In the Angellier household they were locking away all the important papers along with the family silver and the books: the Germans were coming to Bussy. For the third time since the defeat of France, the village was to be occupied. It was Easter Sunday, High Mass. A cold rain was falling. At the entrance to the church, the branches of a small peach tree, pink with blossom, swayed mournfully. The Germans marched in rows of eight; they wore their field dress and metal helmets. Their faces maintained the impenetrable and impersonal expression of professional soldiers, but their eyes glanced furtively, inquisitively, at the grey façades of the town that was to be their home. There was no one at the windows. As they passed the church, they could hear the sound of the harmonium and the murmur of prayers; but a frightened member of the congregation shut the door. The stomping of German boots reigned supreme. The first detachment swung past and was followed by an officer on horseback; his beautiful dappled mare seemed furious at being forced to go so slowly; as she placed each hoof on the ground with reluctant care, she trembled, neighed and shook her proud head. Great grey armoured tanks pounded the cobblestone streets. Then came the cannons on their rolling platforms, a soldier positioned high above each one to keep watch. The column of soldiers was so long that throughout the priest's sermon a kind of constant thunder resounded through the church's vaults. The women sighed in the shadows.
After the metallic rumbling subsided, the motorcycles arrived, flanking the Commandant's car. Behind him, at a respectful distance, came trucks packed to the brim with large round loaves of black bread. They made the church windows rattle. The regiment's mascot-a thin, silent Alsatian dog, trained for combat-ran beside the cavalrymen who brought up the rear. Perhaps because they were so far away from the Commandant that he couldn't see them, or for some other reason incomprehensible to the locals, these soldiers were more informal, friendlier than the others. They talked and laughed among themselves. The Lieutenant in charge smiled when he saw the lone pink peach tree lashed by the bitter wind; he snapped off a branch. Since he saw nothing but closed windows all around him, he assumed he was alone. Far from it. Behind each shutter was an old woman, eyes as piercing as a knife, watching the conquering soldier's every move. Deep within hidden rooms, voices groaned.
"Could you ever have imagined such a thing…"
"He's destroying our fruit trees, for heaven's sake!"
"Seems this lot's the worst," a toothless mouth whispered. "I heard they did a lot of damage before coming here. Just our luck."
"I bet they'll take our sheets," said one housewife. "Just imagine, sheets I got from my mother! Only the best for them…"
The Lieutenant shouted an order. The men seemed very young. They had rosy complexions and golden hair. They rode magnificent, well-fed horses with wide, shiny rumps, which they tied up in the square, around the War Memorial. The soldiers broke ranks and started to make themselves at home. The village was filled with the sound of boots, foreign voices, the rattling of spurs and weapons. In the better houses, they hid away the good linen.
The Angellier women-the mother and wife of Gaston Angellier, prisoner of war in Germany -were finishing their packing. The elder Madame Angellier, a thin, pale person, frail and austere, quietly read out loud the title of each book in the library and religiously stroked its cover, before putting it away. "My son's books," she murmured, "to see them in the hands of a German!… I'd rather burn them."
"But what if they ask for the key to the library," groaned the fat cook.
"They'll have to ask me for it," said Madame Angellier and, standing very tall, she lightly tapped the pocket sewn inside her black wool dress; the bunch of keys she always kept with her jingled. "They won't be asking twice," she concluded darkly.
She instructed her daughter-in-law, Lucile Angellier, to remove the decorative ornaments from the mantelpiece. Lucile wanted to leave an ashtray out. At first the elder Madame Angellier objected.
"But they'll drop ash all over the carpets," Lucile pointed out. Pursing her lips, Madame Angellier gave in.
This older woman had such a transparent, pale face that she seemed to have not a drop of blood beneath her skin; her hair was pure white, her mouth like the blade of a knife, her lips almost purple. An old-fashioned high collar made of mauve cotton, held rigid by stays, covered but didn't hide her sharp, bony neck which pulsated with emotion like a lizard. When she heard a German soldier's footsteps or voice near the window, she would tremble from the tips of her small pointy little boots to the top of her impressively coiffed head. "Hurry up, hurry up, they're coming," she'd say.
They left only the bare essentials in the room: not one flower, not one cushion, not one painting. In the large linen cupboard, beneath a pile of sheets, they buried the family picture album, to prevent the sacrilegious enemy from seeing Great-Aunt Adelaide at her First Communion and Uncle Jules, aged six months, naked on a cushion. They packed away everything-right down to the mantelpiece ornaments: two porcelain Louis-Philippe vases decorated with parrots holding a garland of roses in their beaks (a wedding gift from a relative who came to visit less and less frequently but whom they didn't dare offend by getting rid of the present) and the two vases about which Gaston had said, "If the maid breaks them while sweeping, I'll give her a raise." Yes, even them. They had been given by French hands, looked at by French eyes, touched by the feather dusters of France-they would not be defiled by contact with Germans. And the crucifix! In the corner of the room, above the sofa… Madame Angellier took it down herself, slipped it beneath her lace shawl and held it to her breast. "I think that's everything," she said at last.
She took a mental inventory: the furniture from the main reception room had been removed, the curtains taken down, the provisions crammed into the shed where the gardener kept his tools (oh, the large hams smoked in ash, the jars of clarified butter, the salted butter, the fine, pure pork fat, the thick streaky sausages!). All her possessions, all her treasures… The wine had been lying buried in the cellar since the day the English army had left Dunkerque. The piano was locked; Gaston's hunting rifle was in an impregnable hiding place. Everything was in order. There was nothing to do but wait for the conquerors. Pale and silent, with a delicate, trembling hand, she half closed the shutters, as you would in a room where someone had died, and went out, followed by Lucile.
Lucile was a young woman-beautiful, blonde, with dark eyes, but a quiet, modest demeanour and "a faraway expression," for which Madame Angellier reproached her. She'd been acceptable because of her family connections and dowry (she was the daughter of an important landowner in the area). However, Lucile's father had gone on to make some bad investments, lost his fortune and mortgaged his land; the marriage was, therefore, not the most successful; she hadn't had any children, after all.
The two women went into the dining room where the table was set. It was just after twelve o'clock, but only according to the clocks on the church and town hall, which they were obliged to set to German time; every French home set their clocks back by sixty minutes as a point of honour; every Frenchwoman would scornfully say, "At our house, we don't live by German time." This practice left great voids at various points of the day when there was nothing to do. Now, for example, a deadly gap loomed between the end of Mass and the beginning of Sunday lunch. They didn't read. If Madame Angellier saw Lucile with a book in her hands, she would look at her, surprised, and say reproachfully, "What's this? Are you reading?" She had a soft, refined voice, as faint as the echo of a harp: "Don't you have anything else to do?" No one was working: it was Easter Sunday.
They didn't speak. Between these two women, every topic of conversation was a thorn bush they only approached with caution: if they reached out a hand, they risked getting hurt. Every word Madame Angellier heard brought back the memory of some loss, some family story, some former pain Lucile knew nothing about. She would reply with reluctance, then stop to look at her daughter-in-law in sad surprise, as if she were thinking, "How strange that her husband is a German prisoner of war and yet she can still breathe, move, speak, laugh…" She could barely admit that the problem between them was Gaston. Lucile's tone was never what it should be. Sometimes she seemed too sad: was she talking about someone who was dead? Surely her duty as a Frenchwoman, as a wife, was to bear separation courageously, as she, Madame Angellier, had done between 1914 and 1918, just after-or not so long after-her own marriage. But whenever Lucile murmured words of consolation, of hope, her thoughts were similarly bitter: "Ah, you can tell she never really loved him; I've always suspected it. Now I can tell, I'm sure of it… That tone is unmistakable. She's cold and indifferent. She wants for nothing, while my son, my poor child…" She imagined the prisoner-of-war camp, the barbed wire, the guards, the sentries. Tears would well up in her eyes and she would say in a broken voice, "We mustn't speak of him…" Then she would take a clean handkerchief from her bag, always there in case anyone made her think of Gaston or the misfortunes of France, and delicately dab at her eyes with the same gesture she would use to remove a drop of ink with some blotting paper.
And so, silent and still, next to the cold fireplace, the two women stood and waited.
The Germans had moved into their lodgings and were getting to know the village. The officers walked about alone or in pairs, heads held high, boots striking the paving stones. The ordinary soldiers stayed in groups; they had nothing to do, so they paced up and down the only street or gathered in the square near the old crucifix. When one of them stopped, all the others did too, forming a long line of green uniforms that made it impossible for the villagers to get by. Faced with this obstacle, they simply pulled their caps even further down over their eyes, turned away and used the small winding lanes to return to the fields.
The local policeman, under the surveillance of two non-commissioned officers, was putting up posters on the walls and main buildings. These posters were of various types. Some depicted a smiling German soldier with fair hair and perfect teeth giving out jam sandwiches to a group of French children gathered around him under the caption, "Abandoned citizens, trust in the soldiers of the Third Reich!" Other posters used drawings or caricatures to illustrate world domination by the English and the detestable tyranny of the Jews. But most of them began with the word Verboten-Forbidden. It was forbidden to walk down the street between nine o'clock in the evening and five o'clock in the morning; forbidden to keep any firearms; forbidden to "aid, abet or shelter" escaped prisoners, English soldiers, or citizens of countries which were enemies of Germany; forbidden to listen to foreign radio stations; forbidden to refuse German currency. And beneath each poster was the same warning in black lettering, underlined twice: on pain of death.
Meanwhile, Mass was over and the shops were opening for business. In the spring of 1941, there was still no shortage of goods in the provinces: people had secreted away such hoards of fabric, shoes and provisions that they were now rather inclined to sell them. The Germans were not difficult and were prepared to be palmed off with junk: women's corsets from the last war, ankle boots from 1900, linen decorated with little flags and embroidered Eiffel Towers (originally intended for the English)-they'd buy anything. They inspired in the inhabitants of the occupied countries fear, respect, aversion and the amusing desire to fleece them, to take advantage of them, to get hold of their money.
"It's our money anyway… they stole it from us," thought the grocer as he gave a soldier from the invading army his most charming smile and a pound of wormy prunes at double the price they were worth.
The soldier examined the goods sceptically. It was obvious he suspected fraud but, intimidated by the grocer's impenetrable expression, he said nothing. The regiment had previously been stationed in a small town in the north that had been destroyed and pillaged; there had been no supplies for a long time. But in this rich province of central France, the soldier once more found things to covet. His eyes lit up with desire in front of displays full of reminders of comfortable civilian life: pine furniture, ready-to-wear suits, children's toys, little pink dresses. Their expressions serious and dreamy, the troops marched from one shop to the other, jingling the money in their pockets. Behind the soldiers' backs, or above their heads, the French sent little signals to one another from their open windows-they raised their eyes to heaven, shook their heads, smiled, made faint grimaces of scorn or defiance, an entire language of gestures to show that they needed God's help during such terrible times (but that even God…!), that they intended to remain free, free in spirit in any case (if not in actions then at least in words), that these Germans weren't really very clever since they believed favours were done for them willingly, whereas the French knew they were obliged to because, after all, the Germans were the masters. "Our masters," said the women who looked at the enemy with a mixture of desire and hatred. (The enemy? Of course. But they were also men, and young…) The French took special pleasure in cheating them. "They think we like them, but we know we just want to get passes, petrol, permits," thought those women who had already met the occupying forces in Paris or the larger provincial cities, while the naive country girls shyly lowered their eyes when the Germans looked at them.
On entering the cafés, the soldiers took off their belts and threw them on the marble tables before sitting down. At the Hôtel des Voyageurs, the non-commissioned officers reserved the main room for their mess. It was the kind of long, dark room you find in country hotels. Above the mirror at the back, two red flags with swastikas were draped over the cupids and burning torches that adorned the old gilt frame. In spite of the season, the stove was still lit; some of the men had dragged their chairs up to it and basked in its warmth, looking blissfully happy and drowsy. The large purple and black stove sometimes belched out acrid smoke, but the Germans didn't care. They moved even closer; they dried their clothes and boots; they looked pensively around, a look that was simultaneously bored and vaguely anxious, and seemed to say, "We've seen so many things… Let's see what happens here…"
These were the older, wiser ones. The younger ones made eyes at the serving girl who, ten times a minute, lifted open the cellar door, descended into the underground darkness and emerged back into daylight carrying twelve beers in one hand and a box full of sparkling wine in the other ("Sekt!" shouted the Germans. "French champagne, please, Mam'zelle! Sekt!").
The serving girl-plump, round and rosy-cheeked-moved quickly between the tables. The soldiers smiled at her. She felt torn between the desire to smile back at them, because they were young, and the fear of getting a bad reputation, because they were the enemy-so she frowned and tightly pursed her lips, without, however, quite managing to erase the two dimples on her cheeks which showed her secret pleasure. My God, there were so many men! So many men for her alone… In the other establishments the serving girls were the owners' daughters and their parents kept an eye on them, while she… Whenever they looked at her they made kissing noises. Restrained by a residue of modesty, she pretended not to hear them calling. "All right, all right, I'm coming! You're in a big hurry!" she muttered to no one in particular. When they talked to her in their language she retorted proudly, "You think I understand your gobbledegook?"
But as an ever-increasing wave of green uniforms swept in through the open doors, she began to feel exhilarated, overwhelmed, unable to resist. Her defence against their passionate appeals grew weaker: "Oh, do stop it now! You're like animals!"
Other soldiers played billiards. The banisters, window ledges, backs of chairs were hung with belts, pistols, helmets and rounds of ammunition.
Outside, the church bells sounded Vespers.
The Angellier ladies were leaving their house to go to Vespers when the German officer who was to lodge with them arrived. They met at the door. He clicked his heels, saluted. The elder Madame Angellier grew even paler and with great effort managed a silent nod of the head. Lucile raised her eyes and, for a brief moment, she and the officer looked at each other. In a split second a flurry of thoughts flashed through Lucile's mind. "Maybe he's the one," she thought, "who took Gaston prisoner? My God, how many Frenchmen has he killed? How many tears have been shed because of him? It's true that if the war had ended the other way, Gaston might today be entering a German house. That's how war is; it isn't this boy's fault."
He was young, slim, with beautiful hands and wide eyes. She noticed how beautiful his hands were because he was holding the door of the house open for her. He was wearing an engraved ring with a dark, opaque stone; a ray of sunshine appeared between two clouds, causing a purple flash of light to spring off the ring; it lit up his complexion, rosy from the fresh air and as downy as a lovely piece of fruit growing on a trellis. His cheekbones were high, strong but delicate, his mouth chiselled and proud. Lucile, in spite of herself, walked more slowly; she couldn't stop looking at his large, delicate hand, his long fingers (she imagined him holding a heavy black revolver, or a machine-gun or a grenade, any weapon that metes out death indifferently), she studied the green uniform (how many Frenchmen, on watch all night, hiding in the darkness of the undergrowth had looked out for that same uniform?) and his sparkling-clean boots.
She remembered the defeated soldiers of the French army who a year before had fled through the town, dirty, exhausted, dragging their combat boots in the dust. Oh, my God, so this is war… An enemy soldier never seemed to be alone-one human being like any other-but followed, crushed from all directions by innumerable ghosts, the missing and the dead. Speaking to him wasn't like speaking to a solitary man but to an invisible multitude; nothing that was said was either spoken or heard with simplicity: there was always that strange sensation of being no more than lips that spoke for so many others, others who had been silenced.
"And what about him?" the young woman wondered. "What must he be feeling coming into a French home where the head of the house is gone, taken prisoner by him or his comrades? Does he feel sorry for us? Does he hate us? Or does he just consider our home a hotel, thinking only about the bed, wondering if it's comfortable, and the maid, if she's young?" The door had closed on the officer a long time ago; Lucile had followed her mother-in-law; entered the church and knelt at her pew; but she couldn't stop thinking about the enemy. He was alone in the house now. He had taken over Gaston's office, which had its own entrance; he would have his meals out; she wouldn't see him; but she would hear his footsteps, his voice, his laughter. He was able to laugh… He had the right. She looked at her mother-in-law who sat motionless, her face in her hands, and for the first time, felt pity and a vague tenderness for this woman she disliked. Leaning towards her, she said softly, "Let's say our rosary for Gaston, Mother."
The old woman nodded in agreement. Lucile started to pray with sincere fervour, but soon her mind began to wander. She thought of the past that was both near and distant at the same time, undoubtedly because of the grim intrusion of the war. She pictured her husband, a heavy, bored man, interested only in money, land and local politics. She had never loved him; she had married him because her father wished it. Born and brought up in the countryside, she had little experience of the outside world, with the exception of a few brief trips to Paris to visit an elderly relative. Life in the provinces of central France is affluent and primitive; everyone keeps to himself, rules over his own domain, reaps his own wheat and counts his own money. Leisure time is filled with great feasts and hunting parties. This village, where the forbidding houses were protected by large, prison-like doors and had drawing rooms crammed full of furniture that were always shut up and freezing cold to save lighting the fire, had seemed the very picture of civilisation to Lucile. When she left her father's house deep in the woods, she had felt joyous excitement at the idea of living in the village, having a car, sometimes going out to lunch in Vichy… Her upbringing had been strict and puritanical, but she had not been unhappy: the garden, the housework, a library-an enormous, damp room where the books grew mouldy and where she would secretly rummage around-were all enough to amuse her. She had got married; she had been a cold, docile wife. Gaston Angellier was only twenty-five when they married, but he had had that kind of precocious maturity brought about by a sedentary provincial lifestyle, excellent rich food eaten in abundance, too much wine, and the complete absence of any strong emotions. Only a truly deceptive man can affect the habits and thoughts of an adult while the warm, rich blood of youth still runs in his veins.
During one of his business trips to Dijon, where he had been a student, Gaston Angellier ran into a former mistress-a hatmaker with whom he'd broken off; he fell in love with her again and more passionately than before; she had his child; he rented a small house for her in the suburbs and arranged his life so he could spend half his time in Dijon. Lucile knew everything but said nothing, out of shyness, scorn or indifference. Then the war…
And now, for a year already, Gaston had been a prisoner. Poor boy… He's suffering, Lucile thought, as the rosary beads slipped mechanically through her fingers. What was he missing most? His comfortable bed, his fine dinners, his mistress? She would like to give him back everything he'd lost, everything that had been taken from him. Yes, everything, even that woman… Realising this, realising the spontaneity and sincerity of this feeling, she also realised how very empty was her heart; it had always been empty-empty of love, empty of jealous hatred. Sometimes her husband treated her harshly. She forgave him his infidelities, but he had never forgotten his father-in-law's bad investments. She could hear the words ringing in her ears, which more than once had made her feel he'd slapped her face: "Imagine if I'd known there wasn't any money!"
She lowered her head. But no-there was no resentment left in her. What her husband had undoubtedly been through since the defeat-the recent battles, flight, capture by the Germans, forced marches, cold, hunger, death all around him, and now being thrown into a prisoner-of-war camp-all that wiped out everything else. "Please just let him come home to everything he loved: his bedroom, his fur-lined slippers, strolling in the garden at dawn, fresh peaches picked from the trellis, his favourite dishes, great roaring fires, all his pleasures, even the ones I don't know about but can imagine, please give them back to him. I don't ask anything for myself. I just want to see him happy. As for me…"
Lost in thought, she let the rosary slip from her fingers and fall to the ground; she realised everyone was standing up, Vespers was over.
Outside, the Germans were standing around in the square. The sunlight glinting off the silver stripes on their uniforms, their light-coloured eyes, their blond hair and their metal belt buckles gave a feeling of cheerfulness, energy and new life to the dusty spot in front of the church which was enclosed within high walls (the remains of ancient ramparts). The Germans were exercising their horses. They had set up a dining area outside: planks of wood the local carpenter had meant to use to make coffins formed a table and benches. The men ate and looked at the townspeople with amused curiosity. You could tell that eleven months of occupation hadn't yet made them blasé. They regarded the French with the same cheerful surprise as in the early days: they found them odd, strange; they couldn't get used to how fast they spoke; they tried to work out whether this defeated people hated them, tolerated them or liked them… They smiled from afar at the young girls and the young girls walked by, proud and scornful-just like on the first day! So the Germans looked down at the crowd of kids around their knees: all the village children were there, fascinated by the uniforms, the horses, the high boots. However loudly their mothers called them, they wouldn't listen. They furtively touched the heavy material of the soldiers' jackets with their dirty fingers. The Germans beckoned to them and filled their hands with sweets and coins.
It felt like a normal, peaceful Sunday. The Germans added a strange note to the scene, but the essential remained unchanged, thought Lucile. There had been some upsetting moments; some of the women (the mothers of prisoners like Madame Angellier or widows from the other war) had hurried home, closed their windows and drawn their curtains so they wouldn't have to see the Germans. In small, dark bedrooms, they cried as they reread old letters; they kissed yellowing photographs draped with black crêpe and decorated with red, white and blue ribbons… But just like every Sunday, the young women gathered in the village square to chat. They weren't going to miss out on an afternoon when they didn't have to work, a holiday, just because of the Germans; they had on their new hats: it was Easter Sunday. Furtively and with inscrutable faces, the men studied the Germans; it was impossible to tell what they were thinking. One German went up to a group of them and asked for a light; they gave him one; they responded to his salute warily; he went away; the men continued talking about the price of cattle. As on every Sunday, the notary went over to the Hôtel des Voyageurs to play cards. Some families were returning from their weekly visit to the cemetery-an almost pleasurable outing in a village where there was nothing much to do: they went in a group; they picked bunches of flowers between the graves. The teaching nuns brought the children out of the church; they made their way through the soldiers; they were impassive beneath their wimples.
"Will they be here long?" murmured the tax inspector to the court clerk, pointing to the Germans.
"Three months, I've heard," he whispered back.
The tax inspector sighed. "That'll force prices up." And, with a mechanical gesture, he rubbed the hand that had been lacerated by a shell explosion in 1915.
Then they changed the subject. The bells that had been ringing since the end of Vespers grew fainter; the final low chimes faded in the evening air.
To get home, the Angellier ladies took a winding lane; Lucile knew its every stone. They walked in silence, responding to greetings with a nod of the head. Madame Angellier was not liked by the villagers, but they felt sorry for Lucile-because she was young, because her husband was a prisoner of war and because she wasn't stuck-up. They sometimes went to ask her opinion about educating their children, about a new blouse, or about how to send a package to Germany. They knew there was an enemy officer lodging at their home-they had the most beautiful house in the village-and they expressed sympathy that they too had to be subjected to the law like everyone else.
"Well, you've certainly got a good one," whispered the dressmaker as she passed them.
"Let's hope they'll be on their way soon," said the chemist.
And a little old lady who was trotting along behind a goat with a soft white coat stood on tiptoe to whisper to Lucile, "I've heard they're all bad and evil, and that they're causing misery to all us poor people."
The goat gave a jump and butted a German officer's long grey cape. He stopped, laughed and wanted to stroke it. But the goat ran off; the frightened little old lady disappeared, and the Angellier ladies closed the door of their house behind them.
The house was the most beautiful for miles. A hundred years old, it was long, low and made of porous yellow stone that in sunlight took on the colour of golden bread. The windows that gave on to the street (those of the most elegant rooms) were carefully sealed, their shutters closed and protected against burglars by iron bars; the small window of the pantry (where they hid prohibited food in an array of different jars) lay behind thick railings whose high spikes in the shape of a fleur-de-lis impaled any cat who wandered by. The front door, painted blue, had the kind of lock you find on prisons and an enormous key that creaked dolefully in the silence. Downstairs, the rooms had a musty smell-that cold smell of an empty house-despite the constant presence of the owners. To prevent the draperies from fading and to protect the furniture, no air or light was allowed in. Through the panes of glass in the hall-the colour of broken bottles-the day seemed murky and overcast; the sideboard, the antlers on the walls, the small antique engravings discoloured by damp were drowned in the gloom.
In the dining room (the only place the stove was lit) and in Lucile's room, where she sometimes took the liberty of lighting a small fire in the evening, you could smell the smoky perfume of sweet wood, chestnut bark. The dining-room doors opened out on to the garden. It looked its saddest at this time of the year: the pear trees stretched out their arms, crucified on wires; the apple trees had been cut back, and their branches were rough, twisted and bristling with spiky twigs; there was nothing left on the vine but some bare shoots. But with just a few more days of sunshine, the early little peach tree in front of the church would not be the only one covered with flowers: every tree would blossom. While brushing her hair before going to bed, Lucile looked out of her window at the garden bathed in moonlight. On the low wall some cats were howling. Beyond was the countryside, its secret, fertile valleys thick with deep woods, and pearl-grey under the moonlight.
Lucile always felt anxious at night in her enormous empty room. Before, Gaston would sleep there; he would get undressed, grunt, bump into the furniture; he was a companion, another human being. For nearly a year, now, there had been no one. Not a single sound. Outside, everything was asleep. Without meaning to, she stopped and listened, trying to hear a sign of life in the room next door where the German officer slept. But she heard nothing. Perhaps he hadn't come back yet? Or maybe he was sitting still and silent like her? A few seconds later she heard a rustling sound, a sigh, then a low whistling, and she thought he was probably standing at the window looking out at the garden. What could he be thinking about? She tried to imagine but couldn't; in spite of herself, she couldn't credit him with having the thoughts, the desires of an ordinary human being. She couldn't believe he was simply looking out at the garden in complete innocence, admiring the shimmering fish pond where silent slippery shapes slid past: carp for tomorrow's dinner. "He's elated," she said to herself. "He's recalling his battles, reliving past dangers. In a moment he'll be writing home, to his wife, in Germany -no, he can't be married, he's too young-to his mother then, or fiancée, or mistress. He'll say. 'I'm living in a French house, Amalia'-she must be called Amalia, or Cunegonde or Gertrude" (she deliberately chose grotesque, harsh-sounding names). "'Our suffering hasn't been in vain, for we are the victors.'"
She couldn't hear anything at all now; he wasn't moving; he was holding his breath. A toad croaked in the darkness. It was a soft, low musical note, a bubble of water bursting with a silvery sound. "Croak, croak…" Lucile half closed her eyes. How peaceful it was, sad and overwhelming… Every so often something came to life inside her, rebelled, demanded noise, movement, people. Life, my God, life! How long would this war go on? How many years would they have to live like this, in this dismal lethargy, bowed, docile, crushed like cattle in a storm? She missed the familiar crackling of the radio: when the Germans arrived it had been hidden in the cellar because people said they confiscated or destroyed them. She smiled. "They must find French houses rather sparsely furnished," she thought, recalling everything Madame Angellier had crammed into wardrobes and locked away out of sight of the enemy.
At dinner time the officer's orderly had come into the dining room with a short note:
Lieutenant Bruno von Falk presents his compliments to Mesdames Angellier and requests they kindly give the bearer of this letter the keys to the piano and the library. The Lieutenant gives his word of honour that he will not remove the instrument or damage the books.
Madame Angellier did not appreciate this courtesy. She raised her eyes to heaven, moved her lips as if she were praying and acquiescing to God's will. "Might over right, isn't it?" she asked the soldier, who didn't understand French and so simply replied "Jawohl" with a wide grin, while nodding his head several times.
"Tell Lieutenant von… von…" she mumbled scornfully, "that he is in charge here."
She took the two keys he wanted from her chain and threw them on to the table. Then she whispered to her daughter-in-law in a tragic tone of voice, "He'll be playing 'Wacht am Rhein'…"
"I think they have a different national anthem now, Mother."
But the Lieutenant didn't play anything at all. The deepest silence still prevailed. When the ladies heard the great courtyard doors slamming like a gong in the peaceful evening, they knew the officer had gone out and sighed with relief.
Now, thought Lucile, he's walked away from the window. He's pacing up and down. His boots… The sound of his boots… It would pass. The occupation would end. There would be peace, blessed peace. The war and the tragedy of 1940 would be no more than a memory, a page in history, the names of battles and treaties children would recite in school, but as for me, for as long as I live, I will never forget the low, regular sound of those boots pacing across the floorboards. Why doesn't he go to bed? Why doesn't he put slippers on in the evening, like a civilised person, like a Frenchman? He's having a drink. (She could hear the squirting of seltzer water and the faint jzz, jzz of a lemon being squeezed. "So that's why we're short of lemons," her mother-in-law would have said. "They're taking everything from us!") Now he's turning the pages of a book. Oh, it's horrible, thinking this way… She shuddered. He'd opened the piano; she recognised the dull sound of the cover thrown backwards and the creaking of the piano stool as it swivelled. Oh, no! Really, he's not going to start playing in the middle of the night! True, it was only nine o'clock. Perhaps in the rest of the universe people didn't go to bed so early… Yes, he was playing. She listened, her head lowered, nervously biting her lips. It wasn't quite an arpeggio; it was more like a sigh rising up from the keyboard, a flurry of notes; he touched them lightly, caressed them, finished with a rapid, light trill that sounded like a bird singing. Then everything went silent.
For a long time Lucile sat very still, brush in hand, her hair loose over her shoulders. Then she sighed, thinking vaguely, It's such a shame! (A shame that the silence was so complete? A shame that the boy had stopped playing? A shame that he was here, he, the invader, the enemy, he and not someone else?) She made an annoyed little gesture with her hand, as if she were trying to push away great masses of heavy air, so heavy she couldn't breathe. A shame… She climbed into the large, empty bed.
Madeleine Sabarie was alone in the house; she was sitting in the room where Jean-Marie had lived for several weeks. Every day, she made the bed where he had slept. This irritated Cécile. "Why bother! No one ever sleeps here, so you don't need to put clean sheets on every day, as if you were expecting someone. Are you expecting someone?"
Madeleine didn't reply and continued, every morning, to shake out the big feather mattress.
She was happy to be alone with her little boy; he was feeding, his head against her bare breast. When she changed sides, a part of his face was as moist, red and shiny as a cherry, and the shape of her nipple was imprinted on his cheek. She kissed him gently. She thought now as she had before, "I'm glad it's a boy, men don't have it so bad." She dozed while watching the fire: she never got enough sleep. There was so much work to do; they hardly got to bed before ten, eleven o'clock, and sometimes they got up in the middle of the night to listen to English radio. In the morning they had to be up by five o'clock to tend the animals. It was nice, today, to be able to take a little nap. The meal was already cooking, the table was set, everything around her was in order. The faint light of a rainy spring day lit up the shoots in the vegetable plot and the grey sky. In the courtyard the ducks quacked in the rain, while the chickens and turkeys-a little mound of ruffled feathers-sheltered sadly under the shed. Madeleine heard the dog bark.
"Are they home already?" she wondered. Benoît had taken the family to the village.
Someone crossed the courtyard, someone who was not wearing the same kind of shoes as Benoît. And every time she heard footsteps that weren't her husband's or someone else's from the farm, every time she saw a strange shape in the distance, she would immediately panic and think: "It's not Jean-Marie, it can't be him, I'm mad to think it might be. First of all, he's not coming back, and then, even if he did, what would change? I'm married to Benoît. I'm not expecting anyone, quite the opposite, I pray to God that Jean-Marie never comes back because, little by little, I'll get used to my husband and then I'll be happy. But I don't know what I'm going on about, honest to God. What am I thinking? I am happy." At the very moment she had these thoughts, her heart, which was less rational, would start beating so violently that it drowned out every other sound, so violently that she wouldn't hear Benoît's voice, the baby crying, the wind beneath the door; the uproar in her heart was deafening, as if a wave had washed over her. For a few seconds she would be about to faint; she would only come round when she saw the postman bringing the new seed catalogue (he'd been wearing new shoes that day) or the Viscount de Montmort, the landowner.
