Hunting Ground

by J. Robert Janes

  4

  ‘The Louvre, please. The office of Middle Eastern Art and Antiquities, Egyptian desk. A Madame Dominique Vuitton. Yes … Yes, of course I’ll wait.’

  Those dusty back corridors will ring with her steps. The confusion at the Gare de Lyon is the usual—streams of hurrying, indifferent people, trains coming, others leaving. Paris again—I can’t believe I’m really here.

  From Besançon I caught the train to Dijon, and from there to here. Ah, mon Dieu, the destruction along the way. Locomotives on their sides, tracks ripped up—delays and delays while the work crews repaired things. Whole villages in ruins, parts of towns but shattered shells. A country awakening from the ravages of war, but I must confess, the sight of locomotive boilers ripped apart still continues to excite me. A fistful of properly placed plastic can do a lot. You mould it against a bearing housing out of sight. It’s just like bread dough. You make a rope and tuck it up against a rail …

  ‘Madame … madame, this is Lily. I thought you’d like to hear from me personally.’

  As with Dupuis and Jules, there is a momentary silence as she wonders if the sound of my voice is correct, but finally says, ‘You can’t be Lily de St-Germain. She died in a concentration camp.’

  ‘Oh? Which one, please?’

  ‘Bergen-Belsen.’

  The acid’s there, and I let her hear the traffic in the station. ‘Madame, you and the others are to meet me at the house. That’s where things began, and that’s where they’ll end.’

  ‘Dupuis has gone to Zurich.’

  ‘Good!’

  ‘You’re crazy. We’ll never agree to meet you.’

  ‘Madame, the Résistance and its tribunals may have cleared you for lack of evidence, but I’ve come back to put the icing on the cake. You’ve a choice, n’est-ce pas? Either we meet at the house, or I go directly to them now.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Which station do you think?’

  I leave the receiver dangling. I pick up my little cardboard suitcase and walk away from the counter of this bar, on which I found the telephone and purchased the still necessary jeton for the call. There are no SS hanging about, no plainclothes Gestapo, either, or gestapistes français, and this I can’t understand at first. Just Parisian flics with their hem-leaded capes and white, leather-covered, lead-weighted truncheons, and those boys, they’re the same as ever. Not dampened at all by what happened and what they did to help it happen. You’d think they’d all been in the Résistance, just like everyone else.

  The taxi driver sucks on a dead fag and gives me a disdainful look as if I didn’t have a sou. This hasn’t changed much, either, but he’s had to put up with operating a vélo-taxi for four years, so there’s a hint of humbleness when he realizes I might have suffered and actually been in the Résistance.

  We negotiate. Me, I don’t want to waste money, but time is essential and the request a little unusual. ‘I’ll pay you in Swiss francs, which you can readily exchange on the black bourse for American dollars.’

  ‘Get in.’

  I’ve hit the right nerve. He won’t say another thing. In silence, I’ll close my eyes and talk to Michèle and Simone, to Tommy especially and to the others. I’ll say, Hey, mes amis, I’m finally going home.

  From Milly-la-Fôret, the road runs east into the forest, winding a little past some hills and valleys where the aqueducts are quite clearly seen below and to the left. We climb a little more, reach the hill called the “mountain,” la montagne, and finally turn towards Arbonne. Then it’s east again and on to Fontainebleau. Every tree and hill and rock and valley bears a name, for the French pride themselves in calling each part of their wilderness something apt and lovingly descriptive. It was the winter of 1940 when I made this same journey with Tommy, dusk already, just as now, but then there was snow, and among the trees I knew there would be no other sound but its soft falling. A hush that was and still is so beautiful.

  Tommy was at the wheel. Two months it had taken us to leave England. The British—my God, they could be stubborn. The Winter War in Finland was the excuse. The Russians and the Finns, the Nazis waiting.

  Through the long tunnel of the forest, the road ran beneath branches to which the snow clung, and that, too, was beautiful, but there were ruts in the road, those of the woodcutters’ wagons. I searched, I hunted for something more to still the aching in my heart, for we’d hardly spoken.

  ‘Stop! Stop here.’

  ‘Jésus merde alors, madame, are you crazy,’ exclaims the taxi driver. ‘There’s nothing here.’

