The Girl You Left Behind Page 8

  I was about to go back to my room to dress when there was a rap at the door. I flinched, seeing a shadow behind the cotton screen. I pulled my blanket around me, staring at the silhouette, trying to work out who would be calling on us at such an hour, whether it was the Kommandant, come to torment me about what he knew. I walked silently towards the door. I lifted the screen and there, on the other side, was Liliane Bethune. Her hair was piled up in pin curls, she was wearing the black astrakhan coat, and her eyes were shadowed. She glanced behind her as I unlocked the top and bottom bolts and opened the door.

  'Liliane? Are you ... do you need something?' I said.

  She reached into her coat and pulled out an envelope, which she thrust at me. 'For you,' she said.

  I glanced at it. 'But ... how did you -'

  She held up a pale hand, shook her head.

  It had been months since any of us had received a letter. The Germans had long kept us in a communications vacuum. I held it, disbelieving, then recovered my manners. 'Would you like to come in? Have some coffee? I have a little real coffee put by.'

  She gave me the smallest of smiles. 'No. Thank you. I have to go home to my daughter.' Before I could even thank her, she was trotting up the street in her high heels, her back hunched against the cold.

  I shut the screen and re-bolted the door. Then I sat down and tore open the envelope. His voice, so long absent, filled my ears.

  Dearest Sophie

  It is so long since I heard from you. I pray you are safe. I tell myself in darker moments that some part of me would feel it, like the vibrations of a distant bell, if you were not.

  I have so little to impart. For once I have no desire to translate into colour the world I see around me. Words seem wholly inadequate. Know only that, precious wife, I am sound of mind and body, and that my spirit is kept whole by the thought of you.

  The men here clutch photographs of their loved ones like talismans, protection against the dark - crumpled, dirty images endowed with the properties of treasure. I need no photograph to conjure you before me, Sophie: I need only to close my eyes to recall your face, your voice, your scent, and you cannot know how much you comfort me.

  Know, my darling, that I mark each day not, like my fellow soldiers, as one that I am grateful to survive, but thanking God that each means I must surely be twenty-four hours closer to returning to you.

  Your Edouard

  It was dated two months previously.

  I don't know if it was exhaustion, or perhaps shock from the previous day's events - I am not someone who cries easily, if at all - but I put the letter carefully back into its envelope, then rested my head on my hands and, in the cold, empty kitchen, I sobbed.

  I could not tell the other villagers why it was time to eat the pig but the approach of Christmas gave me the perfect excuse. The officers were to have their dinner on Christmas Eve in Le Coq Rouge, a larger gathering than normal, and it was agreed that while they were here Madame Poilane would hold a secret reveillon at her home, two streets down from the square. For as long as I could keep the German officers occupied, our little band of townspeople would be safe to roast and eat the pig in the bread oven that Madame Poilane had in her cellar. Helene would help me serve the Germans their dinner, then sneak through the hole in the cellar wall and out down the alley to join the children at Madame Poilane's house. Those villagers who lived too far from her to walk through the town unnoticed would remain in her home after curfew, hiding if any Germans came checking.

  'But that isn't fair,' Helene remarked, when I outlined the plan to the mayor in front of her two days later. 'If you remain here you will be the one person to miss it. That's not right, given all you did to safeguard the pig.'

  'One of us has to stay,' I pointed out. 'You know it's far safer if we can be sure that the officers are all in one place.'

  'But it won't be the same.'

  'Well, nothing is the same,' I said curtly. 'And you know as well as I do that Herr Kommandant will notice if I am gone.'

  I saw her exchange glances with the mayor.

  'Helene, don't fuss. I am la patronne. He expects to see me here every evening. He will know something is going on if I am missing.'

  I sounded, even to my own ears, as if I was protesting too much. 'Look,' I continued, forcing myself to sound conciliatory. 'Save me some meat. Bring it back in a napkin. I can promise you that, if the Germans are given rations enough to feast on, I will make sure I help myself to a share. I will not suffer. I promise.'

