On the way, she pointed out her favorite wildflower, aphyllanthes, which had six narrow lavender petals with a purple stripe down each. I picked one and threaded it through her hair. Looking at her, I couldn’t be sure, but I thought she had moved her beauty mark from her right cheek to her left. When I questioned her, she said, “We think our son, Michel, is somewhere near the Belgian border. He’s left-handed. I cannot betray him.”
That seemed as reasonable as anything else these days.
We found primroses in a clearing in the woods. Pascal would have called the pale yellow of their petals jaune vapeur. The thought coming so unbidden made me miss him.
Suddenly in my pathway I saw the lacerated body of a rabbit, the ears and feet still intact, the breast torn and bloody, the casualty of an attack by a hawk. I grew quiet.
Back in the village, our arms laden with arugula and primroses, we stopped on the road in front of Odette’s house. She gave me a kind look and turned my collar down, a maternal gesture.
“You seem particularly quiet today. Is it because of the news?” she asked, gently introducing the only subject of importance.
“What news?”
“Germany invaded Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands the day before yesterday.”
The shock of it made me shudder. “Three countries in one day? How did you find out?”
“René went to the café and heard the news. The men were arguing about who would be next, and when.”
“Did he say more?”
“I suspect there was more to say, but he didn’t tell me.”
Hating not being able to hear the news directly, all the news, I went home in a daze and flung the arugula into the sink, spilling my primroses too. If I were living in Paris, I could go into any café, day or night, alone if I wanted to, and have un petit crème, enjoy its frothy milk and listen to the news on the radio, or a musical program, but oh no. Not here in this hinterland.
That evening at apéritif time, I put on a high-necked white blouse and my maroon suit, conservative enough for Roussillon but stylish enough to say This suit came from Paris, and so did this woman. Nobody needed to know I had bought it at a secondhand shop across the street from the synagogue in the Marais district. Brushing my hair in front of the mirror above the dresser, I had a thought. André was right-handed. I twisted the point of my eyebrow pencil on my right cheekbone.
I marched downhill to the café and paused to square my shoulders before parting the beads that hung like a curtain separating me from the world.
The proprietor, Monsieur Voisin, was ranting about something to anyone who would listen. “It’s not my fault if you’re going to be cold in here this winter. Mayor Pinatel took all the wood that was left in the communal woodpile.”
Just the word gave me a start. Was that the woodpile André meant, or did he mean our own, in our courtyard? I listened more attentively.
“That’s hard to believe,” said Constable Blanc, standing a head above every other man at the bar. “He could afford to pay his own wood gatherer.”
“Don’t tell me!” said Monsieur Voisin. “I saw him with my own eyes, the bourgeois poser. He never comes here. Thinks he’s too good to socialize with farmers, even though his father was a farmer just like yours.”
That seemed like exaggerated bluster to me. My chin held high, looking directly ahead, I took a few steps in. All those hunched old men straightened up in their chairs, as if accosted by an enemy. Silence descended around me. I walked boldly to a table near the radio and sat down, in an effort to get as close as I could to where the fighting was happening in the north, one quavering radio wave linking me to one beating heart. No. Two hearts.
Some of the men ignored me and turned back to the bar while others stole squinty-eyed glances at me. Maurice acknowledged me with a small nod, but distress carved tight little wrinkles around his eyes. Most of the others, including Monsieur Voisin, glared at me outright, as though trying to make me feel guilty for breaking some time-honored rule. I had intended to order a café crème, but Monsieur Voisin did not approach me to take my order.
Eventually the BBC news came on in French, scratchy because of German interference. It was true. German paratroopers had landed from planes in Holland, while the Wehrmacht had crossed the frontiers of Luxembourg and Belgium and were moving into the forest of the Ardennes. Norway, too, had already been invaded. After so much waiting, such speed astonished me. The news was brief but devastating, and was followed by Maurice Chevalier in an old recording of the romantic song “Valentine,” in English. Mustering as much grace as possible, I stood to go and felt Monsieur Voisin’s cold eyes push me from behind as I departed.
