Lisette's List

by Susan Vreeland

  Now, every time I passed under the Gothic arch separating the upper village from the lower village, I looked down, shuddering, so I wouldn’t see the huge red-and-black flag with its ugly swastika hanging against the stone of the arch. Coming home, I had to pass another one on the opposite side of the arch. We had learned on the radio that it was called die Blutfahne, “blood flag.” What depravity had made up such a name? Our arch was no Arc de Triomphe, but it was the only striking architectural feature in Roussillon. To have it desecrated with that reminder of our shameful national defeat was an outrage aimed at crushing our spirit.

  One afternoon after the new year, as Odette and I sat in front of the café, a German patrol marched up the incline, escorted by Constable Blanc in his tall black boots, just like theirs. They stopped at the mairie, to our right. On the broad steps, the constable introduced the officer to Mayor Pinatel. We watched, horrified, while they both stood by, helpless, as the officer ripped de Gaulle’s speech off the wall and, after a torrent of angry words, ordered a trooper to replace it with a poster of Marshal Pétain.

  We turned away from the soldiers goose-stepping their arrogance through place de la Mairie, just to humiliate us. The instant they passed, Louise darted out from her salon, spied de Gaulle’s speech in the street, where it lay crumpled and torn, snatched it up, and hurried back inside. I was astounded at her bravery.

  “It’s one thing for smirking soldiers to march down the Champs-Élysées for a big show, but to come here to our unimportant village and do the same is ridiculous,” I said.

  “Then why?” Odette asked.

  “Just to be bullies,” I said, but privately, I had dark misgivings. They must have had a reason. My mind turned on what it might be. Monsieur Beckett? The two British women? Maurice and Aimé? The paintings?

  “Do you think Bernard escorted them willingly?” she asked.

  “No. He was forced. Did you see his face? He wasn’t proud. He was embarrassed.” Whatever else I thought of him, of that I had no doubt.

  THAT EVENING, JUST BEFORE DUSK, as I was about to ladle out my vegetable soup, there was a knock on my door—loud, rapid, insistent. I froze. It came again. What if it was Maurice telling me that Louise had fallen and needed help? No, Maurice would come right in. I stood just inside the door and heard gruff voices. I opened it to the German officer with the peaked hat who had led the patrol. Next to him on one side stood the soldier who had posted Marshal Pétain’s photo on the wall of the mairie, and on the other, Bernard. My throat went suddenly dry. The Germans burst into the room, and Bernard followed more slowly, with a shamefaced look similar to the one he had worn when he’d escorted the patrol.

  “Sit, please, madame,” the officer said in harshly accented French.

  The soldier pulled out a chair from the table and set it in the middle of the room. Feeling weak in the knees, I sat down. The three stood around me in a semicircle, Bernard farther away than the others.

  The officer wore a small firearm in a holster and a snugly fitting gray-green jacket. Oddly, I wondered what Pascal would have called the color, or what ugly name I would invent for it when this was over. Moldy olive? The large brass buckle on his belt bore the inscription GOTT MIT UNS. I guessed its meaning. What a lie. God certainly was not with them.

  The blond soldier, with his trouser legs tucked inside his boots, had a tubelike black rubber stick attached to his belt by a loop. I couldn’t help but stare at it.

  The officer stood before me with his feet wide apart and drew out from his breast pocket a little black book. He thumbed through the pages.

  “Madame Lisette Roux, I presume.”

  “How is it that you know my name?”

  “Just answer the questions. Are you or are you not Madame Lisette Roux?”

  “I am.”

  I glanced at Bernard for some clue or some support. “Look at me,” the officer ordered. “Only at me.”

  I did, and noticed his oily skin shining in the lamplight.

  “The German state is extremely cultured and values music and art. You would agree?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  He scowled. “We are given to understand that you own some French paintings, which, by right of victory, belong to Germany. Is that true?”

  I turned away and sought a cue from Bernard.

  “Look at me only!” the officer shouted. “The answer,” he resumed softly, “is in your heart, madame, not on his face. Is it true that you own some paintings?”

  “How do you know this?”

