what went through Augustin’s mind?
“Yes.”
“And when one of Augustin’s torturers took out a fresh cigarette to continue the game, this same French policeman clicked his heels and dutifully stepped over and lit it for him.” He looked at me starkly. “Now
I was relieved to hear this, since it was at one with my earlier thought and gave me to understand that wherever Danforth’s tale ultimately led, it would not be to some effete notion of wounded idealism.
“You’re right,” I said confidently. “Perspective gets lost in little moral misgivings.”
“Do you think so, Paul?” Danforth asked. “I’m more of a mind to think that perspective gets lost in moral certainties.” He shrugged. “Which only means that no one was ever burned at the stake by a doubter.”
Before I could reply to this curious remark, Danforth eased back slightly, and for a moment he seemed uncertain as to how he should proceed. “So much in life comes as a surprise,” he added softly, and I knew he was once again moving down the twisty path of his tale. “Things we were so sure of. People we thought we knew so well but perhaps did not know at all.” He added nothing to this; instead, he craned his neck slightly, so that I heard the brittle grind of ancient bones.
“Old gears,” he said. “No oil can smooth them.” Then, again moving down a familiar trail, he returned to that long-ago afternoon. “She was in the woods when I got back from the bandstand,” he said.
~ * ~
Winterset, Connecticut, 1939
She was in the woods when Danforth got back to Winterset. He caught only fleeting glimpses of her as she moved through line after gently swaying line of slender trees. She was walking slowly, as he would time and again recall, dressed in a dark blouse and a long equally dark skirt that fell below her ankles. She’d flattened her wild hair beneath the Old-World babushka common to the women he’d seen toiling in the frozen fields of Eastern Europe. In that way she suddenly seemed beyond any future assimilation, a woman fiercely, almost willfully, separated from himself and that part of his country that was most like him.
And yet, it was this that inexplicably attracted him, the allure of something so foreign it called to him in the way of indecipherable languages, and that returned him to the haunting wonder of his boyhood days. She was like a city he didn’t know but wanted to, a vista he’d never seen but yearned to see. Bannion had been right. There was no shortage of courage. Every battlefield was strewn with it. But he sensed in Anna a fatalism she had long ago accepted, making her seem like a woman walking toward her future just as religious martyrs walked toward their execution sites, as if there, and only there, they would find fulfillment.
“Don’t get lost,” he said when he reached her. “These woods are deep.”
“I never wander far,” she replied.
He leaned against one of the trees and glanced back toward the house. “No more training today?”
“No, there’s more,” she answered.
She added nothing else, her silence like a cloak around her shoulders.
“You may be going earlier than we’d thought,” he told her.
She nodded, and an errant strand of hair broke free from the scarf and curled at the side of her right ear.
“No second thoughts?” he asked.
She shook her head.
With that, she turned away from him, and for a moment continued to face away, her features now in profile, her attention focused on the stone bridge in the distance.
“Do you want to walk over there?” Danforth asked.
She nodded, and together they made their way out of the grove and into the wilder woods, with its newly sprouting undergrowth, and finally to the bridge.
During the awkward silence that followed, he made a point of not looking at her.
At last he said, “What are you thinking about?”
She stared out over the stream. “Ellis Island,” she said. “The view from my window.”
“Your window?”
She nodded. “I had trachoma, so I had to stay on the island for a while. My bed was near a window. I could see the big buildings. It was like a make-believe city. Especially at night. The lights fell like fireworks, only frozen.”
“Very different from where you came from?” Danforth asked.
“Yes.”
“Why did you leave your native country?”
“To escape the killing,” Anna said.
Danforth imagined the smoldering villages of the Pale, a half a million Jews crowded into small-town ghettos where they periodically fell victim to renegades of every sort, bandits and gangs of deserters. It was a vast region through which he’d traveled with his father as a boy and through which he would pass again as a man, after the war, those same crowded villages now emptied of their Jews.