  ‘There is! Please just do as I’ve asked.’

  He swings the taxi round and leaves me at the side of the road with a flute of the lips and a kiss of three upraised fingers.

  I wait until he’s out of sight, then let the forest come back to me, the scent of it, the autumn feel that is now almost winter—in late November 1945 not January 1940, though, as it was when Tommy said, ‘Lily, please don’t do this. Let me come with you.’

  I had shook my head. Snowflakes melted as they hit the windscreen. ‘For us, it’s over. I have to be with my children.’

  ‘Your husband mightn’t let you stay.’

  ‘Even though it’s a fake, he wants the tiara back, and the rest of that box of his father’s mistress. This he has agreed to in exchange for my returning it.’

  Tommy knew that to say he was sorry was senseless, but he did try to say something and I should have let him finish. ‘Lily, that tiara … Jules might …’

  ‘Hurt me? Why should he, please, if it’s worthless and I’m bringing it back?’

  ‘Anger. Pride. Talk—I can give you lots of reasons. Fear for one. Fear of what I might now do.’

  ‘The police, the Sûreté?’ I said, reaching for the door handle. ‘He doesn’t know what you do, so why should he think you’d be interested in that thing or that you even know of it? He never once blamed you for having stolen it from him, only me.’

  As I walked away, I knew he was watching. At first, I refused to turn to look back at him, but then I did, to see him raise an open hand, a last gesture, a final farewell.

  The tall iron gates have ice-cold spikes like bars! I clutch them. I stand here looking off towards the house I once called a château. The lawns are all overgrown, the grasses tangled. Some of the shutters have been closed but are splintered—smashed! One swings and bangs in the wind. What glass there is reflects the autumn shadows of the late afternoon.

  The pockmarks of bullets are sprayed across the coral pink of those stuccoed walls. Grenades have exploded.

  I bow my head, cling to those bars, and try to shut out all that has happened since, try not to think of anything but that day, but it’s impossible, for over and over again the belt falls on my naked back as, through bruised and battered lips, I yell, ‘I know nothing!’ Choking, vomiting, I cry out again and am knocked to the floor.

  They have shaved my head and all the rest, but finally some sense returns and I hear myself saying, ‘Lily … Lily, what is this?’ and angrily wipe the tears away. ‘Idiote, try to get a hold of yourself. Ignore the DANGER: DÉFENCE D’ENTRER PAR ORDRE of that signboard. Get back to the 22 January 1940 at four on that afternoon: sixteen hundred hours, damn you!’

  Smoke curled from the chimneys then, but mostly it was from that of my kitchen. My suitcase was of leather, not cardboard as now. My steps were uncertain, just as now, the wrought-iron gate stiff with the frost, though, not rust. It wouldn’t close behind me then and it doesn’t want to now.

  I didn’t go to the front door. I went round the back to my courtyard with its orange-red walls of brick and stood looking out through the orchard, already deep in its winter. Each tree was so beautiful, I felt I could reach out to touch the bark and be as one with it. I desperately needed friends.

  Marcel was waiting for me. A line of his washing hung above the stove. Some woollen socks, two shirts, a smock, a pair of trousers, and one of underpants. A dishcloth was grey.

  �
�Well, Lily, so you’re back at last.’

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘Me?’ He dug three fingers under the dirty red neckerchief and tugged. ‘I’m simply looking after this place in your absence.’

  ‘Where are the children?’

  ‘Must you bristle like a wounded sow? They’re with Georges and that wife of his, at least they will be when Jean-Guy gets home from school. Jules has made his peace with those two, but since he’s told them you’ll be back, they’ve been keeping to themselves.’

  And in a huff, no doubt. ‘Is he very angry?’

  Marcel coughed—wheezed in terribly and hawked up such a wad he had to chew it before spitting into the firebox. ‘Jules,’ he muttered, savouring the moment. ‘If you mean about that bit of paste you lifted and the rest of those things, then ah, oui, oui, bien sûr.’

  Yet he had let me come back. I pulled off my gloves and dropped them into a chair. ‘And the rest?’ I asked. ‘That other business?’

