by Mary Byrne
We walked up to the kitchen door and the man from the Service knocked. The person who opened the door was the tiniest adult I had ever seen, her smile elfish. This was Marguerite, barely out of her teens, working on farms since she was twelve. She had already acquired an authority she never lost since. She looked us up and down.
‘So you’re the boys who relaunched local industry,’ she said.
The Service guy was so surprised he said nothing.
‘They’re busy day and night making clothes and beds for ye,’ she went on.
She yelled for the boss.
When he came, he seemed disappointed in us. He was more than a little dubious about my hand. Although I’d kept it in my pocket, the man from the Service mentioned it. No doubt he didn’t want to have to walk all the way back again with another prisoner. The farmer agreed to take us on trial.
Diana’s new home turned out to be an old barn and two caravans on a hectare of land nearer the coast that she’d bought for a song. They alternated between Denis’s place and hers. There was lots of talk about makeovers and the style she’d do it in—neither heavy-beamed Norman nor Zen, she said. She started dragging furniture home from antique dealers and second-hand stores, before they’d even made the structure sound.
Denis did fewer jobs for others and more for her. His machines sat unoiled and unused, and people phoned to complain that their lawns and bushes were growing wild. The huntress obviously made sure he kept his main job at the factory.
I passed her place a few times when I knew they weren’t there. Diana had installed brand new and highly visible signs saying ‘Lands Protected—Fur and Feather’ and giving the address of some wildlife association. I wondered how Denis and his hunting buddies felt about this, but he seemed to have stopped hunting too. Diana dropped in occasionally to see Marguerite to get info on cooking or remedies, on some back-to-nature trip, her fingers dark from collecting fruit. Looking for alcohol to make sloe gin. The hair dye seemed to be growing out, something brighter underneath. I wondered how Denis was coping, but didn’t dare ask. He wasn’t my godchild, or even my pretend godchild, but that wasn’t the problem. Marguerite isn’t a great talker and her motto was if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it. I suppose we were happy that Denis was getting some loving. And hoping it wouldn’t finish up like all his other affairs.
One day in spring I went by and found vans and scaffolding and a company getting ready to put a new roof on Diana’s barn. Turned out she’d borrowed the money from Denis.
‘Borrowed?’—I said to Marguerite later—‘How’s she going to pay it back with those skivvy wages of hers?’
When I asked Denis, he said, ‘There will be nothing between us anyway, we’ve decided to get married.’
‘Time must be running out on her,’ I told Marguerite.
‘Don’t spoil it. We have to hope it works out for him,’ she said. ‘He won’t get many more chances.’
‘I don’t see what I can do for him anyway,’ I said, ‘the dope’s supposed to be grown up, and we’re not even relatives.’
I did try. I caught him alone one day and suggested he do a pre-nup, a common enough thing in France. I thought it would be a test for her. He said it would be like accusing her of being after his money.
I said nothing. I have little enough myself, the house is in Marguerite’s name, so I’m no example. My old grandfather, referring to another mindless war, used to say a man only needs six feet of land, enough to be buried in.
That will be plenty for me.
My diminished hand and arm proved to be as good as whole ones. The Croat and I set up quarters in the barn and worked from dawn till dusk, him and Marguerite explaining how to do most of the jobs I had never done before, me the boy from a modest family on his way to a university education. I learned about farming and carpentry. All I knew up to then was how to compare one philosopher with another, and a bit of French. After a few months, I was Mr Fixit. Whatever stuffing was left in me after Russia, Marguerite knocked it out and replaced it with good food in the back kitchen. We put on weight and got a tan.
Nine months later the man from the Service came back to explain that we could now sign up to be ‘free workers,’ which would entitle us to a month’s holidays. The Croat and I signed up immediately. We would be replaced by others, either POWs or immigrants. No one referred to the fiction that we would come back or the fact that the journey on foot would take more than our holiday time, one way.
Marguerite helped us sew up two homemade rucksacks. She filled them with food for the journey. We set off in late spring, among the first of the former POWs to leave.
In early summer Diana and Denis decided to celebrate their engagement and marriage in one mad week. Diana installed a blue-and-white-striped marquee in the field behind the barn, and ordered up crates of drink. It was a raucous affair with all Denis’s hunter friends, his odd-job friends, his drinking friends and a group of bikers he knew from camping. An odd group of her friends flew in from the U.S. west coast. These included an Indian chief and a sociologist, who was apparently a local politician and a defender of sex workers.
There was motorbike noise and fumes and music for days. Anyone who went by was treated to food and drink and many people did, just to see the circus. The immediate neighbors, the Langlois, threatened to go for the police. The police wouldn’t have come, busy as they were elsewhere: teenagers were making two hundred Euros an hour from their bedrooms, selling webcam sex shows.
I read from Ouest France: ‘Baby klappe hatches are being provided in Berlin as an alternative dropping point for mothers otherwise desperate enough to kill their babies in an apparent outbreak of infanticide—’
‘Stop reading that stuff,’ said Marguerite; ‘you’re tortured enough without it.’