  They appeared mollified, but I couldn't tell them the truth. Ever since I had discovered that the Kommandant knew about the pig, I had lost my appetite for it. That he had not revealed his knowledge of its existence, let alone punished us, didn't make me joyous with relief, but deeply uneasy.

  Now when I saw him staring at my portrait, I no longer felt gratified that even a German could recognize my husband's talent. When he walked into the kitchen to make casual conversation, I became stiff and tense, afraid he might mention it.

  'Yet again,' the mayor said, 'I suspect we find ourselves in your debt.' He looked beaten down. His daughter had been ill for a week; his wife had once told me that every time Louisa fell ill he barely slept for anxiety.

  'Don't be ridiculous,' I said briskly. 'Compared to what our men are doing, this is just another day's work.'

  My sister knew me too well. She didn't ask questions directly; that was not Helene's style. But I could feel her watching me, could hear the faint edge to her voice whenever the question of the reveillon was raised. Finally, a week before Christmas, I confided in her. She had been sitting on the side of her bed, doing her hair. The brush stilled in her hand. 'Why do you think he has not told anyone?' I asked, when I finished.

  She stared at the bedspread. When she looked at me it was with a kind of dread. 'I think he likes you,' she said.

  The week before Christmas was busy, even though we had little with which to prepare for the festivities. Helene and a couple of the older women had been sewing rag dolls for the children. They were primitive, their skirts made of sacking, their faces embroidered stockings. But it was important that the children who remained in St Peronne had a little magic in that bleak Christmas.

  I grew a little bolder in my own efforts. Twice I stole potatoes from the German rations, mashing what was left to disguise the smaller amounts, and ferried them in my pockets to those who seemed particularly frail. I stole the smaller carrots and fed them into the hem of my skirt so that even when I was stopped and searched, they found nothing. To the mayor I took two jars of chicken stock, so that his wife could make Louisa a little broth. The child was pale and feverish; his wife told me she kept little down and seemed to be retreating into herself. Looking at her, swallowed by the vast old bed with its threadbare blankets, listless and coughing intermittently, I thought briefly that I could hardly blame her. What life was this for children?

  We tried to hide the worst of it from them as best we could, but they found themselves in a world where men were shot in the street, where strangers hauled their mothers from their beds by their hair for some trivial offence, like walking in a banned wood or failing to show a German officer sufficient respect. Mimi viewed our world with silent, suspicious eyes, which broke Helene's heart. Aurelien grew angry: I could see it building in him, like a volcanic force, and I prayed daily that when he finally erupted, it would not come at huge cost to himself.

  But the biggest news that week was the arrival through my door of a newspaper, roughly printed, and entitled Journal des Occupes. The only newspaper allowed in St Peronne was the German-controlled Bulletin de Lille, which was so obviously German propaganda that few of us did more with it than use it for kindling. But this one gave military information, naming the towns and villages under occupation. It commented on official communiques, and contained humorous articles about the occupation, limericks about the black bread and cartoonish sketches of the officers in charge. It begged its readers not to enquire where it had come
from, and to destroy it when it had been read.

  It also contained a list it called Von Heinrich's Ten Commandments that ridiculed the many petty rules imposed upon us.

  I cannot tell you the boost that four-page scrap gave to our little town. In the few days up to the reveillon, a steady stream of townspeople came into the bar and either thumbed through its pages in the lavatory (during the day we kept it at the bottom of a basket of old paper) or passed on its news and better jokes face to face. We spent so long in the lavatory that the Germans asked if some sickness were going round.

  From the newspaper we discovered that other nearby towns had suffered our fate. We heard of the dreaded reprisal camps, where men were starved and worked half to death. We discovered that Paris knew little of our plight, and that four hundred women and children had been evacuated from Roubaix, where food supplies were even lower than they were in St Peronne. It was not that these pieces of information in themselves constituted anything useful. But it reminded us that we were still part of France, that our little town was not alone in its travails. More importantly, the newspaper itself was a matter of some pride: the French were still capable of subverting the will of the Germans.

  There were feverish discussions as to how this might have reached us. That it had been delivered to Le Coq Rouge went some way to alleviating the growing discontent caused by our cooking for the Germans. I watched Liliane Bethune hurry past to fetch her bread in her astrakhan coat and had my own ideas.

