He gives a shrug and a shy smile. “La toilette.”
More rumbling.
Louder, still.
Again, Élodie looks to the sky. Now she sees several flashes of light. It takes her a few seconds to realize the light is the low sun reflecting from airplane canopies. And now comes a low screaming, growing in intensity, like a siren, and she guesses these must be the infamous Stukas that, she’d heard, made a terrifying shriek and she turns to warn the others, but Monsieur Prideaux is already lumbering across the field as fast as his ancient legs and one cane can carry him and the shrieking of the Stukas is louder and people in the column scream and scatter in every direction and there is a crackling of guns and across the field, clods of earth are thrown in the air as the Stukas strafe the field in a ragged line that in seconds will reach the throngs of people in the column and Élodie hears Monsieur Prideaux cry out, “Lucette! Lucette!” and Madame Prideaux turns toward him, and, in that instant, her body erupts in blood, and bits of bone, and flesh, and is thrown several meters through the air before it crashes to the earth. “Lucette! Lucette!” Monsieur Prideaux is almost to his wife when his cane explodes a split second before his body slumps to the earth and his left arm reaches out, hangs in the air for a second or two, then falls to the ground, and now he lies motionless, and Élodie starts into the field after him.
“No, Élodie! No!” cries her father, grabbing her wrist and pulling her down beside him and Madame Bedier as bullets tear into the ground around them, spewing dirt and blood and flesh into the air. It lasts for several long, shuddering breaths, then the bullets stop and there comes a chorus of moaning from the people.
Élodie’s father says, “I must do what I can.”
“Where’s Arlequin?” Élodie cries.
“He must have run off. He’s probably frightened.”
Élodie looks to the woods on the other side of the road, hesitates, then says, “I’ll help you, Papa.” And she is thankful her father has imparted a great deal of medical knowledge to her despite his disappointment that she chose music over medicine.
They start through the crowd. There are at least two dozen dead and wounded. Men. Women. Children. Two babies lie lifeless in their prams. Doctor Bedier comes to a woman who is moaning. “She needs a tourniquet immediately,” he says. “I’ll treat her. You go ahead and triage for me. See if you can decide which ones are too far gone and which ones I should treat.”
“Yes, Papa.”
As she maneuvers her way through the scattered bodies of people and horses and donkeys, the sky has fallen silent. Perhaps the planes have gone away. Up ahead, she hears cries for help. She rushes to the sound and comes to a mother holding her little boy whose severed right arm lies on the ground. The woman looks at her and says, “You! Your father is the doctor. Please bring him here. We need help.”
There is a new shrieking. Rising in intensity.
A screeching from the sky. A stridency.
And from the people, a ululation of horror.
Élodie stares at the woman for a moment, mouth slack. She turns to see if she can locate her father. She sees him about fifty meters away.
The scream of the planes is louder. This time, she sees bombs fall from their shining bodies, fired by the low sunlight.
“Papa!” She starts to run back.
There comes a deafening crump. She is knocked to the ground. More bomb blasts. She sees the large beech tree near the house and barn explode into flames. Moments later there comes a strange pattering, like soft hail on a metal roof. She wrinkles her brow. What can it be? And at once she is horrified to see roasted starlings falling out of the sky all around her. She leaps to her feet. “Papa! Mama!”
As she runs back toward their car, she sees a young woman emerge from the house carrying a bird cage with a songbird inside. But the house and its barn are raging infernos and their appetite for oxygen is so great the bird cage is snatched from the woman’s hand and sucked into the flames the way the tongue of a frog sucks in insects. The young woman can only stand and stare, dumbstruck as the air is tortured with the terrified bellowing of cows and the screaming of horses. And then the inferno sucks her, too, in to its maw.
“Papa! Mama!” Élodie continues to run toward the car. Then she stops abruptly. The car is no longer there. She scans the road and finds it upended on the other side of the road. Beside it, she sees the lifeless bodies of her parents.
Flickering light from the lantern glistens in Élodie tears. “Papa,” she murmurs. “Mama.”
“This is too painful for you,” I say. “Perhaps you should leave the story there.”
“I can’t. I want to leave it at a better place.”
