“But Monsieur Lieutenant, that—”
Essart continued to stare at the schoolmaster as he cut off the policeman. “I would guess, Renard, that your skills as a policeman may be adequate for simple times and ordinary circumstances. But these are, you must have noticed, not ordinary times. Your schoolmaster has confessed to harboring terroristic, anticollaboration, and anti-German opinions and feelings, and we are placing him under arrest.”
Yves Renard gazed at the schoolmaster. “And yet,” said Renard after a pause, “Monsieur Bertrand did not write or publish the leaflet.”
Essart raised his head and faced Renard for the first time since the policeman had entered the office. “Really?” he said. Bertrand dared to raise his face just enough to look into Renard’s face. His lip was swollen and purple, and a drop of blood hung from his ear.
“Then who did publish this seditious document, what you call the ‘leaflet’?” said Essart.
Yves was relieved to see that he had become the object of Essart’s interest. “That is something I am working at finding out,” he said.
“I see,” said Essart. “You do not actually know who published this filth, and yet you are certain it was not the schoolmaster?” Essart’s eyes widened and he looked around the room and chuckled. His colleagues smiled back at him.
Yves Renard seemed undeterred. “That is correct, monsieur.”
“The only way you could be certain it was not the schoolmaster is if you know who it was,” said one of Essart’s men. “Do you know who it was?”
“Or,” Essart added, “if you did it yourself. Did you write this yourself?”
Yves Renard actually seemed to consider both possibilities for a moment. Then he smiled slightly and said, “There is another possibility, Monsieur Lieutenant.”
Essart raised his eyebrows in astonishment. He took a step toward Yves and folded his hands in front of him. At that moment Essart himself looked like an impatient schoolmaster. “Please tell me,” he said, “about this other possibility.”
“I have been watching the schoolmaster for weeks,” said Yves. “He has been teaching his pupils, and that is all he has been doing. He has been teaching them as he is required to. Whatever opinions or statements you might have extracted from him cannot be taken seriously. He was frightened, and he said what he thought you wanted to hear.”
“You also know this to be true? That he said what he thought we wanted to hear? You seem to know a great deal more than I could have imagined it was possible for you to know. How do you know so many things? You seem to be a very smart young policeman.”
“I only mean to say,” said Yves, “that Monsieur Bertrand is brilliant in some things, but not in others. He could never publish such a document. I am certain that, when you do a thorough search of his house, you will not find the machine that was used to print this or any other incriminating evidence. You will not find the paper used or ink-stained rags. Nor was it printed on the mimeograph machine at the school. I have already checked. That machine is always kept under lock and key. There is nothing to connect the schoolmaster to this seditious paper. You have the wrong person.”
Bertrand’s mouth was opening and closing like a fish gasping for oxygen.
“You seem to have made a thorough study of the matter and of Schoolmaster Bertrand,” said Lieutenant Essart. “I wonder why.”
“I have investigated many of the goings-on about town. Like you, I am trying to root out any rebellion before it happens.…”
“Like us,” said Essart. “I see.”
“That is my obligation under the terms of the armistice.”
“Indeed it is,” said Essart. He studied the policeman for a long moment before he spoke again. “Find the author of this … trash.” He held up the mimeographed sheet. “It is up to you, policeman. If another such provocation occurs, you will answer for it.”
“I understand,” said Renard. “And what about the schoolmaster?” He regretted the words as soon as they had left his mouth.
“The schoolmaster is under arrest,” said Essart. “Was that ever in doubt?” With that, Essart motioned with the fingers of both hands for Bertrand to stand up. Bertrand stood slowly and turned toward the door. His legs started to give way under him, but he caught himself. His back was to Yves, but the policeman could see that his former teacher struggled to compose himself. The three Gestapo surrounded him and escorted him from the office. They put him in the back of the black Citroën.
