Amour Provence (13 page)

She spent her days alone, walking around the glass-enclosed terrace that, like a cuckoo's nest, jutted out from the top floor of the building. To the south was a view of the town's cathedral, whose monumental Corinthian capitals, now used as cornerstones, had once decorated a Roman temple. Nearby spread a plowed field as yet unplanted. On the opposite side was a parking lot, and to the right of that, a garage run by a group of young mechanics where there was generally quite a bit of coming and going. Euphémie's face was so often poised behind the glass enclosure that when one
of the men spotted her he would salute, holding up a wrench or waving a grease-covered hand. When there were church services, she peered down into the crowd hoping to recognize someone, anyone, who might have the wherewithal to come up and explain to the doctors and nurses that Euphémie was a healthy woman in body and in mind, and should be immediately released! Round and round she went, pretending she was climbing up rocky roads to high crests, and she imagined the familiar view over the patchwork valley of orchards and vineyards and the sound of the ubiquitous magpies that populated the environs of the small village of Serret. Even during the war, though it was too dangerous to take mountain walks, she had still tried to capture some time to herself in the natural world she loved so well.

Euphémie placed her withered hands flat against the windowsill. In the past, whenever people had asked about her experiences under the occupation, she always said the German soldiers had been perfectly respectful even though they had taken over the small château that belonged to her family, the d'Estangs. During wakeful nights in her room in the rest home, she'd come to realize how elaborate a barricade she'd created to prevent any thoughts of the Nazis, who had felt free to run their cold eyes over her, or of the American pilot who might possibly have become a friend. And then there was Lapin, noble Lapin, whose real name was Charles-Henri Le Lièvre, an aristocratic name, though he was the motherless son of a strange man who made a meager living as a farmer. Once a classmate, Lapin had fallen on hard times, but by the end of the war he had been transformed in her eyes from a lowly
paysan
into a hero. Afterward, she'd
hardly acknowledged him, passing him in the cobbled streets with only a nod. She could face nothing concerning those chilling days and there was no looking back. Thus silence became a habit. She couldn't risk even a short conversation with Lapin because that precious sealed coffer of memory might snap open like Pandora's box and she'd be forced to face what had happened in its dreadful totality.

As Euphémie stood there that night she thought that someone as old as she should be capable of mustering the courage to stare the past in the face without flinching. Don't people remember everything before they die, flashes of a whole life appearing like photographs in just a few seconds? In the darkness, her body shook in a spasm of anxiety (or was it elation?) as she breathed in and told herself that there was no longer anything to fear.

At fifteen, Euphémie was an early riser, up before dawn to collect eggs from the brown and yellow hens kept in the stone barn at the back of their château. That morning, she emerged from the warren of downstairs rooms where she and her father and their cook, Agnes, now resided, the Nazi officers having commandeered the better quarters, including the reception rooms and master bedrooms on the upper floors. She crept cautiously outside through the pantry door, her arms folded across her chest, though it wasn't cold. The walled-in courtyard between the château and the grange, once filled with geraniums in orange
terre cuite
pots and roses that climbed in a tangled riot over whitewashed trellises, had been transformed into a dank
and uninviting place. Anything green and growing had long ago been stomped away. Most of the flagstones were displaced and the pebbled path crushed into the mud, creating soggy gullies where jeeps and other vehicles drove incessantly in and out of what had become a military depot.

At dawn, Euphémie had been awakened by the thunder of antiaircraft artillery. A new troop of German soldiers had recently arrived to replace the first wave of officers, who, though they had been coldly efficient and not particularly friendly, had at least evinced a semblance of manners. That group had nicknamed her Mademoiselle Poulet, appreciative of the fresh eggs she delivered each morning for breakfast. But the latest arrivals lacked even a thin veneer of civilization. They entered the château scowling and shouting, obviously from a much lower rank of the military, invading her home as if they were on a search-and-destroy mission. One of the soldiers, a teenager not much older than she, had approached her in the wood-paneled entryway, his glittering eyes so pale that they looked like raw egg whites in a pan. She'd hunched her shoulders, embarrassed that despite her painful thinness, her rounded chest was suddenly becoming more visible, soft and vulnerable like the plump breasts of her hens. His bold gaze forced her to turn her back to him, hoping to hide the fact that she was no longer a child.

That morning when she dressed, she'd wrapped a strip of cotton sheeting tightly around her chest and pinned it at the back to disguise her figure. She still had the round freckled face of a girl, but she had been aware for some time that even a touch of lipstick would cause a risky transformation. It was safer to camouflage herself than to look like what she was, a person rushing unstoppably to womanhood.

Outside in the crepuscular shadow, the courtyard smelled of mud and chicken droppings. Euphémie felt that she was safe, or at least less likely to be interfered with by anyone at such an early hour. Her father had spent the night at the town hall, where he presided as mayor of their village. She knew that he found it increasingly important to spend long hours at the
mairie
so that he might have a chance of mitigating any trouble that occurred between the occupiers and any French person who ran afoul of them. Excepting the soldiers, it was only Euphémie and Agnes in the house. She picked up the tin pan of kitchen scraps, mostly rutabaga, potato peelings, and the crumble of old biscuits that Agnes always left for her on the sideboard for the chickens. Agnes said that here in the country they didn't have it as bad as the Parisians, who were literally starving to death. That's the way it had been in the first war too. Here people still had their
potagers
of leeks and cabbage, their animals, and if they were lucky, a cache of preserves and legumes stored in the dark cellars beneath their homes.

