Élodie turns to me. “Esclarmonde means ‘light of the world.’”
“And she truly is,” says the priest. “When I told her you were coming with some children, she used up much of her month’s allowance of butter and sugar and eggs to bake something special for the them.”
The barn door squeals as he slides it along its track. An odor of old hay mixed with sheep dung wafts to our nostrils, though there are no signs of sheep. On the far wall, barely visible in the gloaming, written in red paint that has dripped like a blood spatter, is a cross of Lorraine with its one vertical and two crossbars, the symbol of the Free French. Under it is the dot-dot-dot-dash for “V,” representing victory.
“Did Madame Cazenave do that?” Élodie asks, gesturing to the wall.
Abbé Basc nods. “Only yesterday. It was a foolish thing to do. What if the Boche see it? They have an encampment only a few kilometers from here. I suppose anger overcame her. But, pas de problème; she has agreed to paint over it and to do penance for allowing her anger to take hold of her senses. In the meantime, old Monsieur Clérisse has been creating a diversion to keep the Boche away.”
“What sort of diversion?”
Abbé Basc flashes a perky smile. “One that pulls everybody away from the barn and to the other end of the village. You will see tomorrow when the rain stops. It will be a wonderful surprise for the children.”
Élodie gives him an inquisitive look but pursues it no further. Instead, she asks, “What caused Madame Cazenave’s anger?”
“We received news two days ago of a massacre in the Haute-Vienne.”
Élodie looks at me and inhales deeply. “We passed through there two days after it occurred. It was in a commune called Oradour-sur-Glane.”
“Mon dieu! Is it true they killed many women and children? Gathered them in a church and set it afire?”
“It’s true. The animals!”
Abbé Basc makes the sign of the cross, shakes his head, and says, “No, no. No animal loved by Saint Francis would do such a thing. They are human savages, capable of far worse than the most monstrous brute.” He presses the cloths to his chest with one hand and, with the other, pats Mitzi, whom I am carrying on my hip. “To kill innocent children like this! No hell is deep enough!” The priest looks down at the cloths as if he has forgotten what they are for, breathes deeply, and lets a tiny, shuddering cry escape from his lips. Finally, he spreads the cloths on an old wooden table, taking care to keep them far from the can of red paint that sits on one end, and says to Élodie, “For you and the American: altar cloths you can wear like une toge.”
“Yes, a toga,” she replies with a smile.
“They should be quite big enough. And for the older children, some priestly garments: three soutanes, a surplice, two cassocks, a chasuble, plus some of my secular clothes, including two coats. I suggest you separate the boys and the girls—one group can go into the milking room—and tell everybody to strip off their wet clothes and put these on. Madame Cazenave will bring more clothes for the smaller children.”
A flash of lightning is followed, seconds later, by a crack of thunder. Abbé Basc flinches. Rain starts drumming on the roof tiles. From outside the door, I hear rainwater gushing into a metal cistern. In the diminishing light, Élodie ushers the girls into the milking room where she will help them out of their wet clothes and devise ways in which they can wear the new garments. Meanwhile, I do the same with the boys. Giggles and nervous laughter fill the barn. When we are finished with the children, Élodie and I help each other fashion togas from the altar cloths by tying two corners together over one shoulder. With a smile, Élodie asks, “Do you want to wear the embroidered crucifix on the back or the front?”
I laugh. “I think it would be disrespectful to wear it on the back and end up sitting on it.”
Moments later, Abbé Basc returns with Madame Cazenave. She is a tall, slender woman with a kind face and a warm smile. There is no trace of the bitterness that caused her to risk painting anti-German graffiti. She and the priest carry clothes which they distribute to the smaller children. “They are clothes that belonged to my two sons,” Madame Cazenave says. “Now help me carry the wet clothes into the house where we can set them out to dry.”
