Lisette's List

by Susan Vreeland

  What a relief it is to know you are alive. Hang on to that life with all your strength. A good end will come. I will write again, and some beautiful day, I will welcome you here with all my heart. Only endure.

  Affectueusement,

  Lisette

  I PICKED GRAPES IN the fall for Madame Bonnelly, a robust middle-aged woman with thick hands and arms as strong as a man’s. She picked two rows to my one and filled the cone-shaped basket on her back in a matter of minutes. When I saw her carrying crates of grapes on both hips, I felt for her, trying to keep the vineyard going without her husband. She had only one hired refugee to help her, Monsieur Beckett, whom she called Samuel in a motherly way. He spoke French with an Irish accent, placing the stress on the wrong syllables. Maurice and Aimé Bonhomme and this foreigner often met under an oak tree at the edge of the vineyard and talked quietly. Sometimes, after a plane passed overhead, Monsieur Beckett ran out of the vineyard and the three of them drove off together in Maurice’s bus. I imagined it was to collect dropped ammunition.

  One day, while we were eating our lunch under the oak tree, I mentioned to Monsieur Beckett that since he needed to pass as a Provençal, he ought to pronounce bien as bieng, and vin as ving, pain as paing, and raisin as raising. “Add a g. Ang, ang, at the end,” I said. “It needs to be nasal. And pronounce the final e on words as another syllable. Je par-le. Le, le at the end. Make it bounce. Speak it with more energy, more urgency. Decorate the words. Make them robust. Sing them.” And so he practiced.

  “When I first came here six years ago,” I told him, “I thought their speech sounded ugly. Now I find it amusing.

  “And another thing. Your shoes. Anybody can tell by your shoes that you are from Paris. Tomorrow I’ll bring you my husband’s outdoor work boots. They’re scuffed and worn enough to look Provençal.”

  “Won’t he need them?”

  “No” was all I said, but he gathered the truth.

  After some moments of quiet, he asked in a near whisper, “Do you have a strong stomach and a stout heart?”

  “Yes,” I said, with some doubt, remembering with shame how I’d broken under the threat of that bludgeon.

  He reached into the pocket of his shirt and showed me two pages from Défense de la France, a newspaper of the Résistance. “As far as I know, these are the first photos of Nazi barbarism in the camps,” he said.

  Shock after sickening shock drove into my chest until, mercifully, the photos of skeletal men blurred before me.

  “Who are these people?”

  “Mostly Jews.”

  “Are they in prisoner of war camps?”

  “No. Extermination camps.” He paused while I took in the meaning of the word. “Few people know of the mass atrocities, or believe that they have happened.”

  “I believe now.”

  “Besides preserving our liberty and way of life, whether or not your husband was aware of it, this was one reason he fought.” He pointed to a photo. “And why we are still fighting, covertly. Why we are doing more than just waiting under this tree for God to deliver us.”

  Then André had been protecting us from that, preventing that from happening here. I saw at once the nobility in his act and felt proud. He had accepted his place in the bigger picture without the reluctance I had felt.

  Monsieur Beckett folded the pages and put them back in his shirt pocket, and I went back to picking grapes, unable to see what I was doing, my hands shaking with relief that Marc and Bella had gone away, although I might never find out if they had reached safety. If they had known that this was happening, and that they had to flee for their lives, what a bighearted man Marc was to have taken the time to paint a picture for me when danger loomed, and what a caring woman Bella was to get that address of a friend in Paris who might be able to help me one day.

  How many thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands were suffering, hopelessly dying at this very hour? Out of a black sky that night, the sad old moon shone down on the cruelty of humans. What must he have been thinking? What must God have been thinking? How deeply disappointed He must have been.

  WHAT COULD I DO? I remembered de Gaulle’s speech, which Louise had rescued and posted in the window of her hair salon. I call upon every French person to unite with me in action, in sacrifice, and in hope. With all leather going to Vichy and from there to Germany, there were people other than Maurice walking around in tattered shoes. After giving Monsieur Beckett André’s work boots, I still had three pairs of his shoes. I saved one to wear while working in the garden when it was muddy and for cleaning the outhouse and took the others and two leather belts to the mairie. Alone in the office, Aimé Bonhomme welcomed me warmly and asked how I was doing.