"Well, Madeleine, aren't you going to say hello?" Mother Sabarie would say, surprised.
"I think I woke you up," the visitor would say, as she feebly apologised and mumbled, "Yes, you frightened me…"
Woke her up? From what dream?
Now she felt that emotion within her once more, that secret panic caused by the stranger who had entered (or was coming back into) her life. She half sat up in the chair, stared at the door. Was it a man? It was a man's footsteps, that light cough, the aroma of fine cigarettes… A man's hand, pale, well-manicured, was on the latch, then a German uniform came into sight. As always, when it wasn't Jean-Marie, her disappointment was so intense that she sat dazed for a moment; she didn't even think of buttoning up her blouse. The German was an officer-a young man who couldn't be more than twenty, with an almost colourless face and equally fair and dazzling eyebrows, hair and small moustache. He looked at her bare bosom, smiled and saluted with an exaggerated, almost insolent politeness. Certain Germans knew how to place in their salute to the French a mere show of politeness (or perhaps it just seemed like that to the defeated French in all their bitterness, humiliation and anger). It was not the courtesy accorded to an equal, but that shown to the dead, like the Presentation of Arms after an execution.
"Can I help you, Monsieur?" Madeleine said, finally buttoning up her blouse.
"Madame, I have been billeted on the farm," replied the young man, who spoke extremely good French. "I apologise for the inconvenience. Would you be so kind as to show me my room?"
"We were told we'd have ordinary soldiers," Madeleine said shyly.
"I am the Lieutenant who serves as interpreter to the Commandant."
"You'll be far away from the village and I'm afraid the room won't be good enough for an officer. It's just a farm, here, and you won't have any running water or electricity, or anything a gentleman needs."
The young man glanced around. He looked closely at the faded red tiles on the floor, worn pink in places, the big stove standing in the middle of the room, the bed in the corner, the spinning wheel (they had brought it down from the attic where it had been since the other war: all the young women in the area were learning to spin; it was impossible to find wool in the shops any more). The German then looked carefully at the framed photographs on the walls, the certificates for agricultural prizes, the empty little niche that used to hold a statue of a saint, surrounded by a delicate frieze now half worn away; finally, his eyes fell once more upon the young farm girl holding the baby in her arms. He smiled. "You needn't worry about me. This will do nicely."
His voice was strangely harsh and resonant, like metal being crushed. His steel-grey eyes, sharply etched face and the unusual shade of his pale-blond hair, which was as smooth and bright as a helmet, made this young man's appearance striking to Madeleine; there was something about his physique that was so perfect, so precise, so dazzling, she thought to herself, that he reminded her more of a machine than a human being. In spite of herself, she was fascinated by his boots and belt buckle: the leather and steel seemed to sparkle.
"I hope you have an orderly," she said. "No one here could make your boots shine like that."
He laughed and said again, "You needn't worry about me."
Madeleine had put her son in his crib. She could see the German's reflection in the mirror above the bed. She saw the way he looked at her and smiled. She was afraid and thought, "What will Benoît say if he starts chasing after me?" She didn't like this young man, he frightened her a bit, yet despite herself she was attracted by a certain resemblance to Jean-Marie-not to Jean-Marie as a man, but as a member of a higher social class, a gentleman. Both were carefully shaven, well brought-up, with pale hands and delicate skin. She realised the presence of this German in the house would be doubly painful for Benoît: because he was the enemy but also because he wasn't a peasant like him-because he hated whatever aroused Madeleine's interest in and curiosity about the upper classes to such an extent that for a while now, he had been snatching fashion magazines from her hands; and if she asked him to shave or change his shirt, he'd say, "Better get used to it. You married a farmer, a country bumpkin, I got no fancy manners" with such resentment, such deep-seated jealousy that she knew who had given him these ideas, that Cécile must have been talking. Cécile wasn't the same with her as before, either… She sighed. So many things had changed since the beginning of this damned war.
"I'll show you your room," she said finally.
But he said no; he took a chair and sat down near the stove.
"In a minute, if that's all right with you. Let's get to know each other. What's your name?"
"Madeleine Sabarie."
"I'm Kurt Bonnet" (he pronounced it Bonnett). "It's a French name, as you can see. My ancestors must have been your countrymen, chased out of France under Louis XIV. There is French blood in Germany, and French words in our language."
"Oh?" she said indifferently.
She wanted to say, "There's German blood in France too, but in the earth and since 1914." But she didn't dare: it was better to say nothing. It was strange: she didn't hate the Germans-she didn't hate anyone-but the sight of that uniform seemed to change her from a free and proud person into a sort of slave, full of cunning, caution and fear, skilful at cajoling the conquerors while hissing "I hope they drop dead!" behind closed doors, as her mother-in-law did; she at least didn't pretend, or act nice to the conquerors, Madeleine thought. She was ashamed of herself; she frowned, put on an icy expression and moved her chair away so the German would understand she didn't want to talk to him any more and she didn't like him being there.
He, however, looked at her with pleasure. Like many young men subjected to strict discipline from childhood, he had acquired the habit of bolstering his ego with outward arrogance and stiffness. He believed that any man worthy of the name should be made of steel. And he had behaved accordingly during the war, in Poland and France, and during the occupation. But far more than any principles, he obeyed the impulsiveness of youth. (When she first saw him, Madeleine thought he was twenty. He was even younger: he had turned nineteen during the French campaign.) He behaved kindly or cruelly depending on how people and things struck him. If he took a dislike to someone, he made sure he hurt them as much as possible. During the retreat of the French army, when he was in charge of taking the pathetic herd of prisoners back to Germany, during those terrible days when he was under orders to kill anyone who was flagging, anyone who wasn't walking fast enough, he shot the ones he didn't like the look of without remorse, with pleasure even. On the other hand he would behave with infinite kindness and sympathy towards certain prisoners who seemed likeable to him, some of whom owed him their lives. He was cruel, but it was the cruelty of adolescence, cruelty that results from a lively and subtle imagination, focused entirely inward, towards his own soul. He didn't pity the suffering of others, he simply didn't see them: he saw only himself.
Mixed in with this cruelty was a slight affectation that was a product of his youth as well as a certain leaning towards sadism. For example, although he was harsh towards people, he displayed the greatest solicitude towards animals. It was at his instigation that the Headquarters at Calais had issued an order several months earlier. Bonnet had noticed that, on market days, the farmers carried their chickens feet tied and head down. "As a gesture of humanity" it was forthwith forbidden to continue this practice. The farmers paid no attention, which only increased Bonnet's loathing of the "barbaric and thoughtless" French, while the French were outraged to read such a decree beneath another announcing that eight men had been executed as a reprisal for an act of sabotage. In the northern city where he'd been billeted, Bonnet had only been friendly with the woman whose house he lived in because one day, when he'd been suffering from flu, she'd taken the trouble to bring him breakfast in bed. Bonnet had immediately thought of his mother, his childhood years and, tears in his eyes, thanked Lili-a former Madam in a house of prostitution. From that moment on he did everything he could for her, granting her passes of all kinds, coupons for petrol, etc.; he spent the evenings with the old hag because, he would say, she was old and alone and bored; though he wasn't a rich man, he brought her expensive trinkets every time he returned from missions to Paris.
These acts of kindness were sometimes the result of musical, literary or, as on this spring morning when he walked into the Sabaries' farmhouse, artistic impressions: Bonnet was a cultured man, gifted at all the arts. The Sabaries' farm, with its slightly damp, sombre atmosphere created by the rainy day, its faded pink floor tiles, its empty little niche from which he imagined a statue of the Virgin Mary had been removed during the last revolution, its little palm branch above the cradle and the sparkling copper warming pan half in shadow, had something about it, thought Bonnet, that reminded him of a "domestic scene" of the Flemish School. This young woman sitting on a low chair, her child in her arms, her delightful breast lustrous in the shadow, her ravishing face with its rosy complexion, her pure white chin and forehead, was herself worthy of a portrait. As he admired her, he was almost transported to a museum in Munich or Dresden, alone in front of one of those paintings that aroused within him that intellectual and sensual intoxication he preferred above all else. This woman could treat him coldly, even with hostility, it wouldn't matter; he wouldn't even notice. He would only ask of her, as he asked of everyone around him, to provide him with purely artistic acts of kindness: to retain the lighting of a masterpiece, with luminous flesh set against a background of velvety shadows.
At that very moment a large clock struck midday. Bonnet laughed, almost with pleasure. It was just such a deep, low, slightly cracked sound he had imagined coming from the antique clock with the painted casing in some Dutch Old Master, along with the smell of fresh herring prepared by the housewife and the sounds from the street beyond the window with its tarnished panes of glass; in such paintings there was always a clock like this one hanging on the wall.
He wanted to make Madeleine speak; he wanted to hear her voice again, her young, slightly lilting voice.
"Do you live here alone? Your husband must be a prisoner?"
"Oh, no," she said quickly.
At the thought of Benoît, a German prisoner who had escaped, she was afraid again; it struck her that the German would guess and arrest him. "I'm so stupid," she thought, and instinctively softened: she had to be nice to the conqueror.
"Will you be here long?" she asked in a frank, humble voice. "Everyone's saying three months."
"We don't know ourselves," Bonnet explained. "That's military life for you: in war, it all depends on orders, a general's whim or chance. We were on our way to Yugoslavia, but it's all finished over there."
"Oh? Is it?"
"It will be in a few days. In any case, it would be all over by the time we got there. And I think they'll keep us here all summer, unless they send us to Africa or England."
"And… do you like it?" said Madeleine, intentionally feigning innocence, but with a little shudder of disgust she couldn't hide, as if she were asking a cannibal. "Is it true you eat human flesh?"
"Man is made to be a warrior, just as woman is made to please the warrior," Bonnet replied, and he smiled because he found it comical to quote Nietzsche to this pretty French farm girl. "Your husband must think the same way, if he's young."
Madeleine didn't reply. Actually, she had very little idea what Benoît thought, even though they'd been brought up together. Benoît was taciturn and cloaked in a triple armour of decency: masculine, provincial and French. She didn't know what he hated or what he liked, just that he was capable of both love and hatred.
"My God," she said to herself, "I hope he doesn't take against this German."
She continued to listen but said little, straining all the while to hear any sounds on the road. Carts passed by, the church bells chimed for evening prayers. You could hear the bells ring out one after the other across the countryside; first the light silvery note of the little chapel on the Montmort estate, then the deep sound from the village, then the hurried little peal from Sainte-Marie that you could only hear in bad weather, when the wind blew in from the tops of the hills.
"The family will be home soon," murmured Madeleine.
She placed a creamy earthenware jug of forget-me-nots on the table.
"You won't be eating here, will you?" she suddenly asked.
He reassured her. "No, no, I've paid to have my meals in town. I'll only have some coffee in the morning."
"Well, that's easy enough, Monsieur."
It was an expression they used a lot around Bussy. She said it in an affectionate sort of way, with a smile. It didn't mean a thing, though; it was a mere politeness and didn't actually mean you would get anything. A mere politeness and, if the promise wasn't kept, there was another expression ready and waiting, this time spoken with a tinge of regret and apology: "Ah, well, you can't always do what you want."
But the German was delighted. "How kind everyone is here," he said naively.
"You think you so, Monsieur?"
"And I hope you'll bring me my coffee in bed?"
"We only do that for sick people," said Madeleine ironically.
He wanted to take her hands; she quickly pulled away.
"Here's my husband."
He wasn't there yet, but he would be soon; she recognised the sound of the mare's hooves on the road. She went out into the courtyard; it was raining. Through the gates came the old horse and trap, unused since the other war but now a replacement for the broken-down car. Benoît held the reins. The women were sitting under wet umbrellas.
Madeleine ran towards her husband and put her arm round his neck. "There's a Boche," she whispered in his ear.
"Is he going to be living with us?"
"Yes."
"Damn!"
"So what?" said Cécile. "They're not so bad if you know how to handle them, and they pay well."
Benoît unharnessed the mare and took her to the stable. Cécile, intimidated by the German but conscious of having an advantage because she was wearing her best Sunday dress, a hat and silk stockings, proudly walked into the room.
The regiment was passing beneath Lucile's windows. The soldiers were singing; they had excellent voices, but the French were bemused by this serious choir whose sad and menacing music sounded more religious than warlike.
"That how they pray?" the women asked.
The troops were returning from manoeuvres; it was so early in the morning that the whole village was still asleep. A few women woke with a start. They leaned out of the windows and laughed. It was such a fresh, gentle morning! The roosters crowed huskily after the cold night. The peaceful sky was tinged with pink and silver. Its innocent light played on the happy faces of the men as they marched past (how could you not be happy on such a glorious spring day?). The women watched them for a long time: these tall, well-built men with their hard faces and melodious voices. They were beginning to recognise some of the soldiers. They were no longer the anonymous crowd of the early days, the flood of green uniforms indistinguishable from one another, just as no wave in the sea is unique but merges with the swells before and after it. These soldiers had names now: "Here comes that short blond who lives with the shoemaker and whose friends call him Willy," the townspeople would say. "That one over there, he's the redhead who orders omelettes with eight eggs and drinks eighteen glasses of brandy one after the other without getting drunk or being sick. That little young one who stands so straight, he's the interpreter. He calls the shots at Headquarters. And there's the Angelliers' German."
Just as farmers used to be given the names of the places where they lived, to such an extent that the postman who was a descendant of former tenant farmers on the Montmort estate was called Auguste de Montmort to this very day, so the Germans more or less inherited the social status of their landlords. They were called the Durands' Fritz, the La Forges' Ewald, the Angelliers' Bruno.
Bruno rode at the head of his cavalry detachment. The well-fed, fiery animals pranced and eyed the onlookers with pride and impatience; they were the envy of the villagers.
"Mama, did you see?" the children shouted.
The Lieutenant's horse had a golden-brown coat, as glossy as satin. Both horse and rider were aware of the cheers, the women's cries of pleasure. The handsome animal arched its neck, violently shook its bit. The officer smiled faintly and sometimes made a little affectionate smacking sound with his lips, which controlled the horse better than the whip. When a young girl, at a window, exclaimed, "He's a good rider, that Boche, he is," he raised his gloved hand to his helmet and solemnly saluted.
Behind the young girl you could hear nervous whispering.
"You know very well they don't like being called that. Are you crazy?"
"Oh, so what! So I forgot," the young girl retorted, red as a cherry.
The detachment broke ranks at the village square. In a great clanking of boots and spurs, the men went back to their billets. The sun was shining and it was hot now, almost like summer. The soldiers got washed in the courtyards; their naked torsos were red, burned by being outdoors so much, and covered with sweat. One soldier had hooked a mirror on to the branch of a tree and was shaving. Another plunged his head and bare arms into a large tub of cool water. A third called out to a young woman, "Beautiful day, Madame!"
"Well now, so you speak French?"
"A little."
They looked at each other; smiled at each other. The women went over to the wells and sent down their buckets on long creaking chains. Once retrieved and full of shimmering, icy water that reflected the dark blue of the sky, these buckets always attracted a soldier, who would hurry over to take the heavy burden. Some of the soldiers did it to prove that, even though they were German, they were polite; others did it out of natural kindness; some because the beautiful day and a kind of physical invigoration (brought on by the fresh air, healthy tiredness and the prospect of a well-earned rest) put them in a state of exaltation, of inner strength-a state where men who would gladly act maliciously towards the strong feel even more kindly towards the weak (the same state, doubtless, that in spring causes male animals to fight one another yet graze, play and gambol in the dust in front of the females). A soldier walked a young woman home, solemnly carrying two bottles of white wine she had just pulled out of the well. He was a very young man with light-blue eyes, a turned-up nose, large strong arms.
"They're nice," he said, looking at the woman's legs, "they're nice, Madame…"
"Shh… My husband…"
"Ah, husband, böse… bad," he exclaimed, pretending to be very frightened.
The husband was listening behind the closed door and, since he trusted his wife, instead of getting angry he felt rather proud. "Well, our women are beautiful," he thought. And the small glass of white wine he had every morning seemed to taste better.
Some soldiers went into the shoemaker's. He was a disabled war veteran who had his workbench in the shop; the deep, natural aroma of fresh wood hung in the air; the freshly cut blocks of pine still shed tears of sap. The shelves were crammed with hand-carved clogs decorated with all manner of patterns-chimera, snakes, bulls' heads. There was a pair in the shape of a pig's snout.
One of the Germans looked at them appreciatively. "Magnificent work," he said.
The morose, taciturn shoemaker didn't reply, but his wife, who was setting the table, was so curious she couldn't help but ask, "What did you do in Germany?"
At first the soldier didn't understand; then he said he'd been a locksmith. The shoemaker's wife thought for a moment, then whispered in her husband's ear, "We should show him that broken key to the dresser. Maybe he could fix it…"
"Forget it," her husband said, frowning.
"You? Lunch?" the soldier continued. He pointed to the white bread on a plate decorated with flowers: "French bread… light… not in stomach… nothing…"
What he meant was that the bread didn't seem nourishing, wouldn't fill you up, but the French couldn't believe anyone would be crazy enough not to recognise the excellence of their food, especially their golden round loaves, their crown-shaped breads. There were rumours they would soon have to be made with a mixture of bran and poor-quality flour. But no one believed it. They took the German's words as a compliment and were flattered. Even the sour expression on the shoemaker's face softened. He sat down at the table with his family. The Germans sat on wooden stools, at a distance.
"And do you like this village?" the shoemaker's wife continued.
She was naturally sociable and suffered from her husband's long silences.
"Oh, yes, beautiful…"
"And what about where you come from? Is it like here?" she asked another soldier.
The soldier's face began quivering; you could tell he was desperately trying to find the words to describe his own land, the fields of hop and deep forests. But he couldn't find the words; he just spread out his arms. "Big… good earth…" He hesitated and sighed. "Far…"
"Do you have a family?"
He nodded yes.
"You don't need to talk to them," the shoemaker said to his wife.
The woman felt ashamed. She continued working in silence, pouring the coffee, cutting the children's sandwiches. They could hear joyful sounds coming from outside. It was the cheerful din of laughter, weapons rattling, soldiers' voices and footsteps. No one quite knew why, but they felt lighthearted. Maybe it was because of the beautiful weather. The sky, so blue, seemed gently to bow down towards the horizon and caress the earth. The hens were squatting in the dust: every so often they made sleepy squawking sounds and fluffed themselves up. Bits of straw, feathers, invisible grains of pollen floated in the air. It was nesting season.
There had been no men in the village for so long that even these soldiers, the invaders, seemed in their rightful place. The invaders felt it too; they stretched out in the sunshine. The mothers of prisoners or soldiers killed in the war looked at them and begged God to curse them, but the young women just looked at them.
In one of the classrooms of the independent school, the ladies of the village and some of the fat farmers' wives from the surrounding countryside had gathered together for the monthly "Packages for Prisoners" meeting. The village had taken responsibility for local children of prisoners of war who had been on welfare before the war. The Charity's President was the Viscountess de Montmort. She was a shy, ugly young woman who got flustered whenever she had to speak in public. On each occasion she stuttered; her hands would sweat; her legs trembled; in short, she was just as prone to stage fright as any member of the aristocracy. But she felt it was an obligation, that it was her personal responsibility, her vocation, to enlighten the peasants and middle classes, to show them the way, to plant the seed of righteousness within them.
"You see, Amaury," she explained to her husband, "I cannot believe there is any essential difference between them and me. Even though they disappoint me (if you only knew how crude and petty they can be!), nevertheless I persist in trying to find some spark within them. Yes," she added, looking up at him with tears in her eyes-she cried easily-"yes, our Lord would not have died for such souls if there had been nothing inside them… But their ignorance, my dear, they are steeped in such ignorance that it is truly frightening. So at the beginning of each meeting, I give them a little talk to help them understand why they are being punished and (go ahead and laugh, Amaury) I have sometimes seen a glimmer of understanding on their chubby faces. I do regret," the Viscountess thoughtfully concluded, "I do regret not having followed my vocation: I would have enjoyed preaching in an isolated region, working alongside some missionary in a savannah or virgin forest. Well, best not to think about it. Our mission is here where the Good Lord has sent us."
She was standing on a small platform; the classroom had quickly been cleared of its desks; a dozen or so pupils deemed the most worthy had been allowed to come and hear the Viscountess speak. They were scraping their shoes on the floor and looking vacantly into space with their large, dull eyes, "like cows," the Viscountess thought, feeling rather annoyed.
She decided to speak directly to them. "My dear girls," she said, "you have been the victims of our country's misfortunes at such a tender age…
One of the girls was listening so attentively that she fell off her wooden stool; the eleven other girls tried to stifle their riotous laughter in their smocks.
The Viscountess frowned and continued more loudly. "You play your childish games. You seem carefree, but your hearts are full of sadness. What fervent prayers you must offer to Almighty God, day and night, begging Him to take pity on our dear suffering France!"
She paused and nodded curtly to the teacher who had just come in: she was a woman who did not attend Mass and who had buried her husband in a civil ceremony; according to her pupils she hadn't even been baptised, which seemed not so much scandalous as unbelievable, like saying someone had been born with the tail of a fish. As this person's conduct was irreproachable, the Viscountess hated her all the more: "because," she explained to the Viscount, "if she drank or had lovers, you could understand her lack of religion, but just imagine, Amaury, the confusion that can be caused in people's minds when they see virtue practised by people who are not religious."
The presence of this teacher was so odious to the Viscountess that her voice took on the same burning passion that seeing the enemy stirs in our hearts, and it was with true eloquence that she continued, "But our prayers, our tears are not enough. I say this not only to you; I say it to your mothers. We must be charitable. But what do I see? No one is charitable; no one puts other people first. I am not asking you for money; alas, money doesn't mean very much any more," the Viscountess said with a sigh, remembering she had spent 850 francs on the shoes she was wearing (fortunately, the Viscount was the local Mayor and she had coupons for shoes whenever she pleased). "No, it isn't money, it's food I want to send in these packages to our prisoners of war, food we have in such abundance in this region. Each one of you is thinking of your own relatives, your husband, son, brother, father who is a prisoner, and nothing is too much for them; you send them butter, chocolate, sugar, tobacco, but what about the men who have no families? Oh, ladies, think of it, just imagine the state of these poor wretches who never receive any packages, never receive any letters! Come now, what could you do for them? I'll collect all the donations, I'll sort them all out; I'll send them to the Red Cross to distribute them to the different Stalags. What do you say, ladies?"
They said nothing; the farmers' wives looked at the village ladies, who pursed their lips and stared back at them.
"Come along now, I'll start," said the Viscountess sweetly. "I have an idea: we could send a letter written by one of the children here in the next package. A letter that in simple, touching words would reveal their hearts and express their sorrowful, patriotic feelings. Just think," the Viscountess continued in an impassioned voice, "just think of the joy a poor abandoned soldier will feel when he reads those words, when he can almost touch, in a way, the very soul of his country; their words will remind him of the men, the women, the children, the trees, the houses of his dear little home, and as the poet said, loving our home makes us love our country even more. But most of all, my children, let your hearts speak. Do not aim for stylistic effect: forget your letter-writing skills and speak from the heart. Ah, the heart," said the Viscountess, half closing her eyes, "nothing beautiful, nothing great is accomplished without heart. You could put a little flower from the fields in your letter, a daisy or a primrose… I don't think that would be breaking any rules. Do you like that idea?" the Viscountess asked, tilting her head slightly and smiling graciously. "Come, now, I've talked enough. It's your turn."
The notary's wife, a woman with hard features and a slight moustache, said sharply, "It's not that we don't want to spoil our dear prisoners. But what can we poor villagers do? We have nothing. We don't have enormous estates like you, Viscountess, or big farms like the country folk. We can barely feed ourselves. My daughter just gave birth and can't even get any milk for her baby. Eggs cost two francs each, if you can find any."
"Are you saying we farmers are running a black market?" asked Cécile Sabarie who was in the audience. When she got angry, her neck swelled up like a turkey and her face went purplish-red.
"I'm not saying that, but…"
"Ladies, ladies," the Viscountess said softly, and she thought despondently, "Well, there you have it, there's nothing to be done, they feel nothing, they understand nothing, they have base souls. What am I thinking? Souls? They're nothing more than stomachs with the gift of speech."
"It's hurtful to hear you say that," Cécile continued, "it's hurtful to see you with your houses and having everything you want and then to hear you cry poverty. Come on, everyone knows you villagers have everything. You hear me? Everything! You think we don't know you're getting all the meat? You buy up all the coupons. Everybody knows it. You pay a hundred for each meat coupon. If you've got money, you want for nothing, that's for sure, while we poor people…"
"Well of course we have to have meat, Madame," said the notary's wife haughtily, anxiously wondering if she'd been spotted coming out of the butcher's with a leg of lamb the day before (the second one that week). "We don't have pigs we can kill! We don't have hams in our kitchens, tubs of lard and cured sausages we'd rather see eaten by worms than give them to the miserable people in the village."
"Ladies, ladies," the Viscountess implored. "Think of France, elevate your hearts. Control yourselves. Silence these hurtful remarks. Think of our situation. We are ruined, defeated… We have only one consolation: our dear Maréchal. And all you can talk about is eggs, milk, pigs! How important is food? Really, ladies, this is all so vulgar! We have so many other things to worry about. What is really important in the end? Helping each other a little, a little tolerance. Let us unite just as the soldiers in the last war did in the trenches, just as, I am sure, our dear prisoners of war are doing in their camps, behind their barbed-wire fences."
It was strange. They had barely been listening to her until now. Her imploring had been like a priest's sermon you hear without understanding. But the image of a German prisoner-of-war camp, with men herded behind barbed wire, touched them. Every one of these large, heavy women had someone they loved in one of those camps; they were working for him; they were saving for him; they were putting money aside for his return, so he could say, "You really took care of everything; you're a good wife." Each woman pictured her absent man, just hers; each woman imagined in her own way the place he was held captive; one thought of a pine forest, another of a cold room, yet another of fortress-like walls, but each of them ended up imagining miles of barbed wire surrounding their men and isolating them from the rest of the world. The farmers' wives and villagers alike felt their eyes fill with tears.
"I'll bring you something," one of them said.
"Me too," said another with a sigh. "I'll manage to find a bit of something."
"I'll see what I can do," promised the notary's wife.
Madame de Montmort hurried to write down their promises. Every one of the women stood up, went over to the President and whispered something in her ear, because now they were all deeply moved and touched; they truly wanted to give, not only to their sons and husbands, but to strangers, to children on Welfare. However, they didn't trust each other; they didn't want to seem richer than they were; they feared being denounced. There wasn't a single household that didn't hide its provisions; mothers and daughters spied on each other, denounced each other; housewives closed their kitchen doors at mealtimes so they wouldn't be betrayed by the smell of lard sizzling in the pot, or the piece of prohibited meat, or the cake made with illegal flour. Madame de Montmort wrote down:
Madame Bracelet, farmer's wife in Les Roaches, two sausages, a pot of honey, a jar of potted meat… Madame Joseph, from the Rouet estate, two potted guinea fowl, some salted butter, chocolate, coffee, sugar…
"I can count on you, can't I, ladies?" the Viscountess said again.
But the farmers' wives just stared at her, astonished: they never went back on their word. They said goodbye to the Viscountess, holding out their red hands that were chafed by the harsh winter, by caring for animals, by doing the washing. She shook each hand reluctantly; touching them was physically distasteful to her. But she made the effort to overcome this feeling so contrary to Christian charity and, in the spirit of mortification, forced herself to kiss the children who accompanied their mothers; they were all fat and pink, overfed and with dirty faces, like little pigs.
At last the room was empty. The teacher had taken the girls out; the farmers' wives were gone. The Viscountess sighed, not from tiredness but from disgust. How base and ugly people were! "You have to go to so much trouble to instil a glimmer of love into these sad souls…" she said to herself out loud, but as her spiritual adviser had suggested, she offered up her day's tiredness and work to God.
"And what do the French think, Monsieur, of the outcome of the war?" Bonnet asked.
The women looked at each other, scandalised. It just wasn't done. You simply didn't talk to a German about the war-not about this one, or the other one, or about Maréchal Pétain, or about Mers-el-Kébir, or about how France had been split in two, or about the occupying forces, or about anything that mattered.
There was only one possible attitude: an affectation of cold indifference, the tone of voice Benoît used as he raised his glass, full to the brim with red wine: "They don't give a damn, Monsieur."
It was evening. The setting sun, clear and crisp, was a sign there would be a frost that night, but that the next day would undoubtedly be magnificent. Bonnet had spent all day in the village and was on his way to bed. But before going up, he had lingered downstairs-out of politeness, natural kindness, the desire to be well regarded or perhaps simply the wish to warm himself a moment by the fire. Dinner was almost over; Benoît was alone at the table; the women had already got up and were tidying the room, doing the dishes.
The German looked at the big useless bed with curiosity. "No one sleeps here, do they? It isn't used for anything? How odd."
"Sometimes it's used," said Madeleine, thinking of Jean-Marie.
She thought no one would guess, but Benoît frowned; every allusion to what had happened that past summer pierced straight through his heart like an arrow, but it was his business, no one else's. He looked reproachfully at Cécile, who had started to snigger.
"Sometimes it can be useful," he replied with excessive politeness. "You never know… If something bad happened to you, for example (not that I'd want it to). Around here, we lay out our dead on beds like this."
Bonnet looked at him, amused, with the same scornful pity you feel when a wild animal grinds its teeth behind the bars of its cage. "Fortunately," he thought, "this man will be busy working and won't be around too often… and the women are more approachable." He smiled. "In wartime, none of us wants to die in a bed."
Madeleine, meanwhile, had gone out into the garden; she came back with some flowers to decorate the mantelpiece. They were the first lilacs of the season, as white as snow, with greenish tips. At the top of each stem the clusters of flowers were still in bud, but further down they opened out into perfumed blooms.
Bonnet lowered his pale face deep inside the bouquet. "How divine… and how well you know how to arrange flowers."
For a second they stood silently, side by side. Benoît thought that she (his wife, his Madeleine) always seemed comfortable when it came to doing lady's work-when she chose flowers, polished her nails, wore her hair differently from the other women in the area, when she spoke to strangers, held a book… "People shouldn't take in foster-children, you never know where they come from," he said to himself. Once more that painful thought… When he said, "You don't know where they come from," what he imagined, what he was afraid of, wasn't that Madeleine might come from a family of alcoholics or thieves, but from the middle classes; perhaps it was that which made her sigh and say, "Oh, it's so boring in the countryside," or "I want to have pretty things, I do," and it was that which made her feel some vague bond with strangers, with the enemy, so long as he happened to be a gentleman with fine clothes and clean hands.
He pushed his chair back angrily and went outside. It was time to get the animals in. He stayed in the warm darkness of the stables for a long time. A cow had given birth the day before. She tenderly licked her little calf with its big head, its thin trembling legs. Another cow was breathing quietly in the corner. He listened to her calm, deep breaths. From where he was, he could see the open door of the house; a shape appeared on the doorstep. Someone was worried because he hadn't come back, they were looking for him. His mother or Madeleine? His mother, no doubt… Just his mother, sadly… He wouldn't move from here until the German had gone upstairs. He'd see his light go on. Sure, electricity didn't cost him anything. He was right; after a few moments a light shone through the window. At the same time the shadowy figure who'd been looking for him left the doorstep and ran lightly towards him. He felt his heart soften, as if some invisible hand had suddenly lifted the burden that had weighed so heavily on his chest for so long that he felt crushed by it.
"That you, Benoît?"
"Yes, I'm over here."
"What are you doing? I was scared."
