Madame Ariane was a formidable sportswoman. Suzie had turned the pages of her photograph albums, which portrayed her before the war, swimming, sailing, skiing. For her it was natural that the girls should ride and swim, even if other sports were denied them. She familiarised Suzie with the water and the strokes she must make to master it. Then she suggested that Sabine should help her practise. Sabine herself had only learned to swim the previous summer, also taught by Madame Ariane.
She had been an apt pupil and now spent hours swimming up and down, or perfecting her diving. She was delighted to take over as teacher.
Immediately she discovered the difference between her own boldness in the water and Suzie’s timidity. She would manipulate Suzie’s fear, using it to punish or threaten, whenever she wished. If she wanted to please Suzie, she would help her, or even better, leave her alone. When they pulled themselves out of the lake, their woollen costumes drooping with the weight of water, Suzie would be filled with relief that she had survived the afternoon without drowning. However, when Suzie was in disgrace for some imaginary act of disloyalty, Sabine would use her power to terrify her, jumping into the pool, diving beneath her, seizing her legs to pull her under. She enjoyed the exercise of power and extended her rule, bit by bit, creatively, to demand all kinds of acts of physical daring. Her cruelty was not applied every day. Suzie came to recognise threatening situations and did what she could to evade or postpone them. Sometimes they could not be avoided.
One afternoon that first autumn they had been sent out by Micheline to gather chestnuts. Suzie enjoyed such activities. The woods were always beautiful. The golden light filtered between the trunks of the trees of the chestnut wood, illuminating their blotched, silvery bark. She was a good observer and, squatting under the trees, she hunkered round, picking the fattest bulbs out of their prickly shells. It was an undemanding activity, one in which her sharp attention had no reference to herself.
When their baskets were full, they walked home, climbing the cliff path from the valley. Suzie was trailing behind Sabine, searching for late field mushrooms in the field in front of the house. She heard Sabine calling to her and, looking up, could not see her.
Awakening to danger, she realised that Sabine had disappeared into a covert of rough undergrowth and young trees.
‘Suzie, come down here. I need you. I want you to give me a hand.’
Abandoning her basket, she crept forward, stooping under the gothic architecture of dead bramble canes, until she reached the edge of a rocky pit hidden from view by the tangle of vegetation. Sabine was squatting below ground level, like a frog beside a dry pond, at the edge of a hole in the ground fringed with dead grasses.
‘I can’t see where …’
It was no good; excuses never worked. Sabine’s peremptory voice, ordering, then threatening, compelled her to ease herself down on her stomach, legs dangling until she found a foothold. She knew that she had reached Sabine when her ankles were seized and she was pulled abruptly onto the ledge to join her.
‘Sabine, how are we going to get up again?’
‘We’re going on down.’
Suzie clung miserably to the rock while Sabine looked for the next stage of their route, peering down into the narrowing bowl. Suzie could envisage the next stage: a descent into the abyss. She dared not even look at the hole which should have contained something – earth, grass, water – but was filled instead with nothing but darkness. She tried to convince herself that there was no danger. Even if they were stuck, glued to the rock like lizards on the house wall, if they shouted and shouted, surely someone, Henri in the fields, Micheline in the farmyard, would hear them and come to their rescue. Sabine, however, was not interested in relying on others to extract her from danger.
She had seen a foothold and was lowering herself further into the pit. Suzie was obliged to follow. Soon the sky above them was reduced to a disc, shaded with branches. It was harder to see where they were placing their feet and hands. The circumference of the bowl was narrowing. Suzie could see no way out and no way back.
‘There’s fresh air coming out of there.’ Sabine licked her finger and held it over the darkness. ‘We must be able to get out down there.’ She contemplated the hole, tipping a pebble into the void. They listened to the silence that swallowed up the stone. ‘You go first.’
‘No, Sabine, please, no. Let’s just shout. Henri will come.’
‘And then what? We’ve still got to get out and we’ll do it by ourselves.’
‘You go down. If there’s a problem I’m here to help you up again.’
