by Perrat, Liza
‘But you do think us Boche are stupid, yes?’ he went on. ‘We have radios too, Céleste Roussel. Of course we know you are drinking to the surrendering Italians.’
‘Well, it is good news for us,’ I said, my eyes flickering around the bar again.
‘Yes, I can imagine. You French might beat us after all. But enough joking, I wanted to give you this.’ He held out a brown paper parcel.
‘Are you crazy?’ I hissed. ‘Anybody could walk in.’ With another nervous glance about me, I took the parcel.
‘Do not worry so, I am watching the door. I was going to leave your present in the toilet. I am thinking it is a good place to leave notes for each other. That is, if you want … if you would like us to meet again?’
‘Meet again? Well … all right, why not? I’d like that, Martin. And yes, leave me a note down behind the cistern. Thank you for the present, it’s kind of you.’
I hurried into the cubicle, bolted the door, and eased the paper off. I stared, in awe, at the different-coloured paints and a variety of brushes –– round, flat and fan-shaped. There was a roll of paper too –– beautiful thick sheets, slightly rough to the touch.
I pushed my unease aside as I thought of Talia and Max’s pleasure, and ignored my rising fear of playing that blind man’s bluff; that lethal pantomime. The parcel wedged beneath my coat, I almost galloped up the hill to L’Auberge.
9
‘I don’t know how we’re going to survive this year,’ Maman said, scrutinising the orchard fruit, split and rotting on the branches, the trunks sitting in puddles of water, their exposed roots decaying.
‘What with the summer drought baking the soil rock hard, and this month’s storms turning it all into one great mush. Not to mention those extra mouths to feed.’ She raised her eyes towards the attic. ‘I thought your sister was taking them?’
‘It takes time to organise something like that, Maman.’
‘Well let’s hope it doesn’t take much longer,’ she said, holding her apron down against the breeze, which caught the scent of lavender, peppermint and thyme that clung perpetually to her. ‘Now stop dreaming, Célestine, we have our work cut out gathering what’s left of the fruit. Some at least will serve for jam or liqueur.’
‘The Wolfs would be more than happy to help,’ I said. ‘If you’d let them out of the attic in the daytime, instead of only at night to use them as slaves for the heavy housework, and getting Max to fix everything that breaks down.’
Still far from pleased about having them at L’Auberge, I think Maman had resigned herself to their presence because she hadn’t ordered me to get “that family” out of her home again. She appeared simply to regard them as a nuisance; extra bodies messing up her tidy home, strangers tarnishing her clean smells of wax and floor polish. And she never looked Max and Sabine in the eye, as they quietly went about their nocturnal tasks.
‘I have been thinking about that,’ she said. ‘It may be our only way of salvaging something from this disaster. And it would be impossible for anyone to come up here to L’Auberge without us seeing them.’ She gazed again, at her wasteland of putrid fruit as it plopped to the ground, macerating into a great sugary, insect-riddled soup. ‘Besides, it’s only right they pay their way. People can’t expect free lodgings, no matter who’s chasing them.’
‘They don’t expect anything, Maman. They’d love to help and if you’d bother to get to know them, you’d see how nice they are. Nice, normal people, and the children are so sweet.’
‘Nice and normal they may be, but nobody will be sweet, Célestine, if we’re caught. You know that, don’t you? You know the consequences?’
‘We’ll keep a special watch out,’ I said, hurrying indoors and up the stairs.
‘Céleste!’ Talia cried, as I climbed the attic ladder. ‘Come and look at Papa’s paintings.’
She grabbed my hand and pulled me from the last step, up into the attic. ‘My father is the best artist, really.’
I kissed Sabine and little Jacob, and Max pivoted around from his chair in front of the window, a brush gripped between his teeth.
‘Look,’ Talia said, pointing out the window, ‘this painting is of that side of the farm and the courtyard.’
‘Your papa certainly is a talented artist,’ I said, my eye following Max’s clump of lavender shrubs down to the bricked well, and its spray of red roses. Heavy brown strokes outlined the wooden gateway of L’Auberge with its Lyonnais-style cornice. He’d sketched the U-shaped courtyard too, the sunlight stippling the timbers of the outhouses and my father’s wood-working shed. He’d used the same deep brown for the oak door, and shuttered the windows in a rich green.
