Suite Française

by Irene Nemirovsky

  The young man glanced around. He looked closely at the faded red tiles on the floor, worn pink in places, the big stove standing in the middle of the room, the bed in the corner, the spinning wheel (they had brought it down from the attic where it had been since the other war: all the young women in the area were learning to spin; it was impossible to find wool in the shops any more). The German then looked carefully at the framed photographs on the walls, the certificates for agricultural prizes, the empty little niche that used to hold a statue of a saint, surrounded by a delicate frieze now half worn away; finally, his eyes fell once more upon the young farm girl holding the baby in her arms. He smiled. “You needn’t worry about me. This will do nicely.”

  His voice was strangely harsh and resonant, like metal being crushed. His steel-grey eyes, sharply etched face and the unusual shade of his pale-blond hair, which was as smooth and bright as a helmet, made this young man’s appearance striking to Madeleine; there was something about his physique that was so perfect, so precise, so dazzling, she thought to herself, that he reminded her more of a machine than a human being. In spite of herself, she was fascinated by his boots and belt buckle: the leather and steel seemed to sparkle.

  “I hope you have an orderly,” she said. “No one here could make your boots shine like that.”

  He laughed and said again, “You needn’t worry about me.”

  Madeleine had put her son in his crib. She could see the German’s reflection in the mirror above the bed. She saw the way he looked at her and smiled. She was afraid and thought, “What will Benoît say if he starts chasing after me?” She didn’t like this young man, he frightened her a bit, yet despite herself she was attracted by a certain resemblance to Jean-Marie—not to Jean-Marie as a man, but as a member of a higher social class, a gentleman. Both were carefully shaven, well brought-up, with pale hands and delicate skin. She realised the presence of this German in the house would be doubly painful for Benoît: because he was the enemy but also because he wasn’t a peasant like him—because he hated whatever aroused Madeleine’s interest in and curiosity about the upper classes to such an extent that for a while now, he had been snatching fashion magazines from her hands; and if she asked him to shave or change his shirt, he’d say, “Better get used to it. You married a farmer, a country bumpkin, I got no fancy manners” with such resentment, such deep-seated jealousy that she knew who had given him these ideas, that Cécile must have been talking. Cécile wasn’t the same with her as before, either . . . She sighed. So many things had changed since the beginning of this damned war.

  “I’ll show you your room,” she said finally.

  But he said no; he took a chair and sat down near the stove.

  “In a minute, if that’s all right with you. Let’s get to know each other. What’s your name?”

  “Madeleine Sabarie.”

  “I’m Kurt Bonnet” (he pronounced it Bonnett). “It’s a French name, as you can see. My ancestors must have been your countrymen, chased out of France under Louis XIV. There is French blood in Germany, and French words in our language.”

  “Oh?” she said indifferently.

  She wanted to say, “There’s German blood in France too, but in the earth and since 1914.” But she didn’t dare: it was better to say nothing. It was strange: she didn’t hate the Germans—she didn’t hate anyone—but the sight of that uniform seemed to change her from a free and proud person into a sort of slave, full of cunning, caution and fear, skilful at cajoling the conquerors while hissing “I hope they drop dead!” behind closed doors, as her mother-in-law did; she at least didn’t pretend, or act nice to the conquerors, Madeleine thought. She was ashamed of herself; she frowned, put on an icy expression and moved her chair away so the German would understand she didn’t want to talk to him any more and she didn’t like him being there.

