“I wonder about that man,” I say.
“What man?”
“Private first class John True.”
“Why? He seemed like a nice man to me.”
“The guy managed to get promoted just once, from buck private to private first-class, while fighting all the way across Europe,” I say with, I admit, a bit of a growl in my voice. “Christ, with so many combat casualties, guys were getting promoted left and right!”
“Papa, you sound positively angry and that’s not like you.”
“I’m sorry. Let’s drop it.”
“No. I’m not gonna drop it until you come clean. It’s more than those D-Day groupies or Private True. You’ve gone somewhere profoundly sad.”
As always, Callie is on to me. I stare out at the ocean for a long moment, glance up at the life boats suspended above us, and finally say, “You and I talked before about closure and grief.”
“I remember.”
“And I said there is no such thing as closure. There’s only dealing with it better.”
“But with Élodie, it isn’t about closure. You said it’s about a final chapter to your story.”
I sigh and turn to look at her. “And learning to handle the grief better. But sometimes it’s more difficult than at other times and those people brought me back to that time when I first lost her. The way it works is at first the grief makes you feel your life boat is swamped and you think you will surely sink. You bail like a body possessed, but it feels like you’ll never catch up. Then slowly, over time, you’re able to bail just enough to keep the boat afloat and eventually the waves of grief get smaller, but they are always there, and you’re always bailing. And every so often there comes a giant wave and you’re in danger of sinking again. That’s when some people give up.”
“And you’ve felt like that sometimes,” Callie says. “That’s what we talked about that day of the family gathering in Gloucester.”
“Yes. But you need to have faith that the giant grief-wave is like the real ocean ones called freak waves. Like in that movie, The Perfect Storm. They pile up when several wave trains from different storms converge in the same place at the same time. It’s like that with grief. Several things come together—a song, a sad movie, a memory, people unwittingly dragging you back to a painful time—all of it converging at once.”
“The D-Day fans?”
“Yes, because that’s when it all began with Élodie.”
“Will you tell me the whole story? When it’s not too painful, I mean.”
“You’ll be the only person I’ll tell the story to in person … without a bound memoir between us, that is.”
Moonlight silvers the tree trunks as Élodie and I lead the children down a meandering path to the riverbank. We wear our ponchos against the morning chill. Silently, we cross the ancient Roman bridge at the edge of the village which Élodie said has been long thought by the locals to be the gateway to the Pyrénées. But for this strange procession—white caped, tiny monks led by two taller monks in kaki—I hope the bridge is the gateway to life.
Once across the river, we turn south and follow the west bank of the Ariège along a path lined with smooth, gray beeches, gnarled oaks, and arched canopies of chestnuts. Cascading down from the melting snow fields of the Pyrénées, the river here is a little over fifty meters wide, and as it cataracts over rocks with a spumy roar, the moonlight transforms the roiling water into sprays of sparkling diamonds.
Now and then, we come to places where farm fields reach down to the river. In these places, Élodie and I gather the children into a tight group and lead them across the exposed field at a run. The first time we do this, I feel Mitzi bouncing on my back and laughing and squealing, “Lauf, Papa! Lauf!” It is the first time any of us has heard Mitzi speak.
“Lauf means run?” I ask Élodie.
“Yes,” she replies. “Now at least we know, for sure, she is German.”
With a lump in my throat, I reach behind me and pat Mitzi on the head. Élodie gives me a tender smile and I think this must be the way parents look at each other. Mitzi rests her head on my shoulder and murmurs, “Papa.”
“Well, doesn’t that beat all,” I say to Élodie.
“It’s brilliant!” Élodie says.
Max, the twelve-year-old British-German who has been lagging a little behind, says, “Some of the children are tired. Can we rest here for a little while? Just a little while?”
“Of course, Max,” says Élodie. “Thank you for looking after the other children. Well done, you. And you should rest, too.”
Max flashes her a smile of delight. “Isn’t it cracking that Mitzi spoke?”
“Yes, it is, Max. It’s brilliant.”