‘And those are the back steps leading up to the door,’ Talia said.
‘Oh yes, I can see that.’
‘And footprints too.’ Talia pointed out the faint depression in the middle of each stone step.
‘The steps of every person who’s lived at L’Auberge,’ I said.
‘Even ours,’ Talia said. ‘But we don’t really live here, do we Papa? We’re going home soon, aren’t we? And Maman’s going to set up a gallery for your paintings.’
Max gave her a distracted nod. As always when he was painting, he seemed to vanish into his coloured dabs and smears. Or perhaps it was the fear of his daughter’s questions that stopped him meeting her trusting eyes.
I peered over his shoulder at the beginnings of a sketch of the Monts du Lyonnais, and the Vionne River pleating the hills.
I stared at the patches of grey, where the river should be. ‘I’ve never seen a painting made from the start. That’s strange, why isn’t the river green?’
‘Look,’ Max said. ‘Look at the river.’
Through the window, I caught my mother’s glare, her arms planted on her hips. I waved at her and mouthed, ‘Coming.’
‘Is the river green?’ Max said.
‘Yes, it’s green.’
‘Look again, what colours do you really see, Céleste?’
I squinted. ‘Oh yes, I can see grey, and brown and yellow and a darkish rust. I’ve never seen the Vionne that way before.’
‘Nothing is how it looks to the naked eye,’ Max said. ‘You have to concentrate, look closer, to see how things truly are.’
Max gave me a satisfied art-teacher smile, but only his lips moved, the anguish trapped as ever in the dark eyes behind the spectacles. Beneath her joyous facade, Sabine hid her fear well from Talia and Jacob, but I was certain the children had begun to sense their father’s desperation.
I thought back to our conversation around the Dutrottier’s radio. We were hearing more and more stories of deportations, of families separated, of windowless trains and barbed-wire camps; vague, frightening whispers that raked the air like a foul wind.
‘Look, Céleste,’ Talia said. ‘I did a painting too. It’s our house.’
A great sun shone over the home the Wolfs had been forced to flee. Talia’s garden was a shower of bright flowers, with enormous birds perched on tree branches. A fluffy grey cat sat at the foot of the trunk, eyeing the birds.
‘When the war is over,’ I said, ‘you’ll be able to show me your lovely home, and Cendres.’
Max shot his wife a glance, removed his glasses, and rubbed the lenses with his shirttail. ‘Let’s pray that day comes soon.’
***
‘About time,’ my mother said, as we all assembled in the orchard. ‘I wondered whatever you were all up to.’
She nodded at Talia and Jacob. ‘For a start, this is no place for those children.’ She flicked a wrist at the swarm of wasps that had wedged themselves into the crevices in the fruit. ‘They’ll only get stung and cry. Take them into the kitchen, Célestine. Tell them not to touch anything until I get there, then they can help me store the fruit.’
I was disappointed she still wouldn’t address the Wolfs directly, but pleased, and slightly embarrassed, at that first modest attempt at empathy.
Maman distributed thick gloves and the
wooden tongs she used for plucking boiled garments from the tub, and we began gathering the half-rotten fruit, flinging it into her large jam-making saucepans.
‘I can’t be near wasps, Céleste,’ Sabine whispered. She let out feeble whimpers, and looked fearfully at my mother, who was waving her tongs about, commanding the operation like a fierce general.
‘Do you think the fruit will gather itself?’ Maman said who wasn’t afraid of any insect; of anything at all really. She heaved her shoulders. ‘Oh, never mind. Go inside and supervise your children until I get there. Then you can help with the jam.’
Sabine’s eyes glistened as she scurried away from the humming black mass.
‘My wife’s allergic to wasp stings,’ Max said. ‘She loses her breath and gets wheezy.’
‘It’s all right,’ I said, pitying him his frustration –– a man powerless to help, or even defend, his wife. ‘We’ll finish off.’
If my mother had the slightest notion of friendliness or kindness, I might have kept trying to break down those battle lines between us. But it was becoming more and more difficult to tolerate –– let alone love –– that insensitive, mocking creature.
