The Occupation Secret

by The Occupation Secret (retail) (epub)

  She sighed. ‘Ask me again when the Liberation comes. Then I promise I’ll give you your answer.’

  ‘You mean it?’

  ‘Yes, Hervé. I mean it.’

  PART FOUR

  St Gervais Du Mont-Boisé, Aveyron, France.

  May 1944

  Monsieur Phillibert

  Ever since he had first heard the girl sing, two weeks before, Max von Aschau had been becoming progressively more certain about his future course of action.

  He was bored with St Gervais. Bored with routine training. Bored with the mediocrity of the men he had inherited to replace the better men he had lost on the Eastern Front. Each and every day began and ended in the same dreary way. The same faces seen. The same opinions held. The same routines followed. Max felt in desperate need of action – any action – and the girl had piqued his curiosity quite sufficiently so that it had become her, in his mind’s eye, whom he had selected to provide it for him.

  During the past few weeks, the hour and a half he had set aside for lunch and, before that, for playing music, had progressively become the high point of his day. Now a dogged part of him had made up its mind to further his relations with the girl, and this he resolutely intended to do, come hell or high water. He had spent the last five years of his life playing at being soldiers, and he now decided that it would please him to play at being a normal man again, for a change. The girl excited him, as much for the seeming impossibility of any sensible non-military relation with her, as for the marginally less unlikely possibility of their future collaboration in making music together.

  He had therefore decided to concentrate all his non-military energies on breaking through that icy reserve of hers, and flatter and batter her into acceding to his wishes in the matter of her singing to his accompaniment. It was as simple as that. The fact that he also found her physically attractive was neither here nor there – it was damned certainly no disadvantage.

  Max was rapidly coming to the conclusion that his brainwave of letting out his uniforms – of persuading the girl that she should personally show him where the town’s tailor lived – had been a stroke of tactical genius. It had not been easy to conjure up a situation in which he would be able to converse with Lucie on neutral ground, outside their respective workplaces. Max was only too well aware that, as regional commander, he became an instant talking point each time he ventured outside the precincts of the Bastide. Neither was he reasonably able to contrive a private meeting with her via a visit to her grandfather’s farm – for non-official calls to rural areas were frowned upon as leading to potential breaches of security or to unanticipated encounters with the Maquis. Then he had stumbled upon the flawless idea of the uniforms.

  Instinct had persuaded him that he would never succeed in breaking through Lucie’s formal reserve while they remained in a position of master and servant relative to each other. He must vary the ground rules, therefore, and force her to view him as a man, and not as an enemy.

  ‘You must go well ahead of us. It would hardly be wise for you to be seen walking with me and another soldier through the town. Go into the tailor’s house and prepare him for our visit. Remain inside to introduce us, and I will follow on a few moments later. Then you may, of course, go. Will you do this favour for me?’

  Lucie had hesitated, more than a little nonplussed at being asked to perform a series of duties which fell entirely outside the normal parameters of their relationship. How was she to respond? Her mother relied on her to maintain normal, friendly relations with the German, and she had already gone so far as admitting to herself that she was finding this increasingly easy to do.

  The major was an upright man – that much was obvious. And his mild but nevertheless increasingly persuasive hints that she should sing for him once again were flattering and appealed to her sense of drama and of the romantic. It was embarrassing to have to admit it, but she enjoyed being the focus of his attention and of his flattery, both in terms of her cooking and of her singing voice. These were elements on which she prided herself, and which she felt marked her out from the herd. It made her feel good that the German had noticed them too, and affixed a similar value to them – for Hervé, being close to tone-deaf, found her singing irrelevant, and took her cooking ability entirely for granted.

  ‘I would be extremely grateful for your help in this matter, Mademoiselle. You have, after all, been more than a little instrumental in forcing me to take this course of action. The splendour of the lunches you and your mother provide me from your restaurant have undoubtedly contributed to my expanding waistline, and it is therefore indirectly because of you that I have been forced into emergency remedial action. I am no longer the spare, lean fighting unit that I once was in Russia. Now I am coming more and more to resemble Monsieur Jourdain, Molière’s fat Bourgeois gentilhomme – “Suivez-moi, que j’aille un peu montrer mon habit par ville.”’

