“There is enough to carry in life without having to carry the worries of others,” he said one day when I complained. “But you’re not gypsy orphans anymore, and from now on I want you to stand up to people who say that. You have and always will have a home with me. You are the daughters of a Frenchman, and you don’t need a piece of paper to tell you this.”
I stood up to kiss the top of his head; then I had gone to my room to cry. Because he had reminded me that he had saved us from a future of cruelty and begging, which Layla and our mother might still have.
“We have to forget our mother,” Helene said quite forcefully when I repeated what Jerome had said and explained why I was so upset. “Jerome is our real parent now. Our papa.”
Though it didn’t stop me from spying on the gypsy camps that appeared sometimes, to catch a glimpse of someone who I thought might be our mother, since I did not have any clear memory of her. And sometimes when we saw a little girl with red hair, even Helene would stop to examine her to see if she was Layla.
Then suddenly, according to Jerome and Helene, I had grown into a woman overnight, and another year had passed, and I was nearing fifteen, and boys went from pushing me over in jest to feeling awkward around me. And I have to admit I liked the attention. I must confess also that I liked their mothers’ expressions of displeasure when they would see whom their sons were sneaking out to meet in the town square. And everyone except me seemed to think I was a problem. Helene accused me of teasing them, of getting them into trouble.
One day when I was grooming the horses, Jerome came and spoke to me.
“Ettie, you are a pretty girl. Trouble has a tendency to triple, and soon enough the problems are larger. Remember, the wrong choices you make can lead to more wrong choices until you can no longer contain them. Be careful, slow down some days, and take the time to look at yourself from the outside.”
“If you are trying to tell me not to do anything with a boy, then why don’t you come out and say it,” I said in disgust. “Kissing them is one thing, but I am never going to sell my body for coin nor give it to someone for free unless I choose it!”
He looked shocked, then laughed. “You are certainly a different one!”
“Papa,” I said, “I can make my own decisions. You don’t have to worry so much.”
And he had nodded and left.
I was angry that everyone was telling me what to do, as if they knew what was inside my head. So I went to the house of one of the boys, Felix—the son of the tavern owner, Gerard—who had sent me little notes of love in class, whom I had kissed beneath the bell tower. I knocked on his door, and he had answered, looking behind him fearfully.
“What are you doing here?”
“I missed you after school today.”
“I couldn’t come. Maman is angry with me.” He looked down and guilty. “Because I’m spending time with you, but I told her it wasn’t true. That you were different—”
He never got to finish what he was saying, because I walked away, and I would never kiss him again no matter how many times he asked. And later he would continue sending me notes that I would ignore. I realized that I would always be different, and perhaps it was my blood that would always make it so.
Helene had stopped going to school the previous year, and Jerome was now paying her a wage, and I told him then that I was not going back to school, that I had learned enough. And he agreed without argument. I knew who I was then: a girl who would make her own destiny. Though a few things would come along to get in the way of that.
Lenore moved to Armentières. She had said on many occasions that a rural life had never been for her. But I know in my heart that she never truly accepted us. Helene was then given the room behind the house, and I now had my own room. I made curtains and hung up pieces of fabric around the walls like from a picture I had seen of a palace in India. When Helene came in she joked that gypsy practices were hard to get rid of, and I had taken them all down again. I was becoming very self-conscious of who I was and who I wanted to be. But suddenly I wanted a name like everyone else: a surname that was mine, and legal, and to have a record that I existed.
Jerome was suffering from arthritis like Lenore, and we had taken to doing more of the picking, grooming, cleaning, manning of our fruit stall on market day in the town square, and helping with the delivery of orders. People got used to us. We were soon just known as “Jerome’s girls,” and just occasionally “Jerome’s pretty gypsies,” though by that time it wasn’t said in a bad way, only because they were used to us and we were used to the name. Soon Helene stopped coming with us altogether, and it was just Jerome and I that went into town.
I wore a dress when we delivered things and did my hair up in case I should meet the man who would marry me. If I were to marry someone, they would need to be someone new to the town, an older male, and not one who had to answer to his parents.
I would parade in front of the tiny wall mirror now that I had the room to myself. I had no jewelry of my own, so sometimes I would sneak into Jerome’s room and look at his wife’s jewelry. She had a necklace of cream-colored pearls and a ring with an emerald-green stone.
Then one weekend Jerome decided to take us to Paris. From the train, we watched the fields disappear and the city buildings rise up spectacularly on the horizon. And once we’d arrived, there were lots of people, and color and noise and smells. Helene had told me that we had lived in Paris once, and though it was crowded, I looked to see if there were faces like ours.
From the train we walked several blocks with our cases, and we stayed in a little room in a tiny hotel, with two beds side by side and a shared bathroom at the end of the hall. We didn’t mind, Helene and me, that we were back to sleeping together on this trip. It sometimes felt as if we were one person, with the one heart and head, as so often we would say the same things at the same time.
