Wolfsangel

by Perrat, Liza

  My mother was also Lucie’s reputed faiseuse d’anges –– an angel-maker –– her methods far superior to those common abortionists whose dirty curtain rails, knitting needles and mustard baths caused feverish sicknesses; deaths even.

  ‘You can get up now,’ Maman said as she withdrew the tubing from inside the girl.

  I slunk away from the door, down the stairs and outside to the well. I drew water with the hand pump, inhaling the perfume from the knot of rose bushes beside the great brick well.

  When I returned with my full bucket, the girl was standing in the kitchen clutching her stomach. Her face was the colour of week-old snow.

  She looked away from me, at the wide stone hearth that housed the stove; at Maman’s gleaming pots, pans and utensils hanging from racks on the whitewashed walls. Her eyes roved across the ornaments on the mantelpiece as if a pottery dish containing a scattering of dried mugwort, a single cufflink and a broken ornamental comb were the most interesting things in the world.

  The girl had the same embarrassed, fearful look as all of them. Poor thing, I itched to say, to get yourself in that bind. But my mother had long ago forbidden me to speak to her customers.

  I took onions, carrots and potatoes from the cool room and started chopping them for supper. My knife chack-chacked against the chopping board in rhythm with the tock-tock of the grandfather clock –– the Rubie clock my grandmother had called it, because of its dark red fruitwood stain and because it came from an ancestor named Rubie, a celebrated midwife from the times of Emperor Napoléon.

  I could hear Maman fussing about in her herbal room –– her sanctuary that was forbidden to us. But my mother’s rules had never stopped me as a young girl, and when she was out, or busy in the orchard, I would sneak into the narrow room with its casement windows that let in so much light and poke about at the drying frames netted with gauze, and the hooks above the small fireplace for heat-drying. I loved its smell, like something in the woods hidden under rotting leaves. With tentative fingers I would touch each neatly-labelled bottle, basin and earthenware jar lining the floor-to-ceiling shelves, and feel that chilling, though not unpleasant, sensation amidst the spicy scents. I imagined I was standing in the shadows of all the healer-women who’d inhabited L’Auberge, with their own herbal medicines. The lair of ancient witches.

  ‘Mix this with warm water and drink it,’ Maman said, pressing a sachet of dried flowers into the girl’s palm. My mother had never taken me with her to gather medicinal stocks, or explained how she used them, but I had picked up a few things over the years, like how she used sage, mugwort or rue to brew angel-tea.

  ‘Go now,’ she said to the girl. ‘It will all happen in a few hours.’

  With another blush the girl glanced at me again. I gave her a brief nod as she scurried along the hallway, and from the window I watched her scuttle across the courtyard like a frightened rabbit.

  ‘You’re still doing that?’ I said, heating the pot of water on the stove. ‘Even after they guillotined the abortionist woman only last month?’

  Maman didn’t answer as she untied her apron and took a clean one from the hook behind the door.

  ‘And not that I care a flip what Marshal Pétain says,’ I went on. ‘About there being too few children; that the women of France have neglected their duty by not having enough babies, but you do realise Vichy have strengthened their abortion laws?’

  ‘You know it’s simply a question of survival,’ Maman said –– the same argument she always came back with. ‘Even more so since the German pigs took your father.’ She glared at me as if it were my fault. ‘How else do you suggest I run the farm, buy food for us and the animals? Besides, of course the girls will keep their mouths shut.’

  That was true enough. My mother protected her customers’ identity while they in turn kept quiet about her violating Marshal Pétain’s natal laws, a defiance punishable by death. I also sensed that behind the stony mask she believed, as I did, she was providing an essential service –– one she’d learned, like the herbal lore, from her lineage of angel-makers and healer-women.

  Patrick kept his nose right out of my mother’s illegal business, shrugging it off as women’s affairs. But I suspected it was Maman’s angel-making that convinced Félicité to take the veil. As if that way she could atone for my mother’s sins. Or perhaps it was simply a handy excuse to get away from the farm and banish the ungodly act from her sight.

  ‘What are you gawping at, Célestine?’ she said, swiping at wisps of hair.

