Green-tomato jam. Cut green tomatoes into pieces, like apples, and weigh them. Place in a bowl with 1 kg. of sugar to the same weight of fruit. Awoke at three again this morning and went to find my pills. Forgot again that I’d none left. When the sugar is melted (to stop it burning add 2 glasses of water if required) stir with a wooden spoon. I keep thinking that if I go to Raphaël he might find me another supplier. I daren’t go to the Germans again, not after what happened. I’d rather die first. Then add the tomatoes and boil gently, stirring very frequently. Skim off the residue with a slotted spoon at intervals. Sometimes dying seems better than this. At least I wouldn’t have to worry about waking up, ha ha. I keep thinking about the children. I’m afraid Bele Yolande has honey fungus, have to dig away the infected roots or it will spread to them all. Allow to boil gently for about 2 hours, maybe a little less. When the jam sticks to a small plate it is ready. I feel so angry, with myself, with him, with them. With myself most of all. When that idiot Raphaël told me, I had to bite my lips till they bled so that I wouldn’t give myself away. I don’t think he noticed. I said I knew already, that girls were always getting into mischief, that nothing had come of it. He seemed relieved, and when he’d gone I took the big hatchet and chopped wood until I could hardly stand, wishing all the time it was his face.
You see, her narrative is unclear. Only in retrospect does it begin to make a little sense. And of course, she gave nothing away of her conversation with Raphaël. I can only imagine what took place, his anxiety, her stony impassive silence, his guilt. It was his café, after all. But Mother wouldn’t have given anything away. Pretending she knew was a defensive measure, throwing up a barrier against his unwanted concern. Reine could look after herself, she must have said. Besides, nothing really happened. Reine would be more careful in future. We could only be happy that nothing worse had occurred.
T. told me it wasn’t his fault, but Raphaël says he stood by and did nothing. The Germans were his friends, after all. Perhaps they paid for Reine the way they did for those town women T. brought with him.
What lulled our suspicions was that she never mentioned the incident to us. Maybe she simply didn’t know how-her distaste of anything that reminded her of bodily functions was acute-or maybe she thought it was something better left alone. But her album reveals her growing rage, her violence, her dreams of retribution. I wanted to chop at him until there was nothing left, she writes. When I read that for the first time, I was certain she was referring to Raphaël, but now I’m not so sure. The intensity of her hatred speaks of something deeper, darker. A betrayal, perhaps. Or a thwarted love.
Below a recipe for applesauce cake, she writes:
His hands were softer than I expected. He looks very young, and his eyes are the exact same color as the sea on a stormy day. I thought I would hate it, hate him, but there is something about his gentleness. Even in a German. I wonder whether I am insane to believe what he promises. I’m so much older than he is. And yet I’m not so old. Perhaps there’s time.
There is no more at this point, as if she is ashamed at her own boldness, but I find small references throughout the album, now that I know where to look. Single words, phrases broken by recipes and gardening reminders, coded even from herself. And the poem.
This sweetness
scooped
like some bright fruit…
For years I assumed that it was fantasy too, like so many of the other things she mentions. My mother could never have had a lover. She lacked the capacity for tenderness. Her defenses were too good, her sensual impulses sublimated into her recipes, into creating the perfect lentilles cuisinées, the most ardent crème brûlée. It never occurred to me that there might be any truth in these, the most unlikely of her fantasies. Remembering her face, the sour turn of her mouth, the hard lines of her cheekbones, the hair scraped back into a knot at the back of her head, even the story of the kite woman seemed more likely.
And yet I came to believe it. Maybe it was Paul who started me thinking. Maybe the day when I caught myself looking at my reflection in the mirror with a red scarf round my head and my birthday earrings (a present from Pistache, never before worn) dangling coquettishly. I’m sixty-four years old, for pity’s sake. I ought to know better. And yet there’s something in the way he looks at me that sets my old heart lurching like a tractor engine. Not the lost, frantic feeling I had with Tomas. Not even the sense of temporary reprieve that was Hervé‘s gift to me. No, this is something different again. A feeling of peace. The feeling you get when a recipe turns out perfectly right, a perfectly risen soufflé, a flawless sauce hollandaise. It’s a feeling which tells me that any woman can be beautiful in the eyes of a man who loves her.
