When the soup is finished, Magdalen carries in a tray on which there is what looks like a length of broom handle, a great mound of white cheese, a large pat of butter, a few cloves of garlic still in their purple skins, a small pewter pitcher, and a stone basin filled with boiled potatoes, steaming. With Claude’s gentle humming as accompaniment, Magdalen begins pounding at the potatoes, heaving in cheese and pounding again, some butter, then milk from the pitcher, a good whack with the wooden thing upon the garlic, and she slips the cloves from their skins, flings them into the basin. More pounding, more cheese, more butter, three fat pinches of sea salt from the salière on the table, more pounding still until she begins to raise the mass from the basin with the wooden thing, pulling it up higher and higher into thick white strings, beating it back down, pulling it up again, and then finally walking about the table to serve it in our bread-wiped bowls.
“Aligoté,” she tells me before I can ask her.
She stays seated at the table while the others begin to clear, gestures for me to put down the plates I’ve taken up, to sit next to her. “Bring your glass, Solange.”
She pours wine into it and into hers. Looks at me and smiles. “Lily will take Amandine and Claude up to your room, light the fire. Whenever Lily is home, Claude begs to sleep in her room. I imagine there will be all sorts of strategies about who will sleep where tonight. Are you well?”
“Oh, yes. We’re well. And thank you for—”
Shaking her head, fluttering the back of her hand in dismissal, she says, “We grow food for the Résistance. Wheat for bread. Our herds are a good size. We have a small dairy. Bread and cheese. It’s what they need most. We grow vegetables and corn. Sugar beet. We keep something for us. My husband, like many of the men who fought in the Great War, never stopped. And since this all began, this latest … it’s a question of conscience. He must fight. He cannot accept defeat. He’s that kind of French. We had this house, the land, he found a way for us to fight with these. Empty bellies can’t think, can’t rest, can’t believe. Instead they begin to believe what the fuller-bellied enemy tells them. Hunger versus satiety, that’s really what it comes down to. War. Empty bellies make traitors. We feed people. There is a prison in Clermont-Ferrand. When we’re not working in the fields or the dairy, we work in a kitchen near the prison. The Vichy fiends have granted us permission to bring one hot meal a day to the prisoners. Their duty to feed them they’d somehow overlooked. Death by starvation is far uglier than a bullet in the skull. So we cook soup, make parcels, buy soap and wool on the black market, knit socks and scarves. We bury the dead. We do what Vichy doesn’t do.”
We have moved into the kitchen, where three of the women work without a single wasted motion, sweeping, scrubbing pots, placing dishes and cups and cutlery in their proper places. Magdalen has seated me at the table, where she sets about whacking apart four or five small yellow pumpkins, places the pieces on a metal tray.
“They’ll cook overnight in the embers. Soup again tomorrow. We eat what’s ripe, and right now that means cabbage and pumpkin. We save the preserved things to bring to the prison. Or to take with us should we have to flee …”
She shakes her head, laughs, wipes her hands—small, long-fingered—down the length of her apron, removes a guttering candle from a pewter holder, lights a fresh one with its flame. Sits down again.
“Lily and Jacques are almost never here. They have other work.”
“Lily has told me. They take people out of the country.”
“If you decide—”
“I won’t.”
“Stay as long as you’d like. There’s work here and on the farm. Choose which would suit you. Amandine can have her lessons with Claude. A classroom in the church. We have a teacher. Three hours in the morning. Sometimes the children sleep in the colombier, though I think it’s already too cold for that. Three more children are arriving tomorrow. No adults. They’re Jews. Claude’s mother was Dutch, her father Algerian. Both naturalized French citizens. Jews. All the laws broke down early for the Jews. No rights. They gave Claude over to … They put her in the line when she was three. A few months past three. Before the occupation. They knew what was coming. When they left her, they also left her history. Photos and letters, keepsakes. Most parents who leave their children want to believe it will be only for a while, that they shall somehow be spared, reunited. Two wooden boxes locked in a valise, they were sent on to an orphanage in Switzerland, the place where she is expected. Her history will be waiting for her.”
