Disturbing the Dark

by Wendy Hornsby

  “I’m fine, thank you.” I checked Taylor’s camera and got a thumbs-up from Guido about sound levels on the synchronized sound recorder. It was time for me to take the chair on Grand-mère’s left so that I faced her across the corner of the table. Guido’s camera had me in profile, Taylor caught me full face, the opposite of their camera angles on Grand-mère. After I had settled into my seat, there was a little rearranging of key lights behind us to separate us visually from the background. When I was assured that both Guido and Taylor were ready to begin, I turned and gave my grandmother a smile that I prayed did not look mercenary. “As long as I meet my film deadline, I’ll be solvent.”

  “Well then.” She set the berries aside and folded her red-stained hands on the table in front of her. So far, the cameras hadn’t seemed to bother Grand-mère as we walked around the property, talking about the estate’s history, its people, and its various enterprises. Indeed, she seemed to enjoy the attention and the constant companionship. But this conversation about the men buried under the carrots was on a different plane altogether, and I knew I needed to proceed with caution.

  “Grand-mère,” I said, “anytime you want to stop, or if there’s something that is too painful to talk about, promise me you’ll let me know.”

  Her cheeks colored. “And then what? You pack your cameras and go home, perhaps to lose your job?”

  “No,” I said, smoothing a stray strand of her hair. “Nothing as dire as that. I’m sure we can come up with something that will make the network happy. Discovery of the skull alone, with some spooky background music and light effects, could be turned into something more if we need it to.”

  She smiled at the thought, and relaxed some. The von Streicher letter had upset both her and Marie, robbed them of some of their normal resilience. Until Grand-mère told me she wanted to talk on camera about how all those men came to be buried where they were, I was ready to scrap the piece rather than cause her further pain. I admired her fortitude in going ahead with it, but I wasn’t sure that we should. Maybe she sensed my qualms, because she caught my hand, and after a few breaths she squared her shoulders, looked at Guido’s camera lens, and nodded. “I am ready to tell my story now, as it should be told. Will there be a drum roll or some trumpets to start us off?”

  “Artillery fire in the background would be appropriate.” I checked again with Guido and Taylor; in sync, in focus, we had speed and we were ready. To Grand-mère, I said, “For this segment of the film, the first thing we’ll see is a black screen. Slowly, a title crawls across from the right: occupied normandy, february 25, 1944. And then your story begins.”

  “But that isn’t where the story begins, chérie,” she said.

  “It’s your story, Grand-mère.” The cameras were rolling. “Where does it begin?”

  “It was so very long ago.” Absently, she touched the little pouch of soft flesh under her chin. “And I was so young. Just fifteen I think when the war began. Still in school.”

  “In the village school here?” I asked when her pause stretched long.

  “No. In Paris still, with my parents. When the Germans arrived in 1940, they swept in on us like a biblical plague. Overnight, we went from being a free people to subjects living under tyranny. Papa thought I would be better off here in Normandy with friends. Better food than in Paris and fewer troops for the father of a young daughter to worry about. As I have told you, my father, your great-grandfather, was a cheese broker. He knew most all of the fromagers in France. The good ones, anyway. So for safekeeping, he brought me to this village to board with his old friend, Giles Martin.”

  “My other great-grandfather,” I said.

  “Eventually he was, yes.”

  “Is that how you met my grandfather?”

  “Oh, no. I knew Henri from childhood. Our families used to pass summer holidays together in Anneville-sur-Mer, where you visited when you were here last fall. You remember?” She searched my face, always hoping for a profound connection I doubt was there. Though the land had been in my family for centuries, everything and everyone here was new to me. Knowing that seemed to fill her with regret. “Of course, we had only a simple cottage then. Your mother took it down to build the modern pavilion that’s there now.” She smiled. “A big improvement over the old, I admit. Indoor plumbing and Wi-Fi; what would your grandfather have said about that?”