"Scared? Of what? You're crazy."
"I don't know. Come in."
"Wait. Wait a little."
He pulled her towards him. She struggled and pretended to laugh, but he could sense, by a kind of stiffening throughout her body, that she didn't really want to laugh, that she didn't find it funny, that she didn't like being thrown down in the hay and cool straw, she didn't like it… No! She didn't like him… She got no pleasure from him.
He said very quietly, in a low voice, "Is there nothing you like?"
"There is… But not here, not like this, Benoît. I'm embarrassed."
"Why? You think the cows might see you?" he said harshly. "Fine, go on, get out."
She let out the despondent little moan that made him want to cry and kill her at the same time.
"The way you talk to me! Sometimes, I think you're cross with me. For what? It's Cécile who's…"
He put his hand over her mouth; she quickly pulled away and continued, "She's the one who's getting you all worked up."
"No one's getting me worked up. I don't need other people's eyes to see, do I? All I know is whenever I come near you it's always 'Wait. Not now. Not tonight, the baby's worn me out.' Who are you waiting for?" he roared suddenly. "Who are you saving yourself for? Well? Well?"
"Let go of me!" she cried as he grabbed hold of her. "Let go of me! You're hurting me."
He pushed her away so violently that she hit her head on the low door frame. They looked at each other for a moment in silence. He picked up a rake and angrily stabbed at the hay.
"You're wrong," Madeleine said finally, then whispered tenderly, "Benoît… Poor dear Benoît… You're wrong to think such things. Come on, I'm your wife; if I seem cold, sometimes, it's because the baby wears me out. That's all."
"Let's get out of here," he said suddenly. "Let's go up to bed."
They went into the dark empty house. There was a little light left in the sky and at the tops of the trees. Everything else-the earth, the house, the meadows-was plunged into cool darkness. They undressed and got into bed. That night he didn't try to take her. They lay awake, motionless, listening to the German's breathing above their heads, the creaking of his bed. In the darkness, Madeleine reached for her husband's hand and squeezed it tightly. "Benoît!"
"What?"
"Benoît, I just remembered. You have to hide your shotgun. Did you read the posters in town?"
"Yes," he said sarcastically. "Verboten. Verboten. Death. That's all they know how to say, the bastards."
"Where are you going to hide it?"
"Forget it. It's fine where it is."
"Benoît, don't be stubborn! It's serious. You know how many people have been shot for not turning in their weapons."
"You want me to give them my gun? Only chickens do that! I'm not scared of them. You want to know how I got away last summer? I killed two of them. They didn't know what hit them! And I'll kill some more," he said furiously, shaking his fist in the dark at the German upstairs.
"I'm not saying you should hand it in, just hide it, bury it… There are plenty of good hiding places."
"Can't."
"Why not?"
"I've got to have it to hand. You think I'm going to let the foxes near us-or all the other stinking beasts? The château grounds are crawling with them. The Viscount, he's a real coward. He's shaking in his boots. He couldn't kill a thing. Now there's one who's handed in his gun to the Commandant, and with a nice little salute to boot: 'You're very welcome, Messieurs, I'm truly honoured…' It's lucky me and my friends go up to his grounds at night. Otherwise the whole area would be overrun."
"Don't they hear the gunshots?"
"Of course not! It's enormous, almost a forest."
"Do you go there often?" said Madeleine, curious. "I didn't know."
"There's lots of things you don't know, my girl. We go looking for his young tomato plants and beetroot, fruit, anything he's not taking to market. The Viscount…" He paused for a moment, plunged in thought, then added, "The Viscount, he's one of the worst…"
For generations the Sabaries had been tenants of the Montmorts. For generations they had hated one another. The Sabaries said the Montmorts were mean to the poor, haughty, shifty; the Montmorts accused their tenants of having a "bad attitude." They whispered these words as they shrugged their shoulders and raised their eyes to heaven; it was an expression that meant far more than even the Montmorts thought. The Sabaries' way of perceiving poverty, wealth, peace, war, freedom, property, was not in itself less logical than the Montmorts', but it was as contrary to theirs as fire is to water. Now there was even more to complain about. The way the Viscount saw it, Benoît had been a soldier in 1940 and, in the end, it was the soldiers' lack of discipline, their lack of patriotism, their "bad attitude" that had been responsible for the defeat. Benoît, on the other hand, saw in Montmort one of those dashing officers in their tan boots who during those June days had headed towards the Spanish border in their expensive cars, with their wives and suitcases. Then had come "Collaboration"…
"He licks the Germans' boots," Benoît said darkly.
"Be careful," said Madeleine. "You say what you think too much. And don't be rude to that German up there…"
"If he starts chasing after you, I'll…"
"You're crazy!"
"I have eyes."
"Are you going to be jealous of him too?" Madeleine exclaimed.
She regretted it as soon as she had said it: she shouldn't have given substance to her jealous husband's imagination. But after all, what was the use of keeping quiet about something they both knew.
"They're both the same to me," Benoît replied.
These well-groomed, clean-cut men with their quick, witty way of talking-the girls are drawn to them, in spite of themselves, because they're flattered to be sought after by gentlemen… that's what he means, thought Madeleine. If only he knew! Knew she'd loved Jean-Marie from the first moment, the very first moment she saw him lying on that stretcher, exhausted, covered in mud, in his bloody uniform! Loved. Yes. Lying in the dark, deep in that secret part of her heart, she repeated to herself over and over again, "I loved him. There it is. I still love him. I can't help it."
At dawn, the husky crow of the cock pierced the silence and put an end to their sleepless night. They both got up. She went to make the coffee, he to tend the animals.
Lucile Angellier sat in the shade of the cherry trees with a book and some embroidery. It was the only corner of the garden where trees and plants were left to grow untended, for these cherry trees bore little fruit.
But it was blossom time. Against a sky of pure and relentless blue-that deep but lustrous Sèvres blue seen on certain precious pieces of porcelain-floated branches that appeared to be covered in snow. The breath of wind that moved them was still chilly on this day in May; the flowers gently resisted, curling up with a kind of trembling grace and turning their pale stamens towards the ground. The sun shone through them, revealing a pattern of interlacing, delicate blue veins, visible through the opaque petals; this added something alive to the flower's fragility, to its ethereal quality, something almost human, in the way that human can mean frailty and endurance both at the same time. The wind could ruffle these ravishing creations but it couldn't destroy them, or even crush them; they swayed there, dreamily; they seemed ready to fall but held fast to their slim strong branches-branches that had something silvery about them, like the trunk itself, which grew tall and straight, sleek and slender, tinged with greys and purples. Between the clusters of white flowers were long thin leaves; in the shade they looked a delicate green, covered in silvery down; in the sunlight they seemed pink.
The garden ran alongside a narrow road, a country lane dotted with little cottages. This was where the Germans had set up their ammunitions store. A guard marched up and down, beneath a red sign that said in large letters:
VERBOTEN
and further down, in small writing, in French:
KEEP OUT UNDER PENALTY OF DEATH
The soldiers whistled as they groomed their horses and the horses ate the green shoots of the young trees. In the gardens bordering the road, men calmly went about their work. In shirtsleeves, corduroy trousers and straw hats, they tilled, pruned, watered, sowed, planted. Sometimes a German soldier would push open the gate of one of these little gardens to ask for a match to light his pipe, or for a fresh egg, or a glass of beer. The gardener would give him what he wanted; then, leaning on his spade and lost in thought, watch him walk away before turning back to his work with a shrug of the shoulders that was no doubt a reaction to a world of thoughts, so numerous, so deep, so serious and strange that it was impossible to express them in words.
Lucile began to embroider, but soon set down her work. The cherry blossom above her head was attracting wasps and bees; they were coming and going, darting about, diving into the centre of the flowers and drinking greedily, heads down and bodies trembling with a sort of spasmodic delight, while a great golden bumblebee, seemingly mocking these agile workers, swayed in the soft breeze as if on a hammock, barely moving and filling the air with its peaceful golden hum.
From her seat, Lucile could see their German officer at the window; for a few days now he'd had the regiment's Alsatian with him. He was in Gaston Angellier's room, sitting at the Louis XIV desk; he emptied the ashes from his pipe into the blue cup that the elder Madame Angellier used for her son's herbal tea; he tapped his heel absent-mindedly against the gilt bronze mounts that supported the table. The dog had put his snout on the German's leg; he barked and pulled on his chain.
"No, Bubi," the officer told him, in French, and loud enough for Lucile to hear (in this quiet garden, all sound hung in the air for a long time, as if carried by the gentle breeze), "you can't go running about. You will eat all these ladies' lettuces and they will not be happy with you; they will think we are all bad-mannered, crude soldiers. You must stay where you are, Bubi, and look at the beautiful garden."
"What a child!" Lucile thought. But she couldn't help smiling.
The officer continued, "It's a shame, isn't it, Bubi? You would love to make holes in the garden with your nose, I'm sure. If there were a small child in the house it would be different… He'd call us over. We've always got along well with small children… But here there are only two very serious ladies, very silent and… we're better off staying where we are, Bubi!"
He waited another moment and when Lucile said nothing, he seemed disappointed. He leaned further out of the window, saluted her and asked with excessive politeness, "Would it inconvenience you in any way, Madame, if I were to ask your permission to pick the strawberries in your flower beds?"
"Make yourself at home," said Lucile with bitter irony.
The officer saluted again. "I wouldn't take the liberty of asking you for myself, I assure you, but this dog loves strawberries. I would point out, as well, that it is a French dog. He was found in an abandoned village in Normandy, during a battle, and taken in by my comrades. You wouldn't refuse to give your strawberries to a fellow Frenchman."
"We must be idiots," thought Lucile. But all she said was, "Come, both of you, and pick whatever you like."
"Thank you, Madame," the officer exclaimed happily and immediately jumped out of the window, the dog following behind.
The two of them came up to Lucile; the German smiled. "I hope you don't mind me asking, Madame. Please do not think me rude. It's just that this garden, these cherry trees, it all seems like a little corner of paradise to a simple soldier."
"Did you spend the winter in France?" Lucile asked.
"Yes. In the north, confined to the barracks and the café by the bad weather. I was billeted with a poor young woman whose husband had been taken prisoner two weeks after they got married. Whenever she saw me in the hallway she started to cry. As for me, well, it made me feel like a criminal. Though it wasn't my fault… and I could have told her I was married too, and separated from my wife by the war."
"You're married?"
"Yes. Does that surprise you? Married four years. A soldier four years."
"But you're so young!"
"I'm twenty-four, Madame."
They fell silent. Lucile took up her embroidery. The officer knelt on the ground and began picking strawberries; he held them in the palm of his hand and let Bubi come and find them with his wet black nose.
"Do you live here alone with your mother?"
"She's my husband's mother; he's a prisoner of war. You can ask the cook for a plate for your strawberries."
"Oh, all right… Thank you, Madame."
After a moment he came back with a big blue plate and continued picking strawberries. He offered some to Lucile who took a few and then told him to have the others. He was standing in front of her, leaning against a cherry tree.
"Your house is beautiful, Madame."
The sky had become hazy, cloaked in a light mist, and in this softer light the house took on a pinkish ochre colour, like certain eggshells; as a child, Lucile had called them "brown eggs" and thought they tasted more delicious than the snow-white ones most of the hens laid. This memory made her smile. She looked at the house, its bluish slate roof, its sixteen windows with their shutters (carefully left only slightly ajar so the spring sunshine couldn't fade the tapestries), the great rusty clock over the entrance that no longer sounded the hour and whose glass cover mirrored the sky.
"You think it's beautiful?" she asked.
"One of Balzac's characters might live here. It must have been built by a wealthy provincial notary who retired to the countryside. I imagine him, at night, in my room, counting out his gold coins. He was a freethinker, but his wife went to first Mass every morning, the one whose bells I hear ringing on my way back from night manoeuvres. His wife would have been blonde, with a rosy complexion and a large cashmere shawl."
"I'll ask my mother-in-law who built this house," said Lucile. "My husband's parents were landowners, but in the nineteenth century there must have been notaries, lawyers and doctors, and before that farmers. I know there was a farm here a hundred and fifty years ago."
"You'll ask? You don't know? Doesn't it interest you, Madame?"
"I don't know," said Lucile, "but I can tell you about the house where I was born; I can tell you when it was built and by whom. I wasn't born here. I just live here."
"Where were you born?"
"Not far from here, but in another province. In a house in the woods… where the trees grow so close to the sitting room that in summer their shadows bathe everything in a green light, just like an aquarium."
"There are forests where I live," said the officer. "Very big forests. People hunt all day long." After thinking for a moment he added, "An aquarium, yes, you're right. The sitting-room windows are dark green and cloudy, like water. There are also lakes where we hunt wild duck."
"Will you be getting leave soon so you can go home?" asked Lucile.
Joy flashed across the officer's face. "I'm leaving in ten days, Madame, a week from Monday. Since the beginning of the war I've only had one short leave at Christmas, less than a week. Oh, Madame, we look forward to our leave so much! We count the days. We hope. And then we get there and we realise we don't speak the same language any more."
"Sometimes," murmured Lucile.
"Always."
"Are your parents still alive?"
"Yes. My mother will probably be sitting in the garden right now, like you, with a book and some embroidery."
"And your wife?"
"My wife," he said, "is waiting for me, or rather, she's waiting for someone who went away four years ago and who will never return… Absence is a very strange thing!"
"Yes," sighed Lucile.
And she thought of Gaston Angellier. There are some women who expect to welcome back the same man, and some who expect a different man from before, she said to herself. Both are disappointed. She forced herself to picture the husband she hadn't seen for a year, and what he must be like now, suffering, consumed with longing (but for his wife or his hatmaker in Dijon?). She wasn't being fair; he must be devastated by the humiliation of the defeat, the loss of so much wealth… Suddenly, the sight of the German was painful to her (no, not the German himself, but his uniform, that peculiar almond-green colour verging on grey, his jacket, his shiny bright boots). She pretended she had some work to do in the house and went inside. From her room she could see him walking up and down the narrow path between the large pear trees, their arms stretched out, heavy with blossom. What a beautiful day… Gradually the light began to fade, making the branches of the cherry trees look bluish and airy, like powder puffs. The dog walked quietly beside the officer, now and again rubbing his nose into the young man's hand. The officer stroked him gently each time. He wasn't wearing a hat: his silvery blond hair shone in the sunlight. Lucile saw him looking at the house.
"He's intelligent and well-mannered. But I'm glad he'll be leaving soon. It pains my poor mother-in-law to see him living in her son's room. Passionate souls are so simple," she thought. "She hates him and that's all there is to it. People who can love and hate openly, consistently, unreservedly, are so lucky. Meanwhile, here I am, on this beautiful day, confined to my bedroom because that gentleman wants to take a little walk. It's too ridiculous."
She closed the window, threw herself down on the bed and continued reading. She persevered until dinner time, but she was half asleep over her book, tired from the heat and bright light. When she entered the dining room her mother-in-law was already at her usual place opposite the empty chair where Gaston always sat. She was so pale and rigid, her eyes so raw from crying, that Lucile was frightened.
"What's happened?" she asked.
"I wonder…" replied Madame Angellier, clasping her hands together so tightly that Lucile could see her nails turning white, "I wonder why you ever married Gaston?"
There is nothing more consistent in people than their way of expressing anger. Madame Angellier's way was normally as devious and subtle as the hissing of a serpent; Lucile had never endured such an abrupt, harsh attack. She was less indignant than upset; suddenly she realised how much her mother-in-law must be suffering. She remembered their melancholy, affectionate and deceitful black cat who would purr, then slyly lash out with her claws. Once she even went for the cook's eyes, nearly blinding her. That was the day her litter of kittens had been drowned. After that she'd disappeared.
"What have I done?" Lucile asked quietly.
"How could you, here, in his house, outside his windows, with him gone, a prisoner, ill perhaps, abused by these brutes, how could you smile at a German, speak with such familiarity to a German? It's inconceivable!"
"He asked my permission to go into the garden to pick some strawberries. I couldn't exactly refuse. You're forgetting he's in charge here now, unfortunately… He's being polite, but he could take whatever he wants, go wherever he pleases and even throw us out into the street. He wears kid gloves to claim his rights as a conqueror. I can't hold that against him. I think he's right. We're not on a battlefield. We can keep all our feelings deep inside. Superficially at least, why not be polite and considerate? There's something inhuman about our situation. Why make it worse? It isn't… it isn't reasonable, Mother." Lucile spoke so passionately that she surprised even herself.
"Reasonable!" exclaimed Madame Angellier. "But my poor girl, that word alone proves you don't love your husband, that you've never loved him and you don't even miss him. Do you think that I try to be reasonable? I can't bear the sight of that officer. I want to rip his eyes out. I want to see him dead. It may not be fair, or humane, or Christian, but I am a mother. Being without my son is torture. I hate the people who have taken him away from me, and if you were a real wife, you wouldn't have been able to bear that German being near you. You wouldn't have been afraid of appearing uncouth, rude, or ridiculous. You would have simply got up and, with or without an excuse, walked away. My God! That uniform, those boots, that blond hair, that voice, and that look of good health and contentment, while my poor son…"
She stopped and began to cry.
"Come on now, Mother…"
But Madame Angellier became even more enraged. "I wonder why you ever married him!" she exclaimed again. "For his money, for his land no doubt, honestly…"
"That's not true. You know very well it's not true. I got married because I was a little goose, because Papa said, 'He's a good man. He'll make you happy.' I never imagined he'd start being unfaithful to me with a hatmaker from Dijon as soon as we got married!"
"What?… What on earth are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about my marriage," Lucile said bitterly. "At this very moment a woman in Dijon is knitting Gaston a sweater, making him sweetmeats, sending him packages and probably writing 'My poor sweetheart, I'm so lonely without you tonight, in our great big bed.'"
"A woman who loves him," muttered Madame Angellier, her lips becoming as thin and sharp as a razor, and turning the colour of faded hydrangea.
"At this very moment," Lucile thought to herself, "she would cheerfully kick me out and have the hatmaker here instead," and with the treachery present in even the best of women, she insinuated, "It's true he loves her… a lot… You should see his chequebook. I found it in his desk when he left."
"He's spending money on her?" cried Madame Angellier, horrified.
"Yes; and I couldn't care less."
There was a long silence. They could hear the familiar sounds of evening: the neighbour's radio sending out a series of piercing, plaintive, droning notes, like Arab music or the screeching of crickets (it was the BBC of London distorted by interference), the mysterious murmuring of some stream hidden in the countryside, the insistent croak of a thirsty frog praying for rain. In the room, the copper lamp that hung from the ceiling-rubbed and polished by so many generations that it had lost its pink glow and was now the pale, yellow colour of a crescent moon-shone down on the two women sitting at the table. Lucile felt sad and remorseful.
"What's wrong with me?" she thought. "I should have just let her criticise me and said nothing. Now she'll get even more upset. She'll want to make excuses for her son, patch things up between us. God, how tedious!"
Madame Angellier didn't say a word for the rest of the meal. After dinner they went into the sitting room, where the cook announced the Viscountess de Montmort. This lady, naturally, did not associate with the middle-class people of the village; she wouldn't invite them into her home any more than she would her farmworkers. When she needed a favour, however, she would come to their homes to make the request with the simplicity, ingenuousness and innocent superiority of the "well-bred." The villagers didn't realise that when she dropped by, dressed like a chambermaid, wearing a little red felt hat with a pheasant feather that had seen better days, she was demonstrating the profound scorn she felt towards them even more clearly than if she had stood on ceremony: after all, they didn't get dressed up to go to a neighbouring farm to ask for a glass of milk. Her deception worked. "She's not stuck-up," they all thought when they met her. Nevertheless, they treated her with extraordinary condescension-and they were just as unaware of it as the Viscountess was of her feigned humility.
Madame de Montfort strode into the Angelliers' sitting room; she greeted them cordially; she didn't apologise for coming so late; she picked up Lucile's book and read the title out loud: Connaissance de l'Est by Claudel.
"Very good indeed," she said to Lucile with an encouraging smile, as if she were congratulating one of the schoolgirls for reading the History of France without being forced to. "You like reading serious books, very good indeed."
She knelt down to pick up the ball of wool the elder Madame Angellier had just dropped.
"You see," the Viscountess seemed to say, "I've been brought up to respect my elders; their background, their education, their wealth mean nothing to me; I see only their white hair."
Meanwhile, Madame Angellier, with an icy nod of the head, barely moving her lips, invited the Viscountess to sit down. Everything inside her seemed silently to scream, "If you think I'm going to be flattered by your visit you're mistaken. My great-great-grandfather might have been one of the Viscount de Montmort's farmers, but that's ancient history and no one even knows about it, whereas everyone knows the exact number of hectares of land your dead father-in-law sold to my late husband when he needed money; what's more, your husband managed to come back from the war, while my son is a prisoner. I am a suffering mother and you should be showing respect to me." To the Viscountess's questions she replied quietly that she was in good health and had recently heard from her son.
"You have no hope?" asked the Viscountess, meaning "hope that he'll soon come back home."
Madame Angellier shook her head and raised her eyes to heaven.
"It's so sad," said the Viscountess and added, "We're going through such hard times."
She said "we" out of that sense of propriety which makes us pretend we share other people's misfortunes when we're with them (although egotism invariably distorts our best intentions so that in all innocence we say to someone dying of tuberculosis, "I do feel for you, I do understand, I've had a cold I can't shake off for three weeks now").
"Very hard times, Madame," murmured Madame Angellier coldly. "We have a guest, as you know," she added, indicating the next room and smiling bitterly. "One of these gentlemen… You're putting someone up as well, no doubt?" she asked, even though she and everyone else knew that thanks to the Viscount's personal contacts there were no Germans at the château.
The Viscountess did not reply to this question, but said indignantly, "You will never guess what they have had the nerve to request… Access to the lake for fishing and swimming! And I, who love the water so much, will be forced to stay away all summer."
"Are they forbidding you to use the lake? Well, that's a bit much," exclaimed Madame Angellier, vaguely comforted by the humiliation inflicted upon the Viscountess.
"No, no," she insisted, "on the contrary, they behaved quite correctly. 'Please tell us when we may use the lake so we will not disturb you,' they said. But can you imagine me running into one of those men in my bathing suit? You know they even eat half naked? They take their meals in the courtyard of the school with bare chests and legs, and wearing a kind of jockstrap! The older girls' classroom looks out over the courtyard so they have to keep the shutters closed so the children don't see… what they shouldn't see. And you can imagine how pleasant that must be in this heat!"
She sighed: she was in a very difficult position. At the beginning of the war she had been passionately patriotic and anti-German, not that she particularly hated the Germans (she felt the same aversion, defiance and scorn towards all foreigners), but there was something wonderfully dramatic about patriotism and hatred of the Germans, as there was in anti-Semitism or, later, devotion to Maréchal Pétain, that sent chills down her spine. In 1939 she had organised a series of easy-to-follow lectures at the school on Hitler's psychology, which she had delivered to an audience of nuns, village gentlewomen and rich farmers' wives, and in which she had depicted all Germans, without exception, as madmen, sadists and criminals. Immediately after the defeat of France she had maintained this stance, mainly because it would have taken the kind of flexibility and sharpness of mind she clearly lacked to change camp so quickly. At the time, she herself had typed and distributed several dozen copies of the famous prophecies of Sainte Odile, who predicted the extermination of the Germans at the end of 1941.
But time had passed; the year had ended; the Germans were still here and, what's more, the Viscount had been appointed town Mayor, thus becoming a public official, forced to embrace the government's views. And so, with each day that passed, the Viscount leaned more and more towards what was called the policy of collaboration. As a result, Madame de Montfort found herself forced to water down her comments on current events. Now, once more, she remembered she mustn't show any ill will towards the conqueror and so said with tolerance (and anyway, Jesus wanted us to love our enemies, didn't he?), "I do understand they have to wear light clothing after their tiring exercises. After all, they're just like any other men."
But Madame Angellier refused to accept this argument. "They are dreadful creatures who hate us. They've said they won't be happy until they see all Frenchmen on their knees."
"It's abominable," said the Viscountess, sincerely indignant.
After all, the policy of collaboration had only been in existence for a few months, while hatred of the Germans was nearly a century old. Madame de Montmort instinctively reverted to speaking as she had in the past.
"Our poor country… laid bare, oppressed, ruined… And so many tragedies! Just look at the blacksmith's family: three sons, one killed, one a prisoner, the third missing at Mers-el-Kébir… And the Bérards from La Montagne," she said, adding the family's name to that of the farm where they lived, as was the custom in that part of the world, "since her husband was taken prisoner, the poor woman has gone mad from exhaustion and all her problems. The only people left to keep the farm going are her grandfather and a little thirteen-year-old girl. And as for the Cléments… the mother has died from overwork; her four children have been taken in by neighbours. Countless tragedies… poor France!"
Madame Angellier, her pale lips tightly closed, nodded her head in agreement and continued knitting. However, she and the Viscountess soon stopped talking about other people's disasters in order to discuss their own problems. There was a marked difference in the lively, passionate manner in which they now spoke, compared with the slow, exaggerated, polite way they had recalled their neighbours' misfortunes: it was the way a bored schoolboy would recite the death of Hippolytus seriously and respectfully, since it meant nothing at all to him, yet make his voice miraculously persuasive and impassioned when he stopped to complain to the teacher that someone had stolen his marbles.
"It's shameful, shameful," said Madame Angellier. "I pay twenty-seven francs for a pound of butter. Everything is sold through the black market. The townspeople have to get by, of course, but still…"
"Oh, don't remind me! I wonder how much food costs in Paris… It's fine for anyone with money, but," the Viscountess virtuously pointed out, "there are so many poor people, after all," and she enjoyed feeling she was a good person, demonstrating she hadn't forgotten the destitute; her pleasure was increased by knowing that thanks to her enormous fortune, she herself would never be in a position to be pitied. "People don't think about the poor enough," she said.
But all this was mere banter; it was time to come to the real point of her visit: she needed to get some grain for her chickens. Her poultry were famous in the region. In 1941 all wheat was requisitioned; it was, in theory, forbidden to give any to chickens. But "forbidden" didn't necessarily mean "impossible to get around," just "difficult to do"; it was simply a question of discretion, opportunity and money. The Viscountess had written a little article for the local newspaper, a right-thinking publication to which the local priest was a contributor. The article was called "Anything for the Maréchal!." This is how it started: "Let everyone remember! Let everyone continue to remind each other-gathered round your cottage hearths through the long evenings-any Frenchman worthy of the name will no longer give a single grain of wheat to his hens, not a single potato to his pigs; he will save his oats and rye, his barley and his rapeseed, and having gathered together all his riches, the fruits of his labour, watered with his own sweat, he will make a wreath of them, tie them up in a red, white and blue ribbon, a symbol of his patriotism, and lay them at the feet of the Venerable Elder who has restored our hope!" But of all the poultry yards where, according to the Viscountess, not a single grain of wheat should remain, her own was, naturally, the exception: it was her pride and joy, the object of her most attentive devotion; she raised rare breeds, prizewinners in the biggest agricultural competitions, both in France and abroad. The Viscountess's land was the very best in the region, but she wouldn't dream of going to her tenant farmers about such a sensitive transaction: it was unthinkable to give the working classes anything they could use against you; they would make you pay dearly for any such collusion. Madame Angellier, on the other hand… well, that was different. They could always come to some arrangement.
Madame Angellier sighed deeply. "I could perhaps… one or two bags… And you, Madame, perhaps you could arrange through the Mayor to get us a bit of coal? In theory, we shouldn't, but…"
Lucile left them and walked over to the window. The shutters were still open. The sitting room looked out on to the square. There was a bench opposite the War Memorial, in shadow. Everything seemed to be asleep. It was a wonderful spring night; silvery stars filled the sky. In the fading light you could just make out the rooftops of the neighbouring houses: the blacksmith's, where an old man was mourning his three lost sons; the small home of the shoemaker who had been killed in the war, and whose poor wife and sixteen-year-old son did their best to carry on. If you listened closely, thought Lucile, you might hear each of these low, dark, quiet houses moaning. But… what was that sound? From out of the darkness came laughter, the rustling of skirts. Then a man's voice, a foreign voice asked, "How you say that, in French? Kiss? Yes? Oh, it's nice…"
Further away, shadowy figures wandered past. You could just about make out a pale bodice, a ribbon in flowing hair, a shiny boot or belt buckle. The guard was still marching up and down in front of the Lokal, which it was forbidden to approach upon pain of death, but his comrades were enjoying their free time and the beautiful night. Two soldiers were singing amid a group of young women-
Trink'mal noch ein Tröpfchen!
Ach! Suzanna…
– and the young women softly hummed along.
During a moment of silence, Madame Angellier and the Viscountess heard the final notes of the song.
"Who could be singing at this hour?"
"They're women with German soldiers."
"How revolting!" the Viscountess exclaimed. She made a gesture of horror and disgust. "I'd really like to know who those shameless girls are. I'd make sure the priest knew their names." She leaned forward and eagerly peered out into the night.
"I can't make them out. They wouldn't dare in broad daylight. Oh, ladies, this is worse than everything! Now they're corrupting Frenchwomen! Just think of it, their brothers and husbands are prisoners and they're out having a good time with the Germans! What's come over these women?" the Viscountess cried, indignant for many reasons: wounded patriotism, a sense of propriety, doubts about her influence in society (she gave lectures every Saturday night on "How to be a true Christian woman"; she had founded a local library and she sometimes even invited the local young people to her home to watch informative, edifying films such as A Day at Solesmes Abbey, or From Caterpillar to Butterfly. And for what? So that everyone would have a horrible, debased idea of Frenchwomen?). Finally, she was angry because she had a passionate nature that was troubled by certain stirring images. Yet she knew there was no hope of the Viscount satisfying her, since he had little interest in women in general and her in particular.
"It's scandalous!" she exclaimed.
"It's sad," said Lucile, thinking of all the girls whose youth was passing them by in vain: the men were gone, prisoners or dead. The enemy took their place. It was deplorable, but no one would even know in the future. It would be one of those things posterity would never find out, or would refuse to see out of a sense of shame.
Madame Angellier rang for the cook, who came in and closed the shutters. Everything withdrew back into the night: the songs, the murmur of kisses, the soft brightness of the stars, the footsteps of the conqueror on the pavement and the sigh of the thirsty frog praying to the heavens for rain, in vain.
The German and Lucile ran into each other once or twice in the dimly lit entrance hall. When she took her garden hat down from its peg on one of the antlers, she knocked against a decorative copper plate on the wall and made it jingle. The German seemed to listen for this faint sound in the silent house. He would go to the door to help Lucile, offering to carry her basket, her secateurs, her book, her embroidery, her deckchair into the garden. But she no longer spoke to him. Instead, she thanked him with a nod of the head and a forced smile; she thought she could sense Madame Angellier lying in wait behind the shutters to spy on her. The German understood and kept to himself. He went out with his regiment on manoeuvres almost every night; he never returned until four o'clock in the afternoon and then shut himself in his room with his dog. While walking through the village in the evening, Lucile sometimes saw him sitting alone in a café, reading a book, with a glass of beer in front of him. He avoided acknowledging her and would turn away, frowning. She was counting the days. "He'll be leaving on Monday," she said to herself. "By the time he gets back, his regiment may have already left. Anyway, he's understood I won't speak to him any more."
Every morning she asked the cook, "Is the German still here, Marthe?"
