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.’
He caught the flash of surprise on my face,
barely suppressed, and I saw that it satisfied something in him. It was perhaps enough
for him to know I had believed myself doomed. He was smart, this man, and subtle. I
would have to be wary.
‘Men.’
His soldiers turned, blindly obedient as
ever, and walked out towards their vehicle, their uniforms silhouetted against the
headlights. I followed him and stood just outside the door. The last I heard of his
voice was the order to the driver to make for the town.
We waited as the military vehicle travelled
back down the road, its headlights feeling their way along the pitted surface.
Hélène had begun to shake. She scrambled to her feet, her hand white-knuckled
at her brow, her eyes tightly shut. Aurélien stood awkwardly beside me, holding
Mimi’s hand, embarrassed by his childish tears. I waited for the last sounds of
the engine to die away. It whined over the hill, as if it, too, were acting under
protest.
‘Are you hurt, Aurélien?’ I
touched his head. Flesh wounds. And bruises. What kind of men attacked an unarmed
boy?
He flinched. ‘It didn’t
hurt,’ he said. ‘They didn’t frighten me.’
‘I thought he would arrest you,’
my sister said. ‘I thought he would arrest us all.’ I was afraid when she
looked like that: as if she were teetering on the edge of some vast abyss. She wiped her
eyes and forced a smile as she crouched to hug her daughter. ‘Silly Germans. They
gave us all a fright, didn’t they? Silly Maman for being frightened.’
The child watched her mother, silent and
solemn. Sometimes I wondered if I would ever see Mimi laugh again.
‘I’m sorry. I’m all right
now,’ she went on. ‘Let’s all go inside. Mimi, we have a little milk I
will warm for you.’ She wiped her hands on her bloodied gown, and held her hands
towards me for the baby. ‘You want me to take Jean?’
I had started to tremble convulsively, as if
I had only just realized how afraid I should have been. My legs felt watery, their
strength seeping into the cobblestones. I felt a desperate urge to sit down.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I suppose you should.’
My sister reached out, then gave a small
cry. Nestling in the blankets, swaddled neatly so that it was barely exposed to the
night air, was the pink, hairy snout of the piglet.
‘Jean is asleep upstairs,’ I
said. I thrust a hand at the wall to keep myself upright.
Aurélien looked over her shoulder. They
all stared at it.
‘
Mon Dieu
.’
‘Is it dead?’
‘Chloroformed. I remembered Papa had a
bottle in his study, from his butterfly-collecting days. I think it will wake up. But
we’re going to have to find somewhere else to keep it for when they return. And
you know they will return.’
Aurélien smiled then, a rare, slow
smile of delight. Hélène stooped to show Mimi the comatose little pig, and
they grinned. Hélène kept touching its snout, clamping a hand over her face,
as if she couldn’t believe what she was holding.
‘You held the pig before them? They
came here and you held it out in front of their noses? And then you told them off for
coming here
?’ Her voice was incredulous.
‘In front of their snouts,’ said
Aurélien, who seemed suddenly to have recovered some of his swagger. ‘Hah!
You held it in front of their snouts!’
I sat down on the cobbles and began to
laugh. I laughed until my skin grew chilled and I didn’t know whether I was
laughing or weeping. My brother, perhaps afraid I was becoming hysterical, took my hand
and rested against me. He was fourteen, sometimes bristling like a man, sometimes
childlike in his need for reassurance.
Hélène was still deep in thought.
‘If I had known …’ she said. ‘How did you become so brave,
Sophie? My little sister! Who made you like this? You were a mouse when we were
children. A mouse!’
I wasn’t sure I knew the answer.
And then, as we finally walked back into the
house, as Hélène busied herself with the milk pan and Aurélien began to
wash his poor, battered face, I stood before the portrait.
That girl, the girl Édouard had
married, looked back with an expression I no longer recognized. He had seen it in me
long before anyone else did: it speaks of knowledge, that smile, of satisfaction gained
and given. It speaks of pride. When his Parisian friends had found his love of me – a
shop girl – inexplicable, he had just smiled because he could already see this in
me.
I never knew if he understood that it was
only there because of him.
I stood and gazed at her and, for a few
seconds, I remembered how it had felt to be that girl, free of hunger, of fear, consumed
only by idle thoughts of what private moments I might spend with Édouard. She
reminded me
that the world is capable of beauty, and that there were
once things – art, joy, love – that filled my world, instead of fear and nettle soup and
curfews. I saw him in my expression. And then I realized what I had just done. He had
reminded me of my own strength, of how much I had left in me with which to fight.
When you return, Édouard, I swear I
will once again be the girl you painted.
The story of the pig-baby had reached most
of St Péronne by lunchtime. The bar of Le Coq Rouge saw a constant stream of
customers, even though we had little to offer other than chicory coffee; beer supplies
were sporadic, and we had only a few ruinously expensive bottles of wine. It was
astonishing how many people called just to wish us good day.
‘And you tore a strip off him? Told
him to go away?’ Old René, chuckling into his moustache, was clutching the
back of a chair and weeping tears of laughter. He had asked to hear the story four times
now, and with every telling Aurélien had embellished it a little more, until he was
fighting off the
Kommandant
with a sabre, while I cried ‘
Der Kaiser
ist Scheiss!
’
I exchanged a small smile with
Hélène, who was sweeping the floor of the café. I didn’t mind.
There had been little enough to celebrate in our town lately.
‘We must be careful,’
Hélène said, as René left, lifting his hat in salute. We watched him,
convulsed with renewed mirth as he passed the post office, pausing to wipe his eyes.
‘This story is spreading too far.’
‘Nobody will say anything. Everyone
hates the Boche.’ I shrugged. ‘Besides, they all want a piece of pork.