When the fuss died down, Denis seemed curiously deflated. He visited us more often. He was supposed to be learning English. I got him to give us a sampling. From the little I knew, it seemed she was laughing at him.
By summer, a crack appeared.
‘She refuses to go camping in Brittany,’ he told us.
‘Makes sense,’ said Marguerite. ‘Bunch of boys in a tent.’
‘She wants to go down the coast,’ he said.
‘Certainly more chic,’ I said.
There was something about visiting Pierre Loti’s house, a writer Diana had studied at school.
So that was what they did.
‘Must have been only scouting, the day she found him on the campsite,’ I told Marguerite.
When we got to Nuremberg we split up. The Croat went south, I went on towards the north east.
(The next time I saw the Croat he had spent five years in the French Foreign Legion, had French nationality, worked in a northern coal mine and had a Polish wife—a tall young woman trying to climb out of an obese body. He sat and drank forever at a black-topped table, occasionally reaching out for cake, scooping it up by the handful, never looking right or left. I didn’t stay long.)
When I eventually arrived to where my village, house, and family should have been, I could find nothing. I circled excitedly. By evening I collapsed in a ditch from exhaustion and confusion. The next day was no better. Hardly anyone passed, and those who did knew nothing. There was a blasted aspect to the landscape, and an irritating wind. I decided I’d lost my memory and wandered away.
Around mid-morning I came on a man sitting on a hummock, staring into space. He ignored me. I waited.
‘Bodies everywhere,’ he said, after a while. ‘Bodies in dirty uniforms. Sweaty, suffering women in frocks. Smoldering houses invested by starving cats. Cold fabric of the priest’s dirty habit, in from the cold with Extreme Unction. A boy with a bell and an incense-burner.’
He didn’t seem to be talking to me.
I named my village, asked him how to find it. He ignored me. I decided he might be deaf.
‘This is nothing, compared to those coming out of the camps. Men in rags too tired and scared to walk through an open gate. Red Cross. United Nations. Abjection.’
After a while, he turned, looked me up and down, then finally caught my eye.
‘There’s no point in looking, son,’ he said gently. ‘It’s gone. And everyone in it.’
‘Get away,’ he said. ‘Far as you can. They won’t want you here. You will remind them of all that was bad and went wrong. They’ll call you a Nazi.’
They occasionally called us that in France. Nevertheless, I turned on my heel and headed back the way I had come, the empty rucksack flapping at my back.
When Denis and Diana came back from the west coast, she was full of Pierre Loti and his house and his mad parties. Loti had once sent party invitations out a year in advance, so that everyone had enough time to learn medieval French, not to mention knocking together suitable costumes. He’d had two families, oriental lovers (male and female, it would appear), and had made his house into an oriental museum piece, with real sarcophagi in an Islamic-style prayer room. Diana was impressed by how ordinary the house appeared from the outside.
‘Loti was ahead of his time,’ I told Marguerite. ‘They’re all into stuff, these days. Stuff. A crisis is when they can’t change their car annually.’
‘I explained all that to you long ago,’ she replied.
She’d once told me how the bigger landowners saw themselves as a different race: les possédants, the ones who possess.
‘The rest of us don’t deserve a say in anything. They resent our having a vote, but it’s good if we vote for them. They took over from the nobility after the Revolution.’
I’d seen them in action, the way they cliqued and dressed and looked down on people not like them.
‘Used to call them bourgeois, the way I learned it.’
‘Don’t start with that capitalist guff again,’ she sighed. ‘If you wanted to be a communist you should’ve stayed over east.’
‘Which is capitalist now anyway. Six feet, that’s all I need.’
She sighed again loudly.
The journey back to France was harder, with no food, hardly any money and no family reunion to look forward to. Shoes worn and feet blistered, I went like the wind. I met, ate and got lifts with people fleeing in all directions. Everyone had a story that was sadder than the last. I watched sunrises and sunsets as if I’d never seen them before. I told myself that if I hadn’t lost my reason up to now, I could hang onto it for another while. I remembered my grandfather’s version of Nietzsche’s motto ‘What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger:’ ‘What doesn’t choke will fatten,’ my father often said.
I even thought I was cured of emotion, but there was that small kernel of it that drew me back to Normandy—the only other place anyone had ever cared for me.
Another crack appeared in the works by Autumn. Mme Langlois—Diana’s neighbor, the one she’d bought the barn from—accused Diana of witchcraft.
‘Nothing new there,’ said Marguerite.
It was a common accusation around here among the older women—the first word they went for when they felt things getting out of their control. What I liked about Marguerite was that she never got involved in this witchcraft talk, never accused anyone of it, even in anger. Some of the crones do it all the time, falling in and out of friendships with alarming regularity. Marguerite believes in Something or Someone Up Above, as she puts it, although she doesn’t go to church. She even watches Mass on the telly on Sunday mornings, but if anyone comes in she switches it off.
‘God has nothing to do with organized religion,’ she said one day. ‘I’m well placed to know about that.’
‘Well, if there is a god, Up There or Down Here, he must be saving me for something,’ I said, ‘although at this stage I’m at a loss to see what I’ve been keeping my head below the parapet for, this long.’