"Well, yes," the cook would say. "He doesn't seem so bad: he asked if Madame would like to have some fruit. He'd be happy to give us some. Good grief, they want for nothing, them! They've got crates of oranges. So refreshing…" she added, torn between a feeling of kindness towards the officer who offered her fruit and who always behaved, as she put it, "very nice, very kind; he doesn't scare you," and another feeling, a surge of anger when she thought of all the French people who couldn't get any fruit at all.
This last thought was undoubtedly the stronger. "Still, they're a rotten lot, they are!" she finally said in disgust. "I take whatever I can get from that officer, I do: his bread, his sugar, the cakes he gets from home (made with the best flour, I can tell you, Madame), and his tobacco that I send to my prisoner of war."
"Oh, you shouldn't, Marthe!"
But the old cook just shrugged her shoulders. "Since they take everything from us, it's the least…"
One evening, just as Lucile was leaving the dining room, Marthe opened the kitchen door and called out, "Could you please come in here, Madame? There's someone who wants to see you."
Lucile went in, afraid of being seen by Madame Angellier, who didn't like anyone to go into the kitchen or the larder. Not that she seriously believed Lucile would steal the jam, despite ostentatiously inspecting the cupboards in front of her, but rather because she felt the same sense of intrusion an artist feels when interrupted in his studio, or a socialite in front of her dressing table: the kitchen was a sacred domain that belonged to her and her alone. Marthe had been with her for twenty-seven years. And for twenty-seven years, Madame Angellier had gone to great lengths to make sure Marthe never forgot she wasn't in her own home, and that at any moment she could be forced to leave her feather dusters, her pots and pans, her stove; just as the devout must remember that, according to the rituals of the Christian religion, worldly possessions are granted only temporarily and can be taken away overnight on a whim of the Creator.
Marthe closed the door behind Lucile and said reassuringly, "Madame is at church."
The enormous kitchen was as big as a ballroom, with two large windows that opened out on to the garden. A man was sitting at the table. Lucile saw that a magnificent pike, its silvery body trembling in its final death throes, had been thrown on to the oilcloth, between a large loaf of bread and a half-empty bottle of wine. The man raised his head; Lucile recognised Benoît Sabarie.
"Where did you get that, Benoît?"
"In Monsieur de Montmort's lake."
"You'll get caught one of these days."
The man didn't reply. He lifted up the enormous fish by the gills; it flicked its transparent tail, now barely breathing.
"Is it for us?" asked Marthe, who was related to the Sabaries.
"If you want."
"Give it to me, Benoît. Do you know, Madame, that they're cutting back the meat rations again? It'll be death and the end of the world," she added, shrugging her shoulders while hanging a large ham from the joists. "Benoît, since Madame isn't home, tell Madame Gaston why you've come."
"Madame," said Benoît with difficulty, "there's a German at our place who's chasing after my wife. The Commandant's interpreter, a nineteen-year-old kid. I can't take it any more."
"But how can I help?"
"One of his friends is living here…"
"I never speak to him."
"Don't give me that," said Benoît, looking up.
He went over to the stove and absent-mindedly bent the poker, then straightened it again; he was extraordinarily strong.
"You were talking to him in the garden the other day, laughing with him and eating strawberries. I'm not criticising you, it's your business, but I'm begging you. Get him to talk to his friend so he sees reason and gets himself somewhere else to live."
"This village!" Lucile thought. "People can see through walls!"
At that very moment a storm broke. It had been brewing for several hours. There was a single, solemn thunderbolt, followed by the sound of cold rain falling in sheets. The sky darkened; all the lights went out, just as they usually did when the wind was up.
"I guess Madame will be stuck at the church now," Marthe said smugly.
She took advantage of the fact to bring Benoît a bowl of hot coffee. Lightning flashed through the kitchen; the water streaming down the window-panes looked green in the sulphurous light. The door opened and the German officer, forced out of his room by the storm, came in to ask for a few candles.
"Is that you, Madame?" he added, recognising Lucile. "Excuse me, I couldn't see you in the dark."
"There aren't any candles," Marthe said sourly. "There are no candles in all of France since your lot got here."
She didn't like the officer being in her kitchen. She could put up with his presence in other rooms, but here, between the stove and the pantry, it seemed scandalous and almost sacrilegious: he was violating the very heart of the house.
"At least give me a match," the officer implored, deliberately trying to look plaintive to soften up the cook, but she just shook her head.
"There aren't any matches either."
Lucile began to laugh. "Don't listen to her. The matches are on the stove, behind you. And actually, there's someone here who wants to speak to you, Monsieur; he has a complaint about a German soldier."
"Oh, really? I'm listening," the officer said eagerly. "We insist that the soldiers of the Reichswehr behave with perfect correctness towards the local people."
Benoît said nothing.
It was Marthe who spoke. "He's chasing after his wife," she said in a tone of voice that made it difficult to tell exactly what she was feeling: virtuous indignation, or regret she was no longer young enough to be prey to such outrages.
"Ah, but you overestimate the power we German officers have, my boy. Of course I can punish him if he bothers your wife, but if she likes him…"
"It isn't no joke!" Benoît growled, taking a step towards the officer.
"Excuse me?"
"It isn't no joke, I'm telling you. We didn't need you dirty…"
Lucile let out a cry of anguish and warning. Marthe jabbed Benoît with her elbow; she guessed he was going to say the forbidden word "Boche," punishable by imprisonment. Benoît forced himself to stop.
"We don't need you running after our women now."
"Well, you should have thought about defending your women before, my friend," the officer said quietly. His face had turned bright red; he looked haughty and upset.
Lucile intervened. "Please," she said softly, "this man is jealous. He's suffering. Don't push him over the edge."
"What's the name of this man?"
"Bonnet."
"The Commandant's interpreter? I have no control over him. He has the same rank as me. It would be impossible for me to intervene."
"Even as a friend?"
The officer shrugged his shoulders. "Impossible. Let me explain."
"No point explaining!" Benoît cut in, his voice calm and bitter. "There are always rules for the poor bloke who's a private. Verboten, as you say in your language. But no one bothers the officers if they want to have a good time! It's the same in all the armies in the world."
"I certainly won't speak to him," replied the German, "because that would be letting him in on the game and I wouldn't be doing you any favours," and turning his back on Benoît, he walked over to the table.
"Make me some coffee, my dear Marthe, I'm leaving in an hour."
"Manoeuvres again? That's three nights in a row," exclaimed Marthe, who couldn't seem to manage to keep her feelings towards the enemy straight. Sometimes, when the regiment came back in the early hours of the morning, she would say with great satisfaction, "Look how hot and tired they are… Oh, that makes me feel good!" But sometimes she'd forget they were German and would feel a sort of maternal pity rising up in her: "Still, those poor boys, what a life…"
For some reason, this evening saw a surge of feminine tenderness. "All right, I'll make you some coffee. Sit down over there. You'll have some as well, won't you, Madame?"
"No…" Lucile started to say.
Meanwhile, Benoît had disappeared; he'd climbed out of the window without making a sound.
"Please say yes," murmured the German softly. "I won't be bothering you much longer: I'm leaving the day after tomorrow and there's talk of sending my regiment to Africa when I get back. We'll never see each other again and I would like to think you don't hate me."
"I don't hate you, but…"
"I know. Let's leave it at that. Just agree to keep me company…"
Marthe laid the table with the tender, complicit, scandalised smile of someone secretly giving bread and jam to naughty children who should be punished. On a clean cloth, she placed two large earthenware bowls decorated with flowers, a piping-hot pot of coffee and an old oil lamp she'd taken out of the cupboard, filled and lit. Its soft yellow flame lit up the copperware on the walls.
The officer looked at it with curiosity. "What do you call that, Madame?"
"That's a warming pan."
"And that?"
"A waffle iron. It's nearly a hundred years old. We don't use it any more."
Marthe came in with some jam in an engraved glass dish and an enormous sugar bowl; with its bronze feet and carved lid, it looked like a funeral urn.
"Well, at this time the day after tomorrow," said Lucile, "you'll be having a cup of coffee with your wife, won't you?"
"I hope so. I'll tell her about you. I'll describe the house to her."
"Has she ever been to France?"
"No, Madame."
Lucile was curious to know whether the enemy liked France, but a kind of modest pride prevented her from asking. They continued drinking their coffee in silence, not looking at each other.
Then the German told her about his country: the wide avenues in Berlin, what it was like in winter, the snow, the biting cold air that blew in from central Europe, the deep lakes, the pine forests and sand quarries.
Marthe was longing to join the conversation. "Is it going to last long, the war?" she asked.
"I don't know," the officer said, smiling and with a slight shrug of the shoulders.
"But what do you think?" Lucile then asked.
"Madame, I am a soldier. Soldiers don't think. I'm told to go somewhere and I go. Told to fight, I fight. Told to get myself killed, I die. Thinking would make fighting more difficult and death more terrible."
"But what about enthusiasm…"
"Madame, forgive me, but that's a term a woman would use. A man does his duty even without enthusiasm. Perhaps that's the way you know he's a man, a real man."
"Perhaps."
They could hear the rain rustling in the garden, the last droplets slowly dripping off the lilacs; the fish pond murmuring languidly as it filled with water. The front door opened.
"It's Madame, hurry!" whispered Marthe, terrified. And she pushed Lucile and the officer outside. "Go through the garden! Good Lord, she'll give me hell!"
She quickly poured the remaining coffee down the sink, hid the cups and put out the lamp. "Do you hear me? Hurry up! Thank goodness it's dark out."
They both went outside. The officer was laughing. Lucile was trembling a little. Hidden in the shadows, they watched Madame Angellier walk through the house behind Marthe, who carried a lamp. Then all the shutters were closed and the doors locked with iron bars.
"It's like a prison," the German remarked on hearing the creaking of the hinges, the rusty chains and the mournful sound of the great doors being bolted. "How will you get back in, Madame?"
"Through the side door in the kitchen. Marthe will leave it open. What about you?"
"Oh, I'll jump over the wall."
He made it over in one nimble leap and said softly, "Gute Nacht. Schlafen sie voll wohl."
"Gute Nacht," she replied.
Her accent made the officer laugh. She stood in the shadows for a moment, listening to his laughter fade into the distance. The damp lilacs swayed in the soft wind and brushed against her hair. Feeling light-hearted and happy, she ran back into the house.
Every month, Madame Angellier visited her farms. She chose a Sunday so "her people" would be at home, which exasperated the farmers. The moment they saw her, they rushed to hide away the coffee, sugar and eau-de-vie they'd been enjoying after lunch: Madame Angellier was of the old school-she considered the food her tenant farmers ate was somehow stolen from her; she complained bitterly about anyone who bought the best-quality meat from the butcher. She had her police, as she called them, all over town, and wouldn't keep tenants whose daughters bought silk stockings, perfume, make-up or books too often. Madame de Montmort ruled her estate with similar principles, but as an aristocrat she was more attached to spiritual values than the bitter, materialistic middle classes (to whom Madame Angellier belonged). She therefore concerned herself with religious issues: she tried to find out whether all the children had been baptised, whether they took Communion twice a year, whether the women went to Mass (she let the men get away with it; it was just too difficult). Of the two families who owned all the land in the region-the Montmorts and the Angelliers-the Montmorts were the more hated.
Madame Angellier set off at first light. The weather had changed after the storm the evening before: sheets of cold rain were falling. The car was unusable, for they had no petrol or travel permit, but Madame Angellier had unearthed an old gig from the shed where it had sat for thirty years; with two strong horses in harness, it could travel fairly good distances. The entire household had got up to say goodbye to the elderly lady. At the last minute (and grudgingly) she entrusted Lucile with the keys. She opened her umbrella; it started raining even harder.
"Madame should wait until tomorrow," said the cook.
"I have no choice but to take care of things myself, given that the head of the house is a prisoner of these gentlemen," Madame Angellier replied in loud, sarcastic tones, undoubtedly to make the two German soldiers passing by feel guilty.
She glared at them the way Chateaubriand described his father's expression: "a burning eye seemed to shoot out and hit home like a bullet."
But the soldiers, who didn't understand a word of French, evidently interpreted her look as a tribute to their strong physiques, their confident bearing, their perfect uniforms, for they smiled with shy good grace. Disgusted, Madame Angellier closed her eyes. The carriage left. A gust of wind rattled the doors.
A little later that morning Lucile went to see the dressmaker, a young woman who, people whispered, socialised with the Germans. She took with her a length of light material that she wished to have made into a dressing gown.
The dressmaker nodded her head: "You're lucky to have some silk like this now. We don't have anything left."
She said this without apparent envy, but thoughtfully, as if she recognised that the middle classes had not so much the right to come first, but a kind of natural shrewdness which meant they could get things before anyone else, just as people who live on the plains say of mountain dwellers, "No chance he'll loose his footing, not him! He's been climbing the Alps since he was a child." Evidently she also believed that Lucile, because of her parentage, because of some innate gift, was more skilful than she was at evading the law, bending the rules, for she smiled at her and winked. "I can see you know how to get by," she said. "Well done."
At that moment Lucile noticed a German soldier's belt on the bed. The two women looked at each other. The dressmaker's expression was sly, cautious and implacable; she looked like a cat who's afraid someone is about to take her prey from her claws and so raises her head and miaows arrogantly, as if to say, "No? Well, really! Just whose is it, then?"
"How can you?" murmured Lucile.
The dressmaker wavered between several attitudes. Her expression was a mixture of insolence, confusion and deceit. Then suddenly she lowered her head. "So what? German or French, friend or enemy, he's first and foremost a man and I'm a woman. He's good to me, kind, attentive… He's a city boy who takes care of himself, not like the boys around here; he has beautiful skin, white teeth. When he kisses, his breath smells fresh, not of alcohol. And that's good enough for me. I'm not looking for anything else. Our lives are complicated enough with all these wars and bombings. Between a man and a woman, none of that's important. I couldn't care less if the man I fancy is English or black-I'd still offer myself to him if I got the opportunity. Do I disgust you? Sure, it's all right for you, you're rich, you have luxuries I don't have…"
"Luxuries!" Lucile cut in, sounding bitter without meaning to, wondering what the dressmaker could imagine might be luxurious about an existence as an Angellier: visiting her estate and investing money, no doubt.
"You're educated. You see people. For us, it's nothing but slaving away at work. If it wasn't for love, we might as well just throw ourselves in the river. And when I say love, don't think it's only about you know what. Listen, the other day this German, he was at Moulins and he bought me a little imitation crocodile handbag; another time he brought me flowers, a bouquet from town, like I was a lady. It's stupid, I know, because there are flowers all over the countryside, but he cared, it made me happy. Up until now, to me men were just good for a tumble. But this one, I don't know why, I'd do anything for him, follow him anywhere. And he loves me, he does… Oh, I've known enough men to tell when there's one who's not lying. So, you see, when people say to me 'He's German, a German, a German,' I couldn't care less. They're human, like us."
"Yes, but my poor girl, when people say 'a German,' of course they know he's just a man, but what they mean to say, what is so terrible, is that he's killed Frenchmen, that they're holding our relatives prisoner, that they're starving us…"
"You think I never think about that? Sometimes, when I'm lying in bed next to him, I wonder, 'Maybe it was his father who killed mine ' (my dad was killed in the last war, you know…). I think about it for a while and then, in the end, I don't give a damn. On one side there's me and him; on the other side there's everyone else. People don't care about us: they bomb us and make us suffer, and kill us worse than if we were rabbits. And as for us, well, we don't care about them. You see, if we did what other people thought we should do we'd be worse than animals. Around town they call me a dog. Well, I'm not. Dogs travel in packs and bite people when they're told to. Me and Willy…"
She stopped and sighed.
"I love him," she said finally.
"But his regiment will be leaving."
"I know that, but Willy said he'd send for me after the war."
"And you believe him?"
"Yes, I believe him," she said defiantly.
"You're mad," said Lucile. "He'll forget you the moment he's gone. You have brothers who are prisoners. When they come home… Believe me, be careful. What you're doing is very dangerous. Dangerous and wrong," she added.
"When they come home…"
They looked at each other in silence. There was a rich, secret scent in this stuffy room, cluttered with heavy rustic furniture, that troubled Lucile and made her feel strangely uneasy.
As she was leaving, Lucile ran into some children with dirty faces on the staircase; they were running down the steps four at a time.
"Where are you rushing like that?" Lucile asked.
"We're going to play in the Perrins' garden."
The Perrins were a rich local family who had fled in June 1940. They had been so panic-stricken when they fled that they'd left their house unlocked, all the doors wide open, silver in the drawers, dresses in the wardrobes. The Germans had pillaged it: even the large abandoned garden had been sacked, trampled, and looked like a jungle.
"Do the Germans let you in there?"
They didn't reply and ran off, laughing.
Lucile went home in the rain. She could see the Perrins' garden. Despite the freezing rain, the village children darted back and forth between the trees in their blue and pink smocks. Every so often she glimpsed a shiny, dirty cheek gleaming in the rain like a peach. The children picked lilacs and cherry blossom and chased each other across the lawns. Perched high on top of a cedar tree, one little boy in red trousers whistled like a blackbird.
They were managing to destroy what remained of a garden that had been so well-tended in the past, so loved-a garden where the Perrins no longer came together as a family at dusk to sit in cast-iron chairs (the men in black jackets, the women in long rustling dresses) and watch the melons and strawberries ripen. A small boy in a pink smock was walking along the iron gate, holding on to the spikes to keep his balance.
"You'll fall, you little devil," said Lucile.
He stared at her without replying. Suddenly, she envied these children who could enjoy themselves without worrying about the time, the war, misfortune. It seemed to her that among a race of slaves, they alone were free, "truly free," she thought to herself.
Reluctantly, she walked back to the silent, morose house, whipped by the rain.
Lucile was surprised to see the postman coming from her house: she didn't receive many letters. On the hall table lay a card addressed to her.
12 rue de la Source, Paris (XVI) Madame,
Do you remember the old couple you took in last June? We have thought of you often since then, Madame, and your kind welcome when we stopped at your home during that terrible journey. We would be so pleased to hear your news. Did your husband come home from the war safe and sound? As for us, we had the great joy of being reunited with our son. We send you our best wishes, Jeanne and Maurice Michaud
Lucile was glad for them. Such nice people… They were happier than she was… They loved each other. They had faced such danger together, and come through it together…
She hid the card in her desk and went into the dining room. It was a nice day, in spite of the persistent rain. There was only one place set at the table and she felt happy again that Madame Angellier wasn't home: she could read while eating. She ate lunch very quickly, then went over to the window and watched the rain falling. It was the back end of the storm, as the cook put it. The weather had changed over the last forty-eight hours, transforming a radiant spring into a cruel, vague sort of season, where the last snow merged with the first flowers. The apple trees had lost all their blossom overnight; the rose bushes were dark and frozen; the wind had smashed flowerpots full of geraniums and sweet peas.
"Everything will be ruined! There'll be no fruit," Marthe groaned as she cleared the table. "I'll make a fire in here," she added. "It's so cold it's unbearable. The German asked me to make a fire in his room, but the chimney hasn't been swept and he'll just be breathing in smoke. Too bad for him. I told him, but he didn't want to listen. He thinks it's because I don't want to do it. As if we wouldn't give them a couple of logs after everything else they've taken from us… Listen, he's coughing! Good Lord! What a pain to have to wait on these Boches. All right, I'm coming, I'm coming!" she said in annoyance.
Lucile heard her open the door and reply to the irritated German, "Well, I tried to tell you! With this wind blowing, a chimney that hasn't been swept just pushes the smoke back inside."
"Well why hasn't it been swept, mein Gott?" shouted the frustrated German.
"Why? Why? I don't know anything about it. I'm not the owner. You think with your war going on we can do what we like?"
"My good woman, if you really think I'm going to let myself be smoked out like a rabbit, you're very mistaken! Where are the ladies? If they can't provide a habitable bedroom, then they can let me move into the sitting room. Make a fire in there."
"I'm sorry, Monsieur. That's not possible," said Lucile, walking towards him. "In our provincial houses the sitting room is a formal room where no one sleeps. The fireplace isn't real, as you can see."
"What? That white marble monument with the carved cupids warming their hands?"
"Has never had a fire in it," Lucile continued, smiling. "But do come into the dining room, if you'd like; the stove is lit. It's true that your room is in a sad state," she added, looking at the waves of smoke pouring out of it.
"Oh, Madame, I nearly choked to death… Being a military man is clearly fraught with danger! But I wouldn't want to impose on you for anything in the world. There are some dusty cafés in the village where they play billiards amid clouds of chalk… And your mother-in-law…"
"She's away for the day."
"Ah! Very well then, thank you, Madame. I won't disturb you. I have important work to finish," he said, holding up some maps.
He sat down at the table and Lucile sat in an armchair by the fire; she stretched her hands out towards the warmth, occasionally rubbing them together absent-mindedly. "I have the mannerisms of an old woman," she thought sadly, "the mannerisms and the life of an old woman."
She let her hands settle back on to her lap. When she looked up, she saw that the officer had abandoned his maps and pushed back the curtain to look at the grey sky and the crucified pear trees.
"What a sad place," he murmured.
"Why should that matter to you?" Lucile replied. "You're leaving tomorrow."
"No," he said, "I'm not leaving."
"Oh! But I thought…"
"All leave has been cancelled."
"Really? But why?"
He shrugged his shoulders slightly. "No one knows. Cancelled, that's all. That's life in the army."
She felt sorry for him: he'd been looking forward to his leave so much.
"That's very annoying," she said compassionately, "but it's just been postponed…"
"For three months, six months, for ever… I'm most upset for my mother. She's elderly and frail. A little old lady with white hair and a straw hat; a gust of wind could knock her over… She's expecting me tomorrow night and all she'll get is a telegram."
"Are you an only child?"
"I had three brothers. One was killed in Poland, another died when we invaded France a year ago. The third one is in Africa."
"That's very sad, for your wife as well…"
"Oh, my wife… My wife will soon get over it. We got married very young; we were practically children. What's your opinion of people getting married after a two-week acquaintance on a trip round the lakes?"
"I have no idea! That doesn't happen in France."
"But it isn't exactly like it used to be any more, is it? When you were received twice by friends of the family and the next minute you were married, as your Balzac describes?"
"Not exactly, but it's not all that different, at least in the provinces…"
"My mother told me not to marry Edith. But I was in love. Ach, Liebe… You must be able to grow up together, grow old together… But when you're separated, when there's war, when there's suffering, and you find yourself tied to a child who is still eighteen, while you"-he raised his arms, let them drop again-"sometimes feel twelve and sometimes a hundred…"
"Surely you're exaggerating…"
"But I'm not. A soldier remains a child in certain ways and in other ways he's so old… He has no age. He is as old as the most ancient events on earth: Cain murdering Abel, cannibal rituals, the Stone Age… Let's not talk about it any more. Here I am, locked up in this tomb-like place… no… A tomb in a country cemetery, rich with flowers, birds and lovely shade, but a tomb nevertheless… How can you bear to live here all year long?"
"Before the war, we used to go out sometimes…"
"But I bet you never travelled, did you? You've never been to Italy or central Europe… only rarely to Paris… Think of everything we're missing… museums, theatres, concerts… Oh! It's really the concerts I miss most. And all I have here is a miserable instrument I dare not play because I'm afraid of offending your justifiable feelings as French people," he said resentfully.
"But you can play as much as you like, Monsieur. Look, you're feeling sad and I'm not very happy either. Sit down at the piano and play something. We'll forget about the bad weather, separations, all our problems…"
"Really, you'd really like that? But I have work to do," he said, looking at his maps. "Oh, well… You bring some embroidery or a book and sit next to me. You must listen to me play. I only play well if I have an audience. I'm truly… how do you say it in French? A 'show-off,' that's it!"
"Yes. A show-off. I compliment you on your knowledge of French."
He sat down at the piano. The stove purred softly, its heat filling the room with the sweet smell of smoke and roasted chestnuts. Great drops of rain streamed down the windows, like tears; the house was empty and silent; the cook was at Vespers.
She watched his slim white hands run across the keyboard. The wedding ring with the dark-red stone he wore made it difficult for him to play; he took it off and absent-mindedly handed it to Lucile. She held it for a moment; it was still warm from his hand. She turned it so it caught the pale-grey light filtering through the window. She could make out two Gothic letters and a date. She thought it was a love token. But no… the date was 1775 or 1795, she couldn't tell which. It was obviously a family heirloom. Gently she put it down on the table. He must play the piano like this every evening, she thought, with his wife at his side… What was her name? Edith? How well he played! She recognised certain pieces.
"Isn't that Bach? Mozart?" she asked shyly.
"Do you know music?"
"No, no! I don't know anything really. I used to play a little before I got married, but I've forgotten everything. I do love music. You're very talented, Monsieur."
He looked at her and said seriously, "Yes, I think I am talented," with a sadness that surprised her.
Then he played a series of light-hearted, humorous arpeggios.
"Listen to this now," he said.
He started playing and speaking softly: "This is the sound of peace, this is the laughter of young women, the joyful sound of spring, the first swallows coming back from the south… This is a German village, in March, when the snow first starts to melt. Here's the sound of the stream the snow makes as it flows through the ancient streets. And now there is no more peace… Drums, trucks, soldiers marching… can you hear them? Can you? Their slow, faint, relentless footsteps… An entire population on the move… The soldiers are lost among them… Now there should be a choir, a kind of religious chant, unfinished. Now, listen! It's the battle…" The music was solemn, intense, terrifying.
"Oh! It's beautiful," Lucile said softly. "It's so beautiful!"
"The soldier is dying, and at that very moment he hears the choir again, but now it's a divine chorus of soldiers… Like this, listen… it has to be both sweet and deafening at once. Can you hear the heavenly trumpets? Can you hear the brass instruments resonating, bringing down the walls? But now everything is fading away, softening, it stops, disappears… The soldier is dead."
"Did you compose that piece? Did you write it yourself?"
"Yes. I intended to be a musician. But that's all over now."
"But why? The war…"
"Music is a demanding mistress. You can't abandon her for four years. When you return to her, you find she's gone." He saw Lucile staring at him. "What are you thinking?" he asked.
"I'm thinking that people shouldn't be sacrificed like this. I mean none of us. Everything has been taken away. Love, family… It's just too much!"
"Ah! Madame, this is the principal problem of our times: what is more important, the individual or society? War is the collaborative act par excellence, is it not? We Germans believe in the communal spirit-the spirit one finds among bees, the spirit of the hive. It comes before everything: nectar, fragrance, love… But these are very serious thoughts. Listen! I'll play you a Scarlatti sonata. Do you know this one?"
"No, I don't think so, no…"
The individual or society? she thought. Well, Good Lord! Nothing new there, they hardly invented that idea. Our two million dead in the last war were also sacrificed to the "spirit of the hive." They died… and twenty-five years later… What trickery! What vanity! There are laws that regulate the fate of beehives and of people, that's all there is to it. The spirit of the people is undoubtedly also ruled by laws that elude us, or by whims we know nothing about. How sad the world is, so beautiful yet so absurd… But what is certain is that in five, ten or twenty years, this problem unique to our time, according to him, will no longer exist, it will be replaced by others… Yet this music, the sound of this rain on the windows, the great mournful creaking of the cedar tree in the garden outside, this moment, so tender, so strange in the middle of war, this will never change, not this. This is for ever…
He suddenly stopped playing and looked at her. "Are you crying?"
She quickly wiped the tears from her eyes.
"Please forgive me," he said. "Music brings out the emotions. Perhaps my music reminded you of someone… someone you miss?"
In spite of herself she murmured, "No. No one… That's just it… no one…"
They fell silent. He closed the piano.
"After the war, Madame, I'll come back. Please say you'll let me come back. All the conflict between France and Germany will be finished… forgotten… for at least fifteen years. One evening I'll ring the doorbell. You'll open it and you won't recognise me in my civilian clothes. Then I'll say: but it's me… the German officer… do you remember? There's peace now, freedom, happiness. I'm taking you away from here. Come, let's go away together. I'll show you many different countries. I'll be a famous composer, of course, and you'll be as beautiful as you are at this very moment…"
"And your wife, and my husband, what will we do about them?" she said, forcing herself to laugh.
He whistled softly.
"Who knows where they'll be? Or us? But, Madame, I'm very serious. I'll be back."
"Play something else," Lucile said after a brief silence.
"No, enough. Too much music ist gefährlich… dangerous. Now, you must play the society lady. Invite me to have some tea."
"There's no more tea in all of France, mein Herr. I can offer you some wine from Frontignan and some cakes. Would you like that?"
"Oh, yes! But please, don't call the servant. Let me help you set the table. Tell me where the tablecloths are. In this drawer? Allow me to choose one: you know we Germans are very bold. I'd like the pink one… no… the white one embroidered with little flowers. Did you embroider it?"
"But of course."
"The rest I leave to you."
"That's good," she said, laughing. "Where's your dog? I haven't seen him lately."
"He's away on leave: he belongs to the whole regiment, to all the soldiers; one of them took him with them, Bonnet, the interpreter, the one your country friend was complaining about. They left for three days in Munich but the new orders mean they'll have to come back."
"Speaking of Bonnet, did you talk to him?"
"Madame, my friend Bonnet is not a simple fellow. Until now, he's been having some innocent fun, but if the husband starts getting frustrated, he's capable of getting really involved. Schadenfreude, do you understand? He could even fall in love for real, and if the young woman isn't faithful…"
"There's no question of that," said Lucile.
"She really loves that country bumpkin?"
"Without a doubt. And don't think that all the women around here are the same just because certain young girls let themselves get involved with your soldiers. Madeleine Sabarie is a good wife and a good Frenchwoman."
"I understand," said the officer, nodding his head.
He helped Lucile move the card table over to the window. She put out some antique crystal glasses cut with large facets, the wine carafe with the gilt silver stopper and some small painted dessert plates. They dated back to the First Empire and were decorated with military scenes: Napoleon inspecting the troops, Hussars in gold brocade setting up camp in a clearing, a parade along the Champ-de-Mars.
The German admired the strong, bright colours. "What beautiful uniforms! How I'd love to own a jacket embroidered in gold like that Hussar!"
"Have some cakes, mein Herr. They're home-made."
He looked at her and smiled.
"Madame, have you ever heard of those cyclones which rage in the South Seas? If I've understood what I've read, they form a sort of circle whose edges are made of wind and rain but whose centre is so still that a bird or even a butterfly caught in the eye of the storm wouldn't be harmed; their wings would remain unruffled, while all around them the most horrible damage was being unleashed. Look at this house! Look at us about to have our wine from Frontignan and our cakes, and think of what's going on in the rest of the world."
"I prefer not to think about it," Lucile replied sadly.
Nevertheless, in her soul she felt a kind of warmth she'd never felt before. Even her gestures were more delicate, more adept than usual, and she listened to her own voice as if it were a stranger's. It was lower than normal, this voice, deeper and more vibrant; she didn't recognise it. Most exquisite of all was this sense of being on an island in the middle of the hostile house, and this strange feeling of safety: no one would come in; there would be no letters, no visits, no telephone calls. Even the old clock she had forgotten to wind that morning (what would Madame Angellier say-"Of course nothing gets done when I'm away"), even the old clock whose grave, melancholy tones frightened her, was silent. Once again, the storm had damaged the power station; no lights or radios were on for miles. The radio silent… how peaceful… It was impossible to give in to temptation, impossible to look for Paris, London, Berlin, Boston on the dark dial, impossible to hear those mournful, invisible, cursed voices telling of ships being sunk, planes crashing, cities destroyed, reading out the number of dead, predicting future massacres… Just blessed forgetfulness, nothing else… until nightfall, time passing slowly, someone beside her, a glass of light, fragrant wine, music, long silences. Happiness…
One month later, on a rainy afternoon like the one the German and Lucile had spent together, Marthe announced that the Angellier ladies had visitors. Three women were shown into the sitting room. They wore long black coats, mourning hats and black veils that cascaded down towards the ground, imprisoning them in a kind of impenetrable, mournful cage. The Angelliers didn't often have guests. The cook, flustered, had forgotten to take their umbrellas; they still held them, half-open, in their hands, like bell-shaped calyx flowers, catching the last few drops of rain dripping from their veils-or like the funeral urns on the tombs of heroes into which stone women weep.
