Authors: Irene Nemirovsky
In the dining room (the only place the stove was lit) and in Lucile’s room, where she sometimes took the liberty of lighting a small fire in the evening, you could smell the smoky perfume of sweet wood, chestnut bark. The dining-room doors opened out on to the garden. It looked its saddest at this time of the year: the pear trees stretched out their arms, crucified on wires; the apple trees had been cut back, and their branches were rough, twisted and bristling with spiky twigs; there was nothing left on the vine but some bare shoots. But with just a few more days of sunshine, the early little peach tree in front of the church would not be the only one covered with flowers: every tree would blossom. While brushing her hair before going to bed, Lucile looked out of her window at the garden bathed in moonlight. On the low wall some cats were howling. Beyond was the countryside, its secret, fertile valleys thick with deep woods, and pearl-grey under the moonlight.
Lucile always felt anxious at night in her enormous empty room. Before, Gaston would sleep there; he would get undressed, grunt, bump into the furniture; he was a companion, another human being. For nearly a year, now, there had been no one. Not a single sound. Outside, everything was asleep. Without meaning to, she stopped and listened, trying to hear a sign of life in the room next door where the German officer slept. But she heard nothing. Perhaps he hadn’t come back yet? Or maybe he was sitting still and silent like her? A few seconds later she heard a rustling sound, a sigh, then a low whistling, and she thought he was probably standing at the window looking out at the garden. What could he be thinking about? She tried to imagine but couldn’t; in spite of herself, she couldn’t credit him with having the thoughts, the desires of an ordinary human being. She couldn’t believe he was simply looking out at the garden in complete innocence, admiring the shimmering fish pond where silent slippery shapes slid past: carp for tomorrow’s dinner. “He’s elated,” she said to herself. “He’s recalling his battles, reliving past dangers. In a moment he’ll be writing home, to his wife, in Germany—no, he can’t be married, he’s too young—to his mother then, or fiancée, or mistress. He’ll say. ‘I’m living in a French house, Amalia’—she must be called Amalia, or Cunegonde or Gertrude” (she deliberately chose grotesque, harsh-sounding names). “ ‘Our suffering hasn’t been in vain, for we are the victors.’ ”
She couldn’t hear anything at all now; he wasn’t moving; he was holding his breath. A toad croaked in the darkness. It was a soft, low musical note, a bubble of water bursting with a silvery sound. “Croak, croak . . .” Lucile half closed her eyes. How peaceful it was, sad and overwhelming . . . Every so often something came to life inside her, rebelled, demanded noise, movement, people. Life, my God, life! How long would this war go on? How many years would they have to live like this, in this dismal lethargy, bowed, docile, crushed like cattle in a storm? She missed the familiar crackling of the radio: when the Germans arrived it had been hidden in the cellar because people said they confiscated or destroyed them. She smiled. “They must find French houses rather sparsely furnished,” she thought, recalling everything Madame Angellier had crammed into wardrobes and locked away out of sight of the enemy.
At dinner time the officer’s orderly had come into the dining room with a short note:
Lieutenant Bruno von Falk presents his compliments to Mesdames Angellier and requests they kindly give the bearer of this letter the keys to the piano and the library. The Lieutenant gives his word of honour that he will not remove the instrument or damage the books.
Madame Angellier did not appreciate this courtesy. She raised her eyes to heaven, moved her lips as if she were praying and acquiescing to God’s will. “Might over right, isn’t it?” she asked the soldier, who didn’t understand French and so simply replied
“Jawohl”
with a wide grin, while nodding his head several times.
“Tell Lieutenant von . . . von . . .” she mumbled scornfully, “that he is in charge here.”
She took the two keys he wanted from her chain and threw them on to the table. Then she whispered to her daughter-in-law in a tragic tone of voice, “He’ll be playing ‘Wacht am Rhein’ . . .”
“I think they have a different national anthem now, Mother.”
But the Lieutenant didn’t play anything at all. The deepest silence still prevailed. When the ladies heard the great courtyard doors slamming like a gong in the peaceful evening, they knew the officer had gone out and sighed with relief.
