by Alan Furst
Khristo walked quietly from the bedroom of the old house that had been his refuge, the polished wood floor cold on his bare feet, and dressed from a large closet in the adjoining alcove. Thick wool socks, corduroy trousers suitable for working dogs in the field—a gentleman's roughwear—wool sweater, and an old coat, shapeless but warm. Good high boots that laced up tight. From a peg on the inside of the closet door he took a Hungarian machine pistol—Gepisztoly M43—on a leather strap. It had cost four chickens, three dozen eggs, and a bottle of brandy, but it made them comfortable to have a weapon in the house. He smiled as he handled it; Sophie had oiled the cheap wooden stock as though it belonged to a fine gun kept on an estate. But then, Sophie had altered the corduroy trousers so that he could wear them, had knitted the sweater and the socks—unraveling fashionable items from better days in order to do so—and, come to that, had polished the floor as well. All her life she had done these things and saw no reason to stop just because of the war. Perhaps the war was all the more reason to do them.
He took four loaded magazines from the closet shelf and put two in each pocket of the coat, then tiptoed down the hall to Sophie's bedroom to say good-bye. Her bed was empty, a heavy comforter folded neatly at the foot. Next door, where Marguerite slept, it was the same. He listened and, very faintly, heard the sound of plates and silverware in the kitchen on the first floor. Years of service, he realized, had schooled the sisters in the preparation of breakfast without waking the house.
Prison had changed him.
He came to understand that on his first day of freedom. The Nikko Petrov papers were no longer of use, so he walked restlessly about the streets of the city—frantic knots of people on one block, deserted silence on the next—as it waited to see what Occupation might bring. Eventually, he found a young man approximately his height and size and strong-armed him in a doorway, taking his passport. He bought glue in a papeterie, then found a café, pried his photograph from the Nansen document and made himself a French passport. The franking marks across the corner of the picture did not quite match, but one had to look carefully to see that. He ordered a steak, ate it so fast he barely noticed the taste, then left the café with the steak knife in his pocket. A few blocks away he found a mont de piété—“mountain of piety,” as the French ironically termed their pawnshops—held a knife to the pawnbroker's throat, and stole a small French pistol. He could have bought it, he had money from the priest, but he knew that money meant survival and he intended to survive. Nearby, he saw a finely dressed gentleman getting into a car, held him at bay with the pistol, and drove away in the car, a five-year-old Simca Huit, dark blue, with nearly a full tank of gas. For as long as he was able, he drove south and west. Away from the advancing Germans, headed for the coast or, perhaps, Spain. He would accept whatever the fates offered.
But the farther south he drove, the worse the nightmare. The roads were clogged with people and their possessions, cars had been pushed into the fields when they would no longer run, abandoned cats and dogs were everywhere. He saw a woman pushing a baby carriage with a grandfather clock in it, he saw unburied dead by the side of the road, bloated and flyblown in the early summer heat. The anarchy of flight was exacerbated by Stuka bombing runs on the refugee columns so that people had to run for the ditches and, here and there, a tower of smoke rose into the sky from a burning car.
The Germans had learned the tactic in Spain, refined it in Poland: clogged roads made reinforcement and supply impossible—tanks would simply not drive over their own people, at least not in this part of Europe. So the Stukas' objective was to sow panic and terror among the fleeing civilians, and they buzzed low along the roads for a long while before they used their machine guns or dropped a bomb.
This effort was aided, on the ground, by German agents who spread horror stories and rumors among the civilian population. Khristo came upon such a man at dusk on the first night, holding the terrified attention of a small group of refugees by the roadside with stories of German atrocities. Khristo stopped the car and stood at the edge of the crowd and listened to him, a master storyteller who didn't miss a detail: the screams, the blood, the horror. He was a heavy, blunt-featured man who clearly enjoyed his work and was adept at it. When Khristo could no longer bear the looks on the faces of the listeners, he pushed his way through the crowd and took the man by the scruff of the neck. “This man is trying to frighten you,” he said. “Don't you see that?” They stared at him, paralyzed, not understanding anything at all. In disgust, Khristo marched the man behind a tree and chopped his pistol's trigger guard across the bridge of the man's nose. The man yelped and ran away across the field, bleeding all over himself. But when Khristo turned back to the crowd he saw that they too had run away. He had frightened them, had only made it worse.
On the second day, somewhere on the N52 where it ran along the Loire between Blois and Tours, the car began to stall. All day it had crept along, in first and second gears, stopping and starting, locked in the stream of cars and bicycles and people on foot. By now, the Simca was full—and heavy: a mother and daughter, the latter having somehow injured her knee, a wounded French artilleryman who sang to keep their spirits up, and an old woman with a small, frightened dog that whined continually. His passengers got out of the car and sat in a resigned group among the roadside weeds while he opened the hood. The smell of singed metal from the engine reminded him of the flight from Madrid, only here no little man on a bicycle showed up to help. Perhaps it wants water, he thought, treating it more like a horse than a car. Someone volunteered a bottle and he slithered down the bank to the edge of the Loire, holding the bottle against the gravel and letting water trickle in. It was peaceful by the river; cicadas whirred in the heat, a small breeze stirred the air.
