A Good Death

by A Good Death (retail) (epub)

  ‘Will you have tea?’ Nikola spoke fluent French with a pronounced accent.

  ‘Tea, ah, yes, please.’

  He detested tea, the drink of his London years, yet this was not that sickly, fatty, opaque brew which the English drank ad nauseam. When it came, in glasses encased in filigree holders, it was black, translucent and fragrant, accompanied by a teaspoon and a saucer full of a thick dark brown substance.

  ‘Jam?’ His host held out the saucer.

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘No lemons for five years, but I still have jam.’ He ate it appreciatively. ‘What do you want to know about Henri? I’d have thought they could tell you anything you wanted to know over there at Bonnemort.’

  ‘You don’t always hear…’ Theo began.

  ‘Women, eh?’ Nikola commented shrewdly. He looked at him out of small pale blue eyes set deep in their sockets. ‘Well, what is it you want to know?’

  ‘I want to know what happened to Henri. I’ve been given hints and rumours: he was betrayed; he was incompetent; even that he was a coward.’

  The Russian laughed. ‘All that? What can I say? Henri was a good man. He wasn’t a fool; he wasn’t reckless; he wasn’t a coward. You know that anyway. Perhaps it helps if someone else says it to you, eh? Now, what happened here? You mean with the Resistance?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ah, that takes longer. Up at Bonnemort, that’s where it began, early on. You know the mayor here?’ he asked, leaning forward to pour more tea.

  Theo had by now realised that he had found a raconteur. This was probably going to take a long time, but he would get a full story.

  ‘Not this one now, Vernhes; the old one, Gargaud,’ Nikola continued. ‘He was Petainist through and through. Me, I’m French now. I got my citizenship in thirty-four. But these French quarrels, they mean nothing to me. I’m waiting for Russia to be put right. Gargaud was all for the Marshal and so your family were already against him. I knew what was going on sooner than the others down there in the village. Me, I can tell a Russian Jew when I see one. And I can tell a Polish Jew, too. You know how I can tell? He looks Russian. And the Pole, he looks Polish. Round here they think everyone is foreign. You could come from anywhere, Paris, Marseilles, even Toulouse and you’re still foreign. So when I see a Polish woman and two kids walking up the track to Bonnemort in April 1941, I knew what I was seeing. So that’s when it began.’

  He sucked the last of the plum jam off his spoon, turning the bowl face downwards on his tongue like a child, relishing his story.

  ‘But I wasn’t involved then. It wasn’t until June forty-one that I went along to Henri and said, I know you’re up to something and I want to be in it. That was when Hitler invaded Russia,’ he added helpfully, in case Theo had missed what was happening in Europe as well as at Bonnemort. ‘Now, I don’t like that bastard who’s in charge in Russia. If you ask me, there’s nothing to choose between Stalin and Hitler. But I fought the Germans in the first war, and I wasn’t going to put up with the buggers invading my country without doing something about it. You don’t want to hear this stuff about me,’ he said, now that he had finished talking about himself, ‘but I’m just telling you how I joined the Resistance. June forty-one it was, when Henri put me on to Dr Maniotte. So this is the first Resistance group in Lepech. We’re all legal, quiet, steady. We look after communists and Jews. We make false papers. We keep in contact with others.

  ‘Now the second group begins. I don’t know when exactly, but by the end of forty-two there was a communist group here. They weren’t locals, mostly town people, boys from far away: Toulouse, Bordeaux, Racines. Group Noix, they called themselves, hard nuts. Communists.’

  Suddenly, with terrible noise and violence, he snorted, hawked, chewed his phlegm for a moment and spat with vicious accuracy into the flames, which hissed at him in reply, like a disturbed viper.

  ‘Did the two groups co-operate at all?’ Theo asked.

  Nikola leaned back in his chair and laughed, so that Theo could see his tongue and throat, glistening red against his dark beard. ‘Co-operate? You’re a Frenchman and an army man and you ask if they co-operated? I don’t know how you professional soldiers make an army out of the French. You do, but God knows how. Russians are sheep: they are driven to do everything together. The English are geese: their instincts tell them all to do the same thing at the same time. The Germans are dogs: they obey their master. But the French! Every one of them is an individualist who decides for himself whether to get up in the morning. No, they didn’t co-operate. Don’t tell me you in London thought they would co-operate?’

