Off the Wild Coast of Brittany

by Juliet Blackwell

  “What’s all this?” asked Alex as Jean-Luc hurried over to open the gate and help Nat and Gabriel.

  “I ordered this stuff ages ago,” said Nat, looking irritated as she pushed the charette through the gate and came to a stop near the porch steps. “I waited for it anxiously for weeks, then forgot all about it. Typical.”

  “What is it?”

  Nat blushed. “I know a lot of the walls aren’t even repaired and prepped yet, but François-Xavier and I worked out a color scheme for each floor of the house. The top floor—your bedroom and Jean-Luc’s—were going to be in shades of the sea, blue and green and aquamarine. The second floor in floral shades, buttercup yellow and lilac. The main floor was going to be in shades of cream, but with this wallpaper in the parlor. It’s a vintage design. . . .”

  Gabriel lingered by the gate, apparently interested in their discussion.

  “Very pretty. But what are these?” Alex asked, holding up a plastic-enclosed bundle of cloth in a garish assortment of colors.

  “That was supposed to be curtains, for the kitchen.” Nat grimaced.

  “You chose these?” Alex asked, trying to keep a straight face.

  “I swear the colors didn’t look like that on the website,” Nat said.

  “The wallpaper’s nice,” said Alex, as she picked up one of the heavy rolls, which displayed an ocean theme, with mermaids frolicking among the waves. Against a pale aqua background, a brown woodcut-style of mermaids, shells, and horns o’ plenty twisted so the design at first seemed abstract, until you looked more closely and saw the figures.

  “It reminds me of the paper in my grandmother’s house,” Jean-Luc said. “I hung it for her.”

  Alex cocked her head. “You know how to hang wallpaper?”

  “Uh-oh, you’re in for it now, Jean-Luc,” Nat murmured.

  “I do,” Jean-Luc said, looking a bit confused. “It was a long time ago, but it is not that difficult. It is mostly a matter of measuring carefully.”

  “I can also to help,” said Gabriel, in heavily accented but clear English.

  “Gabriel, is it?” asked Alex. “Thanks for the offer. How can I get in touch with you?”

  He gave her his cell phone number and said, “I work on the ferry most days but not Tuesdays and Wednesdays.”

  Nat, Alex, and Jean-Luc carried the paints and wallpaper into the house, setting them in the dining room alongside other building supplies and random pieces of furniture.

  Alex expected Nat to go hide in her office, but instead her sister picked up a broom and started sweeping the hallway.

  “I can do that if you want to get back to writing,” Alex offered. She might not be able to handle roofs, but she could still wield a broom.

  “It’s okay. I’m sort of at a crossroads in this project, anyway. Let me ask you something. . . .” Nat paused and leaned on the broom handle, apparently searching for the right words. “You like to read now, right?”

  “I like to read some things,” Alex said. “Why?”

  “Would you be interested in reading a cookbook if it also told stories about the history of the island?”

  “I guess,” Alex said with a shrug. “I’m not the one you should ask, though. I’ve bought precisely one book in my life: yours. But why are you talking about writing a cookbook? I thought you were working on a follow-up to Pourquoi Pas?”

  “I was, but real life isn’t cooperating.”

  “Because Monsieur Scumbag took off to open a restaurant in Paris with another woman?”

  Nat winced. “Way to sugarcoat it, Alex.”

  “Isn’t it better to face the truth and move on?”

  “Whether it’s better or not doesn’t really matter since I don’t have a choice. The book I proposed and sold to my publisher is not going to have the ending I imagined it would.”

  “Life can be awfully inconvenient that way.”

  “But here’s the thing: I can’t stop thinking about the journal we found in the attic last night. I was up late last night, reading through the entries. There are letters from World War Two, notes about herbal remedies, and a whole Celtic medical system I’ve never heard of before. It’s this really fascinating relic of an entire way of life that’s now gone.”

  “Sounds interesting,” said Alex. “So how do you get started?”

  “I need to talk to as many islanders as possible.”

  “Hey, you should bring the journal to dinner tomorrow and ask Tonton Michou and Tante Agnès about it.”

  “Maybe. I actually went to talk to Milo about it this morning.”

  “Why Milo?”

  “He’s a native islander, knows everyone on the Île de Feme.”

  “Aren’t you, like, sort of related to half the island through François-Xavier?”

  “That’s the problem. It’s all too . . .” Nat left off with a shrug. “Too close, too incestuous, I guess. I was hoping to talk to some of the other families first. And I’m not looking forward to answering a lot of questions about François-Xavier.”

  “Yeah, sorry again about accepting that dinner invitation. I should have asked you first.”

  “No, it’s fine,” Nat said. “I owe them a visit anyway.”

  “You’re going to have to tell them soon, you know.”

  “I know. I’d just like to get things a little farther along first, that’s all.”

  “Hey, you know what might be fun for dinner tomorrow?” Alex said. “You could make one of the recipes from the journal, see how it turns out.”

  “As a matter of fact,” Nat said, “that’s exactly what I was thinking.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Natalie

  The next day, Natalie laid the cookbook on the kitchen counter, noting again the assorted stains, dried splashes, and distinct handwriting of the various entries. It was exciting to hold in her hands such a tangible link to the past. One section was titled recettes de Mamm-gozh Gladie. Recipes from Grandma Gladie.

