A Good Death

by A Good Death (retail) (epub)

  ‘More likely so that they learn what is valuable, in order to carry it off to Germany,’ Henri replied cynically.

  One officer was seated at the desk with another, wearing an eyepatch, standing behind him. The residents of Bonnemort lined up in front of him, as if for a family photograph. Madame Ariane and Henri encompassed the group at either end; in the middle stood the aunts, radiating a haughty indignation, refusing to look at the Germans. Micheline and Florence also lowered their eyes, each of them clutching a child. Suzie shrank into the comforting softness of Micheline’s belly, her shoulders wedged just below her bosom. Sabine, Suzie observed, like Madame Ariane, stared boldly ahead. The lieutenant took the bundle of their papers and placed it before the major, who examined each one.

  ‘De Cazalle, Ariane? De Cazalle, Marguerite?’ He looked up after each name, while Madame Ariane indicated its bearer. ‘De Cazalle, Sabine? Ollivier, Suzanne? Menesplier, Henri? Menesplier, Micheline? Menesplier, Florence? Veyrines, Odette?’ He spent some time examining the documents, then slapped the last one down.

  ‘Who is the owner of this property?’

  ‘My stepdaughter, Sabine de Cazalle.’

  The major spoke in German. Madame Ariane replied in the same language. Suzie realised that she was the only other person, apart from the lieutenant, who understood what was being said.

  ‘And your husband?’

  ‘He is dead.’

  ‘Who is the other child?’

  ‘She’s the daughter of a friend of mine who became ill with tuberculosis; she’s been living with us for several years now.’ He picked up Suzie’s card again. ‘And where was she born?’

  Suzie held her breath. This was the first time her story had ever really been tested.

  ‘In St Sever, Pas-de-Calais, in 1931.’

  ‘And this is your farm manager?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Are there any other family members?’

  Without hesitation Madame Ariane replied, ‘The sons of Mr Menesplier are conscripted workers in Germany.’

  The major folded his hands on the pile of documents. He was wearing black leather gloves, even indoors. ‘We found some interesting things in our search of your property,’ he remarked.

  Suzie felt Madame Ariane beside her stiffen.

  ‘Do you not want to know what we noticed in particular? A car, a fine car, Hispano-Suiza 1937.’

  Still no reply from Madame Ariane.

  ‘What do you say?’

  ‘There’s nothing to say. It’s my car and it rests on blocks because I have no petrol to run it. It hasn’t been on the road since 1940.’

  ‘From now on the house is ours. Neither you nor your family will enter. The garden, the park, the lake are ours also. Please instruct your people they are to keep strictly to their own areas. There will be a curfew from eight p.m. to eight a.m.’

  ‘The cows are milked at six every morning,’ Madame Ariane said.

  ‘They must be milked at eight.’

  ‘Cows are milked every twelve hours. A twelve-hour curfew does not allow time for the milking,’ she insisted.

  ‘Very well,’ he said indifferently. ‘Eight p.m. to six a.m, for the sake of the cows.’ He obviously could not care less for the cows. Nevertheless, Suzie felt a small surge of triumph at the two hours won. ‘The car also we shall use,’ he finished.

  The lieutenant was handing back their papers.

  ‘May we go?’

  ‘You may.’

  Suzie began to turn before Madame Ariane indicated to them they could leave. She told herself she must be careful not to show that she understood what they said. No one noticed this time because, as the rest of them turned, the major spoke again, addressing Madame Ariane directly. ‘You will return at eight for dinner.’

  Madame Ariane stopped and looked back at the major. Suzie, too, halted with her and for the first time examined the German closely. He had risen and was standing by the desk, not wearing his cap, which rested on the table beside him. He looked very fine in his black uniform, she had to admit, tall and frightening. He was not an old man, for his hair was thick and smooth and dark. He had a long thin tapir’s nose, golden-brown eyes, placed too close together. He did not smile. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, about him that was … Suzie sought what she meant … Friendly. Men usually appear polite to women, kindly to children, even if they do not care about them. This man did not bother with even a pretence of good will. He did not like Frenchwomen or children.