THE NEXT EVENING, I went again. It was a bit easier. Maurice bought a glass of the local rosé for me. Most of the men gave him scornful looks. The BBC opened its news bulletin with the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Maurice said it was the signal in Morse code for the letter V, London’s symbol for victory.
The news was worse than the night before. Selfishly, disregarding my friends, I felt its import aimed precisely at me. Nevertheless, the BBC played “La Marseillaise.” With a stone in my throat, I was the first to stand. Some of the men didn’t budge at first—reluctant to follow the lead of a woman, I supposed—but eventually everyone in the room was standing.
AFTER THE MORNING RUSH for baguettes at the boulangerie, I beckoned to Odette and we walked to place du Pasquier, empty this time of day. I told her what I had heard the night before that René hadn’t told her. The Maginot Line had proved to be folly. The Wehrmacht troops and big panzer tanks had swung wide, north of the northernmost Maginot fort, and had crossed the Ardennes in sixty hours. The next day, a terrifying all-day bombardment by German dive-bombers had hurtled down on the sparse French infantry defending the frontier along the Meuse River between the northern end of the Maginot Line and the city of Sedan. I feared that it was the river André had described. My voice cracked when I told her this last horrifying report, and it was some minutes before I could say any more.
“It’s not fair that René didn’t tell you everything.”
“He must have had his reasons. Protecting me, I suppose, on account of Michel. I wonder whether Mélanie Vernet knows. Her brother is in the army.”
“Come with me tonight. I’ll ask her to come too. We don’t deserve to sit out this war ignorantly.”
“But my husband. Mélanie’s husband—”
“They’ll just have to get used to it. These are not normal times.”
AS WE HAD EXPECTED, we three women coming into the café together angered the men.
“Now see what you did, Maurice?” a farmer said. “You’ll have all of the wives of Roussillon here before long, and then who will cook our dinners?” He walked out in a huff, and two others followed.
The BBC reported fierce fighting over the next week as the Wehrmacht, with its panzers, made a rapid and methodical push across France and reached La Manche, what the British announcer called the English Channel, pinning tens of thousands of the British Expeditionary Force, together with French and Belgian soldiers, on the beaches and harbor of Dunkerque. Meanwhile, two more women whose sons or husbands or brothers were in the army pushed east, into the café. By the end of May, the Allied escape at Dunkerque was under way and the allied women of Roussillon were occupying the café, beauty marks on their cheekbones for solidarity, right or left depending on their men at war.
Our table of five women celebrated with beating hearts and moist eyes the inestimable bravery of humanity. We pooled our money and bought bottles of wine for the men’s tables, in honor of the crews of hundreds of British destroyers, ferries, merchant marine vessels, private fishing boats, pleasure craft, and lifeboats who, day after day, under air and artillery attack, rescued hundreds of thousands of exhausted Allied soldiers off the beaches and quays at Dunkerque, while the French rear guard fought the advancing German infantry and forestalled catastrophe.
Could André and Max
ime be among them, pushed all the way across France and through the waves to a fishing boat? Or were they … I refused to imagine anything else.
Sandrine was in a stupor, worried about her brother, Michel. “Hold up your glass,” I whispered to her. “He’s one of the lucky ones. I can feel it.”
With my glass aloft, I announced to all, “I hope you know that drinking this wine means you accept that women are not going to retreat. We will not go back to the way it was in this café before the war.”
“You, madame, and your highfaluting Paris ways are an offense to my steady customers. You’re not wanted here. Can’t you see that?”
“And you, monsieur, are an offense to our men in uniform fighting for justice and freedom.” That sounded rude. I added in a softer voice, “We should all be fighting for that together.”
“Now you have twice as many customers,” Odette said merrily. “That should make you happy.”