Along with Abbé Basc and Madame Cazenave, we gather up all the wet clothes and carry them from the barn to the house. The moment we enter the kitchen, we are assaulted by heat emanating from a cast iron stove which is surrounded by four high-backed chairs. “I know it’s June, but I started the stove to dry the clothes.” Madame Cazenave loosens a thin rope from a wall hook and lowers, through pulleys, a rack from the ceiling above the stove. The rack has eight long wooden slats. “Spread the clothes on the rack. What doesn’t fit, drape over the chairs.”
When we finish hanging the clothes, a large puddle sits on the kitchen floor. It grows larger as beads of water slide down the clothes and drop to the floor with little plops. Madame Cazenave steps into an adjoining room and returns with a book tucked under her arm and a basket whose contents are covered by a cloth. Sitting atop the cloth is a stuffed toy. She hands it to Élodie. “Here is un ours en peluche for the little one. How do you call it in English?”
“A teddy bear. But for Mitzi, it’s German name might be better: ein Teddybär.”
“That is appropriate because it’s from the German company Steiff. But we won’t hold that against it.”
She lifts the cloth and shows us two dozen madeleines and says, “For the little one and the other children.”
“Oh, thank you! They’ll be very happy,” says Élodie. “What book do you have there?”
“One the children may enjoy. My sons certainly did. It’s called Le Petit Prince and it’s by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.”
Élodie turns to me. “Saint-Exupéry is a famous writer and aviator here in France. Rumor is, at present, he flies with General Valin’s Free French Air Force.”
“A very courageous man,” says Abbé Basc.
“When I was in England,” Élodie says, “I read his book Terre des hommes which in English is called Wind, Sand and Stars.”
Madame Cazenave frowns, “I don’t know this book of which you speak, but now we should read his Little Prince to the children while they eat their madeleines.”
“Of course. You read in French and I’ll translate into German and English.”
“D’accord.58 But first, in the next room I have set out four kerosene lamps. Help me carry them to the barn. Children often have a fear of the dark.”
When we return to the barn, we distribute the lanterns among the children. Madame Cazenave presents the madeleines and there are muffled cries of joy, but mostly there are tears of gratitude for the unexpected, and unaccustomed, kindness and I am forced to wonder when was the last time they experienced goodness in the world.
Élodie and I sit beside each other on a bench. Madame Cazenave sits in an old, metal chair with red paint stains, while Abbé Basc leans against a creep. Most of the children sit on the barn floor with legs crossed in the manner of children everywhere anticipating a story. A few lay prone on the floor propped on their elbows, hands cupping their chins. I watch the children relish the little cakes, which are shaped like scallop shells, and it makes me smile. Little Mitzi bounces to her feet and offers me a bite of her madeleine. I take the smallest possible nibble and she gives a delighted giggle.
The light from the lanterns illumines the faces of the children, causing their eyes to shine like cats in the night. Not since Élodie and I first met them, have they looked this free of fear, even if, as it turns out, only for a fleeting time.
Élodie announces, first in French then in German, that Madame Cazenave will read them a story about a little prince. She has already asked Aron Klotz to translate for the five Polish children.
In a voice tight with tension (she no doubt is thinking of her sons) Esclarmonde Cazenave begins to read the story in the original French. Almost simultaneously, Élodie translates the story into German a
nd, while Aron further translates it into Polish, Élodie turns to me and repeats the narration in English.
Within moments, the children are transported from the rain-soaked foothills of the Pyrénées, and the grown-up desolation of war, to the clean Saharan desert where a pilot, whose plane has crashed in the sands, encounters a boy with blond hair who says he is a little prince from Asteroid B-612. The children hear how the little prince has traveled a very long way to come to this place and how he asks the narrator about his airplane and what it does and how the narrator says the plane allows him to fly great distances through the air.
“Like an eagle?” asks twelve-year-old Max Jäger.
“Yes, like an eagle, an eagle who can fly over fields and fences,” replies Madame Cazenave. “And over German guard posts, too.”
