In This Hospitable Land (29 page)

Christel was excited but the schoolmaster Patrick Molines was not. Given the great disparity in the ages of his students he already had his hands full. He didn’t wish to be mean to Christel but told her to sit on the bench on one side of the classroom and stay quiet.

This was miserably hard for Christel, who was used to running around freely and to speaking whenever she wished. Determined to prove she was ready for school she tried hard and did well. But Monsieur Molines never smiled at or talked to her once.

When Christel needed to relieve herself she was afraid that if she said anything Monsieur Molines wouldn’t let her come back. So she kept her mouth closed and had an accident. She was wet everywhere. The teacher just made her sit there.

“Monsieur Molines says she can go to school,” Katie explained later at La Font, “but she’ll still have to sit on the bench and he’s not going to teach her anything.”

“It’s not fair,” Ida said, trying to comfort her little sister, who was weeping with abandon. “She’s so young and Monsieur Molines only wants to work with the older kids. He’s not even interested in me and Katie!”

“You must understand,” Denise said, stroking Christel’s hair. “His honor and a promotion depend on his students passing tests and obtaining their certificates.”

Christel wailed more so Geneviève suggested, “I could teach Christel since I spend less time working outside than you, Denise. I’d be delighted to help her learn to read and write.”

Ida and Katie jumped up and down chanting, “Good for Christel!”

“And good for us,” Katie concluded. “Without her it won’t take so long to climb back up the hill!”

On May fifth, the Sauverins celebrated Christel’s birthday, during which she displayed her ability to write her name. “I like having school at home,” Christel proclaimed proudly. But Christel’s joy was overshadowed for the Sauverins, who still hadn’t heard directly from Jack Freedman, which worried Geneviève to distraction. She and Denise had taken turns writing to him in England but they had no way of knowing whether any of their letters got through. And they knew that André’s anonymous letter about evading jamming had reached the BBC—because they had responded in one of their broadcasts!

“We acknowledge the letter from PHOTON,” was the cryptic response. The Sauverins never knew whether or not André’s advice was taken seriously. The radio signals from Britain remained as obstructed as before.

Shortly after mentioning PHOTON the BBC aired instructions for those in Nazi-controlled lands who wished to write to England. “Don’t use exact postage,” the announcer recommended. “Either add too much or affix too little.”

The postman when next he arrived explained that exact postage implied to French postal authorities the writer’s British sympathies since he knew the precise cost of such communications. Inexact postage suggested greater ignorance and therefore lesser danger.

“You’d be surprised at the different tricks people employ now,” he elaborated. “For example, I know of other Belgians who send letters to London via Léopoldville in the Belgian Congo. It sounds crazy but it can be easier to send a letter through Africa than across the English Channel. And if you put your postage stamp on upside-down it might not mean a thing to the Nazis but tells local postal workers the writer is against the Germans. They make sure the letter gets through.”

The Sauverins obtained a new goat Ida and Katie named “Louise” after the grand Avenue Louise in Brussels. Louise needed milking every day—a job Geneviève took on even though it was lots of hard work for limited results.

The goats’ odor added to the challenge. All the animals in the great space beneath the house smelled, but the goat stench was so noxious Geneviève insisted they be moved to the barn, where she would sit on a little stool with a bucket between her legs and gently stroke the milk out of the udder—an activity which gave her mind time to wander.

One morning, a sound in the rafters distracted Geneviève. Looking up she suddenly saw a gigantic disgusting rat clinging to the underside of a wooden beam, carefully making its way backwards to just above her head.

Geneviève screamed and jumped up involuntarily, accidentally spilling the bucket of milk and frightening poor Louise as she ran out shrieking.

“I’m not going back in there ever!” she shouted to Denise, who had rushed to her screeching sister’s aid.

Geneviève told her about the rat. Denise put her arm around her quivering sister.

“Poor darling!” Denise said soothingly. “That rat was probably as scared as you.”

“Then it was plenty scared!”

Denise gently rubbed Geneviève’s back and spoke calmingly. Slowly Geneviève settled down.

“I’ll tell you this,” Geneviève laughed. “Louise better get used to being milked outside!”

May eighteenth, Katie’s seventh birthday, André left La Font for a walk after lunch and came back hours later with a surprise for everyone—most enchantingly for Katie, who loved animals and spent most of her free time looking after the chickens and rabbits; most disturbingly for Alex, who thought his brother had gone mad with a whole flock of sheep complete with a sheepdog.

