Unraveling Oliver

⁷ VÉRONIQUE

Oliver’s name has been in the headlines in the papers here over the last month or two. I have refused to take part in any more media interviews. I cannot help but feel responsible for his attack on his wife. It is tragic, but every time his name is spoken, I automatically think first of the harvest of 1973, and I feel the pain as sharply as I felt it almost forty years ago.

One does not forget the worst time of one’s life, no matter how hard one tries. I have spent so many years wishing to change things. What if one had done this, what if one had done that… But the ache is still there. Time does not heal. It is a lie. One just gets used to the wound. There is nothing more.

But I must make sense of all this, before it slips through my fingers. One must go back to my father’s time to explain everything. One would want everything to be clear.

Papa was made old by la guerre, much older than his years. I was a small child at the time of the war and did not understand anything except that there was a constant stream of visitors to our estate for a certain period. I know now that they were Jewish families protected by my father from the Prefect of Bordeaux in the Vichy regime. It has since been revealed that this civil servant ordered the deportation of 1,690 Jews, including 223 children, from the Bordeaux region to the transit camp at Drancy, near Paris, and then on to death camps in the east.

It is impossible to believe that so many of my compatriots did nothing, but I think genocide happens every day in some part of the world and it is easier for us to pretend that it is not happening, easier to turn off the TV or skip that column in the newspaper.

My father was a hero, an intellectual, and a noble man. My mother’s death occurred shortly after the occupation, and he was heartbroken, but she had foreseen some of the horror that was to follow and she extracted a promise from my father that he would do everything in his power to protect our friends, no matter what their faith. We lived in very comfortable circumstances in a château handed down through seven generations of my father’s family. We produced good wines that were sold all over Europe and gave employment throughout the region. My father was less business orientated than my mother and struggled to keep a rein on things in her absence. He was too distracted and scandalized that the Vichy government could preside over such evil.

He invited several Jewish families to make their homes in the wine cellars underneath the terraced steps, particularly between 1942 and 1944, as the roundups intensified with the full participation of our own French authorities. Papa refused to stay quiet and made several representations to the secretary general to the Prefecture to no avail. So he took the law into his own hands and, using local informants, was able to preempt the official roundups with roundups of his own. My Tante Cecile was active in the Resistance movement in the city and, through a network of friends, managed to coordinate the rescue of many families targeted by the Gestapo. The families had to be kept out of sight, and even though we probably had the space for them in the château, Papa felt it was too risky. Our château was in a valley overlooked on two sides, so it was not possible for any of them to be outside during the daytime. If there was to be a sudden inspection, there must be no trace of them. So Papa set about turning the cellars into a more comfortable home. He knew he risked the business by doing this, as wine production would have to cease for the duration. He ordered oil lamps, blankets, books, and clothing through some friends in Valence so as not to arouse suspicion in the local village of Clochamps. He took delivery at night and, with trusted friends, created a temporary sanctuary for these families who had nowhere else to run, until a contact could be made to get them north, out of the country and across the border to Switzerland, where they were guaranteed to be free of persecution. As a child, it was tremendously exciting for me. A constant stream of new people coming and going. I was too young to notice their sorrow and desperation. Until then, I had been homeschooled, an only child, but Papa made sure that I knew the importance of keeping secrets when it was crucial to do so.

Despite all this activity, my father continued to make time for me, ensuring that I understood the world in a moral sense and that I knew that I would always come first in his life.

In May 1944, just a few months before the Liberation, a midnight raid by the Gestapo found fourteen Jewish families in our cellars, including my best friends Sara and Marianne. I never saw them again, but was later to discover that they and all their families were dead, some shot while trying to escape the camp at Drancy, others gassed in Auschwitz.

The Gestapo seized our home, had my father arrested by the local police, and I was sent to Tante Cecile in the city. I did not see my father again for six months, but prayed every night for his safe return. I do not remember most of these events and it shames me a little that I do not, but I can visualize the story as it was retold to me by those who were old enough to understand what was happening.

We were reunited for Christmas after the Liberation back at Château d’Aigse, but it was barely recognizable as the grand home it had once been. The house had been stripped to its bones: no rugs, paintings, furniture, or bedding. Floorboards had been used as firewood. It was the first time I saw my father cry. Whatever they had done to him in prison had broken him. He was just forty-eight years old.

