by Hilton, Lisa
Madame Teulière had wheeled Bernard Vionne outside, despite the cold. They’d had a time of it lifting poor Jean-Marc into the attic. Madame Teuliere had said why couldn’t Bernard hide in the attic for that matter, but Laurent’s plan was that some of the refractaires had to be recognized as other people, if they all just vanished it would be too suspicious. They had to make a distraction. Bernard sat upright in the chair, his ears stretched in opposite directions like a snail’s eyes, one for the sound of a truck and one up the stairs, anticipating the first of his old friend’s cries that would have him on the train to Germany. His fingers were wound tightly together beneath the rug that covered his knees. There were four of them climbing down, three younger and the one in charge, a great wineskin of a fellow with a huge swag of belly juddering above his belt. Reluctantly, Bernard closed his eyes and let his head loll down to his shoulder. He could hear Madame Teulière speaking to them, smell a cigarette. He pushed his breath deliberately through his nostrils, feeling it warm in the three day’s growth on his upper lip. A hand touched his shoulder.
‘Jean-Marc,’ Madame Teulière said softly.
He opened his eyes, taking care not to focus on her face, but keeping them fixed in the middle distance.
‘Can he understand me then?’ asked the fat one.
‘He seems to, sometimes. We hope so.’
‘Jean-Marc Teulière!’ bellowed in his ear so that involuntarily, Bernard jumped. ‘He heard that all right.’
‘Oh, you shouldn’t frighten him. You’ll set him off!’
The cold was digging at Bernard’s neck like a knuckle grinding into his sinew. How was it possible they could not hear his heart? He gripped the handles of the chair, forcing his weight into his stomach, controlling the desire to jump and run. He tried to keep his eyes soft and wandering vaguely over the faces of the waiting men. Madame Teulière was whispering Jean-Marc’s story, the nightmares, the useless flailing limbs. As she spoke, Bernard caught the sound of a wail beginning from the house, hatefully familiar, the snuffling gulps of a grown man preparing to scream like a child. He sensed that Jean-Marc’s mother heard it too, for she raised her voice determinedly and stroked the blanket, patting, soothing. The fat man’s blunder was his salvation then. As the first cry swelled from the house, he opened his mouth and roared, adding an upward kick of his leg for good measure. The men jumped back, shocked, and Bernard screamed with all his strength, drowning the sound of Jean-Marc’s echoing sob, joining swiftly with his mother’s shrill complaints.
‘You see, you see what you’ve done. I said he’d go off! Shame on you!’
As he screamed, it seemed to go dark before his eyes. A scent came to him, a scent he thought he had forgotten, but which now swelled to a vile stench in his nostrils. That smell of livid, peeling flesh, the smell of Laurent’s leg, skewed across Bernard’s body in the trench, Laurent’s face in still, astonished agony somehow too far away from the limb that weighed on Bernard like a live thing, creeping over him. He rolled in the stifling mud, trying to breathe, and sucked in a gobbet of warm flesh. He screamed and screamed, until he felt Madame Teulière’s hands on his shoulders, shaking at him.
‘You can stop now. Stop! They’re gone. Stop it.’
Bernard could not breathe, could not pant out the smell from his lungs. He floundered and gasped until he subsided, sobbing, into Madame Teulière’s surprised arms.
‘It’s funny,’ said Thierry as they bumped down the track, ‘I could have sworn there were two of them, just then.’
Eric laughed, ‘Watch it, you’re going gaga too! Aaagh,’ he cried, waving his arms, ‘the gas, the gas! It’s coming for me!’
Georges thought he ought to reprimand them, but he was beginning to feel slightly defeated. The next hour was spent searching fruitlessly and infuriatingly for Contier and Vionne. It was as much as they could do to get any of the Castroux people to admit to knowing them, most of their questions were met with a shrug and a muttered ‘sais pas’ which was as near as most of them seemed to get to speaking French at all.