  I shot a look at Bernard. He had betrayed me, the bastard.

  “You need not glare at him. Herr Constable did not tell us.”

  “Then how did you know?”

  “I take that to mean that you do own some paintings.” He paused. “Say it.”

  I felt my underarms grow moist. I was silent for some minutes, resisting his trickery.

  “If I may advise you, madame,” the trooper said, “it is not wise to keep Herr Leutnant waiting.” He moved his hand to the top of his stiff rubber bludgeon.

  So he spoke French too.

  “Yes, I own some.”

  “How many?”

  “Three.”

  Herr Leutnant consulted his book. He raised an eyebrow and pursed his lips. “Perhaps my aide can help you remember the number accurately.”

  The aide slid his rubber stick slowly out of the loop, watching me watch it come out, and smacked it hard against his palm, which instantly turned pink.

  “Seven.”

  “Merci,” the lieutenant said, smug and cool. “And now you can tell us where they are.”

  “I don’t know.”

  The lieutenant’s slap came instantly and burned my cheek. Bernard flinched and took a step forward, as if to protect me from another.

  “It’s best not to intervene, Herr Constable.” The lieutenant cleared his throat. “Would you like to amend that, madame?”

  The trooper approached me with his bludgeon raised, and the lieutenant stopped him with a slight gesture of his open palm. “We are not cruel. Her face is beautiful. It would be a shame.… Give her time.”

  This was the moment André had prepared me for, and Bernard had as well. The sting on my cheek continued to burn. I touched it with my trembling hand to try to cool it. Bernard wet a dish towel with water from a pitcher, and the lieutenant let him hand it to me. It seemed a reminder of his advice the night of the ransacking: Take care of yourself. Give the paintings up if you need to. I struggled not to cry. I would not give them tears.

  Herr Leutnant raised his face and sniffed. He turned around and noticed my pot of vegetable soup simmering. He dipped in the ladle, blew on it, and slurped the broth. May God let him burn his tongue, I said to myself.

  “Ah, the French cuisine, so delicate and savory.” He ladled out a bowlful, pulled out a chair, and sat at the table facing me. Waiting for it to cool, he put his feet, in their muddy boots, on a chair to the side and drummed his fingers on the table. When he began spooning the soup into his mouth, I fumed at his sense of entitlement and was outraged again, remembering what the Prussian soldiers had done to Pissarro’s home in Louveciennes.

  “Not bad, madame. What do you call it?”

  “Pistou à la provençale.” I exploded my p’s at him as if they were bullets.

  “Pistou à la provençale,” he repeated, gently mocking me.

  He lit a cigarette.

  “If you refuse to tell me, I will be forced to tell my captain, who has a ravaging hunger for art, and a rough way about him.”

  To give up the paintings just because of a short-lived pain seemed faithless. But how much pain would that bludgeon cause? And what disfigurement? What would André have me do? Let them go. His letter said so. I tried to reconcile myself to that—the loss of Cézanne’s still life, of the girl with the goat on the ochre path, of the Provençal landscape. My heart was breaking.

  “Ah, we see that she is resolute.” He nodded to his aide, who lunged
toward me with his bludgeon raised.

  “The woodpile. A community woodpile.” My throat was raw for no physical reason.

  “I am glad that you understand our position. My captain will be happy to receive them.” He put out his cigarette in the bowl half full of soup and stood up. “Take us there.”

  I sat rooted to the chair. The trooper grabbed me under one arm and yanked me upright. I walked toward the stairs, and the trooper quickly positioned himself in front of them. “May I get my coat?”

  “Let her,” I heard behind me, Bernard’s voice. I turned just in time to see the lieutenant assent.

  I made the walk to the woodpile last as long as I could, thinking of the red roofs of Pontoise, the quarry in front of Montagne Sainte-Victoire, the girl with the goat, absurdly asking her for forgiveness, asking Pascal as well.

  It was nearly dark when I stopped in front of the neatly stacked wood and saw that the enclosure was three-quarters full. The lieutenant held a light, and the trooper went to work lifting off the wood. Bernard stood next to me without helping. Curiously, that was some small comfort. The officer could have ordered him to help. I sensed a silent power struggle. After quite a while, the trooper removed the last of the wood and the kindling and lifted a large piece of canvas.