  ‘Nothing.’ I lay the knife on the chopping board and rocked my angel pendant back and forth along its leather thread. ‘I want to get my Baccalauréat and study at university in Lyon.’

  I’d said that to her so many times I’d have thought she’d be fed up, and relent, but still she looked at me as if I’d said I wanted to move to Bordeaux.

  ‘You, study at university?’ She dismissed me with a flick of her wrist, her lips curving into a mean little smile. ‘Do you think this farm can run on its own? Besides, you’re nineteen. If you’ve got any sense you’ll find a good Lucie farmer to marry, have a family and settle down. Children and a family would curb that hot-head temper; would whip the rebel spirit out of you.’

  ‘Live on the farm. Be a wife. Have babies,’ I said, sliding the vegetables into the boiling water. ‘That’s all you think I’m good for.’ In my agitation, a clutch of carrots fell to the floor.

  ‘You’re just like Marshal Pétain, wanting to keep women in the kitchen with dozens of children hanging off their skirts. It’s people like you who keep women inferior to men,’ I said, crouching to gather up the vegetables.

  My mother almost pushed me aside as she snatched the carrots and started rinsing them. ‘I don’t know where you’ve picked up these ideas. Why can’t you be like your brother, content to stay put in Lucie?’ She slid the washed carrots into the saucepan.

  ‘Of course Patrick doesn’t want to get away,’ I said. ‘He wants nothing beyond being a carpenter in Lucie the rest of his life. Besides, he doesn’t have to put up with your spite.’

  ‘Spite? Don’t be ridiculous, girl.’

  People always remarked that I was like my mother, the only one to inherit the pale, almost transparent skin, the cinnamon-coloured hair and blunt manner. Like her, I was difficult and defiant, but as I grew older I sensed, more and more, those were things Maman could understand. She never knew what to make of the likeable Patrick or the God-fearing Félicité, so she left my siblings alone.

  Now, as the war dragged on and my father had volunteered his carpentry skills for the Reich, Maman, while bearing her separation like the dutiful Frenchwoman, retreated further and further from us. She simply vented her inexplicable anger on the easiest target –– the person she knew like she knew herself.

  ‘The city is not the exciting, adventurous place you imagine,’ she said, slapping plates onto the table.

  ‘Well that’s something I want to find out for myself, Maman.’

  8

  I hurried across la place de L’Eglise, my shopping basket swinging from my arm. I waved to Miette’s father in his carpentry shopfront, to the greengrocer and to old Monsieur Thimmonier lounging against the door of his wood-carving shop.

  I saw they’d pasted more posters on the church wall. One was of a smiling German soldier handing out sandwiches to French children gathered around him. The caption underneath read:

  Abandoned citizens, trust in the soldiers of the Third Reich!

  Another poster used drawings to illustrate world domination by the English and the tyranny of the Jews, but most of them still began with the word Verboten.

  Forbidden to be out between nine o’clock in the evening and five o’clock in the morning. Forbidden to keep firearms, forbidden to aid, abet or shelter escaped prisoners, or citizens of countries that are enemies of Germany. Forbidden to listen to the BBC.

  Along the bottom of each poster, the warning, in black lettering, was underlined twice: O
N PAIN OF DEATH.

  I slipped into the butcher’s shop, where Ghislaine and her father were serving their last customers.

  The butcher gave me his usual friendly nod and I followed Ghislaine from the shop, out the back to where she lived with her father and Marc.

  Patrick, Olivier and the other boys were already bunched around the radio with Miette. Nobody spoke as Marc fiddled with the wireless knobs, an exasperating hum adding to the usual jamming efforts of Vichy and the Germans –– piercing sounds like the screeching of crickets.

  We listened to the Germans’ false information such as claims they’d landed in England, and waited for the BBC’s Radio London, operated by General de Gaulle’s Free French Forces, to expose the truth –– the truth our occupiers tried to conceal.

  ‘Yesterday, September 8, 1943, Italy surrendered and now joins the war on Germany!’ the French speaker finally announced. ‘General Eisenhower, commander in chief of Allied forces in the Mediterranean, says Italy has signed an unconditional armistice with the Allies; that all Italians who now help eject the German aggressor from Italian soil will have the assistance and support of the United Nations.’

