Bella... A French Life
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Authors: Marilyn Z Tomlins
Table of Contents
Bella... A French Life
by
Marilyn Z. Tomlins
Publisher
Raven Crest Books
Copyright © 2013 Marilyn Z. Tomlins.
All rights reserved
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Author’s Note
Thank you Dave Lyons of Raven Crest Books for publishing this novel.
I also say thank you to: Louise McDermott (for always listening); Charmaine Olinsky Howard (for always encouraging); Deidre Vogtmannsberger (for that charming verdict regarding the ending which brings a smile to my face); Lynda Desgris (for telling me about the
trou normand
and how one eats oysters in Normandy).
I also offer a special thank you to:
Paula Rae Gibson
who offered me the photograph of model
Allison Willow
for the cover of this novel.
Chapter One
The holidaymakers have returned home. And yesterday the wind rose. The holidaymakers going home and the wind rising mean it is the end of summer.
I do not know what I will do to pass the time this winter.
God, I hate winter.
The family to the right set off first. She’s a teacher; he is a doctor. I did not tell them that I too am a physician. At least, I used to be. I would have had to tell them something about myself. Of course, this I would not have wanted to do. They would have asked, “Gave it up?” Whatever I would have replied, would have led to another question. Even to several questions. That dreadful thing that had happened to the Brissard twin would have come back to me. Not that it has ever left me. No, it is with me like an ugly mole on one’s back; you can cover it with a frilly blouse, but sure to God, one knows it is still there.
Du Pont is the family’s surname.
“Easy to remember,” he said.
I am bound to see them again next summer because they have bought the house next door.
“Paid two hundred thousand francs for it,” she boasted.
My parents had bought this house of mine for fifteen thousand francs. The old man from whom they bought it wanted to go into an old-age home. That was in 1947. It is 1986 now.
I was four. Marius, my brother, still had to be born.
Oh dear! I have now revealed my age, and I planned not to mention anyone’s age.
My name is Bella Wolff.
I should have had a name like Françoise du Pont. This is the name of the woman who stayed next door. Her husband’s name is Martin. Martin du Pont. Nice uncomplicated names. Martin du Pont; Françoise du Pont. No one need to ask, “Where are you from?”
My father’s name was Rodolph Wolff. He was German. A German soldier. A
Wehrmacht
soldier.
My mother’s name was Henriette Desmarais. She was French. She fell in love with my father the moment she set eyes on him. He was one of the victors. She - one of the defeated.
Hardly ever did my mother speak of what had happened to her during those years of the Second World War. Of
l’occupation allemande.
What I know about it I heard from others, some of them having meant well, others having enlightened me in order to harm my mother. Harm my mother more.
As I heard, on the day the war ended, my mother’s brothers fetched her from the café where she was a waitress and dragged her to the barbershop where one of their cousins worked. They wanted the cousin to shave their sister’s head. That was what was done to French women who had slept with German soldiers. My uncles thought that by having their sister’s head shaved themselves they would save her the humiliation of having angry villagers do so. When she had not a hair left on her head, they handed her over to the angry villagers, who marched her with the other women, who had had German lovers - the
horizontal collaborators
- through the streets. My father had by then left - fled France with the other German soldiers. I have often wondered what went through my mother’s mind on that day, her lover gone and not there to protect her. To defend her.
My father was an honourable German soldier. This was what he always said to me and my brother. He said that he fought his country’s enemy justly and decently; he had nothing to do with concentration camps.
He was also an honourable man. This is what I say, because after the Germans had signed the official capitulation with the Allies and the war was over, he returned to the village and went straight to my grandfather’s house to ask for my mother’s hand. “Yes, marry the whore and afterwards you can both get out of my sight,” my grandfather told him. He marched my mother and father to the priest and the priest made them confess their sin of having indulged in sexual intercourse out of wedlock and to have produced a bastard child. I was two years old. The priest told them to go down on their knees to ask, to
beg
the Good Lord for His forgiveness. “To beg it will have to be because you have indeed sinned.”
The following Saturday afternoon the priest married my mother and my father.
My grandfather forced my mother to wear a black dress and cover her head in a black mourning veil. He himself wore a black tie. My grandmother was also dressed in black and also wore a black mourning veil. My uncles insisted that I should be present at the wedding: I, the bastard, fruit of my parents’ whoring. My Uncle Georges carried me to the church and put me down in the front pew and there I sat all alone; no one wanted to sit beside me. “She is contaminated,” Uncle Georges told the priest. I carried German germs. The germs were in my blood, in my veins and arteries, in my intestines, and in my heart and soul. I was doomed.
