Lauren Groff - Delicate Edible Birds - And Other Stories

Viktor, darling, she said, a serrated edge to her voice. Is there a problem?

But it was Frank, with his Kansas drawl, who said, If Reynaud fought, my dear, poof, up in smoke goes all your precious architecture. All the civilians, smithereens. He did the sensible thing, you know. Paris remains Paris. It’s what I’d have done.

It’s cowardly, spat Bern.

Frank rubbed his fat hand over his head. Oh, Bernie. Don’t you grow tired of being the everlasting firebrand? And where the hell is that little Eyetie of ours, that’s what I want to know. Let’s give him ten more minutes, then scram.

Bern bristled. There weren’t enough female firebrands in the world as far as she was concerned, she said; Lucci was the best damn photographer in this damn war; and why the hell Life magazine paired Frank with Lucci was beyond her when Frank could barely write a story without bland-as-buttermilk prose. God knows she herself, by far the better journalist, even if she was a girl, had to bend over like a goddamn contortionist for Collier’s even to get to tour the front lines.

But Frank wasn’t listening. Viktor, we better get going, he said. Germans catch us, you know where you’re all headed. Me, I’m the only one who’d go free.

Parnell rubbed his handsome forehead with a knuckle. What do you mean, Frank? he said softly.

I know it’s hard, but make an effort, Parnell, said Frank. Viktor’s a Commie, Orton’s a Jew, you’re a Brit, and they probably wouldn’t let Lucci go, what with his wife causing all that trouble down in Italy. I’m inoffensive. He gave a snort-laugh and turned around, his face set for Bern’s attack.

There was a pause, then Bern said, softly, Good God. Parnell gripped her thigh to hold her back, but the truth was that she was glad for this argument, for the dirty distractions of a fight, for just now two planes with swastikas on their wings roared overhead into the fields south of them, then separated, curved about, poured together like water into water and came back over the jeep. The journalists, despite themselves, cringed. In the silence of the planes’ wake, Bern took a breath, ready to lash some sense into Frank. But she didn’t have the chance because Parnell, his voice slipping from its cultivated heights back into its native Cockney, said, Bloody hell, if it isn’t Lucci.

There he was, tiny Lucci with the camera like a millstone around his neck, throwing down the bicycle so it clattered on the cobblestones, leaping into the jeep, saying, Gogogogogo. And Viktor threw the jeep forward even before they heard the drone behind them, and they shot out from the city onto the tiny dirt road as the motorcycles came around the bend. Two hundred feet apart and even from that distance Bern could see the stark black of the German officers’ armbands, the light-sucking matte of their boots, the glint in their hands from the pistols. Viktor cursed in Russian and spun the jeep over the dark and rutted road. Lucci was in Bern’s lap, hot with sweat and flushed and trembling; she frowned and kept her head down and watched the lace of his eyelashes on his cheeks. And then, over the roar of the engine and wind and pebble clatter, as the motorcyclists rapidly lost their grasp on them, falling back, Lucci opened his eyes and said, Oh, Bernice, in his Italian way, Ber-eh-nee-che; Oh, Bernice, I have it. The best photo of the war. Nazis goose-stepping through the Arc de Triomphe. You shall see. Oh, it is the sublime photo. Oh, the one to make me live forever, he said, and Bern couldn’t help it; she closed her eyes; she clutched Lucci’s thin shoulders and threw her head back. Hurtling into the steel-gray dawn, she laughed and she laughed.