The bell was ringing as they arrived at the schoolhouse. A dozen or so children were filing out, stooping to step into their clogs at the door, the bigger girls helping the little ones with jackets and mufflers tied across the breast like miniature bandoliers. Georges guessed that several of them would have a bitter walk home, long kilometres across the fields. Odd that he felt a stab of fear as they stepped down into the schoolroom, a forgotten anxiety returning to him even before his body gratefully registered the warmth of the fat iron stove. Behind his back, his hands washed themselves, the pressure reconjuring the burning tenderness of palms red-stripped from the cane. The feeling heightened when the figure bending to rearrange some books in a cupboard resolved itself as a priest, a tall narrow man with greying hair brushed aristocratically back from his temples. Georges saluted and the priest came forward, smiling pleasantly.
‘Good morning. Or is it just afternoon? What can I do for you, gentlemen?’
Georges felt Thierry and Eric behind him, and the consciousness of their morning’s failure fought with his natural respect for the collar and the cassock. ‘We’re very busy, Father,’ he began gravely, ‘so we won’t take up your time. I’ll come straight to the point.’
‘Please do.’
Georges felt his throat contracting dustily as it always had when it was his turn to recite the catechism. Thierry interrupted, ‘We need Boissière. François Boissière, the schoolteacher. And don’t mess us about, with respect, padre.’
If the priest was affronted, he didn’t show it. ‘Monsieur Boissière? I see. I had better fetch his wife, if you can wait a few moments.’ He passed down the room to a yellow painted door at the right of the stove that presumably connected the schoolroom with the teachers’ living quarters. Georges cleared his throat and strolled over to the bookcase to look over a copy of Molière, turning the pages with slow attention and not glancing at the others, nor did he stir at the sound of the door.
‘Dear old Harpagon?’ asked the priest. ‘One of his finest comedies, I think.’
‘I prefer the tragedies, myself,’ said Georges.
‘Of course, of course. You are the er, the superior officer, sir?’
‘Indeed.’
‘Well perhaps you would like to come and sit down in private. This is rather a delicate matter, you understand.’
Boissière’s wife was in the small sitting room of the schoolhouse, like a man in the armchair, with her big feet planted flat on the floor and her hands clasped beneath her knees. Later, to make a joke, Georges said he could see why Boissière would have preferred to get into bed with Uncle Joe. Now, he removed his cap and gratefully took the weight off his feet at her invitation. There was an arrangement of dried twigs in the empty grate. Artistic, he supposed, though the room was freezing.
‘You are looking for my husband, I imagine?’ Her educated voice showed that she was not local.
‘Yes, Madame. He is in our files, you see.’ Georges liked the sound of that.
The woman attempted to speak and then began to weep, scrambling a grubby handkerchief from the nubbly brown sleeve of her buttoned sweater and pressing it to her eyes. The priest took over.
‘I’m sorry, Monsieur, but we have all had a terrible shock. We learned recently that Madame Boissière’s husband was, is,’ he lowered his voice and cast a pained glance at the snuffling woman.
‘Yes?’ said Georges.
‘Not to put too fine a point on it, you understand—’
‘Yes?’
‘—a Communist.’
Père Guillaume had said it was impossible for them to light a brazier in the crypt. François Boissière had felt awkward at first to be confined so closely with his three former pupils, but the cold and the injunction against speech and cigarettes united them swiftly. Marcel had thoughtfully brought a pack of cards, and they played hand after hand of vingt-et-un, laying the cards down separately so they would not slap even slightly on th
e floor. None of them concentrated on the game, but it gave their eyes something to focus on besides one another’s faces, and the movement of their hands marked the time. François wanted to talk to the lads, to ask them how they thought it was that they found themselves here, but he knew better than to expect an explanation, even if they were not hiding underneath Castroux church whilst they were variously denounced and impersonated to the Milice.