  I told him I was getting by, then asked, “Would you see that a refugee or a farmer in need gets these shoes and belts?”

  “That’s very kind of you.”

  I thought for a moment. “If you suggest this gently to other widows, we could establish a giveaway box here.”

  “A fine idea.”

  “I can help with that. I mean, I would like to. It doesn’t have to be only widows who contribute, or only shoes and belts. I can get started knocking on doors right now.”

  I whirled around to go out the door and ran smack into Mayor Pinatel coming in from the square. I apologized but he didn’t, even though he had stepped on my foot; nor did he even greet me. He just peered at me slantwise and shuffled the papers in his hands. “Did you ever find Pascal’s paintings?” he asked gruffly.

  It was prying, not compassion, that colored his tone, so it irritated me. “That’s my business, monsieur, not yours.” I slipped out the door, wondering if it had been he who had told the German officer about my paintings.

  IN CONTRAST, I APPRECIATED Madame Bonnelly’s kindness and down-to-earth company. In the evenings, Samuel and I stayed to help her write the labels identifying the wine as the vintage of 1943. Would it ever be known as a war vintage? Samuel felt sure that it would. I asked him what he did later in the evenings, because Madame Bonnelly went to bed early.

  “I’m writing a play about waiting.”

  “Just about waiting? That doesn’t sound very interesting.”

  “About waiting and about cruelty.”

  That made me think of the camps, so I asked Madame Bonnelly for the name of her husband’s prisoner of war camp, hoping it was Maxime’s, Stalag VI-J.

  “First it was XII-A, Limburg, a horrible transit camp. Now it’s XII-F, which was moved from Saarburg to Forbach, where he is now. It’s better. He works in a factory.”

  “Better than digging coal in an underground mine.”

  “When he’s back here tending the vines he loves, I’ll be so happy I won’t be able to take my eyes off him.”

  I admired her spirit. Working alongside her every day, by the end of the vendange, I knew her well enough to ask if André had hidden anything there. No, she said, not unless he had done it before her husband left.

  I wondered whether there would come a time when I could go house to house through the whole commune, asking that question. It wasn’t wise to do that yet.

  NOW I WENT TO the post office every day and came home to tell the sad no-news to Geneviève, and to receive her compassionate bleat in reply. Often I stood with her looking out over the valley, resting my hand on her neck while trying to resolve the knotty question of loyalty. I bore my sorrow for André so deeply that I doubted I would ever get over it completely, yet I longed for a letter from Maxime.

  Finally, in November, he wrote.

  Chère Lisette,

  The socks, oh, the socks. If I were a poet, I would write an ode to the socks knit by Lisette’s lovely fingers. Thank you from the bottom of my heart and the soles of my feet.

  To combat boredom, I have taken to counting things. It is my morose entertainment. One hundred and twenty days of waiting in the phony war, one day of fighting, six days in a cattle train, twenty-one days in that hellhole, Stalag XII-A, the transit camp in L
imburg, and one thousand two hundred fifty-one days so far as a prisoner fighting a private war. How many days more?

  Six horizontal bars in the miners’ cage descending eight levels. Three dead of exhaustion in the mine. I take stock of myself: Ten working fingers, ten dirty toes. Two ringing ears. A stretcher-bearer here says a man has twenty-four ribs. I can see fourteen of mine easily.

  One hundred twenty men in my barrack. Twenty barracks in this camp. Twenty-four hundred men using two rows of trenches as latrines. Bunks three tiers high. One stove in the center. When the man closest to it died and prisoners were ordered to drag him out, other prisoners took to fighting violently over his bunk. We are hardly human.

  For the sake of my life, remind me of Paris.

  Bien affectueusement,

  Max

  Oh, dear God, dear God. I closed my eyes and felt a responsibility, no, a yearning to knit together his wounded soul. I was sure André would have wanted me to help him.

