The Occupation Secret

by The Occupation Secret (retail) (epub)

  The Bar Des Amis

  Jupien Fombert polished the glasses behind his bar for the third time that morning. Glass polishing allowed him to watch without prying, to observe without the necessity for self-justification. It was the barman’s secret weapon.

  This morning he was watching Hervé Najac. The man was drunk already, and it was hardly eleven o’clock. And a Tuesday, too. No market. No possible excuse for being in town. It didn’t take a scientist to work out what was eating away at him behind those grotesque scars of his.

  Fombert glanced quickly around to make sure no one had crept in to overhear what he was about to say. He knew the Maquis had it in for him – it wouldn’t hurt, therefore, at this delicate stage of the wartime proceedings, to get Najac on his side. The man was thick as thieves with those bandits up on the Causse. And Fombert knew for a fact that their leader, Jean-Baptiste, would shoot him as soon as look at him. How these stupid Germans could have contrived to lose a war they as good as had in their pocket baffled Fombert. He had wagered everything on keeping in with the winning side, and now the whole thing was threatening to backfire on him

  ‘Have a drink on the house, Najac. You’re fast becoming my best customer.’

  ‘Go and fuck yourself.’

  Fombert raised an eyebrow. Well, if Najac was going to behave like that! He set down the glass he was polishing and sauntered around the front of the zinc. He fetched up at the big window, looking up towards the church and the Bastide de Marmont. Putting both hands in his trouser pockets, he eased himself comfortingly back onto his heels. ‘I suppose you’re wondering what the two of them get up to, all alone in the de Joinville’s library? Yes. That must be it. Why else would you squander all your farm profits on black-market Pastis?’

  ‘Shut up, pédé. How would you know what I’m thinking?’

  Fombert bit his lip. Najac was obviously spiralling out of control. No one called him a pédé to his face and got away with it. He self-consciously reined himself in, however, the better to plant his long-tailed barb.

  ‘It’s true. I do like to hang my legs either side of the saddle. You might be better off if you did the same thing yourself, rather than lusting after that little Schleuh tart. It’s obvious she’s wet for the German. Why not accept it, and use the whole thing to your advantage? You’re in with the Maquis. Why not get to the Major through her? Pussy-struck men are always easy pickings. You could even blackmail him – tell him the Maquis will slit her throat if he doesn’t do what you want. I could pretend to be a neutral third party. Conduct negotiations for you. Nobody else would need to know. We could both retire rich after the war. Just think. You might even persuade someone to marry you despite your ruined face.’

  Hervé heaved himself to his feet. He stood by the table, rocking – his eyes dead.

  ‘Please don’t take what I said amiss. I meant it in the kindest possible way.’ Fombert was enjoying himself. There was nothing so sweet as loosing off a few volleys at a sitting duck. ‘Just look at what she’s done to you. That’s women for you. No consideration. He’ll probably knock her up, and then where will you be? No. My way’s better. Turn the situation to your advantage. That’s how I made my pile. Swing with the tide. Blow with the wind. Sure you won’t have a drink on the house? I feel we understand one another now.’

  Hervé launched himself at the door. For one delicious moment Fombert thought that he was about to pick up a table and smash his way through it, but Hervé somehow succeeded in manhandling the latch open and launching himself out into the deserted Place. Fombert smiled. It amused him to stir things up. Passed the time. Everybody had a weakness. You only needed to find it. Then give it a tweak. You never knew what came of it.

  He glanced down at the table, sniffed, and gave Hervé’s retreating back the right-angled fist. ‘Will you look at that? The bastard hasn’t paid.’

  Marie Léré

  Lucie threw open the shutters with a satisfying clatter. Her parents’ old room, despite the frequent airings her grandmother gave it, smelled musty, with the elusive scent of mouse overlaying its torpidity.

  She swivelled around to admire the effect of her handiwork, then clapped her hands together in astonishment. The light streaming in from outside illuminated a mattress folded back on itself and tied with string, like the snout of a sucking pig, surmounted by a pair of curled bolsters resembling two sardonically raised sun-bleached eyebrows – the folded edge of a counterpane, loosely draped over the bed-head, completed the macabre picture, doubling as the fringe of a wildly unsuitable hat.