He could not ascertain satisfactorily even to himself why his convictions had failed to make even a token show of themselves when René Larivière called on him to explain the warning. Nor did he understand why, when they had all met in the presbytery, Bibles clutched absurdly in their hands, he had taken a certain pleasure in selecting the Communist cover story for himself. He, who had tried to explain to the Castroux farmers that the world had changed definitively, for better or worse, that France was beaten and this must be accepted, that at least they were on the winning side in the coming battle against Communism, had suddenly found himself amused by the idea that he had run off to join the Party. He was rationalizing his own cowardice, he knew that. What he thought he believed to be correct was a puff of air, and François Boissière was revealed to himself as a man of no principle who was terrified of what he had taken pride in ignoring until it came too close.
If he could have asked the others why exactly they were here now, he knew they could not answer him. He remembered too clearly their blushes when he asked them to respond to a question, the way they had sprawled their already-powerful bodies over the forms, shoulders and biceps arguing more impressively against their imprisonment in this little room than their tongues could ever have done. At fourteen, Jean Charrot had had an almost full moustache. None of them had taken their Certificate, and in the case of Nic Dubois, François had felt guilty when he filled in the customary ‘knows how to read and write’ on the leaving paper, though the lad did have a good head for figures, which would be useful to him in the café. None of them was lazy or would ever consider himself a coward, that much François thought. If they refused their obligations now, he doubted whether they did so after any considered analysis of what was their duty. Partly it was the mulishness with which their type, the peasant type, greeted an injunction of authority, and partly the foxy delight that class took in getting the better of the same.
It was all very well for the likes of de Chazoumes to sentimentalize the rural poor, but there was no denying that they were often a bad lot. François had re-read La Terre before coming to Castroux, and had often discussed with Charlotte his surprise at the continuing accuracy of Zola’s depiction. They liked to get one over whenever they could, these people, and they didn’t consider it dishonest, just looking out for their own. That was their only principle, though it seemed that in the end he himself was no better. François did not consider then or afterwards for how many it had begun like that, doing what you could to get by until you found yourself suddenly on the wrong side of the law, with the game changed beyond recognition.
Georges was at a loss. The chair into which he had squeezed himself was very low, and the narrow wings confined him so that he was unsure that he would be able to get up with any dignity. Moreover, his paper-stuffed holster had been pushed up by the flesh of his thigh and had risen obscenely against his belly, right in the schoolmistress’s line of vision. The poor woman was obviously desperately ashamed, she repeated again and again that she was trying to compensate now by being ever stricter with the pupils, for who knew how he might have indoctrinated the big boys whilst she took the little ones for their nature walks? She had jumped up and pulled papers from her desk; extracts from the Maréchal’s speeches made by the children, her own notes on the education laws of 1940. The priest had taken over some of her husband’s lessons, and with God’s grace they were getting by, but it was a struggle to recover from such a terrible betrayal. There was more of this, a good deal more. Georges attempted to look knowledgeably at the extracts whilst thinking of a way to tell the woman that if her husband were to return it would be her duty to report him, and that he would surely go to prison.
He had impressed that on the mayor, he thought later, made that fact thoroughly clear. This observation was repeated in various formulations throughout the drive home in the humiliatingly empty truck. If any of them, Dubois, Charrot, the Vionnes, Contier, Boissière, so much as showed their faces there or anywhere else then they were under arrest. The mayor would be under arrest if he failed to report any information pertaining to their capture.
‘Is it clear, Monsieur,’ Georges had asked grandly, ‘that these men of the Saintonge commune are considered outside the law by the state. Outside the law!’ Thierry and Eric had thankfully not witnessed the priest’s effort to extract him from the armchair. Georges was unaware that they were presently puffing out their cheeks in the doorway and muttering ‘Outside the law!’
Eric was a serious young man, Georges thought, but he had his doubts about Thierry. Too keen, yet in the wrong way.