  Lucie had stared at him, open-mouthed. There were occasions, and this was one of then, when she had not the remotest idea what he was talking about. He was certainly not fat – far from it. In fact, he had hardly an ounce of spare flesh on his body. And why did he want her to show him Monsieur Phillibert’s house? Couldn’t one of his own men do it? And she had never read Molière, nor anything much else for that matter, beyond old copies of her mother’s Votre Beauté and Marie Claire magazines.

  ‘Do you want to go now?’ she said at last.

  ‘That would be excellent. Klasing will accompany me and carry my uniforms, and we shall follow fifty metres behind you. Are you sure you’re entirely happy to do this? I personally guarantee that you will not be compromised in any way.’

  ‘Yes, I’m happy to do it. Perfectly happy.’

  She wasn’t, of course. And therefore, in consequence, Max took the greatest possible care to enter Monsieur Phillibert’s house when no one else was visible on the street, and a good three minutes after Lucie had entered herself.

  ‘I’ll take the uniforms now. You can stay outside, Klasing, and make sure no one else comes in. Don’t hover outside the door, though. Go on up the street a little. That way no one will know where I am to be found.’

  ‘Jawohl, Herr Sturmbannführer.’

  Max’s eyes took some little time to accustom themselves to the dim light of the hallway after the brilliant sunshine of the street, and he hesitated for a moment outside the parlour door, gathering his thoughts – contriving expediencies. As he hovered there, his eye was caught by two screw holes set at an angle about three inches away from the centre of the right-hand side of the door frame, at a little above shoulder height. They had been painted over in a lighter paint than had originally been used for the door, and it was this fact that made them stand out.

  Max hesitated before knocking, his head cocked a little to one side, as if thinking. At one point he even placed his finger between the holes and felt around the indentation that the fresh paint so signally failed to hide. Then he allowed his breath to flutter out between his partly opened lips.

  ‘Monsieur Phillibert? It’s a pleasure to meet you. I hope Mademoiselle Léré has already explained the purpose of my visit. I asked her to show me the location of your premises on her way back from the Bastide. She is responsible for bringing me my lunches from her mother’s restaurant, you know?’

  ‘Yes. I know.’ Monsieur Phillibert was casting anxious glances back towards a partially open door to the rear of his atelier. A child’s face appeared briefly around the door, then snatched itself away.

  ‘Your son?’

  Phillibert swallowed. He seemed to be having difficulty in forming complete sentences.

  ‘Please ask Monsieur Phillibert’s family to come inside, Lucie. I should like very much to meet them.’

  Lucie shrugged and made her way into the rear parlour. As she entered, Max allowed his gaze to pass over that doorframe too. The same two screw-holes had been unevenly painted over with a lighter shade of paint, as if in mirror image of the first, out in the hallway.


  Madame Phillibert entered the room, with her two children behind her. Her face was deathly pale, and her expression strained. Phillibert went to stand beside them, as if he half expected Max to leap forward and threaten them with the chair on which he was now settling his uniforms. Lucie came back inside the room, frowning a little at the unexpected atmosphere Max’s presence was creating.

  ‘Have you been living here long, Monsieur Phillibert?’

  ‘Thirty years.’ Phillibert’s hands were shaking. He reached across to smooth his young son’s hair back across his brow in a vain attempt to disguise the spasmodic movements.

  ‘May I ask if any other of my officers have already visited you? To have their uniforms tailored? Or to order a new shirt, perhaps?’

  ‘No, Sir. No one has come here. You are the first German I have ever met.’

  Max nodded. ‘Good. Good.’ He allowed his gaze to rest for a moment on Phillibert’s young daughter. Then he smiled. ‘You know what a mezuzah is, don’t you Monsieur Phillibert?’