Now, thought Lucile, he’s walked away from the window. He’s pacing up and down. His boots . . . The sound of his boots . . . It would pass. The occupation would end. There would be peace, blessed peace. The war and the tragedy of 1940 would be no more than a memory, a page in history, the names of battles and treaties children would recite in school, but as for me, for as long as I live, I will never forget the low, regular sound of those boots pacing across the floorboards. Why doesn’t he go to bed? Why doesn’t he put slippers on in the evening, like a civilised person, like a Frenchman? He’s having a drink. (She could hear the squirting of seltzer water and the faint
jzz, jzz
of a lemon being squeezed. “So
that
’s why we’re short of lemons,” her mother-in-law would have said. “They’re taking everything from us!”) Now he’s turning the pages of a book. Oh, it’s horrible, thinking this way . . . She shuddered. He’d opened the piano; she recognised the dull sound of the cover thrown backwards and the creaking of the piano stool as it swivelled. Oh, no! Really, he’s not going to start playing in the middle of the night! True, it was only nine o’clock. Perhaps in the rest of the universe people didn’t go to bed so early . . . Yes, he was playing. She listened, her head lowered, nervously biting her lips. It wasn’t quite an arpeggio; it was more like a sigh rising up from the keyboard, a flurry of notes; he touched them lightly, caressed them, finished with a rapid, light trill that sounded like a bird singing. Then everything went silent.
For a long time Lucile sat very still, brush in hand, her hair loose over her shoulders. Then she sighed, thinking vaguely, It’s such a shame! (A shame that the silence was so complete? A shame that the boy had stopped playing? A shame that he was here, he, the invader, the enemy, he and not someone else?) She made an annoyed little gesture with her hand, as if she were trying to push away great masses of heavy air, so heavy she couldn’t breathe. A shame . . . She climbed into the large, empty bed.
5
Madeleine Sabarie was alone in the house; she was sitting in the room where Jean-Marie had lived for several weeks. Every day, she made the bed where he had slept. This irritated Cécile. “Why bother! No one ever sleeps here, so you don’t need to put clean sheets on every day, as if you were expecting someone. Are you expecting someone?”
Madeleine didn’t reply and continued, every morning, to shake out the big feather mattress.
She was happy to be alone with her little boy; he was feeding, his head against her bare breast. When she changed sides, a part of his face was as moist, red and shiny as a cherry, and the shape of her nipple was imprinted on his cheek. She kissed him gently. She thought now as she had before, “I’m glad it’s a boy, men don’t have it so bad.” She dozed while watching the fire: she never got enough sleep. There was so much work to do; they hardly got to bed before ten, eleven o’clock, and sometimes they got up in the middle of the night to listen to English radio. In the morning they had to be up by five o’clock to tend the animals. It was nice, today, to be able to take a little nap. The meal was already cooking, the table was set, everything around her was in order. The faint light of a rainy spring day lit up the shoots in the vegetable plot and the grey sky. In the courtyard the ducks quacked in the rain, while the chickens and turkeys—a little mound of ruffled feathers—sheltered sadly under the shed. Madeleine heard the dog bark.
“Are they home already?” she wondered. Benoît had taken the family to the village.
Someone crossed the courtyard, someone who was not wearing the same kind of shoes as Benoît. And every time she heard footsteps that weren’t her husband’s or someone else’s from the farm, every time she saw a strange shape in the distance, she would immediately panic and think: “It’s not Jean-Marie, it can’t be him, I’m mad to think it might be. First of all, he’s not coming back, and then, even if he did, what would change? I’m married to Benoît. I’m not expecting anyone, quite the opposite, I pray to God that Jean-Marie never comes back because, little by little, I’ll get used to my husband and then I’ll be happy. But I don’t know what I’m going on about, honest to God. What am I thinking? I
am
happy.” At the very moment she had these thoughts, her heart, which was less rational, would start beating so violently that it drowned out every other sound, so violently that she wouldn’t hear Benoît’s voice, the baby crying, the wind beneath the door; the uproar in her heart was deafening, as if a wave had washed over her. For a few seconds she would be about to faint; she would only come round when she saw the postman bringing the new seed catalogue (he’d been wearing new shoes that day) or the Viscount de Montmort, the landowner.
“Well, Madeleine, aren’t you going to say hello?” Mother Sabarie would say, surprised.
“I think I woke you up,” the visitor would say, as she feebly apologised and mumbled, “Yes, you frightened me . . .”
