In This Hospitable Land (25 page)

The undertaker arrived at the little house early Friday morning leading a horse and cart carrying a plain, primitive coffin. After introducing himself to André, he expressed his regrets and apologized.

“It’s not much,” he said, referring to the simple pine box, “but it’s the best we can do in times like these.”

“I deeply appreciate your efforts and your concern,” André said kindly. “This simplicity is exactly as it should be according to Jewish tradition.”

The man that had been Louis Sauverin was dressed in his best suit. The undertaker took special care as he single-handedly lowered the body into the casket. Then he noticed that the rest of the family including the four grandchildren was wearing the straightforward garb of the region’s farmers. That surprised him. He had anticipated a display of big-city finery from these Belgian refugees. But it soon became clear from the little he overheard and the gestures he could construe that this apparel was purposeful. The Sauverins had arrayed themselves to fit in with the local population as a sign of honor and respect.

The procession began and proceeded slowly the few kilometers to Vialas. At the beginning the funeral cortège was quite modest: the widow, her two sons and their wives, the grandchildren, the Brignands, and Lucien Mauriac from Bédouès. Every time the undertaker turned around, though, he saw more and more people following. Soon almost every resident of Soleyrols had turned out to accompany Louis Sauverin to his rest.

In Vialas the Protestant temple was filled with residents of the town and nearby hamlets. Even the staff from the Hotel Guin and the shopkeepers of the village were in attendance.

The warm greetings from a striking number of local inhabitants showed that many were familiar with the Sauverins but quite plainly a larger number were not. For them the Sauverins served as a symbol, providing the Cévenols a rare opportunity to show what they were truly about. To these people, whether Louis Sauverin had or hadn’t been Jewish wasn’t important. What mattered was that they were all too well aware of the daily increasing persecution of the Jews and of those who harbored Jews and anyone else who had fled from the German occupation of the Low Countries and northern France. This funeral service, short as it was—and as kindly as the pastor spoke of the deceased, his family, and their friends—offered an unusual chance for a strong show of defiance of the Vichy government and of the German conquerors of their beloved country.

Then the unadorned casket was carried to the cemetery perched alongside a farm lane and shaped into terraces sloping toward the valley below. They all entered through the old cast-iron gates which long ago had been set into the stone boundary wall, then proceeded down several levels of steps to an open grave. After a few further words from Pastor Burnard the coffin was lowered into the ground. André led the mourners in shoveling dirt onto it.

The Sauverins exchanged a few words with each of the many considerate well-wishers. Slowly the residents of Vialas drifted away.

Then the new head of the Sauverin family went out of his way to thank Pastor Burnard warmly and to say, “We are so grateful to be here. We draw courage and confidence from the faith and independence of the residents of the Lozère. In fact I hope you will allow me to pay a proper visit to your temple soon. You see, I am engaged in a quest of faith of my own and would gladly learn from your teachings.”

“You will be most welcome,” the pastor replied with equal warmth. Then he lowered his voice. “At the proper time,” he said, gazing at André as if to deliver his message through his eyes as much as his veiled words, “we must talk of other matters too—so that we make sure no other Sauverins are lost to us.”

As André considered the meaning of this mysterious speech he returned to his family for the slow melancholy walk back to La Font. He noticed that the undertaker was still standing alone with his horse and cart beside the grave. The grave had already been filled in.

It was all so sudden,
André thought.

Then it was all over.

The sudden death of Louis Sauverin was an irretrievable loss and an ominous sign. Until then the family’s members had all been riddled with fear about their fate but each had felt certain that someday they would return to Brussels. Now death had given hope the lie. And the little ones had been forced to confront life’s saddest truth. It had never come so close before.

Yet life went on implacably. The adults struggled for sheer survival and the six-year-olds had a new distraction: their education in the one-room schoolhouse in Soleyrols where the single teacher taught twenty lower-school students who would go on to high school in Vialas.

Each weekday Ida and Katie managed the trek—fifteen minutes in the morning mostly downhill and twenty-five minutes back up later in the day—though the journey grew trickier with steadily increasing cold and deepening snow. Remarkably the girls inserted themselves easily into a roomful of strangers who knew each other well and spoke mostly in the Cévenol dialect.

