Lisette's List

by Susan Vreeland

  I carried her inside and smoothed her feathers, with Geneviève close beside me. “It’s all right. It’s far away.”

  But it wasn’t all right. Bombardments continued throughout the night. I went to the outhouse under an orange sky thick with smoke. The acrid smell made me choke. Gordes was burning just as Marc and Bella’s Russian village had burned. The lives. Oh, the lives.

  In the morning, ashes black as the swastika blanketed the courtyard. Kooritzah did not lay an egg. Geneviève followed me around and butted me. Maurice came by, told me to stay at home, and left quickly.

  The next day, the people of Gordes were ordered into their houses and were shot if they didn’t move fast enough. Then cannons set up on the Bel-Air rock let loose a mighty barrage of explosions. About twenty houses were destroyed, and the people in them as well. The castle was dynamited, and five people were taken away as prisoners. Maurice heard it all from Aimé Bonhomme, who heard it from a resident of Gordes who had managed to escape to Roussillon.

  The domestic alternated with the tragic. Kooritzah stopped laying altogether. Knowing I could not bring myself to eat her, Louise told me that I should give her away for food. That hit me hard. Kooritzah had become a friend. Sadly, I did as Louise directed, and pictured Maurice enjoying Louise’s fricassée Arlésienne with onions, garlic, eggplant, and white wine.

  The Roussillonnais remained nervous. Although Maurice had the gasogene conversion now, he drove only to Apt, which was overrun with German soldiers garrisoned there. With Louise’s help, I chose a new hen and named her Kooritzah Deux, not knowing the Russian word for two.

  In disbelief, we stumbled upon a market table piled high with yarn that had somehow been shipped to Apt in a relief package from Switzerland. We bought all of it, and quickly handed it out to the women of Roussillon who Louise knew could knit. By working feverishly night and day, we were able to send two cartons of socks to the Croix Rouge in Paris to be delivered to prisoner of war camps in France.

  ON 19 AUGUST, the BBC reported that the French Résistance had attacked the German garrison in Paris. Maurice reached for his wine tumbler to raise a toast and knocked it over. Louise called him clumsy, and Mélanie shushed her, straining to hear.

  On 25 August, just ten days after the landings in Provence, the BBC triumphantly announced the Liberation of Paris. We were delirious with joy. Our City of Light would sparkle again. I hoped with all the hope in my heart that Maxime knew. Back home, on her knees, Geneviève prayed with me for the release of prisoners, as Sainte Geneviève had done fourteen centuries earlier.

  But that was not the end of the war. Fighting continued in the south and in the German-held Atlantic seaports. All the terrain east of Paris—Alsace, Lorraine, and the Rhine—had to be recaptured, and the German offensive in Belgium had to be put down. The BBC called that the Battle of the Bulge, and the miserable fighting in the snow lasted for more than a month. Every week, the Allies pushed on toward Germany, and on 29 April 1945, the United States Army liberated a prison camp called Dachau. The next day, we heard later, Adolf Hitler committed suicide. The day after that, Aimé discovered that Mayor and Madame Pinatel had fled in the night.

  For a week, the disbelief, the tension, the excitement, the relief crackled the air. By universal agreement of a crowd in place de la Mairie, Aimé Bonhomme was declared the new mayor. He and Maurice and Monsieur Beckett had a sense that a big announcement would come soon. Louise, Mélanie, and I did not stray far from the café those days, but Odette was running back and forth between the café and her daughter’s house, checking to see if Sandrine was in labor yet.

  Louise and I were sitting in place de la Mairie when Monsieur Voisin cranked up the volume on the radio at the same moment that Aimé leapt down the steps of the mairie and shouted through a homemade megaphone, “The war is over! France has been liberated! Europe has been liberated! Today, the eighth of May 1945, is and ever shall be Victory in Europe Day! Victory in Europe Day! Victory in Europe Day!”