Sabine’s command over her was such that, crying and begging, Suzie was forced further into the hole. She was entering a rock tomb and would never come out alive. She braced her back against the wall of the chimney and lowered herself away from Sabine, crouching above her.
‘What’s happening?’ Sabine called out. ‘Tell me what you find.’
Suzie refused to speak. She was so far down now that there was no more vegetation for her hands. She was held in place by the narrow bore of the hole and descended by pushing her body down, scraping her back on the rock, until her knees were bent and then, extending one leg after the other, she found a new foothold. The pressure on the muscles of her thighs increased. Her descent was for ever and for good; she would never, never be able to climb up again.
The pipe opened out. As she put out one foot to find somewhere to wedge it, the rock wall below her vanished. She kicked wildly and lost her purchase. Her fall was a matter of feet. She landed, miraculously, on a soft bed. She lay on her back and her hands discovered hay. It was not wholly dark; rolling over, she could see cracks of light below her and could make out shapes in the darkness, masses, which resolved themselves into structures. She was in a loft in one of the cave storerooms on the path down to the lake. She could distinguish a ladder leading down to the rocky floor and she quickly scrambled down. Wooden doors closed the entrance. Nowhere on the farm was ever locked and the double doors swung open to the push of her shoulder. She found herself on the cliff path, the water shining darkly in the late afternoon light. Returning to the cave, she shouted up to Sabine in the rock chimney, ‘It’s all right, you can come down.’
She stood outside in the sunshine, gratefully breathing in the fresh air.
Sabine wants to kill me, she thought. She’ll go on and on until she does.
Walking back into the barn, her eyes full of the radiance of the sun, she was forced to duck in terror. A powerful projectile had swung just over her head and back again.
‘Watch out,’ she cried in alarm.
Sabine was standing in the loft, watching the swing of the free end of a rope, weighted with an iron hook, suspended from a pulley. She caught it on its return, and once more sent it in a sweeping arc across the empty space of the barn. When its diminishing swing brought it at last to a swivelling halt, Suzie saw that it hung well above her head. It could not have hit her.
Sabine reached the ground, euphoric at their adventure. ‘We must do it again,’ she said. ‘It was brilliant. We can use it as our hiding place from her, instead of the chapel.’
In the light that flooded in through the open doors Suzie examined what they had discovered. The space was empty. Around the walls were wide wooden racks and the rock floor was carved with an enormous circle.
‘What is this place?’ she asked.
‘It’s the winepress,’ Sabine explained. ‘That’s where the vat used to be. They put the grapes in it in the olden days and then everyone trod on them to mash them and get the juice out.’
‘They didn’t,’ Suzie said sceptically.
‘They did once. But they took the press away when they abandoned the vineyards here.’
* * *
Lying in the hay, Suzie asked herself why she had done it. Why? If she had found the courage to make that descent, why could she not refuse to do what Sabine demanded? She had often asked herself this during the first terrible six months at Bonnemort. It seem
ed as if she was more afraid of Sabine’s taunts than of the physical tests she was put to. And perhaps it was true: isolation was worse than danger; friendship at any price. Sabine had a command which sabotaged her will, converting it to her, Sabine’s, ends, not her own. But, however much she puzzled over this power, she knew that she had surrendered her freedom herself, in an act of folly and betrayal. She had yielded to Sabine from the start, not knowing how to resist her, but she did not blame herself for that, for what else could she have done? What she regretted was the madness of voluntarily giving up the information that had made Sabine’s control complete.
Madame Ariane had made her promise never to tell anyone she was Jewish. Maman had commanded it, too. She could not understand why this element in her identity should be shameful, criminal, yet she could see that it was. And the shame was infectious; other people fled from them. Madame Ariane had welcomed her, but on the condition that her Jewishness was hidden. She understood that she had a duty not to allow the harm she carried to affect others. Was this why she had told Sabine, as a revenge for the suffering she had inflicted, to pass the danger on to her? Or had she hoped that this willing surrender of her greatest secret would somehow show Sabine that her demands had reached the end? There was nothing more she could give.
