by Hilton, Lisa
He scrambled out of the woods at the back of the stables and bent over with his head between his knees to catch his breath. There was a mirror in the stall the division had converted into a shower-room, he should try to tidy himself up before anyone saw him, he was all over scratches, and his hair was full of moss and leaves.
Karl was splashing water on his face when he saw Willi in the mirror behind him, spooky in the lamp light.
‘Christ, you made me jump, mate.’
There was something strange about Willi’s eyes.
‘What you got there? Mate.’
Karl knew it was all done with before he began to turn around, so when he did he was not surprised to see the end of Willi’s pistol, hovering a hair’s breadth from the fabric of his tunic. The violin lay on the slippery flagged floor between them.
‘It’s that girl, isn’t it? The one with the kid? Her brother?’
Karl nodded slowly. Perhaps there was a chance of sympathy.
‘You don’t know what’s happened, do you?’
‘There was a message?’ Karl replied.
Willi lowered the snout of the gun. His face was twisted with contempt. ‘Your barmy pal has just got the fucking Toulouse train blown up at Monguèriac, see? There was a group of them in it. It was full of our lads.’
He raised the gun. ‘I should shoot you, you cunt.’
Karl thought of protesting, that he didn’t know, how could he have known, but he knew Willi. Their friendship was dead, and the only reason Willi refused to let his own anger get the better of him and blow Karl’s head off right here was because he believed in honour. Karl had never gone in for all that, had even teased Willi about his old-fashioned code, but it occurred to him now that he would be allowed to die like a gentleman. There was nothing to be afraid of.
‘Put it down then. You know you don’t need it.’
Willi put his hand to Karl’s face. Karl flinched, expecting a blow or even a caress.
Almost tenderly, Willi hooked his hand into the pips on his collar and pulled. ‘And you won’t be needing these.’
‘There’s a letter, on my bed. Could you see to that? Please, Willi?’
Willi smiled, a gentle, faraway, cruel smile. Then he saluted, banging his heels together.
‘Come.’
So they walked together side by side across the dark patch on the cobblestones where William had helped the Marquis to pour away his wine.
JUNE 1944
The sound of the bells of Castroux church counted von Scheurenberg through the night. The quarter hour struck with an extra ring for each fifteen-minute section of what was left of his life, the hour sounded deeper. It had seemed pointless to undress and lie on the bed, but if he did not he knew he would sit out the night with his cigarettes and the brandy bottle. Bernd was bad enough without a hangover. So it was precisely half past two when Hummel came in with the news of the explosion on the Monguèriac line. It had happened at midnight, a motorcyclist had just arrived. Suddenly, he felt truly sleepy on top of his exhaustion. The cruel bed now looked the gentlest, most inviting place in the world. If he could just close his eyes. Instead he rubbed at them roughly, splashed water on his face and lit a cigarette, opened the window. The air was cool now and he had seen enough night skies here to know where the constellations hovered above the landmarks in the valley, circling slowly, raptorlike, as the year moved around. There was Orion right above him.
‘Sir, excuse me, sir?’ Hummel was hovering in the doorway, undismissed. Von Scheurenberg pulled himself together, like an actor about to step out into the lights. He cleared his throat and began the barking of orders.
René had been left alone for some time, he heard the church bell strike two, then three. He wished he had a cigarette. There had been commotion, engines and running and whistles and it occurred to him that he might escape in the confusion, but he had refused to try the door and, as the time wore on, it became a strange point of honour, that he would remain here of his own free will. It was locked anyway, because he heard the key turn before a hugely obese man lumbered in, bulging out of his uniform. His fat fingers fluttered delicately on the gilt doorhandle.
‘Tell me about Monguèriac.’
‘Monguèriac?’
‘Please, Monsieur le Maire, you know what I am talking about.’
