but you come way behind a pregnant horse in my priorities just now,” she said, ruffling his greasy hair, and then wiping her hand in a matter-of-fact way on her smock.

When she left, he took the scrap of soap, limped out to the yard, stripped and bathed himself from head to foot under the pump. He came back with a basin full of water, and washed Christophe’s hair as well. Then he took his Rolls razor from the small tin case that had been with him since Palestine, stropped it to sharpness, and shaved Christophe and himself.

Francois came later the same day, with cigarettes and a collection of De Maupassant’s short stories, and a bottle of cognac that he claimed had been liberated from a German canteen. There had been another parachute drop, and Marat had provided them with information about an ammunition train that they had derailed. They did not talk about the fishmonger, nor about the German reprisals. The war was going very well without him, said Francois, and when he left, he took Christophe with him, to shelter on a cousin’s farm.

Sybille did not come for two days, and when she did she was angry with him. “You have been trying to walk on this foot,” she accused him. “The cuts have opened again.”

“Not walking,” he lied. “I was using the crutch and I fell.”

“You’re a fool,” she said coldly, reaching for the iodine. “To think that you can fool your doctor.”

“That’s just it,” he gasped through the pain. “I don’t think of you as my doctor.”

“Because to you I’m just a vet,” she flared.

“Because you’re a woman.” He leaned back and closed his eyes, relishing the warm touch of her hand on his foot. He felt her hands stop their work. “Because you are beautiful and I want to be in your house watching you cook and listening to Jean Sablon on your gramophone.” There was a long silence, and she continued changing his dressing.

“You just say that because you enjoy my omelets and my music. You like to relax in my little fantasy world of the time before the war,” she said, her tone too forced to be light.

“No. I want it in the time after the war,” he said tiredly, despairing of ever reaching that deep melancholy within her. “Before the war, you belonged to someone else. I want you to belong to me. In the war, after the war, I don’t care. I want to belong to you.”

He opened his eyes and stared at her, and reached out to take her hand, not knowing if she would leave or dismiss him with a joke. Instead, her mouth worked as if she were about to cry but she left her hand in his. Suddenly he knew, and he felt a great tenderness as the conviction gripped him, that there had been no other men since her husband. And the private sanctuary of her room and her gramophone, which she had shared with him, was already a privilege.

“Seize life, Sybille, while we have it,” he said, knowing as he said it that this was what he believed in most of all.

“You are a fool of an Englishman. It isn’t that at all,” she said softly. “I am feeling very, very shy.”