Amandine (28 page)

I
T IS SATURDAY MORNING, JUNE 22. THE SUN JUST RISEN, AMANDINE
and Solange are on their way to bid farewell to Philippe. Solange had made a pallet of the old picnic quilt, laid it inside a wheelbarrow, and then set Amandine upon it. Cleopatra on her barge. The way to Philippe’s grave is long, and sometimes Amandine prefers to walk, to gather wildflowers and pretty weeds and to disappear every once in a while down a narrow path between the vines, to lie for a moment on the soft black earth.

“What are you doing? The ground is still damp. You’ll need to change and all our clothes are packed.”

“I’m saying good-bye to the vines.”

“There are tons of vines in Champagne.”

“I know, but they’re not these vines.”

When they arrive, they fuss a bit over the stone, Amandine polishing it with the juice from a milkweed and a fistful of leaves. Having brought a small shovel and a pot of basil, they set about planting it in
a great lush clump in front of the stone. A jug of water from the barrow then.

“I hope he still likes basil.”

“No doubt he does.”

“Marie-Albert will come to water it. She promised.”

“Yes, she told me you’d made those arrangements.”

“Are we ever coming back?”

“I think we will. Someday. But when we do, we won’t be the same and whoever is still here won’t be the same, not even the house or the land will be the same. It’s okay to go back to a place as long as you understand that.”

“I do. That’s why he’s coming with us. Philippe.
”

“I know. Let’s start back. In an hour the bishop’s auto will be waiting …”

The convent sisters have packed bread and cheese, a small crock of duck rillettes, dried sausages, candied fruits stuffed in a jar, honeycomb in another, gingerbread, chocolate, petits beurres, two packs, each thing wrapped in brown kitchen paper or a crisp white napkin and all of it pushed down into a market string bag. Enough for days and nights.

Amandine’s
mise
, mildly eccentric, includes the red boots, her tulle skirt—once scorned, now beloved, and recently dismembered from its crocheted bodice, which had become too snug—a tartan shirtwaist, and a rose-colored sweater embroidered with darker rose fleurs-de-lis. Her hair is loose and wild. Solange wears a soft yellow cardigan closed up to the hollow in her neck with satin loops over small pearl buttons. The sweater had belonged to her mother, and when Solange was preparing her valise before departing Avise for Montpellier, Magda had brought it to her. All folded in tissue paper, Magda had laid the sweater on top of the other things in the valise, smiled, almost smiled, then turned and walked away. In all the nine years since, Solange has never worn it. With a narrow dark blue skirt—part of the
tallieur
that Janka had bought for her in Reims on her sixteenth birthday
and that fits the curve of her derriere—the soft yellow sweater is beautiful. She wears the regulation patent ballerina slippers with floppy grosgrain bows at the toes, which are part of the convent girls’ evening uniform since, twice yearly, the teaching sister in charge of such things ordered a pair for her. Solange, too, has left her hair loose, a mass of tight blond ringlets and waves falling beyond her shoulders. A few reddish marks from the fever are scattered on the tawny skin of her cheeks and neck.

Slung across her chest, Solange wears the purse in which she’s placed the black leather portfolio Fabrice had given her, into which he’d tucked the papers he had had drawn for Amandine, those and an inordinate number of francs and letters of introduction to be presented, upon need, to the curia of any parish of Mother Church in France. Solange had placed her own papers in the portfolio as well and Baptiste’s file with Amandine’s records. She opens and closes the purse to touch the portfolio, the file, closes the purse, opens it again.

They climb into the backseat of the limousine with the small purple flags mounted on the windscreen while the driver sees to the string bag and their single valise, the same one Solange had carried from the farm. How little there was to pack. Books and toys and winter clothing they left in wrapped, marked boxes for eventual posting. The driver closes the door. Amandine opens it to blow a last kiss to the sisters who huddle under the portico waving, holding their balled-up handkerchiefs to their eyes, their noses.

At the same time that Fabrice’s driver is delivering Amandine and Solange to the station, an aide knocks on his door. He is still abed.

“Entrez.”

“Your Eminence, please forgive the intrusion, but we’ve just learned, just been informed …”

“What is it? Say it.”

“France has surrendered, Your Eminence. Total capitulation, sir.”

“Take the jeep, go to the station, find them. Find Alain. Tell the authorities to use the loudspeaker. Don’t let them board that train. Go.”

Solange asks Alain, the bishop’s driver, to leave them at the main doors of the station.

“Thank you very much. No, the valise is light. And Amandine wishes to carry the string bag. We’re fine, really we are. Thank you once again.”

Solange hears the news as they enter the station. People are shouting in disbelief, weeping, running, screeching. Decorum, civility shut down like metal gates.

So we French have submitted to the
boche.
Now it will be French against French here just as Fabrice says it is in the north. Look at them, how they pummel one another to get out, to get in, to be first. Step on Grand-mère’s throat, the French would
.

She holds Amandine tighter. She tells her, “Look at me. No matter what, you must never let go of this hand. Never. Not for a half second. Do you understand?