“Ah, monsieur, thank God you have come.”
He turned toward the voice and discovered the woman he would come to know as Sophie. She looked to be in her middle fifties, with anxious eyes and a broad, placid face. She wore a “good” dress, black with white polka dots, sweated through in circles beneath the arms. He must have looked puzzled, for she elaborated: “We have been praying very hard, you see.”
“Oh?”
“Please,” she said urgently, “there's little time.”
Around the curve of the river he found another woman, similar to the first though perhaps somewhat younger—he took them to be sisters—and an old man in a formal white suit laid back against the grassy bank. His tie was undone and his face was the color of paper. The younger woman was fanning him with his hat. Khristo knelt by his side and placed two fingers against the pulse in his neck. The beat was faint and very fast and the man was comatose, an occasional flutter of the eyelids the only sign of life.
“I'm afraid I can do nothing,” he said. “This man is dying, he needs to be in hospital.”
The elder sister answered a little impatiently. “We know he is dying. But he must receive unction, you see, the last rites, so that his soul may rest peacefully in heaven.”
Khristo scratched his head. The women reminded him of nuns, innocent and strong-willed at once. “I am not a priest, madame. I'm sorry.”
The elder sister nodded. “That we can see. But my sister and I are Protestant, and we do not know the proper ceremony for these matters.”
He turned back toward the man. “I cannot say it in French,” he said.
“No matter,” the elder sister replied. “God hears all languages.” Then, as a slightly horrified afterthought: “You are Catholic, of course.”
“Of course,” he said.
He was Bulgarian Eastern Orthodox—closer to Catholicism than a Protestant, in theory, but the rites were different and the customs not at all the same. From his training he knew that European Catholics expected “Hail Mary” and “Our Father” and an Act of Contrition. What he was able to offer, however, were predsmurtna molitva, prayers for the dying. There should have been soborovat, elders, present to pray a dying man into the next world, but God would have to
forgive this requirement. As for the prayers themselves, they were supposed to be improvisational, in whatever form was appropriate to those present. He therefore leaned close to the man—whispering so quietly that the sisters could not hear him—and asked God to ease his entry into heaven, to forgive him his sins, and to unite him with those he'd loved in this life who had preceded him. Finally, returning to the Catholic tradition, he anointed the man with river water in place of holy oil, touching his face in the sign of the cross and saying, in French, “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” The man's lips were cold as snow, and Khristo suppressed a shiver. “Go to God,” he added, then stood, indicating that the ritual was concluded.
Both sisters were weeping silently, dabbing at their eyes with small white handkerchiefs. “Poor Monsieur Dreu.” The younger sister spoke for the first time. “His heart …”
“It is the war,” the other sister said.
“Was he your husband?” Khristo asked.
“No,” the elder answered. “Our employer. For many years. He was as a father to us.”
“What will you do?”
They simply wept. Finally Sophie, the elder sister, said, “Monsieur Dreu intended that we should go to the little house—we would have been safe there. We tried, but we could not make way. Everyone wants to go west. Monsieur Dreu tried to drive the car, all the way from Bordeaux, but the strain on him, the planes, the people on the road …”
Something in her voice, in the inflection of petite maison, caught his attention. “Little house?”
“In the mountains, to the east, toward Strasbourg. There is no road there, you see, and no people. Just an old man who chops the wood.”
“Charlot,” the younger sister offered.
“Yes. Charlot.”
“How would you live?” he asked.
“Well, there is every sort of food, in tins. Monsieur Dreu always saw to that. ‘One must be prepared for eventualities,' he used to say. ‘Some day there will be turmoil,' he said, ‘another revolution.' He said it every summer, when we all went up there to clean the house and air the linen. Monsieur Dreu had great faith in air, especially the air one finds in the mountains. ‘Breathe in!' he would say.” Both sisters smiled sadly at the memory.
East, he thought. No one was going east—perhaps if they took the country lanes between the north-south highways. No road. Tinned food. In his mind, the words narrowed to a single concept: sanctuary. But there was his own group to consider; he would not simply toss them from the Simca. “Have you an automobile?” he asked.
“Oh yes. Up on the road, a very grand automobile. A Daimler, it is called. Can you drive such a car?” Sophie stared at him with anxious eyes.
He nodded yes.
The younger sister cleared her throat, the knuckles of her reddened hands showed white as she twisted the handkerchief. “Are you a gentleman, monsieur?”
“Oh yes,” he said. “Very much so.”
“Thank God,” she whispered.
He went up onto the road and inspected the great black Daimler, polished and shimmering in the midday sun. The gas gauge indicated the tank was a little less than half full, but he knew they would have to take their chances with fuel, no matter what, and if his own money didn't hold out, he was certain Monsieur Dreu had provided amply for the run to his mountain retreat.
