In This Hospitable Land

by Jr. Lynmar Brock

  “That’s pretty talk,” Alex complained, “but what nobility do you perceive in our running and hiding? What is this ‘something worthwhile’ we’re doing besides saving our skins?”

  Without hesitation André replied, “Maintaining sanity in our world however small or circumscribed it may be.” André took out his large white handkerchief to wipe his brow and polish his glasses reflexively. “It may be a ‘Thousand Year Reich’ as Hitler has proclaimed. He may win the war but not the hearts and minds of the people. Not totally. Not forever. People like us and the descendants of the Huguenots who shelter us keep the promise of humankind alive.”

  “Please!” Geneviève cried. “If we can’t talk about something else I swear I’d rather do this tiresome work in silence!”

  “Maybe one of us can read as the others peel,” Denise suggested, dropping her scraper and reaching for a book on the mantelpiece.

  “I’ll do it,” Geneviève declared, snatching Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes from Denise’s hand and beginning to read. “‘The journey which this little book is to describe was very agreeable and fortunate for me…’”

  Night after night, Geneviève read while the others scraped, amused by Stevenson’s misadventures with his willful pack-donkey Modestine. They also took pleasure in the familiar settings Stevenson described—walks through locales the Sauverins had experienced recently.

  “‘A little after,’” Geneviève read, “‘the stream that I was following fell into the Tarn at Pont de Montvert of bloody memory.’”

  “That’s where we entered the Cévennes,” Denise recalled.

  Geneviève continued, “‘One of the first things I encountered in Pont de Montvert was, if I remember rightly, the Protestant temple.’” She interrupted herself. “It’s uncanny.”

  Stevenson’s book didn’t serve as mere travelogue and reminder. It proved practical when Geneviève read about chestnut trees: “‘The slope was strewn with lopped branches, and here and there a great package of leaves was propped against a trunk; for even the leaves are serviceable, and the peasants use them in winter by way of fodder for their animals.’”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” André allowed.

  “Helpful as the old farmers have been,” Alex remarked, “no one mentioned it either.”

  Later Geneviève read that “‘chestnut gardens are infested with rats.’ Ugh!” she grunted. “You won’t catch me going back into those anytime soon!”

  “We’ll set traps,” Alex said dismissively. “We’ll take care of it.”

  “But let’s have the children play elsewhere till we do,” Denise suggested.

  That Stevenson confirmed some of their impressions of the vicinity and its inhabitants suggested neither had changed in the previous sixty years and so might be assumed unlikely to change anytime soon: “‘I had not only come among new natural features, but moved into the territory of a different race. These people…questioned and answered me with a degree of intelligence which excelled all that I had met…’”

  Much of the rest was congenial to André especially because it dealt with the spiritual dimensions of the Cévennes. André felt encouraged by a number of passages, one of which spoke to him as no other. He even took the book to bed one night and sat up late to memorize Stevenson’s words in order to have them with him as he went about his labors:

  Outdoor rustic people have not many ideas, but such as they have are hardy plants, and thrive flourishingly in persecution. One who has grown a long while in the sweat of laborious noons, and under the stars at night, a frequenter of hills and forests, an old honest countryman, has, in the end, a sense of communion with the powers of the universe, and amicable relations towards his God…he knows the Lord. His religion does not repose upon a choice of logic; it is the poetry of the man’s experience, the philosophy of the history of his life. God, like a great power, like a great shining sun, has appeared to this simple fellow in the course of years, and become the ground and essence of his least reflections; and you may change creeds and dogmas by authority, or proclaim a new religion with the sound of trumpets, if you will; but here is a man who has his own thoughts, and will stubbornly adhere to them in good and evil.

  No one could have been more surprised or less delighted than Alexandre Sauverin to find himself in the Protestant temple in Vialas Christmas morning. But he could not have avoided it: his children and nieces were appearing in the pageant. The little ones’ excitement might have been contagious even to him if the whole business hadn’t seemed such a foolish waste of time.

