‘Liliane? Are you … do you
need something?’ I said.
She reached into her coat and pulled out an
envelope, which she thrust at me. ‘For you,’ she said.
I glanced at it. ‘But … how
did you –’
She held up a pale hand, shook her head.
It had been months since any of us had
received a letter. The Germans had long kept us in a communications vacuum. I held it,
disbelieving, then recovered my manners. ‘Would you like to come in? Have some
coffee? I have a little real coffee put by.’
She gave me the smallest of smiles.
‘No. Thank you. I have to go home to my daughter.’ Before I could even thank
her, she was trotting up the street in her high heels, her back hunched against the
cold.
I shut the screen and re-bolted the door.
Then I sat down and tore open the envelope. His voice, so long absent, filled my
ears.
Dearest Sophie
It is so long since I heard from you. I pray you are safe. I tell myself in
darker moments that some part of me would feel it, like the vibrations of a
distant bell, if you were not.I have so little to impart. For once I have no desire to translate into colour
the world I see around me. Words seem wholly inadequate. Know only that,
precious wife, I am sound of mind and body, and that my spirit is kept whole by
the thought of you.The men here clutch photographs of their loved ones like
talismans, protection against the dark – crumpled, dirty images endowed with
the properties of treasure. I need no photograph to conjure you before me,
Sophie: I need only to close my eyes to recall your face, your voice, your
scent, and you cannot know how much you comfort me.Know, my darling, that I mark each day not, like my fellow soldiers, as one that
I am grateful to survive, but thanking God that each means I must surely be
twenty-four hours closer to returning to you.Your Édouard
It was dated two months previously.
I don’t know if it was exhaustion, or
perhaps shock from the previous day’s events – I am not someone who cries easily,
if at all – but I put the letter carefully back into its envelope, then rested my head
on my hands and, in the cold, empty kitchen, I sobbed.
I could not tell the other villagers why it
was time to eat the pig but the approach of Christmas gave me the perfect excuse. The
officers were to have their dinner on Christmas Eve in Le Coq Rouge, a larger gathering
than normal, and it was agreed that while they were here Madame Poilâne would hold a
secret
réveillon
at her home, two streets down from the square. For as
long as I could keep the German officers occupied, our little band of townspeople would
be safe to roast and eat the pig in the bread oven that Madame Poilâne had in her
cellar. Hélène would help me serve the Germans their dinner, then sneak
through the hole in the cellar wall and out down the alley to join the children at
Madame Poilâne’s house. Those
villagers who lived too far from
her to walk through the town unnoticed would remain in her home after curfew, hiding if
any Germans came checking.
‘But that isn’t fair,’
Hélène remarked, when I outlined the plan to the mayor in front of her two
days later. ‘If you remain here you will be the one person to miss it.
That’s not right, given all you did to safeguard the pig.’
‘One of us has to stay,’ I
pointed out. ‘You know it’s far safer if we can be sure that the officers
are all in one place.’
‘But it won’t be the
same.’
‘Well, nothing
is
the
same,’ I said curtly. ‘And you know as well as I do that Herr Kommandant
will notice if I am gone.’
I saw her exchange glances with the
mayor.
‘Hélène, don’t fuss. I
am
la patronne
. He expects to see me here every evening. He will know something
is going on if I am missing.’
I sounded, even to my own ears, as if I was
protesting too much. ‘Look,’ I continued, forcing myself to sound
conciliatory. ‘Save me some meat. Bring it back in a napkin. I can promise you
that, if the Germans are given rations enough to feast on, I will make sure I help
myself to a share. I will not suffer. I promise.’
They appeared mollified, but I
couldn’t tell them the truth. Ever since I had discovered that the
Kommandant
knew about the pig, I had lost my appetite for it. That he had
not revealed his knowledge of its existence, let alone punished us, didn’t make me
joyous with relief, but deeply uneasy.