  People burst out of their houses with their arms raised, beating on pots and pans, crying out, “Grâce à Dieu! Grâce à Dieu!” through streams of tears. Samuel Beckett ran into the square shouting, “Right has prevailed!” Surrounded by a delirious, cheering crowd, he grabbed my hand and we followed Aimé through the village just to hear him shout again and again, “The war has ended! The war has ended!” and watch him tear down the swastika flags on the Gothic arch. A young boy who would remember his act for the rest of his life touched a lit match to them. Known enemies hugged and kissed and danced in the streets. Women tossed packets of sugar they had been hoarding, and men poured the last of their marc for refugees.

  Maurice drove through the village sounding the horn on his bus and shouting, “It’s over! It’s over!” He scrambled out and hugged Louise, kissed her loudly and swung her around, and then me, bending me backward and kissing me on both cheeks, right and left and right and left, laughing and whirling me around so that my feet lifted off the ground, until I squealed and laughed and squealed again.

  Odette came running into the street shouting, “It’s a boy! They’ve named him Théo Charles Franklin Silvestre. De Gaulle and Roosevelt will live in Roussillon! Théo’s life will begin in peace!”

  The first sounds the babe must have heard were shouts of joy and the church bell ringing with all its wild might, as if to welcome him. The bells from Gordes and Apt and Saint-Saturnin-lès-Apt and Bonnieux answered ours in wild jubilation.

  The constable was nowhere to be seen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE UNSPEAKABLE

  1945

  I RECEIVED A LETTER, BUT IT WAS MERE TRICKERY SINCE IT WAS my own to Maxime, now bearing the stamp RETURNED UNDELIVERABLE. It sent me into a panic. What was the meaning behind UNDELIVERABLE? I couldn’t help but think the unthinkable. An accident in the mine. Or some revengeful atrocity in the last days of the war. I wrote a hasty letter of inquiry to Monsieur le Chef d’État-Major de l’Armée begging him for information. Sandrine searched through a postal directory for an address.

  Contrary to my own anxiety, the general mood in Roussillon was buoyant, as people stood on cliff edges watching long lines of defeated German troops trudging east in the valley below. Some gun-happy Résistance maquisards took potshots at them from the woods below the cliffs, injuring a few, which I thought was unconscionable when I heard about it in the café. Apparently a single unarmed Frenchman thought so too. He was reported to have stepped forward between the line of unarmed retreating soldiers and the armed maquisards and ordered them to desist. At least that was what they said in the café. Most people speculated that it had been Aimé Bonhomme, but he denied it. I thought it must have been Samuel Beckett.

  Despite the end of the war, I could not shake the gloom generated by the return of my letter. I made a batch of chèvre and took it to Madame Bonnelly, whom I found carrying a wooden crate of filled wine bottles on her ample hip as if it were a feather pillow. I showed her the envelope.

  “Puh! Don’t let that scare you, minette.” She pulled out from a stack of papers an envelope of her own, with the same stamp, and slapped it against her palm. That ruled out an accident in the mine.

  “I imagine the camps are in chaos,” she said. “They probably closed some of them and moved their prisoners just ahead of the Allied advance. Don’t worry your pretty head under that Parisian haircut. It will all get resolved.”

  Her explanation washed me clean of fear.

  She crooked her index finger around the neck of a bottle to lift it out of the crate. “Take this with you. To celebrate the peace. And if my husband does not come home before the vendange, come pick for me again.”

  SO I WAITED, AND went to the post office every day and held baby Théo in my arms while Sandrine sorted letters. I often saw stout, stouthearted Madame Bonnelly there, who came for the same reason. “Any news?” she always asked, and when I shook my head, she would say with amazing cheer, as though someone had poured steel down her bac
kbone, “Any day now.”

  Finally that day came, and I read,

  4 JUNE 1945

  Chère Lisette,

  Please forgive me for letting such a long time pass without writing to you. Stalag VI-J was closed at the end of 1944, and we were held at another camp for weeks or months.

  Obeying your wishes, I did not count them. There was no arrangement for writing letters there.