The fat man spoke French well, though his accent should have been comic. René had been surprised to find himself in this warm, pleasant room, he had imagined some medieval dungeon concealed in the cellars, dripping with slime and rats, but they were on the first floor of the chateau, in what he thought might once have been Madame La Marquise’s sitting room. The room had a deep bow window and retained an air of femininity, with its pale green walls and cream tiled fireplace. The grate was filled with a dusty oriental fan that must have been left over when the family scarpered. René had had ample time to study the little Chinese figures on the silk, busy in their pleated world. The fat man was crammed into a delicate white love seat upholstered in an apricotcoloured fabric. He looked ridiculous in this place, with the dawn just beginning to show through the long window behind him, but the quietness of his voice and the faint scent of lavender made him even more menacing.
‘Then tell me about the gun we found in the barn.’
‘Please believe me, sir. I really don’t know what you are talking about.’
‘Do you know William Aucordier?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where is he?’
‘At home, I should think.’
‘No.’
‘Then I have no idea.’
‘Very well.’
The fat man heaved himself unselfconsciously to his feet. René heard the painted wood crack, released from the strain. The fat man waddled towards the door and held it open. René was incredulous. They couldn’t be allowing him to go. Up a little twisting flight of stairs the space opened up into a long hall, dim in a single oil lamp. Réne could see paintings on the walls, Greek-looking people twined with hints of flowers. The fat man indicated another door at the end and René walked into a smaller room that had been made into an office.
‘Open the shutters, please. You see the village?’
‘Yes.’
‘All the women and the children are in the church. The men are in your little Mairie, with a few exceptions.’ He pulled a list from his pocket and read slowly. ‘William Aucordier, Laurent Nadl, François Boissière, Marcel Vionne, Jean Charrot, Nicolas Dubois. Where are they?’
‘I don’t know. I was asleep. I don’t know.’
The fat man made a show of looking disappointed. He looked back into the passage and beckoned to the two men who had pushed René up the staircase. He spoke to them and turned to René. ‘I have told them that Monsieur le Maire needs a little help refreshing his memory. When you remember, just say yes. They’ll stop helping you then.’
Von Scheurenberg was furious. Bernd’s zeal was turning the whole situation into a farce. There was the mayor in the drawing room, the women in the church, shenanigans in some disused barn, and now Unterscharführer Sternbach was holed up in the cellar, confessing to a dreary little love affair. Like some absurd boulevard comedy. He vaguely remembered the pregnant girl going quietly up and down the stairs with her laundry basket. She had pretty hair.
‘I don’t have time for this,’ he snapped at Hummel, welcoming the fury into him. ‘Get the girl, see if she’ll talk. Leave it to Bernd, shoot the pair of them if you have to. Just get rid of it.’ It was odd, Sternbach’s behaviour, he had been a fine translator and a good Panzer man. But he had Cahors on the line, it seemed they would have to swing around and use the roads as far as Limoges. How long? He stared irritably at the map in front of him, trying to calculate extra time the lost days would add to his life.
Oriane thought that things might have been different if she hadn’t had to take Jacky. His little body was warm against her, tied in her shawl, one little soft arm escaped and his fingers played curiously with the fringe. She
cupped her hand around his head as she stood in the cold stone room, looking at Karl. Karl’s face was scratched and his hands were cuffed behind his back. He stood still with his head bent, his eyes on the ground. She had known something was wrong when William hadn’t come home, but she had believed that Laurent was with him. Then William had been found at the dance with a gun and Karl had tried to save him. It was perfectly clear and made no sense.
Karl had tried to save him. She didn’t dare speak to him, and he kept his face down. His thick hair looked wet, at the parting she could see the reddish tinge where his scalp had burned in the hot sun. Later and later and later, when she remembered that, it was all there was. He would not look at her. She felt no wish to reach out to him, to touch that hair, which she had filled her mouth with, to hold up his child to his eyes that were already gone. Before everything else began, she needed to see his blue eyes. She stared at him pointlessly for a while, then one of them touched her arm and led her back to the passage, past a wooden door. She thought she could hear someone moaning. Was this where they had taken Papie?
