Lisette's List

by Susan Vreeland

  I could not believe that this was happening. It was someone else sitting here in a daze, half-hearing, half-breathing, declaring impetuously that there had been a mistake.

  Monsieur Bonhomme took my hand and held it between his thick palms. “No words can express how deeply grieved I am. I will do everything within my power to help you. Please, call me Aimé.”

  After Aimé’s comment, Constable Blanc could find nothing to say other than what the mayor had said. “I’m sorry, madame.” But unlike the mayor, he had the courtesy or the courage to look at me directly. His face was pinched with what I took to be genuine sympathy.

  I, also, found no speakable words. It was all I could do to stand upright again and watch them fumble their way out the doorway into the angry wind and then to push the door closed against their sad errand.

  I HEARD MYSELF HOWL, louder than the mistral, the ugly sound ricocheting off the walls, hammering the truth. I was that banshee, half-crazed, ferocious, with rage in my chest so fierce I thought I would die.

  “André! Couldn’t you have helped yourself? Couldn’t you have stayed out of danger? Couldn’t you have been more careful?” Foolish questions: it was war.

  “And God. What kind of a God are you? You could have prevented this. You could have led him to a safe place. But you didn’t. You didn’t.”

  Blinded by tears, I stumbled upstairs in a stupor, threw myself onto his side of the bed, and held his pillow hard against my chest. I sobbed my throat raw, imagining André’s last moments, the raging battle, his disbelief that he’d been hit, his desperate call for help, his struggle to stay alive, the loneliness of dying. Was Maxime with him? Could André speak? Could he see the sky? Did he suffer long?

  Horrible pictures battered at me until, exhausted, I felt sleep mercifully take me. I woke to a shutter banging like gunshot, and reality. Light pierced the narrow space between the shutters, bringing the recognition that a new day had dawned, a day that proclaimed that I was a war widow at twenty-three. It took mental effort to acknowledge that; it took physical effort to get out of bed and go downstairs, famished. No bread in the panetière; the walk to the bakery had been aborted. The need to live kept grinding convulsively.

  Catching sight of the bare walls took me by surprise. There was that to deal with—the missing paintings. But what did paintings matter when I had lost the man I loved?

  I paced around the salle weeping, railing at the war, the Germans, depravity, duty, patriotism. How could I think of anything other than André? My mind cried his name continually. The claustrophobia of four blank walls pressed in on me. I went outside to André’s workshop. The wind had taken no notice of the magnitude of this day. With neither sympathy nor respect, it had blown the canvas off his tools, which lay neatly on the shelf—small and large V-gouges and U-gouges, narrow and wide chisels, concave and convex chisels, small and large mallets, sharpening stones, files, rulers, hammers, clamps, miter box—the tools that had bought Pascal the paintings, had built my new crockery cabinet, and had provided our bread. I picked them up one by one to touch what André had touched, hoping that they had been burnished by his soul. Sharp, every one of them, and cold as death.

  I imagined his hand grasping the narrow U-chisel, his long index finger pressing it down along the wood to release a perfectly curled ribbon, but I could not make my eyes travel up his arm to see his face. We had used those ribbons and shavings as kindling. Would that I had kept just one.

  Back inside, I spotted his woolen cap hanging on the peg by the door. I buried my face in it to get the smell of him, then held it in my palm upside down, trying to remember where he had come from when he hung it there the last time. I was dumbfounded. I could not bring it to mind.

  Carrying the cap around the room like a sacred relic, I brought it into the light of the window and found a hair in the inner band. I plucked it off. Something of him, alive once. I sucked it between my lips and swallowed it, choking, forcing it down.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  LAMENTATIONS

  1940

  THE SOLE OF MY LEFT SHOE SPLIT FROM THE UPPER, FLAPPING and breaking away more as I ascended the stairs to the church for my own sad errand.

  The abbé Autrand, Father Marc, suggested a Low Mass for the standard offering of eight hundred francs. My good intentions were shattered. I emptied out of my drawstring bag sixty francs. It would not have mattered to André at all if he didn’t have a funeral mass. It was for me, an attempt to acknowledge God, that I offered a fourth of the money he had put into the olive jar.