  For one faltering moment Lucie wondered whether her grandmother, in a quite uncharacteristic explosion of folly, had not arranged the scene as an ironical commentary on her parents’ disastrous marriage, but no sooner had she entertained the idea than she realised its absurdity. She and her father were the only dreamers in the Léré household – the rest of the family had their feet firmly planted in the Aveyron loam.

  At the sudden recollection of her father, she sighed and moved across to where his accordion was kept. She opened the box, ran her fingers across the yellowing keys, then picked up the accordion and squeezed some air into it, as if she were injecting vitality into his distant lungs at the same time. The accordion wheezed tunelessly. She set it back down again, illogically disappointed that it hadn’t struck up on its own – with Jeanette perhaps, or Gus Viseur’s Flambée Montalbanaise – tunes which had become, by popular acclamation, her father’s signatures. She comforted herself with the thought that her father would one day return from his imprisonment in Germany, take up his instrument and play for her again.

  Humming the chorus from Charles Trenet’s Boum! (something she did whenever she wished to banish sad thoughts from her mind), she made her way to the far wall and craned forwards to peer at a hand-coloured daguerreotype of her great grandparents. In the photograph, her great grandmother was seated, a worried expression on her face, with her corduroy-suited husband standing beside her, hands firmly at his sides, his eyes and forehead blurred and out of focus as if he had fidgeted at a crucial moment and spoiled the sitting.

  Ever since her childhood, Lucie had had a clear mental picture of the heated discussion this errant movement must have provoked – the proof of her great grandfather’s perfidy, visible only after the event, doomed to hang on the wall for generations of his family to see and to judge. With a sudden flash of insight she realised that the almost comically flawed photograph was the only truly personalised memorial of any of her ancestors that she possessed, the rest having commemorated themselves only in the arranging of stones in a barn wall, the design of an embroidered handkerchief, the incline of a roof, or the curve and curl of a hand-carved wooden yoke.

  Still humming to herself, she squatted down in a corner of the room and began to leaf through her father’s collection of sheet music and 78 rpm disks in search of more pieces to sing with the German major. The collection had been Gaston Léré’s one extravagance. Twice a year he would choose some titles from a well-thumbed catalogue, then send off to a music shop in Toulouse for them, payment on delivery, and great would be the excitement when a fresh batch arrived at the St Gervais post office. Lucie and her mother, who constituted between them the most urban-inclined of the otherwise rurally minded Lérés, were the ones invariably chosen to make the journey into town to pick up and pay for the package. It was on these occasions that Jeanne Léré would try her hardest to convince her daughter that there were better and more sophisticated things in life than the family farm, and that she must remember that one half of her family, at least, stemmed from the petite bourgeoisie.

  Lucie, however, although briefly seduced by the exotic splendours of Blanchon’s window display, the shoes in La Ciboulette, and the mysterious ewers and crocks at Jeannot Moulin (Herboristerie/Phytologiste), would always save her real excitement for the return home and the exalted pleasure on her father’s face when he took possession of his new batch of music. The two of them would unwrap the parcel together on
the kitchen table, riffling through the contents like truant children.

  When they’d chosen two or three likely numbers – some of which they might have heard on the radio, others of which were entirely new, or simply picked at random – they would disappear up to the bedroom to practise. Lucie’s grandmother always frowned on these paternal excursions of hers, considering them inappropriate behaviour on a working farm, but to Lucie they were the energy that made the sun rise. She loved having her father to herself, loved hearing him experiment with his transcriptions – putting in a chorus here, a grace note there – until he felt he was ready to accompany her. Then she would stand by the window, staring out into the basse-cour, measuring her breathing to the rhythm of his playing, until, nine times out of ten, they got the thing right. Until recently, it had been the most satisfying experience of her life. Now, reluctant though she was to admit it, it had been superseded by a greater.

  A sudden noise in the corridor caused Lucie to glance up from what she was doing.