Élodie adds, “And even fly so high as to soar over the mountains of the Pyrénées with ease.” Her words are translated until every child has uttered a gasp of wonderment and, with rapt attention, has turned back to Madame Cazenave for more. She reads on about how the pilot sketches a sheep, because the boy wants the sheep so it can eat the seedlings of the gigantic baobab trees that threaten to split the boy’s tiny planet to pieces.
“Baobab trees are like the Wehrmacht,” says Max.
Madame Cazenave pauses, looks up at Abbé Basc. Élodie and I exchange knowing glances. “Yes,” says Élodie. “They can be like the Wehrmacht.”
Madame Cazenave continues. She reads to the children how the little prince says sunsets can bring cheer and comfort to a person who is sad, and how the boy’s planet is so small, he can see forty-four sunsets by simply moving a few steps and how the little prince worries the sheep will eat, in addition to the baobab seedlings, his special, unique rose, and how nothing is more important to him than protecting that rose, and how the prince loves the rose, and waters it, and covers her with a glass globe at night, and how on the day the prince leaves his tiny planet, the rose, who loves him, assures him she no longer needs him to water and protect her, but then turns her face away so he will not see her crying.
The barn is pin-drop quiet except for the voices of Madame Cazenave, whose once tense voice has softened, and the even more hushed voices of Élodie and Aron. The lamps cast dancing reflections on the walls which are, in turn, reflected in the children’s eyes. And in those eyes, I see, if only for a short time, yearning memories of rainbows, and big-eyed teddy bears, and princesses with tiaras, and sweet lollipops, and gay balloons, and purring kittens, and long-maned ponies and chin-licking puppies … and mothers’ aprons and fathers’ pipes.
Madame Cazenave reads on about how, in the course of his travels, the little prince visits many planets and many characters: the king who claims to rule over all the stars in the universe but who, in reality, has no subjects including the vain man who wants only to be admired as the finest man on his planet when, in truth, he is the only inhabitant of the planet; the drunkard who drinks to forget the shame of his drinking; the businessman who has no time to answer the little prince’s questions because he is busy counting the stars which he claims to own; and the lamplighter who lives on a planet so tiny there is room for only one lamp which the lamplighter must light every dusk and extinguish every dawn for a total of 1,440 sunsets every twenty-four hours because the planet spins so rapidly.
A twitter of laughter rises from the French children, followed quickly by the children listening in German and even more quickly—because laughter is infectious—by the five children listening in Polish. A rolling laughter that, in itself, draws laughter.
Madame Cazenave lowers her voice to an audible whisper and narrates how, on the 6th planet, the little prince meets a geographer who records information about places. But when the boy tells the scholar about his own planet and his rose, the man says he doesn’t record roses because they are too ephemeral, which deeply saddens the boy.
Again, Élodie and I exchange glances. I feel a vague unease, the grief of love.
Madame Cazenave turns the pages to the final chapters and reads how the little prince finds a huge rose garden and is saddened to find so many flowers that look just like his rose, whom he thought was unique in the world, and how he lies down in the grass and cries and how, as he’s crying, a fox appears, and how the prince asks the fox to play with him but the fox replies that the prince must first tame him.
After translating this passage into German and English, Élodie says to Madame Cazenave, “I’m afraid that doesn’t translate well into English. Please allow me to explain to the American.” She turns to me. “Madame Cazenave used the word apprivoiser which does, indeed, translate to ‘tame.’ But it is not ‘tame’ in the sense meant by the English word. For that, the French word would be domestiquer, meaning to make a wild animal domesticated. But to ‘tame’ in the apprivoiser sense means to make a loving connection.”
“In that case, you may ‘tame’ me whenever you like. I won’t resist.”
Élodie flashes me a warm smile, then, becoming serious, says, “I hope we come across a stray dog that Adrien can ‘tame.’ It would help pull him out of his gloom.”
