Village of Scoundrels

by Margi Preus

  “I don’t care,” Jules said with a shrug. “They want us to be so afraid we give up. If that’s what they want, then that’s the last thing I want to do. In fact, it makes me want to do even more.”

  Philippe let out a little laugh. “You’re as stubborn as a billy goat,” he said, adding, “Where are you headed from here?”

  “Home.” Jules swiped at his eyes with his mittened hand.

  “Come on,” Philippe said, standing. “I’ll give you a ride.”

  “And my pup?” Jules asked.

  “Room for the hound, too,” Philippe said.

  Before leaving, the two of them kicked snow over the coals. When there was nothing left but a thin trail of smoke, they stood for a moment feeling how, without the bright warmth of the fire, the night had suddenly grown so much colder and so much darker.

  They walked to the edge of the hill and climbed onto the sled, Jules with the dog in his lap. Then Philippe steered it down the slope toward a distant light—the lantern Jules’s mother kept burning in the window to let Jules know it was safe to come home.

  WINTER CLOSES IN AGAIN

  Even though Perdant had little to do with the arrests, he tried to act as if he had. He bought himself a new leather jacket and went around with his chest puffed out.

  But there was no one to admire him. The town went quiet and dark. Villagers drew their curtains, turned their lamps low, and stayed inside. Or, when outside, struggled against the wind with their berets pulled over their ears and their heads tucked into their collars. It seemed as if the town had shut down.

  But it had not.

  Everything that went on before continued to go on, more quietly than before. Madame Desault continued to shepherd children to the plateau. Farmers continued to arrive at the station with their horse-drawn sledges and sleighs, ready to receive a child or two. Young people continued to be tucked away into boardinghouses.

  Refugees managed to trickle in, as well as more and more young Frenchmen trying to avoid the compulsory labor service. All over the plateau, shadowy figures slipped from groves of trees, crossed moonlit fields, crept into barns in darkness, joined others sleeping in haylofts. Day by day, groups of men climbed higher in the mountains, hiked farther into forests, joined other armed resisters or maquisards, named for the brushy terrain in which they hid and built their organization. The maquis—the resistance—was growing.

  While all this was going on, Perdant was recording his observations, then struggling against the wind to the post office to mail thick envelopes stuffed with his reports.

  As the weather closed in, the falling snow pulled a curtain between the little town and the rest of the world. Cocooned in snow, the villagers knitted sweaters, patched trousers, and stitched together plots and plans.

  HENNI

  At the Beehive, Henni wrote one letter to her aunt in Switzerland asking for help getting an entrance visa to that country. She hoped it was possible, even though getting an exit visa from France was probably impossible. Still, she had to try.

  Then she reached for another piece of paper, intending to start a letter to Max. What should she say? What could she say?

  With her pen poised over the paper, she thought about the last time she’d seen him—on her way back to Les Lauzes after seeing her mother deported. He’d gotten out of Gurs not long before and was staying at a Scout camp near Lyon.

  Boys had been working in the garden, their voices sliced into ribbons of sound by the wind. The wind lifted swirls of dust and rocked the crowns of the trees, which cast wild shadows of light and dark on the ground. Max’s white shirt billowed; his hair rippled like wheat. He adjusted his glasses, smiled his incandescent smile. Still, she could see that the trusting, happy-go-lucky fellow she’d known had been worn thin, chipped away a little.

  Our youth was stolen from us, she thought, when our fathers were arrested, when we could no longer go to school, when we were called names and people spit at us, when Max had to ride his bicycle deep into the Black Forest to get away from the taunts, the jeers of “Stinking Jew!” Or when he was sent with other Jewish men to work the harvest and was paid absolutely nothing. When we were sent to the internment camp at Gurs, a place where little bites were taken out of us every day by bedbugs, lice, and fleas, and where hunger and deprivation carved away whatever dignity we still retained. And then—the deportations.

