St Péronne
October 1916
I was dreaming of food. Crisp baguettes,
the flesh of the bread a virginal white, still steaming from the oven, and ripe cheese,
its borders creeping towards the edge of the plate. Grapes and plums, stacked high in
bowls, dusky and fragrant, their scent filling the air. I was about to reach out and
take one, when my sister stopped me. ‘Get off,’ I murmured. ‘I’m
hungry.’
‘Sophie. Wake up.’
I could taste that cheese. I was going to
have a mouthful of Reblochon, smear it on a hunk of that warm bread, then pop a grape
into my mouth. I could already taste the intense sweetness, smell the rich aroma.
But there it was, my sister’s hand on
my wrist, stopping me. The plates were disappearing, the scents fading. I reached out to
them but they began to pop, like soap bubbles.
‘Sophie.’
‘
What?
’
‘They have Aurélien!’
I turned on to my side and blinked. My
sister was wearing a cotton bonnet, as I was, to keep warm. Her face, even in the feeble
light of her candle, was leached
of colour, her eyes wide with shock.
‘They have Aurélien. Downstairs.’
My mind began to clear. From below us came
the sound of men shouting, their voices bouncing off the stone courtyard, the hens
squawking in their coop. In the thick dark, the air vibrated with some terrible purpose.
I sat upright in bed, dragging my gown around me, struggling to light the candle on my
bedside table.
I stumbled past her to the window and stared
down into the courtyard at the soldiers, illuminated by the headlights of their vehicle,
and my younger brother, his arms around his head, trying to avoid the rifle butts that
landed blows on him.
‘What’s happening?’
‘They know about the pig.’
‘What?’
‘Monsieur Suel must have informed on
us. I heard them shouting from my room. They say they’ll take Aurélien if he
doesn’t tell them where it is.’
‘He will say nothing,’ I
said.
We flinched as we heard our brother cry out.
I hardly recognized my sister then: she looked twenty years older than her twenty-four
years. I knew her fear was mirrored in my own face. This was what we had dreaded.
‘They have a
Kommandant
with
them. If they find it,’ Hélène whispered, her voice cracking with panic,
‘they’ll arrest us all. You know what took place in Arras. They’ll
make an example of us. What will happen to the children?’
My mind raced, fear that my brother might
speak out making me stupid. I wrapped a shawl around my
shoulders and
tiptoed to the window, peering out at the courtyard. The presence of a
Kommandant
suggested these were not just drunken soldiers looking to take
out their frustrations with a few threats and knocks: we were in trouble. His presence
meant we had committed a crime that should be taken seriously.
‘They will find it, Sophie. It will
take them minutes. And then …’ Hélène’s voice rose, lifted by
panic.
My thoughts turned black. I closed my eyes.
And then I opened them. ‘Go downstairs,’ I said. ‘Plead ignorance. Ask
him what Aurélien has done wrong. Talk to him, distract him. Just give me some time
before they come into the house.’
‘What are you going to do?’
I gripped my sister’s arm. ‘Go.
But tell them nothing, you understand? Deny
everything
.’
My sister hesitated, then ran towards the
corridor, her nightgown billowing behind her. I’m not sure I had ever felt as
alone as I did in those few seconds, fear gripping my throat and the weight of my
family’s fate upon me. I ran into Father’s study and scrabbled in the
drawers of the great desk, hurling its contents – old pens, scraps of paper, pieces from
broken clocks and ancient bills – on to the floor, thanking God when I finally found
what I was searching for. Then I ran downstairs, opened the cellar door and skipped down
the cold stone stairs, so sure-footed now in the dark that I barely needed the
fluttering glow of the candle. I lifted the heavy latch to the back cellar, which had
once been stacked to the roof with beer kegs and good wine, slid one of the empty
barrels aside and opened the door of the old cast-iron bread oven.