“The eight-forty-nine to Nîmes. Track seventeen. Do you see it up there? The fourth one down. Let’s go.” She takes the string bag from Amandine, settles it on her shoulder, pats the valise, the purse, holds up Amandine’s hand as if in victory.

“Let’s go.”

W
E NEVER ARRIVED IN NÎMES THAT DAY. AS IT WAS SCHEDULED TO
, our train stopped at the station in Baillargues but, once passengers had descended and others had stepped up into the cars, it was announced that the train would go no farther. To each one who waited in line to speak to the ticket agent, his response was as if from a script. “Due to the ‘circumstances,’ schedules are being rearranged. Come back tomorrow, there’s bound to be something. No, no lodgings here, but perhaps in the next village. A few kilometers down the D-3. The A-11. Perhaps there.”

Along with three others of the stranded, Amandine and I walked to that next village. A cluster of blue-painted houses with swags of blown red roses arching the doors, it hugged the verge of the road. No bar, no hotel, no sign of welcome, or of life for that matter. Shaking their heads, speaking in quiet commiseration, our companions bode us adieu, turned and walked, single file, back toward Baillargues, leaving Amandine and me standing alone in the gold silence of noon. Not a single starched Flemish lace curtain parted.

“Wait here,” I told Amandine, setting down the valise. I knocked at the first house, waited and walked on to the second, Amandine, pulling the valise along behind her, following my progress. I might well have been knocking on the lids of coffins. The fourth door opened, if only a crack.

“What is it you want?”

“The trains, madame, we were on our way to Nîmes but … A place to stay, madame, for my little girl and me. I can pay.”

“Not nearly enough, I would think. Go away.”

A road sign a few meters from where we stood pointed to Nîmes. Our lodestone, our north. Several smaller signs were posted under it. Places on the way.

“Shall we walk a little farther, my love, or shall we look for somewhere to set out a picnic? Or would you …?”

How thin my voice sounded, even to me. Where had she gone, that arrogant self of a few hours ago? Buttoning up my pretty sweater, brushing out my hair. The bishop’s chauffeur waiting in the drive, shining the fenders of the wide black sedan. I’d thought I was heroic, I’d thought I was grand.
The war is somewhere else, the war is something else. We’ll be fine. Two days and we’ll be home. God, make haste to help me
.

A breeze blew hot and damp and, under the shivering blossoms of chestnut trees, we walked on the road to Nîmes. Resting in the shade of roadside woods, eating cheese and bread and sipping water cupped in our hands from a faucet on the side of a barn, our pace was slow and somehow ghostly. No rhythms and rituals, no bells, no clack of the castanets, no trainman to tell us we’d arrived and could depart again on track number … Adrift. Terrifying. Yet not altogether so. The second day, the third.

At the station in Sommières.

“Ah, to Nîmes, mademoiselle? Left an hour ago. Tomorrow. Perhaps tomorrow.”

Whenever I thought of turning back, the not-altogether-terrified part of me pleaded,
Just one more day. Amandine is doing well. There is still gingerbread in the sack. If we can get to a larger town with a
better train line …
But then, when an explosion—unrelated to war, we were assured—destroyed two cars of a train a few kilometers down the track from where we waited to board it in Alès, it seemed wiser to walk, and that’s what we did through much of the summer.

We saw a shepherd wielding a stick and a black dog, pirouetting, inflict order upon a disheveled band of sheep. As though there was no war. Pink clouds moved in a pewter sky, and a dark-eyed woman sat in a cart with no wheels, peeling an apple with a green-handled knife. As though there was no war at all. We saw a barn door swung open, and we looked inside, smelled hay fresh from the sun and sank our tired bodies into its comfort, heaped it over us like a quilt, slept in the solace of some nightbird’s whirring.
So where is the war?
In the hot reddish blaze of a sinking sun we saw an ox draw a plow through a rusty-earthed field, a farmer walking beside it speaking tenderly to the beast. The man drank, sometimes, from a bottle strapped across his chest. I asked myself again,
Where is this war? Don’t you see how the plowing goes on so the wheat will grow? And when it’s high there’ll be someone to cut it down and someone to beat it and take it to the mill and the miller will drive the wheat to the baker and the baker and his son will make it into bread so that the baker’s girl, with her broad, hard thighs under her blue linen dress, will pedal the tall narrow wagon stacked with baskets of still warm loaves and, pulling the rope on her bell, chant at the top of her voice:
“Le pain est arrivé. Le bon pain est arrivé.”
If all that can happen, how can there be a war?

And later, when we came to another field where the wheat was already grown, we walked across it, seeing lights in a farmhouse on the far side. With our hands we made a path through the high stalks, which were already bent here and there by a corpse. Bodies laid down, shot down, past pain. We’d found the war.

We slept wherever we could. On the floor of a town hall or a church, in barns and in automobiles propped up on blocks in old garages. We managed. As for food, we did well enough. On the fourth or perhaps
it was the fifth day, when we’d finally made our way to Nîmes, a grocer there asked me, “Your ration books, mademoiselle?”