Epilogue
1999
Chapter Thirty-eight
Two elderly women were sitting side by side in the large seats of the Concorde lounge at JFK airport. Apart from their proximity they showed no other sign of connexion. Among the finely shaded categories of old age, both could be placed within the range of the young elderly: their faces were marked by the events of years, but their movements were still energetic and decisive.
The air crackled with the announcement of a half-hour delay in boarding. One of them, wearing a trouser suit, rose irritably when the speaker had finished and walked away, leaving her silk raincoat in her place. As she stood up, her passport and boarding card fell to the ground and lay unheeded under her seat.
Her neighbour watched her placidly, without stirring. Half an hour here or there made no difference to her. She made a quick social assessment of the impatient one: a Frenchwoman by her appearance. The plane, when it eventually took off, was bound for Paris, and this woman with her elegant suit and thick, crinkly dark hair, badger-striped at the temples, was unmistakably European. The seated woman’s eye caught sight of the passport, its pages fanned out, the boarding pass slotted within. She leaned down to retrieve them, and read the name on the boarding pass: de Cazaller, S.
She felt a blow in her chest as if someone had punched her, not hard, just enough to stop her breath and leave her gasping. She concentrated on steadying her breathing, telling herself that she had had a check-up only two weeks ago and her doctor had given her a clean bill of health. Apart from her blood pressure, she was fine, fine. She kept her eyes closed for a minute, counting the seconds, until the world settled down. When she opened them again, she saw that her neighbour was at the far end of the lounge, idly choosing a magazine from a rack. Rapidly and furtively she rifled through the passport, seeking the personal details. Sabine de Cazalle.
She would never have guessed. Nothing in the woman’s appearance would have recalled the past, as her name had just done so violently. Why should it? It was now more than fifty years since they had seen one another. The cells of their bodies had grown and renewed and died; they had lost vitality and elasticity; they had thickened and hardened and changed. They were no longer the people who had last seen one another as children in 1946.
She studied the approaching figure of Sabine. She might be wrong, her memories and emotion roused at a false alarm. There must be more than one Sabine de Cazalle in the world and this one could be a Sabine married to a Cazalle. That was much more likely. She felt a loosening in her chest, as if her not being the Sabine de Cazalle somehow changed things.
The woman sat down beside her and she held out the passport and boarding card.
‘You dropped these,’ she said.
Sabine de Cazalle took them with a quick word of thanks. Her English was heavily accented, but automatic, her reply formal. She was clearly not someone who fell into conversation with fellow travellers. As she began to study her magazine, her attention firmly focused, her companion said, ‘I’m sorry, I have to ask you this. I saw your name and I wondered if you were Sabine de Cazalle of Bonnemort.’
The look of astonishment was confirmation enough. ‘Yes, I am, or at least I was.’
‘My name is Rachel Oppenheim. It won’t mean anything to you, but if I say I was known as Suzie as a girl, you will know who I am.’
Sabine de Cazalle’s expression was distant, her magazine remained half-open. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t think the name means anything to me.’
Rachel Oppenheim was not going to be put off by European reserve. ‘I lived with you during the war at Bonnemort. I was called Suzie Ollivier then.’
‘You lived with us?’ Sabine was genuinely puzzled. ‘I think there must be some mistake. I don’t recall …’
Rachel turned towards her, speaking feverishly. ‘I’m Jewish, of course, and I was taken in by your stepmother, Madame Ariane. I lived with you there for two years and then another two years in Paris.’
Sabine now understood that she could not brush away this encounter. She looked at the well-preserved American face under its smooth cap of white hair knotted in a chignon. She saw a stranger gazing at her with an almost hysterical intensity, someone she had never met before in her life.
‘My stepmother was made a Companion of the Resistance for what she did during the war. I know we sheltered a number of people at Bonnemort during those years, but I wasn’t involved. I was only a child. I had the impression that the fugitives stayed for a matter of days, not more than a week or so.’
‘ Your stepmother should be named a Righteous Gentile. She saved my life,’ Rachel said passionately. ‘Both my parents died in the Shoah. My grandparents, great-uncles and great-aunts, cousins, every member of my family in Europe, except me, was murdered by the Nazis.’ She opened her large Hermes bag, fumbled for a handkerchief and blew her nose. ‘I’m sorry. I never talk about these things normally. I never think of the past; it’s necessary to forget. It was the sight of your name that brought it all back to me.’
Sabine de Cazalle was gathering up her raincoat and bag.
‘We’re being called,’ she said, glad to escape from this outburst of inexplicable emotion.