  He, however, looked at her with pleasure. Like many young men subjected to strict discipline from childhood, he had acquired the habit of bolstering his ego with outward arrogance and stiffness. He believed that any man worthy of the name should be made of steel. And he had behaved accordingly during the war, in Poland and France, and during the occupation. But far more than any principles, he obeyed the impulsiveness of youth. (When she first saw him, Madeleine thought he was twenty. He was even younger: he had turned nineteen during the French campaign.) He behaved kindly or cruelly depending on how people and things struck him. If he took a dislike to someone, he made sure he hurt them as much as possible. During the retreat of the French army, when he was in charge of taking the pathetic herd of prisoners back to Germany, during those terrible days when he was under orders to kill anyone who was flagging, anyone who wasn’t walking fast enough, he shot the ones he didn’t like the look of without remorse, with pleasure even. On the other hand he would behave with infinite kindness and sympathy towards certain prisoners who seemed likeable to him, some of whom owed him their lives. He was cruel, but it was the cruelty of adolescence, cruelty that results from a lively and subtle imagination, focused entirely inward, towards his own soul. He didn’t pity the suffering of others, he simply didn’t see them: he saw only himself.

  Mixed in with this cruelty was a slight affectation that was a product of his youth as well as a certain leaning towards sadism. For example, although he was harsh towards people, he displayed the greatest solicitude towards animals. It was at his instigation that the Headquarters at Calais had issued an order several months earlier. Bonnet had noticed that, on market days, the farmers carried their chickens feet tied and head down. “As a gesture of humanity” it was forthwith forbidden to continue this practice. The farmers paid no attention, which only increased Bonnet’s loathing of the “barbaric and thoughtless” French, while the French were outraged to read such a decree beneath another announcing that eight men had been executed as a reprisal for an act of sabotage. In the northern city where he’d been billeted, Bonnet had only been friendly with the woman whose house he lived in because one day, when he’d been suffering from flu, she’d taken the trouble to bring him breakfast in bed. Bonnet had immediately thought of his mother, his childhood years and, tears in his eyes, thanked Lili—a former Madam in a house of prostitution. From that moment on he did everything he could for her, granting her passes of all kinds, coupons for petrol, etc.; he spent the evenings with the old hag because, he would say, she was old and alone and bored; though he wasn’t a rich man, he brought her expensive trinkets every time he returned from missions to Paris.

  These acts of kindness were sometimes the result of musical, literary or, as on this spring morning when he walked into the Sabaries’ farmhouse, artistic impressions: Bonnet was a cultured man, gifted at all the arts. The Sabaries’ farm, with its slightly damp, sombre atmosphere created by the rainy day, its faded pink floor tiles, its empty little niche from which he imagined a statue of the Virgin Mary had been removed during the last revolution, its little palm branch above the cradle and the sparkling copper warming pan half in shadow, had something about it, thought Bonnet, that reminded him of a “domestic scene” of the Flemish School. This young woman sitting on a low chair, her child in her arms, her delightful breast lustrous in the shadow, her ravishing face with its rosy complexion, her pure white chin and forehead, was herself worthy of a portrait. As he admired her, he was almost transported to a museum in Munich or Dresden, alone in front of one of those paintings that aroused within him that intellectual and sensual intoxication he preferred above all else. This woman could treat him coldly, even with hostility, it wouldn’t matter; he wouldn’t even notice. He would only ask of her, as he asked of everyone around him, to provide him with purely artistic acts of kindness: to retain the lighting of a masterpiece, with luminous flesh set against a background of velvety shadows.

  At that very moment a large clock struck midday. Bonnet laughed, almost with pleasure. It was just such a deep, low, slightly cracked sound he had imagined coming from the antique clock with the painted casing in some Dutch Old Maste
r, along with the smell of fresh herring prepared by the housewife and the sounds from the street beyond the window with its tarnished panes of glass; in such paintings there was always a clock like this one hanging on the wall.

  He wanted to make Madeleine speak; he wanted to hear her voice again, her young, slightly lilting voice.

  “Do you live here alone? Your husband must be a prisoner?”

  “Oh, no,” she said quickly.

  At the thought of Benoît, a German prisoner who had escaped, she was afraid again; it struck her that the German would guess and arrest him. “I’m so stupid,” she thought, and instinctively softened: she had to be nice to the conqueror.

  “Will you be here long?” she asked in a frank, humble voice. “Everyone’s saying three months.”

  “We don’t know ourselves,” Bonnet explained. “That’s military life for you: in war, it all depends on orders, a general’s whim or chance. We were on our way to Yugoslavia, but it’s all finished over there.”

