Waging War (29 page)

We went outside again to find the mist had
burned off, and dew on the leaves sparkled in the sunlight.
Marianne gestured that I should follow her into the garden, where
we spent a very pleasant hour picking lettuce, spinach, early
radishes, strawberries, gooseberries, and currants. The little bits
of medieval French I’d learned on the river made the sign language
intelligible during discussions of simple recipes and gardening
techniques, and when Marianne indicated that I should accompany her
on a walk, I readily understood.

I asked her, through hand gestures and my
limited French, whether it was safe for her to be seen with me, and
her answer was a scowl and a tug on my arm as she opened the garden
gate. I did a quick appearance assessment, and the phrase ‘what’s
the worst that could happen’ played like a perseverant chant
through my brain. But I was there to find the Werwolves, and going
to the village in broad daylight sounded safer than sneaking around
at night ever would, especially with the lurking Maquis to contend
with after dark.

Oradour-sur-Glane looked like something from
a postcard of French country life. The dirt road ambled past stone
farmhouses and gave way to cobblestone streets that wound around
small shops with second-floor apartments. We passed several large
barns attached to smaller buildings overlooked by a lovely old
stone church that sat up on a hill. The town square was at the
center of the market district, sort of like a fairground, and
several people were out with baskets over their arms, either buying
or selling edible things.

A dour-faced woman walked past us as we
entered the town square. She was leading a group of about ten rowdy
village children in a resolute march. At the end of the line I
spotted Marcel walking quietly alone, and Marianne left my side to
give her son a kiss on the cheek before he was led back to school.
Marcel threw me a quick wave before they rounded the corner, and I
thought he looked especially small against the big personalities of
his classmates.

Marianne explained to me, in simple
language, that the village school was hard for her boy because he
was so quiet. I asked if there was another school for him. Marianne
hesitated, then whispered the words in French so quietly under her
breath I barely heard them.

“For Jews.”

The fear that laced her tone told me
everything about the culture in this country that had been occupied
by Germany for the past four years. As Nancy Wake had so blithely
pointed out, Tom, with his dark gypsy coloring, looked like most of
the French people she worked with. Coincidentally, most of the
Jewish people in Europe did too. Which meant anyone with the
slightest anti-Semite inclination could point at almost any
Frenchman or woman and raise suspicion about them, just on looks
alone. Even Marianne, with her soft black hair and sun-browned
skin, was a candidate for ethnic investigation if she crossed the
wrong person. It was a chilling thought to carry as we entered the
village square.

Marianne led the way to a short, round woman
wearing a crisp white apron, whose basket was similar to the ones
we both carried. She reminded me of a mother goose in the way she
clucked over the vegetables Marianne held out for her inspection,
and then proudly showed off her own fresh cheeses. When the trade
of goat cheese for radishes and spinach had been made, Mother Goose
clucked quietly to Marianne about various people scattered around
the town square, her eyes lighting on each person before beginning
another round of gossip.

Marianne didn’t contribute to the
conversation except to nod or murmur the occasional ‘hmm,’ and only
as Mother Goose was winding down did Marianne’s eyes finally flick
to me. I’d been standing back, out of the line of her sight, but
with the carefully guarded expression in Marianne’s eyes I took
another step into the shadows of the barn behind me. Cool air hit
my back, and I turned to find myself in the open doorway of a
working garage. An old Citroën sedan teetered on jacks, and a pair
of legs stuck out from underneath the heavy steel car.

The legs bent and kicked the mechanic out
from under the fender. I almost stepped back outside, but realized
I was more afraid of being noticed by Mother Goose than by the
person who had just stood up to retrieve a wrench from the work
table.

Especially as she seemed to have more to
hide than I did.

