by Andie Newton
‘Well, do you know what I’ve done?’ he said, and there was a pause. ‘What I mean is, we do what we have to.’
When we have to.
‘Understand?’ he said, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt closer to one person in my life.
‘Yes,’ I said, and I took his hand. ‘But I realized something this morning I hadn’t before. Maybe it was the rocks caving in around me like a tomb, or maybe it was the light of day on my face that made me wake up. One thing I know for certain. The work has to be my own.’ I looked up from our hands. ‘It’s time for me to carve my own path in the Résistance.’
We kissed again, only this time long and slow, the sun sinking very low into the hills, turning all the leaves in the trees fire-orange, and the moment felt right. I tugged on his hand. ‘Come on,’ I said, and I led him to the bubbling hot spring steaming behind us where I slipped off my dress.
He pulled his shirt up over his head and unbuckled his pants. I shivered from a forest chill, and he embraced me in the night, hands sliding down my bare back, thinking I’d trembled. ‘Are you nervous?’
His question caught me off guard, then I remembered what Charlotte had said to me. And she was right, when you’re in love there’s no time for nerves.
‘No,’ I breathed. ‘I’m not.’ We eased into the pool, and he held me close, kissing me lovingly as leaves fluttered off long branches and tumbled like pinwheels over the forest floor in the quiet black, black night.
*
We fell asleep next to a crackling fire, cuddled in blankets Luc had stashed in a nearby vehicle. Résistants who had rendezvoused with their lovers shared similar makeshift beds in the forest and around the camp. I woke at the break of dawn to his arms wrapped around me. I felt his biceps, thinking he was still asleep, but he was very awake.
‘It’s from the parachutes,’ he said.
I raised my head up. ‘I was teasing when I asked if you had flown in with your radio.’ I felt him again, wondering if we’d ever be able to lie in the sun out in the open one day. I wished it, closing my eyes and imagining it, but everything had changed now with the Germans.
‘Hear that?’ Luc said, and my eyes popped open. He shifted under the covers, listening. Others sat up. The drone of a faraway aeroplane turned into a roaring squadron of German fighters flying over the treetops. ‘They can’t see us,’ he said, but I was shaking as they flew over us lying in the trees.
They’d come out of nowhere, furious, and we watched them disappear, flying south. I swallowed. ‘What’s going to happen to us now?’ I said.
‘The Wehrmacht will drive south to fight the Allies in North Africa,’ he said. ‘And try to take the French fleet.’
I gasped. ‘There really won’t be anything left of France, will there? But, what about here, Luc?’ I said. ‘How will life change in Vichy?’ I searched the sky, wondering how our lives would change even more than they already had.
‘Expect more restrictions. When the fleet falls into German hands, Pétain won’t have any leverage, and the government will have to do what the Reich says. We’ve heard whisperings about a French-style Gestapo.’ He looked at me. ‘How many guns do you have?’
‘I don’t have one,’ I said, and I think he was surprised. ‘Mama has one hidden in her floor, but…’
‘I think you need one of your own.’ Luc reached into his pack and pulled out a gun, not a big one, but not as dainty as Mama’s either. ‘Here, let me show you how to shoot it.’
I slipped on my ratty housedress and we moved into some trees. Luc stood behind me—his presence comforting—his arms and hands lifting mine into an aim. ‘See that tree?’ he said. ‘Aim at the knot in the middle.’
I raised the gun out in front of me with both hands, aiming. ‘There’s two barrels when I do,’ I said, repositioning my feet. ‘And seems too far away to hit.’
‘Now,’ he said. ‘Close one eye.’ He held me tighter, the smell of his skin almost as distracting as his strong, warm touch. ‘And look down the barrel, you should see one target.’
I closed one eye, and the distant target was now much closer, more manageable to hit. ‘I see it now.’ I lowered the gun, his hands slipping from mine.
‘Keep the gun on you,’ he said. ‘Even if you think you don’t need it.’
I had to wonder where I was supposed to put it. Dresses didn’t have pockets big enough to hide something so bulky. ‘Where?’