  ‘Your ass.’ Marcel savoured that, too, and went on, ‘Me, I wouldn’t know since that little sister of yours still wraps the warmth of her lovely chatte about his bitte whenever she feels the need or he does. They dine out most nights, of course, and yes, I think she might be putting on a bit of weight.’

  Was there cruelty now? ‘What, exactly, do you mean?’

  The buttons of his flies were undone. He looked at them, then up at me before pulling in his stomach and going to work.

  ‘Is she pregnant, damn it?’ I stamped a foot.

  No one could shrug like Marcel. The gesture said so many things like, Merde, why should I care?

  ‘I think so. Yes … yes, she has that look about her. Like a croissant that has been stuffed with almond paste but before it’s been shoved into the oven.’

  Two months … three. Jules wouldn’t have cared about Nini. To have fathered children by us both would have been a tale to tell all others, if only to save face, knowing, of course, what they’d all be saying about him behind his back.

  ‘I’d better go and get the children.’

  Marcel tossed his head, arching those bushy black eyebrows of his as he gestured expansively and said, ‘Why tempt the fates? Why not give them a little surprise and save yourself a lot of grief? Let’s have some coffee. Let’s try not to hate each other. I think you need a friend, and as for myself, I’m perfectly willing to let bygones be bygones.’

  ‘What the hell is it that you really want?’

  ‘In return for my friendship and loyalty?’ He wiped that swarthy nose with a knuckle. ‘A look, I think, at that thing you’ve brought back.’

  The tiara. ‘It’s in my suitcase with the box. It’s all there, even the earrings that his father gave me.’

  Marcel found us two cups and filled them, adding a liberal dash of cognac to both and a little more to his own. Pawing through my lingerie, he took out that box, for I’d wrapped it in a slip and Tommy had, of course, smuggled it back into the country.

  Greed has a way of lying just beneath the skin. Marcel’s pores were craters whose hollows were filled with black, but there were also bumps that seem to breathe, red swellings that the years and the drink had only encouraged. ‘So, it’s really back,’ he said, and heaved a grateful sigh, still couldn’t believe what was in his hands.

  ‘Now maybe, mon ami, you’d be good enough to tell me how you two came by such a thing in the first place? That’s exactly as the tiara of the Empress Eugénie would be if it was real.’

  He was startled. ‘Me? But I had nothing to do with this. I only learned of it from your son.’

  Timidly, I touch one half of the kitchen door. I rub one of the windowpanes and peer inside. Cobwebs are everywhere. Everywhere there’s rubbish. No furniture—not even my kitchen table, on which I used to knead the bread dough and cut or shape it into sculptures.

  A litter of broken plaster lies where I used to stand. The bare ribs of the lathing are exposed in the ceiling above. There are old rags, glass, bits of china—Marie’s Peter Pan bowl, her coveralls …

  Some pots. Splintered boards. Clots of dust. They even took the stove. Soot marks the place where the chimney pipe was torn away. The door to my storeroom is gone, but a corner of splintered shelving reveals that it is empty, and I can’t move, can’t breathe. It’s all rushing back to me. ‘Jean-Guy,’ I cried out. ‘Marie … darlings, look who’s here.’

  ‘Maman!’ They flung themselves into my arms. Wet kisses, hugs, and caresses. They were all over me like puppies, and I was all over them.

  I throw a shoulder against the door. In anger, I kick and shove, but it’s useless. I haven’t the strength. What have they done to me in the camps?

  The coach house is empty—more debris, more litter. No packing cases. None, only broken bales of mouldy straw and brass shell casings—9 mms, some 7.92’s, a blood-soaked German tunic, and forage cap. These guys were from the Waffen SS.

  A rusty crowbar. I bring it down at that kitchen door of mine and hear the glass shatter, hear the sound of a Messerschmitt’s guns, the explosions of its cannon shells as they hit the road, the car, the kids, and myself. God help us, everything! Jésus … cher Jésus …

  Dust settles on the road as a stunned silence enters and the door swings open. There is a last tinkle of falling glass, a silence that reminds me of that road during the great Exodus from Paris immediately before the fall of France, but then I’m back here in time again, back to that January 1940.