Many years later, I wanted him to get a typewriter and modernize our archaic filing system, as it would be easier than filling out the old ledgers we used for the administration of the farm. Papa’s refusal was instant and ferocious, and it was only then he told me that while in prison he had been forced to type up deportation orders. He had told nobody, and despite his heroics, he felt nothing but shame. I think it an honorable thing not to visit your horror upon those that you love, but I suspect that the pain of keeping it inside must also cause a lesion to the soul. It was known that when the Gestapo realized they were on the verge of defeat, they became particularly vicious.

I recall the particular warmth of my father holding me tightly in the skeleton of our library, picking over the remnants of our raped bookshelves, where he had kept many precious volumes. Papa was a book collector, and I remember that he swore to restore this room first.

Because our winery had ceased production when we were hiding the families (there was no way of operating without the use of the cellars), and my father’s nerves were too shattered to return to the business of wine, we had no income apart from what was left of his inheritance. We closed off one wing of the house and confined ourselves to just a few rooms. My privileged childhood was over, but I had no concept of it and so I did not miss it. I was too young to be aware of wealth or the lack of it. I was delighted to attend the local lycée as my father tried desperately to nurse his neglected vines back to life. My father begged Tante Cecile to move in with us. He was determined that I should have a mother figure. Tante Cecile was my mother’s older spinster sister. The few photographs that remain of my mother show some resemblance, though my mother was beautiful and Cecile was not. She did not know what to do with a child, and we had many battles of will over the most ridiculous things. My father grew weary of being the referee between us, and it took me some time to realize that if Papa trusted her, then I should also trust her. It occurs to me now that they may have been lovers. I have snapshots of catching them awkwardly together in my mind, but no matter. She was a good woman in a difficult situation, and I should have been more aware of the sacrifice she had made to become my guardian.

It was Tante Cecile who spoke to me about how to be a woman and who gave me napkins when menstrual blood first appeared. I thank God for that, because my father was old-fashioned in a lot of ways and could not have countenanced such a conversation, although he proved to be quite the feminist in other ways later on.

I was decidedly average at school but got respectable grades upon graduation. Papa thought it was time for me to go to university in Bordeaux or Paris, but I was not a city girl and could not imagine myself adjusting to life beyond my friends, my father, and Cecile. The village girls were not going to university and I thought of myself as one of them. They would mostly end up working on our land in some capacity, so I did not want to mark myself out as different from them. They were good, honest people. Besides, we could not afford three years in the Sorbonne, and I thought that anything I needed to learn, I could learn in Clochamps. I had no ambition to be a doctor or a lawyer, as my father had suggested, and I dreaded telling him this. When I eventually did, his relief was palpable. My father and I had become very close, and he depended upon me more as he aged and his health gradually began to fail.

It was arranged that I would work as secretary to the maire, a token job, really, that took up five half days a week, although it was rather more demanding to dodge his roaming hands successfully for the ten years I worked there, usually by reminding him loudly of his obligations to his wife and children and by pointing out how very old he was.

I never breathed a word of this to my father. He would have been horrified, and I was strong enough and confident enough to deal with the old buffoon.

In the afternoons, I returned to my father and Cecile and helped with the work of maintaining the land and the house as we began a painstaking restoration project.

I had a social life with the other young people in the village, and I attended all the local carnivals and dances, but I did not want a boyfriend. I was sought after by the local boys, and I certainly flirted and exchanged kisses and probably was quite a tease, but I did not fall in love. I cannot understand why, as most of my friends fell in love many times before they married and several times afterward, but at the back of my mind, I always wondered, Would Papa like this boy in his house? Would Papa like to see me marry this boy? Could Papa live with this boy? The answer in my head was always negative. My female friends pitied me, I think, as I attended one wedding after another, assuring me that I would be next, suggesting their cousins and friends as potential partners, but I was happy alone.

The next decade saw the recovery of the vineyard. My father was something of a legendary figure in the entire region. Mostly the villagers felt tremendous guilt that they had done nothing during those terrible years, although we understood their fear. Even known collaborators bent over backward to help us, and Papa accepted their help graciously, knowing that he was doing them the favor. We drew up plans to restore the house to its former glory, although it was a tediously slow process and, as it later turned out, a futile one.