THE DAY WAS ALREADY full when they stopped in the hemlock copse. Bern was stretched over the hood, basking in the sun like a cat. They were waiting for Lucci to finish vomiting in the ditch; ten miles south of the city he had discovered that the Germans had shot through one of his rolled-up trouser cuffs, and he slowly unrolled the fabric and fingered the six neat holes. Turned green. Viktor had to stop the car. Now Parnell and Frank were smoking, looking back at the city behind them. For a moment, Viktor wondered if he could just take Bern and leave the rest behind; Lucci was all right, but Parnell and Frank he despised. Parnell for obvious reasons; Frank because he was a greasy toad. But he couldn’t; they were not far enough out of Paris for abandonment to be anything but cruel. The last bicyclists they had passed were now passing them and an old woman with a chicken under her arm hobbled by, the chicken’s head bobbing with each step. The Germans would be along soon. In the distance there were odd mechanical sounds.

Viktor flicked his eyes over Bern. Though she was the most beautiful woman he knew, she was not a true beauty. He should know; he himself was a warthog, but he had grown up around swans, long-necked sisters with velvety eyes and a mother whose grace was so legendary that, among her three dozen rejected suitors in old noble Moscow, there were still men who wept when they remembered her. Bern was too dark a blonde and too light a brunette, devoid of embonpoint, her face hawkish with its aquiline nose and her mouth like a pink knot tied under it. Too thin, also; war whittled her down, though she was always hungry, always eating. Still, even though she was almost plain when she slept, when she was vibrant it would take a strange man to find her unattractive. In the sunshine she radiated; her hair turned golden, her eyes green, and her skin seemed to pulse with health. In the sunshine, Viktor had to hold his hands in his pockets to keep from grabbing Bern’s sole world-class attraction, her tidy rear, fleshed with a layer of smooth lard, firm and handy as a steering wheel.

The day Viktor met Bern, she was twenty-two, climbing up the stairs of a Spanish hotel just after witnessing her first battle. Her face was pink, her eyes sparked angrily. She was trembling, and shook his hand hard to introduce herself, then said, Damn! I mean, damn! and went into her room and tapped at her typewriter for an hour, until she came out to the veranda, where he was waiting for her and pretending not to. She thrust a piece of paper into his hands and demanded to know if it was good, because, you see, she was determined to be a war reporter, and she’d heard he was a good one. The man she came to Spain with, a lover, wasn’t worth his weight in pig poo, she’d said, and she had to learn from someone . Viktor read the article, and said it was a job well done, B. Orton: but what does B. stand for? And she said in her French horn of a voice, Ah, well, it means Bernice but it also means that if I can fool Collier’s into thinking I’m a man, I’m a war reporter for good, and don’t you forget it. And Viktor said, To be sure. And she said he better goddamn not because they were going to be buddies, watch out.

But they didn’t become buddies yet: he went off to a different section of the front and when they met up again, it was in a hotel right after Guernica and Viktor was having an awful time of it. He kept seeing flashes of things he tried to shunt away. Late at night he wept in the water closet, unable to stop himself; he tried to stuff his shirt in his mouth to muffle the sound, but couldn’t. For fifteen minutes, there were two dark shadows in the crack under the door, Bern’s feet, Bern’s head on the door, listening. When she came in and took off her blouse and hitched down her trousers and smiled up at him, he couldn’t think to say no.

Afterward, he kissed the delicate slice of her chin under her ear and asked her to marry him. And she laughed roughly, gave him a tweak of the ear, and said, Oh, well, Viktor, dear, now you’ve made a terrible mistake, and vanished down the dark hallway. And so, to Bern, it had been a mistake; it hadn’t happened again. Instead, he’d watched time and again as she disappeared down other hallways with Parnell. And he had to swallow it because she was who she was, a woman so removed from the women of his youth as to be a whole new gender. In her every small movement she was the woman of the future, a type that would swagger and curse, fall headlong, flaming into the hell of war, be as brave and tough as men, take the overflowing diarrhea of nervous frontline troops without grimacing, speak loudly and devastatingly, kick brain matter off their shoes and go unhurriedly on. When he looked at Bern, Viktor saw the future, and it was lovely and clean and as equal as things between men and women, between prole and patrician, could be. And he also saw that any impulse to pin her down would only make her flitter away. Some days he hated her.