  What would happen, she wondered, if these men, her countrymen, who spoke her language, discovered who she was? She had no doubt that it would be something terrible. She would certainly be removed from Bonnemort and from Madame Ariane, who was her only link with Maman and Papa. If she were taken away to one of the camps that they used to speak about with horror in Clermont Ferrand, how would her parents find her when the war was over, as Madame Ariane promised it soon would be? The threat lay in Sabine, whose power over her, absolute since her arrival, was now made immediately dangerous. Even the most trivial act, interpreted as disloyalty, could arouse Sabine’s bullying, a subtle combination of sulking, denial of friendship, taunts, threats and sly physical persecution. Now these trials, which she had lived with daily, seemed nothing in comparison with denunciation to the Germans.

  When Sabine understood that Madame Ariane was to dine with the officers, she exploded with rage. Suzie could not work out whether she was infuriated because her stepmother was being awarded a privilege which should somehow have gone to her, or whether, by sitting at table with the German officers, Madame Ariane was collaborating.

  ‘Well watch them, to see what’s going on,’ Sabine decided. ‘We can’t,’ Suzie objected, in alarm. ‘We’re not allowed to go into the house. We have to stay in the tower.’

  ‘She just says that, so we shan’t see what she’s doing.’

  ‘No, no, the officer said …’

  ‘You understood what he said?’

  ‘Yes,’ Suzie admitted reluctantly.

  ‘That’s good. We shall understand what they say as well as see what they do.’ As always, Sabine’s will overpowered Suzie’s.

  It was not difficult for them to enter the house from the upper storey of the tower, to creep down the stairs and to hide. It was made easier when they discovered that the batman had prepared the dinner table in the blue salon, which had a gallery. Sabine led Suzie up the spiral staircase while the servant was out of the room. At eight o’clock they were lying flat on the floor of the gallery, with a God’s-eye view directly onto a round table laid for three.

  They heard footsteps and the major and lieutenant entered, preceded by Madame Ariane. The major took Madame Ariane’s usual place at the head of the table. She sat on his right and the lieutenant sat opposite her, with a view out of the window. There was silence while the batman placed in front of each of them a bowl of thin vegetable soup. Sabine nudged Suzie as he stood back and wiped his thumb, sticky from the soup plate, on the seat of his trousers. Suzie resolutely refused to look at her, keeping her eyes fixed on the three figures below them. In that way she might prevent Sabine from starting an irresistible burst of giggling that would risk everything. Sabine did not understand that these were not people who would punish a childish prank with a reprimand.

  Below them there was no conversation. The major and the lieutenant unfurled their napkins and began their meal. Madame Ariane did not move. It was only after taking several mouthfuls of soup that the lieutenant observed this. With his head bent and his spoon arrested in front of his mouth, his single eye looked at her and then at the major, whose attention was thus caught. Suzie felt the menace as he slowly turned his head to look at Madame Ariane. The lieutenant was smiling. He was awaiting, and welcoming, an outburst. The major put down his spoon with exaggerated care, so that it did not chime on his bowl.

  ‘You’re not eating?’ he remarked.

  ‘Thank you, I prefer not.’

  The tense silence that follow
ed produced a spurt of adrenalin in Suzie. Madame Ariane appeared submissive; she kept her eyes lowered and said nothing.

  The major smiled and lifted his spoon once again. ‘We won’t let your abstinence spoil our enjoyment. I believe,’ he went on, ‘that rigorous dieting is a way of life for fashionable Frenchwomen. A sign of their decadence. Nazi womanhood prizes strong healthy bodies to fulfil its duties of childbearing and homemaking.’

  The lieutenant burst out laughing, and Suzie saw Madame Ariane relax slightly. The joke was on her, her action of defiance rebounding on her by the major’s acceptance of it. Suzie thought of the loose folds of Madame Ariane’s dresses, signs that she had once been rounded and filled them out. The agony of not eating the food twisted her own stomach.

  The batman removed the soup dishes and placed plates in front of them, returning with a platter containing pieces of fowl and some vegetables, carrots and leeks.

  ‘What is this?’ the major asked, as the man went to serve him.

