"Like a snake," he would say, smiling. "Very flat and wriggling. I have eaten of the dirt, mademoiselle."
Then he would stop and cut, very awkwardly, with his left hand.
"Go on," she would prompt him. "But they had put barbed wire there. Is that it? So you could not get through?"
"With tin cans on it, and stones in the cans. I thought I had removed them all, but there was one left. So they heard me."
More cutting and a muttered French expletive. Henri was not a particularly patient cripple. And apparently there was an end to the story.
"For goodness' sake," Sara Lee would exclaim despairingly; "so they heard you! That isn't all, is it?"
"It was almost all," he would say with his boyish smile.
"And they shot at you?"
"Even better. They shot me. That was this one." And he would point to his arm.
More silence, more cutting, a gathering exasperation on Sara Lee's part.