Now when I saw him staring at my portrait, I
no longer felt gratified that even a German could recognize my
husband’s talent. When he walked into the kitchen to make casual conversation, I
became stiff and tense, afraid he might mention it.
‘Yet again,’ the mayor said,
‘I suspect we find ourselves in your debt.’ He looked beaten down. His
daughter had been ill for a week; his wife had once told me that every time Louisa fell
ill he barely slept for anxiety.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I
said briskly. ‘Compared to what our men are doing, this is just another
day’s work.’
My sister knew me too well. She didn’t
ask questions directly; that was not Hélène’s style. But I could feel
her watching me, could hear the faint edge to her voice whenever the question of the
réveillon
was raised. Finally, a week before Christmas, I confided in
her. She had been sitting on the side of her bed, doing her hair. The brush stilled in
her hand. ‘Why do you think he has not told anyone?’ I asked, when I
finished.
She stared at the bedspread. When she looked
at me it was with a kind of dread. ‘I think he likes you,’ she said.
The week before Christmas was busy, even
though we had little with which to prepare for the festivities. Hélène and a
couple of the older women had been sewing rag dolls for the children. They were
primitive, their skirts made of sacking, their faces embroidered stockings. But it was
important that the children who remained in St Péronne had a little magic in that
bleak Christmas.
I grew a little bolder in my own efforts.
Twice I stole potatoes from the German rations, mashing what was left to disguise the
smaller amounts, and ferried them in my pockets to those who seemed particularly frail.
I stole
the smaller carrots and fed them into the hem of my skirt so
that even when I was stopped and searched, they found nothing. To the mayor I took two
jars of chicken stock, so that his wife could make Louisa a little broth. The child was
pale and feverish; his wife told me she kept little down and seemed to be retreating
into herself. Looking at her, swallowed by the vast old bed with its threadbare
blankets, listless and coughing intermittently, I thought briefly that I could hardly
blame her. What life was this for children?
We tried to hide the worst of it from them
as best we could, but they found themselves in a world where men were shot in the
street, where strangers hauled their mothers from their beds by their hair for some
trivial offence, like walking in a banned wood or failing to show a German officer
sufficient respect. Mimi viewed our world with silent, suspicious eyes, which broke
Hélène’s heart. Aurélien grew angry: I could see it building in
him, like a volcanic force, and I prayed daily that when he finally erupted, it would
not come at huge cost to himself.
But the biggest news that week was the
arrival through my door of a newspaper, roughly printed, and entitled
Journal des
Occupés
. The only newspaper allowed in St Péronne was the
German-controlled
Bulletin de Lille
, which was so obviously German propaganda
that few of us did more with it than use it for kindling. But this one gave military
information, naming the towns and villages under occupation. It commented on official
communiqués, and contained humorous articles about the occupation, limericks about
the black bread and cartoonish sketches of the
officers in charge. It
begged its readers not to enquire where it had come from, and to destroy it when it had
been read.
It also contained a list it called Von
Heinrich’s Ten Commandments that ridiculed the many petty rules imposed upon
us.
I cannot tell you the boost that four-page
scrap gave to our little town. In the few days up to the
réveillon
, a
steady stream of townspeople came into the bar and either thumbed through its pages in
the lavatory (during the day we kept it at the bottom of a basket of old paper) or
passed on its news and better jokes face to face. We spent so long in the lavatory that
the Germans asked if some sickness were going round.
From the newspaper we discovered that other
nearby towns had suffered our fate. We heard of the dreaded reprisal camps, where men
were starved and worked half to death. We discovered that Paris knew little of our
plight, and that four hundred women and children had been evacuated from Roubaix, where
food supplies were even lower than they were in St Péronne. It was not that these
pieces of information in themselves constituted anything useful. But it reminded us that
we were still part of France, that our little town was not alone in its travails. More
importantly, the newspaper itself was a matter of some pride: the French were still
capable of subverting the will of the Germans.