  Phillibert’s eyes flashed briefly towards the door frame. Then he looked down. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you, Lucie? Do you know what it is?’

  ‘No.’ Lucie frowned at him. She was uncertain what was going on, but she knew, from the expressions on Monsieur Phillibert’s and his family’s faces, that whatever it was had somehow taken on a desperate and vital importance.

  ‘A mezuzah is a tiny cylindrical container which Jews affix to their doorframes. It contains a parchment with verses from the Torah’s Book of Deuteronomy written on it. The text is written in a series of twenty-two scored lines, which correspond to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The whole is divided into two paragraphs, with the second paragraph indented to correspond to the design of a Torah scroll. God’s name is written in Hebrew on the reverse of the scroll, together with three further Kabbalistic names. Some Jews, when they enter a doorway with a mezuzah on it, even touch it and then kiss their hands. Is this not so, Monsieur Phillibert?’

  ‘Yes.’ Phillibert’s face had taken on the blankness of certain defeat.

  ‘There are exactly 713 letters on the scroll, and the scroll must be preserved intact, without any deterioration or damage, if it is to work in its capacity of protecting the house, and those inside it, from harm.’

  Phillibert closed his eyes. His wife moved unconsciously closer to him, gathering her children to her.

  ‘Do you know how I know all this, Monsieur Phillibert?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘SS officer training at Paderborn. We are given lectures on what to look out for in potential Jewish households. What signs to search for. What indications and habits we need to notice in potential suspects. All – and I repeat – all SS officers receive this training. If any of my officers had entered this house before me – on a similar errand, say, to the one I am on now – it would have taken them a bare ten seconds to come to quite the wrong conclusions about you and your family.’

  ‘The wrong conclusions?’ Monsieur Phillibert was staring at Max as if he expected him to burst out of his uniform and transform himself into some aspect of the antichrist before his very eyes.

  ‘Yes. The wrong conclusions. It is perfectly obvious to me from what you say that the person – or persons – who owned these premises before you was Jewish. They quite correctly removed the mezuzah, knowing ownership of the house was to change into non-Jewish hands. Not understanding the possible import of the mezuzah to SS eyes, you yourself paid far too little attention to covering the places where the mezuzoth had been, nor to filling in the screw-holes which can act as such a tragic giveaway to trained observers. Do you understand what I am saying to you, Monsieur Phillibert?’

  ‘No, Sir. No. I don’t really understand.’

  ‘What I am saying is that I do not wish to be placed in the irritating position of having to process – and then to throw out, no doubt – an inappropriate accusation from one of my men, if such an eventuality may in any way be avoided. I am here to conduct a war, and not a census. Do you take my meaning now, Monsieur Phillibert?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’ Phillibert’s eyes were brimming with tears. ‘Thank you, Sir. Thank you on behalf of my family.’

  ‘Good. That’s settled then.’ Max smiled around the room. ‘Now you may please take my measurements. These old uniforms make me look like a buffoon.’

  ‘Un Amour Comme Le Notre’

  8th May 1944

  Dearest Bettina,

  Thank you for your recent letter, and for the news about Hans-Albin and your darling Fritz – it’s reassuring to know that such paragons of virtue still exist somewhere in the world! I am, of course, devastated that I shall not be there for your wedding. Still, at least you’ll have Papa to give you away – if you can prise him from his books and his deer stalking, that is. Reading between the lines, it seems that you are still to be counted among the vestals, and my feeling is that this is a good thing. As I said to you before, our only chance to keep our sanity in wartime is to pretend, in all the ordinary things, that we are still at peace.

  I am at peace here. It is chastening how quickly soldiers can become used to the luxury of not fighting. It has been nearly six months since I last heard a shot fired in anger. Sometimes I wake up at night and think that I am simply hallucinating that I am here in France, training with my men, and that I am really back in Russia, pinned down in a slit trench, and have taken too much Pervitine to keep me awake. I could say more, but it will probably be censored. Suffice it to say that where others have had trouble, we have had none. The local French just get on with living their lives, and leave us, for the most part, to ours. We are like squabbling neighbours who have decided to turn their backs on one another – for the time being, at least – and pretend ignorance.