  Rose had begged off because of the cold, blustery weather. The rest had bundled up for the tramp to the French Reformed Church, which wasn’t as bad as it could have been for the day was crisp, the sun was out, and even Alex had to admit it was dramatically beautiful on the road with snowcapped mountains majestically surrounding them, crystalline in sparkling sunlight.

  The church was packed with worshipers excited for the lengthy celebration of Christ’s birth to begin. They greeted the Sauverins warmly. André plainly fit in.

  Alex defiantly didn’t. Sitting with his wife beside their brother and sister he felt uncomfortable physically because of the hard bench and mentally because he didn’t share the faith by which in Alex’s not-humble opinion everyone else had been brainwashed.

  The children disappeared into the back to prepare for the “show.” After a long time Pastor Burnard began preaching a long sermon. Others seemed enraptured by it but Alex was mind-numbingly bored and not a little angered. Worse still, when the sermon was finally finished the parson invited others up for an extended series of readings from the Bible, mostly from the New Testament which Alex had managed previously to avoid.

  His back stiff and his legs asleep by the time the children finally filed out to perform, Alex still felt a thrill of excitement since the Sauverin progeny looked incontrovertibly adorable even to his curmudgeonly self. But he quickly concluded he had only perked up because the intolerably dull and utterly preposterous readings had ended.

  Preposterous was also his word for the traditional Christmas pageant unfolding before his disbelieving unbeliever’s eyes. But Katie and Ida acquitted themselves admirably as members of the chorus and little Philippe appeared every now and again too. Christel had a memorable nonspeaking role as one of three girls at play in a field—presumably one of the fields of the Lord. An evil person came along and for no apparent reason killed them by beheading them, of all hideous things, represented by each girl pulling a blanket over her head. Then St. Nicholas happened along and miraculously brought them back to life—that is, the little girls threw off the blankets again.

  The only real miracle to Alex was that he kept from laughing out loud. He actually enjoyed the extravaganza’s climax: a choral rendition of a Protestant hymn taken from Handel’s oratorio “Judas Maccabeus:” “Thine is the Glory,” the children sang, and though the sentiment rang hollow, Alex could appreciate the music.

  Then midday dinner was served. The parson had somehow found enough rolls baked from scarce white flour to give one to each child to take home as a Christmas gift.

  During the dinner interlude, Alex and Geneviève slipped away. A few grocers were keeping hours that day so last-minute items could be picked up for a Christmas “feast.” As they passed one open store, the shopkeeper waved them in.

  “I’m glad to see you,” she exclaimed, picking up and proudly displaying a box of figs. “I’ve been saving these for you. The local folks won’t eat them—they’d rather keep their money. But I know you Sauverins have more cultivated tastes and will appreciate these.”

  The shopkeeper placed the box atop the counter expectantly. Geneviève gave her husband a look of request and demand. Alex smiled indulgently.

  “This will be our Christmas treat,” he agreed, placing his payment into the little dish on the counter. “Sweeter even than a roll.”

  Back at church the Sauverins said good-bye and swathed themselves. Snow fell and the wind
, into which the road home faced, picked up, whipping freezing white powder into their lowered faces and making remaining upright steadily more difficult.

  “It’s good Mother decided to remain Jewish today,” André shouted to Alex inches away.

  “I wish I hadn’t pretended to be a Christian,” Geneviève shouted back, voice muffled by the scarf in which she had buried her mouth.

  “It was a nice service though,” André insisted.

  “Lovely,” Denise called out, supporting him.

  To Alex, it was the box of figs that made all the effort and suffering worthwhile.

  Despite the pleasing spiritual interlude, André was distressed by the way 1940 ended and 1941 began. There was simply too much work to do for him to find the time he wished to devote to his interior life. And listening to the radio gave little cause for optimism, let alone joy.