  There were no paintings, not a single one! Only the blank canvas André must have used to cover them.

  Disoriented and disbelieving, I staggered forward to get a better look, and gasped. “They’re gone!”

  The lieutenant shined his battery torch right in my eyes, blinding me. Tears came suddenly.

  “Who else did you tell?”

  “No one.”

  The lieutenant kicked the kindling. “She doesn’t know,” he grumbled. Disgusted, he jerked the light toward his aide as a sign to leave.

  “We will be in Apt, in case you remember another place where they might be found. If they are ever traced back to you, I assure you that you’ll be sorry. Good night, madame.”

  The three went off downhill, leaving me there and leaving the wood scattered. The paintings were lost. I was lost. I turned toward home, stumbling in the dark to Maurice and Louise’s house instead of my own farther up the hill. I told them through sputtering sobs what had happened, and they insisted that I sleep there that night.

  SANDRINE STOPPED ME IN the street on a Sunday morning not long afterward and told me she had a piece of mail from Germany that had been waiting for me for several weeks.

  “Germany! I’ll get it right now.”

  “We’re closed. It’s Sunday. You’ll have to wait.”

  Impossible. The hours crept torturously. I paced. I shook. I couldn’t sleep. I dared not hope. I could not keep from hoping.

  Early Monday morning, she handed me the envelope. Maxime’s handwriting! He was alive! That was enough for the moment. I held it unopened against my chest as I hastened home.

  It contained one piece of paper, with his letter written in pencil on both sides.

  14 MARCH 1943

  Dearest Lisette,

  I am alive. I am a prisoner in Stalag VI-J, some place called S.A. Lager Fichtenhein in Krefeld, which I ascertain from other prisoners is close to the border with the Netherlands. The shame of being a prisoner, when I think of how André died, fighting right next to me, has prevented me from writing to you. I’ve been afraid that you would not like to hear from the living, only the dead. But I cannot bear to cause you any anguish, not knowing whether or not I am alive. And, just as true, I cannot bear not knowing how you are faring.

  I am completely broken by André’s death. No words can express the sorrow I feel for you. I will have to rely on deeds, if I am ever released and have strength enough to see you—if you will agree to that. I think of you and André every day, a hundred times a day. Sometimes I weep, but that does no good for the other prisoners in my barracks, so I try to control myself.

  I am forced to work in a coal mine for ten hours a day, living two months at a time in a mining camp, with two weeks off for recovery back at Stalag VI-J. In winter I never see daylight, and the cold, damp floor seeps through my worn boot soles. I hate my grimy body, hate myself, in fact. I think of Pascal working in the ochre mine, but he was working for beauty. I am haunted by the thought that every piece of coal I dig may fuel the trains that bring more prisoners. The thing we most fear is not to be healthy enough to work. If we can’t work, they don’t feed us. I am managing, though.

  We are given one sheet of paper, an envelope, a pencil, and a stamp once a week at the permanent barracks to write a letter. There is no provision for letter writing at the mining camp, but all week at the permanent camp, I frame my sentences to my mother and memorize them because we only have fifteen minutes to write. So she won’t worry, I wrote to her that I was going to skip a week in order to write to you.

  To the extent that I am able to pray, I pray for you, and I pray for André. Do I dare to hope that you will pray for me?

  Affectueusement,

  Max

  Alive! Thank God! I wept great tears of rejoicing tinged with sadness. Prison. Deprivation. What had he been forced to do to be alive today? Avoid offending his captors? Show that he was likable so they wouldn’t shoot him for some inadvertent glance or for not being able to work fast enough? Lick a guard’s tall black boots? My imagination went wild. Sleep in mud? Eat ants? What shame had they put him through? Swallowing his own urine? After my encounter with Herr Leutnant, I hated to imagine worse bullying.

  How would André have managed under such treatment if their fates had been reversed? Would he have had the strength to endure? I hated to think of that too.