“Of course, but it doesn’t have to be now.”
Élodie is silent for a few moments. Finally, she swigs from the bottle, wipes her lips with the back of the hand holding the bottle, and says, “What could I do? I couldn’t give them a proper burial on my own, so I begged a local farmer to help me. He was very kind. He got some others to help, and we had a very quick service the next day. Every time I think about his kindness, it makes me cry. Amid all that hatred and fear, amid all that broken humanity, there was this one man who managed to find compassion in his soul. His name was Aristide Charnay. When this fucking, goddamned war is over, I will try to find him. I swear it! And I will kiss him on the cheeks, over and over, until he can stand it no longer!”
I am afraid to ask, but I must. “Your dog? Arlequin?”
Élodie squeezes her eyes shut, shakes her head slowly. “I searched for hours. I was in a daze. I even cried out to God and asked Him, if he was going to take my parents, at least leave me Arlequin because he’s only a dog and he’s innocent and he’s so very vulnerable and he can’t be blamed for all this the way we humans can. But I could never find Arlequin. The poor little guy must have been so frightened. Maybe he just didn’t trust humans anymore. Even me. Or maybe he was dead under some rubble.”
I put an arm around her shoulders and pull her toward me. She sinks back into my chest. She looks back and up at me. “Sometime in the days after that—I can’t say exactly where or when; it’s all a blur—I heard a radio broadcast by General de Gaulle. He appealed to French people to join him in London to continue the fight. That became my single-minded focus. Eventually, I walked all the way to Granville. Perhaps four hundred kilometers. It took almost two weeks. I thought the blisters on my feet would never heal.”
“Granville?” I ask.
“It’s a small coastal commune north of Saint-Malo. I went there because I was afraid the Germans might already be in Saint-Malo. I’d once given a concert there and I knew it had good port facilities they would want. But I had to get to the coast.”
“To escape by water?”
She nods. “I found a fisherman from Chausey who agreed to take me there. It’s a little island about twelve kilometers off the coast. We had to go at night, without lights, except for the moon, for fear the Germans were in the area. From Chausey, another fisherman took me to Jersey. From there, I managed to get to Guernsey. Of course, those two islands are British, but that didn’t mean I was safe. They were expecting the Germans to invade at any moment. In fact, they had already evacuated almost half the population.”
“So, you joined the evacuation?”
Élodie shakes her head. “No. By the time I got there, they had a priority system for who got on the boats and, of course, French refugees were not one of the categories.”
“So how did you get to England?”
She gives a guilty smile. “I became a passagère clandestine.” She pauses, wrinkles her brow. “What is it in English? Oh, yes, ‘stowaway.’ I hid in a lifeboat. The crossing was very rough, and I became seasick. But I was afraid to crawl out of the lifeboat which had a canvas cover. Eventually, we arrived at a port I later discovered was Weymouth. From there, I took a train to London.”
“How did you afford a ticket?”
“I had taken all the money my father ha
d on him, which was quite a lot. Both French and British, because he used to travel to London often to give talks. Of course, much of it went to bribing fishermen, but I still had a lot left and, if I was unable to find people willing to take French francs, I could always use the pound sterling.”
“So, you got to London.”
“Yes. And I went straight to General de Gaulle’s headquarters near Saint James Park and got a job.”
“Just like that?” I ask.
“They needed secretarial help. I was willing to do anything. I even entertained with my violin when the general had guests for dinner.”
“They made a musician as talented as you do clerical work and entertain?”
“It was the war effort. Besides, it wasn’t as bad as all that. I ate with them at the main table. Even sat next to Churchill once.”
“What was he like?”
“He kept bumping my knee with his. And his cigars stank. And he drank. He surely did drink.”
“So far you haven’t told me how you became a resistance fighter.” With my thumb, I carefully wipe the tears from under her eyes.
She touches my wrist and caresses it with a single finger. The moon slides out from behind some clouds and slants heavily through large cracks in the barn’s siding. Moonlight sizzles on the tines of a pitchfork. “That started almost exactly two years later. May of nineteen-forty-two. They encouraged me to join the SOE.”
“SOE?”