“No word from Claude’s parents?”
“There is word. Both missing. We’ll get her to Switzerland. It wants time. Is that what happened to Amandine?”
I look at her, shake my head.
“It’s only that you look nothing alike and she calls you Solange and …”
“You’re right, she’s not my daughter. But her parents, they, their absence from her life has been—”
“I need no explanation. I’d only wondered about—”
“I’ve told Lily and your husband, Amandine is not Jewish.”
“I’ll not ask you again.”
“But you must allow me to thank you, you and Lily, your husband, for helping us to get so much closer to home.”
“Will you stay for a while?”
“You can imagine how tempted I am. A paradise here. On the road we never know, from day to day—”
“Nor do I know. Once inside the Résistance, the only way out is death. It’s a mantra we all share. Life expectancy, six weeks. Not so true for people who do what we do up here, but quite true for the others. Those ‘in the field.’ When I see my husband or Lily, I never know if it will be the last time. Will he or she or one of the others, will they be stopped on the road with one of our ‘guests’? Interrogation, torture, execution. Not such a paradise. Oh, inside these walls, the fire and the soup … But beyond them …”
She fills the silence by rinsing the pumpkin seeds under the tap in the sink, pulling them from the mass of strings and pulp. She dries them in a kitchen cloth, spreads them out in a large skillet, sets it aside. She dries her hands on her apron again, leans against the sink, folds her arms across her chest.
I want to talk longer with this Magdalen but fear she is ready to send me off upstairs.
“Lily. She’s so young.”
“Nineteen. Most of the women in this business are young. Their men gone, husbands, lovers, fathers, brothers, they either take up with the boche or fight. Whatever way they can. I think solitude has much to do with it. We, we elders, it’s we who have brought down the evils. Made victims of the young. They’re lost trying to wander the paths we’ve laid. To feel less lost, they submit to the romance of danger. The thrill. They deliver packages, they hide arms. They set up transmitters, shelter Jews, arrange for false documents. Lily has a white velvet hat with a white, blowsy rose in the front and the good black suit I was married in twenty years ago and suede sandals with heels thin as blades and, when she dresses in this costume, sits across from some schnapps-bloated boche in Vichy, she begets wonders. The prison program in Clermont-Ferrand is hers. Then, in boots and hunting jacket and with a Luger in her belt, she walks children from safe house to safe house across the mountains. There are legions like her. I and the mothers of all of them, we should have given our daughters the same name. We should have called them France. The youngest ones are the students from the universities in the bigger cities, the ones who, tottering about on their high heels, rendezvous with the boche, glean names and dates, times and places. Those who are a bit older usually operate more rurally. Crack shots, warrior saints. France’s secret weapons. Those are the ones you’ll meet up with as you proceed.”
As you proceed. Her voice, her words, over and over during that night I felt something like envy, I think that’s what it was. Envy of these others, how they are living out the war with purpose. Raison d’être. All my energy was taken up in trying to keep us fed. Out of harm’s way. Once we are home, I will be able to
help. Of course we could stay here and join them. We could do that. I think that’s what Magdalen and even Lily want us to do, expect us to do, and yet, as alluring a prospect as it seems right now, I am too weary of living in other people’s houses, living other people’s lives. I want to take Amandine home. I think for right now that’s my job in this war.
Though Amandine pleaded to take Claude with us, she, too, was ready to return to our journey by the time we’d stayed three nights at La Châtaigneraie. Each in our way, we knew that staying longer would be staying too long. On the evening when I told Magdalen that we’d be starting off in the morning, she said, “As you wish.”