When we’d gathered the last of the apples and pears we lugged the great saucepans into the kitchen, where Sabine and the children began placing the better fruit in trays.
‘Separate each one,’ Maman ordered, ‘so the rot won’t spread.’ Her face grim, she set about storing the rest in the cellar for making chutney, jam and pies, and her tart pear liqueur.
The fruit episode over, the Wolfs trundled back up to the attic, and Maman exchanged her stained apron for a clean one. Patrick appeared in the kitchen and began stuffing bread and slices of cured ham into his bag.
‘Going out on another coup?’ I said, following him outside, and down to the courtyard. ‘Where is it tonight?’
‘A factory,’ my brother said, the vein in his temple flickering as he strapped the bag to the back of his bicycle. ‘But I’ve told you, best stay out of it, then nobody can force information out of you … especially not that Boche officer.’ He dragged his beret over his ears and swung a leg over the bicycle.
‘He won’t get a thing out of me,’ I said, waving as he disappeared down the hill into the twilight. ‘Keep safe.’
As night fell, and I snuffed out my bedside candle, I knew I would barely sleep. How much longer would Patrick and Olivier get away with these sabotage attacks? Were the police arresting them that very moment? I kicked the sheet off my clammy body, sick with the thought of the Gestapo marching them away, handcuffed.
I got up and stared from the window at the crowd of stars burning in the navy bowl of sky. The shadow of a clutch of oak leaves mottled the moon, and the silence was absolute, as if all of Lucie had sunk into a mournful kind of sleep.
As the church bell chimed midnight, the moonlight outlined the figure of my brother crossing the courtyard. They were safe. One more storm averted, and one more success for our resistors.
Patrick’s step creaked on the middle stair and I lapsed into a restless sleep.
10
‘Célestine, Patrick!’ Maman’s shrill voice cut up the stairs, jolting me from sleep as if she’d shaken me. ‘This farm won’t run on its own.’
I groaned, stumbled from my bed, and threw the shutters open onto the cold dawn. I breathed in the heavy autumn smell of ripeness and decay –– the scent of the Harvest Festival.
The crops harvested in summer and the last pears and apples picked, we looked forward to relaxing and enjoying ourselves at the festival. But with the summer drought, the autumn storms and the miserable harvest –– not to mention the occupation –– there seemed little to celebrate.
However, it was a week since Patrick and Olivier’s Resistance coup at that factory so we all assumed the boys were safe, which was good enough reason to celebrate.
I dashed water over my face, threw on my dress, emptied my night chamber pot and joined Maman and Patrick at the kitchen table.
‘Hurry along, Célestine,’ my mother said, spreading strawberry jam on her bread –– the only fruit in abundance that year, maturing before the drought. ‘Have you forgotten the festival?’
‘Oh là là,’ I said. ‘As if I’d forget one of the few days of the year when something actually happens around here.’
‘You might stop moping about like some underpaid farmhand then,’ Maman said, pouring a dash of her eau-de-vie into the ersatz coffee that tasted like dishwater, and which we called café Pétain.
‘Underpaid? I’m not paid at all. And I don’t see why I can’t be more than a simple farmhand; do something different like … like Félicité.’ I tore off a hunk of bread, slapped on strawberry jam, and crammed it into my mouth.
‘Are you mad, girl?’ Maman shrieked, rising from the table and carrying her plate to the sink. ‘As if they’d let you into a convent.’
‘I didn’t say I wanted to be a nun. All I want is to finish school and get a proper job, so I can ––’
‘Don’t speak with your mouth full,’ she said, rattling cutlery and crockery in the sink. ‘You’ll get nowhere in life with your head in a book. Hard work and good clean soil under your nails is what pays off.’
My cheeks burned as she crossed to the oven and removed her last cakes and fruit pies, made once again from her stores beneath the herbal room. The Harvest Festival was one of the rare village events in which my mother participated, baking for days and draping mugwort over the door to ward off evil. ‘Now go and brush that crow’s nest hair,’ she said. ‘You never know who’ll be at the festival.’