  I am even getting a little stout. Soon I will no longer be able to climb inside the turret of my tank. Every day I have my lunch sent over from the local restaurant, and then I sit in solitary splendour, drinking the wines laid aside by my absent host (I shall leave money for them, of course), and eating better food than anyone, in a time of war, has a right to. I wish you were here to share my meals. Instead I have a peasant girl to serve me, complete with clogs. She has even tuned my piano for me – her father, who usually deals with such things, is unavoidably absent, if you take my meaning, so she has conveniently stepped into his place. So now I can play every day… Bach, Schumann, Beethoven and Boyer.

  Boyer, I hear you ask? Yes, I have become a popular musician. The girl is – just like you, Bettinchen – a singer, and I am obviously so fatally jaded and in need of a chasse-spleen (the concept, not the wine), that I now spend my time learning, from the recordings she has agreed to lend me, how to accompany her in French popular songs. I can’t tell you what pleasure this gives me. When the war is over I shall oil back my hair and become a nightclub pianist, complete with bow tie and sideburns. I shall call myself Max Ash. Do you think I might find a position in the Vier Jahreszeiten? Or would your Fritz find it too humiliating to have a brother-in-law who is a popular entertainer?

  Anyway, please reassure Father Bauer that I have not entirely abandoned his beloved Bach. I have already completed work on the whole of Book One of The Well-Tempered Clavier. On a good day, when I have been drinking no wine, I can almost play them through by memory. My intention is to complete the second book before… well, before it is too late and I no longer have the time, nor a spare piano to play on.

  So you see, I am filling my days outside my usual military duties, and am busy losing what my friend, Paul Meyer, calls my ‘edge’. I presume, by this, he means the edge of a sword-blade? So. I am blunting myself. Soon I shall be no threat at all to the enemy. I shall simply play them to death – a new secret weapon? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if one could sit down in the midst of a battle, and play Bach? Would the soldiers drop their rifles, do you think, and start listening? Or would the gunfire and the bombing redouble themselves in an effort to dampen down civilizat
ion forever, as they did after the famous football match between the 134th Saxons and the Tommies during the Ypres offensive? Father heard all about it – you can ask him if you don’t believe me. His unit was stationed nearby. He tells me High Command immediately moved the 134th to an entirely different part of the front to prevent any possibility of a repetition. Plus ça change…

  You must be thinking to yourself by now, ‘Well, this brother of mine, he is making no kind of sense. Perhaps he has gone mad, and he is in fact writing to me from a field hospital for men suffering from battle fatigue?’ I can assure you I am not. Down here, the people still work in the fields as normal, cultivating the ground and feeding their animals. There is Mass on Sundays – which I attend, in a special pew set aside for German Catholics! – the vines have been pruned and are slowly ripening for September’s grape harvest, and couples are getting married. Nightingales sing, not only in April, but through May and June, and, so they tell me, sometimes even into July as well, and I can’t say that I blame them. Roquefort cheese is still made in caves only thirty or so kilometres away as the crow flies, and in the rivers you can catch langoustines using your fingers, as I saw a boy do the other day, snatching your hands out of the holes in the river bank before the crustaceans have bitten too deep.

  Yesterday I had langoustines for lunch, cooked in a garlic sauce, with real butter, followed by a goat’s cheese, called Cabécou. They have a saying here: ‘Un repas sans fromage est une belle à qui il manque un oeil.’ I cannot imagine you without an eye, my dear, just as I can no longer imagine lunch without cheese.

  Yes. Tragically, it’s true. I am becoming decadent. The French have lured me from the straight path of rectitude and have enmeshed me in their coils. In fact I can imagine nothing better than coming back to France when the war is over, and living here (perhaps I shall marry my broken-nosed peasant girl??), having fat babies and working my little piece of land. I shall play the piano at all the local fêtes, and…