“But your husbands are buying fewer drinks because you are here spying on them from across the room,” Monsieur Voisin muttered.
Odette’s cheerfulness was short-lived. Three nights later, we heard the tragic news that on the ninth day of the evacuation, after holding off German troops for four critical days and sacrificing their own escape, the French rear guard was captured and forced to surrender. Even with the playing of “God Save the King” and “La Marseillaise” after the broadcast, the news of tens of thousands of our countrymen taken prisoner cast gloom over everyone.
THE NUMBER OF WOMEN coming to the café increased to eight who had relatives in the fighting, plus two more who didn’t. We found comfort in sitting close together. The men speculated, argued, cursed as though they were at a boules tournament. The women didn’t speak during the BBC news reports, trying to make out the sense despite the transmission crackling like electrocuted moths too close to a lightbulb. We heard the voice of Winston Churchill calling the evacuation a miracle, yet cautioning his nation with the ominous statement, “We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.” That sent me further into the depths.
The broadcasts repeated themselves, drumming home the despair by describing the refugees’ movement southward. The exodus started in Belgium and collected thousands more in Paris. Bedraggled families gripped by panic carried carpetbags and valises, rolled bundles, pet canaries and cats in cages, china, silver chests in wheelbarrows or piled onto bicycles or on their backs, and they shed heavy loads along the roads, beside dead farm animals. That was the chaos that André hadn’t wanted me to experience.
On 14 June, a male voice quavering with emotion announced that German troops had entered the capital. Paris had been declared an open city, which saved its architecture and monuments and many lives, but had sacrificed its liberty. The French government had abandoned the city to set up operations in Bordeaux. A German victory parade marched under the Arc de Triomphe and down the Champs-Élysées. My spirit was crushed by the stomp of jackboots.
IN THE CAFÉ, we women grabbed each other’s arms, hid our faces in each other’s breasts. The men looked positively wounded. It was inconceivable, the speed of this defeat—hardly more than a month of fighting. Maurice’s face contorted in anguish. “Quelle catastrophe,” he muttered, and then gave in to weeping.
As if the news weren’t enough, Rina Ketty sang over the airwaves yet another time that slow, heart-wrenching song of longing and desire and endurance, “J’Attendrai,” promising to wait for her man. The effect of its anticipated refrain was hypnotic.
THE NEXT WEEK REVEALED more startling events. Prime Minister Paul Reynaud resigned under pressure from Marshal Pétain, the highest-ranking military officer, who installed himself as premier of a new French government that would seek an armistice with Germany. “The shame of it,” René murmured in disgust.
With a mix of misery and courage, Roussillon managed to get through the next day. The café was crowded and noisy, with all the notables there—Mayor Pinatel, Secrétaire de la Mairie Aimé Bonhomme, Constable Blanc, and the town notary, Monsieur Rivet. Everyone quieted to hear the BBC broadcast a speech by General Charles de Gaulle, the minister of war, in which he defied Pétain’s willingness to surrender.
“France has lost a battle, but she has not lost the war,” he declared in a strong voice. “Nothing is lost because this war is a world war now. One day the forces of the free world will crush the enemy. France will recover her liberty and her grandeur. This is my aim. My only aim. Therefore, I call upon every French person to unite with me in action, in sacrifice, and in hope. Let us all strive to save her. Vive la France!”
I clung to the spirit he exhibited.
Nevertheless, four days later the scratchy voice of that English radio announcer revealed the terms of the armistice. France was to be divided into an Occupied Zone in the north and west, giving Germany access to all industries and ports, and an Unoccupied Zone in the middle and south, leaving its wine and olive oil and sunflowers to us, to be governed by Pétain in Vichy. As if the loss of life and liberty weren’t enough, Hitler rubbed our noses in defeat by staging the signing of the armistice in the Forest of Compiègne, in the very same railway carriage in which Germany had been forced to surrender in 1918.
