Jo Baker - A Country Road, a Tree

He twists his lips. Shrugs. “I’ll be glad to be of use.”

—

Suzanne refers to the drawer as the Tinderbox. Things could so easily spark and catch and burn the whole place to the ground.

Alfy comes round to the apartment with his satchel full of typescript and a French — English dictionary. If he’s stopped, they are working on the translation of Murphy into French.

The translation is getting nowhere.

The paper slips, though, are piling up; Alfy slides them from between the leaves of his dictionary, ruffles them out of his typescript. They fill up the drawer, dry and whispering like leaves.

He works at night, after curfew, the curtains drawn, observing blackout with all due diligence: one doesn’t wish to draw attention. He empties the drawer out on to his desk; the paper scraps scatter like a parlour game. He slides them around. Looking for patterns. Matching them. Finding echoes.

Cigarette papers, a torn-up flour bag. Some of them have been folded tiny and are now criss-crossed with creases, others have been rolled up into tight cylinders and must be rolled back on themselves to be flattened out. Sometimes there is a square of lavatory paper — quite a sacrifice — or the margin of a book, or a strip of advertising poster, the writing on the reverse, with the blocks of colour leaching through. Assembled there on the desk, these scraps of paper mark the movement of troops and materiel across the north of France.

And then, one day, on a dirty green omnibus ticket, five words appear in smudged graphite. Two of the same words are scratched on to the ripped-off corner of a menu; one of them is on a bit of paper bag; three are scribbled on to a panel of a cigarette packet. They are padded round and buffered with other stuff, but those same words keep emerging. He pushes his glasses back up to the bridge of his nose. In soft graphite and in neat hard pencil and in schoolteacherly copperplate and pragmatic print, the five words step forward to be noticed. They can’t be unnoticed now.

Four of the words are German. They are names of ships. Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Prinz Eugen. One name is of a French port. Brest.

He sits there, fingertips on the bus ticket.

“What is it?” Suzanne asks. She sets aside her sewing, comes to him. “Have you found something?”

He lines up the ticket alongside the lavatory paper. She cranes in; he taps the ticket with a blunt nail.

She presses a finger on a cigarette skin and drags it across the table to line it up beside the ones he has already selected.

“Is that what you were thinking?” she asks.

He nods.

He knows the town. Waves slopping against a harbour wall; a round tower; old men dangling lines into the water; children chalking a game on to the pavement. And these words, lined up in front of him now, could conjure aeroplanes out of a clear sky, could bring all hell raining down on it. These words could take a hundred lives. A thousand.

“You’d only be passing it on,” she says.

He nods.

“It’s not as if you’d be adding anything, or changing it.”

He nods again.

“And if you don’t, and it might have done some good, if it could have helped bring things to an end, saved other lives…”

He closes his eyes. He breathes.

“Because you can’t be certain, can you?”

He shakes his head to clear it. He lifts a sheet of tellière, folds it and tears it sharply along the fold. He scrolls the half-page into his Olivetti. His fingertips peck out the letters, and the letters strike on to the paper, and the letters cluster into words, and the words seethe on the page, and he can’t bear this and yet it must be borne. He swallows down spittle, closes his eyes. All he can see is fire and blood and broken stone.

When he’s finished — it is only a few lines to type — he slips the sheet between two pages of his manuscript, which is by far the safest place to keep something that he doesn’t want anyone to read. He sweeps all the paper scraps together, then he gets down on hands and knees and checks the floor for drifting slips. He drags the table forward to be certain that nothing has been missed. He drops the crumpled scraps into the grate.

He sits back, rubs cold hands together, eases out his neck. “You want to share a cigarette?”

He holds the flame to a curled edge of paper. He watches it catch and flare, then drops it into the grate. He lifts the match and lights his cigarette.

He feels the smoke fill his lungs and soothe them, and his head spins; he passes the cigarette on to her. The smoke slips slowly from his lips, towards the fireplace, where it is caught by the draw of the chimney. Their drooping tent stands behind them. It’s as though they are camping out here on the floor.

With tired eyes, knees drawn up to her chin, she takes the cigarette. They watch the contagion of the flame, the way that black creeps across the white, then breaks into bits and falls in soft flurries.

“Alfy coming for the thing tomorrow?”

He shakes his head. “I’m to make the drop-off. Him coming and going here so much, it’s getting to look suspicious. He’s given me the address. Place over near Parc Montsouris.”

She holds her thin hands up to the brief warmth. “I don’t need to know.”

“I know.”

“Just,” she says, “be careful.”

The paper’s gone, its warmth spent, in just a few moments. He lifts a poker, stirs the ashes. The flakes fall through the grate, and he pulls the ash pan out to riddle through underneath, so that no word might remain allied to any other. So there is no suggestion that there were ever any words allied here at all.

“Now would be a good time to get raided,” he says.

“It’s never a good time to get raided.”

“It’s better than half an hour ago.”

“Don’t wish it down on our heads, for goodness’ sake.”

A little later, she says, “We should find something else to burn. Burning only paper might look suspicious.” The chill has descended again; her breath mists the air.

“We’re burning books, if anybody asks.”

“You could write one, instead,” she says.

“Ah yes. But who’d publish it?”

He leans against her, experimentally. She doesn’t shy away. He slips an arm around her shoulders. She shuffles closer on the rug. They smoke the cigarette down to nothing, then drop the nothing in a saucer, so that it can be unpicked and the filaments of tobacco can be teased into a roll-up, later, when the need will come.

—

There are not too many people in the Métro at this time of day. Which is just as well, since every single one of them is a police informer, and every single one of them is staring at him. Not unreasonably, either: his bag has swollen to the size of a suitcase, and his legs have grown too long for him, and his elbows stick out like coat-hangers. He is a crane-fly carrying a brick. A flamingo in charge of a wardrobe. Who wouldn’t stare?

He’s on the train now, and it lurches away, and he sits down and lays the bag on his lap and folds his hands on top of it and sways with the motion of the train. The familiar smell of diesel and cigarettes and bodies and perfume and the contained space hurtling through the dark make it feel more like Paris down here than the city above now does. In the corners and margins, if one doesn’t look too closely, Paris remains itself; the city lives on in its underground, in its catacombs; it has become its own reflection in the Seine.

He risks a glance around the carriage. A mother and son, neatly dressed, which isn’t easy nowadays. They’re not looking at him; the woman is murmuring something to the child. Across the aisle, an old lady in faded black sits with her old man beside her in working blue. Their tree-root hands lie in their laps, and they’re not, after all, staring at him either.