When Marta Tranchet spoke, her voice was so low, so dreamlike and detached, that Scotty Weir wondered if she had forgotten he was there, or if this was a trip she often made in sadness, and alone.
“Your face was smudged with dirt that night,” she said. “It made your eyes so white, so staring. There was a rip in your canvas jacket, I remember that, a big, loose tear that went right through to your backbone. One could have touched your skin. It looked warm to me, but I was too cold to move. And your boots were muddy.”
Weir’s cheekbones felt chapped by the raw wind and he sensed the beginning of a roughness in his throat. The sticky loam had covered his shoes and now added damp and weight to the cuffs of his trousers every time he moved. He took a package of the mints he’d bought at the airport and put two under his tongue.
“Yes, we were a pretty beat up bunch of sad sacks that night, Marta.”
“No, no, don’t say that! You looked like knights in shining armor to me and my family, don’t you know that? You were like white lights, like saviors, and you were that thing I had never known in my young life — a man without fear.”
“Then we put up a pretty good front, Marta.”
She smiled, slipped off a glove and touched his bare wrist. “You were just children yourselves, what were you, Scotty — eighteen? A child-man, and for your courage, I thought you were a god...”
He took her hand in his big one and rubbed it gently. “Don’t talk yourself into anything now because of something that happened way back then, Marta.”
She shook her head. “No, no,” she said. “I will make the call.”
Back at the farmhouse she gave him dry socks and a pair of Emile’s slippers while she scraped the mud from his shoes and set them on the hearth. She put the decanter of sherry on the table between them but Weir shook his head when she asked to fill his glass.
“I want a clear head for the trip back to Liege. Those roads weren’t quite as familiar as I thought they’d be.”
Marta poured herself a sherry. “It is like a holiday for me, Scotty, having you here.”
They spent the rest of the afternoon in front of the fire as the apple logs burned down to fragrant ash and the stormy skies turned dark over the countryside. A digital clock, incongruous on the century-old mantelpiece, clicked the numbers rhythmically until the dial showed 4:45. Tarbert Weir forced himself to talk with his old friend, but he was conscious of the growing tension in her manner, the slur to her carefully worded English.
“I wonder, my cher ami Americain,” she burst out suddenly, “do you know how frightened we are here in Europe? Do even the Russians understand that? More and more of those missiles, hundreds at first, now thousands. They circle our borders and cities, they can be fired from the ground, from cannons on moving railroad trains. The North Sea to the Mediterranean, giant warheads everywhere, ready to fire.” She sat rocking back and forth, hugging her breasts. “Poor little Belgium, only ten million souls, all of us. We offer so little, we live on our exports, no natural resources. So what can we give you? Industrial diamonds, a little steel. No, you love us for the pastries we export, our chocolate and hams... and space to put your weapons.
“Must we be the prize in your contest for power? We march, we protest, thousands of us in Europe, from Sicily to Amsterdam. In Bremen, there were night-long vigils, people by the hundreds, praying on their knees with candles. Millions marching for peace, that is the will of the people. But can we change the man in the White House? Or the Kremlin? What more is wanted of us?”
She had put down her glass and sat staring at him, hands clasped in her lap now, watching him as if she expected an answer. In the curves of her face, the color high with sherry and emotion, and beneath the coiffed cap of her hair, he saw that her eyes were again like an eight-year-old, pleading and frightened.
“Marta,” he said gently. “I will try to understand. You don’t want to make the call to Alain.”
“You are wrong,” she said, standing. “I will call him now. We Belgians are not without honor. If it weren’t for you, le monsieur Scotty, I wouldn’t have a son to be frightened for tonight.”
As Marta talked on the phone in the hall, Weir paced the floor of the dining room, trying to drown out the sound of her voice with the shuffle of his slippers. He did not want to overhear. But the loose velvet scuffs with their soft chamois soles made him feel irresolute, almost old. With a spasm of irritation he kicked them off and put on his own shoes, still feeling the stiff dampness as he tied the laces over Emile LeRoi’s fine cashmere socks.
He positioned himself at the bow window and looked out past the courtyard to the farm buildings. Through the dusk he saw the storm clouds had parted for a thin moon, a light that glinted on the hedges, the cobbled courtyard and the dark mass of the plum orchard. The barn was as he remembered it, but freshly roofed and tuck-pointed, and beside it the tall lilac bush, graceful and bare now, just as it had been that winter night decades ago.
Marta entered from the hallway and came to stand close to him at the window. Weir put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to him, stooping to kiss the top of her hair. It smelled pleasantly of fresh air, wood smoke and sherry.
“I’m sorry for what I said a few moments ago,” she murmured. “Alain will be expecting you tomorrow, sometime before noon. He understands, he will be ready.”
Scotty Weir kissed her hair again and pulled her close to him, grateful for the warmth of human flesh. He felt a faint sexual desire, something he had never felt for Marta before, and he wondered if she sensed the shift in his mood.
“I was looking at our tree, the old lilac bush,” he said. “It is still where it should be. I have never forgotten it, Marta, but it’s strange how memory changes things. I had remembered the old bush as more full, and taller, reaching as high as the barn roof, in fact.”
He felt her intake of breath, then a tremor that passed through her body, an almost imperceptible drawing away from his embrace.
“I didn’t think you’d notice, Scotty,” she said. “It is a lilac tree, or bush. The first one, long ago, was a lilac vulgaris. My father told me it must be a sport, a stray seed that came in on the wind. He never remembered his parents planting it. It was just there.”
Weir stared through the darkness, straining for a better look at the tree. No, it was not as tall as it should be, and much slimmer than he remembered. Marta was saying, “I’m trying the species Leon Gambetta this time. It’s a double-flowered hybrid and does well in this part of the world.”
Weir withdrew his arm from her shoulders and turned her body so he was looking directly down into her eyes. “Let me understand you, Marta. Are you telling me that lilac bush out there is not the lilac bush we all looked at the night I killed the Germans?”
“It’s a lilac, but not the same lilac,” she said. “The genus Syringa is not all that hardy. Besides, lots of natural things have accidents.”
“What kind of accidents?”
“The first one broke apart when there was a sudden thaw one year and the snow fell off the barn roof. That was the winter mother died.”