  ‘Guinea fowl, sir.’

  One of Micheline’s, Suzie thought. Soon there would be nothing left for them.

  ‘Serve Madame first.’

  The smell of the guinea fowl made Suzie’s saliva run. She clenched her belly to forbid its rumbling and betraying her hunger, hoping that Micheline had something good for them when they escaped from this torture. From the major’s expression, she guessed that he was enjoying Madame Ariane’s suffering.

  ‘This looks excellent,’ he remarked. ‘Cut it up for me.’ The batman approached and was waved away. ‘No, her not you, I want her to do it.’ He stared straight at her. ‘Cut it up for me.’

  Madame Ariane did not move immediately. Suzie wondered if she had understood.

  He repeated, ‘Cut it up for me.’

  She rose tentatively and stood beside him. With one hand he pushed his plate in front of her. Taking her knife and fork she cut the meat into pieces, manoeuvring it off the breastbone, slicing the thigh meat from the leg. When she had finished, watched by all eyes around the table, she returned the plate to its position in front of the major and sat down again.

  Then Suzie understood. She saw him pick up his fork in his right hand, while his left hand, still in its black leather glove, lay inert on the table. She wondered how far it was dead. To the wrist? To the elbow? To the shoulder?

  The lieutenant had begun eating the minute that the major took up his fork, bending low over his plate and shovelling the food fast into his mouth. He stared at Madame Ariane who seemed to find his one-eyed glare disconcerting. She raised her eyes to a portrait on the wall.

  ‘She didn’t understand what you wanted her to do or why,’ he commented to the major. ‘She didn’t realise that this is a company of the wounded, the lame and the blind and the limbless. She didn’t know that they,’ he jerked his head at the world outside the window, ‘call themselves the Hospital Company. And it doesn’t mean they’re invalids; it means we’re all survivors of wounding on the eastern front. To survive there, wounded, meant you were harder than the men who were still fit. The Russians take no prisoners, you know, and in that climate … It was twenty-five degrees below zero for weeks on end in the winter of forty-two. So if you were left wounded on the battlefield, there were only two alternatives. You froze to death or you were bayoneted where you lay.’

  Suzie found the lieutenant easy to understand. He was just the boastful warrior, trying to impress Madame Ariane how tough he was. The major was another matter. He wanted humiliation. He took pleasure in making Madame Ariane knock on the door in her own house, in commanding her to cut up his food. These were cruelties that Suzie understood: petty in themselves, they mounted up to make life unbearable.

  ‘The major lost his arm last autumn,’ the lieutenant was saying. ‘His hand was smashed up in an attack and he retreated for five days with a tourniquet round his elbow and gangrene creeping into his fingers, before he reached a field hospital where they amputated his hand at once without anaesthetic, to kill him or save his life. And he survived.’

  The lieutenant’s face was mobile; he saw no need to maintain the dignified impassivity of the major’s expression. He chewed his food as he talked and swilled the red wine to cleanse his mouth before he swallowed. He pursed his lips, trying to extract a shred of poultry meat from between his back teeth.

  ‘Now, I lost my eye two years ago, at Stalingrad. A piece of shrapnel, the luckiest hit I ever received. It got me out of that hell-hole before the lid of the coffin came down on us. I was walking wounded and I managed to get on a plane and stay on it. When they found it was too heavily loaded for take-off they started to kick people out. The unconscious can’t protest. They’re the easiest to dispose of and they’re probably going to die anyway. But I still lost my toes to frostbite while I waited for the plane at the landing ground at Pitomnik. Five days and five nights I was there, without medical treatment. Beside me was a comrade who had been shot up. He was on a stretcher and lay in agony, crying and calling for his mother for two days. Finally, he understood he wasn’t going to make it and he begged us to put a bullet through him to end his misery.’

  He pushed his plate away, scraped clean. Suzie understood that he had answered his comrade’s pleas and that this action on his part and that of the wounded man was meant to illustrate their common heroism.

  The major had taken no part in the recital, but he listened approvingly, nodding at the last anecdote. Then he rose to his feet.