Essart’s Gestapo colleagues also got in the backseat on either side of the schoolmaster. Once they were in the car and the doors were closed, Essart turned and entered Yves Renard’s office once again. “Listen to me, my little gendarme,” he said before the policeman could say anything. He stepped up to Yves, so that their faces were centimeters apart. “I do not have time to waste on you; I will say it as plainly as I can.” Yves could feel the German’s breath on his face. He could see the veins in the yellowish whites of his eyes.
“We are not partners. We are not equals. We won this war, and you lost it. Our victory was complete, and so was your defeat. Do not be confused by the armistice. You are entirely under our jurisdiction; it is our law and authority you as a policeman must enforce, not some fanciful version of justice you entertain in your head. You French no longer have any laws that belong to you, except by our sufferance; you have no authority of your own. None. Whatever law and authority seem to remain to you will cease the moment we decide to end them. They will cease the moment you are no longer useful to our purposes.
“Looking at you now”—Essart made a show of actually looking Renard up and down—“I can see why you French lost the war. You are reckless and frivolous and not as smart as you think you are. You are willing to take risks whose consequences you do not understand, to play games whose rules you do not understand.
“The only reason I do not arrest you this very moment, Gendarme Renard, is that you might still be of some use. But be advised: I see through all your maneuvering and obfuscation. I did so from the beginning. And it does not amuse me.
“Do not ever, ever try to play clever with me again. Do not ever, ever try to lead me astray again.” Lieutenant Essart reached inside his jacket and withdrew a black Luger pistol. He held the pistol under Yves’s nose, not pointed at him, but so that Yves could smell its oily smell, see the gleam and weight of it, and feel the cold metal next to his skin. “If you ever again attempt what you just attempted with me, I will shoot you dead. And your relatives and your charming village will all come to regret your folly.”
Essart slid the gun back inside his jacket, looked into Yves’s eyes for another moment, then turned and walked out the door. He got behind the wheel of the Citroën and drove it away.
The schoolmaster was not heard from again.
VIII.
YOUNG YVES RENARD stared through the glass front of his office long after there was anything to look at. Then he turned back to his desk and sat down on the wooden chair where the schoolmaster had sat. Yves reached across the desk and took a cigarette from the blue package lying there. He had difficulty lighting it because his hands were shaking. And even when it was finally lit, the cigarette trembled so terribly that he crushed it out.
Essart was right about him, right about everything, about the game he had been playing, about his feeble attempts at deception. What had he been thinking? He had tried to outsmart and outmaneuver Essart, as though they were playing a chess game and the cleverest player would win. But it was not a chess game. And Yves was not the cleverest player. The schoolmaster would pay for Yves’s carelessness.
Yves lit another cigarette. His hands had stopped shaking enough that he could smoke it, but the smoke felt like ashes in his mouth. He thought he might vomit. He smoked anyway. When the cigarette was finished, he used it to light another.
Yves lived on the top floor of a small house on the eastern edge of town. His rented rooms—a bedroom and a small kitchen—were no more than a five-minute walk from his
office and only a ten-minute walk from the farmhouse where he had grown up as the youngest of ten children.
His parents were dead. Two brothers and two sisters were dead. His remaining brothers and sisters were much older than he. They lived nearby with their husbands and wives and children, but he rarely saw them. Saint-Léon was his world. And yet in some sense he was—had always been—a stranger here.
Yves had always liked it that way, had liked belonging and not belonging at the same time. He felt safest when he kept his distance. If he had not become a policeman, he might have been a writer. He could imagine sitting at the corner table at the Cheval Blanc and making notations in a small notebook. Being an outsider was his natural state.
Yves was engaged to Stephanie Letellier. He imagined that they might somehow always remain engaged. He regarded engagement as the perfect state. He liked the promise it held out, he liked the commitment without the intimacy of daily life. He could not imagine marriage, the sharing of happiness and boredom and anguish, the living in constant proximity to each other, eating, sleeping together, constantly taking account of each other.