  Theo was laughing by now. ‘No, we didn’t.’

  ‘Trying to make fighters out of those French boys was no holiday. They were keen, I’ll give them that. And a lot of the country boys could shoot already; they made very nice snipers. But discipline? Drill? Impossible. But it wasn’t just that. There was hostility, jealousy, rivalry, all the local quarrels you can think of. If the man that you had a dispute with about the price of hay or a sliver of land supported Group Noix, then you would help Group Rainbow. Henri spent days on end, riding round, getting the farmers to agree to help us. And then these buggers in Noix would turn up and take without asking. So then, naturally, the peasants wouldn’t give anything to us. Noix stole one of our arms caches. When that happened, in forty-three, we almost had a local war here. It was just after Dr Maniotte was arrested and then Henri. That’s when the FTP began to say that it was Henri’s fault; that he was no good. Things were very bad. You know what I think was the real trouble? It was Henri being socialist. Communists hate socialists worse than fascists, you know that?

  ‘At the beginning of forty-four we began to get organised, at last, and they set up the National Council of the Resistance, with regional committees and local committees and liaison officers to try to make the communist and the free Resistance work together. By then the FTP were more royalist than the king. You wouldn’t think they’d spent two years sitting on their arses, doing nothing from thirty-nine to forty-one.’

  Nikola got up to throw more logs onto the fire. ‘You know all this,’ he said, half-question, half-statement. ‘Madame Ariane was our area liaison officer with the FTP. She and Henri took over here when Dr Maniotte was arrested and they split the work between them. She went to the regional committee as the representative of the Secret Army.’

  Theo, gazing at the new flames flaring round the logs, did not reveal that he had not known. ‘You tell it anyway,’ he said. ‘Tell it as you saw it.’

  ‘Two months, three maybe, she worked with them on our plans for D-Day. German Army Group G covered this area of France. We knew that whenever D-Day came, wherever the landings were, in the Mediterranean, Normandy, Pas-de-Calais, wherever, some of those troops, particularly the armoured divisions, would be ordered immediately to the front. We had to delay them. We made plans to blow up the river bridges, to cut the rail lines, east-west and north-south. And not just once, you understand. The Germans could repair a blown track in forty-eight hours, maximum. So over and over again we had to be able to do it, until we ran out of plastic. I’m not exaggerating when I say that the Germans hardly dared step out of the towns around here.’

  He stretched out his long legs and arms until his chair creaked. ‘D-Day. I tell you, the night before, 5 June, I’ll never forget the excitement. Someone came for me at about eleven at night to say, it’s for tomorrow. We thought it meant a general uprising. We were all going to meet the following morning at our appointed rendezvous and then each group to its task. That was the theory.’

  One of the canaries, which had been flying about the darkening room from time to time, suddenly landed on Nikola’s head. He reached up and clasped it in his huge hand, absently stroking its exotic feathers while it grasped his fingers as if they were twigs on a tree.

  ‘God knows if it would have worked. I doubt it. And if it had, we might have been carved up like the guys on the Vercors plateau in July. So we, or so
me of us, were saved by what happened. Next morning, the SS rolled into Bonnemort.’

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Nikola tossed the bird into the air. ‘We need food. We need drink. We need wood. We still have a long way to go. That is, if you want to hear the whole story?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Theo.

  As Nikola had talked the light had gone and the fire had fallen in. The Russian disappeared, still talking, shouting from different points around the house.

  ‘I come from Orel, a small town between Moscow and Kharkov, you know it? My parents were small shopkeepers, but we had a dacha, two hours’ cart ride out of town. I was born Nikolai Nikolaievich Dekanozovochenko. When I came to France, they don’t use patronymics and they couldn’t pronounce Dekanozovochenko, so they call me Mr Nikola.’

  He was outside now, clapping the shutters closed the length of the house, re-entering by the front door, his beard pearled with moisture. ‘A bugger of a night.’

