Jo Baker - A Country Road, a Tree

So they talk in hushed voices; he stretches out his legs, eases the clicks out of his knees. They share their bad food with him. He joins them at the table for sulphurous stews of turnip and cabbage and beans. He eats little, is constantly hungry. Hunger is normal. You can get used to it, to its incremental twist. In hiding, he can no longer claim his rations, and beyond a little money for off-ration things like blood pudding and root vegetables, he has nothing to contribute here. He just consumes, and excretes, and is dependent on the family to deal with both. He feels the indignity of that; it renders him just animal.

He shaves at the stone sink. He looks at himself in the scrap of mirror, at the angles of his bones. He’s no more than a few miles across town from his apartment, but it might as well be another country, since he cannot go back there. He sees in himself now a quality of the patients he’d met at the Bethlem hospital, that time Geoffrey Thompson had taken him to look round. They’d roam the corridors, disoriented and hopelessly lost, but never more than a few yards from their beds.

Geoffrey Thompson. How he’s getting on, now? He’ll be busy; he’ll be rushed off his blessed feet, now that the whole world has gone mad.

He scrapes away the stubble, leaves his top lip unshaven. He is growing a moustache. It’s good to have a hobby.

For Suzanne, he wishes daylight, air, the occasional cup of coffee. He wishes her to be safe. They have been separated, so as to be less conspicuous. They will be returned to each other when their new, fake papers have been achieved.

He listens to the Russian but he thinks in French, in its uncompromising precisions, and in German, its words fitting themselves together like links in a necklace, and in Italian, which falls through his thoughts as smooth as drops of water. He strokes that new moustache and thinks in English too; his thoughts assemble themselves in its measured blocks. An English sentence is a brick. To build with, yes, a solid structure; something one can inhabit. But also a dividing wall, a closing-off; a limitation.

—

The chap has a mouse-brown suit and an old Mossant fedora gone dark around the band where he has sweated through it. His chin is shaven shiny. He hands over the new papers, then dabs at his forehead with a handkerchief; his line of work is enough to make anybody sweat. They step out into the corridor. He glances back — the apartment is empty for the day. The old grandfather is asleep beneath the floor. He closes the door behind him. He will not have the chance to say goodbye. To say thank you. For the bad food, and the floorboards, and the risk that they have undertaken on his behalf.

He pockets his papers. They clip down the stairs and out of the doors into the street.

“Where are we heading?”

“Hotel in the Fifteenth.”

“Will Suzanne be there?”

A brisk nod. A gesture of impatience: they have to get a bloody move on if they are to get there before curfew. They also have to look as though they’re not in any hurry whatsoever.

They are approaching a tram halt when they spot the gendarmes on board, checking papers; they duck down a side street. But then there is a checkpoint on the rue des Ombres, which they swerve again to avoid. There’s a long loop round through back streets and alleyways, and they find themselves in the leafy haut-bourgeois Sixteenth, not far from the Bois de Boulogne, where nobody is ever in a hurry, where women snuggle into their furs and feed their tiny dogs on black-market ham, and time ticks slow and weighs a ton, and half the apartments are locked up and empty, their owners gone to the country.

He knows that they look very out of place indeed. In their worn and grubby suits they look like a couple of housebreakers. Unsuccessful ones.

The shadows are long and the sun is low; the air is filling up with darkness like smoke.

“Today’s Tuesday…,” he says.

“Yep.”

And so the world goes on, and time keeps passing. Tick-tock. Tuesday slides into Wednesday, and Wednesday crumbles into Thursday and for a good while Thursday seems solid and secure, but inevitably it too shivers and falls and Friday is triumphant, and what he really needs to do is notch it up, note it down, tick it off, keep a tally of the days, to notice time as it is passing, because he fears he is losing his grip on it, and there can be no break, no abeyance, no lacuna: time ticks by and it is their time, his and everybody else’s, and what they do in it, and with it, is not separate and distinct from before and afterwards; it is a continuation, and it must be acknowledged as such; time will have to be reckoned with eventually. And so he must check and clarify and notice. He will not let himself come adrift from it.

They turn the corner.

“Oh, the cow.”

There’s a checkpoint. Police glance at papers, ask lazy questions of two plump matrons in their furs.

“Nice area for it.”

“Bluff it out?”

Sucked teeth. It’s a risk.

Their stride is already shortening, their pace slackening off. The matrons will soon be sent on their way: they can’t have anything to hide. There’s money in their purses; they’re wearing furs. Of course they’re law-abiding; the laws suit them.

“C’mon,” the chap says, and they turn and cross the street. “We’ll head through the park.”

—

Between the trees it’s already so much darker. Gravel crunches underfoot.

“Which way?”

“If we head round to the Place de Colombes, then double back, we should be all right.”

“Good. Come on.”

The man’s really sweating now, trotting to keep up alongside his lope. The setting sun shafts through the trees, and over the open glades a faint mist rises. There’s just their ragged breath — he has no stamina nowadays — and the crunch of gravel, and birds settling in the trees, and something rustling through the shrubbery.

“With any luck,” the man says, “people will think we’re out chasing whores.”

“That still happens here?”

“More than ever. If there’s any truth to rumour.”

But luck is an unlucky word; said out loud it just dissolves. Because only a moment later they hear the dogs.

Barrel-chested barking. A pair of them, at least; maybe more. These are not some sclerotic old pugs out for an airing. These are big dogs, hounds.

“You hear that?”

“It’s nothing.” They come to a fork in the track; he heads towards the left-hand path. “It’s not to do with us.”

But a hundred yards further on, they hear the voices. Somewhere ahead and off to the right: between them and the maze of city streets. They are speaking German.

“Last seen headed across the Place de la Porte…”

They stop dead. He can feel his breath dragging in his chest. He presses a hand to his scar.

“…must presume they entered the park.”

He looks to the little man, who shakes his head; he doesn’t understand. “What are they saying?”

He waves a hand to shush him, listening.

“…start by the lake and sweep across. We’ll send the dogs round the other way.”

The little man raises his hands, nonplussed. What to do?

He finds himself in charge. A low jerk of the arm: come on.

One of the dogs lets out a howl and others join it. Voices call back and forth between the trees. There are footfalls on the track behind them: more than one person, gaining on them.

They peel off the pathway, duck under the low boughs, dodge between the trees. Fallen leaves, dry branches: the noise of their passing is agonizing. It is impossible, though, to go silently.

They slip round the thick trunk of a sycamore and hunker down. The colour is seeping from the world.

“Split up?” the man breathes.