Suite Française

by Irene Nemirovsky

  At first the soldier didn’t understand; then he said he’d been a locksmith. The shoemaker’s wife thought for a moment, then whispered in her husband’s ear, “We should show him that broken key to the dresser. Maybe he could fix it . . .”

  “Forget it,” her husband said, frowning.

  “You? Lunch?” the soldier continued. He pointed to the white bread on a plate decorated with flowers: “French bread . . . light . . . not in stomach . . . nothing . . .”

  What he meant was that the bread didn’t seem nourishing, wouldn’t fill you up, but the French couldn’t believe anyone would be crazy enough not to recognise the excellence of their food, especially their golden round loaves, their crown-shaped breads. There were rumours they would soon have to be made with a mixture of bran and poor-quality flour. But no one believed it. They took the German’s words as a compliment and were flattered. Even the sour expression on the shoemaker’s face softened. He sat down at the table with his family. The Germans sat on wooden stools, at a distance.

  “And do you like this village?” the shoemaker’s wife continued.

  She was naturally sociable and suffered from her husband’s long silences.

  “Oh, yes, beautiful . . .”

  “And what about where you come from? Is it like here?” she asked another soldier.

  The soldier’s face began quivering; you could tell he was desperately trying to find the words to describe his own land, the fields of hop and deep forests. But he couldn’t find the words; he just spread out his arms. “Big . . . good earth . . .” He hesitated and sighed. “Far . . .”

  “Do you have a family?”

  He nodded yes.

  “You don’t need to talk to them,” the shoemaker said to his wife.

  The woman felt ashamed. She continued working in silence, pouring the coffee, cutting the children’s sandwiches. They could hear joyful sounds coming from outside. It was the cheerful din of laughter, weapons rattling, soldiers’ voices and footsteps. No one quite knew why, but they felt light-hearted. Maybe it was because of the beautiful weather. The sky, so blue, seemed gently to bow down towards the horizon and caress the earth. The hens were squatting in the dust: every so often they made sleepy squawking sounds and fluffed themselves up. Bits of straw, feathers, invisible grains of pollen floated in the air. It was nesting season.

  There had been no men in the village for so long that even these soldiers, the invaders, seemed in their rightful place. The invaders felt it too; they stretched out in the sunshine. The mothers of prisoners or soldiers killed in the war looked at them and begged God to curse them, but the young women just looked at them.

  7

  In one of the classrooms of the independent school, the ladies of the village and some of the fat farmers’ wives from the surrounding countryside had gathered together for the monthly “Packages for Prisoners” meeting. The village had taken responsibility for local children of prisoners of war who had been on welfare before the war. The Charity’s President was the Viscountess de Montmort. She was a shy, ugly young woman who got flustered whenever she had to speak in public. On each occasion she stuttered; her hands would sweat; her legs trembled; in short, she was just as prone to stage fright as any member of the aristocracy. But she felt it was an obligation, that it was her personal responsibility, her vocation, to enlighten the peasants and middle classes, to show them the way, to plant the seed of righteousness within them.

  “You see, Amaury,” she explained to her husband, “I cannot believe there is any essential difference between them and me. Even though they disappoint me (if you only knew how crude and petty they can be!), nevertheless I persist in trying to find some spark within them. Yes,” she added, looking up at him with tears in her eyes—she cried easily—“yes, our Lord would not have died for such souls if there had been nothing inside them . . . But their ignorance, my dear, they are steeped in such ignorance that it is truly frightening. So at the beginning of each meeting, I give them a little talk to help them understand why they are being punished and (go ahead and laugh, Amaury) I have sometimes seen a glimmer of understanding on their chubby faces. I do regret,” the Viscountess thoughtfully concluded, “I do regret not having followed my vocation: I would have enjoyed preaching in an isolated region, working alongside some missionary in a savannah or virgin forest. Well, best not to think about it. Our mission is here where the Good Lord has sent us.”