Luc touched my inner thigh. ‘Here. Around your leg,’ he said, kissing me.
I resisted the urge to throw my head back and let him take me once more, but with the gun in my hand and the busyness of the Maquis moving arms and trucks down the road away from camp, I knew our time together on the cliff was nearing its end.
He shouted to someone running equipment between sputtering vehicles for a leg holster. I fastened it to my thigh myself, pulling the leather strap tightly around my leg.
‘When will I see you again?’ I said.
‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘I’ll miss you every day.’
Gill motioned for Luc to hurry up and get in his running truck. ‘We’re leaving!’ he yelled to Luc.
Luc looked back and forth between me and the truck.
We kissed, holding each other’s hands, drawing out our last few moments together, but then Gill yelled again, and our hands slid excruciatingly away from each other.
*
Marguerite drove me to Vichy in an unassuming black car after she changed into a clean postulant’s skirt and shirt. We stopped a kilometre or so away from Papa’s vineyard, the door to Mama’s kitchen a hazy outline in the distance.
‘Be careful, Adèle. Know the costs of love in the Résistance.’ She turned toward me as she sat behind the wheel of the running car, and I caught a glimpse of the locket under her smock. ‘You’d be wise not to tell anyone. Not even your mother. Gérard will kill him if he finds out what you’re doing.’
‘I know.’
She rubbed the locket in her fingers, and we sat without a word between us, the midmorning sun shining onto the Vichy hills and over Creuzier-le-Vieux, over Papa’s craggy vines.
‘Marguerite,’ I said, and she looked at me. ‘There’s something else I’m going to do for the Résistance. I thought you should know.’
She didn’t look surprised but rather turned my forearm over to get a better look at what little paint the spring hadn’t washed off. ‘In the Occupied Zone some are scrawling the letter V in places for Victoire. Timing is everything,’ she said. ‘Résistants get caught when they’re careless. Remember that.’
Timing. ‘I will.’
‘One more thing,’ she said. ‘There will be a lot of police activity after the foiled raid, and a lot of distrust. They will be looking for leaks, spies. You’ll need to find a way to distance yourself from the Hotel du Parc and Gérard during this time. For a little while anyway, until things die down.’
I was surprised, to say the least. Pleasantly surprised.
‘It will be a delicate walk,’ she said. ‘Be careful. Make it seem natural, be conveniently busy. He will be busy himself.’
‘All right.’
We took each other’s hands. ‘If you would have told me months ago I’d be holding your hands, I would have called you a liar,’ Marguerite said.
‘Actually, I would have called you a liar, and then you would have swatted me with a switch.’
‘Hanger.’ She smiled. ‘I think I’d prefer the hanger.’
‘Indeed,’ I said, laughing.
‘We were awful to each other on the train, weren’t we?’ I said.
‘Saving my life makes me like you a lot more, Adèle.’
‘I feel the same.’
We kissed each other’s cheeks before I opened the door, the wrought smell of old vines and soured grapes coming from Papa’s crusted, broken-down vineyard reminding me I was home.
‘Adèle?’ Marguerite stopped me with her voice. ‘I always wanted to know,’ she said, leaning over the seat,
catching my gaze as I stood outside holding the door open, ‘in Lyon you said one of the reasons why you didn’t marry Gérard was because he was a collaborator.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s true.’
‘What’s the other reason?’ she asked. ‘I heard he was different before the war.’
‘He was different,’ I said. ‘But even if he went back to the boy he was before and grew into an honourable man, there’d still be one thing missing.’ I shut the door.
‘What’s that?’
‘My fluttering heart,’ I said.
I walked down the hill to the chateau where Mama sat in an old chair she’d dragged out to the patio. A half-drank cup of chamomile tea sat on the armrest. She had a notebook in her lap and a pencil in her hand. She looked up as I neared, almost surprised. ‘Did he give you anything for me?’
The warmth of Luc’s touch was still on my mind, and I found it difficult to concentrate on her words. The scent of the hot spring moistened on my skin didn’t help. ‘Who?’
