51.

HE COULD STILL HEAR HER VOICE AS HE DROVE THE RENTED Citroën down small country roads. He meandered along the lay of the land, with no compass headings, no map check. He was flowing aimlessly through the countryside. He circled and wound through vineyards and villages. It was a soft, gray day.

Not far from a military base, he parked on a side road while trios of fighters screamed overhead, mad birds against a gray sky. He stayed a long time and watched for more.

Then, at a small café in a village twenty kilometers south of Angoulême, he studied the Michelin map of the Charentes and drank an express. He had been drinking a great deal of coffee. The strong European coffee agreed with him, sharpened him. The waiter, a small middle-aged man in horn-rimmed glasses, glanced his way.

“C’est tout? Anything more, monsieur?”

“Non, merci.”

He had to think. He couldn’t think. In his mind, Annette was the young girl again. He saw the gentle outlines of her innocent face, her spirited teasing, her panache. The horrors she described had been inflicted on that young girl. As she related her sufferings, he became the young guy she had risked her life for. He had known so little then. There were only faint whispers, averted eyes. He had been ignorant. Maybe he had never learned anything truly important until these last few days.

He was in the car again, driving.

A girl in a summer dress digging sod in the snow, hacking out stumps, shivering with ragged, hungry women. The blasts of icy wind cut through them. They chopped through ice and slogged through mud, making a bed for an airstrip. Annette and her mother, balled together like a pair of socks tunneled into each other. Crowds of shriveled women like flocks of chickens scratching in dirt.

Monique and her doll; Annette and her mother. Mother and child roulé en boule, the mother almost dead but refusing to die, the daughter refusing to abandon her mother. So many women packed together—filthy, debilitated women dragging one another on the Death March. The Russian soldiers offering a cow, in kindness.

She hadn’t told him everything. She balked at some of her memories. She spoke of the “depravity,” as if one ugly word could sum it up, but she wouldn’t say more. He had to fill in the blanks. Rape? Mutilation? She mentioned the young women at Ravensbrück who were called “rabbits.” Nazi doctors carved up these women’s legs to study gangrene. She described the Walzkommando—a giant roller for smoothing roadbeds. Women who were being punished had to pull it until they collapsed. What she wouldn’t say about the colossal chimney behind the kitchen at Ravensbrück made him cringe. She dismissed that strange burnt odor greeting new arrivals. She had not told him the worst.

He wanted to scream, hit, crush—something. His own past was splintered by her tale. It was falling into a new design. He wanted to see his long-dead mother again. He wanted to apologize to Loretta, to make up for all the slights and indiscretions, anything he had ever done wrong. He wanted to tell his children all his memories of the war, and all of Annette’s. His breathing was like the labored gasping of a rickety antique machine. He couldn’t fill his lungs. Highway markers danced in the periphery of his vision as if fractured by raindrops.

A team of red-clad bicyclists passed him, rushing and melting together like a swarm of birds. He thought of bombers forming up. As an obtuse youth, he had crashed into a strange land. And thinking only of himself, he had fled the scene, alone.

Annette.

She had saved his precious hide. And her reward was the hell of Ravensbrück and Koenigsberg.

He pulled over to the side of the road, his body shaking. He parked beside a vast vineyard. The grapevines—spindly, twisted trunks held by posts and wire supports—were disciplined like soldiers in straight rows. He examined the vines, the way their tendrils wrapped around the wires and even around themselves. Some of the tendrils waved in the air, seeking a hold.

If Mary or Albert asked him how his summer in France was going, where would he begin?

Starting up again, he was scarcely aware of the car or the road. Annette would meet him later at the train station in Angoulême, in her small blue Renault. He was returning the rental car.

She had borne two children; she had grandchildren.

She was beautiful.

He writhed in sympathetic pain. The women, crowded and cold and starved.

The sky was clearing, and clouds were drifting in from the Atlantic—white puffs, the kind of cloud that was so satisfying to see from above. An infinite, rolling field of white.

AT THE TRAIN STATION, he sat in the car, the engine off. He listened to the whistle of an approaching train. It was her idea that he return the rental and use her car, but she hadn’t insisted.

Her voice was still echoing in his mind—her fervor in telling him things she had stored up for so long, the pitch of her voice rising as a memory overcame her. She trusted him enough to tell him more than she had ever told anyone else. It was a special honor, an obligation he couldn’t calculate.

He thought about the nurses at the Polish hospital, and he pictured the piano that the Germans had stolen from someone’s home.