  She was standing on a small platform; the classroom had quickly been cleared of its desks; a dozen or so pupils deemed the most worthy had been allowed to come and hear the Viscountess speak. They were scraping their shoes on the floor and looking vacantly into space with their large, dull eyes, “like cows,” the Viscountess thought, feeling rather annoyed.

  She decided to speak directly to them. “My dear girls,” she said, “you have been the victims of our country’s misfortunes at such a tender age . . .”

  One of the girls was listening so attentively that she fell off her wooden stool; the eleven other girls tried to stifle their riotous laughter in their smocks.

  The Viscountess frowned and continued more loudly. “You play your childish games. You seem carefree, but your hearts are full of sadness. What fervent prayers you must offer to Almighty God, day and night, begging Him to take pity on our dear suffering France!”

  She paused and nodded curtly to the teacher who had just come in: she was a woman who did not attend Mass and who had buried her husband in a civil ceremony; according to her pupils she hadn’t even been baptised, which seemed not so much scandalous as unbelievable, like saying someone had been born with the tail of a fish. As this person’s conduct was irreproachable, the Viscountess hated her all the more: “because,” she explained to the Viscount, “if she drank or had lovers, you could understand her lack of religion, but just imagine, Amaury, the confusion that can be caused in people’s minds when they see virtue practised by people who are not religious.”

  The presence of this teacher was so odious to the Viscountess that her voice took on the same burning passion that seeing the enemy stirs in our hearts, and it was with true eloquence that she continued, “But our prayers, our tears are not enough. I say this not only to you; I say it to your mothers. We must be charitable. But what do I see? No one is charitable; no one puts other people first. I am not asking you for money; alas, money doesn’t mean very much any more,” the Viscountess said with a sigh, remembering she had spent 850 francs on the shoes she was wearing (fortunately, the Viscount was the local Mayor and she had coupons for shoes whenever she pleased). “No, it isn’t money, it’s food I want to send in these packages to our prisoners of war, food we have in such abundance in this region. Each one of you is thinking of your own relatives, your husband, son, brother, father who is a prisoner, and nothing is too much for them; you send them butter, chocolate, sugar, tobacco, but what about the men who have no families? Oh, ladies, think of it, just imagine the state of these poor wretches who never receive any packages, never receive any letters! Come now, what could you do for them? I’ll collect all the donations, I’ll sort them all out; I’ll send them to the Red Cross to distribute them to the different Stalags. What do you say, ladies?”

  They said nothing; the farmers’ wives looked at the village ladies, who pursed their lips and stared back at them.

  “Come along now, I’ll start,” said the Viscountess sweetly. “I have an idea: we could send a letter written by one of the children here in the next package. A letter that in simple, touching words would reveal their hearts and express their sorrowful, patriotic feelings. Just think,” the Viscountess continued in an impassioned voice, “just think of the joy a poor abandoned soldier will feel when he reads those words, when he can almost touch, in a way, the very soul of his country; their words will remind him of the men, the women, the children, the trees, the houses of his dear little home, and as the poet said, loving our home makes us love our country even more. But most of all, my children, let your hearts spea
k. Do not aim for stylistic effect: forget your letter-writing skills and speak from the heart. Ah, the heart,” said the Viscountess, half closing her eyes, “nothing beautiful, nothing great is accomplished without heart. You could put a little flower from the fields in your letter, a daisy or a primrose . . . I don’t think that would be breaking any rules. Do you like that idea?” the Viscountess asked, tilting her head slightly and smiling graciously. “Come, now, I’ve talked enough. It’s your turn.”

  The notary’s wife, a woman with hard features and a slight moustache, said sharply, “It’s not that we don’t want to spoil our dear prisoners. But what can we poor villagers do? We have nothing. We don’t have enormous estates like you, Viscountess, or big farms like the country folk. We can barely feed ourselves. My daughter just gave birth and can’t even get any milk for her baby. Eggs cost two francs each, if you can find any.”

  “Are you saying we farmers are running a black market?” asked Cécile Sabarie who was in the audience. When she got angry, her neck swelled up like a turkey and her face went purplish-red.

  “I’m not saying that, but . . .”