By the time I was thirty-two, my beloved Tante Cecile died peacefully in her sleep and my father was bereft again. I, too, felt grief, but whether my father and Cecile were lovers or not, they were certainly confidants and, I suspect, I was often the sole topic of conversation. Cecile thought my father was wrong not to insist that I go to university. She thought I would never meet a suitable husband in our provincial little corner. After she died, Papa began to worry that she was right. It worried him enormously that I was childless. By then, I had had a healthy number of assignations, and had long since lost my virginity to our butcher’s nephew Pierre, who came to spend a winter in Clochamps and begged me to marry him at the end of it. It was an intense affair, but I saw no future in it, and poor Pierre left the village with a broken heart. Papa had begged me to marry him, or indeed anyone, but I resisted, insisting that I did not want a husband and would never marry. Papa surprised me then by lowering his expectations, suggesting that I take a lover instead. I was shocked, not by the idea of having a lover, which was an entirely acceptable concept, but that my father had suggested it.

“But you need a child!” he pleaded. “When I am gone, there will be nobody! I am getting old and tired and you are here to care for me, but who will take care of you when you are old? Nobody! Who will take care of this estate?”

I had to concede his point. But looking at the potential gene pool in the village, I could not think of anybody who I would want as a father to my child, except Pierre, and he had married and moved north to Limoges.

It had now been six years since my liaison with Pierre. He was strong and handsome and was interested in old maps and books. I began to regret not accepting his proposal, which I think had been sincere. He had not ever met Papa, but they had shared interests, for example books and me, so they might have been friends.

Pierre visited his uncle once a year, and there was the small matter of timing within my cycle to be considered. I know it was deceitful of me, because perhaps I could have told him the truth and got the same result, but I was afraid that Pierre’s inherent decency would preclude him from cheating on his wife if I had baldly made my request. All Pierre’s qualities were of the kind one would want for one’s child, is that not so?

I set out to seduce Pierre, but my window of opportunity was brief, as he was only around for two weeks to take lessons from his uncle, the longest established charcutier in the region, and I had only four or five possible days within that frame to get pregnant.

At first Pierre failed to respond to my seduction, out of fidelity to his wife and concern for my welfare, but I knew he liked me, and although it took some persuasion, thank God he did not make me beg and I did not have to demean myself. The next three nights we spent together in the annex to his uncle’s abattoir. It was not the most auspicious of locations for a seed to be planted, but the breeze through the valley blew the smell of the slaughterhouse downwind, and a little pastis helped us to forget our circumstances. Pierre was a warm and tender lover, and I regretted that this affection was just temporary, that he would be returning to Limoges to his wife. I fell in love a little for the first time. Pierre was terribly sweet and had an innocence about him that I felt I had defiled by the time he left. He was practically apoplectic with apology for leading me astray, and I assured him that we would never speak of it again. I insisted that it would be best if he did not return to the village the following year, and that we both must move on from our folly, and that he must do his best to make it up to his wife. True to his word, Pierre stayed away, and I was glad and sorry.

I was able to confirm my pregnancy, to my father’s delight, and in 1967 my precious Jean-Luc was born, a big and healthy baby to our enormous relief. I realize that having a baby out of wedlock is shameful in some families, and I am sure that the village must have been alive with gossip, but I think that out of respect for my father and me, they started to refer to me as “the widow.” Better in those days to be a bereaved wife than a single mother. Papa, his mischievous spirit finally returning, was highly amused, as if we had played a successful prank on all our neighbors. “How is the widow this morning?” he might say, with a wink.

From the time of the birth, Jean-Luc and Papa were inseparable. Papa fashioned a harness out of leather straps and carried Jean-Luc on his back as he went about his business in the markets or at the mayor’s office or with the estate manager. As the boy grew, Papa’s general mood improved, although he was growing slightly frailer with each passing day. I tried not to be upset when Jean-Luc’s first word was Papi —Grandpa—particularly since he had been coached from birth to say it. We were completed by him, Papa and me. I had not realized how much I needed my boy until I had him and tried to think of life without him.

In the years that followed, my father returned to his former self, as if the war had never happened, with renewed vigor and spirit. A peach orchard was planted on one side of the struggling vineyard, an olive grove on the other. Jean-Luc’s arrival blessed the house in some way, and our finances began to improve. We began to employ migrant laborers, men and women, to work the land on a seasonal basis. Right up until the summer of 1973.