Madame Angellier had some difficulty in recognising the three black shapes. Then she said, surprised, "But it's the Perrin ladies!"
The Perrin family (proprietors of the beautiful estate pillaged by the Germans) was "the region's finest." Madame Angellier's feelings towards the bearers of this name were comparable to those one member of a royal family might feel towards another: calm certainty that one was among kindred spirits who held the same opinions about everything; that despite the fleeting differences which might naturally occur, despite wars or governmental misconduct, they remained united by an indissoluble bond, to such an extent that if the Spanish royal family were dethroned, the Swedish royal family would feel the repercussions. When the Perrins had lost 900,000 francs after a lawyer in Moulins had run off, the Angelliers felt the aftershock. When Madame Angellier had paid a pittance for a piece of land that had belonged to the Montmorts "since time began," the Perrins had rejoiced. The grudging respect the Montmorts received from the middle classes bore no comparison to this sense of shared values.
Madame Angellier warmly asked Madame Perrin to sit down again (she'd started to get up when she saw her hostess coming towards her). She didn't experience the disagreeable feeling she always had when Madame de Montmort came to visit. She knew the Perrin ladies approved of everything: the mock fireplace, the musty smell, the half-closed shutters, the slip covers on the furniture, the olive-green wallpaper with silver palm leaves. Everything was as it should be; she would soon be offering her guests a pitcher of orangeade and some stale shortbread. Madame Perrin would not be shocked by the stinginess of this offering; she would simply see it as one more proof of the Angelliers' wealth, for the richer one is, the stingier as well; she would identify with her own tendency to save money and the inclination towards asceticism that lies at the heart of the French middle classes and makes their shameful secret pleasures even more bitter-sweet.
Madame Perrin told them that her son had died a hero's death in Normandy as the Germans advanced; she had received permission to visit his grave. She complained at great length about the cost of this journey and Madame Angellier sympathised with her. Maternal love and money were two completely different things. The Perrins lived in Lyon.
"The city is destitute. I've seen crows being sold for fifteen frances each. Mothers are feeding their children on crow soup. And don't think I'm talking about the working classes. No, Madame! I'm talking about people like you and me."
Madame Angellier sighed sadly; she imagined her relatives, members of her family, sharing a crow for supper. The idea was somehow grotesque, scandalous (though if it had been just the working classes, all they would have done was say, "Those poor creatures" and then move on).
"Well, at least you have your freedom! You don't have any Germans living with you like us. Yes, Madame, here in this house, behind that wall," said Madame Angellier, pointing to the olive-green wallpaper with the silver palm leaves. "An officer."
"We know," said Madame Perrin, slightly embarrassed. "We heard about it from the notary's wife who came to Lyon. Actually, that's why we've come."
They all involuntarily looked at Lucile.
"Please explain what you mean," Madame Angellier said coldly.
"I've heard that this officer behaves absolutely correctly, is that right?"
"Yes."
"And he's even been seen speaking to you extremely politely on several occasions?"
"He never speaks to me, " Madame Angellier said haughtily. "I wouldn't stand for it. I accept that my attitude may not be very reasonable" (she stressed this last word) "as has been pointed out to me, but I am the mother of a prisoner of war and because of that, even if I were offered all the money in the world, I wouldn't consider these gentlemen as anything but our mortal enemies. Although other people are more… how can I put it?… more flexible, more realistic, perhaps… my daughter-in-law in particular…"
"I answer him if he speaks to me, yes," said Lucile.
"But you're so right, absolutely right!" exclaimed Madame Perrin. "My dear girl, I'm putting all my hope in you. It's about our poor house! You've seen what a terrible state it's in…"
"I've only seen the garden… through the gates…"
"My dear child, do you think you could possibly arrange for us to have back certain items from inside the house to which we are particularly attached?"
"Madame, but I…"
"You mustn't refuse. All you have to do is speak to these gentlemen and intervene on our behalf. It might all have been burned or damaged, of course, but I can't believe the house has been so vandalised that it is impossible to recover our family portraits, correspondence or furniture, of sentimental value only to us…"
"Madame, you should speak to the Germans occupying your house yourself and…"
"Never," said Madame Perrin, pulling herself up to her full height. "Never will I cross the threshold of my house while the enemy is there. It is a question of dignity and sensitivity. They killed my son, my son who had just been accepted to study at the Ecole Polytechnique, in the top six. I'll be staying at the Hôtel des Voyageurs with my daughters until tomorrow. If you could arrange to have certain things returned to us, I would be eternally grateful. Here's the list. If I found myself face-to-face with one of these Germans, I wouldn't be able to stop myself singing the 'Marseillaise' (I know myself!)," said Madame Perrin in an impassioned voice, "and then I'd get deported to Prussia. Not that that would be a disgrace, far from it, but I have daughters. I must keep going for my family. So, I am truly begging you, my dear Lucile, to do whatever you can for me."
"Here's the list," said Madame Perrin's younger daughter. She unfolded the paper and began reading:
A china bowl and water jug with our monogram, decorated with butterflies
A salad dryer
The white-and-gold tea service (twenty-eight pieces, the sugar bowl is missing its lid)
Two portraits of grandfather: (1) sitting on his nanny's lap; (2) on his deathbed
The stag's antlers from the entrance hall, a memento of my Uncle Adolphe
Granny's plate warmer (porcelain and vermeil)
Papa's extra set of false teeth he'd left behind in the bathroom
The pink-and-black sofa from the sitting room
In the left-hand drawer of the desk (key herewith): My brother's first page of writing, Papa's letters to Mama while he was away taking the waters in Vittel in 1924 (tied with a pink ribbon), all our family photographs
There was a deathly silence as she read. Madame Perrin cried softly beneath her veil.
"It's hard, so hard to watch things you care about so much being taken away from you. I beg you, my dear Lucile, do everything you can. Be clever, persuasive…"
Lucile looked at her mother-in-law.
"This… this officer," said Madame Angellier barely moving her lips, "has not yet come back. You won't see him tonight, Lucile, it's too late, but tomorrow you could speak with him and ask for his help."
"All right. I will."
Madame Perrin, her hands covered in black gloves, hugged Lucile. "Thank you, thank you, my dear child. And now we must go."
"Not before having some refreshments," said Madame Angellier.
"Oh, but we don't want to impose on you…"
"Don't be ridiculous…"
They made quiet, courteous little noises when Marthe brought in the pitcher of orangeade and the shortbread. Now that they felt reassured, they began talking about the war. They feared a German victory, yet weren't altogether happy at the idea that the English might win. All in all, they preferred everyone to be defeated. They blamed their difficulties on the fact that the desire for pleasure seemed to have taken hold of everyone. Then the conversation returned to more personal matters. Madame Perrin and Madame Angellier discussed their poor health. Madame Perrin went into great detail about her last bout of rheumatism while Madame Angellier listened impatiently and, as soon as Madame Perrin paused for breath, interjected, "It's the same with me…" and talked about her own bout of rheumatism.
Madame Perrin's daughters discreetly ate their shortbread. Outside, the rain kept falling.
By the next morning the rain had stopped and the sun shone down on the damp, joyous ground. It was early and Lucile, who hadn't slept well, was sitting on a garden bench waiting for the German to come out of the house. As soon as she saw him she went up to him and explained her request; both of them sensed the hidden presence of Madame Angellier and the cook, not to mention the neighbours, who were spying on the couple from behind closed shutters as they stood on the path.
"If you would accompany me to these ladies' house," said the German, "I will have all the things they've requested gathered together for you; but a number of our soldiers have been billeted in this house since the owners abandoned it and I think the damage has been considerable. Let's go and see."
They walked through the village, side by side, barely speaking.
Lucile saw Madame Perrin's black veil fluttering from a window of the Hôtel des Voyageurs. They were watching Lucile and her companion with curiosity, complicity and a vague sense of approval. It was clear that everyone knew she was on her way to extract from the enemy the crumbs of his conquest (in the form of a set of false teeth, a china dinner service and other household items of sentimental value).
An old woman who couldn't even look at a German uniform without being terrified nevertheless came up to Lucile and whispered, "That's it… Well done! At least you're not afraid of them…"
The officer smiled. "They think you're Judith going to murder Holofernes in his tent. I hope you don't have the same evil plan! Here we are. Please come in, Madame."
He pushed open the heavy gate. The little bell that used to tell the Perrins they had visitors tinkled sadly. In just one year the garden had become so neglected it would have broken your heart to look at it, had it not been such a beautiful day. But it was a May morning, the day after a storm. The grass was sparkling, the damp paths overgrown with daisies, cornflowers and all sorts of other wild flowers that gleamed in the sun. The flower beds were a riot of shrubs, and fresh clusters of lilacs gently brushed against Lucile's face as she walked by. In the house they found about a dozen young soldiers and all the children from the village who spent happy days playing in the entrance hall (like the Angelliers' hall, it was dark, with a vaguely musty smell, greenish panes of glass in the windows and hunting trophies on the walls). Lucile recognised the cart maker's two little girls, sitting on the lap of a blond soldier who had a wide grin on his face. The carpenter's little boy was playing horsy on the back of another soldier. The illegitimate children of the dressmaker, all four of them, aged two to six, were lying on the floor, plaiting crowns out of forget-me-nots and the small, sweet-smelling carnations that had once lined the formal flower beds.
The soldiers leapt to attention the way they do in the army: chin up, eyes straight ahead, the whole body so tense you could see the veins in their necks throbbing slightly.
"Would you be so kind as to give me your list," the officer said to Lucile. "We can look for the things together."
He read it and smiled.
"Let's start with the sofa. It must be in the sitting room. Over here, I assume?"
He opened the door and went into a large room full of furniture-much of it knocked over or broken. The paintings had been removed and stacked against the walls; several had been kicked in. The floor was scattered with scraps of newspaper, bits of straw (vestiges, presumably, of the mass exodus in June 1940) and cigar stubs left by the invaders. On a pedestal stood a stuffed bulldog with a broken muzzle and a crown of dead flowers.
"What a terrible sight," said Lucile, upset.
In spite of everything there was something comical about the room and especially about the sheepish expression on the faces of the soldiers and the officer.
Seeing the look of reproach on Lucile's face, the officer said sharply, "My parents used to have a villa on the Rhine. Your soldiers occupied it during the last war. They smashed rare, priceless musical instruments that had been in the family for two hundred years and tore up books that once belonged to Goethe."
Lucile couldn't help but smile; he was defending himself in the same crude and indignant way a little boy does when accused of some misdeed: "But I wasn't the one who started it, it was the others…"
She felt a very feminine pleasure, an almost sensual, sweet sensation at seeing this childish look on a face that was, after all, the face of an implacable enemy, a hardened warrior. For we can't pretend, she thought, that we aren't all in his hands. We're defenceless. If we still have our lives and our possessions, it's only because of his goodwill. She was almost afraid of the feelings growing within her. It was like stroking a wild animal-an exquisitely intense sensation, a mixture of tenderness and terror.
Wanting to hold on to the feeling a little longer, she frowned. "You should be ashamed! These empty houses were under the protection of the German army, the honour of the German army!"
As he listened to her, he lightly tapped the back of his boots with his riding crop. He turned towards his soldiers and gave them a good dressing down. Lucile realised he was ordering them to get the house back in order, to fix what had been broken, to polish the floors and the furniture. His voice, when he spoke German, especially with that commanding tone, took on a sharp, resonant quality. Hearing it gave Lucile the same pleasure that a slightly rough kiss might-the kind of kiss that ends with a little bite. She slowly brought her hands to her burning face: Stop it! she said to herself. Stop thinking about him; you're asking for trouble.
She took a few steps towards the door. "I'm going home. You have the list; you can ask your soldiers to find everything."
In a flash he was by her side. "Please don't go away angry, I beg of you. Everything will be repaired as well as possible, I give you my word. Listen! Let's let them look for everything; they can put it all in a wheelbarrow and, under supervision from you, take it straight over to the Perrin ladies. I'll go with you to apologise. I can't do more than that. In the meantime, come into the garden. We could go for a little walk and I'll pick some beautiful flowers for you."
"No! I'm going home."
"You can't," he said, taking her by the arm. "You promised the ladies you'd bring them their things. You have to stay and make sure your orders are carried out."
They were outside now, standing on a path bordered with lilacs in full bloom. A multitude of honeybees, bumblebees and wasps were flying all around them, diving into the flowers, drinking their honey and settling on Lucile's arms and hair; she was frightened and laughed nervously.
"We can't stay here. Everywhere I go is dangerous!"
"Let's walk on a little further."
They came across the village children at the back of the garden. Some of them were playing in the flower beds where everything had been pulled up and trampled; others had climbed the pear trees and were breaking off the branches.
"Little beasts," said Lucile. "There'll be no fruit this year."
"Yes, but the flowers are so beautiful."
He stretched out his arms and the children threw him some small branches with clusters of delicate petals.
"Take them, Madame; the petals will be wonderful in a bowl on the table."
"I would never dare walk through the village carrying branches from a fruit tree," Lucile protested, laughing. "Just wait, you little devils! The policemen will catch you."
"Not a chance," said a little girl in a black smock.
She was eating a jam sandwich while wrapping her dirty little legs round a tree and climbing up.
"Not a chance. The Bo… the Germans won't let them in."
The lawn hadn't been mowed for two summers and was dotted with buttercups. The officer spread out his large, pale, almost almond-green cape and sat down on the grass. The children had followed them. The little girl in the black smock was picking cowslips; she made big bouquets of the fresh yellow flowers and stuck her nose deep inside them, but her dark eyes, both innocent and crafty, remained fixed on the grown-ups. She looked at Lucile curiously and somewhat critically: the look of one woman to another. She looks scared, she thought. I wonder why she's scared. He's not mean, that officer. I know him; he gives me money, and once he got my balloon that was caught in the branches of the big cedar tree. He's really handsome. More handsome than Daddy and all the boys around here. The lady has a pretty dress.
Surreptitiously she moved closer and touched one of the folds of the dress with her little dirty finger; it was simple, light, made of grey cotton and decorated only with a small collar and cuffs of pleated linen. She tugged on the dress rather hard and Lucile suddenly turned round. The little girl jumped back, but Lucile looked through her with wide, anxious eyes. The little girl could see that the lady had gone very pale and that her lips were trembling. For sure she was afraid of being alone here with the German. As if he would hurt her! He was talking to her so nicely. But then again, he was holding her hand so tightly that there was no way she could escape. All boys were the same, the little girl thought vaguely, whether they were big or small. They liked teasing girls and scaring them. She stretched out in the tall grass which was so high that it hid her from sight. It felt wonderful to be so tiny and invisible, with the grass tickling her neck, her legs, her eyelids…
The German and the lady were talking quietly. He had turned white as a sheet too. Now and again, she could hear him holding back his loud voice, as if he wanted to shout or cry but didn't dare. The little girl couldn't understand anything he said. She vaguely thought he might be talking about his wife and the lady's husband. She heard him say several times: "If you were happy… I see how you live… I know that you're all alone, that your husband has abandoned you… I've asked people in the village." Happy? Wasn't she happy, then, the lady who had such pretty dresses, a beautiful house? Anyway, the lady didn't want him to feel sorry for her, she wanted to leave. She told him to let go of her and to stop talking. My word, it wasn't she who was scared now, it was he, in spite of his big boots and proud look. He was the nervous one now. At that moment a ladybird landed on the little girl's hand. She watched it a while. She wanted to kill it, but she knew it was bad luck to kill one of God's creatures. So she just blew on it, very gently at first, to see it lift its delicate, transparent wings; then she blew with all her might, so that the little insect must have felt it was on a raft caught in a storm at sea. The ladybird flew off. "It's on your arm, Madame," the little girl shouted. Once again, the officer and the lady turned and looked at her but without really seeing her. Meanwhile, the officer made an impatient gesture with his hand, as if he were chasing away a fly. I'm staying right here, the little girl said to herself defiantly. And first of all, what are they doing here? A man and a woman: they should be in the sitting room. Mischievously, she strained to hear them. What were they talking about? "I'll never forget you," said the officer, his voice low and trembling. "Never."
A large cloud covered half the sky; all the fresh, bright colours in the garden turned grey. The lady was picking some little purple flowers and tearing them up.
"It's not possible," she said, on the verge of tears.
What's not possible? the little girl wondered.
"Of course I've also thought about it… I admit it, I'm not talking about… love… but I would have liked to have a friend like you… I've never had any friends. I have no one. But it's not possible."
"Because of other people?" said the officer scornfully.
She just looked at him proudly. "Other people? If I myself felt innocent then… No! There can be nothing between us."
"There are many things you will never be able to erase: the day we spent together when it rained, the piano, this morning, our walks in the woods…"
"Oh, but I shouldn't have…"
"But you did! It's too late… there's nothing you can do about it. All that was…"
The little girl rested her face on her folded arms and heard nothing more than a distant murmur, like the humming of a bumblebee. That big cloud bordered with burning rays of sunlight meant it would rain. What if it suddenly started raining, what would the lady and the officer do? Wouldn't it be funny to see them running in the rain, her with her straw hat and him with his beautiful green cape? But they could hide in the garden. If they followed her, she could show them a bower where no one would be able to see them. It's twelve o'clock now, she thought when she heard the church bells ringing the Angelus. Are they going to go home for lunch? What do rich people eat? Fromage blanc like us? Bread? Potatoes? Sweets? What if I asked them for some sweets? She went up to them and was going to tug at their hands to ask for some sweets-she was a bold little girl, this Rose-when she saw them suddenly jump up and stand there, shaking. Yes, the gentleman and the lady were shaking, just like when she was up in the cherry tree at school, her mouth stuffed full of cherries, and she heard the teacher shouting, "Rose, you little thief, come down from there at once!" But they hadn't seen the teacher: it was a soldier standing to attention, who was talking very quickly in an incomprehensible language; the words coming out of his mouth sounded like water rushing over a bed of rocks.
The officer moved away from the lady, who looked pale and dishevelled.
"What is it?" she murmured. "What is he saying?"
The officer seemed as upset as she was; he was listening without hearing. Finally, his pale face lit up with a smile.
"He says they've found everything… but the old gentleman's false teeth are broken because the children have been playing with them: they tried to cram them in the mouth of the stuffed bulldog."
Both of them-the officer and the lady-gradually seemed to come out of their stupor and return to earth. They looked down at the little girl and saw her this time. The officer tugged at her ear. "What have you little devils been up to?"
But his voice quivered and in the lady's laugh you could hear the echo of stifled sobs. She laughed like someone who had been very frightened and couldn't forget, while laughing, that she'd had a narrow escape. Little Rose was bothered and tried in vain to run off. She wanted to say, "The false teeth… yes… well… we wanted to see if the bulldog would look vicious with some brand-new teeth…" But she was afraid the officer would get angry (seen close up, he seemed very big and scary) so she just whined, "We didn't do anything, we didn't… we didn't even see any false teeth."
Meanwhile, children were coming over from all directions. They were all talking at once with their young shrill voices.
"Stop! Stop! Be quiet!" the lady begged. "Never mind. We're just happy to have found everything else."
An hour later a gang of kids in dirty clothes came out of the Perrins' garden, followed by two German soldiers pushing a wheelbarrow containing a basket of china cups, a sofa with its four legs in the air (one was broken), a plush photograph album, a birdcage that the Germans mistook for the salad dryer and many other items. Bringing up the rear were Lucile and the officer. Curious women stared at them as they walked through the village. They didn't speak to each other, the women noticed; they didn't even look at each other and they were deathly pale-the officer's expression cold and impenetrable.
"She must have given him a piece of her mind," the women whispered. "Said it was shameful to get a house into that state. He's furious. Goodness gracious, they're not used to people standing up for themselves. She's right. We're not dogs! She's brave, that young Angellier lady, she's not afraid." One of them, who was tending a goat (the little old woman with white hair and blue eyes who'd run into the Angellier ladies on their way back from Vespers that Easter Sunday and had said to them, "These Germans, I've heard they're bad and evil"), even came up to Lucile and whispered to her as she passed, "Good for you, Madame! Show them we're not afraid. Your prisoner of war would be proud of you," she added and she began to cry, not that she had a prisoner herself to cry over-she was long past the age of having a husband or a son at war-she cried because prejudice outlives passion and because she was sentimentally patriotic.
Whenever the elder Madame Angellier and the German met each other, they both instinctively stepped back. On the officer's part this could have been interpreted as a sign of exaggerated courtesy, the desire not to impose his presence on the mistress of the house. He had almost the air of a thoroughbred horse leaping away from a snake it sees at its feet. Madame Angellier, on the other hand, didn't even bother to disguise the shudder that ran through her, leaving her looking stiff and terrified, as if she'd come into contact with some disgusting, dangerous animal. But the moment lasted for only an instant: a good education is precisely designed to correct the instincts of human nature. The officer would draw himself up, put on the rigid, serious expression of an automaton, then bow and click his heels together ("Oh, that Prussian salute!" Madame Angellier would groan, without thinking that this greeting was, in fact, exactly what she should have expected from a man born in western Germany, since it was unlikely to be an Arab kiss of the hand, or an English handshake). As for Madame Angellier, she would clasp her hands in front of her like a nun who has been sitting at someone's deathbed and gets up to greet a member of his family suspected of anticlericalism. During these encounters, various expressions would cross Madame Angellier's face: false respect ("You're in charge here!"), disapproval ("Everyone knows who you are, you heathen!"), submission ("Let us offer up our hatred to the Lord") and finally a flash of fierce joy ("Just you wait, my friend, you'll be burning in hell while I'm finding peace in Jesus"), although this final thought was replaced in Madame Angellier's mind by the desire she felt every time she saw a member of the occupying forces: "I hope he'll soon be at the bottom of the English Channel," for everyone was expecting an attempt to invade England, if not imminently, then very soon. Taking her desires for reality, Madame Angellier even came to believe the German looked like a drowned man: pallid, swollen, thrown about by the waves. It was this thought alone that allowed her to look human again, allowed the shadow of a smile to pass over her lips (like the final rays of a dying star) and allowed her to reply to the German when he asked after her health, "Thank you for asking. I'm as well as can be expected," mournfully stressing these final words to imply, "as well as I can be, given the disastrous situation France is in."
Lucile walked behind Madame Angellier. She had become colder, more distracted, more rebellious than usual. She would nod silently as she walked away from the German. He too was silent. But, thinking no one could see, he would watch her for a long time as she walked away. Madame Angellier seemed to have eyes in the back of her head to catch him. Without even turning round she would mutter angrily to Lucile, "Pay no attention to him. He's still there." She could only breathe freely after the door had been shut behind them; then she would give her daughter-in-law a withering look and say, "You've done something different to your hair today," or "You're wearing your new dress, aren't you?" concluding sarcastically, "It's not very flattering."
And yet, despite the waves of hatred she felt towards Lucile because she was there and her own son was not, in spite of everything she might have imagined or suspected, she never thought her daughter-in-law and the German could possibly care for each other. After all, people judge one another according to their own feelings. It is only the miser who sees others enticed by money, the lustful who see others obsessed by desire. To Madame Angellier, a German was not a man, he was the personification of cruelty, perversity and hatred. For anyone else to feel differently was preposterous, incredible. She couldn't imagine Lucile in love with a German any more than she could imagine a woman mating with some mythical creature, a unicorn, a dragon or the monster Sainte Marthe killed to free Tarascon. Nor did it seem possible that the German could be in love with Lucile. Madame Angellier refused to accord him any human feelings. She interpreted his long looks as a further attempt to insult this already defiled French home, as a way of feeling cruel pleasure at having the mother and wife of a prisoner of war at his mercy. What she called Lucile's "insensitivity" irritated her more than anything else: "She's trying out new hairstyles, wearing new dresses. Doesn't she realise the German will think she's doing it for him? How degrading!" She wanted to cover Lucile's face with a mask and dress her in a sack. It pained her to see Lucile looking healthy and beautiful. She was suffering: "And all this time, my son, my own son…"
It was, for Madame Angellier, a moment of intense pleasure when they ran into the German in the hall one day and saw he was very pale and wore his arm in a sling-quite ostentatiously, in Madame Angellier's opinion. She was outraged to hear Lucile quickly ask, without thinking, "What happened to you, mein Herr?"
"I came off a horse. A difficult animal I was riding for the first time."
"You don't look well," said Lucile when she saw the German's haggard face. "You should go and lie down."
"No, no… It's only a graze and in any case…" He indicated the sound of the regiment going past their windows. "Manoeuvres…"
"What? Again?"
"We're at war," he said.
He smiled slightly and, after a brief salute, he left.
"What are you doing?" Madame Angellier exclaimed sharply. Lucile had pushed aside the curtain and was watching the soldiers go by. "You have absolutely no sense of propriety. When Germans march by, the windows and shutters should be closed… like in '70…"
"Yes, when they march into a town for the first time… But since they walk around our streets nearly every day, we'd be condemned to perpetual darkness if we followed tradition to the letter," Lucile replied impatiently.
It was a stormy night; a yellowish light fell on all the soldiers. They held their heads high and moved their lips in song. Their music began softly, as if restrained, suppressed, but it would soon burst forth into a magnificent, solemn chorale.
"They've got some funny songs," the locals said. "You can't help listening… They're like prayers."
A streak of red lightning flashed across the setting sun and seemed to pour blood over the tight-fitting helmets, the green uniforms, the officer on horseback who commanded the detachment. Even Madame Angellier was impressed.
"If only it were an omen…" she murmured.
Manoeuvres finished at midnight. Lucile heard the sound of the courtyard doors open and close again. She recognised the officer's footsteps in the hall. She sighed. She couldn't sleep. Another bad night. They were all the same now: miserable sleeplessness or confused nightmares. She was up by six o'clock. But that didn't help: all it did was to make the days longer, emptier.
The cook told the Angellier ladies that the officer had come home ill and had been visited by the Major who had seen he had a fever and ordered him to stay in his room. At noon, two German soldiers arrived with a meal that the injured man wouldn't eat. He was staying in his room but he wasn't staying in bed. They could hear him pacing back and forth, and the monotonous footsteps annoyed Madame Angellier so much that she retired immediately after lunch. This was not like her. Usually she would spend the afternoon in the drawing room doing her accounts or knitting. Only after four o'clock would she go up to her rooms on the second floor, where she was insulated from all noise. Finally Lucile could breathe easily. She sometimes wondered what her mother-in-law did up there, in the darkness. She closed the shutters and windows, and never put on a light, so she couldn't be reading. Besides, she never read. Maybe she kept on knitting in the dark, making great long scarves for the prisoners of war with the confidence of a blind woman who doesn't need to look at what she is doing. Or was she praying? Sleeping? She would come downstairs at seven o'clock without a single strand of hair out of place, stiff and silent in her black dress.
On this day and the ones that followed, Lucile heard her lock her bedroom door, then nothing else; the house seemed dead; only the German's steady footsteps broke the silence. But Madame Angellier didn't hear them; she was safely tucked away behind her thick walls, all sound deadened by her draperies. Hers was a large, dark, heavily furnished room. Madame Angellier would begin by closing the shutters and curtains to make it even darker. Then she would sink into a large green armchair with tapestry upholstery, fold her translucent hands in her lap and close her eyes. Sometimes a few bright, rare tears trickled down her cheeks-the reluctant tears of the very old who have finally accepted that sorrow is futile. She would wipe them away almost angrily and, sitting up straight, murmur, "Come along now, aren't you tired? You've been running again, and right after lunch when you should be digesting your food; you're sweating. Come along, Gaston, bring your little stool. Put it here next to Mama. You can read for me. But rest for a while first. You can lay your little head on Mama's lap." Softly, lovingly, she stroked imaginary curls.
It was neither delirium nor the first signs of madness; never had she been more totally lucid and aware of herself. It was deliberate play-acting, the only thing that brought her some solace, in the same way as morphine or wine. In the darkness and the silence, she could relive the past; she resurrected moments she herself had thought were lost for ever; treasured memories resurfaced; she would remember certain words her son had said, certain intonations in his voice, a gesture he made with his chubby little hands when he was a baby, memories that, truly, for just an instant, could take her back in time. It was no longer her imagination but reality itself, rediscovered through her enduring memories, for nothing could change the fact that these things had actually happened. Absence, even death, could not erase the past; the pink smock her son had worn, the way he cried and held out his hand to her when he'd been stung by nettles, all these things had happened and it was within her power, as long as she was still alive, to bring them back to life. All she needed was solitude, darkness, the furniture around her and these objects that her son had touched. She would vary her hallucinations to suit her mood.
Not content merely with the past, she anticipated the future; she moulded the present to her will. Though she lied and deceived herself, the lies were her own creation and she cherished them. For very brief moments she was happy. Her happiness was not hampered by the restrictions of reality. Everything was possible, everything within reach. First of all the war was over. That was the starting point of her dream, the springboard from which she could launch herself towards endless joy. The war was over… It was a day like any other… Tomorrow-why not? She would know nothing until the very last minute; she didn't read the papers any more, didn't listen to the radio. It would be like a bolt from the blue. One morning, she would go down to the kitchen and see the cook wide-eyed: "Haven't you heard, Madame?" The surrender of the King of Belgium, the fall of Paris, the arrival of the Germans, the Armistice… She had learned about all these in just this way. Well, why not peace too? Why not: "Madame, it seems it's all over! It seems no one's fighting any more, there's no more war, the prisoners are coming home!" She couldn't care less if it was the English or the Germans who had won. All she cared about was her son. White as a ghost, eyes closed, she created the scene in her mind with the same abundance of detail found in the paintings of madmen. She could see each and every line on Gaston's face, his hair, his clothing, the laces on his army boots; she could hear every inflection in his voice. She stretched out her hands and whispered, "Well, come inside. Don't you recognise your own house?"
During these first moments, Lucile faded away and Gaston belonged to her and her alone. She would be careful not to cry and kiss him for too long. She would make him a good lunch, run his bath, tell him immediately about his affairs: "You know, I took good care of them. You remember that piece of land you wanted, near the Étang-Neû? I bought it, it's yours. I also bought that meadow of the Montmorts' that borders on ours-the one the Viscount was adamant he wouldn't sell to us. Well, I waited for the right moment. I got what I wanted. Are you pleased? I've put your gold, your silverware, the family jewellery all in a safe place. I did everything, courageously, all by myself. If I'd had to count on your wife… You can see I'm your only real friend, can't you? That I'm the only one who really understands you? But go and see your wife, my boy. Go on. Just don't expect much from her. She's a cold, rebellious creature. Together, though, we'll be able to bend her to our will better than I could do alone. She eludes me with her long silences, whereas you have the right to ask her what she's thinking. You're the master of the house: you can demand to know. Go, go and see her! Take from her what's rightfully yours: her beauty, her youth… I've heard that in Dijon… You shouldn't, my dear Gaston. A mistress is expensive. But I'm sure your long absence will have made you love our old house even more… Oh, what wonderful, peaceful days we're going to spend together," murmured Madame Angellier. She had stood up and was walking around the room holding an imaginary hand and leaning against a phantom shoulder. "Come on, let's go downstairs. I've had a light meal prepared for you in the sitting room. You've lost weight, Gaston. Come, you've got to have something to eat."