  We sat before the stove, the three of us. Marcel had taken himself off, and I didn’t care where. I had an arm around each of them. It was very cosy and all the rest, and we watched the flames through the little gaps of the draught plate in the firebox door. The aroma of baking bread warmed us and to this was added the scent of the split pine, which crackled as it burned.

  Marie tugged at my sleeve and lifted her big hazel eyes to mine. ‘Maman, qu’est-ce qu’une salope?’

  For a moment, I couldn’t answer. Georges and Tante Marie were behind this, but what else had they said?

  ‘A woman who has been unfaithful to her husband.’

  ‘Unfaithful …’ Marie puzzled over this. She scrunched up her nose and twisted her mouth from side to side. ‘Is it like animals?’ she asked.

  Jean-Guy said nothing but, from his stillness, I knew he was alarmed and I wondered what was being said at school.

  He was not long in confessing. ‘You ran away with Monsieur Tommy. Everyone says you did.’

  ‘And what did you tell them?’

  ‘That he was good and kind, and that he’s going to come back if Papa doesn’t look after you better!’

  Wisdom in a child? Note this, too. Note also that my son had been placed in a most delicate position. On the one hand, there was his father, whom he still adored. On the other, was Tommy, whom he missed with a small boy’s longing. It wasn’t fair.

  In the morning, we went for a hike. I had to see the stone tower again, had to look over the forest. Tea from the thermos in hand, and the children nestled against me, I tried to forget things, tried just to let us be ourselves as it was before, but when three biplane fighters drifted lazily over the woods from the little airfield near mother’s farm, Jean-Guy insisted they were Morane-Saulniers. ‘Four-zero-sixes, maman, just like the model that hangs above my bed.’

  The one I had patiently helped him to build, that father of his having seldom been home and of far too little patience.

  The fighters began to climb. Like graceful birds above the tapestry of winter, they soared. Each of them rolled over and over as they fell away and the sound of their engines gradually dwindled on the frosty air.

  ‘Flut … plut! Flut … plut! Prr …’ Marie giggled. Pursing her lips, she gave the engine noise again then frowned fiercely and said, ‘Dive … Dive … Mm-rmm! Blum, blum … T-te! T-te! Mm-rmm! Look, Jean-Guy, they’re coming around for another pass. They’ll machine-gun all those dirty Poles. Kill! Kill them! T-t-te! T-t-t-t-te!’

  We
had had some visitors, fresh from the war in Poland, and I hadn’t known of it until then, but they hadn’t been Polish refugees, you understand. Marie had only picked up what Tante Marie and Georges must have repeated in the kitchen.

  There’s the broken head of a china doll in my hand. I’ve obviously retrieved it from the rubbish at my feet, but have no memory of having done. It was one of Marie’s favourites, and I set it carefully on an overturned packing case to remind Jules of our little daughter. Then I’m right back there again, living in the past.

  ‘Marcel, another cognac? Me, I think I need it.’

  ‘You were never much of a drinker, Lily. Why not tell me the reason.’

  I gave the usual gesture. ‘This place, I guess. Coming back to it feels strange. Has something happened in my absence?’

  ‘The shipments from the Louvre. The crates that are stored in the attic and in the coach house.’

  ‘A few parties perhaps? Some new friends? That sort of thing?’

  He snorted, laid his eyes on me and grinned. ‘I wouldn’t wish to say.’

  ‘Then tell me of that husband of mine. What’s he been up to, besides my sister?’

  ‘The tiara? How should I know?’

  ‘The friends, the new ones, who were they?’

  ‘Wise men from Berlin via Poland and then Switzerland, I think, and following their star.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘That I shouldn’t tell you but will.’

  ‘The price, please?’

  He threw more wood on the fire. ‘Your trust. Your friendship. I’m not all bad. Oh, for sure, I like to fiddle a bit and borrow when I can’t possibly repay, but soon one will have to decide, eh? You, me, that old whore down the road with her shrew eyes and that husband of hers with his sticky fingers. All of us will need friends we can absolutely trust. Take me on credit so that when the time comes, the bank will repay you.’

  ‘Trust? You? Merde alors, why should I?’

  He tossed off the cognac and reached for the bottle to pour himself another large one. ‘Because, ma chère, your husband is digging his own grave and ours.’