Everyone ran to see. Petting the sheep the children declared themselves smitten.

“They’re cuter and softer and more cuddly than the goats,” Katie cheered.

“And they smell a little better too,” Ida added, “though still not good.”

Their instant love for the dog was unalloyed.

“Sheep,” Alex spat. “So stupid. Don’t even know to come in from the cold when it gets dark. André, forget about lamb! Let’s stick to chicken, rabbits, and goats. They’re as stupid as sheep but a lot less trouble. Tell me you don’t expect that sheepdog to do all the work!”

André explained that the old man who had sold him the sheep and sheepdog had assured him all he ever had to do was send Touté into the fields and the sheep came trotting right back.

“Touté?” Alex barked.

“The dog,” André said. “Touté.”

“So it’s a pet,” Alex grumbled. “The children will get more out of ‘Touté’ than we will.”

“The only problem is he doesn’t seem to understand my commands.”

Happily petting the dog stretched out at her feet Katie said, “Maybe he only speaks patois. I wonder what ‘Touté’ means in Cévenol?”

Alex groused, “Now we’ve got to learn the local dialect to speak to a dog.”

“Well we don’t want Touté to realize we’re not from around here,” André said amiably. “In fact if we don’t learn Cévenol anyone coming here will realize we’re not natives.”

“Please, Papy, may we keep Touté?” Katie begged her father. “We’ll do all the looking after him, I promise! Please? For my birthday?”

“Well,” Alex agreed though the concession pained him, “it is your birthday.”

“I don’t know about you,” André said with a funny little grin, “but I really like lamb.”

“So do I,” Alex admitted. “If they fatten up before next winter they’ll make good food for us—or someone else if we decide to sell any. But if we have to keep them over the winter, stuffing them up with chestnuts, they’ll just be old mutton. I hate mutton.”

Alex shook his head with disgust. But if it made the birthday girl happy…

Occasionally André would take a break from backbreaking labor and walk uphill to a shaded spot to rest and think. Usually the sheep were cropping grass nearby. As soon as André sat with his back braced against a tree, Touté would lie down and place his head in his lap.

The dog was far more attentive to the sheep than Alex had feared. But no one could communicate with him verbally even though Touté was an enormously affectionate and clever mutt. Every weekday morning he accompanied Ida and Katie to school and then ran home to tend to the sheep. Just before four o’clock each afternoon he somehow knew to race back to the one-room schoolhouse in time to trot home beside his pair of scholars. Incomprehensibly Touté never failed or showed up so much as a minute late.

André liked these little breaks for the chance to meditate cooled by fresh breezes. Frequently he pulled out his faithful notebook to review notes or make new ones. Recently he had taken to jotting down Cévenol words. These private moments were perfect for practicing his vocabulary and accent without fear of mockery—from his brother, who doubted men their age could acquire new languages, and from the children, who picked up the dialect easily.

Sometimes though—as on June 2, 1941—André couldn’t keep focused because of disturbing news. In this instance Vichy had published more anti-Semitic legislation, banning Jews from public office and placing all Jews under “administrative arrest.” A census of Jews was also to be taken, many suspected as a prelude to deportation.

Soleyrols was sufficiently removed from the immediate reach of the Vichy government that it wasn’t likely anything would happen to the Sauverins anytime soon. Still it had been a difficult couple of weeks for all anti-Vichy French and especially for Jewish residents of France, occupied and unoccupied alike. In mid-May more than three thousand Jews had been arrested in Paris, and Pétain had announced the replacement of the Franco-German armistice with a whole new set of economic-collaboration agreements—agreements so pleasing to the Germans they agreed to release and repatriate one hundred thousand French prisoners of war.

Roosevelt had condemned this collaboration and had informed Vichy France it must choose between Germany and the United States. Vichy’s reaction had been to pass more laws restricting the movement and activities of Jews within France. The Nazi Göring had ordered that no Jew be allowed to emigrate from any occupied territory “in view of the imminent final solution.” (“Final solution”? André had no clear idea what this new, vile phrase meant but it seemed deeply menacing.) Then a Vichy military court had sentenced in absentia, to hard labor or death, fifty-six noncommissioned officers and privates allied with de Gaulle. Orders were issued to confiscate all property in unoccupied France belonging to Free French fighters.

André shook his head. Revolving dreadful thoughts in his mind could do no good so he decided to concentrate on the Cévenol words in his notebook. How hard it was to twist his Brussels French into the patois of the mountains, to emulate its gentle susurrations!