Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant Page B

pockets. He was chewing gum. I saw he had kept his cigarettes, but I didn’t know the rule about that, either. We kept our guns trained on him. The schoolmaster ran out of my grandmother’s guesthouse—everyone ran to stare. He was excited and kept saying in English, ‘How do you do? How do you do?’ but then an officer came running, too, and he was screaming, ‘Why are you interfering? You may ask only one thing: Is he English or American.’ The teacher was glad to show off his English, and he asked, ‘Are you English or American?’ and the American seemed to move his tongue all round his mouth before he answered. He was the first foreigner any of us had ever seen, and they took him away from us. We never saw him again.”
    That seemed all there was to it, but Martin’s mouth was still open. I tried to remember more. “There was hell because we had left the gun and the other things on the ground. By the time they got out to the field, someone had stolen the parachute—probably for the cloth. We were in trouble over that, and we never got credit for having taken a prisoner. I went back to the field alone later on. I wanted to cry, for some reason—because it was over. He was from an adventure story to me. The whole war was a Karl May adventure, when I was fourteen and running around in school holidays with a gun. I found some small things in the field that had been overlooked—pills for keeping awake, pills in transparent envelopes. I had never seen that before. One envelope was called ‘motion sickness.’ It was a crime to keep anything, but I kept it anyway. I still had it when the Americans captured me, and they took it away. I had kept it because it was from another world. I would look at it and wonder. I kept it because of
The Last of the Mohicans
, because, because.”
    This was the longest story I had ever told in my life. I added, “My grandmother is dead now.” My stepfather had finally shut his mouth. He looked at my mother as if to say that she had brought him a rival in the only domain that mattered—the right to talk everyone’s ear off. My mother edged close to Willy Wehler and urged him to eat bread and cheese. She was still in the habit of wondering what the other person thought and how important he might be and how safe it was to speak. But Willy had not heard more than a sentence or two. That was plain from the way the expression on his face came slowly awake. He opened his eyes wide, as if to get sleep out of them, and—evidently imagining I had been talking about my life in France—said, “What were you paid as a prisoner?”
    I had often wondered what the first question would be once I was home. Now I had it.
    “Ha!” said my stepfather, giving the impression that he expected me to be caught out in a monstrous lie.
    “One franc forty centimes a month for working here and there on a farm,” I said. “But when I became a free worker with a druggist the official pay was three thousand francs a month, and that was what he gave me.” I paused. “And of course I was fed and housed and had no laundry bills.”
    “Did you have bedsheets?” said my mother.
    “With the druggist’s family, always. I had one sheet folded in half. It was just right for a small cot.”
    “Was it the same sheet as the kind the family had?” she said, in the hesitant way that was part of her person now.
    “They didn’t buy sheets especially for me,” I said. “I was treated fairly by the druggist, but not by the administration.”
    “Aha,” said the two older men, almost together.
    “The administration refused to pay my fare home,” I said, looking down into my glass the way I had seen the men in prison camp stare at a fixed point when they were recounting a grievance.
    “A prisoner of war has the right to be repatriated at administration expense. The administration would not pay my fare because I had stayed too long in France—but that was their mistake. I bought a ticket as far as Paris on