Later that evening, another storm blew in off the Channel, shaking the château, with every long gust whistling through the trees, knocking branches to the ground. I could hear layers of sound. Doves coo-cooing, seagulls wailing plaintively as they flew above. I looked out my window and watched the gusts in the trees for a long time. A train whistled into the station, its sound echoing in the wind; a car here and there and a lone truck pulled through and waited for the train to pass. From my round porthole window, I looked into the distance.
At dinner, I sat by the window, staring out at the garden. I looked so deeply that my imagination conjured images of what must have been. I ran my hand across the soft, tooled edge of the old fireplace in the dining room while I ate. I wished my father was there to talk to me. Everywhere I looked, I felt their presence, and didn’t want to miss a detail. I felt strangely at home, yet in the weeks to come, as I looked back to those three days, blurry details began to clear and the bold colors of occupation dressed my mind’s eye. The swastika. The flag billowing in the wind, signifying the château as command center. The new order. I spoke to the couple across from me. They had won a trip to the château with all the amenities in a lottery on the Internet designed to attract retirees. I had become somewhat of a novelty with my story. We finished our warm apple galettes and left the dining room.
“Please save the other half bottle of the La Coste for tomorrow’s dinner. Bonne nuit et merci,” I said over my shoulder to Sylvie, the cook by night and maid by day, as I left the dining room. I stood outside for a few minutes to get some air before I decided that I was better served by a good night’s sleep. I had a lot to think about.
The next day I took the steam train to Saint-Valery and Le Crotoy on the Baie de la Somme and walked all over both towns, thinking about the incredible battles that were fought on this land. In Saint-Valery a plaque marked where Joan of Arc passed through after she had been captured by the English in 1430. I took it as a sign that I should have faith in myself and the courage to pursue this project. I wandered all day and ate lunch in Saint-Valery and dinner in Le Crotoy before settling in at the château for a nightcap. For a long time before going to sleep that night, I just listened to the silence.
As promised, Christine had arranged for me to meet with Jean. She arrived promptly a ten the next morning, motioned for me to get into her van and threw a map in my lap. We drove to Vron, where we were welcomed with open arms and hot tea. Although fascinating in themselves, his collection of early twentieth-century postcards of Noyelles proved to be a dead end as far as my research was concerned, so we stayed with him only briefly, as I was on a tight schedule. Olivier, the owner of the château, had arranged a luncheon at noon with the grandson of the former caretakers. He had a feeling that if there was anyone in Noyelles who could remember anything about the occupation, it would this man. I arrived back to the château just in time to see the men pull through the front gates. Before sitting down to lunch, I took a tour of the grounds with Olivier and the now-elderly caretakers’ grandson. As we walked, I asked the man if he remembered anything about the battles that took place in May and June of 1940. He had quite a vivid memory, in fact.
I showed him the precise spot where my father said he remembered the German soldier with a crush on my aunt had been standing when falling bombs killed him and my father landed in the crater of one that didn’t detonate. The man gestured so strongly that he almost knocked me over.
“Là,” he said, pointing to the wall where the pear trees were, beside the Polish caretakers’ house. Precisely where I had chosen to pick a piece of fruit the other day.
“Il était enterré là.” (He was buried there.)
I shook my head and thought: The coveted strawberry patch had turned to jam and the nemesis was buried there too. Ah, la guerre!
The next day I rode my bicycle deep into the countryside and left the road to travel between two fields at sunset. The heavy black bike was difficult to maneuver over the dirt that separated the land into neat pastures on which the white cows of Picardy were grazing. Yet again, we stared at one another for a long time, looking for some kind of answer. As I moved further down the path, westwardly toward the sunset, the cumulus clouds battled, changing the light. Before long I saw the same pattern of broken tiles, a mosaic in the landscape. I couldn’t risk going over them with the heavy bike, and crossed them on foot. I was too far from the château for a flat tire.
It was the night before my departure. I was feeling a deep sense of loss as this door to the past was closing and I had to return to my present life. I found the mosaic over the dirt paths curious and wanted them to be pieces of the destruction of war. They told their own story of the lives lived within walls that were now laid to rest on a path between pastures with inquisitive cows grazing. I stood leaning against my bike, which rested against a tree, for a long time, until daylight gave way to dusk. I ached, wanting to stay longer, not sure of what answers, if any, I would find.
When dusk turned to night, I pulled my bike away from the old tree and rode back toward the paved road until I reached the broken tiles and walked around them until it was safe to ride. I headed toward Noyelles, past Pippa’s café, now closed and locked for the night. I rode through the gates of the château and lined the bike up with the others one last time. Instead of going upstairs, I went into the garden, slowly walking through, past the Polish caretakers’ house. It was quiet, private. I walked a little further until I was directly behind the château. Hidden by a large bush, I lay down, staring up at the sky. I suppose if I could, I would have found a car and hidden underneath, just to feel. I would have engineered my own fear by adding the sounds of planes flying overhead strafing with their gunfire, and the noise of a nearby battle as ground troops fought. I felt cold dampness pushing through my clothes. I lay there for a long time, absorbing. A car pulled in through the gates. I got up with a start, walked back to the front and unlocked the door to the château, holding it open for the two guests back from their long day of sightseeing.
