Page 50 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

49

One Year in Prison

Schw?bisch Hall, Germany, September 1944

Léon once thought he’d recall Marie-Madeleine in sections: her feet, her legs, her hands, her arms, her torso. Although, he admits to himself with his only smile of the month, he would probably have divided her torso into more discrete parts. Belly, breasts, the perfect prism of her sacrum. That was back when he thought the Nazis captured you, tortured you, and killed you—and that the Allies were coming and he just had to put off the killing part until they arrived. That was before he understood that to keep someone alive for months on end is the worst thing of all. Or perhaps it’s been more than months, perhaps even a year. He doesn’t really know; time is as useless a word as freedom.

He’s been officially condemned to death now. He stood in a room and argued for every jailed man in Alliance: that they were prisoners of war and couldn’t be executed. He argued beyond the point of feeling like he might faint from hunger and, at the end, when his words had been ignored and his sentence passed, he shouted, “Long live France!”

But is France still living? He doesn’t know. Knows only that his body is as skeletal as the Russian prisoners he and Marie-Madeleine were sent photographs of, that he’s more corpse than man. But humans are truly miraculous, he supposes—they endure even when nourished only on memory.

On the day after his sham trial, when he’d understood this imprisonment was infinite, he’d begun again with his recollection of her body, remembering smaller bones and precise details: the almost indiscernible difference between the contours of her left hip and her right, the fine blond hairs near her navel, the freckle beside her ear. Now it’s her eyelashes he’s reached on this slow and meticulous journey that began at the third phalanx of her littlest toe.

But today, when it’s the same freezing temperature as every other day, when he can’t see the sun or the moon or the stars, when he knows that tomorrow he’ll again see nothing, he almost cries out, What happens when I reach the air above her head?

What then?

That he will still be here, doing this, when he reaches the end of Marie-Madeleine is a kind of desolation he cannot contemplate. So he returns to the memory of the long, black sweep of her eyelashes when she falls asleep on his chest.

It’s either that or give up.