  I read the letter again, hungering to know how to help Maxime. I took out my list and added, in handwriting jittery with joy,

  13. Do something good for Maxime.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  AN ENDING AND A BEGINNING

  1943–45

  I FELT A WILD NEED TO FLY OVER ROUSSILLON, LIKE BELLA DID in Vitebsk, and shout, “Maxime is alive! My good friend is alive!” But there were five Roussillonnais whose sons had died, and over a dozen in prisoner of war camps. Their names were posted on the wall of the mairie just below PRIVATE ANDRÉ HONORÉ ROUX.

  Nevertheless, containing my joy was impossible. I had to tell someone. I invited Maurice and Louise to come to my house after dinner for sweetbriar coffee, knowing that they could just as well drink that ersatz concoction at their own house. I made a paste of pulverized almonds and acorns and mixed it with some of Geneviève’s milk, a Kooritzah egg, and Maurice’s honey as a sweetener to make a pudding, using a lemon to curdle the milk. It didn’t solidify and was more like lumpy soup, but Maurice said, “Such a delight!” He licked his lips like a little boy, held up his plump index finger, and concluded, “It’s approachable, leaves a pleasant nutty flavor as an aftertaste, and has a personality all its own.”

  With that, I spilled my happy news.

  They both hugged me instantly. “C’est bieng!” Maurice cried.

  Louise said more softly, “Grâce à Dieu.”

  “When I have some yarn ready, can you show me how to knit socks? I want to send him some warm socks.”

  Maurice immediately pulled up his pant legs and kicked out his short calves. “Look! She made these for me before the war, and they still walk well.” He stood up and walked in a circle, showing them off. “Best socks in Roussillon.”

  I laughed, realizing that I hadn’t done so in longer than I could remember.

  “But certainly those aren’t the best shoes in Roussillon,” I said. He had tied the soles onto the uppers with twine and used twine for shoelaces as well. “Wait a minute.” I went upstairs and came back with an armful of shoes. André’s were too narrow, but the one pair of Pascal’s fit.

  “It will be an honor to fill the shoes of the best boules player in the commune. Or at least the man who thought he was the best.” He stood up, pushed out his chest, took the starting position, bent his knees, and pantomimed firing a boule,
running a few steps and pointing where it knocked another imaginary boule out of the way, then raised both arms in victory. “See? I have winner’s shoes. Now I will always be the winner.” A big grin puffed out his round cheeks, and he spread his arms wide. “You and me, we can both be happy today.”

  ALIVE! I COULDN’T STOP saying the word as I unraveled another row of stitches in André’s freshly washed wool pullover. I wanted to be alone and at home when I committed this act of desecration. It seemed so much an ending, an unraveling of our life together, until nothing would be left. Yet as I pulled the unruly brown yarn stitch by stitch, I felt quite sure André would want me to do this. The smell of damp yarn stretched between two ladderback chairs was comforting and cozy, and I hoped each sock would carry those feelings to Maxime.

  Meanwhile, my mind was flooded with questions. Had Maxime been wounded? Was he in good health? Was he well-nourished? Was he in good spirits or in despair? Could he sleep soundly? Did he have any moments of peace? Had his natural affability hardened and become bitter? Would he ever regain his pure love of life?

  I wrote from my heart without censure.

  21 APRIL 1943

  Dear, dear Maxime,

  Thank God you are alive! Imagine the depth and height of my joy at receiving your letter after three years of agony, not knowing. Think of that joy, and never think of shame. Max, understand this—there is no dishonor in being a prisoner or in surviving when another is killed. The outcome of events is not given to our doing. Do not carry the weight of that thought. It does no good. It is false guilt.

  I hate that you have to work in a coal mine. I fear for your health. Please remember with me our beautiful times, you in your immaculate shirts, maroon cravats, sharply creased trousers, and white spats, the picture of health sitting at the Closerie de Lilas, talking about new art. I long for such a day. It will happen again. Receiving your letter has convinced me.

  Pascal’s paintings were not in the woodpile where André wrote that he had hidden them. Did he tell you any other place? I am committed to the core of my being to their recovery. That keeps me in Roussillon. There are some good people here. I am getting by.