by Lily King
“Why are you saying these things? What have I—?” But she could not continue, for she understood now. The land was all they had to offer her. It was what their whole lives had been leading up to, this gift.
Now she could see the pain in her father’s eyes; she could see how it hurt him to perform this way, to bully her. She could not look at her mother; she could not yet forgive the blow that stung beneath her eye.
“I have no choice, then. This has been decided all around.”
“You have a choice among three brothers.”
She considered Xavier, the wild one. He had shaped himself precisely contrary to Octave. Where Octave was cautious, he was reckless; where Octave was grim, he was gleeful. He had passion and curiosity and a devilish, thin-lipped smile. But he was not an even keel. Xavier was one to meet on a train, flirt wildly with at a dance. He would make you laugh as he made love to you. And then he would make someone else laugh just as hard. He was unable to resist wielding his power.
She considered Max. Though only thirteen, he was tall and broad, already by far the most handsome of the three. He was a gentle, dreamy combination of his older brothers, with Xavier’s passions turned inward, Octave’s patience made contemplative. He wrote things in a leather notebook he had made and sang sweet songs to his little cousins. There would perhaps be a wait to marry him—three, or even four years. But how could she live on like that, waiting for her husband to grow up? How could she continue in the Guerrins’ kitchen while her betrothed darted through with urchin friends all soaked from a swim in the quarry? How could she marry a man whose diapers she’d changed and washed, a man she’d taught the alphabet to, a man who’d sobbed in her arms on slaughtering days?
At least with Octave, she told herself, it would be a placid existence. She wouldn’t be betrayed; she wouldn’t be expected to mother him. She wouldn’t disappoint her parents, who’d been good to her, who’d never resented her for being the girl in this inevitable bargain or for somehow blocking the path for more children. Her parents had carefully swallowed their disappointments so that her life would seem as simple and effortless as the rising of the half moon behind them.
“Octave,” she said firmly. They lifted their heads and beamed with pleasure for her, as if the choice among three had been all the choice in the world, as if she herself had chosen to marry and whom and when. This infuriated her the most, the way it quickly and permanently became her decision, the way at the wedding a year later she overheard them telling guests how she simply announced on the night of her sixteenth birthday that she would marry Octave Guerrin. People loved this story. It seemed to revive their faith in the necessary conviction that love lies no farther than your own backyard. Couples danced closer that night than they had in years; teenage girls looked across to the same group of boys they had seen every day of their lives with nascent curiosity, and the boys looked back.
No one but her father sensed Marcelle’s despair. Because they willed it so, they saw a pleasant-looking girl (not a beauty, not even as a bride) achieve her dream. If she looked a bit wan, it was only due to her nervousness about the night ahead and the years to follow, about how to please this man she’d finally caught. But her father heard in her voice at the altar a voice he’d nearly forgotten, which, years earlier, had calmly asked where the belt was when it was not hanging from the nail by the stove and, after it was over, had uttered promises that were never broken. Once she’d charted the boundaries of right and wrong, she never transgressed. He wept then, while the voice continued, as he remembered his obedient child and the earnest face she’d lifted up to him as she offered him his belt. He danced with her first and yearned to hold her close, closer than any woman he’d ever held in his life. And even if the guests hadn’t been watching, he couldn’t have done this, for her arms and body were adamant, her feet made of stone. He was dancing with a smoothed-faced, open-armed statue who spoke to him still in that child’s voice that claimed to understand punishment.
Why were they given the girl? He would never feel such things if he were Octave’s father, who was beaming as he delivered glasses of hard cider and received slaps and pats and kisses.
But he had married Marcelle’s mother out of love, and where were they now? As far apart as two humans could be. Suffering the same griefs had not drawn them closer but thrust them apart. He looked at his wife now, dancing with her cousin René. Her changeable eyes matched today the pale green of her dress. Once those eyes had been liquid and her emotions had floated within, perfectly visible, like bright fish in a clear sea. Now they were as depthless and opaque as ice. He saw that she and René were singing to the music. He no longer liked her singing. Perhaps it was better to begin without expectation and to end without disappointment. Comforted by that thought, he moved from his spot against the wall toward the cider keg to congratulate the father of the groom once more.
Marcelle and Octave produced children, three girls, in rapid succession. Then the news of the Germans in Poland traveled up their hill and, right behind it, the call that beckoned its men away.
She watched him leave from the front window. She told him it would be too upsetting to stand at the station with the other women. He knew he was giving her her freedom now, though he didn’t know in what ways he’d stolen it from her. His presence in the house elicited a recklessness he’d never seen before in Marcelle Maunier. He knew her, had always known her. She was, he’d thought, a lot like him. She was quiet and careful and prudent. If he came home a bit early for lunch and if she were in a window slicing apples or weaving her thick braid, he could stand unseen and watch her deft fingers, her unabating concentration, the swift precision of her movement, just as he had seen her through the windows of their mothers’ kitchens all his life. But once he stepped into the house, the scene vanished. She became awkward and rigid; she made every excuse to be out of any room he entered. Once she took the children to the quarry and didn’t return for lunch or dinner, and when he found them there, they were chasing the light of the moon in the black water. Sexually, she would reject him for weeks, sometimes months, then come to him in the afternoon, insistent and flushed, to lead him to a spot deep in the cherry orchard on what used to be her father’s land. But she didn’t enjoy it, didn’t even seem to feel it, and afterward she drifted off ahead of him, pale and rigid again.