  6 DECEMBER 1943

  Cher Maxime,

  In the spirit of your counting, here is Paris. Twelve streets radiate out from place de l’Étoile like spokes of a wheel surrounding the Arc de Triomphe. Thirteen streets cross the Champs-Élysées from there through les Tuileries to place du Carrousel. If you count each bridge separately from Pont d’Austerlitz to Pont de l’Alma, there are twenty-one, I think. You can see if I’m right when you return. Try to name them now. Eight connect Île de la Cité with the banks, and one small one connects the two islands. Pont Neuf has five arches on the southern span and seven on the northern span. Do you know the number of grotesque stone heads on the sides? Sister Marie Pierre made me count and describe them. There are over 380. Can you believe that? Six columns stand before the Panthéon. How many on La Madeleine? Are they Doric, Ionic, or Corinthian? Sister Marie Pierre would have demanded to know.

  How many portraits of Suzy Solidor are in La Vie Parisienne? Do you remember that we counted them once, before the cabaret show began? Thirty-three, I think. My favorite is Raoul Dufy’s because of the strong blues. How many steps from place Saint-Pierre up to Sacré-Coeur? My guess is eighty. How many wagons in the Funiculaire de Montmartre? How many galleries in the Louvre? You ought to know this last thing precisely.

  Which is the greater distance—the depth you go down in the mine or the height we can go up in the Eiffel Tower when you get back? We will count all of these things. You can be sure of that!

  Reading this, he would have to sense that I ached for Paris nearly as much as he did. Ached to be there, but also ached for her, for her safety, her well-being, her suffering citizens fated to suffer more before this war was over.

  It was silly, this counting, but it might occupy his mind for a few minutes with pleasant memories. It was only a substitute for what I wanted to say.

  However, the most important things can’t be counted, Max. I’m thinking of the feel of spring in the air when they set out the tulips in the Jardin du Luxembourg. The bright colors of the marzipan fruit in the windows of confiseries. The cheerful melody of the organ grinder’s music box at place du Tertre, and the squeals of small children when his white-headed monkey takes their coins. The taste of roasted chestnuts sold on street corners in the fall, and the warmth of the paper cones in your hands. The slightly dank but not unpleasant smell of the Seine on foggy mornings. The exhilaration of being up in the Eiffel Tower after a rain. The sheen on the cobblestones, and on wet rooftops of Haussmann buildings with wrought iron balconies.

  I experienced again, as I was writing, the shivery thrill of being on the topmost platform, André on one side, Maxime on the other, and the adoring look in their eyes when my hair blew free.

  Stop counting days, Max. Keep a list in your mind of things you want to do after your release, and we shall do them all.

  Bien affectueusement,

  Lisette

  I couldn’t bear to tell him that the German authorities had burned more “degenerate” paintings in Paris this year; nor did I mention Herr Leutnant and my relief that he had not found mine. I sent Maxime my rationed amount of canned sausages and a small tin of pâté. For Christmas, I saved my meat ration coupons in order to buy him a canned terrine de canard, plus another of lapin, sure that he would appreciate the taste of duck and rabbit, even in small quantities. He certainly wouldn’t get pâtés in a prison camp! In the same package I sent him André’s wool scarf and leather gloves. And at Midnight Mass, I lit two candles, one out of gratitude and one out of sorrow, and the flames made my falling tears glisten and sizzle.

  THANKFULLY, HIS NEXT LETTER was less despairing.

  4 MARCH 1944

  Chère Lisette,

  Thank you for the lifesaving reminders of Paris, and the lifesaving food as well. The scarf and gloves I recognize to have been André’s. For you to have parted with them shows a generous heart, which I hope can heal as time passes. They are helping me through the winter.

  The Red Cross delivered Christmas packets here. I had missed the last two deliveries because I was at the mining camp. I had my first taste of sardines in a year. Eight in the tin, shared with my ration mate. To celebrate, I decorated my mess tin with a yellow dandelion blossom. It looked like the sun I so rarely see. Van Gogh would have liked it.