  The Kommandant had insisted that we eat. It was the cooks' privilege, he said, on Christmas Eve. We had believed ourselves preparing for eighteen, only to discover that the final two were Helene and me. We spent hours running around the kitchen, our exhaustion outweighed by our silent, unspoken pleasure in what we knew to be going on two streets from ours: the prospect of a clandestine celebration and proper meat for our children. To be given two whole meals as well seemed almost too much.

  And yet not too much. I could never have turned down a meal again. The food was delicious: duck roasted with orange slices and preserved ginger, potatoes dauphinoise with green beans, all followed by a plate of cheeses. Helene ate hers, marvelling that she would be eating two suppers. 'I can give someone else my portion of pork,' she said, sucking a bone. 'I might keep a little bit of the crackling. What do you think?'

  It was so good to see her cheerful. Our kitchen, that night, seemed a happy place. There were extra candles, giving us a little more precious light. There were the familiar smells of Christmas - Helene had studded one of the oranges with cloves and hung it over the stove so that the scent infused the whole room. If you didn't think too hard, you could listen to the glasses clinking, the laughter and conversation, and forget that the next room was occupied by Germans.

  At around half past nine, I wrapped my sister up and helped her downstairs so that she could climb through to our neighbours' cellar and then out through their coal hatch. She would run down the unlit back alleys to Madame Poilane's house where she would join Aurelien and the children, whom we had taken there earlier in the afternoon. We had moved the pig the day before. It was quite large by then, and Aurelien had had to hold it still while I fed it an apple to stop it squealing and, with a clean swipe of his knife, Monsieur Baudin, the butcher, slaughtered it.

  I replaced the bricks in the gap behind her, all the while listening to the men in the bar above me. I realized, with some satisfaction, that for the first time in months I wasn't cold. To be hungry is to be almost permanently cold too; it was a lesson I was sure I would never forget.

  'Edouard, I hope you're warm,' I whispered, into the empty cellar, as my sister's footsteps faded on the other side of the wall. 'I hope you eat as well as we have done this night.'

  When I re-emerged into the hallway I jumped. The Kommandant was gazing at my portrait.

  'I couldn't find you,' he said. 'I thought you would be in the kitchen.'

  'I - I just went for some air,' I stammered.

  'I see something different in this picture every time I look at it. She has something enigmatic about her. I mean you.' He half smiled at his own mistake. 'You have something enigmatic about you.'

  I said nothing.

  'I hope I do not embarrass you, but I have to tell you. I have thought for some time that this is the most beautiful painting I have ever seen.'

  'It is a lovely work of art, yes.'

  'You exclude its subject?'

  I didn't answer.

  He swilled the wine in his glass. When he spoke next it was with his eyes on the ruby liquid. 'Do you honestly believe yourself plain, Madame?'

  'I believe beauty is in the eye of the beholder. When my husband tells me I am beautiful, I believe it because I know in his eyes I am.'

  He looked up then. His eyes locked on to mine and would not let them go. He held my gaze for so long that I felt my breathing start to quicken.

  Edouard's eyes were the windows to his soul; his very self was laid bare in them. The Kommandant's were intense, shrewd and yet somehow veiled, as if to hide his true feelings. I was afraid that he might be able to see my own crumbling composure, that he might see through my lies if I allowed him in. I was the first to look away.

  He reached across the table to the crate that the Germans had delivered earlier and pulled out a bottle of cognac. 'Have a drink with me, Madame.'

  'No, thank you, Herr Kommandant.' I glanced towards the door to the dining room, where the officers would be finishing their dessert.

  'One. It's Christmas.'

  I knew an order when I heard it. I thought of the others, eating the roast pork a few doors away from where we sat. I thought of Mimi, with pork fat dribbling down her chin, of Aurelien, smiling and joking as he boasted of their great deception. He needed some happiness: twice that week he had been sent home from school for fighting, but had refused to tell me what it had been about. I needed them all to have one good meal. 'Then ... very well.' I accepted a glass, and sipped. The cognac was like fire trickling down my throat. It felt restorative, a sharp kick.