After the wedding my parents and I left immediately for Germany. We were welcomed by my father’s family. I cannot remember this, but my mother told me about it when the Brissard twin died. “If you think this is the end of the world, let me tell you that my people - your grandparents, uncles and aunts - spat at me on the day I married your father. That is what can be called
the end of the world
.”
We did not remain living in Germany. We came back to France. We did not go back to the village, but we came here to Normandy, here to Sainte-Marie-sur-Brecque, and to this house, Le Presbytère, which, as planned, my parents had turned into a guest house and of which I am the owner today.
Here, no one knew anything about us.
“Wolff,” the locals said on hearing our surname. “You are Jewish and German and you survived Hitler. Bravo!”
My father did not reply and neither did my mother and when my brother was born, they baptized him in the old Catholic church, Notre Dame Sainte-Marie, which stands on the village square, and no one ever called us Jews again.
-0-
Chapter Two
One of the Brissard twins name was Antony.
He would not breathe.
“Oh, one is enough,” groaned Mrs Brissard.
She made a lot of noise during the birth of her two sons: André and Antony.
“Can’t we shut her up, Doc?” Nurse Bonnec, twenty-two and only recently graduated from nursing college, whispered.
Mr Brissard, a farmer, was sitting unconcernedly in the corridor, smoking a
Gauloises
and blowing grey rings into the air. If I had not known that he was the one who put this woman in the family way, I would have thought that he had wandered into the hospital by mistake.
Antony was tiny. He was red from head to toe, and yes, all babies on birth are red from head to toe, but the redness would fade, but this had not happened as far as Antony was concerned.
“As long as his hair’s not going to remain red,” said Mr Brissard, in from the corridor.
He slapped his thick thighs with his fat hands.
I wondered how Mrs Brissard could have lain down with him; I know that if he had come anywhere near me, I would have run.
André, the first-born, took to his mother’s teat like a puppy to that of a bitch. Antony closed his tiny little mouth and when we forced his mother’s large, red, drooling nipple between his pale lips, he would not swallow.
“Do with him what we do with lambs,” advised Mr Brissard.
“And Mr Brissard, what exactly do you do with lambs?” I asked.
“Doc, we let the little bugger starve, and mark my words, when he’s hungry, he’ll take the teat.”
I struggled for two hours to feed Antony, first by holding him to his mother’s breast and next by trying to get him to drink milk from a bottle, but to no avail. He died in my arms.
“Jesus Christ, get a priest! My child can’t die a heathen!” shouted Mr Brissard, running around his wife’s bed.
He was suddenly concerned.
“Get a priest!” I passed the demand on to Nurse Bonnec.
“How do I do that and whatever for?”
“Because my child can’t die a heathen!” shouted Mr Brissard.
Saliva ran down his chin - his two chins.
“But he’s dead already,” replied Nurse Bonnec, her pretty face as grey as that of the dead twin.
“For God’s sake, Bonnec, keep your voice down, and go get a priest,” I whispered.
“Where? How?”
“Ask reception and if they do not know where to get one from, tell them, I tell them to go and find out.”
Mrs Brissard, who had earlier been so adamant that one baby was enough, lay flat on her back, her legs up in the air and spread wide as if ready to receive her husband’s sperm in order to make a replacement for the dead Antony.
“Mrs Brissard,” I said, “let us cover you.”
Nurse Bonnec, blonde curls falling over her grey face, returned.
“They do not know where to find a priest, and they ask whether we do not know that our country’s law on secularity also applies to hospitals.”
“But there’s still a chapel at the hospital. I pass it every day on my way up from the parking bay. There must be a priest in there.”
“The chapel is closed for renovation. Has been for two years.”
“And I suppose the priests are sunning themselves on the Riviera,” came from Mr Brissard.
“Don’t worry, sir, I will find you a priest,” I told him, complacently.
At the front desk I told the receptionist I needed a priest and I needed him fast.
A priest came. He was young, looked as if it had not yet been necessary for him to shave. I have no idea where the receptionist found him. He held a crucifix on a long string of wooden beads over the dead baby, said a prayer, made the sign of the cross and offered his condolences to Mr and Mrs Brissard, both of them crying.