Now, so close to Viktor’s peculiar scent, Bern felt something stirring in her again, and with her silent cool hands undid his belt. This is what she needed, a man coming alive in her arms, such comfort; and though she preferred Parnell — there was no complication in him, and he was gentle and sweet to Viktor’s large roughness — when Viktor put his hand on her waist and slid it under the band to hold her rear, she let him, eager. She loved this, and not because she ever had much pleasure from it; it was a gift, the men wanted it. Their gratitude made it good; the way that Bern was the white-hot center of another person’s world for those minutes or hours; the way for a moment it made them both forget everything but this other skin, forget the shattered souls drifting over the world, how it was cracking in half.
But Viktor put his two hands on hers and stopped them. She could see a glint in his dark eyes as he looked at her. He lifted her hands to his mouth, and kissed them both, on the palms and on the backs. Then he turned her about so that her back was facing him, and he held her gently around the chaste arc of her rib cage, his arm for her pillow, the deep beat of his heart a current, eventually drifting her off to sleep.
Frank was up earlier than everyone else because his blasted hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Hungry, too. The others useless logs in the hay, Bern cuddled with that mad Russky Viktor. In the back the donkey stinking in his own muck. The dark barn, the stench, the longing to leave made his skin crawl. When he went to the doors and peered out into the half-dark, he saw the refugees along the road. Pale as death, a huddle, waiting.
Frank remembered an assignment he took to Haiti long ago, when he was young, not the fat sad sack he was now. He remembered the stories, the fear in the people’s faces when they talked of the warlords who would steal souls and turn the emptied bodies into slaves. Those people out there moving in the dust and dawn seemed to have their very souls leached from them: war zombies. When they sensed someone awake in the cottage, they knocked, loudly; when nobody answered, two of them moved on. The last, a young man, waited for an hour until the sun rose fully, and then halfheartedly stole a chicken from the yard. The son with the bruised eye stepped from the roadside and cocked his rifle under the man’s chin. The man released the chicken and limped away.
Crazy, Frank muttered, what war makes people. Animals.
There was a rustle and he peered behind him, saw Bern sitting up with her lovely sleepy eyes, hay in her hair. Frank? she said uncertainly.
What I wouldn’t give, he said, for a fucking drink. His voice was shaking, he noticed. Bern stood, and Frank’s heart lifted as she moved toward him, but then the group in the hay began to stir and his mood darkened again. Always there were others around. Frank was no match for handsome Parnell, or Viktor, who sweated virility, or even Lucci, with his easy charm. He’d seen it, there was something going on there between Bern and the photographer. He might as well forget about it. Not that a cold bitch like Bern would be good for him, drive a cold dagger through his heart, more likely than not. There was something so phony about her.
They rose and stretched and tried to forage for food and watched the sunbeams slowly rake across the floor of the barn. Still no Nicolas, none of the sons, not even the weepy old hag, no food but the scent of some kind of ham wafting from the cottage. He couldn’t ignore Bern: just by existing she commanded attention. She needled him. There was that one time in Oslo, anyhow, when they were drunk on aquavit and everyone else had gone to bed. Frank normally resorted to whores, peroxide and bosom, but that night when the electricity shorted out, under the smoke of the cheap tallow candle there was something so dark and appealing about Bern that he put his hand on her and raised his eyebrow. She went still, and carefully raised hers back. Bern had tasted of alcohol and copper, and in the night, rumpled and sweating, he wept and confessed that for years he’d dreamed of killing himself. Usually a noose, he’d said. Sometimes a gun. Sometimes I step deliberately on a land mine.
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.