  Henni told Max how she’d watched her mother and a thousand others being deported. “What will become of us?” she wondered.

  Max pulled her close and said, “We’ll win. When they lose—and eventually they will—we’ll still be alive, and we will have won.”

  Max recounted the little miracles that had kept them alive so far. How he’d been released from Gurs only days before the deportations began. How, back in Germany on Kristallnacht, when the Nazi brownshirts had smashed the windows of Jewish businesses and arrested every Jewish male they could, he had quietly slipped out of town, escaping arrest.

  Henni had her own miracles to recount. First of all, she had been rescued from Gurs and brought to Les Lauzes; she’d returned to the camp to visit her mother just after the lockdown. If she had arrived only the day before, she would have been locked in with everyone else.

  Then, at the rail yard, how easy it would have been for her to have been scooped up with the others, locked into a cattle car, taken away . . . Yet, by a small miracle, she wasn’t. Even on the train that she had taken to see Max, when there had been a document check (she had no false papers), she had escaped—safely asleep on a pile of canvas mailbags in the mail car.

  “We are still alive,” Max said.

  Henni rested her head on his chest, feeling it rise and fall with every breath. We might just make it, Henni thought. With luck, along with inner strength and determination, we might stay alive to see them lose.

  And now, sitting at the dining table in the Beehive, she put her pen to paper and wrote, If you’re not safe there, come to Les Lauzes.

  Together they would find a way to get to safety in Switzerland.

  JEAN-PAUL

  There were days when Sylvie or Léon would work with Jean-Paul, stamping, cutting, trimming, gluing, stapling, and all the multitude of things that must be done to create believable documents. Céleste sometimes came, too, and sat on the sidelines, offering encouragement—convinced she would only mess things up if she tried to help. But today was not one of those days. Céleste and Sylvie were busy with school and other activities. Léon . . . Léon had been absent from school more and more until finally he just wasn’t there anymore. And nobody was sure where he’d gone.

  But today it suited Jean-Paul to be alone. Outside his bedroom/study/forgery office, the wind howled and raged, shaking the trees and rattling the door. Inside, dressed in three sweaters, with a hat pulled down over his ears, Jean-Paul hunched over his work, stamping, drawing, cutting, affixing. Some days his own angry wind raged within him, angry at the injustice of it all.

  But not today. Today, he was almost gleeful, even chuckling a little as he worked. Because today he was making a brand-new identity—this time for himself.

  PHILIPPE

  Sitting in the living area of Madame Créneau’s small flat, Philippe scratched his initials into the thick frost that coated the window.

  “With all that’s happened, it’s no longer enough to keep Jews out of sight,” she said from the kitchen, where she was filling a teakettle with water. “We need to start moving people to Switzerland. Many people. And in order to do that, we need new identities for them.”

  From his place in the one upholstered chair, Philippe heard her set the teakettle on the stove and her footsteps as she crossed the kitchen to the door of the living room.

  “Luckily, we have some good forgers,” she said, appearing at the door. “We’re also going to need money. And,” Madame said, her sharp eyes and the knife in her hand pointed straight at him, “we are going to need guides. Passeurs. People smugglers.”

  He avoided look
ing directly back. Instead, he seemed to take in everything at once: The glowing embers in the wood-stove. The steaming kettle. The borders of thick frost around the edges of the windows. The quiet of the moment, as Madame, butter knife in hand, stood perfectly still, letting her request sink in.

  Because it was a request—Philippe was sure of that.

  Not knowing what else to do, Philippe scraped his thumbnail against the frost on the window, rubbing out his initials.

  “You’ve done well hiding people at the farms,” Mme Créneau said. “You’re resourceful, a quick thinker. You look younger than you are. Your survival training in Scouts, along with the uniform . . .” she continued, enumerating Philippe’s qualifications.