Jerome took us to a museum and then to a café, and we sipped coffee and ate cake and watched the pretty ladies in their dresses and the attentive men beside them. And then he took us to shops and bought us each a dress, and I wore mine straightaway, but Helene said she would save hers, and then we went to have our photograph taken. It was the best day of my life. No one at all suspected we were gypsies. Here I could be whoever I wanted.
And then it was time to go home to our orchard, and I made a vow that I would not live in the country, that I would have to marry one day and live in a city. I also knew that I could never marry any of the boys from the towns and villages we lived near, whether their parents allowed it or not. The place had suddenly grown too small for me.
One day Jerome came back from the town with news that we couldn’t make sense of, and then our world changed. War had broken out, and we were standing in the firing line.
CHAPTER 23
From when we first learned the war was coming to our doorstep, it was the waiting that was killing us slowly, and the uncertainty ahead. Businesses kept going, but people were looking more carefully at things, at the sky and at the faces of passing people, as if the answers to what might happen were there. People stopped to discuss and grimly speculate. From the town and surrounding villages, young men—weavers, farmers, store workers, shoemakers, and more—who had been planning a different, peaceful future were being sent away to fight. Then the sky turned the color of gunpowder, and the ground moved beneath our feet.
German soldiers fired at the town of Bailleul, large heavy shelling that shook the fruit from the trees and killed many less fortunate than we were. It was autumn 1914. They had captured Armentières, and we hid in the cellar during the heaviest bombings heralding their arrival. When their boots finally made it to the streets of the town, many of our men had left and escaped behind the Allied lines. But Jerome made no plans to leave.
Though the occupation was only days long, the German soldiers for no apparent reason interrogated people on the street, thinking they were being spied upon. We were too afraid to leave the house. We had just enough time to hid
e our horses in an abandoned barn before several German hussars arrived to raid our fruit stocks and take our pigs and some of our chickens. There were stories of violent killings of farmers and the plundering of silver along the way as soldiers rumbled toward the town hall to set up headquarters in the hotel opposite. Then we hid once more inside the cellar while bullets and shells fired from both sides and the Germans were driven east again. Our house and orchard had thankfully been spared, and Bailleul was in the hands of the Allies.
When it was safe to come outdoors again, the mood had lightened because now the British ran the town, announcing their arrival by whistling their cheerful foreign tunes. Soldiers from across the world poured into Bailleul to then march back out again and into hellfire. As a show of thanks during their stay, residents baked them biscuits and cakes and delivered these to their initial camps close to the town. Young girls handed out their lace handkerchiefs to the soldiers who paraded in formation in the square, and I could flirt and say anything I wanted, and Helene and Jerome did not disapprove, because these were strange times, as if we were living outside our real lives. Without the constraints of feeling like an outsider, life, in an ironic sort of way, became freer for us. For a period anyway.
Life changed not just with the newcomers but with new attitudes also. Things that had driven us apart, petty gripes, grudges, and small crimes, were not the things to talk about. The talk for most was only about winning or losing the war, new factory work for the women, the threat of poison gas that could tear out our lungs and burn holes through our skin, and what to do with a town filled with soldiers. Helene and I would run to sit on a stone wall outside the church and watch them and listen to them speak, and they liked that we laughed and learned their stories in poorly told French and their humorous tunes that I would want to hear again and again.
A strange new reality planted itself in the town. Injured soldiers were being brought in to recuperate, and there was a constant changeover of billets. Hotels were full, and across the north people opened their doors with offers of help. The smell of engines and metal and men hung about the town, along with mashed earth and smoke that trickled in from the front line.
Though there was an urgency and vibrancy with soldiers and vehicles in and out of Bailleul, the war brought a change in economies. Our fruit trees continued to yield, with the battlefield smoke that blew across them, though not as plentifully. Much of what we had was offered in exchange for food from the Allied administrators and other traders in Armentières. We feared losing our three horses, Hester, Carmello, and Mira, to the British forces, but for the reasons we were too far out of town and our horses were needed for transport and deliveries, they were thankfully not requisitioned. We had only two hens that had somehow escaped German capture, but the things that we relied on to make money were diminishing, and we were forced to turn our sights elsewhere. We offered to clean, sew, and repair the uniforms of the men, and this became a steady income. Helene and I would collect the uniforms on the cart, take them home to clean them, sew up hems and shrapnel holes, and then return them.
Amid the casualties and carnage, the monotony of the shelling only several miles away, and the bleakness of recapture were stories of love to distract us. Madame Favot, a widow who owned a small hotel, had offered permanent accommodation to soldiers, and there was a rumor that she had found love with one of them who was younger than her own son. And there was another story of several daughters who had argued over their billeted soldier, only to lose him into the arms of the girl next door. There were also stories of midnight rendezvous and secret letters and promises of life after the war.