  Marie Léré was standing by the open door, a questioning expression on her face, her eyes fixed on her granddaughter. ‘I thought I heard someone shuffling about in here.’ She gestured vaguely at the gaping accordion box. ‘It’s a tragedy your father never taught you how to play an instrument for yourself, while he still had the chance. You must be missing the music.’

  Lucie blushed deeply, as if she had been caught out in an improper act. She allowed the sheet music to settle back inside the carton. ‘Oh, I only like to sing, really. I’m not interested in learning how to play an instrument.’

  Marie Léré allowed her gaze to diffuse itself about the room. ‘They tell me that you sometimes like to sing up at the German commander’s house?’

  Lucie could feel herself go cold. She stood up from her crouch, then placed a hand on her chest to control her breathing. ‘Who told you that?’ The words seemed to congeal in her throat.

  ‘It doesn’t matter who told me. Such things get around. Is it true?’

  Lucie gave a compulsive swallow – never, for a single moment, was she tempted to lie. ‘Yes.’ The word came out in a whisper.

  Marie Léré cast a baleful eye at the abandoned bed. ‘Then your whore of a mother is more of a fool than I thought she was.’

  Lucie drew herself up, shocked by the sudden intemperance of her grandmother’s language. ‘Don’t talk about her that way.’

  ‘I shall talk about her any way that I please, my girl. The trollop married my son. Then she abandoned her children and her foyer when he was captured doing his duty for France and was no longer in a position to defend his own territory. A decent woman doesn’t do those sorts of things. Now the hussy is carrying on an open affair with the mayor and probably half the other married men of the village. There are worse names for such a woman, but I refuse to utter them. I always knew that that Italian blood of hers would bring us no good.’

  Lucie began to cry. She and her grandmother never had words – it was unheard of. Their relationship, until that moment, had been based on the comfortable assumption that they agreed on all the major issues. The question of Jeanne Léré’s conduct rarely arose, and then only in terms of implied disapproval. Lucie had been perfectly able to live with this – she, too, often disapproved of her mother’s actions, and had been grateful not to have to defend her feelings in a family setting.

  ‘She’s not Italian. She’s French. Just like you. And I’m not doing anything wrong.’

  ‘I’m quite sure you’re not. You’re a good girl. You have enough Gougnac blood in you, thank God, to know how to behave. It’s your floozy of a mother I hold responsible. She should never have sent you up there to wait on that man. I bitterly regret that I did not intervene when this madness first started.’

  Lucie shook her head in bewilderment. ‘But it’s not madness. I simply take the major up his meals. Then one day he asked me to find someone to tune his piano. So I did it myself. I’ve watched papa enough times to know how to do it. And we’ve worked together on the de Joinville’s piano before, so I knew just what was needed.’ She hitched up her chin. ‘I didn’t do it for nothing, you know, Mémère. The major paid me three hundred francs.’

  ‘There is no need to explain yourself any further, child. But it has to stop. That much must be obvious to you. You must tell your mother that you are never going to go up there again, whatever she might have to say about the matter. She can send Idiot Lise. That way nobody can gossip.’

  ‘But who is gossiping?’

  ‘Who do you think, child? Are you out of your head? The entire world is gossiping.’

  Lucie walked over to the bed and sat down. She mopped at her eyes with the sleeve of her dress. ‘But if I’m not doing anything wrong, why should I stop going?’

  Marie Léré put a shocked hand up to her mouth. ‘Are you talking back to me?’

  ‘Of course I’m not, Mémère. But I shall be nineteen next month. Quite old enough to marry. And if I’m old enough to marry, then surely I’m old enough to be responsible for my own actions?’

  Lucie had not the remotest idea where her words were coming from. She had never in her life spoken like this before, and certainly not to her grandmother. She realised, with a mounting sense of incredulity, that she had not the remotest intention of giving up the few moments of pure unadulterated pleasure that she experienced while singing. ‘I don’t go there for the German. I go there to sing. And to cook his meals and collect his laundry.’ This last was said on a diminishing note.

  ‘I don’t care why you go there, Lucette. But it can’t continue. You must see that?’