  Natalie read a list of ingredients and instructions.

  The classic Breton dessert kouign-amann seemed as good a recipe to start with as any, she thought, and gathered butter, flour, and sugar. She finally located the heavy mixer and beaters stowed away on a deep shelf beneath the window and hoisted it onto the counter.

  Their mother had kept recipes in a metal box, most written on index cards, but by the time Natalie was old enough to read them, the Morgen family hadn’t had access to the ingredients. The Commander kept the family on a strict budget, so things like flour and oil were bought in limited quantities. Mostly they ground their own dried corn and used the fat from the animals they hunted, so the Morgen girls grew up eating corn muffins made with rendered deer fat instead of cookies and bread. Still, Natalie loved the way cooking connected her to her mother, and to her grandmother before her, to aunts and family friends whom she had never met.

  For tonight, she decided to start with a couple of classic Breton desserts, no doubt the first recipes young aspiring chefs learned at their mothers’ elbows.

  As was probably true for many if not most culinary traditions, and was certainly so for French food, the type of ingredients was less important than their quality and the way they were used: whipping egg whites into stiff peaks, folding the yolks carefully into the rest of the dry ingredients, the length of time the dough was allowed to rise.

  “It smells luscious in here,” said Jean-Luc when he and Alex came into the kitchen later that afternoon.

  “It’s kouign-amann, we had some when we ate dinner at Milo’s,” said Natalie. “And this is Breton Farz-forn, which is made with a lot of eggs and rum and raisins.”

  Natalie was suddenly overtaken with nerves. She had called ahead to tell Tante Agnès she would bring dessert, but now she wondered if that had been such a bright idea. What was she thinking, making traditional desserts for people
who had no doubt grown up eating them? She should have ordered an exquisite fruit tart from the patisserie in Audierne, like a normal person.

  Fueling her doubt was that the Farz-forn appeared lumpier than she thought it should, and the kouign-amann looked all right but didn’t have the distinctive aroma of caramelized sugar that the dish was known for.

  “It’s a little tough to cook from these recipes,” Natalie said. “They don’t have any oven temperatures or baking times. They just say things like ‘cook till done in a moderate oven.’ What the heck’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Did you compare them to modern recipes, see if they have that information?” asked Alex.

  Natalie nodded. “I did. But still . . . the desserts don’t seem quite right. This book was a general reference, but probably I should be learning by watching an expert do it.”

  Jean-Luc looked up from the recipes he was reading. “I do not know much about this kind of cooking,” he said. “But some of these recipes seem a little . . . odd. See how they specify to use rainwater? Is that not odd?”

  “A lot of it’s odd,” said Natalie, frustrated “Maybe measurements and all that weren’t standardized yet? When did cookbooks start being published? Weren’t recipes mostly handed down from mother to daughter?”

  “I know that Georges Auguste Escoffier was very influential in France,” said Jean-Luc. “He worked with some of the finest hotels, incorporated some recipes from old châteaux kitchens, and helped to popularize haute cuisine.”

  “But that was at the commercial level,” said Natalie. “The everyday cooking, the cuisine most of us are most familiar with, is far more basic and traditionally learned as girls helped their mothers in the kitchen.”

  “I helped my mother in the kitchen,” said Jean-Luc.

  “Somehow that doesn’t surprise me,” said Natalie with a smile. “And I certainly have no problem with it, but I’m talking about back in the day. When this cookbook was written, in the late nineteen thirties and into World War Two, I think everyday cooking was mostly considered women’s work.”

  “I suspect you are right,” said Jean-Luc. “In any case, the desserts, they smell good. And I imagine if the amounts are off, the family will inform you of it tonight. We French rarely hold back such opinions out of politeness.”

  Natalie knew it only too well.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Violette

  Rainer remained cool toward me for a long while. At first I assumed it was because I had been snooping in his room, but as the days went by and he held himself apart, I began to wonder if it was something more. He was unfailingly polite to me and my mother, but he smiled less and less. He no longer played his jaunty tunes on the piano, or lingered to chat with his fellow officers, much less with me.

  One day I knocked on Rainer’s bedroom door. I knew he was in, and hated to disturb him, but my mother had sent me to gather the laundry from the line because the clouds were threatening rain.

  He called for me to come in, but when I did he remained sitting on the side of the bed, frowning, a letter in his hands. His usually neat bedroom was in disarray: There were a pair of trousers on the floor, a bottle of wine left uncorked, books and papers scattered over the unmade bed.

  “Rainer?” I asked, setting down my basket. “Is everything all right?”

  He shook his head.

  “What is it? Is it your mother?”

  “No, in fact I haven’t heard from her in some time. But I just received a letter from a university friend. Things are happening, Violette. Terrible things. In Poland, Romania, Lithuania . . .”

  I wasn’t entirely sure where those countries were, not being a great student of geography. But I knew Hitler’s forces had invaded those poor nations, just as they had France.

