Crossing the Borders of Time by Leslie Maitland Page B

yearning for closeness that she had stifled as long as she could remember. There was only Roland and this kiss that transformed her.
    The room had grown silent, all of them gaping, then suddenly the others started to cheer. “So that’s what you learned in college!” one of the boys snickered, breaking the general tension with laughter. “Well, now it’s your turn, Pierrot,” another proposed. But for Roland and Janine, still standing together, the game was over. Janine felt her heart racing and her face glowing red as she sank back into her chair, mostly determined not to glance in Norbert’s direction. She could feel him studying her and sensed disapproval, the rules he set for his sisters not the same ones he imposed on himself. With a stab of guilt—her chief aim in the past having been pleasing Alice and Sigmar—she realized she would have to find some way of bribing her brother never to tell her parents what happened.

    Was it that kiss that later made my mother so wary that I might too soon discover how souls can meld when lips touch lips? Was it the pain of loving but losing Roland that seemed to make her so intensely protective that the significance she placed on a kiss exploded past reason or my understanding? When I reached the age of going to parties or later on dates, she would always sit waiting until I returned, and there was no disguising the time when the antique French chinoiserie clock on the wall outside her room ceased its regular tick for a moment, pregnantly hiccupped, and then chimed the hour.
    The first question Mom asked was always the same. “Did he try to kiss you good night?” she would probe in a tone of concern. I’d find her reading in bed or on the steps, smoking or filing her long, Revlonred nails, depending on whether my father had gone to sleep yet. My mother looked straight in my eyes and studied my face every time to determine whether a kiss—either empty and careless or pulsing with feeling beyond all forgetting—had affected me in some permanent fashion.
    “You can’t let someone kiss you too soon,” she would lecture, her own youthful romance tucked away in the past at those moments. “He won’t respect you. You’ll get a bad reputation because he’ll tell all his friends.…”
    What did I know at that point of my mother’s time with Roland in Mulhouse? I had heard of their regular meetings on the rue du Sauvage, sharing pastries and talking, playing volleyball and swimming in the Ill River where the young people’s sports club gathered that summer, with Hitler growling just over the border, preparing shortly to pounce upon Poland. An infrequent daytime movie, she said, some hiking, a bike ride, hours in the bookshops, poetry, talking. Much later, however, standing with her on an unseasonably chilly May day on a bridge overlooking the same Alsatian river, swollen with silt and heavy spring rain, other memories revealed why he was the one she had never forgotten. With Roland, her introduction to the opposite sex had been exceedingly tender and loving. What she found in his arms was a goal in itself—shelter from all the ugly turmoil swirling around them. As the threat of war grew closer each day, they seemed to exist, wearing blinders, in a world of their own.
    Friday, September 1, 1939, four days before Janine’s sixteenth birthday, she and Roland lay hidden in a cradle of moist brown earth on the banks of the Ill, with the tall silver grasses that served as their curtain tickling their legs. A light wind rustled the leaves of the willows, and ducks flew over their heads to land on the water and float downstream in pairs. Roland and Janine were wet from a swim, and Roland, slim and bronzed by the sun, rested his weight on one elbow as he smoothed back her hair from her brow and bent down to kiss her. His hand gently stroked her neck and her shoulders and his fingers traced the damp edge of the yellow wool bathing suit her mother had bought her, just a