  Theo had given up hope of letting Ariane know where he had gone. ‘How did a boy from Orel arrive in Lepech Perdrissou?’ he asked.

  ‘I was called up into the Tsarist army in the last war. When the Revolution came, I was all for it, but the Bolsheviks didn’t approve of shopkeepers’ sons: class enemy, I was. So then I joined the Whites, and fought against the Reds instead. We damn near won, for a time. But it wasn’t to be and I had to leave my homeland, like you did. You’re back after four years and I’m still waiting.’

  He threw logs on the fire and stacked more beside the hearth. From the cupboard he took out two small glasses and a stoppered wine bottle. The liquid, like oily water, undoubtedly home-brewed, slid silkily into the glasses. With an air of formality that contrasted with their tousled surroundings, Nikola handed Theo his glass, and held up his own, looking him directly in the eye.

  ‘Nasdrovie,’ he said. ‘Sante,’ and threw the spirit down his throat, refilling his glass at once. ‘Now where were we?’

  Not until much later, when he had recovered from that night of drinking, a night such as he had never before experienced, even in a Scottish mess on Scapa Flow, did Theo ask himself what the Russian did not tell him that evening. In the inundating flow of words, Nikola appeared so overwhelmingly open, with the solitary man’s eagerness to talk, that it did not occur to Theo that he might be holding details back, from discretion or cunning or embarrassment. Each event recounted seemed to burst out of him under pressure, without a filter. But when he replayed his memory of the evening, Theo recalled, drink after drink, the clear shrewdness of the childlike pale blue eyes.

  ‘So,’ Theo prompted him. ‘The SS arrived. What did you do?’

  He groaned. The memory demanded another drink. ‘A terrible anticlimax. Everything countermanded; everyone home. There was a lot of grumbling about it at the beginning. They, the others, wanted action. Even some of our guys argued that it was time to face them, that if everyone, all over France, rose at once, the Germans could not hold on. They wanted to reverse forty, you see. But I told them, look, the Nazis aren’t defeated. And look, they’re not defeated yet; it’s March and we’ve only just crossed the Rhine. Henri always said, if we can’t protect our people, we can’t take risks with them. And he meant the villagers, not the fighters.’

  ‘What was the SS unit actually doing here?’ Theo asked.

  ‘They were supposed to clear the countryside of the Maquis, but they didn’t have the manpower. All they could do was to try to cut off our support, to threaten the local people with such terror that they were too afraid to give us any help. And they had to keep the main roads open. That took up a lot of their time. That’s really where we did good work. We held them down here for two and a half months. But they were dangerous, believe me. Bit by bit we won certain areas. At Lavallade the FTP took over running the commune, with a new communist mayor. They loved it, the communists; committees for food supply, sanitation, refuse collection, national festivals, committees for everything.’

  ‘So what happened to Henri? Was he betrayed? Or was it just chance?’

  ‘Ah, there’s the question that I’ve asked myself every night since that day in August. But first, food. I can’t tell about that day without food in my belly.’

  He drained his glass of the teardrop of liquid in its base and, staggering slightly, led Theo into the kitchen. Eventually, emerging from the indescribable filth, they sat down again beside the fire each with a plate piled high with fried onions and chicken, a wedge of bread. A new bottle of vodka nestled on the floor against Nikola’s calf.

  ‘By August last year,’ Nikola spoke through a mouthful of onion, several strands hanging from his lip, mingling with his beard, ‘the frustration was building up. We knew that there must be an invasion from the Mediterranean coming soon. So there was a big debate in the Resistance here about what to do with our Germans, still dangerous, more dangerous than ever because they could see as well as us how their position was deteriorating. Perhaps they would be left like the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, abandoned to the enemy, swallowed up by the Maquis, who didn’t always take prisoners.