The piglet, still only half grown, blinked
sleepily. It lifted itself to its feet, peered out at me from its bed of straw and
grunted. Surely I’ve told you about the pig? We liberated it during the
requisition of Monsieur Girard’s farm. Like a gift from God, it had strayed in the
chaos, meandering away from the piglets being loaded into the back of a German truck and
was swiftly swallowed by the thick skirts of Grandma Poilâne. We’ve been fattening
it on acorns and scraps for weeks, in the hope of raising it to a size great enough for
us all to have some meat. The thought of that crisp skin, that moist pork, has kept the
inhabitants of Le Coq Rouge going for the past month.
Outside I heard my brother yelp again, then
my sister’s voice, rapid and urgent, cut short by the harsh tones of a German
officer. The pig looked at me with intelligent, understanding eyes, as if it already
knew its fate.
‘I’m so sorry,
mon
petit
,’ I whispered, ‘but this really is the only way.’ And I
brought down my hand.
I was outside in a matter of moments. I had
woken Mimi, telling her only that she must come but to stay silent – the child has seen
so much these last months that she obeys without question. She glanced up at me holding
her baby brother, slid out of bed and placed a hand in mine.
The air was sharp with the approach of
winter, the smell of woodsmoke lingering in the air from our brief fire earlier in the
evening. I saw the
Kommandant
through the stone archway of the back door and
hesitated. It was not Herr Becker, whom we knew and despised. This was a slimmer man,
clean-shaven, impassive. Even in the dark I could see intelligence, not brutish
ignorance, in his face, which made me afraid.
This new
Kommandant
was gazing
speculatively up at our windows, perhaps considering whether this building might provide
a more suitable billet than the Fourrier farm, where senior German officers slept. I
suspect he knew that our elevated aspect would give him a vantage-point across the town.
There were stables for horses and ten bedrooms, from the days when our home was the
town’s thriving hotel.
Hélène was on the cobbles,
shielding Aurélien with her arms.
One of his men had raised his rifle, but the
Kommandant
lifted his hand. ‘Stand up,’ he ordered them.
Hélène scrambled backwards, away from him. I glimpsed her face, taut with
fear.
I felt Mimi’s hand tighten round mine
as she saw her mother, and I gave hers a squeeze, even though my heart was in my mouth.
And I strode out. ‘What, in God’s name, is going on?’ My voice rang
out in the yard.
The
Kommandant
glanced towards me,
surprised by my tone: a young woman walking through the arched entrance to the farmyard,
a thumb-sucking child at her skirts, another swaddled and clutched to her chest. My
night bonnet sat slightly askew, my white cotton nightgown so worn now that it barely
registered as fabric against my skin. I prayed that he could not hear the almost audible
thumping of my heart.
I addressed him directly: ‘And for
what supposed misdemeanour have your men come to punish us now?’
I guessed he had not heard a woman speak to
him in this way since his last leave home. The silence that fell upon the courtyard was
steeped in shock. My brother and sister, on the ground, twisted round, the better to see
me,
only too aware of where such insubordination might leave us
all.
‘You are?’
‘Madame Lefèvre.’
I could see he was checking for the presence
of my wedding ring. He needn’t have bothered: like most women in our area, I had
long since sold it for food.
‘Madame. We have information that you
are harbouring illegal livestock.’ His French was passable, suggesting previous
postings in the occupied territory, his voice calm. This was not a man who felt
threatened by the unexpected.
‘Livestock?’
‘A reliable source tells us that you
are keeping a pig on the premises. You will be aware that, under the directive, the
penalty for withholding livestock from the administration is imprisonment.’
I held his gaze. ‘And I know exactly
who would inform you of such a thing. It’s Monsieur Suel,
non
?’ My
cheeks were flushed with colour; my hair, twisted into a long plait that hung over my
shoulder, felt electrified. It prickled at the nape of my neck.
The
Kommandant
turned to one of his
minions. The man’s glance sideways told him this was true.
‘Monsieur Suel, Herr Kommandant, comes
here at least twice a month attempting to persuade us that in the absence of our
husbands we are in need of his particular brand of comfort. Because we have chosen not
to avail ourselves of his supposed kindness, he repays us with rumours and a threat to
our lives.’
‘The authorities would not act unless
the source were credible.’