Sitting in a circle under a broad-domed chestnut tree, we tear off pieces of the baguettes and cheese Odette has given us.
After a short break, we resume our journey. When we spot, in the distance, the church and castle of Vernet-les-Bains against the backdrop of the Pyrénées, we turn slightly to the west to avoid the cluster of buildings and follow narrow dirt roads limning the edges of farm fields. Thus, zigzagging from field to field, we finally arrive at the outskirts of Lagrâce-Dieu, a tiny commune where the first safe house is located.
“It’s the third house after the church,” Élodie says. “Stay with the children whilst I make sure everything is good.”
I shake my head. “No. I should go in case there’s trouble.”
“Don’t be daft! If there’s trouble, I can deflect suspicion in three languages. You would be revealed instantly. Stop trying to be the protective male. Just make sure the children are hidden and they remain quiet.”
She’s right, of course. Reluctantly, I reach out and squeeze her hand. “Go, then.”
A half hour later, Élodie returns with good news. “It’s all clear. Follow me.”
Lagrâce-Dieu is a tiny hamlet of no more than 100 or 200 people. The few people we see pay us no attention as we hurry past the house into an adjoining lambing shed where the woman, code name Lombarda, awaits us. “Vite! Vite!” she says with waves of her hand, ushering us through the door. She is a young, attractive woman. A boy and a girl stand at her hips and gaze at the children passing into the shed, some older, some younger, than they. The interior of the shed is a grid of drop pens, lambing jugs and creep feeders, all bedded with a thick floor of straw. In one corner is a large, rusted scale for weighing new-born lambs. Several water troughs sit on the floor.
Lombarda says, “Je vais apporter un peu de soupe. Il est tout ce que je peux offrir.”49 She pushes her children before her and they head toward the farmhouse.
Élodie translates for me. I nod and sweep the shed with my arm. “Where are the sheep?”
“Probably in the high pastures with her husband.” Élodie explains to me the practice called transhumance by which livestock are moved from one grazing ground to another. “June is the right time for it.”
Suddenly, there are squeals of delight from the two Polish girls, Elżbietá and Klará. Elżbietá cradles a long-haired, bushy-tailed, black-and-white cat, and Klará is stroking its head.
Élodie smiles and says, “All sheep farmers keep cats to protect the cheese from mice.”
Lombarda and her daughter return with a large, ceramic soup tureen, a ladle and a dozen bowls and coffee cups of various sizes and shapes. The boy carries a huge wedge of cheese on a cutting board.
Lombarda ladles the soup into the bowls and cups and hands them out to the children. “L’azinat,” she says to Élodie who turns to me and says, “It’s a specialty of the Ariège. Cabbage soup with carrots and potatoes. Usually it has pork and duck, but I doubt she is able to get meat of any kind these days.”
The soup is, indeed, meatless. And thin. And not for the first time, I wonder how the people of France survive with such shortages. And I remember Odette Dupont’s cassoulet and marvel again at her resourcefulness.
Élodie asks Lombarda a simple question: “Où sont les moutons?”5
0 which launches the woman into a long, rambling narrative that brings tears to her eyes and ends with Élodie placing an arm around the woman’s shoulders and holding her close while she sobs.
Élodie turns to me and says, “Her real name is Rachelle Monsigny. Her children are Adrien and Yvette. The sheep are not in the high pastures with her husband, as I had thought, because they were all confiscated by the Germans. Her husband, Yves, is at a work camp in Germany. He left last year as part of the so-called STO, the Service du Travail Obligatoire.51 It’s a Vichy program to recover prisoners-of-war. For every three men who go to Germany to do forced labor in factories and mines and so forth, the Nazis promise to release one prisoner. Lombarda’s husband volunteered, hoping he could help get his brother released. But they’re both still in Germany. She’s invited you and me to join her in her house once the children are asleep. She has a little wine.”
