by Perrat, Liza
It seemed the longest night of my life –– the torturous waiting, the not knowing. Were Patrick and Olivier cold, and hungry, in whatever prison they were being held? I thought of Maman too, even if she was not the kind of person who would want anyone fretting for her. Marinette Roussel believed she could hold her own in the world; she had no need of others.
I kept leaping from the chair and crossing to the window at the slightest noise –– an owl hooting into the blackness, the bray of a donkey across the fields, the hollow bark of a dog.
I eventually heard Dr. Laforge’s Traction puttering up the hill, and flew to the door.
‘Are they all right?’ I said, beckoning them inside. ‘Did you get there safely?’
‘A German patrol stopped us,’ Dr. Laforge said, as they followed me into the kitchen. ‘Just before we reached the convent. They wanted to search the car.’
‘Oh no! So did they?’
‘The doc told them it was urgent,’ Père Emmanuel said. ‘Said one of the children was seriously ill, and needed a hospital. They let us go.’
I sank into a chair. ‘That was lucky.’
‘Luck is what it comes down to these days,’ the doctor said. ‘Anyway, the family should be safe at the convent, for now at least. You’ve cleared out the attic, Céleste?’
‘Of course,’ I said, as I crossed to the stove and warmed the pot of onion soup.
‘You’re not eating with us?’ Père Emmanuel said as I placed two bowls of soup on the table.
I shook my head. ‘The thought of food makes me feel ill. I can’t eat until I know Patrick and Olivier are eating supper too. Maman, even.’
‘Unfortunately we can’t know that tonight,’ the priest said, steam spiralling from the gruyère cheese melting into the thick soup. ‘But you need to keep strong if you’re to help them.’
‘You did well tonight, Céleste,’ Dr. Laforge said. ‘But this is only the beginning; our work is far from done.’
I met the doctor’s eyes. ‘I’m ready to do whatever it takes … I know I’m capable.’
13
I knew talk of the arrests would start soon and it did –– the very next day. Anxious to get to the village to see if Père Emmanuel had any news, I rushed through my jobs. The exhaustion of a sleepless night only made things worse, and my trembling hands slopped water from the pails, spilled goat’s milk and scattered the hens’ feed erratically.
The morning farm chores done, I jumped on the bicycle, sped down the hill and veered off to Olivier’s uncle’s farm.
Justin and Gervais were waving small sticks about, charging through the muddle of toys, clothes and dust –– the household mess that seemed to overwhelm their widowed father.
‘Shoot the Boche!’ Justin cried.
‘Kill the bastards!’ his twin yelled. ‘Bang, bang. All dead.’
‘Language, Gervais,’ Uncle Claude said with a half-hearted waggle of his finger. ‘And stop saying “Boche”, Justin. We’ll all be thrown in prison.’
‘The nasty Germans took Olivier,’ little Anne-Sophie said.
Claude passed a sun-crimped hand across his face and tapped his pipe against the ashtray. ‘I’m out of my mind with worry, Céleste. How would I tell Olivier’s parents if anything happened to him? Have you any idea where they’re being held?’
‘Not yet. But I’ve been talking to … to some people who might be able to find out where they are, and what’s happening with them. I’ll come and tell you the minute I know anything.’
The farmer’s brow furrowed into deep clefts. ‘I don’t know how I’m supposed to run this farm without my nephew.’ He shook his head. ‘Sorry, I forgot you’re alone too now, up at L’Auberge. Besides, there’s not a lot left to run here, with the Boche requisitioning everything.’
‘Don’t say “Boche”, Papa,’ Justin said, still pointing his stick at his father. ‘Or we’ll all be thrown in prison.’
With a wave to Anne-Sophie and Paulette, I left the farm and pedalled back along the lane, the air hanging low and damp around tree trunks strangled with ivy.
The familiar aromas of la place de l’Eglise –– fresh bread from Yvon and Ginette Monbeau’s bakery, pungent horse manure and newly-carved wood –– comforted my jangled nerves a little. A delivery boy cycled across the square trilling his bell, and through the chemist’s window I glimpsed Simon Laforge serving customers. Evelyne Perrault was washing down the Au Cochon Tué terrace, and the usual foursome –– the grandfathers of André and Miette, Monsieur Thimmonier and Robert Perrault senior –– studied their playing cards, Gauloises clamped between their lips. Catastrophe may have struck my family but village life was carrying on as usual.