The fat man seemed quite kind, he spoke French. He said he understood Karl was the baby’s father? She nodded. He reached out and stroked Jacky’s cheek with his fat paw, it was all Oriane could do not to jerk the child away. He could see she was a good girl, the fat man was saying, that she wouldn’t be the sort to want trouble. Did she know that her brother was a maquisard, one of Nadl’s men?
This man was a liar, Oriane thought. He was trying to trick her, but he was clever. She shouldn’t pretend not to know what he meant, he might get angry.
‘I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t see how that’s possible. William is, well, he’s a bit backward. He wouldn’t understand.’
‘Nevertheless, we have evidence.’
Did that mean he knew about the other guns, the stolen guns Oriane had kept for Laurent? Jacky had fallen asleep, his breath quick and soft against her breast, she had to be careful, so careful.
‘Sternbach was trying to help you. You know that’s a crime?’ She nodded again. ‘Now you can help him. Where is your brother?’
‘I don’t know, sir. Truly I don’t.’
The fat man poked his head into the passage and another man came in. Oriane recognized Karl’s friend Willi. Willi grabbed her suddenly and held her arms behind her back, she couldn’t struggle in case Jacky tipped out. The fat man reached into her shawl, his hand suddenly deft and quick as a heron’s beak stabbing at a pond, and pulled Jacky free. The baby began to cry, squirming and struggling, Oriane was terrified he would fall on to the stone floor. The fat man swung him back and forth like a pendulum, his legs in their tiny red woollen trousers pumping frantically at the air. Jacky was screaming, and the fat man handed him to Willi, who carried him away, closing the door. His wails grew fainter.
‘Where is your brother?’
When she couldn’t hear him crying she would have no more time left to decide. There was no great moment of choice. William died as she opened her mouth. What woke her screaming for the rest of her life was not what happened later, as Ginette came to believe, but her uncertainty afterwards that as she looked into the fat man’s expectant face it was not Karl she meant to save, that she wanted to see his eyes on her one last time, with hunger in them.
JUNE 1944
René had read very few books in his life, but when they went on their yearly holiday to his wife’s family at Narbonne he enjoyed reading the detective magazines. Whenever the villains temporarily got the better of the detective, they would knock him unconscious with an ornate lamp or a sudden blow to the head. Unconsciousness did not seem to be so easily obtained in real life. He waited for it between the blows, for the black mist that would surely descend on him, but it didn’t come. Instead he felt himself shrinking, shrivelling up into a concentrated ball of pain. His wife was in the church with the children. The men were in the Mairie. Only he and Père Guillaume knew what had happened at Oradour. Something had happened at Monguèriac. He tried to guess what it might be, the detective would know, he would produce a train timetable from his well-cut suit and prove that the villain could not have been on the 6.45 to Paris. His wife was in the church. They would be going in trains to Normandy where the fighting was, Laurent Nadl had hidden a gun in the barn. ‘Yes,’ he shouted, though it seemed to make no noise. ‘Please, yes. I’ve remembered.’ They were laughing and they gave him a glass of water. That was how it was, they would be kind now, they were allowing him to lie on the ground, so cool under his face.
The rat wandered about sniffing at the boxes, twitching its whiskers. ‘Shhh,’ whispered William. The rat’s feet were loud. It turned and squeaked so he could see its long yellow rat teeth. ‘Shh!’ he said more strongly, kicking at it with his boot. The rat ran away. William was pleased. The black man had said to be very very quiet. He stroked about the damp ground on either side of him until his fingers remembered that the violin was gone. Papie might be looking after it. He was a bit hungry but it wasn’t time to eat so he lay on the ground and slept, playing a little tune on the fret with his fingers until they twitched into stillness. After a while he was even more hungry and he wished the rat would come back to keep him company, so he sang a little rat song, chirruping and slurping his lips like the skin of a boiled potato. Then cold grey light came through the open door. Oriane was there with the little baby and some more black men. William crowed with joy and ran towards her. Finally she had come to fetch him home.