As soon as the confession was made, one afternoon when they were sitting in the chapel, she had regretted it. She regretted her broken promise to Madame Ariane, for now she was irrevocably committed to Sabine, who recognised her new power at once. ‘I’ll tell who you are,’ or ‘I’ll tell her what you told me,’ were weapons which destroyed all resistance. She could never appeal to Madame Ariane for help, for she would have to admit that she had broken her promise. She was in Sabine’s hands until the war ended and her parents came back to claim her.
Chapter Nineteen
Sabine was fascinated by the occupiers. She and Suzie had no direct contact with them, confined by the Germans’ rules to the tower, the farmyard and Micheline’s cottage, but there were opportunities to observe them nonetheless. Madame Ariane’s field glasses had lain unused for months after her failure to interest them in bird-watching. Now Sabine picked them up every day and trained them on the Germans’ camp. She liked to watch the soldiers in the late afternoon when, hot and thirsty from their day’s patrol, they would stand around the pipe which flowed into the drinking trough standing in their underwear to throw water over one another. Or, they would go, a group of ten of them, to bathe, naked, in the lake, jumping into the water with shouts of pleasure. For long minutes Sabine would prop her elbows on the windowsill to support the weight of the binoculars, and stare, without moving and without commentary. Suzie would lean beside her. To her unaided vision, they were indistinct, forked, tasselled creatures, running and shouting, splintering the water into iridescent shards of spray.
One evening when Sabine lost interest in the spectacle, Suzie picked up the abandoned glasses and refocused them on the field. The young men were just leaving the drinking trough. The head and shoulders of two of them jumped forward under the magnification. She saw the collar of brick-red skin on their necks between their cropped hair and the silky whiteness of their shoulders. She found it hard to believe that these boys, playful and unarmed, speaking her parents’ language, wished her ill. It seemed so strange to hate someone for being what she was, Jewish. It was like Sabine’s hatred of Madame Ariane, without a reason, just for being what she was, a stepmother.
She swung the glasses from the departing boys to the cobbles in the yard to pick out one of Micheline’s decorative hens. The head and shoulders of Madame Ariane swam out of the haze. She was frowning. Her hair was tied back which emphasised her large nose and dark eyebrows; normally pale, her face was coloured with sun and exertion. She was in motion and disappeared at once, to be replaced in Suzie’s view by the major, bareheaded.
Suzie abruptly lifted the binoculars away from her eyes to understand what she had seen. The figures shrank back into their context: Madame Ariane, carrying her saddle and bridle, was walking rapidly towards the barn, followed by the major. Suzie quickly replaced the glasses before her eyes. She could see that the major’s expression was purposeful. It was harder to decide whether Madame Ariane knew he was behind her, was leading him or fleeing from him.
Stealthily, Suzie laid the binoculars down, saying nothing. There was nothing wrong in the two of them being in the farmyard at the same time. Yet she did not want Sabine to see Madame Ariane and the major together, whatever chance, or purpose, had brought them there.
Two days later it happened again. Micheline had sent the girls to pick peas for dinner. They had brought back the basket and Suzie had been set to pod them. She was much more apt than Sabine for such tasks. Willing, patient and dextrous, she had learned many kitchen skills from Micheline and Florence in her two years at Bonnemort. She could fillet a fish, or bone a chicken, deftly manipulating Micheline’s fiercely sharp knives, skilfully separating flesh and bone. Sabine, on the other hand, was impatient and clumsy, usually cutting her own finger and mingling her blood with the meat. Suzie loved to be with Micheline, sitting at the table in front of the open fire in winter or squatting on the doorstep in the summer, tranquilly peeling vegetables.
That day she had placed a colander on the step and was stripping the tiny peas into it, dropping the pods into a basket to feed later to the rabbits. One of Micheline’s young turkeys was parading up and down the farmyard, his regular course to and fro mimicking that of the guards in front of the house. Every so often he puffed out his chest and gobbled, his black wattles shaking with self-importance.
Henri walked through the yard, crossing the turkey’s path, causing the bird to swell with indignation and rivalry. Henri caressed Suzie’s head in passing and went inside, closing behind him the glass-paned door with its red and white check curtains. A little later Micheline opened it again.