  “It is worse than anyone thought,” he began. “Worse than I could have imagined. The ‘work camps’ we’ve been hearing about? The prisoners there . . . they are not simply working for the war effort.”

  “What do you mean? What are they doing?”

  He hesitated. “There is a saying in German, arbeit macht frei, that work will make you free. But Violette, the Nazis are putting people to death in these camps.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “They are killing the prisoners, Violette. Murdering them. And it’s not only the men. They’re sending entire families to their death.”

  The thought overwhelmed me. It was hard even to wrap my mind around such atrocities.

  “Women, too?” I asked.

  Rainer nodded. His voice was hollow when he added: “And children.”

  We sat for a moment in horrified silence, trying to comprehend what this meant.

  “I don’t understand the hatred toward people for being Jewish,” I said after a long moment. “We all pray to the same God, do we not?”

  “It’s not only Jews. Anyone who speaks out against the new regime, or anyone the Nazis deem ‘antisocial.’ Invalids or the mentally inferior. Slavs. Gypsies. Homosexuals.”

  I shook my head. “But . . . they can’t just kill people indiscriminately, without regard to any kind of human decency. That doesn’t make sense.”

  “None of it makes sense. But I suppose that when soldiers begin to murder little children, any hope of decency is long gone.”

  A long moment of silence passed between us. Only the ticking of the clock, the squeak of charette wheels outside the house filled the room.

  “Is this happening in France as well?” I asked finally.

  Rainer shook his head. “I don’t think so. Not yet, anyway. I suppose I could be wrong. There are so many rumors. . . .”

  “But you’re a soldier. An officer. How can you not know?” I asked, my words tinged with anger.

  “I am told the same propaganda as everyone else, Violette. I have tried to learn more from what my friends and relatives write in their letters. But everyone is so cautious these days, afraid to speak out or oppose the Nazi party. Hitler has stirred up hatred in the hearts of many in my country. Not all of us, obviously, but enough. It makes me so very discouraged, and ashamed.”

  After another long pause, I asked: “What does this mean for you?”

  “I honestly don’t know. Out here, on the Île de Feme, it is easy enough to convince myself that I’m not part of the problem.” He went to stand by the window, looking out over the back garden and beyond to the sea. “Sometimes I think about the men of this island, what it must have taken for them to board their boats and sail away, to leave behind their wives and mothers and children . . . for your husband to leave you behind. I wonder if I would have been so brave.”

  “I believe you are very brave.”

  Rainer turned and looked at me with the saddest eyes I had ever seen on a man. When he spoke, his voice broke: “I am a coward, Violette.”

  * * *

  • • •

  One day, outside on the quay, there was a scuffle and yelling. A crowd had gathered around, the women in their black outfits looking like an agitated murder of crows, ringing the disruption.

  I ran out and down along the seawall. The pale-eyed officer I knew as Hans held two adolescent boys by their ears, pulling them out on the wharf as though intending to throw them into the water. They cried and whined, and one had a bloody nose.

  “What happened?” I asked Marie-Paule. “Is that Benoit and little Ronan?”

  She nodded. “They were painting V’s for Victoire on the walls,” she answered in a low voice.

  “I wondered who was doing that,” I whispered, looking around and hoping to see Rainer. “Those little scamps. But what is the officer planning to do to them?”

  “I hope just throw them in the sea. Not . . . I hope it’s nothing worse.”

  The tension between Hans and the islanders had been growing. Earlier in the week, Hans had discovered and smashed Henri Thom
as’s radio, and the only reason the lightkeeper was not arrested was the Germans needed his expertise with the light and foghorn. Hans had also discovered Père Cecil’s cache of wine, and requisitioned it for himself and his fellow officers. A soldier capable of stealing communion wine from a priest, the islanders muttered, is capable of anything. But the German’s larcenous ways did not bother me nearly as much as the way he looked at me, at all the young women, with a soul-crushing mixture of lust and disdain.

  Hans shouted in German at the crying boys. They kneeled at his feet, not understanding what he was saying. Apparently frustrated at their lack of response, Hans drew his leg back as if to deliver a kick, and the crowd of women surged forward.

  Just then Rainer came running from the quay. He planted himself in front of Hans, speaking German in a low but firm voice. The only word I recognized was “kinder,” which I knew meant “children.”

  Hans replied angrily, his tone radiating contempt. I couldn’t understand him, either, but did hear the word “Anglais.”

  Rainer continued to speak in that quiet, serious tone I had heard before when he was attempting to resolve a confrontation. I wished I spoke German; all I could glean from their argument were a few words with French cognates: “familie,” “kabarett,” and “homosexuell.”

  The men stared at each other and then Hans barked an order and a young soldier handed him the boys’ paint bucket. Hans held the bucket over the boys and poured the red paint over their heads. It streamed down their tearstained faces and dripped onto their chests, like blood.

  Now speaking French, Hans suggested the boys jump into the ocean to get clean. And then he stalked away.

  * * *

  • • •

  Later that afternoon, I spied Rainer out on the shoals, in my favorite spot, staring at the lighthouse.

  I clambered over the rocks to join him.

  “Thank you, again,” I said, “for interceding on our behalf.”

  He said nothing.