  ‘We shall expect you whenever we dine here. Not tomorrow, as we shall be engaged, but the day after, perhaps.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  Suzie was alone, crouched in her favourite refuge, Lou Moussou’s sty, in a rare respite from Sabine, who had been given some extra homework by Madame Ariane, to be supervised by the aunts; Suzie had been allowed to leave. The punishment lay not just in the task of the extra work, but Suzie’s freedom from it. She had made a deprecating face behind the back of Madame de Cazalle and run thankfully away. She would receive the full force of Sabine’s bad temper when the work was over, but she could not be blamed for her release.

  She had gone immediately to Lou Moussou’s house, slipping through the farmyard as quietly as possible in the hope that Micheline would not see her and find her a chore to occupy her solitary hour. She crawled into the musty straw that pleasantly irritated her nose with the beginnings of a sneeze, and curled up, facing the door so that she would be immediately alerted if anyone approached. This place had been her retreat since Sabine had shown it to her on the day of her arrival. Here, she was enclosed in a dark space that seemed to fit around her protectively. At first Lou Moussou was there, as a friend and comforter. Mostly he took no notice of her, after nosing at her on her arrival to see whether she had brought him something edible, taking it gently from her fingers. He then just got on with his piggy life, which seemed to consist of eating, rootling around in his bedding to see if he had dropped something to eat, and lying contentedly waiting to eat. He let her scratch his back companionably. It seemed an ideal existence.

  It was still her hiding place. She had often thought in recent weeks, now that the Germans were living at Bonnemort, that when the worst came to the worst and they decided to shoot them all, or burn down the house, she would run in here where they would never find her. She would sit here in the darkness and wait until the war ended, not moving, not speaking, in suspended animation, just watching, until one day the door would open wide and Papa would be standing there with Maman and Lou Moussou himself, saying, ‘You can come out now. It’s all over.’

  After the first few days the German presence had become normality. The terrifying clamour of their arrival had subsided to a background hum of dull fear and Suzie could now distinguish personalities and routines in the newcomers. The two officers, SS Sturmbannfuhrer Knecht and SS Obersturmfuhrer Hartenstein – she knew their names now, occupied the house. The rest of the men camped in the field, using the caves as living quarters and, according to Henri, had made the
mselves very snug there. A faint smell of woodsmoke and frying floated appetisingly up from their field kitchen, which was evidently kept well supplied. This German zone – house, courtyard, field, stables – was meticulously ordered. Suzie could see from her window the precise rows of motorcycles and the staff car, drawn up near the front door. Then a new car was added: Madame Ariane’s Hispano-Suiza. The major liked to be driven in it, and often took it in preference to his own. In the field armoured trucks were parked in a neat row beside two half-tracks with guns mounted on them. Guards always patrolled the house and camp, even when the men and their vehicles were out.

  Suzie would listen to the adults’ conversations to learn what she could of the Germans’ activities. When they first arrived Henri had hoped that they would be recalled immediately, because of the Allied landings in Normandy. All the other units of the SS tank division stationed in the region were being moved north to repel the invading Americans and British. Reports reached them of the tanks lumbering through the countryside and the clashes that followed, but their Germans made no preparations to move and the hope died. They realised that this unit, of the young, the old, the wounded, had been left behind; were with them indefinitely.

  Which was worse, she asked herself. Living under Sabine’s power, or the Germans’? Once Sabine’s moral domination over her was assured and Madame Ariane’s influence defeated, Sabine had developed new lines in tyranny. The possibilities of physical terror were opened up by Suzie herself.

  * * *

  The summer of her arrival at Bonnemort was hot. Days of relentless sunshine were broken intermittently by nights of storm. Every evening the children would take the cliff path to the lake to swim. For Suzie this was one of the first and worst ordeals of living at Bonnemort. She did not know how to swim and was terrified of the water, of the way it seemed to rise up to envelop her, however hard she tried to keep her head above the surface, of the way it seeped, stinging and choking her, into her eyes, ears, nostrils, mouth. She was squeamish, too, and although the water was kept pure by the ceaseless, invisible flow that filled the lake from the spring and drained it to the river, she disliked the idea of sharing it with fish and waterfowl.