  “Oh? Is it?”

  “It will be in a few days. In any case, it would be all over by the time we got there. And I think they’ll keep us here all summer, unless they send us to Africa or England.”

  “And . . . do you like it?” said Madeleine, intentionally feigning innocence, but with a little shudder of disgust she couldn’t hide, as if she were asking a cannibal. “Is it true you eat human flesh?”

  “Man is made to be a warrior, just as woman is made to please the warrior,” Bonnet replied, and he smiled because he found it comical to quote Nietzsche to this pretty French farm girl. “Your husband must think the same way, if he’s young.”

  Madeleine didn’t reply. Actually, she had very little idea what Benoît thought, even though they’d been brought up together. Benoît was taciturn and cloaked in a triple armour of decency: masculine, provincial and French. She didn’t know what he hated or what he liked, just that he was capable of both love and hatred.

  “My God,” she said to herself, “I hope he doesn’t take against this German.”

  She continued to listen but said little, straining all the while to hear any sounds on the road. Carts passed by, the church bells chimed for evening prayers. You could hear the bells ring out one after the other across the countryside; first the light silvery note of the little chapel on the Montmort estate, then the deep sound from the village, then the hurried little peal from Sainte-Marie that you could only hear in bad weather, when the wind blew in from the tops of the hills.

  “The family will be home soon,” murmured Madeleine.

  She placed a creamy earthenware jug of forget-me-nots on the table.

  “You won’t be eating here, will you?” she suddenly asked.

  He reassured her. “No, no, I’ve paid to have my meals in town. I’ll only have some coffee in the morning.”

  “Well, that’s easy enough, Monsieur.”

  It was an expression they used a lot around Bussy. She said it in an affectionate sort of way, with a smile. It didn’t mean a thing, though; it was a mere politeness and didn’t actually mean you would get anything. A mere politeness and, if the promise wasn’t kept, there was another expression ready and waiting, this time spoken with a tinge of regret and apology: “Ah, well, you can’t always do what you want.”

  But the German was delighted. “How kind everyone is here,” he said naïvely.

  “You think you so, Monsieur?”

  “And I hope you’ll bring me my coffee in bed?”

  “We only do that for sick people,” said Madeleine ironically.

  He wanted to take her hands; she quickly pulled away.

  “Here’s my husband.”

  He wasn’t there yet, but he would be soon; she recognised the sound of the mare’s hooves on the road. She went out into the courtyard; it was raining. Through the gates came the old horse and trap, unused since the other war but now a replacement for the broken-down car. Benoît held the reins. The women were sitting under wet umbrellas.

  Madeleine ran towards her husband and put her arm round his neck. “There’s a Boche,” she whispered in his ear.

  “Is he going to be living with us?”

  “Yes.”

  “Damn!”

  “So what?” said Cécile. “They’re not so bad if you know how to handle them, and they pay well.”

  Benoît unharnessed the mare and took her to the stable. Cécile, intimidated by the German but conscious of having an advantage because she was wearing her best Sunday dress, a hat and silk stockings, proudly walked into the room.

  6

  The regiment was passing beneath Lucile’s windows. The soldiers were singing; they had excellent voices, but the French were bemused by this serious choir whose sad and menacing music sounded more religious than warlike.

  “That how they pray?” the women asked.

  The troops were returning from manoeuvres; it was so early in the morning that the whole village was still asleep. A few women woke with a start. They leaned out of the windows and laughed. It was such a fresh, gentle morning! The roosters crowed huskily after the cold night. The peaceful sky was tinged with pink and silver. Its innocent light played on the happy faces of the men as they marched past (how could you not be happy on such a glorious spring day?). The women watched them for a long time: these tall, well-built men with their hard faces and melodious voices. They were beginning to recognise some of the soldiers. They were no longer the anonymous crowd of the early days, the flood of green uniforms indistinguishable from one another, just as no wave in the sea is unique but merges with the swells before and after it. These soldiers had names now: “Here comes that short blond who lives with the shoemaker and whose friends call him Willy,” the townspeople would say. “That one over there, he’s the redhead who orders omelettes with eight eggs and drinks eighteen glasses of brandy one after the other without getting drunk or being sick. That little young one who stands so straight, he’s the interpreter. He calls the shots at Headquarters. And there’s the Angelliers’ German.”