  “Ladies, ladies,” the Viscountess said softly, and she thought despondently, “Well, there you have it, there’s nothing to be done, they feel nothing, they understand nothing, they have base souls. What am I thinking? Souls? They’re nothing more than stomachs with the gift of speech.”

  “It’s hurtful to hear you say that,” Cécile continued, “it’s hurtful to see you with your houses and having everything you want and then to hear you cry poverty. Come on, everyone knows you villagers have everything. You hear me? Everything! You think we don’t know you’re getting all the meat? You buy up all the coupons. Everybody knows it. You pay a hundred for each meat coupon. If you’ve got money, you want for nothing, that’s for sure, while we poor people . . .”

  “Well of course we have to have meat, Madame,” said the notary’s wife haughtily, anxiously wondering if she’d been spotted coming out of the butcher’s with a leg of lamb the day before (the second one that week). “We don’t have pigs we can kill! We don’t have hams in our kitchens, tubs of lard and cured sausages we’d rather see eaten by worms than give them to the miserable people in the village.”

  “Ladies, ladies,” the Viscountess implored. “Think of France, elevate your hearts. Control yourselves. Silence these hurtful remarks. Think of our situation. We are ruined, defeated . . . We have only one consolation: our dear Maréchal. And all you can talk about is eggs, milk, pigs! How important is food? Really, ladies, this is all so vulgar! We have so many other things to worry about. What is really important in the end? Helping each other a little, a little tolerance. Let us unite just as the soldiers in the last war did in the trenches, just as, I am sure, our dear prisoners of war are doing in their camps, behind their barbed-wire fences.”

  It was strange. They had barely been listening to her until now. Her imploring had been like a priest’s sermon you hear without understanding. But the image of a German prisoner-of-war camp, with men herded behind barbed wire, touched them. Every one of these large, heavy women had someone they loved in one of those camps; they were working for him; they were saving for him; they were putting money aside for his return, so he could say, “You really took care of everything; you’re a good wife.” Each woman pictured her absent man, just hers; each woman imagined in her own way the place he was held captive; one thought of a pine forest, another of a cold room, yet another of fortress-like walls, but each of them ended up imagining miles of barbed wire surrounding their men and isolating them from the rest of the world. The farmers’ wives and villagers alike felt their eyes fill with tears.

  “I’ll bring you something,” one of them said.

  “Me too,” said another with a sigh. “I’ll manage to find a bit of something.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” promised the notary’s wife.

  Madame de Montmort hurried to write down their promises. Every one of the women stood up, went over to the President and whispered something in her ear, because now they were all deeply moved and touched; they truly wanted to give, not only to their sons and husbands, but to strangers, to children on Welfare. However, they didn’t trust each other; they didn’t want to seem richer than they were; they feared being denounced. There wasn’t a single household that didn’t hide its provisions; mothers and daughters spied on each other, denounced each other; housewives closed their kitchen doors at mealtimes so they wouldn’t be betrayed by the smell of lard sizzling in the pot, or the piece of prohibited meat, or the cake made with illegal flour. Madame de Montmort wrote down:

  Madame Bracelet, farmer’s wife in Les Roaches, two sausages, a pot of honey, a jar of potted meat . . . Madame Joseph, from the Rouet estate, two potted guinea fowl, some salted butter, chocolate, coffee, sugar . . .

  “I can count on you, can’t I, ladies?” the Viscountess said again.

  But the farmers’ wives just stared at her, astonished: they never went back on their word. They said goodbye to the Viscountess, holding out their red hands that were chafed by the harsh winter, by caring for animals, by doing the washing. She shook each hand reluctantly; touching them was physically distasteful to her. But she made the effort to overcome this feeling so contrary to Christian charity and, in the spirit of mortification, forced herself to kiss the children who accompanied their mothers; they were all fat and pink, overfed and with dirty faces, like little pigs.

  At last the room was empty. The teacher had taken the girls out; the farmers’ wives were gone. The Viscountess sighed, not from tiredness but from disgust. How base and ugly people were! “You have to go to so much trouble to instil a glimmer of love into these sad souls . . .” she said to herself out loud, but as her spiritual adviser had suggested, she offered up her day’s tiredness and work to God.