Woke her up? From what dream?
Now she felt that emotion within her once more, that secret panic caused by the stranger who had entered (or was coming back into) her life. She half sat up in the chair, stared at the door. Was it a man? It was a man’s footsteps, that light cough, the aroma of fine cigarettes . . . A man’s hand, pale, well-manicured, was on the latch, then a German uniform came into sight. As always, when it wasn’t Jean-Marie, her disappointment was so intense that she sat dazed for a moment; she didn’t even think of buttoning up her blouse. The German was an officer—a young man who couldn’t be more than twenty, with an almost colourless face and equally fair and dazzling eyebrows, hair and small moustache. He looked at her bare bosom, smiled and saluted with an exaggerated, almost insolent politeness. Certain Germans knew how to place in their salute to the French a mere show of politeness (or perhaps it just seemed like that to the defeated French in all their bitterness, humiliation and anger). It was not the courtesy accorded to an equal, but that shown to the dead, like the Presentation of Arms after an execution.
“Can I help you, Monsieur?” Madeleine said, finally buttoning up her blouse.
“Madame, I have been billeted on the farm,” replied the young man, who spoke extremely good French. “I apologise for the inconvenience. Would you be so kind as to show me my room?”
“We were told we’d have ordinary soldiers,” Madeleine said shyly.
“I am the Lieutenant who serves as interpreter to the Commandant.”
“You’ll be far away from the village and I’m afraid the room won’t be good enough for an officer. It’s just a farm, here, and you won’t have any running water or electricity, or anything a gentleman needs.”
The young man glanced around. He looked closely at the faded red tiles on the floor, worn pink in places, the big stove standing in the middle of the room, the bed in the corner, the spinning wheel (they had brought it down from the attic where it had been since the other war: all the young women in the area were learning to spin; it was impossible to find wool in the shops any more). The German then looked carefully at the framed photographs on the walls, the certificates for agricultural prizes, the empty little niche that used to hold a statue of a saint, surrounded by a delicate frieze now half worn away; finally, his eyes fell once more upon the young farm girl holding the baby in her arms. He smiled. “You needn’t worry about me. This will do nicely.”
His voice was strangely harsh and resonant, like metal being crushed. His steel-grey eyes, sharply etched face and the unusual shade of his pale-blond hair, which was as smooth and bright as a helmet, made this young man’s appearance striking to Madeleine; there was something about his physique that was so perfect, so precise, so dazzling, she thought to herself, that he reminded her more of a machine than a human being. In spite of herself, she was fascinated by his boots and belt buckle: the leather and steel seemed to sparkle.
“I hope you have an orderly,” she said. “No one here could make your boots shine like that.”
He laughed and said again, “You needn’t worry about me.”
Madeleine had put her son in his crib. She could see the German’s reflection in the mirror above the bed. She saw the way he looked at her and smiled. She was afraid and thought, “What will Benoît say if he starts chasing after me?” She didn’t like this young man, he frightened her a bit, yet despite herself she was attracted by a certain resemblance to Jean-Marie—not to Jean-Marie as a man, but as a member of a higher social class, a gentleman. Both were carefully shaven, well brought-up, with pale hands and delicate skin. She realised the presence of this German in the house would be doubly painful for Benoît: because he was the enemy but also because he wasn’t a peasant like him—because he hated whatever aroused Madeleine’s interest in and curiosity about the upper classes to such an extent that for a while now, he had been snatching fashion magazines from her hands; and if she asked him to shave or change his shirt, he’d say, “Better get used to it. You married a farmer, a country bumpkin, I got no fancy manners” with such resentment, such deep-seated jealousy that she knew who had given him these ideas, that Cécile must have been talking. Cécile wasn’t the same with her as before, either . . . She sighed. So many things had changed since the beginning of this damned war.
“I’ll show you your room,” she said finally.
But he said no; he took a chair and sat down near the stove.
“In a minute, if that’s all right with you. Let’s get to know each other. What’s your name?”
“Madeleine Sabarie.”
“I’m Kurt Bonnet” (he pronounced it Bonnett). “It’s a French name, as you can see. My ancestors must have been your countrymen, chased out of France under Louis XIV. There is French blood in Germany, and French words in our language.”