Her eyes crossed. ‘Albert, of course.’
‘Papa?’ My mind scrambled.
‘Isn’t that where you’ve been? With your father?’ She wrote on the paper even though her eyes were on me. ‘You said you weren’t going to leave me.’
‘No…’ I said.
‘No, you weren’t with him?’ Her brow protruded from her forehead. ‘Or, no he didn’t give you anything?’
I hesitated. ‘Both.’
‘Humph!’ She went back to writing, a long letter by the looks of it, waving for me to leave.
I took a wet rag from the counter and cleaned myself up. Looking out the window, it was hard not to think about where Luc was, where he had gone after he drove away. Our trees had gone bare from the cooler weather, and leaves rustled in piles under Mama’s clothesline. Winter would be here soon.
On the other side of the field I saw a thin ribbon of smoke rising over the hill. The longer I studied it, the more I could smell the faint acridity of the burn lingering in the air, which didn’t smell like kindling. A fighter plane buzzed overhead, then another and another, flying south. I leaned over the counter, straining to see out the window. Vichy planes never sounded that menacing. Germans.
Mama shuffled in as the windows rattled, ripping the page she had written on from her notebook. ‘There’ll be more rabbits for us this winter. Won’t be making pies for the neighbours.’
‘Why is that, Mama?’ I said, watching the planes fly by.
‘Because the Brochards are dead.’
I whipped my head away from the window. ‘What?’
Mama nodded. ‘There was no sound. Only the smoke is left. Killed himself and the little ones—figured out his wife wasn’t coming back. Things will be different now since the invasion. He knew it. We all know it. Didn’t want the Germans to do what he could do himself with dignity.’
I turned back around. The planes had flown off, but the smoke from the Brochards’ farm clouded into a fresh haze. ‘The children?’
‘They were Jews.’ Mama sat down at the table and relit a cold cigarette. ‘Doesn’t matter if they were French. If the Germans want them, Vichy will hand them over.’ She patted her apron pocket, pressing it against her thigh to make the lump of paper thinner, flatter, which made me wonder how many letters to Papa she had stashed in there. ‘When will you see your father?’
I watched her as she sucked on her dying cigarette, bringing it back to life, the crackle of its ember the only sound in the room as she sat in a chair. I had come close to dying more times than I ever thought I would in one lifetime, but seeing that smoke hovering over our vineyard lit another fire, this one deep within my soul.
‘Does it matter?’
Mama’s eyes bounced, but she said nothing. Then she glanced over my hair where it was flat from the spring, as if she just now realized that not only had I been gone all night, but I had been somewhere far away.
I pointed to her pocket. ‘How many letters did you write that you’ll never send?’ My voice peaked and her eyes bugged from her head. ‘Stubbornness is not a virtue, Mama.’
She gasped. ‘Adèle!’
‘What good are unread letters if you’re dead?’ I bent down in front of her, my eyes level with hers. ‘Living is not a luxury meant for us all.’
Mama sat in silence, taking a shaking puff from her cigarette. ‘Your father chose the regime over me, Adèle.’
I shook my head. ‘Did it ever occur to you he thinks choosing the regime is choosing you? Do what we have to, when we have to. Right?’
The blood drained from her face, leaving her very pale.
I motioned for her to hand me the letters. ‘You can’t change yesterday. But today is what you make it.’
Mama stared at my open hand a good while before I finally left her to think, walking down the corridor into my bedroom and taking a few heavy breaths against the wall. I’d never talked to Mama that way, but felt better saying what was on my mind.
After I changed into a clean dress and fixed my hair, I came back into the kitchen only to find her still sitting at the table with her cigarettes. I stood next to her, fastening my earrings, getting ready to head out to Charlotte’s boutique.
‘I’ve listened to Albert explain himself until I’ve turned blue, and gotten so mad I thought I might burst open my blood pumped so hard. And Charlotte, she’s just taken his side.’ Mama reached into her pocket and pulled out a wad of letters, tossing them on the table in a messy pile. ‘But you’re right. If I’m dead none of it matters, now does it?’