Christel and Philippe—much too young to accompany their sisters—stayed home and played with each other, the farm animals and their grandmother. But Christel kept saying she wanted to go to school like the big girls.

Coping with sorrow was especially difficult as the feeling of isolation multiplied with each day’s fresh blanketing of snow. The Sauverins’ new friends and neighbors were remarkably kind and attentive the first week after the funeral but this was a hard time of year for everyone in the Cévennes. The family quickly found itself left to its own devices.

To alleviate the sense of solitude—and to share their sad news—Denise and Geneviève began writing to almost everyone in the address books they had brought from Belgium.

First they wrote to Anna, Rose’s sister in Brussels. Then they attempted to contact other relatives in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Great Britain and those who had escaped to other countries before the Sauverins entered France.

Focusing on practical matters, André wrote to an agricultural products company in Switzerland. After reading deeply in the great green textbook, he had decided to grow soybeans—a novelty in the area—and hoped the neutral Swiss would send viable seed.

As days went by the Sauverins awaited any response with growing impatience. They understood international mail in wartime could be slow but the wait was difficult. They not only longed to hear from loved ones but also wanted proof their letters were getting through.

Impatient for any communication, Alex pulled his brother aside one afternoon. “Do you think we can purchase a radio so we can get news that isn’t days or weeks old? We need information—on the war, on the Vichy government—to stand a chance of keeping ourselves safe.”

After sunset André made his way downhill to the café.

“A radio?” Albertine spluttered after acceding to André’s half-whispered appeal to step into the back room. “You really are new here. Radios are scarce in the Cévennes and no one has one in Soleyrols. Getting one that works may be impossible. But having access to news could help us all. You have electricity and La Font is high enough on the mountainside to get good reception.”

“And we speak English,” André informed her. “News broadcasts on the BBC are often the most accurate and reliable.”

Albertine agreed. “And here’s a joke for you: one Frenchman says to another, ‘It’s terrible. At nine-twenty a Jew killed a German soldier, cut him open, and ate his heart.’ ‘Impossible,’ the other replies. ‘First a German has no heart. Second a Jew eats no pork. And third at nine-twenty everyone’s listening to the BBC!’”

André promised that were a radio obtained he would never reveal its source.

“I’ll see what we can do,” Albertine said, making André wonder who “we” might be.

The prickly outer husks of the maturing chestnuts started to open. Time to harvest.

“This is worse than picking cherries in Bédouès,” Geneviève complained as she, Denise, Alex, and André struggled through a thick stand of trees, bending repeatedly with clumsily gloved hands to retrieve and sack the precious objects. “Why is reaching down so much harder than reaching up? And these spiny outer shells! Why not wait for the soft nuts to fall out?”

“We’d lose too much to the birds and wild animals,” André explained patiently.

“Move along,” Alex growled, hand pressed to the small of his back in pain. “Each day’s shorter than the last. You want to gather chestnuts in the dark?”

The next day the weather was dreadful but they busily gathered again. A cold wind whipped across the mountain, spiraling around the trees and causing wisps of snow—which had settled onto stones and rocks and compressed dead leaves against the frozen earth—to lift and drift before settling down again. The chestnut gatherers drew scarves up over their ears but still the cold seeped in around their necks. When they took short breaks they jammed their gloved hands tightly into their wool coats seeking warmth in the depths of the lining. Thankfully the landscape was beautiful. The grays and browns of the fields and the oak and chestnut copses heralded the onset of wintertime repose. If only they could finish this.

Suddenly Gustave Chatrey appeared with two women and another man, all elderly.

“I said I’d get you started,” Gustave called cheerfully. “And I’ve brought friends.”

The experienced hands placed themselves and the four Sauverins in a row several feet apart, facing uphill. They began their demonstration by tying canvas sacks around each one’s waist, leaving the sacks to drag behind as they filled up.

“Here,” Gustave called. “Everyone take a wooden rake.”

These curious implements—surprisingly short, with four tines each—were specially adapted to the task.