‘I would argue, Herr Kommandant, that
this visit suggests otherwise.’
The look he gave me was impenetrable. He
turned on his heel and walked towards the house door. I followed him, half tripping over
my skirts in my attempt to keep up. I knew the mere act of speaking so boldly to him
might be considered a crime. And yet, at that moment, I was no longer afraid.
‘Look at us, Kommandant. Do we look as
though we are feasting on beef, on roast lamb, on fillet of pork?’ He turned, his
eyes flicking towards my bony wrists, just visible at the sleeves of my gown. I had lost
two inches from my waist in the last year alone. ‘Are we grotesquely plump with
the bounty of our hotel? We have three hens left of two dozen. Three hens that we have
the pleasure of keeping and feeding so that your men might take the eggs. We, meanwhile,
live on what the German authorities deem to be a diet – decreasing rations of meat and
flour, and bread made from grit and bran so poor we would not use it to feed
livestock.’
He was in the back hallway, his heels
echoing on the flagstones. He hesitated, then walked through to the bar and barked an
order. A soldier appeared from nowhere and handed him a lamp.
‘We have no milk to feed our babies,
our children weep with hunger, we become ill from lack of nutrition. And still you come
here in the middle of the night to terrify two women and brutalize an innocent boy, to
beat us and threaten us, because you heard a rumour from an immoral man that we were
feasting
?’
My hands were shaking. He saw the baby
squirm, and I
realized I was so tense that I was holding it too
tightly. I stepped back, adjusted the shawl, crooned to it. Then I lifted my head. I
could not hide the bitterness and anger in my voice.
‘Search our home, then, Kommandant.
Turn it upside down and destroy what little has not already been destroyed. Search all
the outbuildings too, those that your men have not already stripped for their own wants.
When you find this mythical pig, I hope your men dine well on it.’
I held his gaze for just a moment longer
than he might have expected. Through the window I could make out my sister wiping
Aurélien’s wounds with her skirts, trying to stem the blood. Three German
soldiers stood over them.
My eyes were used to the dark now, and I saw
that the
Kommandant
was wrong-footed. His men, their eyes uncertain, were
waiting for him to give the orders. He could instruct them to strip our house to the
beams and arrest us all to pay for my extraordinary outburst. But I knew he was thinking
of Suel, whether he might have been misled. He did not look the kind of man to relish
the possibility of being seen to be wrong.
When Édouard and I used to play poker,
he had laughed and said I was an impossible opponent as my face never revealed my true
feelings. I told myself to remember those words now: this was the most important game I
would ever play. We stared at each other, the
Kommandant
and I. I felt,
briefly, the whole world still around us: I could hear the distant rumble of the guns at
the Front, my sister’s coughing, the scrabbling of our poor, scrawny hens
disturbed in their coop. It faded until just he and I faced
one
another, each gambling on the truth. I swear I could hear my very heart beating.
‘What is this?’
‘What?’
He held up the lamp, and it was dimly
illuminated in pale gold light: the portrait Édouard had painted of me when we were
first married. There I was, in that first year, my hair thick and lustrous around my
shoulders, my skin clear and blooming, gazing out with the self-possession of the
adored. I had brought it down from its hiding place several weeks before, telling my
sister I was damned if the Germans would decide what I should look at in my own
home.
He lifted the lamp a little higher so that
he could see it more clearly.
Do not put it there, Sophie,
Hélène had
warned.
It will invite trouble.
When he finally turned to me, it was as if
he had had to tear his eyes from it. He looked at my face, then back at the painting.
‘My husband painted it.’ I don’t know why I felt the need to tell him
that.
Perhaps it was the certainty of my righteous
indignation. Perhaps it was the obvious difference between the girl in the picture and
the girl who stood before him. Perhaps it was the weeping blonde child who stood at my
feet. It is possible that even
Kommandants
, two years into this occupation,
have become weary of harassing us for petty misdemeanours.
He looked at the painting a moment longer,
then at his feet.
‘I think we have made ourselves clear,
Madame. Our conversation is not finished. But I will not disturb you further
tonight.’