She walked about the kitchen, hands on her hips. “This is not bicycle country. Leave it here. Leave most everything here except your clothes. I knew you wouldn’t stay. I’ve found some heavier things for both of you. Coats, boots. From here on you won’t need to walk much. Each place where you’ll stay, the people will take you on to the next. I can’t show you the route on a map or even talk you through it. The shortest, fastest way will never be yours. But you know all that by now. A little progress north, then to the west, back to the south, a better road north. Weather, boche movement, changes in our ranks, food and petrol supplies—routes and timing change according to these. You might be driven only a few kilometers one day, thirty or forty another. If the snows come early, you’ll have to stay put. For a while. You will not always be warm or even comfortable, but you will always eat. Always be welcome. People will do the thinking, the deciding, the contacting for you. In some way, you’re part of us now. You may be asked to take along a parcel to the next place, deliver a verbal message. Nothing more.”
“No white, blowsy rose?”
“No Luger either.”
“And what if I want to do more?”
It felt strange to tumble into the back of an auto or to climb up into the bed of a truck driven by someone whose name we didn’t know, whose face we saw only in shadow for a morning’s desolate expedition. Breasting black volcanic hills one after another until shreds of chimney smoke heralded our destination, we would stop then, leave the auto or the truck in a blind and trek to some ancestral farmhouse or hunting lodge or bunker. The women whom Magdalen said we’d find were always there. Sometimes in groups, sometimes alone with their children, they barely broke stride to greet us, feed us, bed us down. We’d stay for a day, sometimes for a month. I did as Magdalen said I should, I let them decide. Around their oilclothed kitchen tables, in attics and cellars, and in the hides where they kept grain and aged their cheese, they plotted shelters, organized their stores, made pallets where other people’s children could sleep. They worked the fields, stirred the soup, suckled their babies, oiled their guns, nursed the wounded, reddened their lips with the ash of crushed bricks, and rimmed their eyes with a shard of charcoaled wood pulled from the fire.
CHAPTER XXXIV
April 1941: A Village in Bourgogne
SOLANGE LOOKS ABOUT AS THOUGH SHE HAS ONLY JUST AWAKENED, uncertain of where she is, even with whom she has been talking. Or if she has. She looks then at the woman who sits on the small sofa facing her, a meter or so across the rose and blue carpet from the chaise longue where she lies.
Of course, the woman. This Dominique. Brown curls clipped like the short mane of a carousel horse, pale skin, brownish eyes full of light like tea in a thin white cup. Wide-legged trousers and a jacket, black leather worn to brown, her bare feet tucked under her on the sofa. Dominique.
“What time is it? How long have we been sitting here? I, forgive me, it’s only that—”
“Nothing to forgive. You slept a bit. And when you awakened, you began to tell me of your journey. I was content to listen.”
“Our position, I know that we’re in Bourgogne, but will you tell me more precisely where we are?”
“Six kilometers from Auxerre. On the river Yonne. A hundred souls live in the village. Our rations are almost always full. The church, the elementary school, and, to some degree, the mairie, all function quite normally. The patron of this house was the village doctor. A Jew. When the boche requisitioned it, he and his wife were, they were ‘relocated.’”
Solange rises, walks about the room, takes up a photo from its place on a small table, looks at it, puts it down. Everything seems in order, perhaps just as it was when the doctor and his wife lived there.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” asks Dominique. “The house. The garden, especially the garden, we’ll walk out there later. And down to the river, if you’d like.”
“Yes, Amandine will like—She hasn’t awakened? All this time?”
“Not a sound from her. I went to check earlier, and she hadn’t even changed position. She was, you both were so tired.”