While the children are settling down to sleep, exhausted after the first day of the escape march, Élodie and I decide to bathe Mitzi and change her diaper. Neither of us having done it before, we struggle together, trying to improvise getting a fresh diaper on the little girl. But it keeps slipping down her legs. Finally, Rebekka Weiß, the eight-year-old Austrian girl, tells Élodie her mother used to take in children for care during the day and she taught Rebekka how to do it. The girl folds the flat diaper into a triangle, tucks one corner between Mitzi’s legs and brings the other two together over her belly where she attaches them with a large safety pin. When she is finished, Mitzi smiles, reaches up to her and touches her lips. Rebekka looks at Élodie and asks, “Was will sie?”52
Élodie shrugs. “Ein Kuss?”53
Rebekka leans forward and plants a soft kiss on Mitzi’s forehead, then abruptly turns and throws her arms around Élodie and bursts into tears and her shoulders shake and Élodie comforts her with caresses on her cheek and Rebekka’s brother Stephan joins them and he, also, is crying and all the other children stare at them with sad expressions, some weeping in empathy.
“What is this all about?” I ask.
Élodie, a tear sliding from the corner of her eye, says, “Mitzi’s mother must have kissed her every time she changed her nappy, so she asked Rebekka to do the same. Undoubtedly, that made Rebekka think of her mother, which made her cry. And Stephan, too. And the others. These children are so very, very fragile. It breaks my heart! Most of them don’t know what happened to their parents and fear the worst. We must be extremely gentle with them.”
I suddenly find it difficult to see as a bit of moistness tingles in my hardened, American, gun-carrying, paratrooper eyes.
An hour later, the children are asleep in the lambing shed, and Élodie and I slip out quietly. We cross the barnyard, which is puddled with moonlight. We hear the staccato, machine-gun cackle of the boreal owl followed immediately by the scamper of a critter through the underbrush. A cool breeze, carrying a rumor of snow, streams down from the distant Pyrénées. We arrive at the farmhouse and knock quietly. The door opens almost instantly. Rachelle greets us with an anxious look. She motions us to the table where she has placed a bottle of wine and three glasses. She pours the wine. She hesitates, stares at Élodie and says, “Je vous prie de m’aider.”
Élodie translates. “She’s begging our help.”
“With what?” I ask.
Élodie turns to Rachelle and asks a question in French. Rachelle’s reply takes a long time. When she finishes, she rises from the table and goes into the next room.
“She seems troubled.”
“She is. She lied to us about why her husband volunteered to go to a German labor camp. It seems the local Vichy police were eager to show the Germans how good they could be at rounding up men for the forced labor camps. They were going from house to house and bullying men to volunteer. But the real problem came when they started sending women east. So, Rachelle’s husband decided to volunteer to take the pressure off. He guessed they wouldn’t visit if they knew he was already in Germany.”
“That seems a drastic thing to do.”
“He felt he had no choice. Rachelle, as it happens, is Jewish. They were desperately afraid she would be found out and sent not to a labor camp but to a death camp. And the strategy worked. Once they knew he was in Germany, they left her alone. But now, she feels time has run out on them.”
“Why?”
“She asks a good question. With the allies continuing to break out from Normandy, what happens if Hitler feels he is losing? What if he becomes a cornered rat? They’ve already accelerated sending Jews eastward. She feels it will just get worse. The more Hitler loses, the more insane he’ll become, and the more the killing of Jews will go on. And they’ll start killing everybody, including the French workers in the labor camps. He’ll see it as some sort of crazy Wagnerian Götterdämmerung in which everybody and everything dies. His own version of Armageddon. That last part, by the way, is me talking; I doubt Rachelle has ever heard of Wagner.”
“I’ve heard of Wagner,” I say. “But I don’t know about that other thing.”
“Götterdämmerung? It’s the fall of the gods.”
“Hitler thinks he’s a god?”
“I don’t know. Something like that, I suppose. In any event, Rachelle said we have no idea how impossible it is for her to sit at home and wonder if Yves will ever return. She said she will go crazy.” Élodie pauses, places a hand on my cheek, takes a deep breath, and says, “Henry, she wants us to take her children with us.” Her voice catches in her throat.