  An Englishman in another barrack made a sign and posted it in three languages by the latrine: DON’T THROW CIGARETTES INTO THE LATRINE AS IT MAKES THEM ALMOST UNSMOKEABLE. It made me chuckle. I have asked my mother for English and Italian language textbooks, whichever she can get.

  A couple of the young Brownshirts, storm troopers who run the camp, are humane fellows. I have had some halting conversations with the guard of my barrack about his home in Cologne and mine in Paris. Two spectacular cathedrals, we decided. Anyone who loves a cathedral cannot wholly serve evil. I traded twenty Red Cross cigarettes with him for seven sheets of paper and a new pencil. I am imagining your paintings from what André told me in order to draw them. If they are decent, and if I can save them, I will give them to you.

  It would be interesting to look up this fellow in ten years to see how he’s thinking. I am hopeful, at times.

  Très bien affectueusement,

  Max

  THE EVENTS OF 1944 seemed to speed up. Our hearts beat faster and our love for France quickened as we anticipated an Allied invasion. We stayed in the café most days so as not to miss any shred of news from the BBC. Odette, my staunch café partner, and I held hands, held our breaths, and prayed. Then, at last, came the announcement from Vichy, reported by the German state radio at seven in the morning: D-Day had begun. The Allies had landed but would be swiftly annihilated, the announcer crowed. We waited more than two hours for a special BBC news bulletin confirming the landing on the beaches of Normandy. Despite inestimable loss of life, the Allies were moving inland. At noon, Churchill reported that all was going according to plan.

  We hugged each other in gratitude, and all day, with watery eyes, I could think of nothing but those brave men and the dying they did on our beaches.

  Not much work got accomplished in the next several days, with so many people traipsing in and out of the café, asking for news. On the evening of 28 June we learned that American troops had liberated Cherbourg the day before. A cheer went up in the café. Monsieur Voisin couldn’t stop smiling, even at me. We felt the end wouldn’t be long now.

  Bernard came in and ordered a bottle of champagne and two glasses. He strode over to my table and poured a glass for me.

  “I didn’t think there was a bottle of champagne left in all of the Vaucluse,” I said and pushed the glass away, not wanting to encourage him.

  “I need to tell you two things,” he said in a near whisper. “I was under pressure to escort that German patrol and was commanded to bring that lieutenant to your home. I didn’t tell them about the paintings. They knew already.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t like to say. The way they treated you made me want to beat both of them to a pulp. Thank God you relente
d.”

  I supposed that I believed him.

  The next day I wrote to Maxime in case he didn’t know of the liberation of Cherbourg, ending the letter with Surely the Allies will recapture Paris soon, and hoped the letter would not be censored.

  ON 15 AUGUST, an evening sultry with humidity, we learned that Allied amphibious troops and paratroopers had landed on the beaches of Provence as they had done in Normandy, and that they were fighting in the streets of Marseille as well. Dear Provence, dear Provence. If only Cézanne knew of the efforts to save her.

  When I told Geneviève that night, she bleated some words of jubilation, a whole sentence, in fact. I’m sure it was “This is the age of courage.”

  A FEW DAYS LATER, Bernard came to my door and said with authority and urgency, “Don’t go anywhere near Gordes, with or without Maurice. It’s a hotbed of the Résistance in the village as well as in the maquis terrain, the scrub woods below Mont Ventoux where maquisards hide out in between their forays against German troop movements. They attacked a German patrol near Gordes. I expect there will be some retaliation. There was a reprisal at Saint-Saturnin-lès-Apt for some Résistance activity there. Villagers were rounded up and shot in the main square. So stay at home, I beg of you.”

  “How do you know all of this?”

  “It’s my job. I’m the garde champêtre.”

  This time he was all business and left without lingering.

  THE NEXT DAY, a distant explosion blasted the air and was quickly followed by more. I ducked instinctively at each one. Between blasts I heard Geneviève bleating urgently, so I stepped outside and was rocked back on my heels by the impact of the explosions. She ran to me. Kooritzah, cowering in her coop, jumped crazily when she saw me.

  “Some chicken you are. Stop flapping so I can hold you.”