I had an ache in the pit of my stomach. I felt as though I was grieving. I got into bed, and fell into a deep sleep and awoke the next morning having dreamed of the broken tiles. There was something about them. In my dream I walked slowly alongside a friend over a hill of destruction. We were talking quietly, I was trying to make a point. It was then that I looked down and saw a sepia-toned photo on a heap and pulled it out from under the glass. There was another photo underneath. Another layer. And another.
On my last morning, I walked along the road to the river Dien, watching the sun cast its rays of white light upon the haystacks rolled in the fields, like Monet’s paintings. I was looking for the Chinese cemetery but couldn’t find it. The cemetery is the resting place for 838 Chinese laborers who died from the Spanish flu after being recruited by the British government during World War I. I followed the sign and walked along the narrow sidewalk, now a couple of kilometers from the château. I should have taken the bike. As I walked on, I looked down at my watch, and in front of me were two broken ceramic tiles. Just a little farther, I thought. My throat was parched, I hadn’t taken any water. Plums from a tree hung heavily over a fence, so I picked one and coated my throat with the juice from the ripened fruit. My father would have done the same. I couldn’t reach any others but saw one that had fallen onto the sidewalk. It tasted even better than the first. The road was clean, I didn’t care. An old man leaning against a ladder was fixing the tiles on his roof and I asked him for directions. Time was short, he had trouble hearing me, and I had to repeat myself over and over.
I had an eleven o’clock rendezvous with the mayor of Noyelles and needed to find my way back. I had wandered a lot farther than I had anticipated and began to follow the parallel road, assuming it was a shortcut. Finally, I found the path along the Rio and took my shoes off as I walked through the wet grass to the château. Just in time, I thought. I would not be late for the mayor. As I walked in, the phone rang and Ludivine answered it.
“Allô, oui, Monsieur Maire. No, I’m sorry.” He had another engagement and couldn’t meet with me. C’est la vie in the fast lane at Noyelles.
Almost as soon as I hung up the phone, I saw Jean approaching, the Frenchman with a German last name whom Crazy Christine had brought me to meet two days earlier. I smiled and waved him in. As he climbed the gray stone steps, I took a better look at him. At almost sixty, he had a youthful way about him. Shy and reserved. A gentle giant. He arrived with a gift, a CD loaded with turn-of-the-century postcards of Noyelles from his enormous collection. The casing enclosed a note:
We wish you a nice trip back to the USA. With the hope that these few days spent in the country at Noyelles-sur-Mer have allowed you to get close to the spirit and memory of your father, who during those uncertain times spent several weeks at this château that has welcomed you.
With friendship and the hope that your book will see the light of day.
Yvette and Jean Willig
I thanked Jean and thought for a moment, then asked him if he wouldn’t mind driving me to Saint-Valery, since he was on his way to work. I had hours before boarding the 3:30 express to Paris and wanted to do a little sightseeing. As we drove through the gates of the château, I took a last look at my father’s room and at the garden where the strawberry patch once stood. I didn’t want Jean to see, but my eyes welled with tears, which I discreetly wiped away.
Later, over a lunch of possibly the worst Italian food I’ve ever consumed, Jean sat across the table from me and quietly told me his story. “As I remember,” he began between bites, “my mother was working in May 1940 at the RAF mess installation at the Abbeville-Drucat aerodrome and evacuated at the same time as the British stationed at the base, and went as far as Avranches. That was where the last of them left for Great Britain. They invited her to come along to England. She refused, telling them, ‘La lutte n’est pas terminée!’(The fight isn’t over!)”
She parted ways with the RAF soldiers, headed for Paris, and settled in with some cousins until September 1940. Then, having been issued new identity papers to cross the border of the occupied zone, she returned to her mother’s in Abbeville, where her mother was in charge of the kiosk at the train station. How she came to work as a cook for the Germans, I don’t know. However, sometime around Christmas of that year, at the station in Abbeville, she never forgot the small man with an oversized uniform walking erect, speaking loudly, slicing the air with his hands as he made a point. Flanked by other military, he stood apart, distinctly apart. It was Hitler, seen close enough to discern his features and gestures and the resolve in his eyes. Close enough to elicit the enormous courage it took to resist—to fight back.
Jean Willig, half German, half French. His mother played an important role in the Resistance. As a cook for the Nazis in Abbeville, she smuggled dynamite to the saboteurs. During shopping trips, she layered the explosives beneath the groceries at the bottom of her sack, letting the vegetables and other supplies stick out at the top. The dynamite that Jean’s mother carried was used to destroy stretches of railroad tracks to derail trains. She belonged to the Fer Réseau, a resistance group that diverted freight shipments to the wrong location and also sabotaged switches to cause derailments. Because the ground was level in northern France, train derailments varied in their effectiveness but were fairly simple to execute. Jean’s father used to alert the train engineer to the time of sabotage so they could collect the valuables on the train, wine and cigarettes among them, and offload them before the derailment. She met Jean’s father at the newsstand in Abbeville, and they fell in love. He was a German officer. They had a baby. Jean is normally careful not to talk about his family history.
