by Perrat, Liza
***
I got off the train at St. Jean in the Renaissance district of Lyon and walked across the bridge spanning the Saône River. The relentless north wind tugged at the water, pleating the surface into small, spiked crests.
I hadn’t been into the city for almost a year, and the Germans’ presence came as a shock. With what we grew, sold or bartered in the countryside we hadn’t felt the brunt of the food shortages too much, but the housewives of Lyon stood in long lines outside shops. The women all had the same tired, dreary look, waiting with their ration cards for butter, milk and meat that might well have run out by the time they reached the front of the queue.
I scanned the giant wall posters portraying the Germans inviting the French –– their compatriots! –– to work and fight for Hitler, for a better Europe, and against Bolshevism and the common enemy. I rubbed the goosebumps from my arms at the image of a contented woman cradling her child, below the slogan: Finis les mauvais jours! Papa gagne de l’argent en Allemagne.
I shook my head in disbelief, the rage rising. We’d had barely a letter, and not a single franc, from Papa. I could not believe his going to work in Germany had signalled the end of our bad days.
A jeep filled with troops in navy coats and wide berets zoomed past. They must be the miliciens Dr. Laforge spoke about. I shivered in their noisy wake, and recoiled from a shop sign that was even more aggressive for its bold capitals: NO DOGS OR JEWS ALLOWED.
Once on la place Antonin-Poncet, I followed Dr. Laforge’s instructions and took the tramway over Lyon’s other river, the Rhône, via the Guillotière bridge.
I got off at Monplaisir station and walked the rest of the way to the mortuary, bent over in my threadbare coat against the icy wind. It seemed I’d been moaning only yesterday about my humdrum farm life, where nothing happened from one day to the next. How quickly I was making up for that, and with a pang I wished to have those uneventful days back.
It wasn’t difficult to find the mortuary, in one of the buildings of the Medical Faculty near Grange-Blanche Hospital. I noticed it was also conveniently placed near the dreaded Montluc Prison.
I hesitated in the cool mist before I rang the bell and walked inside.
‘Mademoiselle?’ a man wearing a worn brown suit and a beret said. ‘Can I help you?’
‘Excusez-moi, monsieur, I’d like to know if you have any bodies that haven’t been identified.’
‘Plenty of those these days,’ the mortuary attendant said. ‘Looking for someone in particular?’
‘Two men … well four. All from eighteen to twenty years old. My brother and his friend have dark hair and eyes … coal-black, actually. And both of them have scars on their knees. They fell out of the same tree.’ A short, nervous laugh escaped my lips and I felt the heat of my blush. ‘But I suppose you don’t want to hear about … The other two have lighter, sort of mouse-brown hair. Maybe you could let me see the unidentified bodies?’
‘Sorry, mademoiselle, that’s forbidden without a police officer present.’
I drew the parcel of pâté and jam from my bag and placed it on the attendant’s desk. ‘Please, it’s very important. I have to find out if they’re … I need to know if they’re still alive.’
‘Well,’ he said, sliding the parcel into the top drawer. ‘Perhaps I could make an exception, just this once.’
The attendant led me down a set of stairs, our footsteps resounding eerily into the white silence. My armpits prickled with sweat and my stomach flipped like a crepe on the skillet. I couldn’t stop wringing my hands as I pictured the boys lying stiff on a slab, their bodies pocked with bullet holes.
We reached a room where large metal squares lined the walls halfway up to the ceiling. Each one had a handle.
‘This is only the first of many with that description,’ the attendant said, pulling on a handle, which I saw was the front end of a long box.
I shook, staring at the outline of the body under the cloth; at the point of the nose, where breath should be making the white sheet rise and fall. But in the stillness of death nothing moved. A tag attached to the big toe poked out from the end of the sheet. There was no name, only a number, a date and a time. An anonymous statistic. My legs threatened to fold beneath me and I couldn’t stop myself gripping the attendant’s arm.
‘Ready?’ he said, holding the edge of the sheet.
I nodded. He folded the sheet back.