They’re hardly going to inform on us before their food arrives.’
The pig had been moved discreetly next door
in the
early hours of the morning. Some months ago Aurélien,
chopping up old beer barrels for firewood, had discovered that the only thing separating
the labyrinthine wine cellar from that of the neighbours, the Fouberts, was a
single-skin brick wall. We had carefully removed several of the bricks, with the
Fouberts’ co-operation, and this had become an escape route of last resort. When
the Fouberts had harboured a young Englishman, and the Germans had arrived unannounced
at their door at dusk, Madame Foubert had pleaded incomprehension at the officer’s
instructions, giving the young man just enough time to sneak down to the cellar and
through into our side. They had taken her house to pieces, even looked around the
cellar, but in the dim light, not one had noticed that the mortar in the wall was
suspiciously gappy.
This was the story of our lives: minor
insurrections, tiny victories, a brief chance to ridicule our oppressors, little
floating vessels of hope amid a great sea of uncertainty, deprivation and fear.
‘You met the new
Kommandant
,
then?’ The mayor was seated at one of the tables near the window. As I brought him
some coffee, he motioned to me to sit down. More than anyone else’s, his life, I
often thought, had been intolerable since the occupation: he had spent his time in a
constant state of negotiation with the Germans to grant the town what it needed, but
periodically they had taken him hostage to force recalcitrant townspeople to do their
bidding.
‘It was not a formal
introduction,’ I said, placing the cup in front of him.
He tilted his head towards me, his voice
low. ‘Herr
Becker has been sent back to Germany to run one of
the reprisal camps. Apparently there were inconsistencies in his
book-keeping.’
‘That’s no surprise. He is the
only man in Occupied France who has doubled in weight in two years.’ I was joking,
but my feelings at his departure were mixed. On the one hand Becker had been harsh, his
punishments excessive, born out of insecurity and a fear that his men would not think
him strong enough. But he had been too stupid – blind to many of the town’s acts
of resistance – to cultivate any relationships that might have helped his cause.
‘So, what do you think?’
‘Of the new
Kommandant
? I
don’t know. He could have been worse, I suppose. He didn’t pull the house
apart, where Becker might have, just to show his strength. But …’ I wrinkled
my nose ‘… he’s clever. We might have to be extra careful.’
‘As ever, Madame Lefèvre, your
thoughts are in harmony with my own.’ He smiled at me, but not with his eyes. I
remembered when the mayor had been a jolly, blustering man, famous for his bonhomie:
he’d had the loudest voice at any town gathering.
‘Anything coming in this
week?’
‘I believe there will be some bacon.
And coffee. Very little butter. I hope to have the exact rations later today.’
We gazed out of the window. Old René
had reached the church. He stopped to talk to the priest. It was not hard to guess what
they were discussing. When the priest began to laugh, and René bent double for the
fourth time, I couldn’t suppress a giggle.
‘Any news from your husband?’
I turned back to the mayor. ‘Not since
August, when I had a postcard. He was near Amiens. He didn’t say much.’
I think of you day and night,
the postcard had said, in his beautiful loopy
scrawl.
You are my lodestar in this world of madness.
I had lain awake for two
nights worrying after I had received it, until Hélène had pointed out that
‘this world of madness’ might equally apply to a world in which one lived on
black bread so hard it required a billhook to cut it, and kept pigs in a bread oven.
‘The last I received from my eldest
son came nearly three months ago. They were pushing forward towards Cambrai. Spirits
good, he said.’
‘I hope they are still good. How is
Louisa?’
‘Not too bad, thank you.’ His
youngest daughter had been born with a palsy; she failed to thrive, could eat only
certain foods and, at eleven, was frequently ill. Keeping her well was a preoccupation
of our little town. If there was milk or any dried vegetable to be had, a little spare
usually found its way to the mayor’s house.
‘When she is strong again, tell her
Mimi was asking after her. Hélène is sewing a doll for her that is to be the
exact twin of Mimi’s own. She asked that they might be sisters.’
The mayor patted her hand. ‘You girls
are too kind. I thank God that you returned here when you could have stayed in the
safety of Paris.’
‘Pah. There is no guarantee that the
Boche won’t be marching down the Champs-Élysées before long. And
besides, I could not leave Hélène alone here.’
‘She would not have survived this
without you. You
have grown into such a fine young woman. Paris was
good for you.’
‘My husband is good for me.’
‘Then God save him. God save us
all.’ The mayor smiled, placed his hat on his head and stood up to leave.
St Péronne, where the Bessette family
had run Le Coq Rouge for generations, had been among the first towns to fall to the
Germans in the autumn of 1914. Hélène and I, our parents long dead and our
husbands at the Front, had determined to keep the hotel going. We were not alone in
taking on men’s work: the shops, the local farms, the school were almost entirely
run by women, aided by old men and boys. By 1915 there were barely any men left in the
town.
We did good business in the early months,
with French soldiers passing through and the British not far behind. Food was still
plentiful, music and cheering accompanied the marching troops, and most of us still
believed the war would be over within months, at worst. There were a few hints of the
horrors taking place a hundred miles away: we gave food to the Belgian refugees who
traipsed past, their belongings teetering on wagons; some were still clad in slippers
and the clothes they had worn when they had left their homes. Occasionally, if the wind
blew from the east, we could just make out the distant boom of the guns. But although we
knew that the war was close by, few believed St Péronne, our proud little town,
could possibly join those that had fallen under German rule.
Proof of how wrong we had been had come
accompanied by the sound of gunfire on a still, cold, autumn morning,
when Madame Fougère and Madame Dérin had set out for their daily six
forty-five a.m. stroll to the
boulangerie
, and were shot dead as they crossed
the square.