  But Philippe had stopped listening, already mapping the journey in his head. There’d be tickets to purchase, trains and buses to arrange, identity checks. No matter where you went, you’d run into German military personnel. Also, probably French border guards, maybe Italian patrols, barbed wire, dogs . . .

  “Philippe?”

  Philippe realized Mme Créneau was speaking to him. She stood in front of him, holding a steaming mug.

  “What do you think?” she asked, handing him the tea.

  He wrapped his cold hands around the hot mug and wondered if she could see his heart pulsing under his thin sweater . . . or maybe even hear it thumping.

  “If you’re afraid,” Madame said, “that’s all right. You should be. Not so afraid that you can’t think straight. Just afraid enough that you stay on your toes.”

  Philippe blew on the tea as if to cool his enthusiasm. “Yes,” he tried to say calmly, so as not to seem too eager. “I’ll do it.

  5.

  SPRING 1943

  A LITTLE MISSION

  In March the pastors and the director of the school were released. The village breathed again, and life seemed to go back to normal.

  Little by little spring arrived, the snow melting slowly and then all at once, creating rushing streams running down the street to the river. Perce-neige, the dainty white flowers that poked their heads out of the snow, appeared, and by late April the hillsides quivered with broad swaths of wild yellow daffodils.

  The countryside was fragrant and sometimes so quiet you could hear a single bell on a farmer’s cow clanking away or the baaing of sheep in faraway fields. It seemed tranquil, but like so much else, that was an illusion. Behind the sleepy facade, things were happening. Summer residents began to trickle into the area, along with others trying to blend in with the tourists. Plans made in winter began to be implemented.

  And on one fine May day, when the roadway was nice and dry, Jules and Claude took a can of paint and some brushes and did a little painting on the pavement.

  JULES AND CLAUDE—CAUGHT RED-HANDED

  They should have gotten away with it, but when Claude went back for the can of paint, they were caught. All the way to the policeman’s office, Jules being yanked along by the arm by one German soldier and Claude prodded along by the other, Jules wondered how he might speak to Claude. He wanted to tell his friend to not mention the goats, or the lady herding the goats, or the suitcase on her back, or that she limped. But he didn’t dare speak French in front of the soldiers—they’d been in France long enough to have learned some of the language—so he tried patois, the local language.

  “Ne parlez pas!” one of the soldiers growled. “No talking!”

  That ended that.

  »«

  Inspector Perdant had been sitting in his office sifting through reports and complaints. There was a complaint by billeted German soldiers of clothes being stolen while they were swimming in the river. The soldiers had had to walk back to the hotel in the buff, much to the amusement of the villagers. It had turned out the clothes had not been stolen, only hidden by pranksters.

  Kids. Perdant had also gotten a report that one of the local teenagers had saved a German soldier from drowning in that same river. Probably the same kid who had earlier hidden the clothes, Perdant thought.

  He was shaking his head over this when German soldiers entered his office with two sheepish boys in tow.

  “We have these two troublemakers caught on the road, painting,” one of them said in awkward French.

  “Painting . . . what?” Perdant asked, eyeing the boys.

  The German either didn’t want to utter the description or perhaps he didn’t have enough French to manage it, so he reached over Perdant’s desk, took a piece of paper and a pen, and drew a V—that was Churchill’s victory sign—then the double-barred cross of Lorraine, the symbol of the free French army, and then 1918, the year of Germany’s defeat in World War I.

  Perdant squinted at the drawing and then at the boys, wondering why. Why would they be doing something stupid like that? Something that would only draw attention to themselves when possibly their peers or family members—maybe they, themselves—were involved in the kind of illegal activity that carried the death penalty.

  Generally the kids around here were careful not to do anything too stupid. And there were plenty of offenses they could have been committing but generally weren’t. The interminable list included, but was not limited to: spitting at Germans, shouting “Down with Germany,” wearing British or American colors, hoisting the French flag, jostling German officers, drawing caricatures of German soldiers, adopting “an anti-German attitude,” and, of course, chalking, drawing, or painting forbidden symbols such as the V sign or the cross of Lorraine on roadways or anywhere else.