“May I ask you something? Our driver, when she left us at the edge of the village this morning, she told us to cross the square, said that, on the other side of a small pinewood, we would find a house. Find you. It was just before noon, I think, and, as we hurried along we saw what looked like a flower seller’s cart overturned under the trees, near the gazebo. Violets and iris and white roses. Amandine ran to where the flowers lay, began to gather them, not to take but to save. She’d righted the cart, you see, and had set about to put things in order, but I told her that it would be best for us to find the house first. That surely someone else would see about the flowers. I’m not certain how to explain it, but I felt fearful there. No, that’s not it.… It was as though fear was all about the place. As though everyone had run away. Loaves set to cool on a windowsill, the flowers strewn on the cobbles, but no one about. I looked up at the windows, nothing. Not a sound. Amandine had to run to keep up with me. I couldn’t wait to find you. I was grateful that the house was so close by. What was it there? What happened?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all. It’s only that everyone was at table or already under the covers, resting. You’ve been too long in the hills. Everything is tranquil enough here. A model occupied village. You know they were billeted here for months, the boche. Some right here in this house. Most of them in the village center. When they left, the women waved handkerchiefs from their upstairs windows, the men shook hands with them.”
“And you, a résistante, were you here when they were?”
“I was cook and housekeeper to the boche. A good story, which I’ll save for another time. Should we meet again after all this is finished.”
“You were a collabò?”
“I might have given that impression. We shall not speak of anything more about me. Will you agree to that? By now you must be at ease with omissions, silence.”
“Yes. At ease.”
“The armoires and commodes in the rooms upstairs are full of clothes. Help yourself. Once in a while, I wear Madame’s things. A blouse, lingerie, a nightdress. In the room where Amandine is sleeping, you’ll find something there. There are some sweaters that might do for her, though—”
“Thank you. I’ll wake her so she can bathe. She’ll be happy to walk to the river. We’ll be down in just a while.”
“No reason to rush. We have cheese and bread. A jar of apricots. The kitchen is cold, so I’ll stir up the fire and set us up in here. I have some information about the next part of your journey.”
“Will we leave tomorrow?”
“I think it will be the day after. Sunday. All the way north from what I understand. The rest of the way. Though you know not to count on …”
“I do.”
“I hope that you’ll rest well here, Solange. Things are somewhat different than they were in the places where you’ve been staying. The only things anyone hunts around here are wild hares.”
“Where are you from? I mean, now that they’ve gone, why are you still here?”
“Nothing about me. Remember?”
“Dominique said that we might find something to wear. After baths, shall we have a look?” asks Solange.
“I’ll choose for you and you choose for me, okay?”
Wrapped in a
towel, her hair in another, Amandine drags a small upholstered chair up to the open doors of an armoire, climbs upon it, considers each dress and jacket and blouse, pushing aside the satin-padded hangers faster and faster until, “This is it. Look, Solange. Look here. This is the dress I want you to wear. You’ll be beautiful as the ballerinas in Swan Lake.”
She climbs down from the chair and, over her arms, carries an icy blue chiffon evening dress. In front of the mirrored door to the bath, she holds it against herself and dances about.
“Solange, you must—”
“What in the world?”
“Say yes, please say yes. Try it, you must try it.”
How strange this laughter sounds. Is it us, laughing and screaming as though …
“Too big,” says Solange even before the dress is settled into place.
“Not so much … hold still.…”
“It fastens with these little hooks. Be careful or you’ll tear it. It is lovely, isn’t it, but we’re going down to the river and then coming back to eat cheese and apricots by the fire. It’s hardly the dress for—”
“Just show Dominique. Please, please.”
“And you, what will you wear, little one? Your tulle skirt is practically in shreds, and none of Madame’s things will do for you.”
“I’ll just wear my sweater and the corduroy pants. They’re still sort of clean.”
Solange says, “I have a better idea. The tulle skirt with my yellow sweater. I haven’t worn it since the day we left the convent, and it will cover most of the damaged parts of the skirt. You’ll be a vision.”
For each satin loop Solange fastens over a pearl button on the yellow sweater, Amandine kisses another part of her face.
“Hurry, hurry, I want to see.”
“Be patient, little one, these loops are so small and you keep moving.”
How thin she is. Thinner than she was always? Perhaps not. Taller, though, far taller over these ten months, and what flesh she has is taut and hard, good muscles in her calves, her thighs. But so thin.
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