  He downed his own glass, watched me drink mine, then pushed the bottle towards me, signalling that I should refill it.

  We sat in silence. I wondered how many people had come to eat the pig. Helene had thought it would be fourteen. Two of the older people had been afraid to break their curfew. The priest had promised to take leftovers to those stuck in their homes after Christmas mass.

  As we drank, I watched him. His jaw was set, suggesting someone unbending, but without his military cap, his almost shaven hair gave his head an air of vulnerability. I tried to picture him out of uniform, a normal human being, going about his daily business, buying a newspaper, taking a holiday. But I couldn't. I couldn't see past his uniform.

  'It's a lonely business, war, isn't it?'

  I took a sip of my drink. 'You have your men. I have my family. We are neither of us exactly alone.'

  'It's not the same, though, is it?'

  'We all get by as best as we can.'

  'Do we? I'm not sure whether anyone can describe this as "best".'

  The cognac made me blunt. 'You are the one sitting in my kitchen, Herr Kommandant. I suggest, with respect, that only one of us has a choice in the matter.'

  A cloud passed across his face. He was unused to being challenged. Faint colour rose to his cheeks, and I saw him with his arm raised, his gun aimed at a running prisoner.

  'You really think any of us has a choice?' he said quietly. 'You really think this is how any of us would choose to live? Surrounded by devastation? The perpetrators of it? Were you to witness what we see at the Front, you would think yourself ...' He tailed off, shook his head. 'I'm sorry, Madame. It's this time of year. It's enough to make a man maudlin. And we all know that there is nothing worse than a maudlin soldier.'

  He smiled then, an apology, and I relaxed a little. We sat there on either side of the kitchen table, sipping from our glasses, surrounded by the detritus of the meal. In the other room the officers had b
egun to sing. I heard their voices lifting, the tune familiar, the words incomprehensible. The Kommandant tilted his head to listen. Then he put down his glass. 'You hate us being here, don't you?'

  I blinked. 'I have always tried -'

  'You think your face betrays nothing. But I've watched you. Years in this job have taught me a lot about people and their secrets. Well. Can we call a truce, Madame? Just for these few hours?'

  'A truce?'

  'You shall forget that I am part of an enemy army, I shall forget that you are a woman who spends much of her time working out how to subvert that army, and we shall just ... be two people?'

  His face, just briefly, had softened. He held his glass towards mine. Almost reluctantly, I lifted my own.

  'Let us avoid the subject of Christmas, lonely or otherwise. I would like you to tell me about the other artists at the Academie. Tell me how you came to meet them.'

  I am not sure how long we sat there. If I am honest, the hours evaporated in conversation and the warm glow of alcohol. The Kommandant wanted to know everything about an artist's life in Paris. What kind of man was Matisse? Was his life as scandalous as his art?

  'Oh, no. He was the most intellectually rigorous of men. Quite stern. And very conservative, in both his work and his domestic habits. But somehow ...' I thought for a moment of the bespectacled professor, how he would glance over to check that you had grasped each point before he showed you the next piece '... joyous. I think he gets great joy from what he does.'

  The Kommandant thought about this, as if my answer had satisfied him. 'I once wanted to be a painter. I was no good, of course. I had to confront the truth of the matter very early on.' He fingered the stem of his glass. 'I often think that the ability to earn a living by doing the thing one loves must be one of life's greatest gifts.'

  I thought of Edouard then, his face lost in concentration, peering at me from behind an easel. If I closed my eyes, I could still feel the warmth of the log fire on my right leg, the faint chill on the left where my skin was bare. I could see him lift an eyebrow, and the exact point at which his thoughts left his painting. 'I think that too.'

  'The first time I saw you,' he had told me on our first Christmas Eve together, 'I watched you standing in the middle of that bustling store and I thought you were the most self-contained woman I had ever seen. You looked as if the world could explode into fragments around you and there you would be, your chin lifted, gazing out at it imperiously from under that magnificent hair.' He lifted my hand to his mouth, and kissed it tenderly.