I held my breath as I stared at the pale, navy-tinged face of the corpse, studying each feature in turn –– the high smooth forehead, the vacant eyes, the square jawline.
No words came. I shook my head and exhaled a long breath.
He showed me several more bodies of dark-haired young men. Some were whole, others in pieces. One was almost faceless, grinning garishly from a broken jaw; another seemed to roll his dead eyes at me in a macabre welcome.
‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘I don’t know any of them, thank God. Oh, thank God.’
‘We get fresh ones in every day,’ the attendant said. ‘But if you come back, remember afternoons are a good time. The police are often here in the mornings. In the afternoons they do the interments; bury them at the Guillotière cemetery. And if you still have your brother and his friends’ tobacco cards, I could use their rations.’
I nodded, whispered a hurried thank you and rushed back out onto the street. I couldn’t banish the images from my mind –– those lifeless bodies of sons, brothers and fathers. I saw the mothers, the sisters, whole families heartbroken. I did not know a single one of them, but I felt bound to them all by some invisible strand, and my grief for those strangers gushed out and drenched me in an icy sweat.
I leaned against the wall, that mortuary stink of death fusing with the autumn scents of decaying vegetation. I lurched forward and threw up.
***
I felt too ill to visit my mother at the Saint Paul-Saint Joseph prison, which was on the other side of the city. Besides I had to get home for the animals, not to mention the curfew. I would go and see Maman the following day.
With feeble steps, I made my way back to St. Jean and caught the Lucie-bound train, crowded as always with city people heading to the countryside to purchase black market food from the farmers.
By the time I climbed the hill to L’Auberge, the despair clenched me as tightly as the hunger and fatigue.
I dragged myself up the steps and peeled off my hat, coat and gloves in the hallway. A familiar musky-lavender smell prickled my nostrils and I looked up sharply.
‘Maman?’ I took cautious steps towards the kitchen.
My mother stood at the hearth stoking the stove with pieces of wood and charcoal, the usual pale grey apron firmly tied around her waist.
‘Where have you been, Célestine?’
‘You’re back? B-but I don’t understand,’ I stammered. ‘They let you go?’
My mother pressed her lips into the familiar hard line.
‘How would I know how they operate?’ she said, stirring something in a saucepan. ‘So, where have you been?’
‘Out,’ I said, all my concern for her vanishing in an instant, our familiar battle-lines immediately redrawn. ‘Into Lyon.’
My mother nodded towards the attic. ‘I see they’ve gone.’
‘It was too dangerous for them to stay here, after the Gestapo visit.’
‘And what of your brother?’
I shook my head. ‘Nothing yet. But people are trying to find out where they are.’
‘What people?’
‘Just people.’ I was weary of her questions, my gut heaving as I thought of those bodies in the mortuary. I’d been lucky, but next time it could be Patrick and Olivier lying on cold slabs.
‘Well let’s hope we know soon,’ she said. ‘Now don’t stand there dreaming, put the supper plates out.’
We ate the cabbage and bacon stew in silence. Between mouthfuls, my eyes kept straying across the table to that rigid face. Why had they released her so quickly? No tr
ial, no punishment. Nothing. In these days of blunt and hasty imprisonment, nobody got out that easily.
15
Martin Diehl was late for our first riverbank rendezvous. As I stood in a patch of weak sun, skimming pebbles across the silvery surface of the Vionne, I was convinced he wasn’t coming; that he’d tired of trying to get information out of me, if that was his real motive.
But there he was, astride his motorbike, stopping on the crest. With a glance about him, he hid the motorcycle in the bushes and slithered down the slope, a parcel cradled under one arm. As the bed of autumn leaves made schlus, schlus noises beneath his feet, my giddiness grew stronger.
The Gestapo’s storming of L’Auberge, the mortuary visit and Maman’s inexplicable release from prison had left me in a perpetually fretful state, but I continued pitching stones with nonchalant flicks of my wrist.
‘I heard of the arrests,’ he said. ‘Of your brother and his friends. And your mother. I am filled with sorrow for you. Have you any news yet?’