The radio clicked off. A hush settled over everyone like a leaden fog, like creeping poison gas. Monsieur Voisin motioned to the door, a signal that everyone should go home. With a hand raised against proffered coins, he refused payment. Wives and husbands sought each other’s eyes and shuffled out into the evening in pairs. The constable asked if I would like him to walk me home. Sick with anguish for France, for André, for Maxime, I shook my head no and plodded home alone on heavy feet.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE MISTRAL AND THE MAYOR
1940
A LATE MISTRAL RACED DOWN FROM THE ALPS AND TORE through the Rhône Valley like a banshee, clawing its way below doors, howling down the chimney, blowing ash from the stove over everything, whistling against the window sashes like a bomb-bearing fighter plane, wrenching loose a pair of shutters, breaking their latches, banging them against the house like a battery of explosions, assaulting my nerves with the suspicion that the mistral had not yet launched its full virulence, that these winds were the mere pacings of a caged hyena.
I had no choice. After three days of being a prisoner in my own house, I needed bread, but I needed a letter from André more. Every week without one widened the crack in my hope. Hearing that letters from the front were taking longer to get here after the armistice, I recited the litany I had been telling myself:
Of course he was safe. Of course he had been in some peaceful place, loading ammunition on trucks or filling out papers. Always in war, papers had to be written out, didn’t they? He had such beautiful handwriting, with flourishes on his g’s and y’s. Documents. Lists of tanks, machine guns, ammunition, vehicles. Lists of medicine, splints, bandages. Lists of names. The missing. The wounded. The dead.
I wrapped my head in a woolen scarf and opened the door. The wind yanked it out of my hand. I fought it closed just as a gust tore free some coral oleander blossoms and cast them tumbling down the hill. How prettily they sailed, like butterflies freed from a jar. One flung itself onto a man’s pant leg right beyond my door and refused to be set free despite the agitated leg shaking of Mayor Pinatel.
Flanked on the right by Monsieur Aimé Bonhomme, the secretary of the mairie, and on the left by Constable Blanc and the notary, Monsieur Rivet, the mayor, cleared his throat and said, in the flat tone of dispensing dully with a routine business matter, “Adieu, madame. May we have a word with you?” Yet I detected an edge of strain. Seized with an instant’s paralysis, I shook myself into action and managed, with the constable’s help, to control the door and get us inside.
“I come on a sad errand.”
I felt a spear enter my heart.
Head lowered in solemn ceremony, Monsieur Pinatel held out a letter. I stared at the seal of the M
inistry of War and my name, Madame Lisette Irène Noëlle Roux. All four of them had known before I did.
I took the letter with a trembling hand, trying to be careful with it, knowing it was something I should save, inadvertently tearing the envelope. The words on the page squirmed like poisoned worms.
Chère Madame,
We regret to inform you that Lieutenant François Pinaud, commander of the 147th Fortress Infantry Regiment, in which your husband, Private André Honoré Roux, served, has reported to General Charles Huntziger, commander of the Second Army, that Private Roux was killed in action on the afternoon of 13 May 1940, while defending the French border along the Meuse River south of Sedan. Lieutenant Pinaud has requested that this notice carry the following remark: Private Roux was a fine soldier and fought valiantly against the onslaught of the German forces to preserve the liberty of France. It would do us great honor if you would accept our sincere condolences.
Holding the letter away as if it were an evil thing, I groped behind myself for the arm of the settee and sank down onto its edge.
Monsieur Pinatel could not meet my eyes. “I’m sorry, madame.”
Wooden. He struck me as wooden, with a wooden tongue.
“André was a fine man,” said Monsieur Bonhomme. “All of us will remember him so. He is the first from our village.”
What right did he have to claim André, as though he were a permanent resident?
Monsieur Rivet said, “As notary here, I will draw up the deed of the house in your name.”
Officious functionary, hiding behind a task. How could he imagine I would be thinking of that now?
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