  Just as farmers used to be given the names of the places where they lived, to such an extent that the postman who was a descendant of former tenant farmers on the Montmort estate was called Auguste de Montmort to this very day, so the Germans more or less inherited the social status of their landlords. They were called the Durands’ Fritz, the La Forges’ Ewald, the Angelliers’ Bruno.

  Bruno rode at the head of his cavalry detachment. The well-fed, fiery animals pranced and eyed the onlookers with pride and impatience; they were the envy of the villagers.

  “Mama, did you see?” the children shouted.

  The Lieutenant’s horse had a golden-brown coat, as glossy as satin. Both horse and rider were aware of the cheers, the women’s cries of pleasure. The handsome animal arched its neck, violently shook its bit. The officer smiled faintly and sometimes made a little affectionate smacking sound with his lips, which controlled the horse better than the whip. When a young girl, at a window, exclaimed, “He’s a good rider, that Boche, he is,” he raised his gloved hand to his helmet and solemnly saluted.

  Behind the young girl you could hear nervous whispering.

  “You know very well they don’t like being called that. Are you crazy?”

  “Oh, so what! So I forgot,” the young girl retorted, red as a cherry.

  The detachment broke ranks at the village square. In a great clanking of boots and spurs, the men went back to their billets. The sun was shining and it was hot now, almost like summer. The soldiers got washed in the courtyards; their naked torsos were red, burned by being outdoors so much, and covered with sweat. One soldier had hooked a mirror on to the branch of a tree and was shaving. Another plunged his head and bare arms into a large tub of cool water. A third called out to a young woman, “Beautiful day, Madame!”

  “Well now, so you speak French?”

  “A little.”

  They looked at each other; smiled at each other. The women went over to the wells and sent down
their buckets on long creaking chains. Once retrieved and full of shimmering, icy water that reflected the dark blue of the sky, these buckets always attracted a soldier, who would hurry over to take the heavy burden. Some of the soldiers did it to prove that, even though they were German, they were polite; others did it out of natural kindness; some because the beautiful day and a kind of physical invigoration (brought on by the fresh air, healthy tiredness and the prospect of a well-earned rest) put them in a state of exaltation, of inner strength—a state where men who would gladly act maliciously towards the strong feel even more kindly towards the weak (the same state, doubtless, that in spring causes male animals to fight one another yet graze, play and gambol in the dust in front of the females). A soldier walked a young woman home, solemnly carrying two bottles of white wine she had just pulled out of the well. He was a very young man with light-blue eyes, a turned-up nose, large strong arms.

  “They’re nice,” he said, looking at the woman’s legs, “they’re nice, Madame . . .”

  “Shh . . . My husband . . .”

  “Ah, husband, böse . . . bad,” he exclaimed, pretending to be very frightened.

  The husband was listening behind the closed door and, since he trusted his wife, instead of getting angry he felt rather proud. “Well, our women are beautiful,” he thought. And the small glass of white wine he had every morning seemed to taste better.

  Some soldiers went into the shoemaker’s. He was a disabled war veteran who had his workbench in the shop; the deep, natural aroma of fresh wood hung in the air; the freshly cut blocks of pine still shed tears of sap. The shelves were crammed with hand-carved clogs decorated with all manner of patterns—chimera, snakes, bulls’ heads. There was a pair in the shape of a pig’s snout.

  One of the Germans looked at them appreciatively. “Magnificent work,” he said.

  The morose, taciturn shoemaker didn’t reply, but his wife, who was setting the table, was so curious she couldn’t help but ask, “What did you do in Germany?”