I have taken to creaming my hands and face before I go to bed at night, and the other day I brought out an old lipstick-cracked and clotted with disuse-and blotted a little of the color onto my lips before rubbing it off in guilty confusion. What am I doing? And why? At sixty-four, surely I’ve passed the age at which I could decently think of such things. But the severity of my inner voice fails to convince me. I brush my hair with greater care than usual and pin it back with a tortoiseshell comb. There’s no fool like an old fool, I tell myself sternly.
And my mother was nearly thirty years younger.
I can look at her photograph now with a kind of mellowing. The mixed emotions I felt for so many years, the bitterness and the guilt, have diminished so that I can see-really see-her face. Mirabelle Dartigen, the tight pinched features and the hair yanked so savagely back that it hurts to look at it. What was she afraid of, the lonely woman in the picture? The woman of the album is so different, the wistful woman of the poem, laughing and raging behind her mask, sometimes flirtatious, sometimes coldly murderous in her imaginings. I can see her quite clearly, not yet forty, her hair only touched with gray, her black eyes still bright. A lifetime of work has not yet stooped her, and the muscles of her arms are hard and firm. Her breasts are firm too, beneath the severe succession of gray aprons, and sometimes she looks at her naked body in the mirror behind her wardrobe door and imagines her long lonely widowhood, the descent into old age, the scraps of youth falling from her, the sagging lines of her belly dropping into pouchy flaps at her hips, the skinny thighs throwing the bulging knees into sharp relief. There is so little time, the woman tells herself. I can almost hear her voice now from beneath the pages of her album. So little time.
And who would come, even in a hundred years of waiting? Old Lecoz with his rheumy lubricious eye? Or Alphonse Fenouil or Jean-Pierre Truriand? Secretly she dreams of a soft-voiced stranger, in her mind’s eye she sees him, a man who could see beyond what she has become to what she might have been.
Of course, there’s no way I can know what she felt. But I feel closer to her now than I ever was, almost close enough to hear that voice from the brittle pages of the album, a voice that tries so hard to hide its true nature, the passionate, desperate woman behind the cold façade.
You understand that this is merely speculation. She never mentions his name. I can’t even prove she had a lover, let alone that it was Tomas Leibniz. But something in me tells me that where I might fail on the details, the essence of it is true. It might have been so many men, I tell myself. But my secret heart tells me it could only have been Tomas. Perhaps I am more like her than I would like to think. Perhaps she knew that, and leaving me the album was her way of trying to make me understand.
Perhaps, at last, an attempt at ending our war.
2.
We didn’t see Tomas until over a fortnight after the dance at La Mauvaise Réputation. That was partly because of Mother-still half crazy with insomnia and migraines-and partly because we sensed that something had changed. We all sensed it; Cassis, hiding behind his comic books, Reine in her new, blank silence, even myself. Oh, we longed for him. All three of us did-love is not something that you can turn off like a tap, and we were already trying in our way to excuse what he had done, what he had abetted.
But the ghost of old Gustave Beauchamp swam beneath us like the menacing shadow of a sea monster. It touched everything. We played with Paul almost in the way we had before Tomas, but our games were halfhearted, pushing us to fake exuberance to hide the fact that the life had gone out of them. We swam in the river, ran in the woods, climbed trees with more energy than ever before, but behind it all we knew we were waiting, aching and itching with impatience, for him to come. I think we all believed he might be able to make it better, even then.