Did she imagine herself the only one to have made a sacrifice? Did she think this marriage, this life, was what he had wanted? He wished now they had spoken of these things. On the train he cried, two small tears he caught with his thumb before they spilled. He did not feel at that moment afraid of war or death or never seeing this station again. But out the window whole families gathered to wave brave and hopeful goodbyes; wives and mothers cried openly; brothers and sisters and children kept their hands raised and swaying in bewilderment. He was not afraid of death, but he was afraid of not being missed or remembered. Even his parents were not here to see him off. They had accompanied Xavier and Max to their ship in Marseille.
Marcelle had stood in the window of their house and felt Octave pull the world apart, pull it wide open, with each footstep away from her. She buried her face in her youngest daughter’s neck and hoped the child could not feel her smile.
Her daughters worked sedulously under her direction. Before the war she had forbidden Octave to put them to labor. She couldn’t bear the thought of another generation harnessed to this land, but now there was no choice.
Octave wrote regularly, first from the front, later from prison camps, though his letters often arrived all at once after months of delay, and they wrote back all together at the long dining room table, with Monique, the oldest, as secretary, for she had the best penmanship, careful to keep the tone cheerful, careful not to mention Xavier’s death or Max’s disappearance. Soon their father became like a benevolent but poor uncle who wished them gifts but could send nothing but warm regards. He often wrote of various children he saw and compared them to his daughters, and by the third year of h
is absence it was clear that he no longer remembered that Marie-Jo was the one with the dead tooth, or that Monique got hives when she was angry, or that Juliette had the small ear, permanently curled tight like the shell of a garden snail. He began not only to confuse them but endow them with characteristics they never had. They weren’t bothered by his confusion. In their own separate minds each fantasized about her father’s return, and how beautiful and womanly he would find her.
Marcelle knew she was not like the other young wives with whom she stood in lines clutching ration tickets. They were ashen and aimless; their children skirted around them unremembered. They waited only for the news of their husbands’ return.
Marcelle waited for the slip of paper coming up the hill in the hands of some youth. She knew it would happen. Soldiers had to move quickly, make decisions in a split second, be sharp and cunning and impulsive. She was surprised that Octave had survived a day, let alone six months of combat. But he would not come back alive from internment. He grew weak and feverish if he missed lunch. She thought of him there, relying solely on his patience to get him through. She thought of him trying to recall the faces of his children and scrambling them. He would know he was forgetting them, and that would cause him more pain than anything else the war could inflict upon him. She wanted to remember one thing she missed about him, one thing to make her prayers for him more sincere, but she could not.
The day the Germans came to the house the air was thick with wet heat, and the smell of gardenia struck her as she climbed back up from the dairy farm empty-handed. She thought of the lavender dress she’d worn, the tables set in white stones. They held the sky at our feet, those stones. Blood red, they were, when my father raised his glass. Nine years had passed, but the flowers always returned her there, to the restaurant in Limne on her sixteenth birthday.
The shape of a German—the sharp epaulets, the tightly cinched waist, the bulbous thighs, the narrow booted calves—was a shape recognizable at any distance. She thought, at the sight of him, she’d stopped dead in her path. She thought she’d frozen in terror, but she was moving, sprinting to the house to reach it before he did. But there was already another inside, interrogating the girls. He had them lined up in the kitchen and placed his fingers under their chins when he asked them with the few French words he had learned where the hidden ones were. Marie-Jo was crying; Juliette stood silent and blanched; Monique was the only one who spoke, repeating over and over her sincere bewilderment at the question. When their mother appeared in the doorway, they flocked to her. The soldier reached for his gun. The other, clearly his superior with his fancy flat-topped hat, slipped past Marcelle and told him in perfect French to put it down. The soldier maintained his position, oblivious to the words. The officer spoke again, harshly, in German, and the weapon was lowered. The officer turned to Marcelle, who was aproned in daughters. She wondered if her girls knew they were holding her upright. She managed to look straight at him.
He asked her a series of questions: where did their land begin and end, how many barns were there, what did they raise, did they have help, had they or were they now hosting strangers? He asked her these questions and she answered, but all the while she felt they were saying other things. She felt light-headed, as fear began slowly to drain out of her. Her children held her tighter.
Then he fired a command at the soldier, who straightened up, saluted, and moved rigidly off toward the back of the house. Caught on the heel of his boot was a little pink duckling that Juliette had made for the cat out of yarn. It bobbed wildly behind his stiff walk. They all saw it at the same time but the officer was the first to laugh, a strange short chortle that gave way to deep wheezes—a laugh that had been welling up for days, perhaps for the whole war. The soldier turned around, having reached for his gun instinctively. His officer, suddenly sober, barked at him, and he continued toward the back. At the sight of the duckling bobbing once more, the officer was plunged into another fit of convulsions and had to reach out to the kitchen counter for support. In the days that followed, while the girls recreated more and more terrifying versions of their interrogation by the Boches, it was the laughter in her house that Marcelle remembered most vividly.