Rachel Oppenheim said, ‘May I ask if we can make an exchange of seats and sit together for the journey. I have so much I want to ask you.’ She was shocked by Sabine’s refusal to recognise her. Not to acknowledge her in the present was understandable; she herself would not have known Sabine. But to deny the past was another matter.
Sabine hid her reluctance and said with a show of interest, ‘Yes, why not. You can tell me what you recall about Bonnemort in the old days. I have to say, I have an awful memory.’
When they were seated in the narrow, uncomfortable cabin of the Concorde, a glass of champagne in front of each of them, Sabine said, ‘I do now dimly remember that for a while I used to share my lessons with another girl. Suzie, it must have been Suzie. So that was you. I had a very erratic education. I went to a convent before the war, to the village school at Bonnemort, and then a lycee in Paris. There was a short time when I was taught by my stepmother and my aunts.’
‘I remember your aunts very well, Madame de Cazalle and Madame Veyrines, one fat, one thin. And Micheline and Florence. I learned to cook from Micheline.’
‘You did know Bonnemort.’
‘Did you think I was making it up?’
‘No, no, I was simply marvelling at your powers of recall. My own memories of my childhood are very hazy. For me the war was so uneventful that I hardly knew it was happening. I can’t remember a single dramatic incident connected with it. Well, in the depths of the French countryside I suppose it’s not surprising.’
‘I remember everything.’
‘I suppose for you the whole thing was so traumatic.’
‘Yes and no. I lived in fear the whole time, but the real trauma came afterwards, when I understood what had happened to my parents. But even in the depths of the French countryside, the house was occupied by the SS for a time. You don’t remember that? You don’t remember the German major?’
She stopped speaking and took a large mouthful of champagne. She had never before mentioned the major to anyone, not even during her long analysis. The memory of the death of Lou Moussou had lived with her for years, half-suppressed, reviving in her nightmares, making her sweat and cry out until she woke. She had practised forgetting with the rigour of a religious fanatic and for months at a time the past had been submerged by the present and the real. Then without warning it would rise through the waters, to surface in the cry of her own child waking her in the night, or in a dream of drowning in a fountain of blood. Her approach elicited no response.
‘No, not at all,’ Sabine said. ‘Were we really occupied? I don’t remember Ariane speaking of it either. Of course, my experience was the opposite of yours. All through the war I thought my father was dead, then he turned up when it was over, alive again. I never had a good relationship with my father.
Correction, I never really had any relationship with my father, so his absence didn’t really affect me much. My stepmother on the other hand was very important to me.’
‘You hated her.’
‘I did not.’ The denial was immediate, indignant. For the first time Sabine de Cazalle showed emotion.
They both awkwardly sipped their champagne to dissipate the sharpness of the contradiction. Had Sabine really forgotten, Rachel asked herself. Had she been successful in erasing the memory, inscribing over the palimpsest the story of an innocent war in a remote house in the depths of the countryside? Afterwards, when she and Sabine were still together, before she had left for America, they had never spoken of what had happened, but each was aware, of the other and of their complicity. When the memory became overwhelming, Rachel had cried, and everyone thought she wept for the loss of her parents. Sometimes, when Madame Ariane comforted her, she thought that she knew and understood.
‘What happened to you after you left us?’ Sabine asked.
‘I came to America to be adopted by some New York cousins. I went to college in America, Vassar. I married and I’ve lived in New York all my life since. My husband died two years ago. I have two sons and two daughters, all married, and twelve grandchildren. So I became American. Yet…’ She broke into French. ‘French is my language. I spoke French to all my children. My youngest daughter is married to a Frenchman. I’m on my way to visit them now. In some way, France is my refuge and ideal country. I never forget that I was saved in France, by the French. We were German by origin, you see. I never was really French myself; I just feel I should have been.’ She paused, thinking over the recital of her life with some satisfaction. The children and the grandchildren, their existence vindicated something. ‘And you?’ she asked.
Sabine put down her empty glass carefully. ‘I wish I could encapsulate my life so well. I’ve been married twice and divorced twice, once to – and from – an American, which is why I speak English. But that was a long time ago. I’m a photographer, still working to keep myself and to keep myself busy. No children. I adopted a Vietnamese child in the sixties and she now owns Bonnemort.’
‘And you really don’t remember those years, forty-two to forty-six, when I lived with you?’
‘What was there to remember? Life was so unexciting.’
The steward was laying cloths in front of them, arranging cutlery, handing out menus. Rachel fussed with the place setting. Her fingers were encircled with several diamond eternity rings, set with extravagantly large stones.
