A sharp blow to her ankle: Lucci kicking her, and she knew he meant to remind her that this man was both bats and had a gun. So she said, grimly, Oh, in a way.
I knew it, he said, sitting back with his charming smile. You are the purest Aryan I have seen for some time. I knew it when I saw you.
Oh, did you, said Bern, and couldn’t help herself, saw herself telling this story to a whole dinner table of guests, saw herself shrieking one day with laughter, saying, My God, he was telling a Jewess she was the most Aryan creature he’d ever seen; even now, she gave a high little bleat of delight. Viktor, she noticed, had grown huge, was sitting up in his chair as if ready to spring; Frank was gaping, red, having apparently understood; even Parnell’s handsome brow was knotted and black. Lucci’s eyes were bowed to his lap, as if in shame.
Your answer is no, Bern said. I would rather gnaw off my own foot.
Very well, said Nicolas, making his mouth twist painfully. You may soon be doing so. I am sorry, but I’ll have to keep all of you fine foreigners here until the Germans come, won’t I. Prisoners. And who knows what they’ll do when they find you.
You can’t do that, said Viktor. We’re reporters.
Oh, can’t I, said Nicolas and it was not a question. Now, boys, he said to his sons. Lock them in the barn.
He stood and nodded at them all, thoughtfully, and said, Good night, and after he climbed the stairs they heard his footsteps on the boards above them, so heavy they feared that great rocks of plaster would fall down on their heads. Then they moved, one by one, into the night, Lucci kissing the hand of the old woman in thanks for the meal.
The barn was one of the buildings of stone, dark and chill, more a cellar than a barn. Inside was a great mass of hay and a mound of potatoes and one ugly old donkey that bit at Lucci when he tried to make friends. The boys shoved the reporters inside and made a great to-do about running the chain through the handles outside and locking them in sturdily, and when the reporters were alone, with just a chink in the roof for a weak light, they settled into the hay in silence. But Parnell stood up presently and began to pace between the donkey and the door, and at last spat out, How disgusting, really. That delivered, he sat down again.
There was another long silence, then Bern burst out, Filthy. Filthy, filthy. I would commit hari-kari. Spectacular fucking brute. Never in my life would I sleep with a Fascist.
From his corner, Frank cleared his throat. No, Bern, he said. No question. I would shoot you myself if you did it. For the principle of the thing. If there’s anything we Americans know, it’s principles. His voice in the darkness held a tremble, and Bern, who was never quite clear where she stood with him, felt a small easing inside her.
No, said Parnell. Nothing of the sort can happen, of course. Barbaric, really. So what, old chaps, do we do?
Bern said, Well, we sure as hell can’t wait for the Germans, and they will be here sometime soon. And even if this old barn weren’t a fortress we couldn’t escape, not without gasoline.
I say, said Viktor, so quietly they could barely hear him, we murder the son of a bitch in his bed. And his two whelps. And leave the mother trussed outside for the vultures.
Wonderful, wonderful, murmured Parnell, standing, then sitting again. Your fury, Viktor, it’s wonderful. In his agitation, he fumbled for a cigarette and failed to light it three times before it glowed a sudden orange in the dark.
Yes, but, said Lucci. But how is it we escape this place?
And you forget, said Frank, that there are three of them, and they all have guns.
After this, a black silence enveloped them. They sank deeply into their thoughts. Without conferring with anyone, Lucci eventually rose and made a thick bed of hay, and they lay down together for the warmth. Bern was in the middle, between Viktor and Lucci, Frank and Parnell on the outside; and when Frank began to snore and Lucci’s nose let out a sleeping squeak, Viktor turned to Bern, and put his arms around her. There, safe against his smell of body and sweat and his own clovelike undertones, she realized how unsurprised she was.
Even as she was now — unbathed, unkempt, exhausted — Bern knew she had it, that same old something. She’d had her first great love affair at sixteen, was still notorious because of it. The man in question had been three times her age, the mayor of Philadelphia, but even so they blamed her, a child. The father of a schoolmate, he had given her a ride home from school one day in his chauffeured car, and that was that. Over the year she was involved with him, his wife grew skinny and sour, his daughter turned the entire school against Bern, and her lover took her to Montreal for a week while her parents were visiting family in Newport News. She was enraptured; she felt free. She took it as her due when her lover fed her vast meals and put her in bespoke lingerie and took her to burlesque shows and, the last night, to a dinner party given by the kinds of friends who would be amused by a sixteen-year-old mistress. In that gilt-and-velvet world of closed curtains and secrets circling like electricity, there was another girl there not much older than Bern, but uncertain and clumsy with her hands, her face in painted roses like a porcelain doll.
Bern had still been vibrating with her strange new joy when the butlers set the silver domes in front of them. The lights had dimmed, and the lids were whisked away. There, on the plates, Bern saw the tiniest bird carcasses imaginable, browned and glistening with butter. There was a collective gasp: L’ortolan, a woman murmured, her voice thick with longing.
A bunting, whispered her lover, bathing her ear in his wine-warmed breath. Caught, blinded, and fattened with millet, then drowned in Armagnac and roasted whole. A delicacy, he said, and smiled, and she had never noticed until then that his eyeteeth were yellowed and extraordinarily long.
With the gravity of a religious ceremony, her tablemates flicked out fresh white napkins and veiled their faces with them. To hide, someone said, from the eyes of God. The porcelain girl held hers like a mantilla for a moment before she dropped it over her face. Bern did not: she watched, holding her breath, as each person reached for his own small bird, and made it disappear behind the veil. For a long time, at least fifteen minutes, there were the wet sounds of chewing, small bones cracking, a lady’s voluptuous moan.
A stillness came into Bern as she observed this, a chill, as if she were watching from a very distant place. Later, she would read of what the others tasted just then: the savory fat, representing God, followed by the bitter entrails, which is the suffering of Jesus, followed by the bones, which lacerated their mouths so they tasted their own blood. All three tastes commingled became the Trinity. Bern, to whom Christianity was a gorgeous myth, like literature, saw then the barbarism at the heart of all the beauty.
The bird on her own plate cooled and congealed, and she didn’t even look at it when she wrapped it in her napkin and placed it gently in her evening bag. She watched as the others, radiant with badness or shamefaced and shaky, came from behind their napkins, wiped their lips. A tiny bone — a wishbone, a foot — stuck to the carmine lipstick of some opera singer. Bern saw thin wet streaks in the porcelain girl’s cheek powder, saw she was still holding something in her mouth, and Bern gazed hard at her until the other turned away, flushing for real under her paint.
That night Bern let the tiny carcass drop from the hotel balcony, setting it free, she thought, though it dropped like a lead weight to the ground for some prowling beast to eat. Like that, she who had been perhaps too amenable, too obedient — why else could she be seduced so easily? — felt herself harden. When she returned to Philadelphia, Bern never spoke to the man again, and the story formed the foundation of the first piece of fiction she ever wrote, in a hiatus between wars. After the magazine ran it, people in Paris and New York began to call her behind her back L’ortolan. Bern Orton; Bern Ortolan. It made a certain awful sense, Bern herself could admit.