They watched the Germans leave from the same window that had framed Octave’s departure. Just before the bend in the path, the soldier looked down. He raised his leg but, before he could unfasten the yarn, he lost his balance and had to put his leg back down. After three attempts, the officer, who’d been waiting farther on, backtracked to help. They could see he was grinning still. While the soldier steadied himself with a hand on his back, the officer leaned down, gingerly removed the pink duckling, and put it in his breast pocket. Then they both straightened up and walked on out of sight.
After that, he was ubiquitous, that officer: on the terrace of the Café Plaire as she stood in line at the butcher’s, in a car at the turn up her road as she made her way home, inspecting the dairy farm when she tried again for cheese and butter they’d already sold to the black market. She never saw him with that soldier again, or with anyone else. He was always alone. He never acknowledged her, never made the slightest intimation that they had met, that he had once laughed in her house. She wondered if the pink duckling was still in his left pocket.
She rapidly withdrew from contact with her neighbors. People had begun to denounce resisters. The Valois boy, whose clubfoot prevented him from going to war, had been reported as aiding the Maquis, the militant arm of the Resistance, and was taken off in the morning and delivered home at night with mayflies sewn in the empty sockets of his eyes. Many openly assisted the new government. The widow Dupin had let the Milice and the Waffen SS entertain in the unused portion of her house and less than a week later was found swinging from her kitchen ceiling, hanged either by informed Maquis or the Milice itself for fear that she had heard too much. Marcelle avoided her parents and in-laws as well, for they could not relinquish the image of Pétain as their hero. He had saved them in the last war; he knew what he was doing. Still, while she was careful to ignore the rest of the world, she could not help but hear about the Germans who occupied their town.
The officer was apparently a commander of sorts. He lived on the second floor of the Hôtel Pons. He did not drink alcohol. He read only French books. Could he have relieved Christian Valois of his eyeballs? Could he have kicked the chair from beneath widow Dupin’s small feet? And the execution of the town’s police force, of which her cousin Alphonse had been a part, could that have been his idea upon arrival? She wished she could see him committing these crimes. Instead, she saw him with a lemon water in the shade of an umbrella, reading Gide, or stroking the silky backs of the black cats that sidled up to him at the dairy.
She began to wish for her husband’s return, but each time her silent prayers were shattered by the sound of laughter in her house.
She saw him standing at the announcement board. No one else was in the street, and she walked toward him. She told herself to stop and turn back around, but she could not. He was studying a schedule for the cinema in Alt and wearing what he always wore. But it was no longer the crisp, sinister uniform from the propaganda posters that were pasted on the old walls of their town. She willed that image back but it wouldn’t come. She knew now that his slate-gray trousers were the color of his eyes.
She stood at his right, feigning interest in the marriage announcement of Lucie Peyraud to Émile Quenelle. Nobody had had the heart to take it down, though they’d only been married three weeks before Émile had gone off and been killed. Staring straight ahead, she asked, “Do you have that duckling in your pocket still? My cat is quite forlorn without it.”
He turned to her, expecting a madwoman beside him. His face softened when he saw it was her. “A duckling?”
“You wouldn’t be delivering anything into the hands of the enemy. Brigitte the cat is a dyed-in-the-wool Pétainiste.”
She spoke quickly and his smile was delayed by the translation. When it came, her chest swell
ed and each strong pulse of her heart seemed to lift her briefly off the ground. She leaned against the board for balance.
“Die klein Enterich.” He chuckled, reaching for it. She watched his fingers fish gently in his breast pocket, and though she knew it was in the left, not the right, she dared not say so. Die klein Enterich. It didn’t frighten her. Up close it was a quiet language, a kind language. He fixed his eyes on her as he fumbled in one wrong pocket, then another. He had long eyelashes and the beginnings of a beard that looked like it had been singed by the sun late in the day. She could feel the sound it would make against her palm. He was younger than she’d thought. She held his gaze, aware that she was not beautiful and that her profile was slightly more alluring but also aware that, with this man, she would never be able to behave with diffidence or insincerity. When he moved to search the fat left pocket, he said, “Please,” indicating that he needed help in emptying it. She held out her hands, imagining bullets or small folding knives or vials of acid that might leak onto her skin. She became aware of the absence of footfall and chatter in the street. People were taking detours through town. No one would come to her rescue. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I don’t have a corpse in here.”
He pulled out an enormous wad of torn paper. At first she thought it was shredded lists, names now dealt with, but as she looked closer, she saw they were cinema stubs, perhaps a hundred of them, perhaps more. She giggled and the pile trembled in her hands. Some of the tiny pieces flipped to the ground.
At the bottom of the pocket was the duckling. He handed it to her with a stern face, but she could see him struggling against a grin. “Have you ever seen a film?”
“Yes, of course.”