I gathered another handful of pebbles. ‘How did you know?’
‘Everyone knows,’ Martin said, skimming a stone of his own, which skipped further than mine. ‘News travels like wind in this village, you must know that.’
‘I’m actually sick with worry,’ I said, flinging my stones aside. ‘I’ve even been to the mortuary. Nobody seems to be able to tell me where they are, or even if they’re still alive.’
I hesitated, gnawing at my top lip. ‘I thought maybe … is there anything you could do, to find out about them?’
‘Me?’ Martin’s face creased into a frown. ‘I would like to help you, Céleste. Yes, we are on the same side in theory, but really we have nothing to do with the Gestapo.’
‘Oh, I’d so hoped …’ I stared across the bleak valley, a wad of cloud obscuring the wan sun, brittle leaves trailing to the ground around us. ‘I don’t know what else to do.’
‘I shall try, but I make no promises,’ he said, pushing the parcel at me. ‘Magazines for you. I know they are not enough to cheer you, but they may give some small comfort.’
I opened the package and started flipping through the magazines. True, they were more interesting than the conservative Catholic Youth magazines –– the only ones the Germans permitted us –– though I could barely muster any admiration for the beauty of Greta Garbo, Bette Davis or Marlene Dietrich. ‘That’s nice of you, but you don’t have to keep giving me presents.’
‘You do not like them?’
‘Of course I do, but with Patrick and Olivier gone –– dead maybe –– all that Hollywood glamour doesn’t seem so important.’ I snapped the magazine shut. ‘I can’t think about anything else until I know what’s happened to ––’
He drew me close, cutting my words off. ‘Do not be sad, mademoiselle autumn-hair and river-eyes. I am sure news of them will reach you soon.’
His tender touch, the soft voice oozing sympathy, infused me with a kind of ease and peace. Perhaps an illusion –– oh yes, I was aware of that –– but even so I was glad of the momentary escape from my bleak thoughts. As a nightingale’s rich voice drowned out the slow murmur of the river, and his fingertips grazed my chin, I tilted my head to his and met his parted lips.
Despite the spikes of fear, I let his tongue explore the crevices of my mouth, and when he finally withdrew for breath, he slung an arm across my shoulders, his hand dawdling in the cleft below the bone.
Apart from the ridge of goosebumps scrambling along my arms, it hadn’t been so unpleasant, the kiss; something I could surely endure if it meant helping our resistors, but I sidled away, anxious to leave things at that one simple kiss.
Martin pulled a Gauloise pack from the pocket of his greatcoat and offered it to me.
I’d never smoked before but I took one on impulse. He touched his match flame to the tip and as I inhaled, my throat caught fire, and I coughed and spluttered.
‘You will get used to it,’ he said. ‘It is always awful in the beginning.’
‘Come on,’ I said, anxious to put distance between us. ‘It’s too cold to stay still. I’ll show you where to find mushrooms. My father taught me where to find the best ones. I swear he’s got a truffle pig’s snout for a nose.
‘He’d sniff those mushrooms out,’ I went on, as we hurried through the chilly woods. ‘Orange girolles that smell like apricots and plums, dark grey trompette de la mort with soft, fruity smells, and cèpes too. He told me I’d find cèpes lurking beneath the chestnut leaves, which are the same dark brown, so they’re easy to miss. My father taught me how to brush a horse too, and let me feed carrots to the baby goats, and throw swill into the pig pen.’
‘I can hear in your words that you miss him.’
‘For weeks after he was sent to Germany,’ I said. ‘I could still smell him; his yellow scent of sawdust and stale tobacco. But it was gone so soon; every trace of him vanished. Perhaps my mother scrubbed the house clean of him so there’d be no reminders. She never mentions him, just bears their separation bravely, like a true Frenchwoman, and says we’re not the only ones –– that many families have lost husbands, brothers and sons. “There’s no time or energy to waste feeling sorry for ourselves,” she says. But she takes out her frustration on me. Oh don’t get me wrong, she was like that before Papa left, only she’s worse now, and still treats me like some silly child.’