JANUARY 1944
Dispatches came by motorbicycle and sidecar twice a day, from Cahors and Monguèriac. In theory, they were to arrive by eight o’clock in the morning and three in the afternoon in winter, but the weather and the condition of the roads had made this improbable since December. Had Obersturmbannführer von Scheurenberg not been waiting irritably in his first-floor office at Esceyrac for the post to appear, smoking his fifth cigarette of the morning and watching a dimly visible work party ploddingly clear leaves from the avenue, he would have thrown the letter away after a first reading. Von Scheurenberg liked his room, with its long windows and thick pale walls and the two elongated Mannerist nymphs, delicate of wrist and ankle and robust about the hips, let into the relief around the fireplace. He guessed, from their appearance and counting the distance from Esceyrac to Fontainebleau, that they were likely late-sixteenth century. It was the sort of thing he would have liked to look up, if he had the time. But the room was overheated and stuffy, and when he opened the casement in the broader panel of glass to get some air, the January mist snaked in from the dark, straight behind his eyes so that his incipient headache became urgent. He felt dehydrated, as though his breath was foul, and pressed the bell for his orderly to fetch a carafe of water.
When it came, he asked the man if the post had arrived, although he knew that it hadn’t. There had been a letter, addressed to him personally, found in the hallway that morning. Von Scheurenberg felt able to work up quite a good rage about that, shouting that he didn’t expect to find correspondence dropped off at random like invitations to a birthday party, and where had the watch been so as not to notice people sneaking around in the grounds delivering letters in the middle of the night, and what did the man think they were here for, a rest cure? He took some time over the explosion, then sent for Wurster to have him look into it, lit another cigarette when he was alone again and thought he might as well open the white envelope, though he knew what he would find.
Monsieur Obersturmbannführer Führer,
I have the honour to draw to your attention the activities of some people who are encouraging drunkenness and idleness in this village. If you look in the barn at Nadl’s farm you will see for yourself. There are certainly some lazy people who try to escape the law.
Respectfully,
An Honest Frenchwoman
Von Scheurenberg had seen hundreds of these things, in Paris and then at Bordeaux, but this was the first he had received here and his disgust was freshened. Who were these mealy-mouthed types who had no loyalty to their own? The Nadl property was the big farm visible in the valley to the left of the chateau, he thought. Hummel had reported that some Milice men from Cahors had been there yesterday, checking up on the STO. There were two pointless organizations, both of them a wearisome waste of energy and resources. There was still no sign of the blasted post. He left the office and crossed the stone-flagged passage to the staircase, admiring as always the smoothness of the bevelled poplar wood under his hand as he descen
ded. Hummel was at his desk in what had been the salon, and as he scraped his chair back to come to attention, von Scheurenberg was glad once more that he had decided not to replace the valuable old carpets on the parquet.
‘Is that Nadl’s farm, down there?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You’d better take a couple of men and go along to see what’s going on. Contraband alcohol.’
‘That will be the old man’s still, sir.’
‘What?’
‘If you look through the window, sir, you can see the smoke. Look. He makes schnapps, sir.’
The lower reaches of the valley were still stuffed with mist, but it was lighter now, with no wind, and sure enough there were two plumes of smoke rising from the farm, one from the main building and the other, finer, from a distance away. Von Scheurenberg recalled the melon drink he had tasted in the summer, sweetish and rather charming, and the stiffer plum brandy, like a slivovitz, of which he had drunk several glasses whenever he went to the café this winter. He considered surprise followed by a lenient warning. Still, it wouldn’t do to seem sloppy.
‘Well if he hasn’t got a permit, you’d better arrest him. You can use the cellar room. Then ring up Cahors and have the Milice deal with him. And ask them what the hell is going on with their dispatches.’
‘Yes sir.’
There was refuge in irritation, von Scheurenberg was aware of that. He feared the contents of the post, feared his own truly righteous anger, because they revealed to him that hope had abruptly departed. He could muster no sincerity for the bumblings of the Milice or anonymous letters, felt himself lean and urgent with the tension of what was to come sprung constantly inside him. The men, he thought, were beginning to be afraid, and he wanted that fear from them, though he had to control it, to direct it through discipline so that it would never be dissipated by despair. Von Scheurenberg had been in Russia, but he thought that this would be worse in the end, though he could not admit of the conclusion of such thinking, as he lit his seventh cigarette and sat in his chair to wait for news.