Without thinking, she opened the door, went down the staircase. Yes, this was how she would come down from her room in the evening, opening the door to surprise the children: Gaston in an armchair next to the window with his wife by his side, reading to him. It was his wife's duty, her role, to look after him, to amuse him. When he was recovering from typhoid fever, Lucile used to read the newspapers to him. Her voice was soft and pleasant. She couldn't deny that even she herself had sometimes enjoyed listening to Lucile read. A soft, low voice… But was it that voice she could hear now? No, she must be dreaming! She'd allowed her imagination to drift beyond the acceptable limit. She pulled herself up, took a few steps and walked into the sitting room. The armchair had been moved next to the window and sitting in it, his injured arm leaning on the armrest, smoking a pipe, his feet on the little stool where Gaston used to sit as a child, she saw the German in his green uniform-the invader, the enemy-and next to him Lucile, who was reading a book out loud.
For a moment no one said a word. They both stood up. Lucile dropped the book she was holding. The officer quickly picked it up from the floor and put it on the table.
"Madame," he muttered, "your daughter-in-law was kind enough to allow me to come and keep her company for a few moments."
The old woman, very pale, nodded. "You're in charge here."
"And since some new books were sent to me from Paris, I took the liberty of…"
"You're in charge here," Madame Angellier said again.
She turned and walked out. Lucile heard her say to the cook, "I'll be staying in my room from now on. You will bring my meals to me upstairs."
"Today, Madame?"
"Today, tomorrow and for as long as this gentleman is in the house."
When she had gone upstairs and they could no longer hear her footsteps in the depths of the house, the German whispered, "That will be heaven."
The Viscountess de Montmort suffered from insomnia. She was in tune with the cosmos; all the great contemporary problems touched her soul. When she thought about the future of the white race, or Franco-German relations, or the threat posed by the Freemasons and Communism, sleep was banished. Chills ran through her body. She would get up, put on an old worm-eaten fur wrap and go out into the grounds. She despised dressing up, perhaps because she had lost hope that putting on a pretty dress could counterbalance the overall effect of her plainness (she had a long red nose, an awkward figure and bad skin), perhaps because of a natural sense of pride that made her believe others couldn't help but see her striking qualities, even beneath a battered felt hat or a knitted wool coat (spinach-green and canary-yellow) that the cook would have rejected in horror, or perhaps out of her contempt for trivial detail. "How important is it, my dear?" she would say sweetly to her husband when he criticised her for coming down to dinner wearing two different shoes. But she quickly returned to earth when it came to overseeing the servants' work or managing their estate.
Whenever she couldn't sleep, she would walk through the grounds reciting poetry or rush to the henhouse and examine the three enormous locks that protected the door; she kept an eye on the cows (since the war had started, no one grew flowers on the lawns any more, the cattle slept there), and in the soft moonlight she would stroll through the vegetable garden and count the maize. She was being robbed. Before the war it was almost unheard of to grow maize in this rich area where poultry was fed on wheat and oats. Now, though, the requisitioning agents searched the lofts for sacks of wheat and the housewives had no grain to feed their hens. People had come to the château to ask for feed, but the Montmorts were hoarding it, mainly for themselves, but also for all their friends and acquaintances in the area. The farmers were angry. "We'd be happy to pay," they said. She wouldn't have charged them anything actually, but that wasn't the issue and they sensed it. They could tell they were up against a kind of brotherhood, like the Freemasons, a closing of ranks that meant that they and their money were insignificant compared to the satisfaction the Montmorts got from doing a favour for the Baron de Montrefaut or the Countess de Pignepoule. Since they weren't allowed to buy, they simply took. There were no longer any gamekeepers at the château; they'd been taken prisoner and there weren't enough men in the area to replace them. It was also impossible to find workmen or the materials to rebuild the crumbling walls. The farmers got in through the gaps, poached whatever they wanted, fished in the lake, stole hens, corn or tomato plants-just helped themselves to anything, in fact.
Monsieur de Montmort's situation was complicated. On the one hand, he was the Mayor and didn't want to upset his constituents. On the other, he naturally cared about his estate. Nevertheless, he would have chosen to turn a blind eye to it all if it hadn't been for his wife, who rejected any compromise or show of weakness on principle. "All you want is a quiet life," she said sharply to her husband. "Our Lord Himself said: 'I have not come to bring peace but the sword.'"
"You're not Jesus Christ," Amaury replied grumpily, but it had long ago been accepted in the family that the Viscountess had the soul of an apostle and that her opinions were prophetic. What was more, Amaury was even more inclined to adopt the Viscountess's judgements since she was the one with the family fortune and she kept her purse strings tightly closed. He therefore loyally supported her and waged a bitter war against the poachers, the thieves, the teacher who didn't go to Mass and the postman, who was suspected of being a member of the "Popular Front" even though he had ostentatiously hung a picture of Maréchal Pétain on the door of the telephone booth in the Post Office.
And so the Viscountess walked through her grounds on a beautiful June evening and recited the poetry she intended her protégées from the school to recite on Mother's Day. She would have liked to have composed a poem herself; however, her talent was really for prose (when she wrote, she felt the deluge of ideas so powerfully that she often had to put down her pen and run her hands under cold water to force back into them the blood that had rushed to her head). The obligation to make things rhyme was unbearable. Perhaps, therefore, instead of the poem to the glory of the French Mother she would so like to compose, she would write an incantation in prose: "O Mother!" would exclaim one of the youngest pupils, dressed all in white and holding a bouquet of wild flowers in her hand. "O Mother! Let me see your sweet face above my little bed while the storm rages outside. The sky darkens the earth, but a radiant dawn approaches. Smile, O kind Mother! See how your child is following the Maréchal who holds peace and happiness in his hands. Join me and all the children, all the mothers in France, to form a blissful circle around the venerable Wise One who restores hope in our hearts!"
Madame de Montmort spoke these words out loud and they echoed in the silent grounds. When inspiration took hold of her, she lost all control. She strode back and forth, then collapsed on to the damp moss and sat in meditation for a long time, her fur wrap pulled tight round her thin shoulders. Whenever she reflected in this way her thoughts quickly led to passionate resentment. Why, when she was so gifted, wasn't she surrounded by love or even the warmth of admiration? Why had her husband married her for her money? Why wasn't she popular? When she walked through the village the children would hide or laugh behind her back. She knew they called her "the madwoman." It was very hard being hated, yet look at how much she'd done for the local people! The library (how lovingly she had chosen the books, good books to elevate the soul but which left them cold; the girls wanted her to get novels by Maurice Dekobra, these young people…), educational films (just as unpopular as the books), a village fête every year in the grounds, with a show put on by the schoolchildren. Yet she had not been oblivious to the harsh criticisms bandied about. They held it against her that the chairs had been set up in the garage because the bad weather had made it impossible to enjoy being outside. What did these people want? Did they expect her to invite them into the château? They'd be the ones who felt embarrassed if she did. Ah, this deplorable new way of thinking that was sweeping through France! She alone could recognise it and give it a name. The people were becoming Bolsheviks. She had thought the defeat would be a lesson to them, that they would see the errors of their ways and be forced to show respect for their leaders. But no: they were worse than ever.
Sometimes she-a passionate patriot, yes she-was actually glad the enemy was there, she thought, listening to the German guards keeping watch on the road alongside the grounds. They patrolled the village and the surrounding countryside all night long, in groups of four; you could hear the sound of church bells ringing, a sweet, familiar sound that gently lulled people as they slept, and at the same time the hammering of boots, the rattling of weapons, as in a prison courtyard. Yes, the Viscountess de Montmort had reached the point where she wondered if she shouldn't thank the Good Lord for the German occupation of France. Not that she actually liked them, Lord no! She couldn't stand them, but without them… who knew? It was all very well for Amaury to say "Communists? The people around here? But they're richer than you are…" It wasn't simply a question of money or land, it was also, especially, a question of zeal. She vaguely sensed this without being able to explain it. Perhaps they didn't really understand the idea of Communism, but it appealed to their desire for equality, a desire so powerful that even having money and land became frustrating rather than satisfying. It was an insult, as they put it, to own livestock worth a fortune, to be able to send their sons to private school, buy silk stockings for their daughters, and in spite of all that, still feel inferior to the Montmorts.
The farmers felt they were never given enough respect, especially since the Viscount was made Mayor… The old farmer who had been Mayor before him had been warm and friendly to everyone; he might have been greedy, vulgar, harsh and insulting to his constituents… he got away with it! Yet they reproached the Viscount de Montmort for being haughty. What did they expect? For him to stand up when they came into the Mayor's office? To see them to the door or something? They couldn't bear any hint of superiority, anyone wealthier or anyone who came from a better family. No matter what people said, the Germans had good qualities. They were a disciplined race, docile, thought Madame de Montmort as she listened, almost with pleasure, to the rhythmical footsteps fading away, the harsh voices shouting Achtung in the distance. It must be very nice to own a lot of property in Germany, whereas here…
She was consumed by anxiety. It was getting darker and she was about to go back into the house when she saw-or thought she saw-a shadowy figure moving along the wall. Head down, it disappeared into the vegetable garden. Finally, she was going to catch one of these thieves. She quivered with pleasure. It was typical of her not to be afraid. Amaury was always worried about confrontations, but not she. Danger aroused the huntress in her. She hid behind some trees and followed the shadowy figure, holding the pair of shoes she had found hidden in the moss at the foot of the wall (the thief was walking in his socks to make less noise). She worked her way round so that he ran straight into her as he was coming out of the vegetable garden. He jumped back and tried to run away, but she shouted at him contemptuously, "I've got your shoes, my friend. The police will soon find out whose they are."
The man stopped and started walking towards her; it was Benoît Sabarie. They stood staring at each other without saying a word.
"Well, that's a fine thing to do," the Viscountess said finally, her voice trembling with hatred.
She despised him. Of all the farmers, he was the most insolent, the most stubborn; whether it was about the hay, the livestock, the fences, everything and nothing, the château and the farm waged silent, interminable guerrilla warfare against each other.
"Well!" she said indignantly. "Now I know who the thief is and I'm going to tell the Mayor immediately. You'll live to regret this!"
"Tell me, do I talk to you like that, do I? Take your plants," said Benoît, throwing them down on the ground where they lay scattered in the moonlight. "Didn't we offer to pay for them? Do you think we don't have enough money to buy them? But every time we ask you for a favour-not that it would cost you anything-no! You'd rather see us starve to death!"
"Thief, thief, thief!" the Viscountess kept shrieking as he talked. "The Mayor…"
"I don't give a damn about the Mayor! Go and get him then. I'll say it to his face."
"How dare you speak to me like that!"
"Because we've all had enough around here, if you want to know the truth! You have everything and you keep everything! Your wood, your fruit, your fish, your game, your hens, you wouldn't sell any of it, you wouldn't give any of it away for all the money in the world. Your husband the Mayor makes fancy speeches about helping one another and the rest of it. You must be bloody joking! Your château's crammed full of stuff, from the cellar to the attic, everyone knows that, they've seen. Are we asking for charity? No! But that's exactly what bothers you, isn't it? You'd be happy to do it as charity because you like humiliating poor people, but when it comes to doing a favour, as equals-'I'm paying for what I take '-you're off like a shot. Why wouldn't you sell me your plants?"
"That's my business and this is my house, I believe, you insolent…"
"That corn wasn't even for me, I swear! I'd rather die than ask people like you for anything. It was for Louise, 'cause her husband's a prisoner and I wanted to help her out. I help people!"
"By stealing?"
"Well, what else are we supposed to do? You're heartless and stingy with it! What else are we supposed to do?" he repeated furiously. "And I'm not the only one to help myself here. Everything you refuse to give away without a good reason, everything you keep out of pure spite, we're going to take. And it's not over yet. Just wait until autumn! Your husband the Mayor will be hunting with the Germans…"
"That's not true! That's a lie! He's never gone hunting with the Germans."
She stamped her foot angrily, wild with rage. Again that stupid slander! The Germans did invite them both to one of their hunts last winter, it was true. They had declined, but they couldn't refuse to attend the dinner in the evening. Whether they liked it or not, they had to follow the government's orders. And besides, these German officers were cultured men, after all! What separates or unites people is not their language, their laws, their customs, their principles, but the way they hold their knife and fork.
"When it's autumn," Benoît continued, "he'll be hunting with the Germans, but I'll be back, I will, back to your grounds and I won't care if it's rabbits or foxes I get. You can have your groundsmen, your gamekeepers and your dogs chase after me as much as you want; they won't be as clever as Benoît Sabarie! They've been running after me plenty all winter without catching me!"
"I won't go and get the groundsman or the gamekeepers, I'll get the Germans. They scare you, don't they? You can show off all you like, but when you see a German uniform, you keep your head down."
"Listen, I've seen them Boches up close, I have, in Belgium and at the Somme. I'm not like your husband. Where was he during the war? In an office, where he could treat everyone like shit."
"You vulgar little man!"
"In Chalon-sur-Saône, that's where he was, your husband, from September 'til the day the Germans arrived. Then he cleared off. That's his idea of war."
"You are… you are repulsive. Get out of here or I'll scream. Get out of here or I'll call them!"
"That's it, call the Boches. You must be really glad they're here, eh? They're like the police, they watch your property. You'd better pray to the Good Lord that they stay a long time because the day they leave…"
He left his sentence unfinished. Quickly grabbing his shoes, the evidence, from her hands, he put them on, climbed over the wall and disappeared. Almost immediately she heard the sound of German footsteps getting closer.
"Oh, I really hope they caught him. I really hope they've killed him," the Viscountess said to herself as she ran towards the château. "What a man! What a species! What vile people! That's what Bolshevism is, exactly that. My God, what has happened to everyone? When Papa was alive, if you caught a poacher in the woods he'd cry and beg for forgiveness. Naturally he'd be forgiven. Papa, who was goodness personified, would shout, make a scene, then give him a glass of wine in the kitchen. I saw that happen more than once when I was a child. But then the farmers were poor. Since they've got money, it's as if all their worst instincts have resurfaced. 'The château's crammed full of stuff, from the cellar to the attic,'" she repeated furiously. "Well! And what about his house? They're richer than we are. What exactly do they want? It's envy. They're being eaten up by base feelings. That Sabarie is dangerous. He bragged about how he came to hunt here. So he's kept his rifle. He's capable of anything. If he gets up to mischief, if he kills a German, the entire region will be held responsible and especially the Mayor. It's people like him that cause all our problems. It's my duty to denounce him. I'll make Amaury see reason, and… if I have to, I'll go to German Headquarters myself. He prowls the woods at night, in complete breach of the rules, with a weapon-he's had it!"
She rushed into the bedroom, woke Amaury up and told him what had happened. "So this is what it's come to!" she concluded. "They can come and challenge me, steal from me, insult me in my own home. Well, let them. Do you think the insults of a farmer are going to affect me? But he's a dangerous man. He'll stop at nothing. I'm sure that if I hadn't had the presence of mind to keep quiet, if I'd called for the Germans who were passing by on the road, he would have been capable of attacking them or even…"
She let out a little cry and went deathly pale.
"He had a knife. I saw the light reflected off the blade, I'm sure of it. Can you imagine what might have happened? A German murdered, at night, in our grounds? Go and prove you're not involved, Amaury. It's your duty. You must do something. That man bragged about hunting in the grounds all winter so he must have a gun at home. A gun! Even though the Germans have said over and over again that they won't stand for it. If he's still got one at home, he must definitely be planning something terrible, an attack of some kind. Do you realise what that means? In the next town a German soldier was killed and all the important people in the town (the Mayor first) were taken as hostages until they found out who had done it. And in a little village eleven kilometres from there a young boy of sixteen got drunk and threw a punch at a guard who was trying to arrest him for being out after curfew. The boy was shot, but there's worse! Nothing would have happened if he'd obeyed the rules, but they considered the Mayor responsible for his constituents and he was almost executed as well."
"A pocket knife," Amaury grumbled, but she wasn't listening. "I'm beginning to think," he said, getting dressed, his hands shaking (it was nearly eight o'clock), "I'm beginning to think I shouldn't have agreed to be Mayor."
"You're going to make a formal complaint at the police station, I hope?"
"At the police station? You're mad! We'll have the whole place against us. You know that to these people taking what we've refused to sell them doesn't count as stealing. They see it as a joke. They'd make our life miserable. No, I'll go to German Headquarters right now. I'll ask them to keep the matter quiet, which they will certainly do, for they're discreet and they'll understand the situation. They'll look around at the Sabaries' place and will, no doubt, find a gun."
"Are you sure they'll find something? People like that…"
"People like that think they're very clever, but I know where they hide things. They brag about it in the bars, after they've had a few drinks. It's either in the loft, the cellar or the pigsty. They'll arrest that Benoît, but I'll make the Germans promise not to punish him too severely. He'll get away with a few months in prison. We'll be rid of him for a while and afterwards, I bet you anything, he'll watch his step. The Germans know how to bring people into line. What's wrong with them?" exclaimed the Viscount, who was now half dressed, his shirt-tails flapping round his bare thighs. "What kind of people are they? Why can't they leave well enough alone? What are they being asked to do? To keep quiet, to leave everyone in peace. But no! They have to grumble, quibble, show off. And just how is that going to get them anywhere, I ask you? We were defeated, weren't we? All we have to do is keep a low profile. You'd think they were doing it on purpose just to annoy me. I had succeeded, after a great deal of effort, in getting along with the Germans. There's not a single one of them living in the château, remember. That was a great favour. And what about the whole region? I'm doing everything I can for it… I'm losing sleep over it… The Germans are behaving politely to everyone. They salute the women, they stroke the children. They pay cash. But, no! That's not enough! What else do they want? That they give us back Alsace and Lorraine? That they agree to our becoming a Republic with Leon Blum as President? What do they want? What?"
"Don't upset yourself, Amaury. Look at me, see how calm I am. Just do your duty without hoping for any reward other than from heaven. Believe me, God can see into our hearts."
"I know, I know, but it's hard all the same." The Viscount sighed bitterly.
And without stopping for breakfast (he had such a lump in his throat, he told his wife, that he couldn't have swallowed a crumb), he left and, in the utmost secrecy, requested an audience at German Headquarters.
The German army had ordered a requisitioning of horses. The going price for a mare was in the region of 60,000 or 70,000 francs; the Germans were paying (promising to pay) half that amount. It was nearly harvest time and the farmers bitterly asked the Mayor how they were supposed to manage.
"With our bare hands, eh? But we're warning you, if we aren't allowed to work, it's the towns that'll starve to death."
"But my good fellows, I can't do anything about it," muttered the Mayor.
In fact, the farmers knew very well that he was powerless; it was simply that they secretly held a grudge against him. "He'll be all right, he'll get by, they won't touch a single one of his cursed horses." Nothing was going right. A storm had been raging since the night before. The gardens were soaked with rain; hail had wreaked havoc in the fields.
That morning, when Bruno left the Angelliers' house to ride to the neighbouring town where the requisitioning was to take place, he looked out over a desolate landscape, lashed by the rainstorm. The great lime trees lining the wide road had been violently battered; they creaked and groaned like masts on a ship. Bruno, however, experienced a feeling of joy as he galloped along; this pure, biting, cold air reminded him of eastern Prussia. Oh, when would he again see those plains, that pale-green grass, those marshes, the extraordinary beauty of the skies in spring-the late spring of northern countries-those amber skies, pearly clouds, reeds, rushes, sparse clumps of silver birch…? When would he again hunt for heron and curlew? Along the way he came across horses and their riders from all the hamlets, villages and estates in the area heading for town. They're good animals, he thought, but badly cared for. The French-and all civilians actually-understood nothing about horses.
He stopped for a moment to let them pass. They were zigzagging by in small groups. Bruno studied the animals closely; he was trying to work out which ones would be suitable for war. Most of them would be sent to Germany to work the fields, but some of them would have to carry heavy loads in the African desert or the hop fields of Kent. God alone knew where the wind of war would carry them. Bruno remembered how the horses had neighed in terror as Rouen burned. It was raining now. The farmers walked with their heads down, only looking up when they saw this motionless cavalryman with his green cape thrown over his shoulders. For a moment their eyes would meet. They're so slow, Bruno thought, look how clumsy they are. They'll get there two hours late and when are we supposed to have lunch? We'll have to see to the horses first.
"Well, go on, then, get a move on," he muttered, impatiently hitting the back of his boots with his riding crop, restraining himself so he didn't start shouting out orders as he did during manoeuvres. Some old people walked past him, children and even women; everyone from the same village stayed together. Then there would be a gap. Only the swirling wind filled the space, the silence. Taking advantage of one of these lulls, Bruno broke into a gallop and headed for the town, leaving the patient procession behind.
The farmers were silent: they had taken all the young men; they had taken the bread, the wheat, the flour and the potatoes; they had taken the petrol and the cars, and now the horses. What would they take tomorrow? Some of them had started out at midnight. They walked with their heads down, stooped over, faces impassive. Even though they'd told the Mayor they'd had enough, that they wouldn't do another thing, they knew very well the work had to be finished, the harvest taken in. They had to eat. "It's strange to think we used to be so happy," they thought. "Germans… bunch of bastards… You have to be fair, though. It's war. Still, for God's sake, how long will it go on? How long?" muttered the farmers as they looked at the stormy sky.
Men and horses had passed by Lucile's window all day long. She covered her ears so she wouldn't hear them any more. She didn't want to know anything any more. She'd had enough of these warlike scenes, these depressing sights. She was deeply disturbed by them; they broke her heart; they prevented her from being happy. Happy, my God! So there's a war, she said to herself, so there are prisoners, widows, misery, hunger, the occupation. So what? I'm not doing anything wrong. He's a most respectful friend. The books, the music, our long conversations, our walks in the Maie woods… What makes them shameful is the idea of the war, this universal evil. But he's no more at fault than I am. It's not our fault. Just leave us in peace… leave us alone! Sometimes she even frightened and surprised herself at feeling such rebellion in her heart-against her husband, her mother-in-law, public opinion, this "spirit of the hive" Bruno talked about. That evil, grumbling swarm serving some unknown end. She hated it.
Let them go where they want; as for me, I'll do as I please. I want to be free. I'm not asking for superficial freedom, the freedom to travel, to leave this house (even though that would be unimaginably blissful). I'd rather feel free inside-to choose my own path, never to waver, not to follow the swarm. I hate this community spirit they go on and on about. The Germans, the French, the Gaullists, they all agree on one thing: you have to love, think, live with other people, as part of a state, a country, a political party. Oh, my God! I don't want to! I'm just a poor useless woman; I don't know anything but I want to be free! Slaves, she continued thinking. We're becoming slaves; the war scatters us in all directions, takes away everything we own, snatches the bread from out of our mouths; let me at least retain the right to decide my own destiny, to laugh at it, defy it, escape it if I can. A slave? Better to be a slave than a dog who thinks he's free as he trots along behind his master. She listened to the sound of men and horses passing by. They don't even realise they're slaves, she said to herself, and I, I would be just like them if a sense of pity, solidarity, the "spirit of the hive" forced me to refuse to be happy.
This friendship between herself and the German, this dark secret, an entire universe hidden in the heart of the hostile house, my God, how sweet it was. Finally she felt she was a human being, proud and free. She wouldn't allow anyone to intrude into her personal world. No one. It's no one's business. Let everyone else fight one another, hate one another. Even if his father and mine fought in the past. Even if he himself took my husband prisoner… (an idea that obsessed her unhappy mother-in-law) what difference would it make? We're friends. Friends? She walked through the dim entrance hall and went up to the mirror on the chest of drawers that was framed in black wood; she looked at her dark eyes and trembling lips and smiled. "Friends? He loves me," she whispered. She brought her lips to the mirror and gently kissed her reflection. "Yes, he loves you. You don't owe anything to the husband who betrayed you, deserted you… But he's a prisoner of war! Your husband is a prisoner of war and you let a German get close to you, take his place? Well, yes. So what? The one who's gone, the prisoner of war, the husband, I never loved him. I hope he never comes back. I hope he dies!
"But wait… think…" she continued, leaning her forehead against the mirror. She felt as if she were talking to a part of herself she hadn't known existed until then, who'd been invisible and whom she was seeing now for the first time, a woman with brown eyes, thin, trembling lips, burning cheeks, who was her but not entirely her. "But wait, think… be logical… listen to the voice of reason… you're a sensible woman… you're French… where will all this lead? He's a soldier, he's married, he'll go away; where will it lead? Will it be anything more than a moment of fleeting happiness? Not even happiness, just pleasure? Do you even know what that is?" She was fascinated by her reflection in the mirror; it both pleased her and frightened her.
She heard the cook's footsteps in the pantry near the entrance hall; she jumped back in terror and started walking aimlessly through the house. My God, what an enormous empty house! Her mother-in-law, as she had vowed, no longer left her room; her meals were taken up to her. But even though she wasn't there, Lucile could still sense her. This house was a reflection of her, the truest part of her being, just as the truest part of Lucile was the slender young woman (in love, courageous, happy, in despair) who had just been smiling at herself in the mirror with the black frame. (She had disappeared; all that was left of Lucile Angellier was a lifeless ghost, a woman who wandered aimlessly through the rooms, who leaned her face against the windows, who automatically tidied all the useless, ugly objects that decorated the mantelpiece.)
What a day! The air was heavy, the sky grey. The blossoming lime trees had been battered by gusts of cold wind. A room, a house of my very own, thought Lucile, a perfect room, almost bare, a beautiful lamp… If only I could close these shutters and put on the lights to block out this awful weather. Marthe would ask if I were ill; she'd go and tell my mother-in-law, who would come and open the curtains and turn off the lights because of the cost of electricity. I can't play the piano: it would be seen as an insult to my absent husband. I'd happily go for a walk in the woods in spite of the rain, but everyone would know about it. "Lucile Angellier's gone mad," they'd all say. That's enough to have a woman locked up around here.
She laughed as she recalled a young girl she'd heard about whose parents had shut her up in a nursing home because she would slip away and run down to the lake whenever there was a full moon. The lake, the night… The lake beneath this torrential rain. Oh, anywhere far away! Somewhere else. These horses, these men, these poor resigned people, hunched over in the rain… She tore herself away from the window. "I'm nothing like them," she told herself, yet she felt bound to them by invisible chains.
She went into Bruno's bedroom. Several times she had slipped quietly into his room in the evening, her heart pounding. He would be propped up on his bed, fully dressed, reading or writing, the metallic blond of his hair glistening beneath the lamp. On an armchair in the corner of the room would be his heavy belt with the motto Gott mit uns engraved on the buckle, a black revolver, his cap and almond-green greatcoat; he would take the coat and put it over Lucile's legs because the nights were cold since the week before with its endless storms.
They were alone-they felt they were alone-in the great sleeping house. Not a word of their true feelings was spoken; they didn't kiss. There was simply silence. Silence followed by feverish, passionate conversations about their own countries, their families, music, books… They felt a strange happiness, an urgent need to reveal their hearts to each other-the urgency of lovers, which is already a gift, the very first one, the gift of the soul before the body surrenders. "Know me, look at me. This is who I am. This is how I have lived, this is what I have loved. And you? What about you, my darling?" But up until now, not a single word of love. What was the point? Words are pointless when your voices falter, when your mouths are trembling, amid such long silences. Slowly, gently, Lucile touched the books on the table. The Gothic lettering looked so bizarre, so ugly. The Germans, the Germans… A Frenchman wouldn't have let me leave with no gesture of love other than kissing my hand and the hem of my dress…
She smiled, shrugging her shoulders slightly; she knew it was neither shyness nor coldness, but that profound, determined German patience-the patience of a wild animal waiting for its hypnotised prey to let itself be taken. "During the war," Bruno had said, "we spent a number of nights lying in wait in the Moeuvre forest. Waiting is erotic…" She had laughed at the word. It seemed less amusing now. What did she do now but wait? She waited for him. She wandered through these lifeless rooms. Another two hours, three hours. Then dinner alone. Then the sound of the key locking her mother-in-law's door. Then Marthe crossing the garden with a lantern to close the gate. Then more waiting, feverish and strange… and finally the sound of his horse neighing on the road, the clanking of weapons, orders given to the groom who walks away with the horse. The sound of spurs on the doorstep. Then the night, the stormy night, with its great gusts of wind in the lime trees and the thunder rumbling in the distance. She would tell him. Oh, she was no hypocrite, she would tell him in clear, simple French-that the prey he so desired was his. "And then what? Then what?" she murmured; a mischievous, bold, sensual smile suddenly transformed her expression, just as the reflection of a flame illuminating a face can alter it. Lit up by fire, the softest features can look demonic; they can both repel and attract. She walked quietly out of the room.
Someone was knocking at the kitchen door; they knocked shyly, softly; you could hardly hear it through the driving rain. Some kids wanting to get out of the storm, thought the cook. She looked out and saw Madeleine Sabarie standing on the doorstep, holding a dripping-wet umbrella. Marthe looked at her for a moment, astonished; people from the farms hardly ever came into the village except on Sundays for High Mass.
"What's going on? Come inside, quickly. Is everything all right at home?"
"No, something terrible's happened," Madeleine whispered. "I need to speak to Madame right away."
"Lord Jesus! Something terrible? Do you want to speak to Madame Angellier or Madame Lucile?"
Madeleine hesitated. "Madame Lucile. But be quiet… I don't want that awful German to know I'm here."
"The officer? He's away at the requisitioning of the horses. Sit down by the fire; you're soaking wet. I'll go and get Madame."
Lucile was alone, finishing her dinner. She had a book open on the tablecloth in front of her. "Poor dear!" Marthe said to herself in a moment of sudden lucidity. "Is this the kind of life she should have? No husband for two years… And as for Madeleine… What terrible thing could have happened? Something to do with the Germans, that's for sure."
She told Lucile that someone was asking for her.
"Madeleine Sabarie, Madame. Something terrible's happened to her… She doesn't want anyone to see her."
"Show her in here. Is the German… Lieutenant von Falk home yet?"
"No, Madame. I'll hear his horse when he comes back. I'll warn you."
"Yes, good. Go on now."
Lucile waited, her heart pounding. Madeleine Sabarie entered the room, deathly pale and out of breath. The modesty and caution innate to country folk battled against her emotional turmoil. She shook Lucile's hand, mumbled "I'm not disturbing you, am I?" and "How are you?" as was the custom, then said very quietly, making a terrible effort to hold back her tears (because you just didn't cry in front of anyone, unless it was at someone's deathbed; the rest of the time you had to control yourself, to hide your pain-and indeed your pleasure-from others), "Oh, Madame Lucile! What should I do? I've come to ask your advice because we're… we're finished. The Germans came to arrest Benoît this morning."
"But why?" Lucile exclaimed.
"They said it was because he had a hunting rifle hidden away. Like everyone else, as you can imagine. But they didn't search anywhere else, just our place. Benoît said, 'Go ahead and look.' They did look and they found it. It was hidden in the hay in the cowshed. Our German, the one living with us, the interpreter, he was in the room when the men from Headquarters came back in with the gun and ordered my husband to go with them. 'Wait a minute,' Benoît said. 'That isn't my gun. It must be someone who lives around here who hid it so they could denounce me. Give it to me and I'll prove it to you.' He was talking so naturally that the men weren't suspicious. My Benoît takes the gun, pretends to be examining it and suddenly… Oh, Madame Lucile, the two bullets fired almost at the same time. One killed Bonnet and the other Bubi, the big Alsatian that was with him."
"I see," murmured Lucile, "I see."