I certainly thought so. He was always so sure, so arrogantly self-confident. I imagined him with his cigarette hanging from his lips and his cap pushed back, the sun in his eyes and that smile lighting his face, that smile which lit the world…
But Thursday came and went, and we saw nothing of Tomas. Cassis looked for him at school, but there was no sign of him in any of his usual places. Hauer, Schwartz and Heinemann were also strangely absent, almost as if they were avoiding contact. Another Thursday came and went. We pretended not to notice, did not even mention his name to one another, though we may have whispered it in our dreams, going through the motions of life without him as if we didn’t care whether we saw him again or not. I became almost frenzied now in my hunt for Old Mother. I checked the traps I had laid ten or twenty times a day, and was always setting new ones. I stole food from the cellar in order to make new and tempting baits for her. I swam out to the Treasure Stone and sat there for hours with my rod, watching the gracious arc of the line as it dipped into the water and listening to the sounds of the river at my feet.
Raphaël called to see Mother again. Business at the café was poor. Someone had painted COLLABORATOR on the back wall in red paint, and someone had thrown stones at his windows one night, so that now they had to be boarded up. I watched from behind the door as he spoke in a low urgent voice to Mother.
“It isn’t my fault, Mirabelle,” he said. “You have to believe that. I wasn’t responsible.”
My mother made a noncommittal sound between her teeth.
“You can’t argue with the Germans,” said Raphaël. “You have to treat them as you would any other customer. It isn’t as if I was the only one…”
Mother shrugged. “In this village, perhaps you are,” she said indifferently.
“How can you say that? You were pleased enough yourself at one time-”
Mother lunged forward. Raphaël took a hasty step back, rattling the plates on the dresser. Her voice was low and furious.
“Shut up, you fool,” she said. “That’s over, do you hear? Over. And if I even suspect you’ve said a word to anyone-”
Raphaël’s face was sallow with fear, but he tried for bluster.
“I’m not having anyone calling me a fool-” he began in a shaking voice.
“I’ll call you a fool and your mother a whore if I want to!” My mother’s voice was hard and shrill. “You’re a fool and a coward, Raphaël Crespin, and we both know it.” She was standing so close to him that I could hardly see his face, though I could still see his hands splayed out either side of her as if in entreaty. “But if you or anyone talks about this-God help you, if my children get to hear anything because of you”-I could hear her breathing, harsh as dead leaves in the tiny kitchen-“then I’ll kill you,” whispered my mother, and Raphaël must have believed her, because his face was white as curd when he left the house, his hands shaking so badly he jammed them into his pockets.
“Anyone messes with my children, and I’ll kill the bastards,” spat my mother in his wake, and I saw him wince as if her words were poison. “Kill the bastards,” repeated my mother, even though Raphaël was almost down to the gate by then, half-running, head lowered as if against a strong wind.
They were words that would return to haunt us.
She was in vicious humor all day. Paul caught the lash of her tongue when he came to ask Cassis to play. Mother, who had been silently brewing trouble since Raphaël’s visit, launched such a fierce and unprovoked attack upon him that he was able only to stare at her, his mouth working, his voice locked into an agonizing stutter. “I’m so-so-so-so I’m so-so-so-”
“Talk properly, you cretin!” screamed my mother in her glassy voice, and for a second I thought I saw Paul’s mild eyes light with something almost savage, then he turned without uttering a word and fled jerkily toward the Loire, his voice returning as he did and ululating behind him in a series of weird, desperate trills as he ran.
“Good riddance!” shouted my mother after him, slamming the door.
“You shouldn’t have said that,” I said stonily to her back. “It isn’t Paul’s fault he stammers.”
My mother turned to look at me, her eyes like agates. “You would side with him,” she said in a flat voice. “If it was the choice between me and a Nazi, you’d side with the Nazi.”
3.
It was then that the letters began to arrive. Three of them, scribbled on thin blue-lined notepaper and pushed under the door. I found her in the act of picking one up, and she crammed it into the pocket of her apron, almost screaming at me to get into the kitchen, I wasn’t fit to be seen, get that soap and scrub, scrub. There was a shrill note in her voice that reminded me of the orange bag, and I made myself scarce, but I remembered the note and later, when I found it pasted into the album between a recipe for boudin noir and a magazine cutting on how to remove boot polish stains, I recognized it at once.