  Since the Germans here were recuperating, they were not in the business of insisting the rules be enforced, but they couldn’t be expected to ignore such flagrant disregard of the law.

  “Your names?” he asked the boys, taking out a pad of paper and a pencil. “First and last, please.”

  Jules pointed at Claude and said, “Claude Dupont.” He pointed at himself and said, “Jules,” then hesitated, perhaps thinking better of giving his surname.

  “What is your last name?” the policeman asked, his pencil poised above the paper.

  Jules grumbled something that sounded to Perdant like “La Crapule,” which meant “scoundrel.” The policeman hooted. “Is that what you said? ‘Scoundrel’?”

  The little scoundrel gave him a scowl.

  Softening his approach, Perdant asked the boy, “What does your father do?”

  “He is a prisoner of war,” Jules said.

  “Ah,” Perdant said gently.

  Jules solemnly bowed his head.

  The little one, the “scoundrel,” was only ten or eleven years old, but Perdant suspected he knew far more than he let on. The other, bigger boy looked like a simpleton, a dullard, with heavy brows and heavy eyelids, his mouth hanging open as they sat awaiting their fate. The little one had bright eyes and, Perdant sensed, a kind of canny intelligence. The ringleader, Perdant assumed.

  He drummed his pencil on his desk and stared at the boys. Why take the time to paint all three symbols? It was almost as if they were trying to take as long as they possibly could.

  The most likely explanation was that it had been a diversionary tactic. Someone of more consequence had escaped into the woods or contraband had been disposed of while the Germans concentrated on catching these two delinquents.

  But he could hardly scold the soldiers for being idiots, and he supposed it was his duty to take it seriously—even more so when an officer walked through the door.

  After being filled in by the soldiers, the officer let his gaze travel over the boys, pausing for a moment to give Claude a look of disgust. “I hope you intend to punish these troublemakers appropriately,” the man said, turning away from the boys toward Perdant.

  “Look,” Perdant said. “They’re just kids being kids. I doubt they even know what those symbols mean.”

  The officer gave him a sour look.

  “All right,” Perdant said. “They probably do. Still, they’re just kids.”

  “What is it you do, by the way?” the officer asked, gazi
ng all about the room as if looking for an indication of the young man’s position.

  Perdant did not think that question really required a reply, but as he was speaking to an officer, he answered, “I am a police inspector.”

  The officer looked him up and down and shook his head. “Are the French accustomed to having teenagers serve in the police force?”

  “I am almost twenty-three,” Perdant said. He would have liked to point out that some of the German soldiers billeted in the hotel were barely old enough to shave, but he kept his mouth shut on the subject.

  The officer continued to shake his head while pacing the room, pausing to peer closely at Perdant’s framed diploma. “Well, that explains the lack of attention to matters in this town, I suppose.”

  “Excuse me?” Perdant said.

  “It is rumored that the village is a nest of deserters, communists, Jews, and other undesirables,” the officer said. “Yet here you are, advocating leniency toward two miscreants brought in by alert German troops.”

  Perdant had an opinion as to how alert the soldiers had been, but he kept it to himself.

  “We have heard reports that there are hundreds of Jews hiding here—all over in this area.” The officer made a big, stiff circle with his arm. “If you are not going to take matters in hand, perhaps we will have to do it.”

  The officer swept out the door before Perdant could respond. The two soldiers scurried after him without a backward glance.

  Perdant’s face stung as if slapped. Why was he continually made to feel like a fool? He stood for a moment looking at the door by which they had exited, feeling a mix of embarrassment and remorse. And something else. Dread.

  He was about to go out and try to clear his head with a walk in the fresh air when he remembered the boys. He cleared his throat and crossed the room to where they were seated, then took a moment to set a chair backward in front of the boys and straddle it.