“As we walk up the hill,” the other man—the women’s brother—explained, “we rake the chestnuts into little piles.”

“For the ones still inside their spiny hulls,” one of the sisters suggested, “just take the side of the rake and hammer them open.”

The old woman leaned down to demonstrate. She was quick and proficient—and so obviously practiced Geneviève doubted she herself would ever do half so well.

“Simple,” the other sister said encouragingly.

Slowly all began walking up the hillside, manipulating their rakes. Though the four old-timers were perpetually stooped their steps were far livelier than those of the decades-younger Sauverins.

Geneviève wasn’t as strong as the others and fell farther behind minute by minute. She found it easier if still painful to remain bent over rather than to stand back up and then bend down again. Exhaustion began to overwhelm her but the work needed to be done and she felt ashamed watching four old peasants keep at it with steady unflagging energy.

Work gloves couldn’t keep painful blisters from developing on their fingers. At the farmhouse for the midday meal, Geneviève wrapped a clean cloth around a rapidly reddening wound.

“That’s bad,” one of the old sisters said. “Infected.”

“Here,” the other spinster said, taking Geneviève’s hand tenderly and applying a home remedy. “A little lemon on that sore and the pus will dry right up. Be sure to care for it like this every day and you’ll see how soon the infection will go away.”

“Homeopathy,” Alex said, nodding significantly at André.

They devoted the afternoon to a lesson in drying to preserve the bulk of the chestnuts through winter. Chestnuts would be the primary staple until the first vegetables ripened in the spring.

Each worker loaded and carried a basket to the drying shed about halfway down the hill. A special two-story structure built of stone apart from the wooden rafters inside, the shed was designed to hold the chestnuts high in a small attic.

The brother and his sisters shoveled chestnuts from baskets into the attic while Gustave started a smoldering fire below. Then all climbed the built-in ladder to the small trapdoor through which the chestnuts had been heaved. There they spread the chestnuts evenly and not too deeply on wood boards positioned to leave small cracks in between, allowing the heat from the smoky fire below to rise and reach the target.

Back downstairs Gustave explained, “We use huge logs for this fire. First get a good blaze going then smother it with old hulls to control the burn and create smoke. You must keep the fire going no matter what, with new logs added and smothered with more dry husks, to ensure constant heat even when rain comes lashing through the mountains. That’s why even the roof is made of stone: stone gains and retains heat despite winter’s chill.”

“Remember,” the older brother cautioned, “turn the chestnuts again and again. You don’t want them to burn but you do want them absolutely dry or they’ll rot.”

“When one batch is done,” a sister said, “replace them with fresh chestnuts. That way the entire crop gets its time in the attic.”

“It takes a month to do a good load,” the other sister added. “So drying goes on through much of the winter.”

Geneviève felt faint. So much work for preservation. And before any nuts could be eaten plain, made into soup or baked into bread, they would need to be boiled more than two hours.

Between this realization and the pain from her throbbing hand, Geneviève wanted to weep. Yet she knew she mustn’t. Like the old peasants, she had to soldier on.

The last Friday of November a Brignand daughter appeared in the field the Sauverins were gleaning and spoke to André. When she left he told the others, “They’ve found us a radio.”

After the sun had set and the moon had begun to creep above the mountains the Sauverin brothers hiked down to the café and entered by the back door.

“Here it is,” Albertine said proudly, shutting the door behind them. “A good one I think.”

“Where did it come from?” André asked admiring the marvel in her hands.

“Over the mountains,” Albertine answered. “The bus driver brought it from Florac.”

So,
André thought,
the bus driver is one of “us.”

Alex examined the radio—an old model from an unfamiliar French manufacturer.

“But it will pick up the broadcasts you want,” Albertine insisted, unruffled. “That much we were assured. And one more thing,” she said as Alex discreetly paid her from the Sauverins’ dwindling supply of francs. “When the postman comes, give him whatever news you have. He’s reliable and will share the news on his rounds—only with those we trust of course.” Back at the door she cautioned, “Always turn the dial away from the BBC frequency when you finish. Anyone could stop by and that would be a foolish way to betray yourselves.”