"Then he jumps out of the window and runs off, the Germans right behind. But he knows the place better than them, as you can imagine. They haven't found him yet. The storm was so bad they couldn't see two steps in front of them, thank goodness. Bonnet's laid out on my bed, where they put him. If they find Benoît, they'll shoot him. He might have been shot for hiding a gun, but if that was all he'd done we could have hoped he'd get off. Now, well we know what to expect, don't we?"
"But why did he kill Bonnet?"
"He must be the one who denounced him, Madame Lucile. He lives with us. He could have found the gun. These Germans, they're all traitors. And that one… was chasing after me, you see… and my husband knew it. Maybe he wanted to punish him, maybe he said to himself, 'Might as well… then he won't be here to play up to my wife when I'm not around.' Maybe… And he really hated them, Madame Lucile. He was longing to kill one of them."
"They've been looking for him all day long, you say? You're absolutely sure they haven't found him yet?"
"I'm sure," said Madeleine after a moment's silence.
"Have you seen him?"
"Yes. This is life or death, Madame Lucile. You… you won't say a word?"
"Oh, Madeleine…"
"All right, then. He's hiding at Louise's place, our neighbour whose husband is a prisoner of war."
"They're going to turn the village upside down, they're going to look everywhere."
"Thank goodness they were requisitioning the horses today. All the officers are away. The soldiers are waiting for orders. Tomorrow they'll start the search. But Madame Lucile, farms have plenty of hiding places. They've had escaped prisoners right there under their noses plenty of times. Louise will hide him good, but it's just, well, it's her kids: the kids play with the Germans, they aren't afraid of them, and they talk, they're too little to understand. 'I know the chance I'm taking,' Louise told me. 'I'm doing it willingly for your husband, just like you would do it for mine, but nonetheless, it would be better to find another house where he could hide until he can get away from here.' They'll be watching all the roads now, won't they. But the Germans won't be here for ever. What we need is a big house where there aren't any children."
"Here?" Lucile said, staring at her.
"Here, yes, I thought…"
"You do know that a German officer lives here?"
"They're everywhere. But the officer hardly ever comes out of his room, does he? And I've heard… forgive me, Madame Lucile, I've heard he's in love with you and that you can do whatever you like. I'm not offending you, am I? They're men like the rest, I know, and they get bored. So if you said to him, 'I don't want your soldiers upsetting everything in the house. It's ridiculous. You know very well I'm not hiding anyone. First of all, I'd be too scared to…' Things that women can say… And in this house that's so big, so empty, it would be easy to find a hiding place, some little corner. And then there's a chance he'd be saved, the only chance. You might say that if you get caught, you risk going to prison, perhaps even being killed. With these brutes it's possible. But if we French don't help one another, who will? Louise, she has kids, she does, and she wasn't scared. You're all alone."
"I'm not afraid," Lucile said slowly.
She thought about it. The danger for Benoît would be the same whether he was in her house or anywhere else. What about the danger for her? What's my life worth anyway? she thought with unintentional despair. Really, it had no importance. She suddenly thought of those days in June 1940 (two years, only two years ago). Then, too, amid the chaos, the danger, she hadn't thought about herself. She had let herself be carried along by a fast-flowing river.
"There's my mother-in-law," she murmured, "but she doesn't leave her room any more. She wouldn't see anything. And there's Marthe."
"Marthe's family, Madame. She's my husband's cousin. There's no danger there. We trust our family. But where could he hide?"
"I was thinking maybe the blue bedroom near the attic, the old playroom that has a kind of alcove… But then, but then, my poor Madeleine, you mustn't have any illusions. If fate is against us they'll find him here as well as anywhere, but if it's God's will, he'll escape. After all, German soldiers have been killed in France before and they've not always found the ones who did it. We must do everything we can to hide him… and… just hope, don't you think?"
"Yes, Madame, hope…" said Madeleine and the tears she could no longer hold back flowed slowly down her cheeks.
Lucile put her arms round Madeleine and hugged her. "Go and get him. Go through the Maie woods. It's still raining. No one will be out. Listen to me, trust no one, German or French. I'll wait for you at the little garden door. I'll go and warn Marthe."
"Thank you, Madame," Madeleine stammered.
"Go quickly. Hurry."
Madeleine opened the door without making a sound and slipped out into the deserted wet garden where tears seemed to drip from the trees. An hour later Lucile let Benoît in through the little green door that opened on to the Maie woods. The storm was over but an angry wind continued to rage.
From her room, Madame Angellier could hear the local policeman shouting in front of the town hall: "Public Announcement by Order of German Headquarters…" Worried faces appeared at all the windows. "What is it now?" everyone thought with fear and hatred. Their fear of the Germans was so great that even when German Headquarters ordered the local police to instruct the villagers to destroy rats or have their children vaccinated, they wouldn't relax until long after the final drum roll had ceased and they had asked the educated people in the village-the pharmacist, the notary or the police chief-to repeat what had just been announced.
"Is that all? Are you sure that's all? They're not taking anything else away from us?"
They gradually calmed down.
"Oh, good," they said, "good, that's fine then! But I wonder why it's their business…"
This would have made everything all right if they hadn't added, "They're our rats and our children. What right have they got to destroy our rats and vaccinate our children? What's it to them?"
The Germans present in the square took it upon themselves to explain the orders.
"We must have everyone in good health now, French and German."
The villagers quickly conceded, with an air of feigned submission ("Oh, they smile like slaves," thought the elder Madame Angellier): "Of course… Good idea… It's in everybody's best interest… We understand."
And each one of them then went home, threw the rat poison in the fire and hurried to the doctor to ask him not to vaccinate their child because he was "just getting over the mumps," or he wasn't strong enough because they didn't have enough food. Others said straight out, "We'd rather there were one or two sick kids: maybe it'll get rid of the Fritz." Alone in the square, the Germans looked around them benevolently and thought that, little by little, the ice was breaking between conquered and conqueror.
On this particular day, however, none of the Germans was smiling or talking to the local people. They stood very straight, a hard stare on their pale faces. The policeman had just played a final drum roll. He was a rather handsome man from the Midi, always happy to be surrounded by women; he was obviously enjoying the importance of what he was about to say. He put his drumsticks under his arm and, with the grace and skill of a magician, he began to read. His attractive, rich, masculine voice echoed in the silence:
A member of the German army has been murdered: an officer of the Wehrmacht was killed in a cowardly way by one Benoît Sabarie, residing at… in the district of Bussy.
The criminal succeeded in escaping. Any person guilty of providing him with shelter, aid or protection, or who knows his whereabouts, is required to report this information to German Headquarters within forty-eight hours, or will otherwise incur the same punishment as the murderer, that is:
IMMEDIATE EXECUTION BY FIRING SQUAD
Madame Angellier had opened the window slightly. When the policeman had gone, she leaned out and looked into the village square. People were whispering, in shock. Only the day before they had been discussing the requisitioning of the horses; this new disaster added to the previous one led to a sort of disbelief in the slow minds of the country folk: "Benoît? Benoît did that? It isn't possible!" The secret had been well kept: the villagers were largely ignorant of what happened in the countryside, on the large, jealously guarded farms.
As for the Germans, well, they were better informed. They now understood what the commotion was about, why there had been whistles in the night, and why, the evening before, they had been forbidden to go out after eight o'clock: "They must have been moving the body and they didn't want us to see." In the cafés, the Germans talked quietly among themselves. They too had the impression it was all horrible, unreal. For three months they had lived alongside these Frenchmen; they had mixed with them; they had done them no harm; they had even managed, thanks to their consideration and good behaviour, to establish a humane relationship with them. Now, the act of one madman made them doubt everything. Yet it wasn't so much the crime that affected them as the solidarity, the complicity they could sense all around them (in the end, for a man to elude an entire regiment hot on his heels meant that everyone must be helping him, hiding him, feeding him; unless, of course, he was hiding in the woods-but the soldiers had spent the entire night searching them). "So, if a Frenchman kills me tomorrow," each soldier was thinking, "me they welcome in their house, me they smile at, who has a place at their dinner table and is allowed to sit their children on my knee… there won't be a single person who'll feel sorry and speak up for me, and everyone will do their best to hide the murderer!" These peaceful country folk with their impassive faces, these women who smiled at them, who had chatted to them yesterday but today walked by embarrassed, avoiding their eye, they were nothing but a group of enemies. They could hardly believe it; they were such nice people… Lacombe, the shoemaker, who had offered a bottle of white wine to the Germans the week before because his daughter had just received her high school diploma and he didn't know how else to express his joy; Georges, the miller, a veteran of the last war, who had said, "Peace as soon as possible and everyone in his own country. That's all we Frenchmen want"; the young women, always eager to laugh, to sing, to share a secret kiss, were they now and for ever to be enemies?
The Frenchmen, meanwhile, were wondering, "That Willy who asked permission to kiss my kid, saying he had one the same age in Bavaria, that Fritz who helped me take care of my sick husband, that Erwald who thinks France is such a beautiful country, and that other one I saw standing in front of the portrait of my father who was killed in 1915… if tomorrow he was given the order, he'd arrest me, he'd kill me with his own hands without thinking twice? War… yes, everyone knows what war is like. But occupation is more terrible in a way, because people get used to one another. We tell ourselves, 'They're just like us, after all,' but they're not at all the same. We're two different species, irreconcilable, enemies forever."
Madame Angellier knew them so well, these country people, that she felt she could look at their faces and read their minds. She sniggered. She hadn't been taken in, not her! She hadn't let herself be bought. For everyone in the village of Bussy had a price, just like in the rest of France. The Germans gave money to some of them (the wine merchants who charged soldiers of the Wehrmacht a hundred francs for a bottle of Chablis, the farmers who got five francs each for their eggs), to others (the young people, the women) they gave pleasure. The villagers were no longer bored since the Germans arrived. Finally they had someone to talk to. God, even her own daughter-in-law… She half closed her eyes and raised her white, translucent hand to cover her lowered eyelids, as if she were trying not to look at a naked body. Yes, the Germans thought they could buy tolerance and forgetfulness that way. And they had.
Bitterly, Madame Angellier made a mental inventory of all the important people in the town. All of them had yielded, all of them had let themselves be seduced: the Montmorts… they entertained the Germans in their own home; she'd heard that the Germans were organising a celebration in the Viscount's grounds, by the lake. Madame de Montmort told everyone who would listen that she was outraged, that she would close all the windows so she couldn't hear the music or see the sparklers beneath the trees. But when Lieutenant von Falk and Bonnet, the interpreter, had gone to see her about borrowing chairs, bowls and tablecloths, she'd spent nearly two hours with them. Madame Angellier had heard this from the cook who'd heard it from the groundsman. These aristocrats were part foreigner themselves, after all, if you looked closely enough. Wasn't it true that through their veins ran the foreign blood of Bavaria, Prussia (abomination!) and the Rhineland? Aristocrats intermarried without a thought for national boundaries. But, come to think of it, the upper middle classes weren't much better. People whispered the names of collaborators (and their names were broadcast loudly on English radio every night): the Maltêtes of Lyon, the Péricands of Paris, the Corbin Bank… and others as well…
Madame Angellier came to feel that she was a race apart-staunch, as implacable as a fortress. Alas, it was the only fortress that remained standing in France, but nothing could bring it down, for its bastions were made, not of stone, not of flesh, not of blood, but of those most intangible and invincible things in the world: love and hate.
She walked quickly and silently up and down the room. "There's no point in closing my eyes," she murmured. "Lucile is ready to fall into the arms of that German." There was nothing she could do about it. Men had weapons; they knew how to fight. All she could do was spy on them, watch them, listen to them… keep her ears open for the sound of footsteps, a sigh in the silence of the night. So that these things, at least, would be neither forgiven nor forgotten, so that when Gaston got back… She quivered with intense joy. God, how she despised Lucile! When everyone was finally asleep in the house, the old woman did what she called "her rounds." Nothing escaped her. She counted the cigarette stubs in the ashtrays that had traces of lipstick on them; she silently picked up a crumpled, perfumed handkerchief, a flower, an open book. She often heard the piano or the German's low, soft voice as he hummed, stressing some musical phrase.
The piano… How could anyone like music? Every note seemed to grate on her exposed nerves and made her groan. She preferred the long conversations that she could just about hear by leaning out of the window above the library window they left open on those beautiful summer evenings. She even preferred the silences that fell between them or Lucile's laughter (laughter… when her husband was a prisoner of war! Shameless hussy, bitch, heathen!). Anything was better than music, for music alone can abolish differences of language or culture between two people and evoke something indestructible within them. Madame Angellier sometimes walked up to the German's room. She listened to his breathing, his mild smoker's cough. She crossed the hall where the officer's large green cape hung beneath the stuffed stag's head and slipped some sprigs of heather into his pocket. People said it brought bad luck; she didn't actually believe it herself, but it was worth a try…
For a few days now, two to be exact, the atmosphere in the house had seemed even more ominous. The piano was silent. Madame Angellier had heard Lucile and the cook whispering to each other for a long time. (Is she now betraying me as well?) The church bells began to ring. (Ah, the funeral of the murdered officer…) There were the armed soldiers, the casket, the wreaths of red flowers… The church had been requisitioned. No Frenchman was allowed in. They could hear a choir of excellent voices singing a religious hymn; it was coming from the Chapel of the Virgin. That winter the children had broken a pane of glass during catechism class and it hadn't been replaced. The hymn rose up through this ancient little window set above the altar of the Virgin and obscured by the great branches of the lime tree in the village square. How happily the birds were singing! Now and again, their shrill voices almost drowned out the German hymn. Madame Angellier didn't know the name or age of the dead man. All German Headquarters had said was "an officer of the Wehrmacht." That was enough. He must have been young. They were all young. "Well, it's all over for you now. What can you do? That's war." His mother will eventually understand that, Madame Angellier murmured, nervously fiddling with her black necklace; it was made of jet and ebony, and she'd started wearing it when her husband had died.
She sat motionless until evening, as if riveted to the spot, watching everyone who crossed the street. In the evening… not a single sound. "I haven't heard even the faintest creak from the third step," thought Madame Angellier, "the one I hear when Lucile leaves her room and goes out into the garden. The silent, oiled doors are her accomplices, but that faithful old step speaks to me. No, there's not a sound. Are they together already? Maybe they're meeting later?"
The night passed. Madame Angellier was overcome with burning curiosity. She slipped out of her bedroom and placed her ear against the officer's door. Nothing. Not a single sound. If she hadn't heard a man's voice somewhere in the house earlier that evening, she might have thought he hadn't come back yet. But nothing got past her. Any man in the house who wasn't her son was an insult to her. There was a smell of foreign tobacco; she went pale and raised her hands to her forehead, like a woman who thinks she's about to faint. Where is he, the German? Closer than usual since the smoke is coming in through the open window. Is he going through the house? Perhaps he's leaving soon and knows it, so he's choosing the furniture he'll take: his share of the spoils. Didn't the Prussians steal the grandfather clocks in 1870? Today's soldiers won't have changed that much. She imagined his sacrilegious hands rifling through the attic, the larder and the wine cellar.
Thinking about it, it was the wine cellar that worried Madame Angellier most. She never drank wine; she recalled having had a sip of champagne for Gaston's First Communion and at her wedding. But wine was somehow part of their heritage and, as such, was sacred, like everything destined to continue after we die. That Château-d'Yquem, that… she'd been given those wines by her husband to pass on to her son. They had buried the best bottles in the sand, but that German… Who could tell? Instructed by Lucile perhaps… Let's go and see… Here's the wine cellar with its door and iron locks, like a fortress. Here's the hiding place only she knows about by a cross marked on the wall. No, everything seems in order here as well. Nevertheless, Madame Angellier's heart is pounding furiously. It is clear that Lucile has just been down to the cellar; her perfume lingers in the air. Following its scent, Madame Angellier goes back upstairs, through the kitchen, the dining room and, finally, on the staircase comes face to face with Lucile carrying a plate, a glass and an empty wine bottle. So that's why she went down into the wine cellar and the larder, where Madame Angellier had thought she heard footsteps.
"A romantic little supper?" said Madame Angellier in a voice as low and stinging as a whip.
"I beg you, please be quiet. If you knew…"
"And with a German! Under my own roof! In your husband's house, you miserable…"
"Be quiet, won't you! Can't you see the German isn't back yet? He'll be here any minute. Let me go and tidy up. In the meantime, you go upstairs, open the door to the old playroom and see who's in there… Then, after you've seen, meet me in the dining room. I was wrong, very wrong to act without telling you; I had no right to put your life in danger…"
"You've hidden that farmer here… the one accused of the murder?"
At that very moment they heard the regiment. There was the hoarse shout of orders being given and immediately afterwards the sound of the German officer coming up the steps to the house. His walk was unmistakable. No Frenchman could produce that hammering of boots, that rattling of spurs. It was a walk that could only belong to a proud conqueror, striding over the enemy's cobblestones, joyfully trampling the defeated land.
Madame Angellier opened the door to her own room, pushed Lucile inside, followed her in and turned the key. She took the plate and glass from Lucile, rinsed them in her dressing-room washstand, carefully dried them and put away the bottle after checking the label. Table wine? Yes, well done! She's prepared to be shot for hiding a man who killed a German, thought Lucile, but she wouldn't be happy to give him a good bottle of Burgundy. Thank goodness it was dark in the cellar and I was lucky enough to take a bottle of red wine worth only three francs. She remained silent, waiting with intense curiosity to hear what Madame Angellier would say. She couldn't have kept the presence of a stranger hidden from her much longer: this old woman could see through walls.
Finally, Madame Angellier spoke. "Did you think I would hand that man over to the Germans?" she asked. Her pinched nostrils were trembling; her eyes sparkled. She seemed happy, elated, almost mad, like a former actress who is once again playing the role she starred in long ago and whose nuances and gestures are second nature to her. "Has he been here long?"
"Three days."
"Why didn't you say anything to me?"
Lucile didn't reply.
"You're mad to have hidden him in the blue room. He should stay in here. Since all my meals are brought to me upstairs, there is no risk of anyone challenging you: you have your excuse. He can sleep on the sofa in the dressing room."
"But think about it, Mother! If he's found in our house the risk is terrible. I can take all the blame, say that you didn't know what I was doing, which is actually the truth, but if he's in your room…"
Madame Angellier shrugged her shoulders. "Tell me everything," she said, with an eagerness in her voice that Lucile hadn't heard for a long time. "Tell me exactly how it all happened. All I know is what the police said. Whom did he kill? Was it just one German? Did he wound any others? Was it at least a high-ranking officer…?"
She's in her element, thought Lucile. She's so eager to do her duty in the call to arms… Mothers and women in love: both ferocious females. I'm not a mother and I'm not in love (Bruno? No. I mustn't think of Bruno now, I mustn't…), so I can't see things in the same way. I'm more detached, colder, calmer, more civilised, I still believe that. And also… I can't imagine that all three of us are really risking our lives. It seems so melodramatic, so extreme. Yet Bonnet is dead, killed by a farmer whom some would treat as a criminal and others as a hero. And what about me? I have to choose. I've already chosen… in spite of myself. And I thought I was free…
"You can question Sabarie yourself, Mother," she said. "I'll bring him to you. Make sure you don't let him smoke; the Lieutenant will smell someone else's tobacco in the house. I think that's the only danger; they won't search the house; they would scarcely believe anyone would dare hide him here in the village. They'll raid the farms. But we could be denounced."
"Frenchmen don't denounce one another," the old woman said proudly. "You've forgotten that, my girl, since you got friendly with the Germans."
Lucile remembered something Lieutenant von Falk had told her in confidence: "The very first day we arrived," he'd said, "there was a package of anonymous letters waiting for us at Headquarters. People were accusing one another of spreading English and Gaullist propaganda, of hoarding supplies, of being spies. If we'd taken them all seriously, everyone in the region would be in prison. I had the whole lot thrown on to the fire. People's lives aren't worth much and defeat arouses the worst in men. In Germany it was exactly the same." But Lucile said nothing of this to her mother-in-law and left her to make up the sofa in the dressing room. She looked impassioned, light-hearted and twenty years younger. Using her own mattress, pillow and her best sheets, Madame Angellier lovingly prepared a bed for Benoît Sabarie.
For a long time the Germans had been making arrangements for a great celebration at the Château de Montmort. It was to take place on the night of 21 June. This was the anniversary of the regiment's arrival in Paris, but no Frenchman was to know this was the reason the date had been chosen: the commanding officers had given orders to respect French national pride. All races are aware of their own faults; they know them better than even the most malevolent foreign observer. In a friendly conversation, a young Frenchman had recently told Bruno von Falk: "We Frenchmen have very short memories; this is both our strength and our weakness! We forgot that after 1918 we were the victors and that was our downfall; we'll forget after 1940 that we were defeated, which will perhaps be our salvation."
"As a nation, we Germans too have a weakness that is also our greatest quality: our tactlessness, which is really a lack of imagination; we are incapable of putting ourselves in anyone else's place; we hurt people for no reason; we make others hate us, but that allows us to behave inflexibly and without faltering."
Since the Germans mistrusted their tendency to be tactless, they were particularly careful of what they said when speaking to the locals; they were therefore accused of being hypocrites. Even when Lucile asked Bruno, "And what's this celebration in honour of?" he avoided answering honestly. In Germany they always had a party around 24 June, he said, as it was the shortest night of the year. However, since the 24th had been set aside for large-scale manoeuvres, they had brought the date forward.
Everything was ready. They were setting up tables in the castle grounds; they had asked the local people to lend them their best table linen for a few hours. With respect, infinite care and under the supervision of Bruno himself, the soldiers had made their selection from the piles of damask tablecloths that lay deep inside cupboards. The middle-class ladies, eyes raised to heaven-"as if they were expecting to see Sainte Geneviève herself descend from on high," Bruno thought mischievously, "to strike down the sacrilegious Germans, guilty of daring to touch this family treasure made of fine linen, hemstitched, embroidered with birds and flowers"-these ladies stood guard and counted their towels in front of the soldiers. "I had four dozen of them: forty-eight, Lieutenant, and now there are only forty-seven."
"Allow me, Madame, to count them again with you. You're just upset, Madame, I'm sure we haven't lost any. Here's the last one; it fell on the floor. Allow me to pick it up and return it to you, Madame."
"Oh, so it is, I'm sorry, Monsieur," the lady replied with her most sour smile, "it's just that when cupboards are turned out like this, things disappear if you're not careful."
Nevertheless, he'd found a way to cajole them. "Naturally, we have no right to ask you to lend us these things," he said, saluting solemnly. "You know we're not entitled to them…"
He even implied that the General shouldn't find out: "He's so strict. He'd tell us off for behaving impertinently, but we're so bored. We want to have a wonderful party. It's a favour we're asking of you, Madame. You are perfectly free to refuse." Magic words! Even the most sullen face lit up with a hint of a smile (like the pale and dismal light of the winter sun, thought Bruno, shining on one of your opulent, decrepit houses).
"But why shouldn't you enjoy yourselves, Monsieur? You will take good care of these tablecloths, won't you? They were part of my dowry."
"Ah, Madame! I give you my word of honour that they will be returned to you intact, washed and ironed…"
"No, no! Just give them back as they are, thank you. Wash my linen! But we don't send them to the laundry, Monsieur. The maid launders them under my supervision. We use fine ashes…"
Then all he had to do was smile sweetly and say, "Well, what do you know! So does my mother."
"Oh, really? Your mother too? What a coincidence. Perhaps you could use some napkins as well?"
"Madame, I didn't like to ask."
"I can let you have two, three, four dozen. Would you like any cutlery?"
The soldiers had come out of the houses weighed down with clean, scented linen, their pockets full of dessert knives and holding, as if it were the Holy Sacrament, an antique punchbowl or some Empire coffee pot whose handle was decorated with ornamental leaves. Everything was stored in the château kitchens until the celebration.
The young women laughed and called out to the soldiers, "How are you going to dance with no women?"
"We'll have no choice, ladies. That's war for you."
The musicians would play from the conservatory. At the entrance to the grounds were pillars and poles decorated with garlands of flowers that would be used to hoist the flags: the regimental flag, which had been carried during the campaigns in Poland, Belgium and France and had emerged victorious from three capital cities, and the swastika-stained, Lucile whispered, with the blood of Europe. Yes, sadly, all of Europe, Germany included: the noblest, youngest, most fervent blood, which is always the first to be shed in battle. And with whatever blood remained, the world would have to be rebuilt. That is why the aftermath of war is so difficult…
Every day, from Chalon-sur-Saône, Moulins, Nevers, Paris and Epernay, military trucks arrived with cases and cases of champagne. If there couldn't be women, there would at least be wine, music and fireworks down by the lake.
"We're going to come and watch," the young Frenchwomen said. "Forget the curfew for one night, all right? Since you'll be having fun, you could at least let us have a good time, too. We'll take the road down to the château and watch you dance."
Laughing, the girls tried on party hats made of silvery lace, masks and paper flowers for their hair. What party had they been meant for? Everything was slightly crumpled, faded, as if it were second-hand or from some costume wardrobe in Cannes or Deauville belonging to a nightclub manager who, before September 1939, was counting on future seasons.
"How funny you'll look in all this," the women said.
The soldiers strutted about making funny faces.
Champagne, music, dancing, a rush of pleasure… so they could briefly forget the war and how quickly time was passing. The only thing they worried about was the possibility of a storm that night. But the nights were so clear… Then, suddenly, there was this terrible disaster! A comrade murdered, unheroically, killed by some drunken cowardly farmer. They had considered cancelling the celebration. But no! The warrior mentality reigned supreme here: the tacit acceptance that, immediately after you had died, your comrades would dispose of your shirts, your boots, and spend the whole night playing cards while you lay in the corner of some tent-if your remains had been found, that is. Yet it was also a mentality that accepted death as something natural, an ordinary soldier's destiny, and therefore refused to sacrifice a moment's pleasure because of it. Besides, the officers' main responsibility was to think of their men, to distract them from demoralising thoughts about future dangers and how very short life was. No, Bonnet had died without suffering much. He'd been given a beautiful funeral. He would not have wanted his comrades to be disappointed because of him. The celebration would take place as arranged.
Bruno gave in to the childish excitement around him. It was mad and slightly desperate-the kind of excitement that a truce brings out in soldiers, who see the possibility of a moment's relief from the day-to-day boredom. He didn't want to think about Bonnet, or about what was whispered behind the closed shutters of these grey, cold enemy houses. Like a child who's been promised to go to the circus and is then told he must stay home because some old, annoying relative is sick, Bruno wanted to say, "But what has that got to do with it? That's your problem. What has it got to do with me?" Did it have anything to do with him, Bruno von Falk? He wasn't just a soldier of the Reich; he wasn't motivated uniquely by what was best for his regiment or his country. He was a sensitive human being. He, like everyone else, was looking for happiness, the unhampered development of his abilities. Yet (like everyone else, sadly, during these times) his justifiable desires were constantly being thwarted by certain national interests called war, public security, the necessity of maintaining the prestige of the victorious army. A bit like the children of princes whose sole reason for existence is to carry out the wishes of their father, the king. He felt this majesty, the way the greatness and power of Germany reflected on him, as he walked through the streets of Bussy, as he rode through a village on horseback, as his spurs rattled at the doorstep of a French home. But what the French would never understand was that he was neither proud nor arrogant, but sincerely humble: terrified by the magnitude of his task.
But he didn't want to think about that, not today. He preferred to enjoy the idea of the ball, or to dream about things he could never have: Lucile by his side, for example… Lucile who could come with him to the ball… "It's madness," he said to himself, smiling. "Oh, I don't care. In my soul I'm free." He imagined the dress Lucile would wear: not a modern dress, but the kind you might find in some romantic print; a white dress with layer upon layer of chiffon, billowing out like a flower, so that when he danced with her, when he held her in his arms, he could feel the frothy lace brushing against his legs. He went pale and bit his lip. She was so beautiful… Lucile close to him, on a night like this, in the Montmorts' grounds, with the fanfares playing and fireworks in the distance… Lucile who, above all, would understand and share the almost religious thrill he felt in his soul when, standing alone in the dark, he felt the distant presence of a vague and terrible multitude-the regiment, the soldiers-and even further away, the army that fought and suffered, and the victorious army that occupied the cities.
"With her," he said to himself, "I would be inspired." He had worked very hard. He used to live in a state of perpetual creative exaltation, mad about music, he would say, laughing. Yes, with her and a little freedom, a little peace, he could have done great things. "It's such a shame"-he sighed-"such a shame… one of these days we'll receive orders to leave and we'll be at war again. There will be other people, other countries, such extreme physical exhaustion that I'll never be able to finish my military career. And the music, still waiting to find expression. Musical phrases, delightful chords, subtle dissonances stand poised… wild, winged creatures frightened off by the crash of weapons. It's such a shame. Did Bonnet care about anything besides war? I have no idea. No one can ever truly know another human being. But what if… he… who died at the age of nineteen, found more fulfilment than me, who's still alive?"
He stopped in front of the Angelliers' house. He was home. In three months he had come to think of all this as his own: the iron door, the prison-like lock, the hall with its musty smell, the back garden-the garden bathed in moonlight-and the woods in the distance. It was a June evening, divinely sweet; the roses were in bloom, but even their perfume was overpowered by the smell of hay and strawberries that hovered everywhere since the day before, for it was harvest time. On the road, the Lieutenant had come across some wagons full of freshly cut hay, drawn by cattle as there were no horses left. He had silently admired the slow, regal pace of the cattle pulling their sweet-smelling goods. The farmers looked away as he went past; he had noticed… but… he felt happy again and light-hearted. He went into the kitchen and asked for something to eat. The cook served him unusually quickly and without replying to his pleasantries.
"Where is Madame?" he said finally.
"I'm here," said Lucile.
She had come in without making a sound as he was finishing a slice of cured ham on a big piece of fresh bread.
He looked up at her. "You're so pale," he said softly, sounding worried.
"Pale? Not really. It's just been very hot today."
"Where is your good mother?" he asked, smiling. "Let's go for a walk outside. Meet me in the garden."
A little later, as he was walking slowly down the wide path, between the fruit trees, he saw her. She came towards him, her head lowered. When she was a few steps away, she hesitated. Then, as she always did as soon as they were hidden from sight by the great lime tree, she went up to him and slipped her arm through his. They walked a while in silence.
"They've cut the hay in the meadows," she said finally.
He closed his eyes, breathed in the aroma. The moon was the colour of honey in a milky sky where wispy clouds drifted by. It was still light out.
"It will be nice weather tomorrow, for our celebration."
"Is it tomorrow? I thought…"
She didn't finish what she was saying.
"Why not?" he said, frowning.
"Nothing, I just thought…"
He nervously flicked at the flowers with the riding crop he was holding.
"What are people saying?"
"About what?"
"You know very well. About the crime."
"I don't know. I haven't seen anyone."
"And what about you? What do you think?"
"That it's terrible, of course."
"Terrible and incomprehensible. After all, what have we, as people, done to them? It's not our fault if we upset them sometimes, we're just following orders; we're soldiers. And I know for a fact that the regiment did everything possible to behave properly, humanely, didn't they?"
"Certainly."
"Naturally, I wouldn't say this to anyone else… Among soldiers it's understood that we don't show pity towards a comrade who's been killed. That would go against military thinking, which requires that we consider ourselves solely as part of a whole. Soldiers can die just so long as the regiment lives. That's why we're not postponing tomorrow's celebration," he continued. "But I can tell you the truth, Lucile. My heart breaks at the thought of this nineteen-year-old boy being murdered. He was a very distant relative of mine. Our families know each other. And then, there's something else I find stupid and revolting. Why did he have to shoot the dog, our mascot, our poor Bubi? If I ever find that man, I'd happily kill him with my bare hands."