  Though encouraging noises kept coming out of Washington, D.C.—President Roosevelt declared that the United States “must be the great arsenal of the democracies”—words were not yet matched by meaningful deeds. And there were other words that had to be considered, such as Hitler’s New Year’s message to the German armed forces in which he promised “the greatest victory in our history” on the Western Front.

  News from the Eastern Front was disturbing too, and puzzling. Despite the 1939 signing of both a nonaggression pact and an economic agreement between the Soviet Union and Germany, André had understood as far back as the Spanish Civil War that there was no love lost between the Nazis and the Communists. He had hoped the Russians would enter the war on the Allied side, possibly sooner than the Americans, but now the Soviets and Germans had signed a new series of pacts recognizing their respective “spheres of influence” and affirming previous trade agreements. Was it conceivable the Russians would sit out the war for a modest economic advantage? Surely it was as obvious in the Kremlin as in Soleyrols that Germany unchecked was a mortal threat to all sovereign nations.

  Nothing in Indochina made sense either. How could France protect its territories in Laos and Cambodia from incursions by Thailand when the Japanese supported Thai rights to the disputed lands? Surely Vichy France would not be allowed to stand up to Germany’s ally!

  Now that the RAF was bombing occupying forces from Brittany to Bordeaux to Cologne, André was grateful yet again that the Sauverins had sequestered themselves in a remote and strategically insignificant locale. But what was he doing with a chestnut in his hand? He didn’t think himself superior to the mundane demands of existence but couldn’t help wondering if there wasn’t something more important for him to do than peel husks from dried nuts.

  After Stevenson’s Travels—a quick and pleasing read as promised—Geneviève read Chronique des Pasquier, a beguiling book she had already begun but was happy to begin again. The story of a poor family’s struggles in Paris could hardly have been more different from the Sauverins’—especially that of the Freedman sisters, who had grown up economically privileged. But that was a large part of the book’s appeal: Duhamel’s ravishingly detailed contemplative narrative drew these Belgian refugees into worlds and lives so unlike theirs it helped them forget present troubles—even the damage to their fingers—for hours at a time. And that this volume consisted of five complete novels was a blessing since so many chestnuts remained to be shelled.

  Recalcitrant nuts didn’t go to waste since the goats and rabbits were willing to eat them even with their peels on. The rabbits fattened with noteworthy speed on this unusual diet.

  Alex closely tracked and recorded the details of the care, feeding and growth of all the animals and chickens because charting the barnyard creatures’ behavior and life cycles impeccably could profit the family. For example, the chickens also turned out to be quite willing to eat cast-off chestnuts, but Alex was able to prove such ingestion reduced egg production and in some cases stopped it altogether. Then again, when Alex’s records indicated a particular chicken was no longer laying eggs anyway, the Sauverins could begin a regimen of deliberate chestnut-feeding to fatten that chicken for the table quickly.

  Before eating chickens, though, they had learned to kill and grill pigeons they discovered pecking at chestnuts in the loft of the barn. Alex kept careful records of them too. The pigeons attracted hawks and the documented depredations helped speed the Sauverins’ determination to get the pick of tasty pigeon treats.

  Toward the end of the first week of February André trembled with delight, believing he had discovered how to stop the German jamming of radio signals.

  “The key, you see,” he told the others that night, “is oscillation. By rapidly shifting the broadcast frequency back and forth ever so slightly, the jamming signal can be evaded and the broadcast can still get through since a radio’s tuning mechanism isn’t all that precise.”

  “You mean we’ll constantly have to twiddle the dial?” Denise asked perplexedly.

  “Not if the oscillations are fast enough. Anyway it’s worth a try. It can’t sound any worse than it already does.”

  André was so taken with this that idea he addressed a letter to “The BBC.”

  “The only problem is where to mail it from,” he said. “I’ve signed it ‘PHOTON’ to maintain anonymity but I don’t want to take any chances even with the postman. I don’t want to get him into any trouble either.”