“The Special Operations Executive. It is part of the British MI9 which is their military intelligence people.”
“So, you became a spy?”
“In a way. The primary mission of the SOE is to help British prisoners of war and downed airmen escape out of France. But they also have a small French unit, F Section, which I joined. Its purpose, as they said in the briefing, is to help start up, train, and arm local resistance groups to perform acts of sabotage and be at the ready to support an eventual invasion. They sent us to a tiny village called Arisaig on the Inverness coast of northern Scotland. We stayed in a small country house for several weeks and were taught how to survive behind enemy lines. We studied and practiced everything: rock climbing, finding our way in unknown territory, making it through an obstacle course, hunting, canoeing, judo.”
“From what I’ve seen, you learned well.”
“But that was only the beginning,” says Élodie. “After Arisaig, we were sent to R.A.F. Ringway, near Manchester, for jump training because we would be parachuting into France.”
“You became a parachutist?” I ask, astonished.
She smiles. “Did you think you were the only one in this barn who’s crazy enough to jump out of an airplane?”
“Were you nervous?”
“A little. But then I realized I had nothing to lose, so it became easier.”
“When did you jump into France?”
“Autumn of forty-two.”
“Tell me about it,” I say, handing her the third bottle of wine.
Tempsford, England. September 24, 1942.
Carrying a parachute on her back, Élodie walks past the squat, heavy blockhouse of a control tower, and across the grass field of RAF Tempsford, a secret airfield about seventy kilometers north of London. A slight breeze cools her cheek. Dense moonlight reflects off the canopies and propellers of idle aircraft: Vickers Wellingtons, big Handley Page Halifax bombers and several Lysanders. Smoke filters back to her from the cigarette of one of the other women. There are four of them. They are among the first women to be dropped into France by the SOE.
Élodie tries to control her shaky legs as she climbs awkwardly aboard a Whitley bomber, a two-engine, twin-rudder plane known not so affectionately as the “flying coffin.” With a crew of five plus the four women, they are soon juddering across the field and then with a roar of engines they lift over the bordering trees. The plane banks and a slash of moonlight streaks across the bulkhead. Élodie sits on the floor of the fuselage, her back supported by the packed parachute which she has jammed against the fuselage wall. Her feet almost stretch to the opposite bulkhead. She reaches behind her to touch the parachute. She can feel the vibrations of the plane’s metal skin deep in her bones. None of the other women, all similarly positioned, speak. Once more, she reaches behind her to touch the parachute. And, for a third time, she reviews in her mind that morning’s task of packing the parachute: check the rigging lines, lay out the yards of canopy silk on the long table, precisely arrange the folds of cloth, feed the rigging lines into their holding straps, pack the pilot chute, adjust the harnesses. It must be perfect if she is to live through the drop and, after running over the steps one more time in her mind, she satisfies herself she’s done everything properly.
It is almost two hours later when a man emerges from the cockpit and announces they will soon be over her target. Élodie reaches behind her to touch the parachute pack yet again. The man opens the trap door in the floor of the fuselage and Élodie hears the wind screeching by. And she hears the roar of the engines. She cannot see the ground. Everything is black for several moments. Then the moon appears from behind clouds and she can see vaguely outlined forms of trees and fields below. She reminds herself to push forward enough for the folded parachute to clear the back edge of the hole. She remembers a woman who failed to do this in training, got tilted forward, and broke her nose on the opposite rim of the jump hole.
The man yells, “Go!”
Élodie pushes forward and drops through the hole. A breathless shiver runs through her loins and stomach. The parachute opens, and she is violently jerked upwards. And suddenly, the rumble of the plane’s engines grows distant and she floats earthward with the only sound a barely discernible silken whisper of air across the parachute, like the sound of a bridal train sweeping a dance floor. Below her, the serpentine bends and loops of the river Lot glitter like a silver necklace carelessly dropped on the bedroom floor. She looks up and sees moonlight illuminating the giant mushroom of her parachute. Who can see her from the ground? Only the people secretly slated to receive her? Or others? Germans? A dog barks some distance away. Now, in the moonlight, she sees she’s coming down into a large, fallow field. She knows it is west of Cahors in the South of France. The field is bordered by stately van Gogh cypresses the halves of whose thin, conical shapes are moonsilvered bright. A pinpoint of light wavers at the edge of the field, then starts to bounce toward the spot where she’ll be meeting the earth, as though someone is running with it. She hits the ground with a thud and stumbles forward several steps before falling to her knees and wrestling the parachute under control. She closes her eyes briefly and whispers, “Merci, mon ange dans ciel.”30
Two people appear at her side. “Come quickly,” says a man of about sixty in French. “And bring the parachute.”