‘I spent a long time in analysis,’ Rachel said. ‘When I was about forty, I suddenly felt I had a lot to straighten out in my head, a lot of guilt and grief. I remembered everything then. My analyst told me to write it all down and I did. I wrote it all by hand in an exercise book. Those were the days before personal computers. Then I locked it up in a bank safe. One day my sons will open it up and learn about the past. The odd thing is that once I’d done it, the nightmares went away and I now only remember what I wrote down, in the words that I used in that exercise book.’
Her analyst had said, ‘You will have to acknowledge what happened before it will go away.’ But she had not told him; she had written it down and it had been fixed in the word. She began to feel desperate at Sabine’s refusal to recognise the past. Remembering had caused her much suffering, but it was better than pretending. She paused. ‘Henri,’ she said. ‘You must remember Henri.’
‘I remember the name, but I can’t picture him. He was Micheline’s husband who was shot by the Germans, I know that. I just don’t remember him as a person.’
Rachel sighed and picked up her glass of white wine. ‘What became of you all? Micheline, Florence?’
‘Micheline lived at Bonnemort until her death. One of her sons, Georges, died in deportation, but the other, Roger, came back from the war and took over the land. It’s his son who farms it now. Florence married. My stepmother kept in touch with her to the end of her life. The aunts died soon after the war.’
‘And your parents?’
‘My father went into politics, for which he was not well suited. He was a minister several times in the fifties, when governments came and went all the time. As I said, I never got on with him very well and relations between us broke down completely when I married my first husband, the American. I was very left-wing in those days and my father, who was a Gaullist and very anti-American, used to regard my activities as having no purpose but to embarrass him. My stepmother was always angelic and supported me against him.’
‘Strange,’ said Rachel meditatively, more to herself than to Sabine. Was she lying, refusing to admit a memory which hammered at the doors of her mind? Or could you forget a killing? ‘You don’t remember the communist schoolmaster who used to beat you?’ she asked.
‘No, did he really? I do remember I was bullied at my convent when I was very little. I must have been so feeble. A terrible child called Antoinette used to play doctors and stick pins in me, but my stepmother rescued me from that hell when she married my father.’
‘Well, he did beat you. Once I wanted to kill him for what he did to you. Do you remember how he broke your arm?’
‘How sweet of you. I know my arm was broken when I was a child. Was it then?’
‘Yes. I made an elaborate plan to kill him, inside that cave, the winepress.’
‘And did you succeed?’ Sabine was laughing.
‘No, I didn’t. I relented and didn’t carry it out. I had every intention of doing it and, at the last moment, my will failed and I reprieved him.’
‘Would it have worked if you had done it?’
‘Oh yes, it would have worked. I knew that already. But he was punished in a way. I lured him there to see you. He had the disappointment and humiliation of finding no one there. I watched him from my hiding place.’
‘It sounds like a big commutation: community service rather than the death penalty.’
‘Yes, it was. But community service was probably more appropriate. I had already rejected the death penalty in principle.’
When she wrote her account of the war years, in her attempt to exorcise the past, she had ended with the sound of Vernhes’ footsteps on the rocky floor of the winepress. She remembered crouching in the loft with the hook of the pulley pulled against her chest, poised to act and to kill. She had listened to him moving in the darkness, calling Sabine’s name; then she heard him opening the door, leaving. Each moment she had told herself that she could do it now, release the pendulum to strike him down, while all the time she knew she would not.
Sabine put down her coffee cup. ‘I’m hopeless,’ she said. ‘We haven’t found a single memory in common. I beginning to feel that I’m an impostor who wasn’t living at Bonnemort and you were the genuine resident. There must be something we can both remember.’
Rachel was recalling the pages of the exercise book. She could visualise her own large European handwriting, the French in which she had written. There must be something that she could use to make Sabine acknowledge what they had done.
‘Lou Moussou,’ she said abruptly. ‘Surely you remember Lou Moussou.’
‘Of course I remember Lou Moussou. There was always a Lou Moussou at Bonnemort. He lived in a sty out of sight, beyond the farmyard.’
‘Because he was hidden from the authorities.’
‘I used to go and sit with him and talk to him.’
‘He was the first person you took me to meet when I arrived at Bonnemort.’
‘He was one of those pink pigs, who looked like a huge naked baby …’
‘And he had such an intelligent face …’
‘And every day we used to take his bucket of pigswill down to him, carrying it between us …’
‘And the pig-killers came …’
‘He was stunned with a blow to his head. We used the pulley in the winepress …’
‘His throat was cut with a knife …’
‘Yes, I remember that.’
&nbs
p; First published in the United Kingdom in 2000 by Hodder and Stoughton
This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by
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Copyright © Elizabeth Ironside, 2000
The moral right of Elizabeth Ironside to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781788630269
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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