  “Did your families expect you and Henri to marry?” I asked, nudging her back toward the topic.

  She gave me a little Gallic shrug, meaning, perhaps. “They were not unhappy or surprised when it happened, yes? It was no secret that I was always in love with Henri, though he was several years older and seemed to think I was a little pest when we were children. But he wasn’t here when I arrived. As soon as the war began, he and his brother enlisted. By the time I arrived, Henri was already a prisoner of the Germans somewhere in Poland. And his brother had perished.”

  Henri was in Poland? I jotted down a question to ask her later. “Tell me about your life during the Occupation,” I said.

  “Ah, well.” She gazed off across the kitchen, her eyes lighting on the old stone sink and the row of jars on the counter that she had sterilized for her next batch of preserves.

  “Was it life?” she said. “It felt like a bad dream I could not wake from. One day I was a schoolgirl, and the next I was a forced laborer, working on the farm of my parents’ dear friends, growing food for German bellies, but not our own. Certainly we ate better here than my family did in Paris; they nearly starved before the war was over. But until you have lost your freedom to simply walk about, to read a book of your choosing, to live life on your own terms, you can’t know how cruel the Occupation was. I think I could tolerate hunger better than the oppression.”

  I poured her a glass of water from the pitcher on the table. She wrapped her hands around the glass, but did not lift it to her lips. After a moment, she continued.

  “To begin, we were a world of women, children, and old men. And, of course, the Boche. Many of our men, the ones like Henri who had gone off to fight, were now prisoners of the Germans. Others left the country or went into hiding. Some joined the Résistance. But the rest of them, oh my dear, it was terrible. During that first summer, any remaining able-bodied men, older boys, and some of the young women were swept up by the STO, the Service du Travail Obligatoire, and taken away to work in German labor camps. They were slaves, Maggie. And many of them starved before the war was over.

  “I suppose that those of us left to work here were the lucky ones,” she said. “If we had known what horrors the Nazis imposed on so many millions of people, we would not have complained about our plight. My father had been wrong: There was no safe place for anyone, anywhere.”

  She dropped her eyes to her stained hands. After a long pause, I put my hand over hers.

  “Can you talk about the Germans posted here?” I asked.

  Again, a little shrug as she turned her focus toward me. “Arrogant, of course. And cruel. They walked around with an insufferable swagger. They had been trained to believe that they were a superior order of men, and that we were nothing. But—” She leaned forward, pinching her thumb and index finger together and holding them up to me. “But they were tiny men. What is that word your daughter used? Such a good one. Ah, yes, pissant. Pissant low-level functionaries in Germany before the war: clerks, accountants, that sort of thing. And they were pissant functionaries during that big war: little men with little jobs in this little place. Most of the soldiers posted here were too old or too unfit for combat duty. They weren’t suited for anything grander than keeping an eye on a bunch of farm girls.”

  “But there were combat troops in Normandy,” I said.

  “Bien sûr. There were Waffen-SS combat troops all along the coast, the Atlantic Wall they called it. But many of those men were not German.”

  “SS, but not Germans?” I asked.

  “Not all. Maybe not most. The Waffen-SS conscripted men from all of the areas that German
y conquered and annexed. Czechs and Austrians, Turks and Poles were put into uniform and folded into the German war effort as forced laborers of another sort. We had very little in this village to entertain or interest them, so we saw little of those troops until the rout after D-Day. When the time came, they couldn’t surrender to the Allies fast enough.”

  “Interesting,” I said. “At some point, soldiers commandeered this house. Tell me about that.”

  “What can I say?” A little shrug as she gathered her thoughts. “In the summer of 1940 a platoon of soldiers, seventeen men in all, moved into this house because of its size and location. From here, they oversaw production and shipment of food from the farms of five villages. It was a large area, and a very valuable one; people have to eat. The officer in charge was Major Horst von Streicher, a petty tyrant of the first order. Before the war, he was headmaster of a boys’ school. I suppose that bossing around little boys was good training for commanding us, but it taught him nothing about making cheese and cider or growing crops.”