My mouth gaped open at the sight of so many letters. ‘Mama…’
‘Give this to Charlotte.’ Mama handed me a knitted hat for the baby. ‘She’ll be mad the whole day that you told me. There’s nothing I can do about that.’ Her eyes welled with tears at the mere mention of Charlotte’s baby. ‘And please tell her I’ve been saying prayers for the granddaughter she won’t let me pay my respects to.’ She cried two heaving breaths, her face bunching up, and I put my hand on her shoulder, my heart breaking from hearing her cry.
‘And the letters?’ I said.
‘All of them go to your father.’ She put a finger on one she had folded tightly into a triangle and slid it toward me. ‘But tell him to open this one last.’
1943
20
A new threat flooded the city almost overnight one day in January, this time dressed in double-breasted blue uniforms and a deceivingly French blue beret. The Milice. Created by our government to hunt and destroy the French Résistance, this new French militia was designed to work side-by-side with the Gestapo—our own countrymen turned against us.
Milice flags unravelled and flew from poles, blue, white, red, and black. People watched from the cobblestone streets in front of the Gare de Vichy, clutching that morning’s meagre rations from the butcher, as the miliciens walked down the street in formation, hands on their rifles, ready to shoot, with their shined black boots and thick, waist-high black belts.
Clomp, clomp, clomp…
‘So, it’s been done,’ I said, gazing at the marching miliciens. ‘Word swept through the street last night, but I didn’t believe it.’
Papa shoved an old cigarette in his mouth and lit what was left of it in the face of a bitter wind, puffing hard until the crumpled end finally caught fire. ‘Word?’ He closed his coat by crossing his arms, watching them assemble under the Gare de Vichy’s stone archway.
‘The Milice, Papa. Gestapo, by another name.’
A lorry pulled up next, and a gendarme in the Vichy police led a handful of men as dirty as a mud hole out of the back with their hands on top of their heads. The Milice barked at the prisoners to stand against the stone wall in front of the train station; one had a clipboard and seemed to be checking names off, while a Gestapo officer in a warm wool coat and matching gloves stood menacingly over his shoulder, monitoring.
‘Le Résistance,’ Papa said, squinting, trying to get a better look at the men as they lin
ed up, backs flat against the wall in their shredded clothes, torn and ripped. Women wept openly for their husbands and sons, kneeling on the cold cobblestones, begging for the Milice to keep them in France—not send them to Germany, but they only pushed their rifles at them, shooing them away like vermin.
Papa mashed his cigarette on the ground before walking into his wine bar, and I followed him inside. He moved crates of wine away from the wall. ‘Vin de merde,’ I swear I heard him say.
‘What’s that, Papa?’
‘Nothing, nothing,’ he said, taking a loose cigarette from his pocket. ‘I wish I had a cigar. That’s what I said.’
The women’s cries outside seeped through the door like a spill and Papa struggled to light another crumpled cigarette pinched in his lips. A delivery of flowers arrived shortly after, six of the fullest, most luxurious red roses I’d ever seen, almost unheard of these days, and very expensive. The deliveryman handed me the card, and I swallowed, knowing roses like this could have only come from one person.
I closed my eyes briefly. Gérard.
After the raid, he’d been busy with the police, travelling to Lyon and Paris, and when he was in Vichy, I used Mama as an excuse to get out of his dates, saying she needed me at the estate—a natural absence, like Marguerite had suggested. What I didn’t expect was for the distance to fuel his infatuation for me.
I opened the card.
‘I’m the cat and you’re the mouse. One day I will catch you. Enjoy the roses.’
My stomach turned.
‘Why aren’t you at Charlotte’s shop?’ Papa said, and I looked up, tucking the card back into the envelope.
‘Because I’m here with you, at your wine bar.’ I could feel the tension behind me and between us, the weight of the miliciens’ presence and the existence of Germans in Vichy and now Gérard’s flowers in my arms. Papa kept his head down as he continued to pull crates of wine away from the wall, oblivious to me and the scene unfolding outside.