  ‘Putain!’ Patrick said, jumping to his feet.

  Marc punched a fist into the air. ‘This calls for celebration.’

  ‘The American armies are pouring across the Atlantic –– men, cannon and tanks,’ the speaker went on. ‘Victory is certain. Absolutely certain.’

  We all looked at each other. Living, as we were, in continual fear of arrest for a simple remark, a violation of curfew or a minor black market transaction, such news brightened our spirits and filled our hearts with hope.

  ‘We’ll drive the filthy Boche out of our country yet,’ André said.

  ‘Don’t be so sure,’ Patrick said. ‘The war is far from won, or over.’

  Olivier strode across to the window, stretching his legs. ‘The war might be looking up for us, but it’s looking worse for them.’ He nodded down to the square where Madame Abraham was closing her antiques shop. ‘They’re carting every last one of them off in cattle trains.’

  ‘I’ve heard they drag people from their homes at any time of day or night,’ Ghislaine said.

  ‘And children get home from school to find their parents have disappeared,’ Miette said. ‘Mothers come back from shopping to sealed homes.’

  I thought of the Wolfs and how, despite the occupation, we could roam about in relative freedom, celebrating such small victories, while they were forced to stay hidden in a cramped attic.

  ‘Those poor people,’ I said. ‘It’s so unfair.’

  ‘But Madame Abraham should be safe, now she’s Madame Lemoulin,’ Miette said.

  ‘Until somebody tells the Boche,’ Gaspard said. ‘Then they’ll ship her off too.’

  Ghislaine frowned. ‘But where exactly do they take them?’

  ‘To somewhere in Poland,’ André said.

  ‘Why would they take them to Poland?’ I said.

  ‘To work for the Reich in labour camps,’ Olivier said. ‘Like your father and Gaspard’s. The Nazis built thousands of these work camps for their regime.’

  ‘Poland’s supposed to be a very Catholic country,’ Miette said. ‘So they should treat the Jews well there.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Marc said with a twist of his lip. ‘Yet isn’t France, the eldest daughter of the Church, behaving very badly towards them these days?’

  ‘Whatever rubbish the Germans and Vichy feed us on that thing,’ Patrick said, gesturing at the radio. ‘I say it’s all one big lie.’

  ***

  The setting sun met the Monts du Lyonnais in a blaze of gold, and it seemed the whole of Lucie was out on la place de l’Eglise.

  We sat on the terrace of Au Cochon Tué, toasting our victory with Robert Perrault’s wine, beer and orangeade.

  ‘They must be pleased victory’s in sight,’ Miette said, nodding at Yvon and Ginette Monbeau as they came across, the baker in a red shirt and blue trousers, his wife wearing a flashy skirt in stripes of red, white and blue. ‘The sooner this war’s over, the sooner they get to see their sons again.’

  ‘Robert and Evelyne Perrault too,’ Marc said. ‘The Boche are holding three of their sons prisoner.’

  ‘That’s if the bastard Nazis don’t kill them all first,’ Patrick said.

  The old men were playing cards at their usual table, Monsieur Thimmonier’s scruffy dog slumped beside his master, his wagging tail painted in slashes of red, white and blue.

  Père Emmanuel appeared from Saint Antoine’s, dodging the small children charging up and down the church steps mimicking the excitement of the adults.

  Olivier’s cousins goose-stepped around, Uncle Claude scolding his boys half-heartedly. Since the arrival of the Germans, with boots to touch and marching to imitate, Justin, Gervais and their friends were no longer bored. Finally they had someone who talked to them; people who gave them sweets.

  Justin and Gervais’ younger sisters, Paulette and Anne-Sophie, were jumping rope with Miette’s little sisters, while another group squealed and swung from the old gallows posts.

  ‘Come and celebrate, Docteur,’ Gaspard called to Dr. Laforge, who was striding from his surgery clutching his black bag. ‘Italy’s surrendered!’

  The doctor lifted his arm in a wave. ‘One more home visit and I’ll be joining you.’

  ‘You’d think our doc would be the first one celebrating,’ André said.

  I raised my eyebrows. ‘Oh?’