Her hair was cut very short like a boy’s,
and there were tracks of grease smeared up her arms and across one
cheek. From a distance I would have thought she was a lanky teenage
boy, but I had done my own masquerading, and I knew to look beyond
the coveralls and boots, the chipped and dirty nails, and the
short, scruffy hair. She was close to my age and, like me, had no
obvious curves, but her cheeks looked soft, even over the
razor-sharp cheekbones, and she didn’t have a man’s Adam’s
apple.

She reached for a wrench and then spotted
me, frozen in place just inside the door. “Puis-je vous aider?” Her
voice was husky, and I wondered if it was naturally that way, or if
she put it on like the red bandana she pulled from her pocket to
wipe off her hands.

I backed toward the door. “Sorry,” I
muttered in English before I could catch myself. Crap.

Her eyes widened fractionally in surprise,
and I waited for them to narrow. They didn’t, but her voice dropped
to a whisper. “Do you need help?” She said in accented English. It
didn’t sound like she was asking as mechanic to customer.

I shook my head quickly. “I’m sorry to
intrude.”

I continued backing out of the garage,
because being English or American in occupied France was not good
for anyone’s health.

The mechanic nodded, but didn’t take her
eyes off me. Right before I stepped back out to the town square she
gave me a quick smile and lifted her hand slightly in what could
have been a wave.

Fascinating.

I blinked in the bright sunlight after the
cool darkness of the garage, and it took a moment to spot Marianne
and her basket a few meters away from where Mother Goose had
corralled some other victim. The gossipy woman looked up at me and
her eyes narrowed slightly as she tried to place me. The companion
said something to her, and I slipped behind a post and back into
the shadows of the building to avoid further scrutiny. I caught up
to Marianne as she finished her trade of delicate, leafy lettuce
for a small basket of eggs, and I realized there’d been no chickens
at Marianne’s farm. It was an odd fact in a time when resources
were scarce and self-reliance in food production could be the
difference between starving and surviving this war.

Marianne traded my full basket for hers, and
we continued walking around the square. She greeted people she knew
and made another trade for a wax paper-wrapped block of what looked
like butter. Marianne was done after that, and as we walked past
the garage on our way out, I tapped her arm and gestured inside.
“Une fille?” I asked quietly.

Marianne nodded. “Rachel.”

It wasn’t until we’d gone past the church
again that I used my quiet mix of French and pantomime to get more
of Rachel’s story from Marianne. It seemed that Rachel’s father
owned the garage and was the main mechanic in town. He had been
taken to the camps with the first wave of internments. Rachel had
cut her hair then and became Raoul. Even the worst of the village
informants knew that if they turned her in as a Jew, the village
would be left without its last mechanic.

We turned left off the road back to
Marianne’s farm, and she indicated the vegetables she still had in
her basket. She had another trade to make, I guessed, and I
followed her down the dirt lane and over the rise of a small hill.
It hadn’t looked like anything from the main road, and I was
surprised to see a vineyard tucked away in an area that wasn’t
really known for its wine production.

The leaves were just showing green on the
twisted vines that managed to look neglected even as they teased
their spring colors. The lane ended at a stand of trees where an
old stone farmhouse stood sheltered from the sun. There were two
windowless outbuildings, which I assumed were for wine production,
but everything had an air of shabbiness, as if the vines grew out
of stubbornness and the buildings stood only because they were too
well-built to fall down.

And then I heard the singing.

It sounded like children, more than just a
couple, with voices that blended together in beautiful harmony. The
sound came from one of the outbuildings of the otherwise deserted
farm.

Marianne smiled at my surprise as she led me
to the farmhouse. She didn’t knock or enter, she just took whatever
vegetables she hadn’t traded out of her basket and arranged them
carefully in a box next to the front door. My eyes kept stealing to
the outbuilding where the voices danced and wove a tune I didn’t
recognize, with words sung in a language that didn’t sound like
French to my ear.

“The Jewish school,” Marianne whispered in
French.

Oh wow. No wonder she wished Marcel could
come here every day. I supposed that people would notice if she
took him out of the village school, and they’d both be in danger if
it was known he came here.