When he and Stephanie made love, the ecstasy of it frightened him. He loved it and yet could not bear loving it. Afterward he could not fall asleep until Stephanie was asleep, in case some reason to flee should arise. None ever did, and her soft, round breathing soon lulled him to sleep.
When Yves’s parents had died only a few days apart, when two sisters and two brothers died one after the other, he felt with each death a simultaneous sadness and liberation. He knew it was shameful to feel that way, but he could not help it. The less sadness remained to be lived through in the future, the freer and surer of himself he felt. He imagined he would be at his freest and surest when everyone he cared about was gone.
Yves sat motionless in his office until dark. Then he stood, went out into the cold air, locked the office door, and started walking home. It was later than usual and the streets were empty. Slivers of light showed here and there through shuttered windows. He imagined that the light was trapped inside, wanting to get out. Bits of it managed to escape but then fell in small pieces on the sidewalk like something badly broken.
Yves did not know why exactly, but he did not stop at his house or even so much as glance at it as he passed. Instead he walked out into the country, following the road toward Villedieu until, after nearly two hours of walking, he arrived at the house where Stephanie lived with her mother. It was very late by now, and the house was dark. Yves knocked at the door and then knocked again. A light came on, and after a few moments Stephanie opened the door. “The schoolmaster,” said Yves. “Schoolmaster Bertrand is gone. Arrested. It is my fault.”
Stephanie brought Yves inside. Her mother got up and made tea. The two women listened while Yves told them what had happened, how it had all eluded him until too late, how it was beyond him now, how he had miscalculated, underestimated, and made every other mistake it was possible to make.
“You cannot outwit them,” he said. “You cannot bargain with them. They are different from us. Essart taught me that. The German lieutenant. They want something; I don’t know how to describe it. It is massive and bright. A blinding light. I don’t know what it is, but it is terrible to look at.” The women listened. “Can I sleep here?”
“Of course you can,” said Stephanie’s mother.
By the end of the next day, everyone in town knew of the schoolmaster’s arrest. And the day after that, it was announced that Colonel Büchner was being transferred. “He is needed back in Germany,” said Colonel Ernst Wilhelm Hollinger. “I am taking over.” He sat where Büchner had sat only two days earlier. Colonel Hollinger spoke a little French, but he chose to speak German.
Lieutenant Ludwig stood at his side and translated his words. The colonel faced the lieutenant and not the town council. He looked as though he might be dictating a letter. The mayor, the council members, the policeman sat before him and gazed at Lieutenant Ludwig as Colonel Hollinger spoke. “Tell them that things are really quite simple,” said Hollinger.
“The colonel says that things are very simple,” said Ludwig.
“Tell them that things have reached a dangerous state in Saint-Léon-sur-Dême.” He pronounced the entire name of the town, as strangers often do. “And I intend to see that things are brought under control. Disruptions of the order will not be tolerated. The next sign of insurrection will result in the harshest punishment. This will include the selection of hostages from the people of this town—from your friends and neighbors—who will then be executed. A lesson must be taught. A harsh lesson.” He waited until Ludwig had finished translating. Then he rose and, without looking in the direction of the town council, he left the room.
“That will be all for now,” said Ludwig. The members of the town council rose and left.
On the square in front of the Cheval Blanc, the mayor pulled Yves aside. “Come with me, Renard,” he said. “Come to my office. We have to talk.” When they were seated at the mayor’s desk, Schneider opened a drawer. He took out a bottle of cognac and two glasses. He raised his eyebrows in Yves’s direction.
“Yes, thank you,” said Yves, and the mayor poured two drinks.
“À la votre, your health,” said the mayor. He drank down the cognac. “We’re in a tough spot, Renard.”
Yves nodded in agreement. “We are.” He lowered his eyes. He took a sip from his glass.
The mayor decided to try another tack. “You seemed to be on to Bertrand from the start.”