I am aware of Madame Cazenave watching us. Her eyes are glistening, as if she is about to cry. She turns back to the book and reads how the fox assures the little prince that, by this act of taming, they will need each other, and each will become special to the other; and how the fox tells the prince to re-visit the rose garden to see why his rose, though not unique, is special; and how the prince comes to realize his rose is special because of the love they have for one another; and how, because of that, he asks the pilot to draw the picture of a muzzle for the sheep to prevent it from eating the rose.
As we sit beside each other on the bench, Élodie presses her thigh against mine.
Many of the children, though captivated by the reading, yawn. No doubt, it’s the exhaustion of walking for several days. Madame Cazenave quickly finishes the story by skipping past a few pages to read the ending about how the marooned pilot and the prince discover a well of sweet water in the desert which revives the body and the heart of the pilot; and how, the following day, the pilot returns to the well to find the prince sitting on a wall and how the prince informs the pilot that he will, by the bite of a snake, be returning to his home planet among the stars and how the prince points to the stars above and assures the pilot they will always have a special meaning for him now that a loving friend, namely the little prince, is living among them, and how the pilot will always look up at the stars and hear the sound of many tiny bells and wonder about his friend, and worry if the sheep has eaten the rose.
Several of the children are already asleep. Madame Cazenave and Abbé Basc bid goodnight to those still awake and leave. Élodie and I move about the barn and extinguish the kerosene lamps. We step outside and look up at the sky and see an exuberance of stars splayed across the heavens. The moon is a waning crescent, a mere sliver of a fingernail. A cradle.
Élodie slips her arm around my waist and leans into me. “You seem glum.”
“Just thinking about the ephemeral rose … and all those sunsets.”
“The sunsets?”
“Fourteen hundred and forty in twenty-four hours?”
“Yes. On the lamplighter’s planet.”
“I’m guessing many more than fourteen hundred and forty people saw their last sunset today in this goddamn war.”
Élodie says nothing.
The field is loud with the staccato squeaks and chatter of tree frogs and cicadae mimicking the clamor of the tracks and sprockets of Panzer tanks on cobblestone village streets.
54 Sweetheart.
55 “Let’s go children of the Motherland.”
56 Years later, I learned this was a sculptor named Anna Coleman Ladd who—coincidentally—came from Manchester-by-the-Sea, less than 10 miles from my Gloucester home! The masks were made from gutta percha, a type of latex, overlaid with a thin film of copper, then painted to approximate the man’s original appearance. Ladd also crea
ted a bronze sculpture, called “Triton Babies” in Boston’s Public Garden which I have visited.
57 An anise-flavored apéritif popular in France, especially in the south.
58 Agreed.
Chapter 12
Roasted Chestnuts
The morning after seeing the ship’s doctor, Callie and I have breakfast again in the King’s Court restaurant on Deck 7, then trudge to the gym in the forward part of the ship, stopping several times so I can sit in a deck chair and recover my breath. A light-infused fog hangs over the ocean. The surface respires in long, slow swells. Several decks below, the frothy bow wave fans away from the ship, leaving a long wake. Old tars would have said she has a bone in her teeth. Not far to starboard we see flashes of light flying near the ocean’s surface.
“Seagulls?” Callie asks.
I shake my head. “Not this far out. Probably flying fish trying to escape bluefin tuna. They are natural prey and predator.” We continue along the promenade deck until we reach the outside door leading to the gym. “Before we go in, let’s take a look near the bow,” I say. “Have you ever seen porpoises frolicking?”
“No,” she says. “Is this a delay tactic?”
“Not at all. Let’s go forward and lean over the rail. We’ll probably see some.”
But we quickly learn we can go no further than the observation deck which ends with a V-shaped breakwater many feet aft of the prow. To starboard and port on the observation deck, gigantic spare propeller blades, each much taller than a person, stand upright, gleaming dully in the refracted light like pieces in a Henry Moore sculpture garden.
The Light from the Dark Side of the Moon Page 21