Lauren Groff - Delicate Edible Birds - And Other Stories

It was this that got him. That he’d said this to her, of all people. That she’d taken it in and stored it away and might use it someday. He couldn’t shake the idea that maybe she’d only done it out of pity, slept with him because she’d felt sorry for him. He couldn’t take pity. Frank turned away and counted his breaths through the morning to stay steady.

The day passed. Lucci sat staring through a crack at the clouds skimming across the delicate sky. Viktor did fifty pull-ups on a beam. Parnell smoked the last of his cigarettes and flipped the photographs of his family over and over again like playing cards. Outside, there were the sounds of a few more passersby. A French owl, someone working nearby, the clang of metal, the blunted clock of wood.

In the midmorning, Frank couldn’t take his hunger, and bit into one of the raw potatoes from the sacks, but spat it out again when he saw its black heart.

Before noon there was a rumble in the sky, and the way that Viktor scowled, Frank understood that the Russian had recognized the sounds as Nazi planes. If the Nazis could fly this far south without firing, their troops would be only a few days away. Then, the camps, which he had heard of. Bullets in the head, inmates thin as bones. Frank was not so sure now that he would get away easily.

At midday, the mother came out into the yard and scolded her chickens; Nicolas and the boys clomped back to the house for their meal. Afterward, Nicolas unlocked the chain on the barn and thrust open the door. In the overbright sun that poured into the dim barn, Nicolas did not seem quite so frightening. Just a peasant farmer, and a not bad-looking one at that. Younger than Frank, at least. He gabbled something inquisitive in French at Bern, and she spat back her answer, saying cochon, which Frank knew meant pig. So: the answer was still no. He felt his insides twist at this and a fury rise up in him when Nicolas laughed, then slammed the door shut again, locking them in the dark.

Germans are advancing on Orléans, Viktor said for Frank’s benefit.

I got it, Frank said. He hadn’t, though he couldn’t let Viktor know that.

Damn Bern. In the light of day, he didn’t see what all the fuss was about. She’d slept with everyone and his brother, so why one more peasant meant anything, he didn’t know. The first time he knew he was going to report on this war (how young he seemed then, my God, not that long ago, either), the fellows back at Life raised their eyebrows. Say hello to Bern Orton for us, Frankie-boy, they’d said. We hear she’s a hot number, and when he said, What do you mean? admiring a woman whose moxie let her do what only men had done until then, they laughed. Showed him a photograph of a young lady. Said, She looks all prim, distant cousin to Eleanor Roosevelt, Main Line, all that, but don’t be fooled. They told stories: the mayor she’d seduced at sixteen, the marriages she’d broken up, the painter who’d shot himself in the heart over her. Pussy of gold, they said. And gives it away for free.

Lucky bastard, they all said, and clapped him hard on the back. Queer, he thought now, how those men were equally right and wrong about Bern.

By evening Frank’s shudders made the wall behind him rattle. He had nothing in America, no family, no wife, no children, nothing but his job and baseball and a small house near a decent brewery, but he just wanted to go home again. When night fell and the moon rose in the chink in the roof and it became painfully evident that there would be no dinner, Frank began to curse. The curses rattled out of his mouth like gravel, like spittle, he couldn’t stop them. He cursed Nicolas, the boys, the dogs, the chickens, the old hag; he cursed God, France, the world, the United States of America, the Kansas City Star, Life magazine, his mother who urged him to be a reporter, his father who had gotten him his first job, President Roosevelt and his ugly old wife, and, because Bern jumped in roaring to defend Eleanor, he spun about to curse Bern.

Dammit, girl, he said. Just do it and get it over with and we can go. I’m dying here. I feel like a fucking beehive was set loose in me. Just do it. Then we’ll never talk about it again and we can reach civilization and I can have a fucking drink.