‘As if it’s some cattle show and I’m the prize heifer up for sale!’
‘Be careful the Germans don’t take you at the next requisition then,’ Patrick said with a laugh. ‘They only want the best cattle.’ He ducked, avoiding my slap, and darted off outside to tend the animals.
‘Since the Wolfs are not allowed to enjoy the festival,’ I said, loading a tray with portions of tripe gratin, lamb’s foot salad, and clafoutis, moist with last season’s cherries, ‘the least I can do is take them up some tasty things.’
Maman fiddled with her chignon. ‘It’s not my fault those people are being rounded up and shipped off.’
‘What exactly, have you got against them?’ I said, steadying the tray with both hands.
‘I have nothing at all against them, Célestine. The only ones I despise are those pale-faced invaders. And I know we must all do our bit to protect them from such swine, but I’m simply not comfortable hiding that family. Besides, people don’t thank you for it. They just scarper off one day and you never hear from them again. Not a word of thanks.’
‘But the Wolfs are very grateful.’ I handed her the tray as I climbed the attic ladder. ‘Don’t they show that, with all the chores they do every night?’
‘Humph, maybe,’ she said as she climbed on a chair and passed me up the tray.
She said nothing more, but from her hesitation and the way she stayed perched on the chair, I sensed she’d have liked to go up into the attic and give her harvest food to the Wolfs herself –– a kind of peace offering perhaps. But she couldn’t, or didn’t dare, show the slightest bit of kindness; as if that would be a battle lost in our on-going conflict.
‘Your mother is so kind to share her harvest food with us,’ Sabine said. She took the tray and Max turned from his window seat, his brush held aloft.
‘Yes, please thank her for us, Céleste.’
‘Maybe you’ll be Harvest Queen this year?’ Talia said.
‘I doubt that, Talia. Whoever would vote for me?’
‘Lots of boys,’ she said. ‘Because you’re lovely.’
I kissed her solemn face. ‘And you’re such a pretty girl, I bet you’ll be Harvest Queen one day.’
***
When the Germans arrived in Lucie seven months ago, they wanted a spacious, centrally-located place with running water to use as their barracks, so they requisitioned the girl
s’ school –– Ecole de Filles Jeanne d’Arc –– located between rue Emile Zola and rue Victor Hugo. With its high stone walls, the enclosed playground was handy too, for practising their manoeuvres we were forbidden to observe.
So Ecole de Filles Jeanne d’Arc was closed to the villagers but the boys’ school, which the girls had to attend, to the indignation of many mothers, was still running, and we watched all those school children parading around the fountain in their starched clothes decorated with dried flowers, fruit and nuts. They held candles and sang the vile Vichy tune, Maréchal nous voilà!
‘Still trying to fool the Germans her name is Lemoulin,’ my mother said, narrowing her eyes at Rachel Abraham. ‘It won’t last, they’ll catch her out. They’ll catch them all out in the end.’
‘But what would the Reich want with an old woman?’ I said. ‘She’s not much use to them as a worker.’
‘No, not much use at all,’ Maman said, as we nodded greetings to other villagers passing beneath the vaulted entrance of Saint Antoine’s church. ‘Unlike your father. Now hurry along, the service is about to start. Even though it is all a lot of rot if you ask me.’
Religion was about the one subject on which my mother and I agreed, and we only attended church at Christmas, Easter and the Harvest Festival. But as much as Mass bored me, once inside Saint Antoine’s I was always in awe of the centuries-old granite monument.
We stood in the pews bathed in the autumn sun in soft sections of reds, greens and yellows reflected from the windows. I felt the power of the bronze organ pipes as Père Emmanuel’s voice spilled over the altar draped in pretty pinks and golds, and down across the flagstones.
‘This year has been difficult for all of us,’ the priest said. ‘There may be amongst you those who bear resentment against God. That He, supposedly omnipotent, can let such things as this war and the occupation happen. But it is not for us to question God, only to accept with patience, remembering the greater suffering of His Son.’ He rapped a fist in the air. ‘If you can think of your grief as an extension of that greater grief, then God will surely give you strength. Because our strength and our faith have served us well. Continue as such and we will emerge victorious!’