The song ended and Marianne sighed, then
picked up her empty basket and we turned to go back up the lane.
When we were out of earshot of any farm, I asked about the school
and she tried to explain it to me.

I gathered that the winemaker had died
before the war began and left the place to the church in the
village, but most of the villagers had forgotten it even existed.
When the Germans began to round up the village Jews, they began
with the adults. By the time they came for the children, most of
them had disappeared. It was presumed they had gone to live with
relatives in some other region, and to be fair to the French
villagers, Marianne said no one really looked too hard for
them.

“So the children live there? Who cares for
them?” I asked Marianne.

“The priest hides them until it’s safe to
move them, and he stays with them several nights a week. Many of us
from the village secretly help to feed them.”

I knew there would be meat in the box on the
front doorstep of the vineyard house tomorrow morning after I told
Archer and Ringo about this place. Somehow, I didn’t think Nancy’s
resistance fighters were doing too much feeding and caring for the
people they were trying to “save.”

When we got back to Marianne’s farm, she
waved me away from helping her in the house. Ringo was still passed
out in the barn, and I stubbornly resisted the urge to look for
Archer in the barn cellar – mostly because I didn’t want to know if
he wasn’t there.

My brain was still spinning on the Jewish
kids, hidden away in a forgotten winery, and the knowledge that the
Werwolves were out there plotting something destructive in this
region. It made me antsy, like my thoughts were making my skin feel
too tight, and I needed to run to loosen everything up. It was
risky to run during daylight hours, but I hoped the forest would
hide me from curious eyes.

I didn’t wake Ringo, and I didn’t leave a
note. But I did tell Marianne I was going into the woods. She
admonished me to be careful, like any mother would, and I nodded
solemnly and promised to be back in an hour. It was more than I
would have promised just about anyone else, but I thought Marianne
had enough to worry about without me adding to her list.

I tucked my wide pant legs inside my long
socks, which looked entirely ridiculous, but I didn’t have a mirror
and wasn’t planning to run into the forest fashion police. The
woods behind Marianne’s farmhouse seemed to stretch for several
kilometers providing the border for most of the town, so I headed
in the opposite direction of Nancy’s Maquis headquarters and moved
as deeply into the trees as I could.

My sense of direction had always been good,
but because there were no street signs or billboards to mark my
way, I did take the time to stack a small cairn at every change of
trajectory. Within about ten minutes of log-hurdles and tree-climbs
with back-flip dismounts, I was breathing hard. And twenty minutes
into the forest, I came to a rocky waterfall in a tiny spring where
the pool at the bottom was perfectly clear and just deep enough to
plunge my hands into and splash my face with the cold water.

The sound of the waterfall made the
tightness in my chest open up, and when I’d stopped gasping from
the run, I discovered I could actually breathe again without
feeling like I needed to climb out of my skin. I wasn’t sure how
much forest was left before the land was cleared for farms again,
and the tree above me was perfectly built for scaling, so after a
long, satisfying drink from the spring, I leapt off a boulder and
hit the lowest branch.

I was in a giant ash tree that had just
gotten its spring foliage, so I had to go pretty high before I
could see enough to get my bearings. I had run a lot farther than I
thought – either that or the strip of forest was narrower than it
seemed – because a road wound around the leading edge of the trees
about a kilometer away from my tree. I shifted in my perch to get a
better view and startled a kestrel off an upper branch. It flew off
toward the road and passed over something that glinted metallically
in the sun. It looked like some sort of vehicle that had pulled off
the road and parked among the low brush.

And then I saw motion in the woods, leading
away from the vehicle and headed toward my tree.

Crap.

I considered carving a spiral into the upper
trunk of the ash and Clocking myself away, but a: that could be
catastrophically stupid if I ended up twenty feet in the air at my
destination, and b: I hadn’t drawn myself a spiral at Marianne’s
farm or anywhere else in France during this time period. A rookie
mistake, I realized, because now I had no automatic escape
route.