  “Why not go to Alès and mail it from there?” Alex suggested.

  The next day André returned from his mission to Alès in an unusually foul humor.

  “I got the letter off easily enough,” he hastened to explain. “But I’m outraged by the black market I found. The world is at war, the true French are under siege, everyone is suffering, and here are black-hearted selfish people profiting from misery.”

  “You’re not just right but righteous,” Geneviève sniffed. “We should feel fortunate you let us accept cow’s milk for our children even though we don’t have proper ration coupons.”

  The cow’s milk was another great gift to the Sauverins arranged by the Brignands. When the old goat stopped giving milk, jeopardizing the children’s health, Albertine convinced an elderly farmer and his wife who lived down the road and owned a milk-giving cow to happily share “with the little ones.”

  “That’s altogether different,” André insisted. “No one profits by it—the farmer and his wife give the milk for free. That’s as it should be. These good people demonstrate we’re all in this together, as we must be if any of us is to survive.”

  “Careful, André,” Alex said acidly. “With thoughts like that next thing you know you’ll be taking up arms against the enemy.”

  “Never.”

  “That’s enough.” Denise interposed herself between the two brothers. “André, something came for you while you were away.”

  She thrust an envelope into his hands and watched his eyes open wide.

  “So mail really can get through from outside the country,” he exclaimed, quickly tearing open the envelope.

  “If we would only hear from our relatives,” Geneviève said wistfully.

  André peered into the envelope and laughed joyfully. The others watched in astonishment as he poured twenty-four little seeds into his hand.

  “Soybeans. From Switzerland.” He declared. “Amazing! Wonderful!”

  Over the next few days letters finally started arriving from family in Canada, Portugal, and Switzerland. Each of these exiled relatives had been relieved to receive evidence of the Sauverins’ successful escape and wanted to know what they might do or send to help them. They also provided good news about members of the family elsewhere. Ominously there was no information about those who had stayed behind in Belgium.

  The greatest joy was definitive word of the fate of Jack Freedman. He had bided his time in Biarritz as suspected but, spurred to action by the Germans’ drive down the Atlantic coast, had caught the last ship out the previous June. Now he was safe with other Freedmans in England.

  The Sauverins asked the postman why he t
hought mail was so slow getting to unoccupied France. He suggested that censorship was more prevalent and intrusive as the Vichy government grew increasingly nervous about dissension and conspiratorial communications. Regarding contact with friends and family in Belgium, he believed the Germans were restricting exchanges between occupied and unoccupied territories and that the Sauverins ran a risk by writing to Belgium at all.

  When André confirmed that some of those they wrote to in their homeland were Jews, the postman said, “I don’t recommend trying that again—not directly. If known Jews write to you from Belgium Vichy postal authorities might be alerted by the Nazis, compromising your security and the security of those associated with you.”

  “We’re already registered as Jews,” Alex burst forth. “How much worse could it be?”

  “It’s one thing to be Jews who keep to themselves,” the postman explained. “It’s something else entirely if someone imagines you fomenting rebellion with coreligionists in another country. I recommend that the next time you attempt to reach anyone in Belgium you send those letters to relatives elsewhere—in Portugal or Switzerland—and ask that they forward them. That would insulate you and paradoxically might get you a quicker response.”

  The calendar promised spring, but as March trudged by, precious little gave hope that the long-dreamt-of softening weather would arrive by the twenty-first—Philippe’s second birthday. And how else could they make that a special occasion?

  Philippe could hardly take a single spoonful of bajana anymore, and who could blame him? The Sauverins had eaten so much of it they could identify the trees the chestnuts came from by the slight difference in look and sweetness. They often ate chestnuts several times a day—as soup, in puddings, mixed with carrots, or roasted in the great fireplace. The barley from Bédouès had begun to run low and the fatback was rapidly diminishing so they could rarely leaven their diet of the despised nuts.