  Father Marc stared down at the coins in my palm a moment longer than necessary.

  “If the government sends me some compensation, I’ll bring you something more.”

  “This will be sufficient since there will be no interment.”

  IT FELL TO THE mayor’s wife to tell a few key people discreetly. From the moment Madame Pinatel told the first person, I pictured the news flying through the village on bat wings, each person flitting through the lanes in order to be the teller rather than the told.

  Maurice and Louise, his wife, burst through the doorway without knocking. I fell into his soft bosom, and he held me there, crooning lamentations as Louise rubbed my back in circles.

  “Do you know how he died?” he asked.

  “Maurice! What a thing to ask.”

  “It’s all right to ask, Louise. No, I don’t know. I probably never will.”

  I showed them the letter. Louise wept openly, Maurice silently, biting his lip. Seeing them so broken up brought on a new wave of my own tears. They both showered me with comfort, commendations of André, and generous assurances of their support.

  Maurice’s thick eyebrows struggled to reach each other over the bridge of his nose. “I will be devastated if this means that we’ll lose you, our gaie Parisienne,” he said. His pout, normally put on for humor, was genuine. “Can you find some reason to stay?”

  “Yes. For a time.” I glanced around the room at the barren walls. “The paintings.”

  Louise followed my gaze. “The paintings!”

  Maurice turned in a circle, his feet splayed outward. “Where are they?”

  “André hid them.”

  “Don’t you go looking for them until we win this war and every German is routed out,” said Maurice. “They might find them and confiscate them. Leave them hidden.”

  “Win? We’ve already lost.”

  “Only the battle. Not the war. De Gaulle’s words.”

  To my surprise, an elfin smile stole across his face. “Better for us—the paintings hidden,” he said. “It will keep you here longer. Besides, Roussillon is safer than Paris.”

  I knew he was right—about the paintings and about Roussillon. “I have to go to Apt tomorrow, Maurice. My shoe broke,” I told him.

  “The sitting-in will be tomorrow, Saturday,” Louise said. “Maurice will take you today.”

  “A special trip, when petrol is so scarce?”

  “We’ll go now,” Louise declared. “I know a good shoe shop.”

  Ridiculous, a broken shoe, when it was my heart that had shattered. A splintered sole was nothing compared to a splintered soul.

  “Once Pascal told me that when something changes your life, you remember every detail. Does that mean I’m going to remember this pitiful old shoe?”

  “Let’s hope not. Instead, let’s hope you remember the love we feel for you,” Louise said, and with that, we set off for Apt.

  THE NEXT MORNING, LOOKING DOWN at my new shoes, I tried to settle the tumult of emotions enough to receive people at the sitting-in. Custom here dictated that on the day before the funeral mass, every Roussillonnais stopped his work for an hour to view the body in the house where the deceased person lived, but in the event that there was no body, only a government document to put on the table, what then? Odette said some people might come anyway.

  She sat with me all afternoon, a solid presence I leaned on as though she were my mother, while she altered a black d
ress of her own to fit me. I felt uncomfortable about letting her. What if she would need it later for herself?

  “When I married André, I saw no heartbreak on the horizon, no longing for what I didn’t have, no end to our happiness. Now I see no end to sadness.”

  She stitched silently for a while. “There will come a time when your life will be full again, and you will look back on this as though it happened to someone else.”

  “I can’t imagine ever feeling that way. I can’t imagine living without gloom.”

  “A moment here, a moment there, even just mildly pleasant moments, and you will stitch them together into a pleasant life.”

  A deep stillness descended over both of us, over her conviction and my fragility.

  “Before anyone arrives,” she said, “I have to tell you, even at the risk of making you sadder. I can’t keep it in. Our Michel is alive.”

  “Alive!” The word struck the air like a gong. I hugged her. How could I do otherwise? “That’s wonderful!”