Martin pulled me close again. ‘I care about you,’ he said, with a small, sad smile.
‘I always wondered why my father chose such a sour woman for his wife,’ I said, squirming from his hold. ‘I asked him once and he said she wasn’t really so grim; that you had to know the person inside. My sister told me something awful happened to her when she was young, but we didn’t know what. All I know is I have a mother who is as hard as those rocks.’ I waved an arm towards the river boulders.
‘Not that that stops me fighting back,’ I said. ‘Or keeps me from trying to find a way to leave L’Auberge.’
‘I miss my father too.’ Martin started picking at the peeling bark of a tree trunk. ‘I do not know if my family is safe, or if our house is blown into pieces. The Allies’ bombing offensive was meant to destroy everything, not only our spirit.’
‘Don’t you write letters?’
‘Oh yes we write, but you know what wartime is, letters are getting lost. I have no word from them for three months.’
‘I know what you mean. We haven’t had a single letter from Papa since July. We’re desperately worried why he’s stopped writing.’
‘It’s not that my billet — the Delaroche family –– isn’t hospitable,’ Martin said, ‘because they are. The family is polite; they cook and clean for me. But I feel like an intruder. I sense they are thinking: how can he be in our home when his countrymen have taken the head of our house prisoner? Or that I see their house as a hotel, not appreciating the comfortable bed and clean sheets,’ he said. ‘I do. But I still miss my home, and wish I did not have to stay in theirs.’
‘I’m sorry for you too,’ I said. ‘I hope your family is all right. So why did you go into the army, knowing you’d have to leave your home and family?’
‘I think I did not know what it really was –– the army, war.’ He was silent for a minute, and lifted his strange eyes to a black bird circling above us, its scythe-like beak carving spirals through tufts of fog.
‘My father owns a successful bicycle business,’ he went on. ‘My brothers and I were happy children, sailing boats on the lakes and hunting duck in the pine forests. When the question came up about earning my living, my father suggested the cycle shop. But that sounded so … so, how do you say? Boring. I wanted to see the world, learn how other people live. I imagined the army was such a way.’
‘What did your parents think of that?’
‘My father was disappointed I would not go into his business but he patted me on the back and wished me luck. My mother shook her head and said I was not born to be a soldier.’
‘Your
mother was right then?’
He nodded. ‘Perhaps. But it is too late for regret.’ He eased down onto a silvered log and patted the spot beside him. I sat, placing my basket between us.
‘Like all my friends, I went to Hitler Youth camp. We learned things: sport, combat, violence. They taught us the Nazi doctrine,’ he said, the chiselled mouth tightening. ‘And they taught us how to hate the Jews.’
‘Lots of French people dislike them too,’ I said. ‘I’ve never understood why.’
‘I have seen battle,’ Martin went on. ‘Horrible death, villages pillaged, men and women tortured and shot in their pyjamas. Now I know people are the same the world over, wherever they come from and whatever their religion. And I see how pointless war is.’
The breeze shifted blond wisps of hair across the sculpted cheeks, settling them on his brow, which was knitted in sadness and a kind of helpless resignation. If that emotion wasn’t real, was not pouring straight from a tormented heart, Martin Diehl was the finest actor.
I got up and walked on. ‘You know, I always thought war was only hard on the losers,’ I said, ‘but now I see you victors suffer too.’
‘Everybody suffers in battle, Céleste. There is no real victor.’ He scuffed his foot through the dead leaves, exposing a cluster of seeds and dried fruit. ‘Look, a poor squirrel forgot his supplies.’
‘So what is the point of this war we’re fighting?’
He shrugged. ‘Ah, the big question. But no one has a good answer. War is not just the work of politicians and capitalists, the common man is also guilty; man and his urge to murder and destroy. And until that changes wars will go on, and everything man has carefully built and nurtured will be cut down, only to start all over again.’
‘Man is crazy,’ I said, spotting a patch of wild thyme niched beneath a woody clump, its tiny flowers like purple gems twinkling in the pale grey air.