  ‘I don’t see it at all. All he does is play the piano for me. He’s always playing the piano. In fact I don’t think he even likes fighting.’ She cocked her head to one side, as if she were hearing distant voices calling to her from outside the house. ‘He was brought up in France, you know.’

  Lucie’s grandmother’s eyes widened in horror. ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘He did. He speaks almost perfect French, Mémère.’ Lucie hesitated, not quite sure what she was giving away or whether she was aggravating the situation any further. ‘He reads books, too.’

  Marie Léré made a deprecatory motion, as if she were swatting a fly. ‘Books.’ Her face was flushed. Her eyes swept around, refusing to focus on Lucie or on anything else in the room. ‘Is he the only one in there when you sing to him?’

  Lucie blinked in confusion. ‘His orderly. Berger. He’s always somewhere around.’ She felt her heart miss a beat under the pressure of the unprecedented falsehood. ‘And sometimes the sergeant-major, too. The one who limps when the weather is cold.’

  ‘It gets worse, then.’

  ‘I don’t understand?’

  ‘So now all the Boche know what you are up to? Even the common soldiers?’

  Lucie could feel herself sinking deeper and deeper into a morass of her own making. ‘But I’m not up to anything.’

  Marie Léré half turned to go. ‘I shall tell your grandfather about this. That’s what I’ll do. He’ll soon put a stop to all this nonsense. With his belt, if need be.’

  Lucie stood up. ‘If you tell my grandfather, I shall go up to the village and live with Maman. And I’ll never come back here again. Ever.’

  ‘Lucette!’ Marie Léré put a hand to her mouth. ‘What does this man have over you?’

  ‘He has nothing at all over me. He’s always behaved perfectly correctly.’

  ‘It is never correct to fraternise with the enemy.’

  Lucie turned on her. ‘Well, you and Pépère provide them with food. What’s so correct about that? In fact half the village is making a living off them.’

  Marie Léré shook her head in bewilderment. ‘I don’t know what’s come over you recently. You brush off a good man like Hervé, who’s been besotted with you ever since he was a little boy, and then you stand up for this bestial German when you should be despising him for everything he is and everything he represents. Have you forgo
tten what happened to your great uncle? These precious Boche of yours spread him all over Verdun with one of their artillery shells.’

  Lucie shook her head. ‘That wasn’t the same. This is a different war. We are at peace with the Germans now. Maréchal Pétain…’

  ‘I don’t give a fig for Maréchal Pétain. The Boche are occupying our country, and we don’t want them here. What happens when we are finally liberated? What do you think people will say then?’

  Lucie pursed her lips in an effort to stop them trembling. ‘I don’t care what people will say. And anyway, I’ve promised Hervé that I will give him his answer when the Liberation happens. So that should please you.’

  Marie Léré raised her head incredulously. ‘Do you mean that you are seriously thinking about marrying him after all?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. I’ll only know when it comes to it.’

  Marie Léré walked wearily to the bed and sat down. ‘I don’t understand you, child. I don’t understand you at all. I always thought you were a good girl.’

  ‘I am a good girl, Mémère.’ Lucie was crying again. She hunched down beside her grandmother. ‘I can’t explain it. I just feel happy when I sing. And the German is just like papa, when he’s playing. The music seems to wipe everything else away. It’s wonderful.’ She was aware that she was not telling the whole truth.

  ‘But everything else isn’t away. It’s still there. You can’t ignore what’s going on in the world simply because it’s convenient to you.’

  ‘Why not? Why can’t one forget things occasionally? I love singing. And the major plays the piano so beautifully. It’s not the same thing singing alone.’ Lucie swallowed compulsively. ‘He’s a count, you know. In France he’d be a marquis. Maman explained it to me.’

  Marie Léré turned on her granddaughter. ‘And what does your mother know about anything? And what are you doing anyway, hobnobbing with the aristocracy? Where do you think you come from? That scatterbrain has been putting storybook notions into your head again, hasn’t she? About her grand family connections in Provence? Do you think he’ll marry you, perhaps? Turn you into his countess? Is that what you’re hoping for? A fine sight you’d look, clomping up the aisle in your clogs and your farm clothes, stinking from the midden, and with your nose canted halfway across your face.’