We now what you’ve bean doing, it read in small, shaky letters. Weve bean watchen you and we now wat to do with colaboraters. Underneath she has written in bold red letters: learn to spell, ha ha! but her words look overlarge, over-red, as if she is trying too hard to appear unconcerned. Certainly she never spoke to us of the notes, though in retrospect I realize that her abrupt changes of mood might have been related to their secret arrival. Another suggests that the writer knew something about our meetings with Tomas.
Weve sene your kids with him so dont try to deny it. We now wat your game is. You think youre so good better than the rest of us well youre nothing but a Boch whoar and your kids are seling stuff to the germans. Wat do you think of that.
The writing might belong to anyone. Certainly the script is uneducated, the spelling atrocious, but it might have been written by anyone in the village. My mother began to behave even more erratically than usual, shutting herself in the farmhouse for most of the day and watching any passersby with a suspicion verging on paranoia.
The third letter is the worst. I suppose there were no more, though she might simply have decided not to keep them, but I think this is the last.
You dont deserve to live, it says. Nazi whoar and your stuckup kids. Bet you didnt now theyre selling us to the germans. Ask them wear all the stuff coms from. They keep it in a place theyve got in the woods. They get it of a man calld Lybnits I think hes calld. You now him. And we now you.
One night someone painted a scarlet C on our front door, and NAZI WHOAR across the side of the chicken hut, though we painted over it before anyone could see what had been written. And October dragged on.
4.
Paul and I came back from La Mauvaise Réputation late that night. The rain had stopped, but it was still cold-either nights have got colder or I’ve begun to feel it more than I ever did in the old days-and I was impatient and bad-tempered. But the more impatient I got, the quieter Paul seemed to be, until we were each glowering at the other in silence, our breath puffing out in great billows of steam as we walked.
“That girl,” said Paul at last. His voice was quiet and reflective, almost as if he were speaking to himself. “She looked very young, didn’t she?”
I was annoyed by the seeming irrelevance. “What girl, for heaven’s sake?” I snapped. “I thought we were going to find a way to get rid of Dessanges and his grease wagon, not to give you an excuse to ogle girls.”
Paul ignored me. “She was sitting next to him,” he said slowly. “You’ll have seen her go in. Red dress, high heels. Comes to the wagon pretty often too.” As
it happened I did remember her. I recalled a vague sulky blur of red mouth under a slice of black hair. One of Luc’s regulars from town.
“So?”
“That was Louis Ramondin’s daughter. Moved to Angers couple of years ago, you know, with her mother, Simone, after the divorce. You’ll remember them.” He nodded as if I’d given him a civil answer instead of a grunt. “Simone went back to her maiden name, Truriand. The girl would be fourteen, maybe fifteen, nowadays.”
“So?” I still couldn’t see the interest in this. I took out my key and fitted it into the front door.
Paul continued in his slow thoughtful way. “Certainly no older than fifteen, I’d say,” he repeated.
“All right,” I said tartly. “I’m glad you found something to liven up your evening. Pity you didn’t ask for her shoe size too, then you’d really have something to dream about.”
Paul gave his lazy smile. “You’re actually jealous,” he said.
“Not at all,” I said with dignity. “I just wish you’d go dribble on someone else’s carpet, you dirty old lecher.”
“Well, I was thinking,” said Paul slowly.
“Well done,” I said.
“I was thinking maybe Louis-being a gendarme and all-maybe he’d draw the line at his daughter being involved-at fifteen, maybe even fourteen-with a man-a married man-like Luc Dessanges.” He gave me a little look of triumph and amusement. “I mean, I know times have changed since you and I were young, but fathers and daughters, specially policemen-”
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