We Meet Apart (Excerpt)

I’m lost, Sabine realizes.

She hates that. The Cork streets wind around following the River Lee, many of them unmarked, and the signs that do exist have films of dirt over them, obscuring the letters. Clouds come and go like a persistent injury, making the afternoon feel suddenly like evening and then returning a moment later to afternoon. She really has no idea where she is.

Was she supposed to veer left instead of turn left after Clancy’s Pub? She tries to get her bearings, sniffing the air like a dog. She’s angry at herself for losing her way, though at least that’s a change from the panicky fear she’s felt almost from the moment she arrived in Cork. The air smells like chimney smoke and animal dung and something tangy, like the pith of an orange.

Nearly all her belongings are gone. A young man on a bicycle swept past her on the street, grabbing her suitcase from her hand as she was leaving Customs. He wobbled away—the case was heavy with her clothes and choice pieces of her grandmother’s silver—before she could even think to run after him. And there goes my passport with it.

Stupid.

Why didn’t she put her passport back in her purse? Her suitcase was open, that’s why. After the Customs agent had finishing rifling through her things and taking what he wanted for himself, he handed Sabine’s passport back to her. Without thinking she threw it on top of her dresses and then buckled the case. She was annoyed that the agent had taken two of her grandmother’s silver teaspoons and had been focused on that. “For my trouble,” he’d said.

You mean for doing your job? she wanted to ask.

But he could have stopped her from entering Ireland altogether, or taken another teaspoon or the pair of silver candlesticks, so she kept her mouth shut. Stepping out onto the street she was distracted and disoriented. An easy mark.

“Stop!” she called as the thief cycled off, ridiculously too late and also just ridiculous, because of course he wouldn’t stop. He had no intention of stopping. For a moment Sabine thought her suitcase was too heavy and he might lose his balance and fall—oh please!—but he didn’t.

That first day she wandered around Cork trying to find the consulate (closed) or some way to locate her aunt. Aunt Maeve’s address, scribbled by Monsieur Perrin on a heavy piece of writing paper, was tucked in her suitcase’s inside pocket.

Stupid, stupid.

She’s been in Cork for almost a week now and has spent all the money that she’d had in her purse. At a bus stop she struck up a conversation with an old woman with sharp blue eyes and deeply grooved wrinkles, who told her about a cheap hotel where she might find a job washing dishes in exchange for a mattress on the storeroom floor. The woman’s accent was not at all like her father’s; it sounded like its own language, or a woman singing in a distant room. Beautiful, but hard to follow.

And I guess I didn’t follow, Sabine thinks now.

While she’s been standing there uncertainly the afternoon has fully shifted to evening. Soon it will be too dark to walk anywhere. They’ve stopped switching on streetlamps because of the threat of a German invasion; it’s all anyone can talk about. People are constantly checking the sky for planes, and she’s seen radios perched on stools in shop doorways, droning out the latest news for passersby.

She gives up on finding the cheap hotel, if it even exists, and walks around an export warehouse, and then another, looking for a way inside. She’d like to sleep under a roof if possible.

At last, a bit of luck: she finds a long, loose board in the back of the third warehouse, which she manages to pry off. At nearly seventeen, she’s only recently left girlhood behind and is still thin as a board herself. Sucking in her breath and twisting her hips, she manages to squeeze through the gap.

Inside she finds crates and crates of butter packed in ice. She has to break a crate to get to one of the tubs, and then break the tub. She eats the butter with a splintered wooden slat like an oversized spoon.

Butter and honey shall be eaten that he may know to refuse the evil and choose the good.

This, printed on a lemony square of poster paper under a picture of a fat black-and-white cow, is pasted on the side of every crate.

Is it an advertisement, Sabine wonders, or a warning? The rumpy cow makes light of the quotation, and the somber quotation makes the cow seem absurd. She arranges a nest for herself using straw and papery packing materials that smell like glue.

Hard to believe that only a month ago she’d been in a hospital in Puy-de-Dôme with her parents and Gaby, all of them trying to fight off a severe strain of typhus fever. Only Sabine, the youngest and scrawniest, had been successful. It left her body weaker, but alive, but alone.

She’s angry about that too. At first she was miserable and afraid, but after that she was angry. They left her all alone. Did they go somewhere else, like heaven? Or are they just gone? They left her, that’s all. She falls asleep stroking the smooth end of her short arm, soothing herself the way she did as a child.

Hours later the boom of guns wakes her, forcing her outside to see what’s happening. A brilliant flare, dropped from a plane, lights up the early morning sky. That’s when she sees the parachutes. White balloons, she thinks at first. Then she notices the men attached. Scores of them. Like a swarm of flies above a carcass, slowly drifting down to feed.