The first two years of battle were fierce, and a steady flow of wounded soldiers were carried from the battlefield. Many of those recuperating were brought by truck to convalesce at the asylum hospital in Bailleul. Until the war, the insane asylum had housed female patients, but the caretaking nuns offered part of the building to the British as a hospital and also allowed the use of their hydrotherapy and bathing facilities as respite for soldiers. In exchange, the nuns received coal, soap, disinfectant, bacon, butter, eggs, and other items that were becoming scarce as supply routes were either cut off or damaged, or factories were destroyed.
One summer morning we came to collect uniforms from the asylum hospital as usual, and Jerome sent us with a box of fruit for the sisters working there. Outside the building, a young man was discussing something with the mother superior. The man was tall, with brown hair and striking eyes of iris blue. He had a sweet face, a long jawline, and he was extremely handsome. The splattering of freckles across his face told me that he did not have the skin for the sun.
Several of the men beside him looked our way. One of them made a mock bow, and I pretended to be shy when he looked at me, though all I could think of was finding a way to speak with them. The one paying me attention had fair hair and a smiling, dimpled face. But my interest was in the handsome man who ignored us to focus on his discussion.
Helene and I slipped into the kitchen with our small delivery to gossip with the cook, who told us that many soldiers were using the baths for healing and respite. By the time we returned to the main entrance, our arms full of jackets and trousers, the men we had seen earlier had gone or progressed to somewhere else in the building. I was disappointed, naturally.
As we were leaving, two army trucks pulled up at the front entrance. Several of the men were piling out the back, some with bloody bandages around their heads, some on crutches, and others missing limbs. The nuns and nursing staff supplied by the Allies were directing them into the building.
Helene was very quiet on the way back, and I asked her what was wrong.
“Those men,” she said. “They suffer for us, for our freedom.”
It was rare for Helene to comment on things, for we had seen such sights before in the war years already passed, but in that year of 1917, these wounded men affected her.
When we got home again, there were two uniformed men in our house, talking to Jerome. He introduced them. An older officer, Jack, and the young yellow-haired man, Roger, whom we had seen at the hospital, were to be billeted there, and Jerome was fussing about with cups of tea and cake that Helene had made earlier.
The two soldiers would take over Helene’s room, and my sister would move once more back into the tiny bedroom with me. In exchange for their billet, they brought meat in tins, tobacco for Jerome, bananas, and eggs. By that time Helene and I had learned many English words and sentences, and we were practicing conversations between ourselves and with the soldiers every chance we could.
Several mornings later we had to return to the hospital to deliver the uniforms. Roger was there with some other men, including the man with the startling blue eyes I had seen earlier. The man was shirtless, and his torso was marked with tiny shrapnel wounds. Roger introduced him as Edgar, and he spoke to us politely in French, but I could tell his mind was elsewhere. He excused himself, and I watched him disappear down the hospital corridors. Helene was the first to ask if Edgar was well, which was unlike her, to be so curious and forward.
“He lost a lot of men beside him and had to be carried from the field in shock,” another man explained. “He is staying here a bit longer, and then he will be back in battle.”
Roger had left for the front a few days later, and as we heard the terrible explosions, I prayed that all the men would survive.
I visited Lenore once in Armentières and took her some fruit and coal that we had been given by the English. She was appreciative, though still cold toward me. Lenore carried much misery. The death of her husband, Jerome had told us, had affected her badly. Only later I would learn that deep love and loss should never be paired.
“I’m moving,” she said. “This place is too noisy for me. Too many soldiers.”
It was just as well she did. In coming months poison gas would spread dangerously close to the town, causing civilians to be evacuated anyway.
One day there was a knock at our door, and E
dgar stood on our threshold in his olive-green uniform beside Roger. Roger was being sent back to the field that day and had asked the garrison town’s mayor, a British officer and close friend, for permission to pass his billet on to Edgar.
The house grew a little quieter, as we were nervous around the newcomer. We felt we should keep some distance, yet at the same time we were drawn to him like the insects to our lanterns. All drawn to want to know him, help him, and protect him. He was strong, big, dwarfing our little kitchen with his presence, but there was a strange vulnerability about him also. He was quiet, dignified, grateful, and considerate. Not that the others weren’t appreciative. They had been a pleasure to be around. It was just that Edgar made us feel important. He complimented us on small tasks we considered unworthy of any praise, offered to wash our dinner plates along with his own, and graciously left us quickly after each meal, which at first I took a different way.
On the second night, after he returned to his room, we discussed him. “He doesn’t like us!” I said.
“Oh, stop talking like that!” said Helene. “Everything is so dramatic with you.” Even when she told me off, it didn’t sound like it. But I got the message. “He is injured. He is missing home. He is stuck here with strangers. He has fought battles already and more to come. Do you really think he should be jumping around joyously? He is a hero. They are all heroes, and we need to treat them as such.”
I felt ashamed for being so petty, though it wasn’t Helene’s intention to make me feel this way. She spoke about him with such passion, and it was not just to me but as if to everyone who wasn’t there also, to the rest of France.
In a Field of Blue Page 21