Once, when Jean’s son was a boy, he asked his grandfather about the gray uniform in his closet. It had a Nazi pin on the lapel. Jean wasn’t clear as to the significance of the pin, but his son never spoke to his grandfather again. Jean has asked his ninety-two-year-old father what he did during the war, and he won’t answer. Suffice to say that there is a coffer that Jean will receive on his father’s death that will explain everything in detail. As one would whisper a mantra during meditation, the old German soldier repeats, “You will see. . . . There is nothing to be ashamed of.”
Jean will have his box, as I have mine. Two German fathers, each with a box of documents, giving their children a link to the past. “You may as well have it,” mine said as he gave me his. My box, cold, green, dusty, metal with raised letters denoting “US Army.” What of the other box? What secrets will it contain? Mine has loving letters home, some on the red-bordered stationery of the Third Reich. Stolen stationery, like a banner, his proof positive of the enemy’s defeat.
* * * *
Later that evening, in Brussels, I was so exasperated that I started a conversation with the ladies next to me. One was an elderly woman, not much younger than my father would have been. They listened and laughed along with me as I told them why I was so aggravated, agreeing that the old Métropole wasn’t kept to its old standard, and no, I certainly shouldn’t have been my own bellman, when I showed them the bruises on my arm from the weight of my heavy bags hanging awkwardly while I maneuvered my luggage to my room by myself. Maybe if I didn’t act like a teenager all the time, people would be more willing to treat me like the woman of a certain age that I am. They asked me where I was from. I explained and told them that my father had stayed at the Métropole during Christmas week of 1945, when the city and the hotel were reborn with the future’s promise. Then, the hotel was lively and festive, not old and stale, the way it was now.
When the waiter came back, I ordered salad and a smoked salmon platter. The ladies asked what brought me to Brussels. I explained that I was there to do research, that I was looking for answers to my father’s past. As we continued to chat, I noticed the old woman’s face change as if lit by flashbacks of the terror that must have enveloped her during the war. Her jaw went slack and stayed that way until I finished recounting my purpose here. As we sat in the café, she began to describe the day she lost her home and her playmate to the Blitzkrieg of bombs and tanks assaulting the city. Her eyes were wide shut. She gripped her patent leather taupe handbag more tightly with every detail, her hands trembling. I ordered more champagne for all of us. She was only ten on May 10, 1940, the first day of “La Grande Exode”—the great exodus when waves of Jews fled Brussels as the Germans poured through the embattled city. Everything had been lost; it was rubble. She spoke of never being able to return to her home, but not of how or where they survived the war. Then, suddenly, her eyes betrayed her will. I could see the tears well up as she told me about her little friend who had been killed. At some point, she sucked in and appeared angry as she said, “Thank God for the Americans. If it wasn’t for them . . . They saved us. I get so angry when anyone says anything negative about the Americans!”
Her daughter said, “My mother is very passionate and loyal when it comes to the Americans.”
During our conversation, the woman’s daughter sat motionless and listened as if a passive observer. I gave them my card, hoping to keep in touch, invited them to see my website and hear my father tell his story in his own words. The old woman loosened her grip on her handbag, and her fingers flushed with color as her blood began to recirculate. As they got up, I rose to shake their hands and bent to give the older lady a kiss on each cheek. For days afterward, I was haunted by her expression. Perhaps the pain of reliving those days was too jarring for her, and I worried that I might have made her sick. The invasion and subsequent occupation of neutral Belgium came as a huge surprise to the country, as it found itself very suddenly under occupation and at war. It was obvious that the fear this woman felt as a little girl had endured in an anger that would last for the rest of her life. I left for the airport early the next morning after breakfast.
* * * *
Weeks passed after I came home. I beg
an to write. I assimilated my trip, and, as I wrote, emails arrived and details emerged that required research. I was stuck on certain points and enthralled by others. My imagination was held captive by history, and what needed to emerge for me was a more complete story of those early days of war. I hungered to hear the voices of the radio reporters, Churchill, Roosevelt, and the BBC. I wanted to know exactly what my father heard as he carefully spun the dial through the crackling static looking for whatever sources could provide accurate news devoid of the propaganda that poisoned listeners.
I read with a voracious appetite, trying to grasp what this war was about. An old friend of the family emerged as a main character in Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War. Leslie Slote was now my personal guide, leading me through history. When the characters in the novel discussed current events, I fact-checked and researched the details. So accurate was Wouk’s account that, during one conversation between two characters at the end of the novel, one asked the other if he had read a certain issue of Time magazine. The issue to which Wouk referred was dated September 22, 1941. I located a copy and immediately ordered it. When it arrived a few days later, I read it cover to cover. In the first few pages were a photograph and a small article about the arrival of the SS Navemar, the ship that brought the Wolff family to the United States. Toward the back I found an article that linked the FDR Drive in New York to the Battle of Britain.
Someday You Will Understand Page 28