"I expect that's what he must have been saying to himself for a long time," Lucile said softly. "If I ever got my hands on one of those Germans, or even one of their dogs, how happy I'd be!"
They looked at each other, dismayed; the words had slipped through their lips, almost against their will.
"It's the same old story," said Bruno, forcing himself to sound lighthearted. "Es ist die alte Geschichte. The conquerors don't understand why people want nothing to do with them. After 1918, you tried in vain to make us believe that we were stubborn because we couldn't forget our sunken fleet, our lost colonies, our destroyed empire. But how can you compare the resentment of a great nation with one farmer's blind outburst of hatred?"
Lucile picked a few sprigs of mignonette, smelled them, crushed them in her hands. "Has he been caught?" she asked.
"No. Oh, he'll be long gone by now. None of these good people would dare hide him. They know only too well they'd be risking their own lives and they're fond of their lives, aren't they? Almost as fond of their lives as their money…"
Smiling slightly, he looked around at all the low, squat, secret houses slumbering in the dusk. She could see he was imagining them full of chatty and emotional old women, prudent and nit-picking middle-class ladies, and further away, in the countryside, farmers who were more like animals. It was almost true, partly true. Yet there remained something shadowy, mysterious, impossible to articulate, and over which, Lucile suddenly thought, remembering something she'd read at school, "even the proudest tyrant will never rule."
"Let's walk on a bit further," he said.
The path was lined with lilies; their silky buds had burst open under the last rays of the sun and now the sweet-smelling flowers blossomed proudly in the night air. During the three months they had known each other, Lucile and the German had taken many walks together, but never in such splendid weather, so conducive to love. By tacit agreement they tried to forget everything except each other. "It's nothing to do with us, it's not our fault. In the heart of every man and every woman a kind of Garden of Eden endures, where there is no war, no death, where wild animals and deer live together in peace. All we have to do is to reclaim that paradise, just close our eyes to everything else. We are a man and a woman. We love each other."
Reason and emotion, they both believed, could make them enemies, but between them was a harmony of the senses that nothing could destroy; the silent understanding that binds a man in love and a willing woman in mutual desire. In the shade of a cherry tree heavy with fruit, near the little fountain where the frogs croaked, he tried to take her. He pulled her into his arms with a violence he couldn't control, tearing at her clothes, crushing her breasts.
"No, never!" she cried out. "Never!" Never would she be his. She was afraid of him. She no longer craved his touch. She wasn't depraved enough (or too young perhaps) to allow her fear to be transformed into desire. The love she had welcomed so willingly that she didn't believe it could be shameful, suddenly seemed to her disgraceful madness. She was lying; she was betraying him. How could you call that love? What had it been, then? Simply a moment of pleasure? But she was incapable of feeling even pleasure. What now made them enemies was neither reason nor emotion, but the secret movements of blood they had counted on to unite them and over which they were powerless. He touched her with his beautiful slim hands. She had so desired them, yet she felt nothing, nothing but the cold buckle of his uniform pressing against her chest, which froze her to the core. He was whispering to her in German. Foreigner! Foreigner! Enemy, in spite of everything. Forever he would be the enemy, with his green uniform, with his heavenly beautiful hair and his confident mouth.
Suddenly, it was he who pushed her away. "I won't take you by force. I'm not a drunken boor… Just go."
But the chiffon ties of her dress were caught on the officer's metal buttons. Slowly, his hands shaking, he freed her. She, meanwhile, was looking anxiously towards the house. The first lamps were being lit. Would Madame Angellier remember to close both sets of curtains so the fugitive's silhouette couldn't be seen through the window? People weren't careful enough on these beautiful June evenings. Secrets were revealed through open bedroom windows, where anyone could see in. People weren't careful enough… They could distinctly hear the English radio coming from a neighbouring house; the cart passing by on the road was full of contraband; weapons were hidden in every home. His head bowed, Bruno held the long ties of her flowing belt in his hands.
"I thought…" he finally said sadly. He stopped, hesitated, then continued, "that you cared for me…"
"I thought so too."
"And you don't?"
"No. It cannot be."
She took a few steps back and stood slightly away from him. For a moment they just looked at each other. The heart-rending blast of a trumpet sounded: it was curfew. The German soldiers walked through groups of people in the village square. "Go along now. Time for bed," they said politely. The women protested and laughed. The trumpet blasted again. The locals went home. The Germans remained. The sound of their monotonous rounds was the only thing that would be heard until daybreak.
"It's curfew" said Lucile impassively. "I have to go back. I have to close all the windows. I was told yesterday at Headquarters that the light from the sitting room wasn't blocked out enough."
"As long as I'm here, you don't have to worry about anything. No one will bother you."
She didn't reply. She held out her hand to him; he kissed it and she walked back to the house. Long after midnight, he was still walking around in the garden. She could hear the brief, monotonous calls of the guards in the street, and beneath her window her jailor's slow, steady walk. Sometimes she thought, He loves me, he doesn't suspect anything, and sometimes, He's suspicious, he's watching, he's waiting.
It's such a shame, she thought in a sudden moment of honesty. It's such a shame, it was a beautiful night… a night made for love… We shouldn't have wasted it. The rest isn't important. But she stayed where she was; she didn't get out of her bed to go to the window. She felt bound and gagged-a prisoner-united with this captive land that dreamed and sighed softly with impatience; she let the empty night drift by.
The village had been looking cheerful all afternoon. In the square the soldiers had decorated the flagpoles with leaves and flowers, and on the balcony of the municipal hall, red and black banners with Gothic writing floated below the swastikas. It was a beautiful day. The flags and banners billowed in the soft, cool breeze. Two young soldiers with pink faces were pushing a cart full of roses.
"Are they for the tables?" the women asked, curious.
"Yes," the soldiers proudly replied. One of them picked out a rosebud and, with an exaggerated salute, offered it to a young girl, who blushed.
"It will be a wonderful party."
"Wir hoffen es. We hope so. We're going to a lot of trouble," the soldiers replied.
The cooks were working outdoors preparing pâtés and cakes for the dinner. To avoid the dust, they had set up beneath the great lime trees that surrounded the church. The head chef, in uniform but wearing a high hat and apron of dazzling white to protect his jacket, was putting the finishing touches to an enormous gâteau. He decorated it with cream swirls and candied fruit. The smell of sugar filled the air. The children squealed with delight. The head chef, bursting with pride but trying not to show it, frowned and scolded them: "All right, back up a bit, how do you expect us to work with you crowding around?" At first, the women pretended not to be interested in the cake. "Ugh!… It will be horrible… They don't have the right kind of flour…" Gradually, they moved closer, shyly at first, then more confidently. Eventually they found the audacity to start giving advice, as women do.
"Hey, Monsieur, there's not enough decoration on this side… you need some angelica."
They ended up helping. Pushing back the delighted children, they bustled about round the table with the Germans; one of them chopped the almonds; another crushed the sugar.
"Is it just for the officers? Or will the ordinary soldiers have some too?" they asked.
"It's for everyone, everyone."
"Everyone except us!" They sniggered.
The head chef raised the earthenware platter holding the enormous cake and with a little salute showed it to the crowd, who laughed and applauded. Then he carefully laid it on a huge wooden plank carried by two soldiers (one at the head, one at the foot) and they all set off for the château. Meanwhile, officers invited from all the regiments billeted in the area began to arrive. Their long green capes floated behind them. The shopkeepers stood in front of their doors, smiling at them. They had been bringing up their remaining supplies from the cellars since morning: the Germans were buying everything they had, and paying well. One officer snapped up the last few bottles of Benedictine brandy, another paid 1,200 francs for lingerie for his wife; the soldiers crowded round the shop windows and looked lovingly at the pink and blue bibs. Finally, one of them couldn't help himself and, as soon as the officer had gone, he called the saleswoman over and pointed to some baby clothes; he was very young, with blue eyes.
"Boy? Girl?" the saleswoman asked.
"I don't know," he said ingenuously. "My wife will write and tell me; it happened during my last leave, a month ago."
Everyone around him started laughing. He blushed but seemed very happy. He bought a rattle and a little robe. He came back across the road in triumph.
They were rehearsing the music in the village square. Next to the circle formed by the drums, the trumpets and the fifes, another circle formed round the regimental postmaster. The Frenchmen noted the open mouths and eyes bright with hope, and nodded politely, thinking sadly, We know what it's like… when you're waiting for news from another country. We've all done that… Meanwhile, an enormous young German with huge thighs and a fat bottom that threatened to split his tight riding breeches entered the Hôtel des Voyageurs and, for the third time, asked to look at the barometer. It was still set at fair. The German, beaming with delight, said, "Nothing to worry about. No storm tonight. Gott mit uns."
"Yes, yes." The waitress nodded in agreement.
This innocent delight spread to the customers and the owner himself (who supported the British); everyone stood up and went over to the barometer: "Nothing to worry about! Nothing! Is good… nice party," they said, deliberately speaking in pidgin French so he'd understand them better.
And the German slapped everyone on the back with a wide grin while repeating, "Gott mit uns."
"Sure, sure, Got meedns. He's drunk, that Fritz," they whispered behind his back rather sympathetically. "We know what it's like. He's been celebrating since yesterday… He's a big lad… Well, so what! Why shouldn't they have fun? They're men after all."
Having created a sympathetic atmosphere with his words and appearance, and after downing three bottles of beer one after the other, the German, beaming, finally left. As the day progressed, all the local people began to feel happy and light-headed, as if they too would be going to the ball. In the kitchens, the young girls listlessly rinsed the glasses and every few minutes leaned out of the window to watch the groups of Germans going up to the château.
"Did you see the Second Lieutenant who lives at the church house? Isn't he handsome with his smooth skin. There's the Commandant's new interpreter. How old is he, do you think? I'd say he couldn't be more than twenty, that boy. They're all so young. Oh, there's the Angelliers' Lieutenant. He'd drive me wild, he would. You can tell he's a gentleman. What a beautiful horse! They really do have beautiful horses, by God." The young girls sighed.
Then the bitter voice of some old man dozing by the stove called out, "Sure they do, they're our horses!"
The old man spat into the fire, muttering curses that the young girls didn't hear. They were only interested in one thing: to hurry and finish the dishes so they could go and watch the Germans at the château. Running alongside the grounds was a path lined with acacias, lime trees and beautiful aspens with leaves that incessantly trembled, incessantly rustled in the wind. Between the branches it was possible to see the lake and the lawns where the tables had been set up and, on the hill, the château, its doors and windows wide open, where the regimental orchestra would play. By eight o'clock, everyone in the village was there; the young girls had dragged their parents along; children that the young women hadn't wanted to leave at home were sleeping in their mothers' arms, or running about shouting and playing with the pebbles; some pushed aside the soft branches of the acacia trees and watched the scene with curiosity: the musicians on the terrace, the German officers lying on the grass or slowly strolling through the trees, the tables covered with dazzling linen, the silver reflecting the last rays of the sun and, behind each chair, a soldier standing as still as if he were at inspection-the orderlies who would act as waiters. The orchestra played a particularly lively, cheerful song; the officers took their places. Before sitting down, the head of the table ("the place of honour… a general," whispered the French) and all the other officers stood at attention, raised their glasses and shouted, "Heil Hitler!" It took a long time for the roar to subside; it reverberated through the air with a pure, fierce, metallic echo. Then they could hear the hubbub of conversations, the clinking of cutlery and the sound of the night birds singing.
The Frenchmen strained to see if they could recognise people they knew. Next to the General with the white hair, delicate features and long hooked nose, were the officers from Headquarters.
"That one, over there on the left, look, he's the one who took my car, the bastard! The little blond one with the rosy complexion next to him, he's nice, he talks good French. Where's the Angelliers' German? He's called Bruno… pretty name… It's a shame it'll be dark soon; we won't be able to see anything then… The shoemaker's Fritz told me they were going to light torches. Oh, Mummy, that will be so pretty! Let's stay 'til then. What will the owners of the château be saying about all this? They won't be able to sleep tonight. Who's going to eat the leftovers? Who, Mummy? The Mayor?"
"Oh, be quiet, you silly thing, there won't be any leftovers, they've got hearty appetites."
Little by little, darkness spread across the lawns; they could still make out the gold decorations on the uniforms, the Germans' blond hair, the musicians' brass instruments on the terrace, but they had lost their glow. All the light of the day, fleeing the earth, seemed for one brief moment to take refuge in the sky; pink clouds spiralled round the full moon that was as green as pistachio sorbet and as clear as glass; it was reflected in the lake. Exquisite perfumes filled the air: grass, fresh hay, wild strawberries. The music kept playing. Suddenly, the torches were lit; as the soldiers carried them along, they cast their light over the messy tables, the empty glasses, for the officers were now gathered around the lake, singing and laughing. There was the lively, happy sound of champagne corks popping.
"Oh, those bastards! And to think it's our wine they're drinking," the Frenchmen said, but without real bitterness, because all happiness is contagious and disarms the spirit of hatred.
And of course, the Germans seemed to like the champagne so much (and had paid so much for it!) that the Frenchmen were vaguely flattered by their good taste.
"They're having a good time. Thank goodness it's not all war… Don't worry, they'll be fighting again… They say it will be over this year. Sure it would be bad if they won, but what can you do, it's got to end… Everyone's so miserable in the cities… and we want our prisoners back."
All along the road, the young girls held one another by the waist and danced to the soft lively music. The drums and brass instruments gave the waltzes and tunes from operettas a bright tone that was victorious, happy, heroic and joyous, that made their hearts beat faster; sometimes a low, prolonged, powerful note rose above the lively arpeggios like the echo of a distant storm.
When it was completely dark they started singing. Groups of soldiers sang to one another from the terrace and the park, from the banks of the lake and the lake itself, where boats decorated with flowers drifted past. The Frenchmen listened, delighted, in spite of themselves. It was nearly midnight, but no one would have dreamed of leaving their spot in the tall grass or between the branches.
Only the burning torches and sparklers lit up the trees. Wonderful voices filled the night. Suddenly, there was a long silence. They could see the Germans running like shadows against a background of green flame and moonlight.
"They're going to light the fireworks!" shouted a little boy. "They're definitely having fireworks. I know. The Fritz told me."
His shrill voice could be heard down by the lake.
His mother scolded him: "Be quiet. You're not allowed to call them Fritz or Boches. Not ever. They don't like it. Just be quiet and watch."
But they couldn't see anything now except the shadows of men scurrying about. From the terrace someone shouted something they couldn't make out; it provoked a long, low commotion, like rumbling thunder.
"What are they shouting about? Could you hear? It must be 'Heil Hitler, Heil Goering! Heil the Third Reich!' or something like that. We can't hear a thing now. They're not talking any more. Look, the musicians are leaving. Do you think they've had some news? Do you think they've invaded England? Well, I think they just got cold outside and they're moving the party inside the château," said the pharmacist pointedly; he was worried about the night dampness because of his rheumatism.
He took his young wife's arm. "Why don't we go home too, Linette?"
But she wouldn't hear of it. "Oh! Let's stay, just a little longer. They're going to sing again, it was so nice."
The French waited but there was no more singing. Soldiers carrying torches were running between the château and the grounds as if they were conveying orders. There was even some shouting. Beneath the moonlight, empty boats drifted on the lake; all the officers had jumped out on to the bank. They were walking along, talking to each other quickly in loud voices. Although the French could hear them, no one could understand what they were saying. One by one, the sparklers went out. The spectators began yawning. "It's late. Let's go home. The party's definitely over."
They made their way in little groups back to the village: the young girls, arm in arm, walking in front of their parents; the sleepy children dragging their feet.
When they got to the first house, they saw an old man sitting on a straw chair, smoking his pipe. "Well," he said. "Is the party over, then?"
"Yes. Oh, they had such a good time!"
"Well, they won't be having a good time for long," the old man said calmly. "I've just heard on the radio that they're at war with Russia." He knocked his pipe against his chair several times to get rid of the ashes, then looked at the sky. "It'll be dry again tomorrow… Not good for the gardens, this weather."
They're going!
For several days they had been waiting for the Germans to leave. The soldiers themselves had announced it: they were being sent to Russia. When the French heard the news, they looked at them with curiosity ("Are they happy? Worried? Will they win or lose?"). As for the Germans, they tried to work out what the French were thinking: Were they happy to see them go? Did they secretly wish they'd all get killed? Did anyone feel sorry for them? Would they miss them? Of course they wouldn't be missed as Germans, as conquerors (they weren't naïve enough to think that), but would the French miss these Pauls, Siegfrieds, Oswalds who had lived under their roofs for three months, showed them pictures of their wives and mothers, shared more than one bottle of wine with them? But both the French and the Germans remained inscrutable; they were polite, careful of what they said-"Well, that's war… We can't do anything about it… right? It won't last long, at least we hope not!" They said goodbye to one another like passengers on a ship who have reached their final port of call. They would write to each other. They would see each other again some day. They would always remember the happy weeks they'd spent together. More than one soldier whispered to a pensive young girl, "When the war is over I'll come back." When the war is over… How far away that was!
They were leaving today, 1 July 1941. The French were concerned primarily with the question of whether the village would be occupied by other soldiers; because if so, they thought bitterly, well, it wasn't worth going to the trouble of changing them. They were used to this lot. Maybe the new ones would be worse…
Lucile slipped into Madame Angellier's room to tell her that it was definite, they'd received their orders, the Germans were leaving that very night. They could reasonably hope for at least a few hours' grace before any new soldiers arrived and they should take advantage of this to help Benoît escape. It was impossible to hide him until the end of the war, equally impossible to send him home as long as the area remained occupied. There was only one hope: to get him across the demarcation line. However, the line was closely guarded and would be even more so during the evacuation of the troops.
"It's dangerous," said Lucile, "very dangerous." She looked pale and tired: for several nights she had hardly slept. She looked at Benoît, standing opposite her. Her feelings towards him were an odd combination of fear, incomprehension and envy: his calm, severe, almost brutal expression intimidated her. He was a big, muscular man, with a ruddy complexion; beneath thick eyebrows, his pale eyes were sometimes unbearable to look at. His tanned, lined hands were the hands of a labourer and a soldier, thought Lucile: earth or blood, it was the same to him. Neither remorse nor sorrow troubled his sleep, of that she was sure; everything was simple to this man.
"I've thought about it a lot, Madame Lucile," he said quietly.
Despite the fortress-like walls and closed doors, whenever all three of them were together, they felt they were being watched and said what they needed to very quickly and almost in a whisper.
"No one will be able to get me across the line. It's too risky. I know I have to leave, but I want to go to Paris."
"To Paris?"
"While I was with the regiment I had some friends…"
He hesitated.
"We were taken prisoner together. We escaped together. They work in Paris. If I can find them they'll help me. One of them wouldn't be alive now if…"
He looked at his hands and fell silent.
"What I need is to get to Paris without getting arrested on the way and to find someone I can trust to put me up for a day or two until I find my friends."
"I don't know anyone in Paris," murmured Lucile. "But in any case, you'll need identity papers."
"As soon as I find my friends, Madame Lucile, I'll be able to get hold of some papers."
"But how? What do your friends do?"
"They're in politics," Benoît said curtly.
"Communists…" murmured Lucile, recalling certain rumours she'd heard about Benoît's ideas and activities. "The Communists will be hunted down now. You're risking your life."
"It won't be the first time, Madame Lucile, or the last," said Benoît. "You get used to it."
"And how will you get to Paris? You can't take the train; your description is posted everywhere."
"On foot. By bicycle. When I escaped I was on foot. It don't scare me."
"But the police…"
"The people who put me up two years ago will remember me and won't shop me to the police. It's safer than here where plenty of people hate me. It'll be easier."
"Such a long journey, on foot, alone…"
Madame Angellier, who hadn't said a word until now, was standing next to the window, her pale eyes watching the Germans come and go across the village square; she raised her hand to warn them. "Someone's coming."
All three of them fell silent. Lucile's heart was pounding so violently, so quickly that she was ashamed; the others could surely hear it, she thought. The old woman and the farmer remained impassive. They could hear Bruno's voice downstairs; he was looking for Lucile; he opened several doors.
"Do you know where Madame Lucile is?" he asked the cook.
"She's gone out," Marthe replied.
Lucile sighed with relief. "I'd better go down," she said. "He's looking for me to say goodbye."
"Take advantage of it," Madame Angellier suddenly said, "to ask him for a petrol coupon and a travel pass. You can take the old car: the one that wasn't requisitioned. You can tell the German you have to drive one of our tenant farmers to town because he's ill. With a pass from German Headquarters you won't be stopped and you could make it safely to Paris."
"But to lie like that…" said Lucile in disgust.
"What else have you been doing for the past ten days?"
"And once we get to Paris? Where will he hide until he finds his friends? Where will we find anyone courageous enough, committed enough, unless…"
She was remembering something.
"Yes," she said suddenly. "It's possible… Anyway, it's a chance we'll have to take. Do you remember the refugees from Paris we helped in June 1940? They worked in a bank, quite an old couple, but full of spirit and courage. They wrote to me recently: I have their address. They're called Michaud. Yes, that's it, Jeanne and Maurice Michaud. They might do it… Of course they'll do it… but we'd have to write and ask and wait for their reply, or just take our chances and hope for the best. I don't know…"
"Ask for the pass in any case," said Madame Angellier. "It shouldn't be difficult," she added with a faint, bitter smile.
"I'll try," said Lucile.
She was dreading the moment she would be alone with Bruno. Nevertheless, she hurried down the stairs. Best to get it over with. What if he suspects something? Oh, so what! It was war. She would submit to the rules of war. She was afraid of nothing. Her empty, weary soul was almost eager to run some great risk.
She knocked at the German's door. She went in and was surprised to find he was not alone. With him were the Commandant's new interpreter, a thin red-headed boy with a hard, angular face and blond eyelashes, and another very young officer who was short and chubby, with a rosy complexion and a childlike expression and smile. All three of them were writing letters and packing up: they were sending home all those little knick-knacks soldiers buy when they are in the same place for a while, to create the illusion they live there, but which are burdensome during a campaign: ashtrays, little clocks, prints and, especially, books. Lucile wanted to go but he asked her to stay. She sat down in an armchair Bruno brought out for her and she watched the three Germans who, after apologising, continued working. "We want to get all this in the post by five o'clock," they said.
She saw a violin, a small lamp, a French-German dictionary, books in French, German and English, and a beautiful romantic print of a sailing boat at sea.
"I found it in Autun at a bric-à-brac shop," said Bruno.
He hesitated.
"Actually, better not… I won't post it… I don't have the right box for it. It will get damaged. It would make me so very happy, Madame, if you would keep it. It will brighten up this rather dark room. The subject is appropriate. Look. Dark, threatening skies, a ship setting sail… and far in the distance, a hint of brightness on the horizon… a vague, very faint glimmer of hope. Do accept it as a memento of a soldier who is leaving and who will never see you again."
"I will, mein Herr, " Lucile said quietly, "because of this hint of brightness on the horizon."
He bowed and continued packing. A candle was lit on the table; he held the sealing wax over its flame, placed a seal on the finished package, took his ring off his hand and pressed it into the hot wax. Lucile watched him, remembering the day he had played the piano for her and how she had held the ring, still warm from his hand.
"Yes," he said, suddenly looking up at her. "The happy times are over."
"Do you think this new war will last long?" she said, immediately regretting having asked. It was like asking someone if he thought he would live long. What did this new war mean? What was going to happen? A series of thundering victories or defeat, a long struggle? Who could really know? Who dared predict the future? Although that's all people did… and always in vain…
He seemed to read her thoughts. "In any case," he said, "there will surely be much suffering, much heartache and much bloodshed."
He and his two comrades were getting everything organised. The short officer was carefully wrapping up a tennis racket and the interpreter some large, beautiful books bound in tan leather. "Gardening books," he explained to Lucile, "because in civilian life," he added in a slightly pompous tone of voice, "I design gardens in the Classical style of Louis XIV."
How many Germans in the village-in cafés, in the comfortable houses they had occupied-were now writing to their wives, their fiancées, leaving behind their worldly possessions, as if they were about to die? Lucile felt deeply sorry for them. Outside in the street there were horses coming back from the blacksmith and saddle maker, all ready to leave, no doubt. It seemed strange to think about these horses pulled away from their work in France to be sent to the other end of the world. The interpreter, who had been watching them go by, said seriously, "Where we're going is a really wonderful place for horses…"
The short lieutenant made a face. "Not so wonderful for men…"
The idea of this new war seemed to fill them with sadness, Lucile thought, but she didn't allow herself to dwell too deeply on their feelings: she feared to find, in the place of emotion, some spark of their so-called "warrior mentality." It was almost like spying; she would have been ashamed to do it. And anyway, she knew them well enough by now to know they would put up a good fight. What's more, she said to herself, there's a world of difference between the young man I'm looking at now and the warrior of tomorrow. It's a truism that people are complicated, multifaceted, contradictory, surprising, but it takes the advent of war or other momentous events to be able to see it. It is the most fascinating and the most dreadful of spectacles, she continued thinking, the most dreadful because it's so real; you can never pride yourself on truly knowing the sea unless you've seen it both calm and in a storm. Only the person who has observed men and women at times like this, she thought, can be said to know them. And to know themselves. She would never have believed herself capable of saying to Bruno in such ingenuous and sincere tones, I've come to ask you a great favour.
"Tell me, Madame, how can I be of service to you?"
"Could you recommend me to someone at Headquarters who could get me a travel pass and petrol coupon as a matter of urgency? I have to drive to Paris…"
As she was speaking she was thinking, "If I tell him about some sick tenant farmer he'll be suspicious: there are good hospitals in the area, in Creusot, Paray, or Autun…"
"I have to drive one of my farmers to Paris. His daughter works there; she's seriously ill and is asking for him. The poor man would lose too much time if he went by train. You know it's the harvest. If you could grant me permission, we could do the entire journey there and back in a day."
"You don't need to go to Headquarters, Madame Angellier," the short officer said quickly; he'd been shyly glancing at her from a distance, lost in admiration. "I have full powers to grant you your request. When would you like to go?"
"Tomorrow."
"Oh, good," murmured Bruno. "Tomorrow… so you'll be here when we leave."
"When are you leaving?"
"At eleven o'clock tonight. We're travelling at night because of the air raids. It seems a bit ridiculous since the moon is so bright it's almost like daytime. But the army works on tradition."
"I'll be going now," said Lucile, after taking the two pieces of paper the short officer had written out: two pieces of paper that symbolised a man's life and liberty. She calmly folded them up and slipped them under her waistband without allowing the slightest sense of urgency to betray her nervousness.
"I'll be here when you go."
Bruno looked at her and she understood his silent plea.
"Will you come and say goodbye to me, Herr Lieutenant? I'm going out, but I'll be back at six o'clock."
The three young men stood up and clicked their heels. In the past, she had found this display of courtesy by the soldiers of the Reich old-fashioned and rather affected. Now, she thought how much she would miss this light jingling of spurs, the kiss on the hand, the admiration these soldiers showed her almost in spite of themselves, soldiers who were without family, without female companionship (except for the lowest type of woman). There was in their respect for her a hint of tender melancholy: it was as if, thanks to her, they could recapture some remnant of their former lives where kindness, a good education, politeness towards women had far more value than getting drunk or taking an enemy position. There was gratitude and nostalgia in their attitude towards her; she could sense it and was touched by it. She waited for it to be eight o'clock in a state of deep anxiety. What would she say to him? How would they part? There was between them an entire world of confused, unexpressed thoughts, like a precious crystal so fragile that a single word could shatter it. He felt it too, no doubt, for he spent only a brief moment alone with her. He took off his hat (perhaps his last civilian gesture, thought Lucile, feeling tender and sad), took her hands in his. Before kissing them, he pressed his cheek against hers, softly and urgently both at the same time. Was he claiming her as his own? Attempting to brand her with his seal, so she wouldn't forget?
"Adieu," he said, "this is goodbye. I'll never forget you, never."
She stood silent. He looked at her and saw her eyes full of tears. He turned away.
"I'm going to give you the address of one of my uncles," he said after a moment. "He's a von Falk like me, my father's brother. He's had a brilliant military career and he's in Paris working for…" He gave a very long German name. "Until the end of the war, he will be the Commandant in greater Paris, a kind of viceroy, actually, and he depends on my uncle to help make decisions. I've told him about you and asked that he help you as much as he can, if you ever find yourself in difficulty; we're at war, God alone knows what might happen to all of us…"
"You're very kind, Bruno," she said quietly.
At this moment she wasn't ashamed of loving him, because her physical desire had gone and all she felt towards him now was pity and a profound, almost maternal tenderness. She forced herself to smile. "Like the Chinese mother who sent her son off to war telling him to be careful 'because war has its dangers,' I'm asking you, if you have any feelings for me, to be as careful as possible with your life."
"Because it is precious to you?" he asked nervously.
"Yes. Because it is precious to me."
Slowly, they shook hands. She walked him out to the front steps. An orderly was waiting for him, holding the reins of his horse. It was late, but no one even considered going to bed. Everyone wanted to see the Germans leave. In these final hours, a kind of melancholy and human warmth bound them all together: the conquered and the conquerors. Big Erwald with the strong thighs who held his drink so well and was so funny and robust; short, nimble, cheerful Willy, who had learned some French songs (they said he was a real comedian in civilian life), poor Johann who had lost his whole family in an air raid, "except for my mother-in-law," he said sadly, "because I've never had much luck…" All of them were about to be attacked, shot at, in danger of dying. How many of them would be buried on the Russian steppes? No matter how quickly, how successfully the war with Germany might finish, how many poor people would never see the blessed end, the new beginning? It was a wonderful night: clear, moonlit, without even a breath of wind. It was the time of year for cutting the branches of the lime trees. The time when men and boys climb up into the beautiful, leafy trees and strip them bare while, down below, women and girls pick flowers from the sweet-smelling branches at their feet-flowers that will spend all summer drying in country lofts and, in winter, will make herbal tea. A delicious, intoxicating perfume filled the air. How wonderful everything was, how peaceful. Children played and chased one another about; they climbed up on to the steps of the old stone cross and watched the road.
"Can you see them?" their mothers asked.
"Not yet."
It had been decided that the regiment would assemble in front of the château and then parade through the village. From the shadow of doorways came the sound of kisses and whispered goodbyes… some more tender than others. The soldiers were in heavy helmets and field dress, gas masks hanging from their necks. The awaited drum roll came and the men appeared, marching in rows of eight. With a final goodbye, a last blown kiss, the latecomers hurried to take their pre-assigned place: the place where destiny would find them. There was still the odd burst of laughter, a joke exchanged between the soldiers and the crowd, but soon everyone fell silent. The General had arrived. He rode his horse past the troops, gave a brief salute to the soldiers and to the French, then left. Behind him followed the officers, then the grey car carrying the Commandant, with its motorcycle outriders. Then came the artillery, the cannons on their rolling platforms, the machine-guns, the anti-aircraft guns pointing at the sky, and all the small but deadly weapons they'd watched go by during manoeuvres. They had become accustomed to them, had looked at them indifferently, without being afraid. But now the sight of it all made them shudder. The truck, full to bursting with big loaves of black bread, freshly baked and sweet-smelling, the Red Cross vans, with no passengers-for now… the field kitchen, bumping along at the end of the procession like a saucepan tied to a dog's tail. The men began singing, a grave, slow song that drifted away into the night. Soon the road was empty. All that remained of the German regiment was a little cloud of dust.