The German soldiers were about too, bored as ever, with never much to do throughout their days besides practising manoeuvres. As they marched from shop to shop, their money jingling in their pockets, the villagers continued to snigger and roll their eyes behind their rigid backs. I kept a stealthy eye out for Martin Diehl, but there was no sign of him.
Shopping baskets cradled over their arms, Miette and Ghislaine were standing with Denise Grosjean beside the fountain, beneath the lime trees. The girls hurried over as I leapt off the bicycle.
‘Merde, merde!’ I shrieked, stumbling over a pedal as I propped the bicycle against the church wall.
‘Oh là là,’ Denise chided. ‘Clumsy Céleste.’
‘Did you hurt yourself?’ Miette bent over and inspected my knee.
‘It’s only a graze,’ I said, rubbing it. ‘I can’t seem to concentrate, or think properly.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ Ghislaine said. ‘Did you know they took my brother too? And André?’
‘I did try to warn you all the Gestapo knew who blew up that factory,’ Denise said, her lips flattening into a smug line.
I itched to slap the smile from her face, but I’d known Denise Grosjean long enough not to let her get to me, so I bunched my hand into a fist. ‘You don’t have to sound so pleased about it.’
‘Do you have any idea where they’ve taken them?’ Ghislaine said.
‘Not yet, but I hope to know soon.’
‘Maman told me they took your mother too?’ Miette said, shifting her basket to the other arm.
‘Everybody knows what she’s been doing for years up at L’Auberge,’ Denise went on. ‘It’s incredible she got away with it this long. I imagine you’re out of your mind worrying they’ll guillotine her, like that other abortionist woman?’
I inhaled sharply, picturing my mother’s head beneath the razor-edged, unflinching blade. ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,’ I said, only too aware it would, most likely, come to that.
‘Robert Perrault thinks Gaspard Bénédict is the traitor,’ Ghislaine said. ‘They’re all talking about it at Au Cochon Tué.’
‘Apparently the Gestapo were shooting at him as he ran off,’ Miette said. ‘And everyone knows those monsters never miss their target. Nobody can understand how he escaped.’
‘Robert Perrault says it was as if they just let Gaspard run off,’ Ghislaine said. ‘So that points to him being the traitor.’
‘But the Germans took his father with mine,’ I said. ‘Surely Gaspard would never collaborate with them.’
‘Who knows why people do what they do?’ Miette said. ‘You just don’t know who to trust.’
‘I’d love to stay gossiping, girls,’ Denise said. ‘But I’m needed at the post office.’
‘I didn’t want to say anything in front of her,’ Miette said, nodding at Denise as she disappeared into the post office. ‘But what of the family from the old witch’s hut? The Gestapo didn’t find them?’
‘No, thank God,’ I said. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t be here talking about it. But we’ve moved them out of the attic to a safer place.’
‘Where?’ Ghislaine said.
I shook my head. ‘It’s safer if nobody knows.’
‘They seem such a lovely family,’ Miette said. ‘They don’t deserve to have t
o live like that.’
‘Nobody should have to live like that,’ I said.
‘I just wish this war would end,’ Miette said, rubbing her arms and stamping her feet against the chill. ‘And people like the Wolfs could be free again.’
‘And our brothers and fiancés would be released.’ Ghislaine threw her arms in the air and strode back towards the butcher’s. ‘And the Boche would take their ugly arses off back to Germany and leave us in peace.’
Miette’s young sisters, Amandine and Séverine, skipped towards us, and I left my friend and headed into Au Cochon Tué. The toilet door bolted, I knelt down and felt behind the cistern, my fingers folding over a scrap of paper.
I wait to see you again. A week seems like eternity. M
The paper shook in my hands as I shredded it, his words ringing so honestly I could almost believe them. I flushed away the scraps, left Au Cochon Tué and crossed over to Saint Antoine’s.
