Read God Speed the Night for Free Online

Town.”

5
    R ACHEL CAME AT LAST, moving among a crowd of girls on their way home from work. She walked, Marc thought, as though she too had a home to go to. He glanced around the loft. It was almost in darkness, the glassless windows boarded up. Once it had been a home of sorts, and he was pleased with his salvage. He turned back to the broken board through which he watched. When Rachel dropped from among the girls and seated herself on the parapet, Marc went down thinking how well she had learned the pattern of flight.
    The street was a clamor of voices and bicycle bells and the clopping of wooden-soled shoes. The air was tainted with gas fumes, coal smoke, and the stench of the tannery up the canal, but the haze was golden in the late sun and it gave the hovelled town a kind of beauty. Marc waited in what was now a hollow shell of stone from which everything worth removing had been taken away, grinding wheels and machinery, even the door to the office. The whole structure trembled when a heavy truck rolled along the street and chunks of mortar plopped into the murky water.
    As a transport of military trucks approached and everybody scattered to make way, Rachel ran down the ramp. Marc called out to her from the shadows. He opened his arms to her, but she came with such slow shyness that he knew they would have to begin all over again, almost from their discovery of one another.
    He showed her his acquisitions of the afternoon piece by piece. He had ventured twice into the streets, moving along the wall with a bargeman’s pole in his hand, and hiding the pole each time beneath the bridge for his return. To the matches and candles, to the bit of soap, to the bread and the cheese, to the pot on the charcoal burner, Rachel put her fingers tentatively and whispered her wonder at his having managed them.
    “You don’t have to whisper,” he whispered teasingly.
    “I feel like I’m still in the church.”
    “I know.”
    But when she stroked the flour sacking on the planked bed as she might a silken sheet, he laughed aloud.
    “What?” she said.
    “You’re like a child in a confectionary.”
    “I am.”
    He put his arm around her. “No. We cannot be children any more.”
    “Not even for a little while?”
    He shook his head and kissed her.
    “We must be gentle, Marc,” she said after a moment.
    “When was I not?”
    “I know. I didn’t mean it that way. But I’ve hurt myself somehow. It’s a little pain mostly, but I don’t want it to come back again.”
    “It won’t.” He moved away from her well aware of the sudden coldness he had not tried to keep from his voice. It was virtually a reflex with him: in three years of trying to get stubborn Jews safely out of Paris, he had learned that the timid of them used your sympathy as they might a crutch: they magnified their infirmities in proportion to the concern you showed. It was not fair, even this momentary abandonment of her, but fairness measured nothing in their lives, if indeed in the life of man. He moved to the boarded window and picked up the voluminous serge skirt he had found in the flea market. “Serge in July, monsieur?” “After July, November is not long in coming.” “Such a thought for so young a man!” “Madame, I have an ancient mother.” And so he had. Somewhere.
    “Rachel, are there scissors in the valise?”
    She found them and brought them to him. He opened the pleats and the seams and then hung the heavy cloth over the window and fastened it with a strip of molding he had torn loose in the office below. He used a brick for a hammer. When he was done the room had the darkness of night.
    “You may light the candle now,” he said.
    The flame flickered up and wavered in the draft. She cupped her hands to protect it, the light making briefly luminous her fingers. She glanced at Marc. “I do not even know what day it is.”
    “Let us say it is whatever day you want it to be.”
    And so she prayed silently with a little bow and the