  Now I am in Paris, our beloved Paris. Elle existe encore! Can you imagine my flood of emotions when I stepped out of the train and saw her with my own eyes? I was processed for readmission at Gare d’Orsay, where a portrait of Charles de Gaulle welcomed us, along with young women handing out French bread rolls. Just think—I was housed for repatriation and recuperation at Hôtel Lutetia. Those elegant salons defaced with swastikas and Nazi slogans on the walls soured my happiness but did not destroy it. I was free!

  I was only one among thousands of prisoners housed there, some of them dazed, pitiful shells of men who had survived camps worse than mine. The repatriation bureau did what they could for us, but since my condition was not considered critical, I was released quickly. Now I am staying at my mother’s house, where she is filling me with more food than my shrunken stomach can accommodate, doting on me, and fluttering around like a nervous sparrow. She cannot grasp that I am stupefied by the vast difference between her beautiful apartment and the barracks. I miss my prison mates terrifically and wonder where they are living.

  I will come to see you when I am able. Please don’t worry if it isn’t soon.

  Très bien affectueusement,

  Max

  I showed the letter to Louise and Maurice, and when Madame Bonnelly told me her husband was home, I showed her too. She gave me a rib-cracking hug. “See? I told you so.”

  During the next months, fourteen other prisoners of war came back to Roussillon. Mayor Bonhomme posted a notice on the mairie when each one arrived, so I was very busy milking Geneviève twice a day, making chèvre as well as ricotta from the whey, using lemon to curdle it, and delivering it to Madame Bonnelly and fourteen other homes as “welcome home” gifts. What a joy that was!

  IN NOVEMBER, A SOFT knock at the door sounded like a child’s knock. I felt no fear. Maybe it was Mimi. I opened the door to a skeletal stranger, still as a statue.

  Maxime.

  Sudden weakness made me sway. I took in his presence in electric silence. Neither of us was able to utter a word. For the moment, just his breathing sufficed. Our mutual restraint rendered us motionless, tumbling me with relief and joy.

  “Come inside.”

  “I wasn’t sure that you would want to associate with a prisoner of war. France needs heroes, not specters of defeat.” The voice I recognized, but his tone was apologetic.

  “Every man who fought is a hero, Maxime.”

  He stepped across the threshold. “Even those who fought for only a day?”

  “You fought for five years.”

  He pursed his lips at that. I must have touched a nerve.

  Behind the closed door we fell into each other’s arms, and held on and on, our beating hearts pressing hard against each other’s, breathy sounds escaping from our lips, wetting each other’s faces with our tears.

  “Let me look at you,” he murmured, and we drew back.

  Then, in a soft voice, “You are beautiful, Lisette.”

  The former full contours of his face had shrunken to reveal jutting bones thinly covered by yellowish skin, the tendons in his neck protruding as though an inner layer of flesh had dissolved. His eyes, now deeply set, as if trying to retreat from what he had witnessed, carried the prison camp in them.

  “So are you. Beautiful.”

  “Short hair. Chic. Like Kiki. I like it.”

  With Max standing in the center of the room, the house, which had been so empty for five years, sprang to life. How ill-prepared I was to offer him comfort with only a wooden settee and ladderback chairs. Quickly I brought downstairs all the quilts and bed pillows and spread them out for him to sit wherever he wanted. Jittery with joy, I prepared a café crème, such as it was, an omelette with chèvre, boiled carrots, and bread. He watched my every move.

  “The cream and cheese are from my goat, Geneviève. Patron saint and protectress of Paris.”

  He smiled at this, and I saw that one of his front teeth was chipped to a point and two others next to it were missing. Despite that, his smile gave me hope for his well-being.

  We stumbled over our commonplace words—I’m happy to see you; I’m happy you’re home—silly, safe understatements. While he ate, so slowly, it was enough just to absorb each other’s being.

  With equal slowness, our fingers stole across the space between us on the table, a hairsbreadth apart for an age before we felt the tender tickle of each other’s skin. The knobs of his knuckles rose like mountain peaks. A nasty mauve scar on the back of his hand had been stitched together inexpertly. I let my index finger graze over it. Without flinching, he offered it to me as evidence of something.

  I ventured a question. “How did you lose your teeth? Do you mind talking about it?”