There were feverish discussions as to how
this might have reached us. That it had been delivered to Le Coq Rouge went some way to
alleviating the growing discontent caused by our cooking for the Germans. I watched
Liliane Béthune hurry past to fetch her bread in her astrakhan
coat and had my own ideas.
The
Kommandant
had insisted that
we eat. It was the cooks’ privilege, he said, on Christmas Eve. We had believed
ourselves preparing for eighteen, only to discover that the final two were
Hélène and me. We spent hours running around the kitchen, our exhaustion
outweighed by our silent, unspoken pleasure in what we knew to be going on two streets
from ours: the prospect of a clandestine celebration and proper meat for our children.
To be given two whole meals as well seemed almost too much.
And yet not too much. I could never have
turned down a meal again. The food was delicious: duck roasted with orange slices and
preserved ginger, potatoes
dauphinoise
with green beans, all followed by a
plate of cheeses. Hélène ate hers, marvelling that she would be eating two
suppers. ‘I can give someone else my portion of pork,’ she said, sucking a
bone. ‘I might keep a little bit of the crackling. What do you think?’
It was so good to see her cheerful. Our
kitchen, that night, seemed a happy place. There were extra candles, giving us a little
more precious light. There were the familiar smells of Christmas – Hélène had
studded one of the oranges with cloves and hung it over the stove so that the scent
infused the whole room. If you didn’t think too hard, you could listen to the
glasses clinking, the laughter and conversation, and forget that the next room was
occupied by Germans.
At around half past nine, I wrapped my
sister up and helped her downstairs so that she could climb through to
our neighbours’ cellar and then out through their coal hatch. She would run down
the unlit back alleys to Madame Poilâne’s house where she would join Aurélien
and the children, whom we had taken there earlier in the afternoon. We had moved the pig
the day before. It was quite large by then, and Aurélien had had to hold it still
while I fed it an apple to stop it squealing and, with a clean swipe of his knife,
Monsieur Baudin, the butcher, slaughtered it.
I replaced the bricks in the gap behind her,
all the while listening to the men in the bar above me. I realized, with some
satisfaction, that for the first time in months I wasn’t cold. To be hungry is to
be almost permanently cold too; it was a lesson I was sure I would never forget.
‘Édouard, I hope you’re
warm,’ I whispered, into the empty cellar, as my sister’s footsteps faded on
the other side of the wall. ‘I hope you eat as well as we have done this
night.’
When I re-emerged into the hallway I jumped.
The
Kommandant
was gazing at my portrait.
‘I couldn’t find you,’ he
said. ‘I thought you would be in the kitchen.’
‘I – I just went for some air,’
I stammered.
‘I see something different in this
picture every time I look at it. She has something enigmatic about her. I mean
you.’ He half smiled at his own mistake. ‘You have something enigmatic about
you.’
I said nothing.
‘I hope I do not embarrass you, but I
have to tell you. I have thought for some time that this is the most beautiful painting
I have ever seen.’
‘It is a lovely work of art,
yes.’
‘You exclude its subject?’
I didn’t answer.
He swilled the wine in his glass. When he
spoke next it was with his eyes on the ruby liquid. ‘Do you honestly believe
yourself plain, Madame?’
‘I believe beauty is in the eye of the
beholder. When my husband tells me I am beautiful, I believe it because I know in his
eyes I am.’
He looked up then. His eyes locked on to
mine and would not let them go. He held my gaze for so long that I felt my breathing
start to quicken.
Édouard’s eyes were the windows
to his soul; his very self was laid bare in them. The
Kommandant
’s were
intense, shrewd and yet somehow veiled, as if to hide his true feelings. I was afraid
that he might be able to see my own crumbling composure, that he might see through my
lies if I allowed him in. I was the first to look away.
He reached across the table to the crate
that the Germans had delivered earlier and pulled out a bottle of cognac. ‘Have a
drink with me, Madame.’
‘No, thank you, Herr
Kommandant.’ I glanced towards the door to the dining room, where the officers
would be finishing their dessert.