Euphémie scattered the feed onto the ground and then entered the barn, where she heard the mild avian cheeping of sleepy birds in their roosts that quickly changed to squawks when they became aware of her presence and flocked to the wire doorway of the cage. She could make them out in the dim light of the back window, where the glass panes had already turned from charcoal to pale violet. When she lifted the wooden hasp, the birds gushed forth into the yard. Momo, her biggest and best layer, was at the head of the flock. And then, as she closed the henhouse and was about to pass back into the courtyard, she sensed a disturbance. Through the half-open door, Euphémie saw a dun-colored uniform and dark boots kicking
and tramping over the birds. When the soldier spun around, she recognized the ice-cold eyes that stared at her in challenge.

In a flash, he sank his bayonet into one of the hens. Euphémie clamped her hands over her mouth to stifle a scream, and with a laugh the soldier cut off the bird's head lickety-split and threw it to the ground. To her horror the other birds surrounded the head in a frenzy of pecking while the soldier twirled the carcass over his head, splattering blood as if it were a game.

Forgetting her usual timidity, Euphémie leaped through the doorway and tore what was left of her hen from the soldier's hands. Momo, her favorite! When she ran toward the pantry door, the soldier jammed the butt of his rifle against her back as if warning her to be aware that he had ownership of the bird, or perhaps something more.

Euphémie ground her teeth so she wouldn't cry. But when she entered the kitchen and saw Agnes with her soft cheeks and swirl of white hair knotted at the top of her head, she couldn't help but let out a sob. Agnes had worked for her family since Euphémie's father was a boy, and Euphémie had come to rely on her for nearly everything since her mother, Huguette, had died of tuberculosis at the beginning of the war.

“Oh, mon Dieu!”
A look of anger and pain crossed Agnes's face. She took the hen and laid it carefully on the sideboard before hugging Euphémie to her. “Filthy barbarians!” she said. Then she sighed and softly rocked Euphémie until a sudden blast from a bullhorn began to issue incomprehensible orders in a loud roar. They heard running soldiers and the revving of trucks. After a few minutes the sounds ebbed as the vehicles departed and the engines faded to a distant drone.

“Those were American planes that flew over so early, did you hear? That's making the Boche nervous!” Agnes used the rude term for Germans. She lifted Euphémie's chin with two fingers and stated with certainty, “We'll soon be quit of them.”

“Is
Papa
home?“ Euphémie asked.

“Not yet.”

As usual, her father would be left to deal as best he could with the occupiers, who behaved like angry hornets when things did not go right. The month before, when a German truck was blown up in a neighboring village, three innocent villagers had been hung in reprisal, their bodies left at the end of the ropes for days until the priest, whose brother was among the dead, had arranged to cut them down. Euphémie hoped nothing like that would ever happen in Serret. Her father might easily be blamed for the smallest thing, and be made to suffer the consequences. It was like having a poisonous viper loose in the house—a constant anxiety that sapped the pleasure from everything.

Outside, there were no sounds except for the clucking of hens oblivious to the violence that had so recently occurred in their midst. Euphémie clenched her hands, imagining being strong enough to wring the life out of that soldier, his pale eyes blearing into gray obliteration. She'd seen people murdered and knew how someone looked when they'd suffered a violent death. She shook her head, aware that anger and desire for revenge could engender savagery itself. Instead, she called up thoughts of the still place by the stream that she hadn't visited in weeks, and she skirted the barn, carefully looking around to be sure there was no one near. Beyond lay the field where Agnes's neat garden plot had been planted with the seeds she'd
conserved from the previous summer. A bit farther on was the ravine filled with a steady flow of water that trickled down from mountain streams. Several immense cypresses towered at the edge. She knew the main source of the water, a place in the mountains called La Fontaine des Fées, where a spring gushed from a rocky outcropping. From there the waters descended through underground channels, filling cisterns and basins used for livestock, eventually tumbling from a precipice and forming the deep ravine behind their château. Euphémie placed her feet carefully on the ancient steps that jutted like an old man's displaced teeth, remnants of a stairway constructed by peasants in medieval times.

It was a warm Provençal morning with the sun already casting its splendid rays. She knew that a marten lived in the cypress tree just above her, but she hadn't seen him in a long while, as he only ventured out at dusk and she no longer dared visit the stream then. Blue and yellow wildflowers listed softly back and forth at the stream's edge. She bent to follow a tunneled path of tangled undergrowth that led to a mossy area obscured from view by low-hanging branches. The silvery water gave off a smell of iced apples. Above her the dappled tops of trees shuddered in the light breeze as the sun crested the rocky crags of the mountain. Euphémie sat down beside the undulating bank of moss that thrust up a host of starlike flowers on hard little stalks. She flattened her hand and let the spiky buds run across her palm. Warm air coursed over her throat and the swift-flowing water sounded the same as the wind passing through the trees. The strip of fabric that bound her chest pressed uncomfortably and she shifted it off her bosom and then made a little pillow out of fresh grass. When
she eased herself down, everything felt perfect, the warmth of the air, the occasional silky scrape of bird wing, the aroma of the fresh-pulled grass beneath her head. But she knew better than to hope it would last. A regret at what the war had done burned within her. It had taken her mother first and then made them all prisoners, definitively ending Euphémie's free wanderings up into mountains where dark woods harbored deer and wild boar that had once ventured forth from their secret hollows, showing no fear.

A movement in the leaves across the way abruptly broke her reverie. She jerked up and quickly adjusted the binding cotton band around her. She had a good eye, easily spotting birds and other animals even at considerable distance. There had been barely a flicker, but she knew for certain something was there.