  “I didn’t do it falling down a flight of marble stairs at the Lutetia, that’s for sure.”

  “I’m guessing something a far sight worse.”

  “The camp was run by storm troopers who brutalized the weaker prisoners. Day after day they found ways to satisfy their hunger to hurt. It enraged me to see one of them kick and beat a sick man for not being able to stand. The prisoner had vomited, and the guard made him lap it up like a dog. That was one cruelty too many. I cursed him and shouted for him to leave the sick man alone, in compliance with the Geneva Conventions, which we had learned about in our training. He struck me in the mouth with his rifle butt.”

  He told it without rancor, a mere fact of life. I would try to do the same when I would tell him about my encounter with the Germans.

  “I know it’s not pleasant to look at. There’s a long delay to see dentists in Paris. I couldn’t wait until then to see you.”

  “That’s what I mean about being a hero! You stood up for a comrade, unarmed. The missing teeth are evidence of your courageous resistance.”

  “Or a mark of my stupidity.”

  “No. Maxime. Please don’t think that way.”

  When he finished eating, he said, “I’ve come to tell you about André. You have a right to know.”

  “Tell me only what you are able to.”

  At that encouragement, he could not bring up speech from his throat. He took a deep, faltering breath and looked away from me, as though reconstructing the scene of battle, as he had probably done a hundred times.

  “We were stretched thin north of the Maginot Line of cement defenses, with only four anti-tank placements to the kilometer where there should have been ten. And only one anti-aircraft battery in the whole area.”

  How strange and alien to hear him speak of military matters.

  “From our position up there on the Marfée Heights, we had a splendid view of the beautiful Meuse River, which sparkled in the morning sun.”

  Relief! That was a glimpse of the Maxime I knew.

  “Early one morning, it was the thirteenth of May, waves of German dive-bombers—Stukas, they’re called—began screaming toward us, hundreds of them, Lisette. The sky was peppered with them hurtling down, shrieking their sirens above the engine noise, and shattering our nerves. Whenever a rain of bombs fell, we flattened ourselves in the bottom of the trench, amazed when they landed even a kilometer away and we still felt the impact through the earth. Explosions came so close together that there was no time in between. Blasts hammered at us all day. Seconds after each one hit, we marveled that we were still breathing but were certain the next one would be the end of us.

  “Nothing had prepared us for the fury of this assault. Some of the men in our platoon were already running to the rear. One man was crying. We were all dazed, cowering against our earth embankment, or recklessly rising above i
t to let loose a round of machinegun fire at a diving plane, or even just to aim rifle fire at the pilot, hungry to see one black swastika plunge nose-first into the ground.” Then, in a softer tone, he said, “For better or for worse, in those hours we were transformed from our former selves.

  “André and I kept a constant watch for each other, asking with gestures toward the sky why our planes weren’t there defending us. Being undefended from the air made us all half-crazed. It was our first glimpse of defeat.

  “As soon as the aerial pounding lessened, the German troops were on the move, launching rubber dinghies into the river. We had good results firing on them, but a few got across, and their loads of men attached a makeshift floating bridge to our bank so their armored personnel carriers could come across. They emptied out their infantry, giving us more targets than we could handle.”

  It appalled me to hear him speak of human beings as targets, and of killing as good results.

  “One by one, their explosives took out seven sod bunkers to the left of us, with the explosions coming our way. Then, just as we had dreaded, a line of panzers appeared, German tanks carrying small mounted cannons. Apparently they had crossed to the north out of sight and were heading toward us along a ridge, and another line was coming from the south. Their shells blasted across great distances, leaving gaping pits.”

  He choked up, and it took him several minutes before he continued. “They were coming at us from all directions, behind us too, close enough to lob grenades. I could hardly believe what I saw when the sod bunker to the right of us exploded, a direct hit, spewing out metal and propelling bodies into the air. Another shell tore into the end of our own trench, sending sharp metal fragments flying into flesh. Our friends …”

  He stopped and shook his head vehemently, as though trying to obliterate a memory. Neither of us dared to move while he gathered the strength to continue.

  “I came here fully intending to tell you everything.”