  “We received a letter earlier this week. I wanted to shout it to the village, but that would not be kind to others who haven’t heard from their sons, so we have kept it to ourselves.”

  “Where is he? Do you know?”

  “In southwest England, at a recovery camp. He was rescued at Dunkerque. He and his friend buried themselves in sand up to their heads for protection from bombers strafing the beach while they waited for their call to enter the sea. He described long columns of men wading far out in choppy water at night. Imagine, Lisette. They had fought through three weeks of retreat, had gone without sleep and without food and water, but as they came to the beach, they kept their ranks and obeyed commands. There was no jostling for a place in the queue. Apparently, it was all orderly and calm. He waited in freezing, chest-high water for hours, until he was pulled aboard a fishing boat and ferried to a ship.”

  “And his friend too?”

  Odette pinched her bottom lip between her teeth. “When he turned around in the sea to find him, he was gone.”

  My mind shifted to André’s friend. Maxime. What of him? Gloom set in again.

  SOON, ODETTE’S DAUGHTER, SANDRINE, whose brother, Michel, would come home someday, and Madame Pinatel, the mayor’s wife, came to pay their respects. Then Mélanie brought two jars of canned cherries from their trees and a bag of raisins. Aloys Biron, the butcher, brought a large salami. Most unexpectedly, Madame Bonnelly, a stout woman with thick arms whom I had never met, brought a gratin d’aubergines, an eggplant-and-tomato pie garnished with bread crumbs.

  “Keep up your strength, dear,” she said.

  The smithy, Henri Mitan, came to the door still wearing his ash-smeared apron, fumbling with his wool cap. The index finger on his left hand was only a stub, purple and puckered at the tip.

  “I-I just want you to know, he luh-luh-loved making that …” He swallowed as though he had a peach pit in his throat, and the rest of the sentence burst out in a flood of sputtered syllables. “That outhouse for you, madame. He wanted the hinges just so.”

  “Would you like to see it?”

  “I wuh-wuh-would be honored, madame.” He bowed to me, or maybe his back was permanently bent from years of work at his anvil.

  I opened the courtyard door, and he went to take a look. After quite a few minutes, he came back, struggling to get the words out. “A g-good carpenter, and a good man. Merci. Merci, madame.”

  He noticed the broken window latch on the table. “Will you allow me to make you new ones and put them on the shutters?”

  He asked the question without a flaw.

  “I would be grateful, monsieur.”

  He bowed again as he backed out the door.

  His manner amused us. We shared a brief lightness. Maybe this was one of those moments, one tiny stitch. Kindness can speak when words cannot.

  I realized that even inside the simplest exterior, there was drama and tragedy and courage. André had never mentioned Henri’s stammer, nor his finger. Perhaps a village rather than a city was the right place to discover a laborer’s humanity, and a husband’s grace.

  THE NEXT DAY, SUNDAY, the villagers gathered outside our house for the processional to the church. My house, I supposed I should call it now. Ownership meant ties to this place, yet through the leaden atmosphere I could not see any future other than the gray of solitude and the sudden bursts of orange when grief flamed.

  Odette and Louise sat inside the house with me. Later Mélanie came in wearing a tiny pillbox hat, small enough to show off the new permanent wave Louise had given her.

  The garde champêtre, Bernard Blanc, was the first man to arrive, befitting his position as constable of the commune, I supposed. In tall black boots, such as an army officer might wear, and a well-tailored black jacket, he took up a post at the side of the room and stood erect and formal, shoulders squared, chin pulled in, as if to give the event some military dignity.

  Aimé Bonhomme and Mayor Pinatel arrived together soon after.

  “Pascal’s paintings!” Aimé said in alarm, looking at the walls and then turning to me.

  “The paintings, madame. Where are they?” Monsieur Pinatel demanded.

  With the eyes of the three men upon me, I was able to lie without hesitation. “I do not know.”

  Aimé drew his eyebrows together in genuine concern; the mayor’s eyes darted around the room, his back stiffening; the constable, cool and dignified, fastened his eyes on me and didn’t look at the walls. They stood like a tribunal, with Constable Blanc, the tallest, in the middle.