‘Run to the tower, Suzie, and tell Madame that Henri’s here. He wants a word with her.’
Suzie dropped her pea pod and set off. Halfway up the stairs she saw from the tower window Madame Ariane approaching through the garden. She turned back and they met on the stairs. Madame Ariane descended with her to see Henri. In the dimness of the hall Suzie was startled to find a black figure standing at the foot of the stairs waiting for them: the major. Madame Ariane showed no sign of having seen him, passing straight out into the sunlight of the farmyard. Suzie followed more slowly and sat down again on Micheline’s step. He had not been there when she went up. Had he been following Madame Ariane, was he stalking her, laying traps for her? Madame Ariane had not noticed, or did not want to notice. Should she warn her?
She finished her job, not drawing it out as she usually did, and put the containers of peas and pods quietly inside the kitchen door, without asking Micheline for another task. She crept into Lou Moussou’s little house. The dust danced in the sun shafts that broke through the cracks in the door, and in the womb-like dark of her straw nest, she tried to work out what Madame Ariane was doing. She had dinner every day with the two officers; they all knew that. They all knew that she hated doing it, was obliged to do it. It was not her fault if the major followed her around.
She chewed her fingertips, gnawing at the nails already bitten to the quick, her tongue finding a tiny flap of loose skin to work on. She imagined Madame Ariane living under the major’s persecution, as she did under Sabine’s. It would be a different sort of tyranny, using different methods, but the result would be the same. You lived in occupied country. At any time, in any place, the attack could strike. You lived perpetually, wearingly, on the alert for the accusation and the penalty. She, Suzie, had never been able to break free of Sabine’s power, but perhaps Madame Ariane would be able to outwit the major. Madame Ariane, powerful, independent, must be able to throw off his domination. Suzie willed it with all her strength, with the double identification of a fellow victim, of Sabine and of the Nazis.
But Sabine must not know. Whatever the state of war
between the major and Madame Ariane, Suzie wanted to protect her from Sabine. She knew that Sabine had a profound sensitivity to atmosphere. The very act of formulating the thought of hiding something from her was enough to rouse Sabine’s awareness. Even though she could not discover the particular incident that Suzie wished to hide, she was able, subliminally, to identify the subject.
That night the heat broke with a thunderstorm, one of the clashing, rainless storms of the region, during which the thunder rolled around the hills and sheets of lightning hung for seconds at a time from the sky. In Madame Ariane’s dressing room where she and Sabine had slept since the Germans’ arrival, Suzie woke at the first growl and lay watching the white flashes at the window. She could hear the wind in the trees behind the tower. A loud clapping sound came from the room next door.
She waited to hear Madame Ariane’s quiet movements in her bedroom, getting up to close the window, or refix the shutter. The noise came again and again.
The bed in the dressing room was boat-shaped, the most beautiful bed she had ever slept in. It was meant for one large person, but she and Sabine were obliged to share it. She slept lightly, without movement, lying along the very edge of the mattress to allow Sabine the maximum space. Her companion was a wild sleeper, thrashing her legs and crying out in her dreams. The worst was when she ground her teeth together, making Suzie shudder. Now Sabine was lying quietly, face down, sprawled over three-quarters of the bed.
Suzie lifted the sheet with infinite precaution and slipped out of the bed, tiptoeing across the wooden floor. The communicating door was unlocked and she pushed it open gently, to see if Madame Ariane was sleeping through the storm. The bed was empty, had not been slept in that night, the linen lying as flat as when Micheline had smoothed it into place that morning. One wing of the casement window had broken loose and was swinging in the wind. She anchored it again to its hook and leaned on the sill to look out at the view, which on this side of the tower overlooked the house and the courtyard. In the quiet and darkness between the rolls of thunder and the flashes of lightning, she saw a red pulse throbbing in the courtyard, then another. She thought they were the glow-worms that she had seen in the garden last summer. She leaned out further and then jumped back as Sabine’s hands fastened on her waist from behind.
A Good Death Page 15