The World at Night

“Jean-Claude, let me in.” Gabriella, with a small suitcase.

He hurried down the stairs, the marble steps cold on his feet because he was wearing only socks. He unlocked the door and pushed it open. He heard a stirring from the concierge apartment, called out, “It’s just a friend, Madame Fitou.”

Back in the apartment he poured a glass of red wine and set out some bread and blackcurrant jam. Gabriella was exhausted and pale, a smudge on the elbow of her coat. “It happened on one of the trains,” she told him. “Really I can’t remember which one it was. I had a first-class compartment, Milan to Turin, then I took the night train to Geneva, eventually the Dijon/Paris express. Then I just barely managed to catch the last Metro from the Gare de Lyon.”

“Gabriella, why?”

“I told my husband I was coming up here to see an old girlfriend- as far as anybody knows I arrive tomorrow morning, eight-thirty, on the train from Milan. Do you see what I did?”

“Yes.”

“Jean-Claude, could I have a cigarette?”

He lit it for her. She took a deep breath and sat back in the chair. “I had to see you,” she said.

This was not the same Gabriella. She’d changed the way she looked-had her hair cut short, then set. She wore three rings: a diamond, a wide gold wedding band with filigree, and an antique, a dull green stone in a worn silver setting, ancient, a family treasure. Clearly she had a new life.

Their eyes met, a look only possible between people who’ve made love, then she looked away. No, he thought, it isn’t that. They’d had one night together, it had been intimate, very intimate. He had wanted her-long legs, pure face-for months, but she turned out not to be someone who lost herself, or maybe just not his to excite. As for her, he’d realized later that she’d been in love with him, the real thing. So, in the end, neither one got what they wanted.

She sighed, met his eyes again, ran a hand through her hair. “I’m married now,” she said softly.

“Gabriella, are you in trouble?”

She shook her head. “No,” she said, “it’s you.”

“Me?”

“Yes. One morning last week, after my husband left for work, two men came to the house. One was from the security service, in Rome, and the other was German. Educated, soft-spoken, reasonably good Italian. The German asked the questions-first about my time in Paris, then about you. ‘Please, do not worry yourself, signora, this is simply routine, just a few things we need to know.’ He asked about your politics, how did you vote, did you belong to a political party. It was very thorough, carefully done. They knew a great deal about your business, about the films you’d made, about Marie-Claire and your friends. He asked what sorts of foreigners did you know. Did you travel abroad? Often? Where to?

“I made a great show of trying to be helpful, but I tried to persuade them that most of my work was typing letters and filing and answering the telephone. I just didn’t know much about your personal life. They seemed to accept that. ‘And signora, please, if it’s all the same to you, we’d rather he didn’t know we’d been around asking questions.’ That was a threat. The Italian looked at me a certain way. Not brutal, but it could not be misunderstood.”

“But you came here anyhow.”

She shrugged. “Well, that was the only way. You can’t say anything on the phone, they read your mail. We’ve had Mussolini and the fascisti since 1922, so we do what we have to do.”

“Not everybody,” he said.

“Well, no, there are always-you learn who they are.”

They talked for a long time, closer than they’d ever been. Trains and borders, special permits, passports. It wasn’t about resistance, it was about secret police and day-to-day life. What had it been, he thought, since the May night they’d spent together-ten months? Back then, this gossip would have been about books, or vacations. “At the line for the railroad controls,” she said, “they always have somebody watching to see who decides to turn back.”

She yawned, he took her by the hand into the bedroom. She washed up, changed into silk pajamas, slid under the blankets. “Talk to me a minute more,” she said. He turned the lights off, sat on the floor and leaned back against the bed. They kept their voices low in the darkness. “It is very strange at home now,” she told him. “The Milanese don’t believe they live in Italy. You mention Mussolini and they look to heaven-yet one more of life’s afflictions that has to be tolerated. If you say ‘what if we are bombed?’ they become indignant. What, here, in Milan? Are you crazy?”

It felt good to talk to a friend, he thought, never better than when your enemies are gathering. It felt good to conspire. “It’s hard to imagine-” he said, then stopped. Above him, a gentle snore. Good night, Gabriella. Ration coupons-did he have enough to take her for coffee in the morning? Yes, he would have a demitasse, it would just work out.

Really, he thought, who was this Guske to tell him what to do with his life? How did it happen that some German sat in an office and told Jean Casson whether or not he could have a love affair with a woman who lived in Lyons?

THE NIGHT VISITOR

24 April, 1941.

4:20 A.M., the wind sighing across the fields, the river white where it shoaled over the gravel islands. Jean Casson lay on his stomach at the top of a low hill, wrapped up in overcoat and muffler, dark hat worn at an angle, a small valise by his side. The damp from the wet earth chilled him to the bone but there was nothing he could do about it. At the foot of the hill, standing at the edge of the river, two border guards, the last of the waning moonlight a pale glow on their helmets, rifles slung over their shoulders. They were sharing a cigarette and talking in low voices, the rough German sounds, the sch and kuh, drifting up the hillside.

The boy lying next to him, called Andre, was fifteen, and it was his job to guide Casson across a branch of the river Allier into the Zone Non-Occupee. Andre stared intensely, angrily, at the sales Boches below him. These were his hills, this was his stream, these teenagers below him-nineteen or so-were intruders, and he would, in time, settle with them. By his side, his brown-and-white Tervueren shepherd waited patiently-Tempete he called her, Storm-her breath steaming as she panted in the icy morning air.

These were in fact his hills-or would be. They belonged to his family, the de Malincourts, resident since the fifteenth century in a rundown chateau just outside the village of Lancy. He raised his hand a few inches, a signal to Casson: be patient, I know these two, they chatter like market ladies but they will, eventually, resume their rounds. Casson gritted his teeth as the wet grass crushed beneath him slowly soaked his clothing. Had they left the chateau as planned, at two in the morning, this would not have happened.

But it was the same old story. He was scheduled to go across with another man, a cattle-dealer from Nevers who couldn’t or wouldn’t get a permit to enter the Vichy zone. The cattle-dealer arrived forty minutes late, carrying a bottle of cognac that he insisted on opening and sharing with various de Malincourts who had chosen to remain awake in honor of the evening crossing-the father, an aunt, a cousin and the local doctor, if Casson remembered correctly. Everybody had some cognac, the fire burned low, then, at 3:20, a telephone call. It was the cattle- dealer’s wife, he’d received a message at his house in Nevers and he didn’t have to go across the line after all. That left Casson and Andre to make the crossing later than they should have, almost dawn, and that invited tragedy.

The sentries had themselves a final laugh, then parted, heading east and west along the stream. The dog made a faint sound, deep in her throat-sentries leaving. No, Casson told himself, it wasn’t possible. But then, he thought, dogs understand war, its memory lived in them, and this one’s traditional business was herding stock to safety. A small cold wind, just enough to lift the soft hair on the dog’s neck, made Casson shiver. He’d been offered an oilskin, hanging amid shotguns and fishing baskets and rubber boots in the gunroom of