  ‘I didn’t take part in this debate, you understand. I didn’t attend these meetings. I just heard what Henri told me. What he said was, we’ve got the countryside, more or less. Let them keep the towns; when they retreat, we take over without bloodshed. But the others, the FTP, wanted to drive them out. They were action men. The FTP was dominant on the regional committee where Vernhes was the boss and he made this plan to capture the SS officer commanding the unit at Bonnemort. They were going to lie in wait for him at Longas. Henri was against it, but the plan was agreed and given the go-ahead. We had superb intelligence, from Madame Ariane. She was a sort of double agent, you see. She passed on to us anything she could learn about the Germans’ movements. And she fed them false information, too. She was part of this kidnap scheme, I remember. The hours we spent planning it. And what for? Did anyone mention, apart from Henri, what would happen afterwards? What they would do, the Nazis, when we’d taken their officer hostage?’

  He put his empty plate on the floor and picked up a chicken bone, gnawing on it, reflectively.

  ‘You know what I think? I’ve never said this to anyone, because it never came off, this plan. I think that was the point of it. It wasn’t for the glory of taking a high-ranking SS officer, it was in order to provoke reprisals. And where would they have fallen, do you think?’

  He paused. The question was real rather than rhetorical.

  ‘Bonnemort?’ Theo suggested.

  ‘You’re dead right.’

  Theo pondered what he had learned. In any alliance in which the allies hate one another only marginally less than they hate the enemy there comes a moment, at victory, or when victory is within sight, when the alliance cracks.

  ‘So you think that the FTP wanted to use the Germans to wipe out their rivals, so when the SS had gone they would have a clear field in the region.’

  Nikola stroked his beard, pleased to find that Theo understood. ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Vernhes wanted to eliminate Henri.’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘What went wrong?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. It aborted. The major didn’t turn up where he was expected. Perhaps he got suspicious. Then we were into a new plan, and that one was forgotten.’

  Nikola threw his chicken bone into the fire, and leaned back, picking his teeth with a black thumbnail. ‘The old mayor of Lepech Perdrissou was still there, Gargaud. Like I said, many of the mayors had gone, resigned. The gendarmes had gone over to the Resistance. But in Lepech, Gargaud hung on. He’s a stubborn old bugger, now up on a charge of collaboration. But although he was always keen on the Matshal, he was never pro-Nazi; he never denounced anyone, as far as I know.

  ‘The plan was for the Resistance to take over the town and drive Gargaud out. It was the FTP leader who was especially keen on this, and you won’t be surprised to hear that he is now our new mayor. But it had to be both groups who entere
d the town, the Secret Army as well, not just the FTP. Why? Because it would have looked like a communist takeover and he knew that the people wouldn’t stand for it.’

  As Nikola, whose rate of consumption was at least twice that of Theo, poured himself more vodka, Theo asked, ‘When was this, exactly?’

  ‘Oh, this was right at the end, in August. This was the culmination of our three years of heroic struggle against the Germans.’

  Although Theo did not find that the Russian’s heavy accent and odd way of expressing himself impeded his understanding of what he said, it did make it more difficult to understand what he meant. Or was it the vodka? Was this last remark satirical, mocking the petty battles of a handful of amateurs who had, in truth, done little to fight against the Germans during the Occupation? Or was he trying to put Henri’s death into context, glamorising war to justify his death, to say that it was worthwhile, that he didn’t die in vain?

  ‘The Allied landing in Provence, 15 August,’ Nikola went on. ‘That was what decided us. Two days later we assembled. We entered the town, the United Resistance of the Secret Army and the FTP. This was our liberation at last.’

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  At the time he hadn’t been so cynical. When he’d marched into Lepech Perdrissou with his guys behind him, he’d been proud of them and proud to be a Frenchman by adoption. They’d raided a youth work camp up in the mountains and taken a big haul of clothes, so they weren’t dressed like Rag, Tag and Bobtail, as they normally were. They’d sewed flashes onto their tricolour armbands: FFI, Forces Françaises de l’Interieur. They looked like an army, waiting to meet their returning brothers in the Free French. And they’d show them that they hadn’t just sat there passively under German rule for four years. They marched down the rue de Paris and formed up in the Place de la Republique, and it was a great moment. They arrived at the same time as Group Noix. In order to avoid quarrels about who should head the parade, it had been agreed that the FTP would approach from the other side, marching up the rue de Toulouse, and that they would arrive in the Place simultaneously. The gendarmes had made themselves scarce. They knew what was going to happen and didn’t want to stop it. Gargaud didn’t appear.