  8

  “And what do the French think, Monsieur, of the outcome of the war?” Bonnet asked.

  The women looked at each other, scandalised. It just wasn’t done. You simply didn’t talk to a German about the war—not about this one, or the other one, or about Maréchal Pétain, or about Mers-el-Kébir, or about how France had been split in two, or about the occupying forces, or about anything that mattered.

  There was only one possible attitude: an affectation of cold indifference, the tone of voice Benoît used as he raised his glass, full to the brim with red wine: “They don’t give a damn, Monsieur.”

  It was evening. The setting sun, clear and crisp, was a sign there would be a frost that night, but that the next day would undoubtedly be magnificent. Bonnet had spent all day in the village and was on his way to bed. But before going up, he had lingered downstairs—out of politeness, natural kindness, the desire to be well regarded or perhaps simply the wish to warm himself a moment by the fire. Dinner was almost over; Benoît was alone at the table; the women had already got up and were tidying the room, doing the dishes.

  The German looked at the big useless bed with curiosity. “No one sleeps here, do they? It isn’t used for anything? How odd.”

  “Sometimes it’s used,” said Madeleine, thinking of Jean-Marie.

  She thought no one would guess, but Benoît frowned; every allusion to what had happened that past summer pierced straight through his heart like an arrow, but it was his business, no one else’s. He looked reproachfully at Cécile, who had started to snigger.

  “Sometimes it can be useful,” he replied with excessive politeness. “You never know . . . If something bad happened to you, for example (not that I’d want it to). Around here, we lay out our dead on beds like this.”

  Bonnet looked at him, amused, with the same scornful pity you feel when a wild animal grinds its teeth behind the bars of its cage. “Fortunately,” he thought, “this man will be busy working and won’t be around too often . . . and the women are more approachable.” He smiled. “In wartime, none of us wants to die in a bed.”

  Madeleine, meanwhile, had gone out into the garden;
she came back with some flowers to decorate the mantelpiece. They were the first lilacs of the season, as white as snow, with greenish tips. At the top of each stem the clusters of flowers were still in bud, but further down they opened out into perfumed blooms.

  Bonnet lowered his pale face deep inside the bouquet. “How divine . . . and how well you know how to arrange flowers.”

  For a second they stood silently, side by side. Benoît thought that she (his wife, his Madeleine) always seemed comfortable when it came to doing lady’s work—when she chose flowers, polished her nails, wore her hair differently from the other women in the area, when she spoke to strangers, held a book . . . “People shouldn’t take in foster-children, you never know where they come from,” he said to himself. Once more that painful thought . . . When he said, “You don’t know where they come from,” what he imagined, what he was afraid of, wasn’t that Madeleine might come from a family of alcoholics or thieves, but from the middle classes; perhaps it was that which made her sigh and say, “Oh, it’s so boring in the countryside,” or “I want to have pretty things, I do,” and it was that which made her feel some vague bond with strangers, with the enemy, so long as he happened to be a gentleman with fine clothes and clean hands.

  He pushed his chair back angrily and went outside. It was time to get the animals in. He stayed in the warm darkness of the stables for a long time. A cow had given birth the day before. She tenderly licked her little calf with its big head, its thin trembling legs. Another cow was breathing quietly in the corner. He listened to her calm, deep breaths. From where he was, he could see the open door of the house; a shape appeared on the doorstep. Someone was worried because he hadn’t come back, they were looking for him. His mother or Madeleine? His mother, no doubt . . . Just his mother, sadly . . . He wouldn’t move from here until the German had gone upstairs. He’d see his light go on. Sure, electricity didn’t cost him anything. He was right; after a few moments a light shone through the window. At the same time the shadowy figure who’d been looking for him left the doorstep and ran lightly towards him. He felt his heart soften, as if some invisible hand had suddenly lifted the burden that had weighed so heavily on his chest for so long that he felt crushed by it.