  Father Marc entered, wearing his funeral cape, and invited us to follow him to the church, downhill from the house. Between mournful peals of the church bell, I heard the old men shuffling out of the café. The solemn tolling disturbed me, so different from the jubilant ringing on Christmas Eve, so slow that I thought the bell ringer had fallen asleep, as slow as Pascal’s last intermittent breaths, a year earlier; but then came the peal again. As we approached the church, I felt the vibration stronger in my chest. Its doleful knelling sounded an unnecessary announcement: Your life will be different from this day forward.

  What was I to do with it now, my one not-so-precious life?

  My new shoes clapped against the church steps, embarrassing me. They had straw uppers that wouldn’t last and wooden soles that, regretfully, would. All leather had been appropriated for the war effort.

  Standing next to Father Marc at the church door, I imagined that people saw me as a figure of the outside world portending sorrow for Roussillon. Everyone passed with downcast eyes, all the men except the constable, who looked at me as though there were words on the tip of his tongue that he held back, all the women except Louise, who raised her chin minutely, encouragement that I should do the same. They had all come to mourn something more than André, the first Roussillonnais to fall to German guns. They were here in recognition that the war had touched their village. My own sorrow spilled over to the wives, mothers, and sisters who would come to know the same sorrow as mine.

  Other than the white daisies from Mélanie’s porch laid across the cotton-and-lace altar cloth, the interior of the church and its larger-than-life crucifix gave me little comfort. Exaggerated spikes pierced Jesus’s hands and feet, and his imploring expression, as if asking, “My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?,” was more pitiful than inspiring. Nevertheless, my heart burned at the agony of his abandonment and suffering, and my eyes flooded for him, for me, for the sickened world.

  The rickety kneelers were in a wretched state, worn raw and splintery. Never having been in the church, André would not have thought to repair them, had it not been Pascal’s last request. Now how long would Roussillon have to wait?

  For André to go from creating carved frames for magnificent paintings by well-known Parisian artists to repairing decoratively tooled chairs in the dining hall of the Palais des Papes in Avignon and then to refurbishing the kneelers in this little provincial church might seem like a heartless downward spir
al, but André had not looked at it that way. On the surface, he might have seen it as a promise to the man who had loved and raised him, but I knew it went deeper. He would have found satisfaction in doing good in the village of his ancestors.

  A plaster Jeanne d’Arc stood forlorn in a corner, lost in her armor, holding a stanchion from which hung a fleur-de-lys flag, the effect deplorable compared to her glorious mounted statue in gold on rue de Rivoli, opposite the Louvre. Oh, for even a whisper of the voices she had heard clear as a clarion call, to give me guidance.

  How was I to manage?

  Father Marc recited from Lamentations, “ ‘The joy of our heart is ceased; our dance is turned into mourning,’ ” as an introduction to his prayers for André’s soul. At the mention of André’s name, tears flooded my eyes. If only I didn’t hear André, André, André echoing from all sides, I might be able to pretend it was just a regular mass on any old Sunday. It was all a wash of words anyway, only one statement of which I could grasp—that trials bring humans closer to God.

  Then Father Marc launched into a patriotic oration. “Let us not forget that the people of Roussillon have been blessed. In the Great War of our fathers, no bombs dropped on our village. There were no explosions here. No cries. No houses toppled. No ranks of German soldiers marching up rue de la Poste. Let us pray that God will spare Roussillon again—”

  “Amen,” I heard Constable Blanc say behind me.

  “And further, that He will guide us in our prayers for our French prisoners of war. Daily, hourly, let us pray that Allied troops will be victorious over the forces of evil and, though the situation seems grim today, that they will eliminate them from our beloved fatherland.

  “We Roussillonnais have struggled and united before—against locusts and blight, flood and drought—and we will unite again against human locusts, putting aside all of our petty resentments in order to love our neighbors as ourselves, as our Lord Jesus commanded.”

  I wondered—Did Father Marc not consider Germany to be our neighbor?