By ten o’clock in the morning there was a terrible stench in the church. Nearly all the children had soiled themselves and the women had resorted to using the flower vases. They put them in the confessional for privacy and removed them when they were full. Madame Larivière had broken down and was sobbing intermittently, recounting the story of the mayor’s arrest over and over. Those who had been at the dance joined in, saying the same things again and again as they tried to hush the hungry children, trying to find a connection, an explanation. Charlotte Boissière had done her best. She had sent Betty Dubois to the vestry for the communion wine and the wafers, which they shared out amongst the little ones. There was holy water in the stoups. Some of the older women protested, but Charlotte said firmly that God would want them to keep their strength up and anyway it wasn’t Mass so it wasn’t as though they were eating Him personally. She was uncertain about the theology of that, but it was better they have something to squabble about amongst themselves. She and Magalie Contier had made a precarious ziggurat of pews from which they took turns to look out of the window into the square, though the hours dragged on and nothing happened except the bored sentries changed places with their doubles. There were two windows on either side of the door of the Mairie, and Charlotte could discern the bodies of the men inside, changing places every few minutes to allow others to look out.
Several cars drew up in the square. The driver of the first climbed down and held the door open for an immensely fat man, who went straight to the café bench in the shade of the chestnut tree. Charlotte could see the sweat oozing from his forehead, which he dabbed with a white handkerchief. Two more soldiers descended and spoke to the sentries outside the Mairie.
‘What’s happening?’
‘What can you see?’
‘They’re bringing the men out,’ answered Charlotte, clutching the window ledge for support as her knees began to jerk like a marionette’s.
‘Can you see Yves?’
‘Can you see Bernard?’
Charlotte flapped her hand behind her for quiet. The men were prodded into rows in the middle of the square, a gun trained at each corner of their ranks. From the second car the men helped what was obviously a prisoner, the white blindfold of his face vanishing into the silver-gold of his hair. ‘Please,’ Charlotte whispered to herself, ‘please, please,’ though she could not have said what it was she was pleading for.
The prisoner was positioned with his face to the wall of the Mairie. Charlotte turned her head to the fat man’s face an
d closed her eyes as she saw him nod, heard the instruction and then staggered and almost fell at the sound of the gunfire. Behind her the church was silent except for the panting of the women’s breath. Charlotte allowed herself to look at the black heap against the dripping red wall.
‘It was one of them,’ she managed to say, she felt faint and wanted to step down, but her fingers seemed frozen to the window ledge, the whole weight of her body supported by the contact.
William Aucordier was brought from the third car. Charlotte thought how the noise must have hurt his poor sensitive ears. He was supported on either side by soldiers, and one of them reached on to the seat of the car and brought out William’s violin. The fat man was smiling, and Charlotte understood what evil he was about to do. They turned him towards the church so that Charlotte could see his puzzled face just a few metres away. Reckless, she rapped on the window, and William smiled uncertainly as he recognized her, holding up his violin. ‘Good boy,’ she mouthed.
‘Give us a tune then, William!’ It was one of the Castroux men. William had no bow, but he plucked a little, pizzicato, searching for a tune. The men took up the note and began to sing, not in Occitan but in French, William’s long fingers moving faster, his eyes closed. They were taking it away from the fat man, transforming his torturing joke for William’s sake. Charlotte knew the song, she had heard it many times in her years in Castroux, the story of a soldier who comes home from the wars to find his bride at her wedding feast with another. ‘Go on, William!’ cried Charlotte, though she could hardly force her lips to make the words and her eyes were swamped with tears of love for William and for all the men of the village. For a few seconds it was beautiful. Then they shot William in the head from close behind so that Charlotte recoiled from the flesh that spattered the window, but she could not stop watching as the front of his face flew off intact, the surprised eyes left behind in the sockets, coming to rest in the dust and lying there white like a carnival mask.