Yves did not answer.
“The schoolmaster,” said the mayor. “He really went after you, didn’t he?” He held up a copy of the pamphlet. “He said you were one of them. ‘Under their thumb,’ he said. He all but called you a Nazi. Of course he went after all of us, the whole town council. He even included himself, just to throw everyone off the scent. What a shit!”
The mayor looked at Yves, but Yves kept his gaze down and sipped from his glass. “I can’t figure you out, Renard. I have to admit, I didn’t like you. And I still don’t know what to think. But now we’re in a hard place, you and I especially, and, to some extent, the others of course. But you and I especially. The pamphlet thing’s finished now with Bertrand out of the picture, but some other crap is going to happen sooner or later, more communist graffiti, another newspaper—something. And Hollinger is serious. They’re going to start killing people.”
The mayor paused and thought. The two men sat in silence for several minutes. Finally the mayor said, “You know about that meeting of mayors and police chiefs in Tours on the afternoon of the twentieth, right? Okay, it will mostly be about the latest changes in Vichy and at the Vichy border. They’re replacing the army with customs people and motorcycles and dogs. Which should stop a lot of the easy back and forth. But it won’t make a big difference. It’s supposed to make it harder for the communists to get up to their shit, but who knows. And for the Jews to cross. There may be some other useful information at the meeting. It doesn’t have much to do with us, but we still ought to go. You should go. We should drive down together and talk about our strategy. Mainly how we keep from getting shot. From getting our people shot.”
It was raining hard the afternoon of February 20, when the mayor stopped his car outside Yves’s office. The policeman sprinted out and jumped in the car. “Whew!” shouted the mayor with a laugh. He put the car in gear and they drove away. Jean Josquin stood in the mechanic’s shop door and watched them go.
The mayor leaned forward, peering hard through the windshield. The rain was coming down hard. Yves stared at the fields and houses through the downpour. The first jonquils were sticking up through the gray earth. Their buds were bright yellow and only a day or two away from opening, and yet he hadn’t noticed them before. It was the first rain in some time. Maybe they had just come up. Yves wondered that such a thing as spring could even be possible in a world like this.
The meeting at the provisional Hôtel de Ville—the old building had
been damaged in the bombardment—was presided over by French functionaries. They read legalistic proclamations and explained why this law or that provision was crucial to the future of France and to the success of the collaboration. They announced new regulations and requirements for movement between occupied and Vichy France. They opened the floor to questions, and several mayors, mainly from towns along the Vichy border, asked about the implementation of the new stricter controls. What about the free movement of their citizens? they wondered. They would be given passes if at all possible, said one of the speakers, but some concession had to be made to the security of the country. The German officers seated around the back edge of the meeting room remained silent throughout the meeting. They left the room as soon as the meeting was over.
“Do you see anyone you recognize?” said Schneider. He knew a few of the other mayors. “Come on, let’s go over,” he said. He and Yves joined a small knot of mayors and policemen.
“Hey, it’s Michel. You had to come all the way down for this?”
“Oh, it seemed like a good idea to keep up with things. How are you, Eduard? How are things in Saint-Pierre?”
“Okay. You know. And Saint-Léon?”
“Fine,” said Michel. “Have you met my gendarme? Yves Renard.”
“Did you run into that rainstorm on the way in?”
“It was unbelievable. I had to pull over, it was coming down so hard.”
“It should be easier going home. It’s mostly stopped.”
“There were jonquils,” said Yves.
“What?” said the mayor of Saint-Pierre.
“Jonquils are out. It’s almost spring.”
“My gendarme likes flowers,” said Michel, and everybody laughed.
* * *
The rain had stopped and it was clearing. The sun had just set and the sky turned golden. Michel Schneider and Yves drove across the Loire on the battered stone bridge. There were still piles of rubble at either end from the battles the previous June. At the top of the hill, the mayor turned the car toward the east.
The Resistance Page 10