  “Surely,” I said, thinking of my German friends and colleagues, many whom I admired, “there must have been some kind or generous men among the Occupation forces.”

  “A benign cancer is a cancer just the same, non?” Her left shoulder rose in a dismissive shrug. “But I must tell you that our experience here was not the same as the experience of some others. This estate became a work camp for those of us who were assigned here. But in the villages and elsewhere, only one or two soldiers would move into a house with a family. If those people did as they were told, they could otherwise ignore the foreigners living among them and eating at their table. It was not a good situation, but it could be borne.”

  “Sometimes friendships of a sort must have developed,” I said.

  “Yes, they did. But not here.”

  I said, “Major von Streicher’s daughter left a note on your door this morning asking you to speak with her. If you sat down with her, what would you tell her about her father?”

  Grand-mère shook her head. “I have nothing to tell her that a child should want to hear about her father. He has been dead for over seventy years now, so she is not young. But she is still his child. No, I will not speak with her. But I will tell you, my dear, in front of these cameras, what happened to us.”

  “Go ahead.” I said.

  She began telling her story in calm, measured tones, but became more emotional, more angry, as her narrative unfolded.

  “By the autumn harvest of 1940, there were only eight of us women left to do all the work of the estate,” she said. “Every day, we rose before the sun to milk the cows and start the day’s batch of cheese. We plowed and planted and harvested using horses—big Percherons—because there was no petrol for the tractors. After the harvest, we made cider and distilled brandy, and put up preserves. And every day, we had to clean up after those putains de salauds, do their laundry, and prepare three meals for them. The soldiers ate like pigs and drank like fools and complained that we had no beer, no Champagne, no eggs for their breakfast after they ate all of the laying chickens.”

  “How were you treated?” I asked.

  “I can’t say that we were ever treated well,” she said. “But when the Germans arrived in 1940 as victors, they were generally disciplined, more so than the English and American soldiers who came during the Libération. For those men it was, oh là, French girls! No, the Germans had strict rules against fraternization, and initially they held themselves aloof from us civilians, which was fine with us. But by the summer of 1943, when the war began to go badly for Germany, everything changed. I think that when the men here realized that their fatherland would lose the war, again, and that they would soon go back to their miserable pre-war lives, they didn’t give a damn about discipline anymore.”

  I asked, “What did they do?”

  “They drank,” she said. “The worse the war news became, the more they drank. We had always served them cider with dinner and brandy after. But now they refused the cider and demanded brandy with their meal. They got drunk. And when they were drunk, no female was safe. We started watering down the brandy, to slow them, but it didn’t work. All we could do was to set out their daily ration on the table with their meal and go lock ourselves into our quarters.”

  “Where were your quarters?”

  “The women workers slept in a loft in the cider house,” she said. “We kept the doors locked, of course, not only for our safety but to keep the men from stealing brandy that was stored in barrels on the ground floor. On Christmas night—it was 1943—a group of soldiers broke in looking for more brandy. As drunk as they were, some managed to get up the ladder to the loft. They fell in among us, grabbing anyone they could catch. We were young girls, virgins, and the men did not care. After that night, it became a regular war for us, trying to stay safe from them.”

  “Did you complain to Major von Streicher?”

  “We didn’t dare,” she said. “He had already taken a village girl, a child of fifteen, into his bed as his regular victim. No, instead, we went to the village priest. But the priest asked us to do what we could to take care of ourselves without involving the church.”

  Grand-mère held up a finger. “Wait before you pass judgment on the priest, chérie. By that time, there were people in hiding all over the parish, maybe a dozen in the cellars of the convent alone, and more in the rectory. The priest was afraid that a complaint to von Streicher, who was not a just man, would bring scrutiny on the church that might imperil every one of us. Even the blessed women of the convent would not be safe if their cellars were searched.”