A woman of about the same age says, “We must bury it.”
They turn and rush toward the edge of the field. Élodie struggles close behind, her legs still stiff from being crammed in the airplane.
Élodie hands the nearly empty bottle of wine back to me, draws the back of her hand across her lips, and says, “They were wonderful and courageous, Monsieur and Madame Lemieux. They hid me for two days until two British pilots were delivered to us through the underground railway. This was why I was dropped into France in the first place. I was to be one of several who escort downed Brits and Americans into Spain from where they are guided to Portugal and eventually back to England.”
“Sounds like a tall order. How will you manage it?”
“I grew up in the Ariège. I know the area. And, by the way, that’s where we’re headed.”
“You’re escorting me to Spain?”
“That’s the way it has to be.”
I stare at her. It feels like there’s a tiny hummingbird caught in my throat. I say nothing. We are startled by a sudden movement. A mouse scampers through a shaft of moonlight, followed instantly by the pounce of a cat. For a few seconds, there are tiny animal cries. Then silence.
; Élodie takes a deep breath. Lowers her head. Wipes a tear from under her eye.
“You’re crying,” I say. I draw her to me. “What is it? Is it the mouse?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then, what?”
She touches my cheek with the back of her hand. “Wine makes me weepy.”
“It’s more than the wine. A sadness came over you.”
“A short time ago, I learned that Monsieur and Madame Lemieux were discovered by the Milice and summarily executed. They were such a sweet, old couple. Mon dieu, I hate this fucking, goddamned war!”
“The Milice?”
“French militia. They work with the Boche.”
I hold her closer. We fall silent for several long moments before finally Élodie asks, “Is there more wine in that bottle?”
The bottle standing by my hip is still half full. I hand it to her. As she lifts the bottle to take a long draught, it catches a shaft of light. The refracted redness of the wine brushes her cheek, giving her a flushed look. She takes a second mouthful, coughs once, and says, “The others won’t be back for hours.”
There’s that hummingbird fluttering in my throat again!
She presses closer to me and touches my hand. Our breathing becomes heavy. Moments later, she touches my knee. Then my thigh. “Yes?” I ask.
She nods. “Yes.”
I embrace her.
“Wait,” she says.
“What?”
Élodie’s right thumb and forefinger tremble as she unbuttons her shirt. Then, pausing, with a demure glance at me, she reaches into her rucksack and pulls out a vial of perfume. She opens it, shakes a few drops into her hand and rubs it between her breasts. “To cover the stench,” she whispers as she leans back into my arms.
A release of Nuit de Longchamp wafts from her now exposed breasts and I take in an aroused breath, and a whisper of wings stirs the air in the rafters, and the swallows flit and unspool ribbons of flight around each other among the roof beams, under the roof, and Élodie and I lie back onto a bed of straw, and I feel the softness of her in the sparse peach fuzz on her arms and breasts that glistens in the moonlight, and in the delicacy there is roundness by the soft light of the lantern, and a coyness and yearning and tenderness and breathlessness, and there is fragrance, and we make love with yesses and ouis, ouis and yesses, and there is wetness and dewiness, and there is a blessedness and a deepness and a devoutness, and there is giving and receiving, and receiving and giving, and soon there is a stillness and a calmness and a sacredness and a sereneness in the wash of moonlight, and we lie together, arms wrapped around each other, and I breathe in her fragrance and she lays her head on my chest and we stay like that until we drift off to sleep. And when we wake, she wraps her arms around me and tucks her nose in the hollow of my neck, and says, “I love snogging with you after we make love.”
The Light from the Dark Side of the Moon Page 10