A man jumps out from a nearby doorway, startling her. He’s wearing a thin oat-colored sweater with the sleeves rolled up over his elbows.

“It’s begun,” he says.

Her fear returns in one quick thrust. “What’s begun?”

“The Germans, they’ve come. Take my advice and get out of the city as quick as you can.” He wags his thumb a couple of times like a hitchhiker.

“Where? To where?”

But he’s already running down the street. She watches him swerve into an alley and disappear.

The butter warehouse is one of a line of warehouses facing the water. Boat lights blink on: an armada. German planes buzz over the rooftops. The sky lights up again as more flares float down, illuminating the way for the parachutists. They’re still far away—they’ll land in fields outside the city, organize themselves, and march in—but there are legions of them, and they’re coming.

The blood rushes to Sabine’s ears. Every cell in her body seems to twitch in a different direction. She should move, do something, hide, but she can’t.

“By air and by sea,” she thinks.

She came to Ireland to be safe.

~

Maybe because the first thing she heard after the invasion began was “Get out of the city,” Sabine tries to follow this directive. But she’s hemmed in by the troops and can’t escape Cork for over a week.

The first days are chaotic. Submarines surface off the Irish coast and great ships unload Panzer tanks that roll through the narrow Cork streets, turning awkwardly through the maze of the city and chipping stone buildings they meet at corners. Glass shards litter the sidewalk from so many windows being shot out as soldiers with rifles lean out of tank hatches to fire into any crowds that form. People quickly learn to duck into doorways if they hear the rumble of metal links eating up the street. Armored vehicles follow the tanks, with helmeted soldiers pointing rifles in every direction.

Sabine sees one tank nick the side of an older block building as it turns. The wall cracks and falls, and a moment later the roof slides down over it into the street, and then the adjacent wall crumbles into its neighbor. A couple more buildings collapse, a domino effect, and a woman screams from a third-floor window as the building she’s standing in starts to fold. But there is nothing anyone can do.

Leaflets rain down from the sky, German propaganda dropped from aeroplanes: “Irish men and women: we have come to you as friends, to save you from the English.” All the government offices have closed and the Lord Mayor has fled. Bands of young people arm themselves and fight back, while others carry flour and sugar in burlap bags as they try to get out of the city.

German soldiers corral young men, pushing them into the back of trucks with the butt end of a gun across their back or head or face. No one knows where they’re going. Other soldiers line up a group of journalists and shoot them against the wall of a pub (“Watch, you must watch,” the soldiers shout to the crowd), and three boys are hanged with some ceremony in Elizabeth Fort for disrespecting the German flag. Their bodies are left hanging to rot while crows flap around them, swooping in and away.

An old woman wearing a long black cloak with an enormous hood throws loose cobblestones at the birds, trying to shoo them off. “But I can’t stand here all night, now, can I,” she complains.

Sabine helps her, hoping the old woman will offer her a place to sleep that night, but when she spots a soldier coming toward them lifting his rifle she runs.

~

By the end of the week, like everyone else, she’s searching for shops that haven’t already been completely looted, while also trying to stay as far away as possible from the soldiers. She’s drunk rainwater that collected in barrel tops and has eaten wet cabbage, discarded sausage casings, potato peelings, scraped bones, moldy bread, and the soggy ends of unidentifiable vegetables. Fear and hunger feel just about the same in her stomach.

One woman pushes a wheelbarrow full of puppies down the street and Sabine follows her for a while, curious, but the woman is walking aimlessly, crying and talking to herself. One sandwich short of a picnic, as her father would say. Sabine can hear his voice so clearly, and a lump rises in her throat. But she can’t let herself cry, she has to focus on survival. Keep moving, find food, hide.

On a narrow side street she comes upon a passel of children, maybe one family, all wearing nothing but white shifts. They glimmer in the sunlight like angels but are stick thin and they crouch in the dirt sobbing with hunger or fear.

Before she can approach them Sabine hears a tank coming and she presses herself into the nearest doorway. The street, not much more than an alley, is empty except for the children and her. The children don’t move from their spot. One of them, the smallest, starts hiccuping while she watches the tank pass. Following the tank are two jeeps, coming so close to the children that the driver could have touched the little girl’s head as he passed. When the second jeep brakes, Sabine holds her breath. A German soldier jumps out of the back with something in his hand.

A loaf of bread.

He gives it to the little girl. Then, moving heavily with all the guns and ammunition strapped to his body, he jogs back to the jeep.

The four ragged angels in their stained white robes stagger away with their prize. For a moment Sabine has the urge to follow them, to snatch the bread for herself. She’s taller than the tallest one and probably older.

No. She’s not as bad as that, not yet. She makes herself walk in the opposite direction.

~