  ‘He despises the Germans more than anyone,’ Olivier said. ‘Uncle Claude told me his father –– old Dr. Pierre Laforge –– died a painful death from his Great War injuries. He said the soldiers brutalised his mother too.’

  To my usual irritation, Denise Grosjean was batting her eyelids at every word Olivier uttered.

  ‘Bastard Boche,’ Ghislaine said, and swallowed a mouthful of wine.

  ‘Shush.’ I nodded at the doctor’s brother, Simon Laforge and his wife and children, heading across from the chemist.

  ‘Anyone fancy a game?’ Yvon Monbeau said, swinging his bag of pétanque balls.

  Marc, Gaspard, Ghislaine, Miette and the others wandered off with him to play in the shade of the lime trees, André limping along behind.

  ‘Come on Olivier,’ Denise said, tugging at his arm.

  He waved her away. ‘You go, I’ll join you soon.’

  Her lips pursed in a pout, Denise stomped off towards the lime trees.

  I was so busy smirking at Denise, I didn’t notice Martin Diehl at first, and those same two –– Karl Gottlob and Fritz Frankenheimer –– sitting with the cluster of Germans at a fringe table, their belts strewn across the top.

  ‘Idiot pigs,’ Patrick said. ‘Sitting here drinking with the rest of us, and no clue we’re celebrating their downfall.’

  Fritz and Karl ogled me with seedy looks that made me squirm in my seat. Martin smiled as he ground his cigarette end into the cobbles, red sparks striking against the dull stone.

  ‘You’re staring at that officer again,’ Olivier said.

  I jumped, startled at the sting of his words. ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘You’ll never get to join our group,’ Patrick said, ‘if you go around grinning at the Boche. And don’t forget, it was his lot who took our father away.’

  ‘It wasn’t him personally, Patrick.’ I lowered my voice to a murmur. ‘Besides, I have a reason to stare at him. I have a job … a mission,’ I said, and told them of Félicité’s plan.

  ‘What?’ Patrick said, his dark eyes wide. ‘I can’t believe Félicité would suggest that.’

  Olivier shook his head. ‘Bad idea, too dangerous. You know what happens to girls ––’

  ‘I also know how to be discreet,’ I said.

  ‘You, discreet?’

  ‘Wait,’ Patrick said. ‘It might just work, and help us. But for God’s sake, be careful. And don’t let that thug get too close.’

  The boys drained their glasses and
sauntered over to join the pétanque game, Olivier turning back to me, and shaking his head.

  I kept my gaze away from the Germans as I sat alone, listening to the card-playing men shouting encouragement as the metal balls rolled through the dust and clanged against each other. His tail flapping like a patriotic flag, Monsieur Thimmonier’s dog kept trying to clamp his jaws around one of the balls, the pétanque players shooing him away.

  I ambled into the empty bar, picked up the telephone and called the convent.

  ‘He’s here,’ I said, when Félicité came on the line. ‘At Au Cochon Tué, with just about everybody in Lucie. I caught him staring at me again.’

  ‘You’re certain you want to do this?’ I sensed the doubt in my sister’s soft voice. ‘If you think it’s too difficult, too risky, that’s all right, I understand.’

  ‘Olivier thinks it’s a dangerous charade and I’ll never pull it off, but I want the Boche gone as much as everybody else, and this seems the only chance to do my bit.’

  ‘That’s good then, Céleste, let me know how it goes.’

  I hung up and turned to head for the toilet, but the tall figure of Martin Diehl blocked my path. There was still nobody inside Au Cochon Tué but I felt my tremor as he bent close, fearing he might try to kiss me again, right there, where anybody could walk in and catch me.

  ‘You telephone to a secret admirer?’ he said, with a sly, collaborative kind of look.

  ‘No … no, I haven’t got an admirer. I was calling my … a family member. We don’t have a telephone; don’t even have electricity, up at L’Auberge.’

  He nodded towards the villagers outside, his face so close I felt his breath on my earlobe, his familiar scent of laundered cloth and something like fresh apples flaring my nostrils.

  ‘Such a party, you would think the French had won the war, n’est-ce pas? Your brother and his friends are most happy.’

  ‘Everybody is pleased,’ I said. ‘Not only my brother and his friends.’