  “Who were all those people in hiding?”

  A little shrug. “All sorts. From time to time, people escaped from Nazi labor and prisoner-of-war camps. Those who managed to get home had to be hidden or they would be shot. There were people from the Résistance, a family of Jews that had hoped to find sanctuary among the English on the Channel Islands until the Germans occupied there in June of 1940 as well. There were spies and pilots: English intelligence used the open fields of Normandy to land small planes and gliders that brought in and took out strategic information and people. Sometimes they were shot down, sometimes they crash landed, other times they had to wait for pick-up. Those men and women needed to be hidden until they could get out again.”

  A sudden thought came to her that made her smile. “One day we found a wounded English pilot in the orchard and hid him in the cider house loft for some weeks until he was well enough to be taken to the sisters at the convent. Can you imagine what the Germans would have done to us if they had caught us hiding him?”

  “I assume the flier was gone from the loft before that particular Christmas night,” I said.

  She wagged her head, maybe yes, maybe no. “But we agreed with the priest.”

  “Is that when you began hatching your plan?”

  “Yes. We talked and argued about what to do. Some of the girls were too afraid to act, afraid of repercussions. The Nazis were known to exact punishment for any infraction on whole villages or on family members who were prisoners of war. So whatever we did, we risked putting many other people in peril.”

  “But you did act.”

  She nodded. “On New Year’s Day of 1944 we learned that the Russians had chased the Germans out of Ukraine and were in ­Poland. As the Red Army marched across Poland headed toward Berlin, whenever they came upon a German prisoner-of-war camp or a concentration camp, they opened the gates and released the ­prisoners.”

  “Ah.” I looked at the note I had jotted earlier; she had told Pierre Dauvin that my grandfather set the cider house on fire. “When did Henri come home?”

  “Early that February,” she said. “He was nothing more than a skeleton when he arrived. Of course, he had to go into hiding. If the Germans spotted him, they would shoot him, and probably all of us. We made a nest for him in the drying room of the fromagerie so that we could keep him warm and feed him regularly. We skimmed cream off the milk befor
e we made cheese to fatten him up. For three weeks he rested and healed.”

  “And plotted?”

  She smiled as she nodded, perhaps remembering Henri, her late husband. My grandfather.

  “During the winter months on the estate,” she said, “as we do to this day, besides making cheese every day, we distill brandy from the apple cider that we put up in the fall to ferment. And we prune the apple trees in the orchard. While he was resting, Henri helped out by sharpening our pruning knives.” She reached into a drawer, pulled out a knife that was no more than five inches long when it was folded, and demonstrated opening it as she spoke. “You see, the blade is curved; the tip is very sharp. When it is folded it can be carried in a pocket.”

  “You keep one in the kitchen?”

  A little shrug as she folded the knife back up. “Yes, of course. It is perfect for trimming vegetables.”

  To get back on topic, I asked, “What was happening in the war at that time?”

  “The Allies were bombing German cities by then,” she said. “At the same time, here in Normandy, the Résistance cut telephone and telegraph lines to disrupt communication,” she said. “It was time for us to act.”

  Grand-mère took a sip of water, preparing herself. “Henri showed us how to use the pruning knife to sever the carotid artery in a man’s neck by using nearly the same twist of the wrist we used to cut little sucker limbs off tree branches and trunks.

  “One night, we told the soldiers that we would be celebrating the first pouring of the first batch of brandy from the big chartenais.” She looked up. “What would you call it? I don’t know the word in English.”

  Taylor, our intern, pulled out her mobile, tapped the screen, and then announced, “It’s an alembic pot used in the double distillation of brandy.”

  “Youth comes to the rescue,” I said, giving her a thumbs-up. “A chartenais is a still.”

  Grand-mère smiled at Taylor. “Thank you, child. You’ll have to show me how to do that.”