Viktor grabbed Frank by the collar and shoved him up against the wall. Frank struggled to breathe, his vision blackening from the edges. And then, saying nothing, Viktor let him go and Frank slid to the ground and wheezed there sullenly for a long time, watching the straw before his eyes dance with his breath, watching Bern at the far end of the room as she combed and combed her hair like a cat licking itself calm.

HE WAS IN THE GARDEN in Fiesole eating figs and Cinzia was there, her hair short like a boy’s and blown by the warm wind. She opened her mouth, about to say something — Lucci’s very limbs tingled, waiting for her voice — when Parnell sat up beside him, shouting incomprehensible words. Lucci sprang up in the darkness of the donkey-smelling barn, his heart splitting in his chest.

Oh, he cried. Viktor lit a match.

In the spit and flare they saw Parnell’s face, seized by fear. Then he was weeping. No, he said, No, no, no, and Bern was beside him, holding his face, saying softly, Parnell, wake up, wake up, it’s okay, sweetheart, it’s a dream, and Frank scrambled to the wall, and Lucci sat down again, wearily, and the donkey kicked, and Viktor lit another match when the first burned out in his fingers.

Parnell rested his head on Bern’s shoulder until he stopped weeping, until his breath came naturally again. He told them what he had dreamed: ranks of soldiers, black as beetles, marching in lockstep down the Strand, a child swung by its heels against a wall so its brains splattered out. London burning. Bombs falling like hailstones on the Houses of Parliament.

I want to go home, Parnell said. Please, Bern. Just let us go home.

See, said Frank from the wall, where he sat, shuddering. See, Bern. You’re hurting all of us, you know. Your morals , he said, are hurting all of us.

Viktor moved toward Frank, but Lucci stepped between them. Frank’s ill, he said quietly, and he knows not what he talks. Viktor glowered down and for a moment Lucci steeled himself for a blow, wondered if it would kill him, but Viktor turned and sat, abruptly.

When they settled again, Lucci could no longer sleep. In his mouth he could still taste figs. He could almost smell Cinzia’s hair. He thought of her as she would be now, if she were alive, in the camp at Bolzano. Probably gaunt, no longer pregnant. Still as fierce as she was as a partisan, going into the night, doing what she needed to do. All that time Lucci had tried not to worry, stood under his red bulb, pulling images from the baths, but growing more frantic as their child began to show. And one bright afternoon he watched as, down a street too long for him to run to her, she was hustled into a dark car.

Now the Germans were coming, perhaps only a few miles down the road. A great ugly inkstain on France, spreading. And when they overtook this barn, who’s to say where the journalists would go. Perhaps Lucci would walk into the camp and see Cinzia look up from whatever work it is they make women do; sewing, or weeding, and she’d blanch, be furious with him for being caught. Wishful thinking, Lucci knew: more likely he’d be killed on the spot. Journalism was no impediment to evil. And only the willful say they do not know what’s happening in Europe anymore.

Yet, he thought, there are still people like Bern, and this is good. White-hot people. Lucci had met Bern long before the war, when she was a debutante visiting Europe on the arm of some man. They’d met at a nightclub and she charmed him. That night, Cinzia, in the presence of a woman so beautiful, was dazzling herself and danced the way that only Cinzia could dance. Bern turned to Lucci in the dim flickering light and brilliant bleat of horns, and said, Giancarlo Bertolucci, your wife is spectacular. And he said, This I know, Bernice, and she laughed her smoke-filled laugh. Later, in his despair with Cinzia gone, when he took the job to photograph the looming war, they met up again in Czechoslovakia. When one night he knocked on her door, she opened it a crack and said, Oh, Lucci. Oh, darling, no. I make it a point of honor not to see the husbands of women I adore. He said, I understand, but it is probable I am a widow. And she said, Widower. And don’t think that. Never Cinzia, she’s a strong one — you can’t let yourself think that. She opened her door a little wider and gave him a long, soft kiss on his mouth. There, she said, now I know she’s alive, and she closed her door.