Several people were kneeling in the pews, and Père Emmanuel was busy taking confession so I went back out onto the square and across to Dr. Laforge’s rooms.
As I passed the butcher’s shop, I poked my head around the door, inhaling the tang of fresh blood that always made me shiver. Monsieur Dutrottier looked to be carving up an entire cow.
He glanced up. ‘Any news, Céleste?’
I shook my head. ‘Nothing yet.’
‘I’d like to get my hands on that traitor,’ the butcher said, raising his great carving knife above his head.
As he brought his blade down in sharp bursts, slicing through flesh, fat and bone, I hurried away from the shop, and from a high windowsill, a raven flapped into the cold sky from where thin clouds hung like scattered rumours.
***
I nodded to the other people in the waiting room and perched my basket on my lap, like many of the doctor’s patients.
‘My mother came down with the pneumonia last month,’ a fat housewife was saying to a thin one. ‘All bunged up she was, with the congestion. We thought it was the end.’ She motioned towards the consulting room. ‘The good doc came across, took one look at Maman and made an abscess come, right here.’ She pointed to a spot below her left breast.
‘Oh, why would he do that?’ the thin woman said.
‘He told us an abscess would divert the poison, and the worse it got, the better Maman would get. We had to phone him every day. Then one evening he came and pierced it. All the pus oozed out, and the infection with it. He saved her life.’
‘I don’t know what we’d do without him,’ the thin woman said.
‘And when I think how reluctant people were when he took over his father’s practice,’ the fat woman said. ‘When old doc Pierre finally succumbed to his Great War injuries. Went through years of agony, he did.’
Their incessant chatter was making me more agitated and I resisted tapping my foot.
The thin housewife nodded. ‘It’s no wonder young Etienne despises the Germans so.’
‘Oh, I know. You’d have thought we’d seen the back of those Boche after the last time, but no, here they are again, walking all over us, telling us how to live our lives.’
‘Well our doc is a right good catch, if you ask me,’ the other one said. ‘With those charming looks and bedside manner. So dedicated, working every day, and all those house calls. I don’t understand why some woman hasn’t nabbed him.’
‘Too busy looking after you lot,’ an old man said, with a toothless grin.
Dr. Laforge came out of his rooms, his eyes widening for an instant when he saw me. ‘Come through, Céleste.’
‘But …’ one of the housewives started. ‘The Roussel girl came in after us.’
The doctor held a hand up. ‘This will only be a brief consultation.’
He closed the door and sat behind his grand mahogany desk. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t know anything about your brother and the others yet.’
‘I wondered if you could drive me to the prison to see my mother.’ That inexplicable urge to see Maman startled and vaguely annoyed me.
‘As much as I’d like to,’ he said, ‘it’s not a good idea. As you know, I’m not connected with them or with any group. If I’m seen with you at the prison somebody might get suspicious. You can understand I’m no help to them or anyone else if I too am behind bars?’
‘I understand,’ I said. ‘Never mind, I’ll take the train into Lyon.’
‘It would be safer,’ Dr. Laforge said. ‘But of course, I’ll help any other way I can, Céleste. Now I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, but you must know I wasn’t keen on including you in our work. You’re young ––’
I fought to curb the flaring anger. ‘As I told Père Emmanuel, I’ve just turned twenty, Dr. Laforge, a year older than Patrick and all his friends. But nobody questions their … their youth. Is that because they’re males? Stronger –– more trustworthy somehow –– than women?’
‘You do have a point,’ the doctor said. ‘But you’ve always had a habit of talking before you think. Don’t get me wrong, Céleste, you’re a good person, with a kind heart. You took the Wolf family in, cared for them. For that I admire you, but you understand we have to be able to count on your discretion. Lives depend on it.’
‘Of course I understand, you can count on me.’
The doctor nodded. ‘Right, well I don’t know if Père Emmanuel told you, but there’ll be no more meetings at L’Auberge, for obvious reasons. We’re moving everything to Au Cochon Tué. Now, about the boys,’ he said, his tone softening. ‘I don’t mean to frighten you but I don’t want you to get your hopes up.’
I frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘The authorities often don’t bother to torture resistors for information these days, Céleste, they just …’
The blood thundered through my head and for a moment I couldn’t speak.
‘I know. You can say it. They just shoot them on the spot.’
Dr. Laforge nodded sharply. ‘Even more so nowadays with the militia roaming about.’
‘Militia?’
‘A French version of the SS,’ he said. ‘Set up by Vichy –– with the Germans’ help naturally –– to combat democracy, Jewish “leprosy” and especially to fight the Resistance. But they can be far more dangerous than the Gestapo because they speak our language; they know the towns, people and informers. Summary executions and assassinations are their speciality.’
My heart went cold, and lumpy as clay. ‘My God, you think they’re already dead?’
‘I don’t know, really I don’t, Céleste. What I’m saying is, it could take a long time to check every prison in Lyon. I don’t want to alarm you, but it might be easier to check the mortuary first.’
The shock was like icy water hurled in my face and, with shaking fingers, I grappled for my angel pendant, working it between my thumb and forefinger.
‘Go to the mortuary? Me? Can a person do that; just walk in and ask if a relative is there?’
‘It’s not quite so straightforward,’ Dr. Laforge said, ‘but with some … some simple persuasion, I’m sure you could find out what you need to know.’
‘Patrick and Olivier aren’t dead,’ I said. ‘They cannot be dead.’
***
It didn’t take the villagers long to find, and punish, the traitor. It happened the following day, in a red-gold dawn, the air clean and crisp and heady as champagne. I thought it ironic such ugliness could take place on one of autumn’s loveliest days.
‘Where did they do it?’ Miette asked Denise, as we stood together in the post-office line.
Denise shrugged as she handed Miette the Dubois family’s letters. ‘Nobody seems to know where it happened,’ she said. ‘All I was told is that when Gaspard finally confessed to collaborating with the Boche they whipped him until he swelled to one great purple mass. They say you couldn’t recognise him in the end.’
‘Do you know who did it?’ Miette said.
Denise shook her head, and it seemed nobody knew
for certain who’d actually wielded the horsewhip that beat Gaspard Bénédict.
‘Is he dead?’ I said.
‘No, but close to it,’ Denise said. ‘In a coma, at the hospital. He could end up a légume. You know, his brain all gaga.’
She slapped a letter onto the counter. ‘Might as well be dead if you ask me.’
14
I felt Maman’s absence as an odd quietness, rather than the great void Patrick and Olivier left –– the emptiness where their teasing grins, their chatter and their working day smells of earth, horses and hay had been.
The Gestapo had taken them only a few days ago but already L’Auberge felt hollow and abandoned. The rooms seemed bigger, the silence resonating from the stone walls. Someone –– perhaps the Germans –– had left a window cracked open in Maman’s herbal room, and a draught blew dirt and dead leaves across the floorboards.
Apart from the animals I was by myself, and yet I did not feel entirely alone. As I sat at the kitchen table with my bowl of café Pétain, I felt a grazing across my nape; something like a hand, and fingers tapping on my shoulder.
I gripped my angel necklace and spun around. Nobody. Nothing. The havoc in my mind was distorting my thoughts. I’d always scoffed at the notion of ghosts, spirits, or whatever my forebears had believed lurked in the crannies of the ancient L’Auberge stones, but I couldn’t help feeling a quiet presence hovering in the firelight shadows.
My hands shook as I raised the bowl to my lips. They would surely slice my mother’s head off, as they’d done to that other abortionist, Marie-Louise Giraud. And what of Patrick and Olivier? The ersatz coffee tasted sourer than ever.
But Dr. Laforge had told me where to go to learn of the boys’ fate, so I grabbed my coat, gloves and my tapestry bag, and hurried outside across the cobbled courtyard.
In the softer light of the mist-clad sky, the farmhouse stones looked a pinkish ochre colour. An unhinged shutter knocked against the wall rhythmically, like a frightened heartbeat, and the iron gate that led around to the back rasped open and shut in the breeze. I saw I’d left a small window open too, airing out the attic after the Wolfs had gone –– a staring eye in a stony face, tracking my every step as I set off down the hill for the train station.