‘He’s hoping you’ll find meaning,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that what you’ve been looking for, all these years? And he’s saving you for me,’ she said, stroking my cheek. ‘For me.’
She grabbed her keys.
‘Now let’s visit Langlois and see what this is all about.’
I limped into the farmyard one sunny morning. Marguerite was watering what was still in the shade. She stood back from the flowers, the watering can outstretched in surprise.
‘So even they didn’t want you,’ she said.
‘I didn’t find them,’ I gasped.
Then I collapsed in tears.
She brought me to the barn and settled me in with bread and butter and milk. It was July 14th. Our replacements were off for the day and there was little to be done. She bathed my feet. She changed my clothes. She held me in her arms while I cried.
And while Churchill was making his speech in Metz about the rebirth of France, Marguerite and I made love. Or should I say, she made love to me, to stop me whimpering.
She told me she had divorced a husband who drank and beat her, and how the crones had ostracized her for it. One had even testified against her at the divorce proceedings.
‘Women are supposed to stay put and take their medicine,’ she said.
It was dark when we heard the others coming back from the fourteenth of July dance. Marguerite whispered, ‘If you and I are to remain friends we mustn’t do this again.’
Then she disappeared into the house.
What the current trouble seemed to be about was Diana the huntress throwing shapes at old Mr Langlois. This might be true or it might not. Marguerite and I had no love for either of the Langlois. Mme Langlois was one of these fervent Catholics who still respects what’s left of the local nobility—the upper echelons of the possessors—and goes on outings organized by priests. Her car sports stickers touting right-wing Catholic groups. She and others would have had Marguerite’s head shaved if our liaison had happened early enough for it. She couldn’t stand me, although she had some spiel about good Germans, nice soldiers who were billeted in her house and used to throw her like a ball between them when she was a kid and her father was dying of hunger in a camp in the east. ‘Komm, Catherine!’ the soldiers would say to her. Langlois smiled as she told it, almost pleased with herself. She wasn’t just conflicted, I thought she was soft in the head. Although logic and reason are not the strongest points in western or any other culture, Langlois didn’t seem to have even the minimum of these. ‘Komm, Catherine…’ tended to ring in my head and Langlois as a child sometimes exercised my mind more than my own horrors.
Marguerite and I would’ve defended Diana anyway, because she was Denis’s wife. The problem was that when we went over there to talk it over, Mme Langlois not only accused Diana of going after her husband. There was worse.
‘She actually lowered her jeans and showed me her backside,’ said Langlois.
‘She what?’ Marguerite blurted, smothering a giggle.
‘Showed me her ass,’ said the bigot. ‘What she said, precisely, was “If you’re interested in my ass, here it is.”’
Take it easy, heart, I thought. We’ve been through worse than bare asses.
‘Well, nobody died,’ said Marguerite.
The bigot looked at her. If the evil eye had any power, Marguerite was a goner.
‘Why would Diana do that?’ Marguerite asked on the way home.
‘America is like an elephant with an itch it can’t scratch,’ I said, mainly for something to say.
‘I think you mean the American government,’ said Marguerite.
She always says that. She said the same thing sixty years ago when we started going places together.
I bought an old motorbike and we would take off for the coast, Marguerite having forgotten her idea that we’d never remain friends if we made love again.
Marguerite had this thing about ocean liners, could never get enough of them
. So I was jealous of ocean liners, especially American ones. We would spend Sundays in Le Havre, where most of the local boys were getting piecework for rebuilding the town, working as fast as they could. Many of the houses around here were paid and families reared on the rebuilding of towns like Caen, Le Havre and St Malo. I never even tried for such jobs, content to stay with Marguerite on farms. I thought no one would have wanted me anyway, although the French were shipping in cheap labor from all over: Germany, Poland, Italy, North Africa. I just kept a low profile and stayed where I was.
Diana started her own business, as planned, but not from home. Before anyone talked of a credit crunch she managed to squeeze county money and regional money and whatever was left of Denis’s money. The thing was set up in a local industrial park and involved lots of packing equipment, plenty of high tech, someone to set up and run a website for mail order, and pharmaceutical standards of hygiene.
Even if she’d cleaned Denis out, we supposed that was okay as long as she stayed with him.
On the quay at Le Havre we stood, keeping our voices down, among American soldiers leaning against American cars, waiting and wanting to go home. Their uniforms weren’t half so crisp or handsome as in the films that portrayed them. But they were better fed than us, from better-fed parents. Good teeth filled their big smiles. They smiled and waited and watched. Marguerite would watch the ships and I would watch her, in a yellow button-down dress with oranges and apples on it, watching those gigantic ships come and go, bearing glamorous passengers and other people’s dreams. Her favorite liner was the Ile de France. Back in the village she would throw her hands together like a child and describe it to friends. One Christmas I found her a poster for the Cunard line. She installed it on the wall of our first house together. By then it was the ‘60s: the crones were being silenced by new clothes, new music, new mœurs. They didn’t like us, but they had no power over us.