“What? Seriously? But, why?”
“Because she wants to go to Germany to find her husband.”
“Is she crazy? Christ Almighty, how the hell would she do that?”
“Being part of the underground network, she knew where to get papers forged. She has false birth and baptism certificates, I.D. cards, even food stamps, for both her and her husband. She plans to travel backwards along the chain of safe houses until she reaches Essen in Germany.”
“That’s nuts! She’ll never make it!” I can’t believe the woman could even conceive of such a hairbrained plan.”
“Please don’t raise your voice.”
“I know, sorry, but—”
“She’s desperate.”
“And her kids?”
“She knows how dangerous it is. She doesn’t want to expose them to that.”
“So, they come with us?”
“What choice do we have?”
I say nothing. Again, she’s right.
Élodie takes a long drink of her wine. “I tried to talk her out of it, but all she said was, Les carottes sont cuites.”
“Meaning?” I ask.
“Literally, the carrots are cooked. It means it’s too late to change things.”
“The die is cast.”
“Yes. That’s what you say in America. In short, she’s made up her mind.”
Moments later, Rachelle reappears and shows us the documents she’s had forged. She insists we examine each one as if to prove to us her plan is feasible. And, once more, she begs us, in a whispered voice, to take Yvette and Adrien with us. She promises they are good children, full of love and compassion, who will get along well with the others. Adrien, especially, she says, is a sweet boy who loves all animals, especially dogs. She tells us he may well adopt one of the many stray dogs that wander the war zones and that the companionship would be good for him. When Élodie says, yes, Yvette and Adrien can join our company, she hugs Élodie, then me. And, after another glass of wine, Élodie and I return to the lambing shed and the children.
We are woken in the morning by the loud wailing of two children who, apparently, have just discovered a new darkness in the world, and a mother’s voice coming across the barnyard, tearfully imploring, full of grief. I need no translation. I feel the agony like a weight on my shoulders, or like a small bird trapped in my breast. And when Rachelle appears with Yvette and Adrien, the eyes of all three are red and moist. Élodie and I embrace Rachelle and gently usher all
the children, now thirteen in number, out of the lambing shed and into the harsh moonlight. Yvette and Adrien move slowly, gazing over their shoulders at their mother until we turn a corner and they can no longer see her.
A short time later, at the far end of a neighboring field, in the soft early morning light, we see a farmer herding some of the sheep he’s managed to save from confiscation into an enclosure. Only the heads of his sheep are visible above a ground fog. He, himself, seems to float with no lower body. He gives no sign he notices us. I realize we, ourselves, must be a strange sight with most of our charges hidden by the same ground fog as we set out for the next safe house in a tiny village called Sainte-Aimée on the Lèze River where we are to seek out a local priest named Peire Basc.
49 “I will bring a little soup. It is all that I can offer.”
50 “Where are the sheep?”
51 Obligatory work service.
52 “What does she want?”
53 “A kiss?”
Chapter 11
The Sheep and the Rose
As we had arranged the night before, I sit at a table in the King’s Court Restaurant on deck 7 awaiting Callie. The plan is to have breakfast and then to go to the gym, which is all the way forward on the same deck. There, Callie will test my breathing with some light exercise.
When she appears, we take trays and go to the breakfast buffet where I lift two waffles onto my plate and Callie orders a vegetable omelet. Callie watches me as we eat, until finally she says, “Do you feel better this morning, Papa?”
“Lots better.”
She gives me a skeptical smile. “We’ll just have to test that.”
“Christ, I feel like I’m back in the military again.”
“Speaking of which, I think we should try to avoid those D-Day enthusiasts. You were getting a little stressed.”
“You mean the hobbyists?” I ask. “Can you imagine? They make a hobby of it.”
Callie points her fork at me. “Now, that’s what I mean, Papa. Already, there’s smoke coming out of your ears. Eat your waffles and don’t get so worked up about it. After all, you were there, in France. You’re way ahead of them on that score.”
The Light from the Dark Side of the Moon Page 19