And if he had any question at all about the change of plan, a visit to his fellow refugees, gathered about the Simca, answered it for him. At the direction of the old lady with the dog, they had pooled their money, purchased a pair of draft horses from a nearby farm, and were in the process of harnessing the animals to the car's bumper. Khristo explained that he would be leaving them and gave the car keys to the old lady, who now assumed command of the vehicle. They all wished him well, embracing him and shaking his hand. As he walked back toward the river, the artilleryman called out, “Vive la France!” and Khristo turned and saluted him.
At the river, he waited patiently with Sophie and Marguerite and, as the sun went down, the old man died peacefully. Using the Daimler's tire iron and their hands, they scratched out a shallow grave by the river and laid him to rest. Khristo found a piece of board by the roadside and carved an inscription with the knife stolen from a Paris café:
Antonin Dreu
1869-1940
The sisters had cared for Monsieur Dreu for more than thirty years, thus Khristo, as his replacement, found himself pampered to an extraordinary degree. The old man had been the last of a long line of grain négociants in the city of Bordeaux and the family had acquired significant wealth over time. Dreu himself had been, according to Sophie, something of an eccentric: at times a Theosophist, a vegetarian, a socialist, a follower of Ouspenskian mysticism, a devotee of tarot, the Ouija board, and, especially, séances. He “spoke” to his departed mother at least once a month, claiming to receive business direction from her. Whatever the source of his commercial wisdom, he had prospered in good times and bad. He had never married, though Khristo had a strong suspicion that he had been the lover of both his servants. Dreu had also believed that a great social upheaval would overtake Europe, and to this end had obtained the little house in the southern Vosges mountains, a long way from anything, and stocked it with food, firewood, and kerosene for the lamps.
Thus in the first months of Occupation Khristo had lived on canned Polish hams, tinned Vienna sausage and brussels sprouts, and aged wheels of Haute-Savoie cheese. The well-stocked wine cellar, he knew from his time at Heininger, was exceptional, and the three of them often got tipsy around the fire in the evenings.
As time passed he ventured out, walking many miles to a tiny hamlet—itself a mile or so from any road—populated by the sort of mountain people who have been interbreeding for too many generations. He became known as Dreu's nephew, Christophe, and was simply accepted as another eccentric from up there.
When their tins of food at last ran out, they bought a rooster and several hens, a milk cow, enough seed for a large garden, and replaced staples as necessary at the little village. Khristo journeyed only once into Épinal, the nearest town of any size, to buy a weapon on the black market and to see the Germans for himself. In the sparse, occasional gossip of the mountain village he heard little of résistance, so bided his time and turned his attention to matters of daily existence.
By the end of 1941, Khristo and the two sisters had fallen into a rhythm of rural obligations: wood had to be chopped, weeds pulled, animals fed, vegetables canned. The roof needed repair, a root cellar had to be built, once you had chickens you needed a chicken house and then—local predators were abundant—a strong fence. Given the absence of ready-made materials, improvisation was the order of the day and every new project demanded endless ingenuity. Such demands constituted, for Khristo, a kind of paradise. By turning his hand to unending chores he gradually cured his spirit of the black despair that had descended on it in the Santé prison.
Down below, in mountain villages and valley towns, the war subsided to the numbing routine of Occupation. Twice, in 1942, he left the mountain and contrived to make contact with maquis units but in both instances he found himself confronted with the political realities of the early résistance. The active groups in the region were dedicated communists, fighting both to defeat the Germans and to obtain political power for themselves. They were suspicious of him—he turned aside their ideological questions, and could find no way to be forthcoming about his past. When further meetings were suggested, in remote areas, he did not attend.
But by the fall of 1942 he had determined to put his caution aside and join the fighting no matter the danger. His conscience gnawed at him, and the peaceful joys of his existence turned bitter. He fabricated a history that could not, he thought, be vetted by the maquis organizations and prepared himself to withstand hostile interrogation.
The fabrication was, however, not to be tested. He spent the late fall and early winter in bed; a yellow blush tinged his cheekbones, his kidneys throbbed
with pain, and his physical energy simply drained away. The two sisters cared for him as best they could, he would emerge from bouts of fever to find Sophie wiping the perspiration from his body with a damp cloth. He was, during the worst moments, delirious, joining a spirit world where every age of his life returned to him in vivid form and color and he called out to childhood friends and NKVD officers as they floated brightly past his vision. He was again a waiter in Paris, wept at Aleksandra's absence, rowed his father across the Dunav, and hung his head in shame in the Vidin schoolhouse.
“Who is May?” Sophie asked tenderly when he woke to reality on a winter afternoon.
He whispered that he did not know.
On another occasion—a week later or perhaps a month, he had lost track of time—he came to his senses to discover both sisters huddled against the bedroom wall, their eyes wide with fright. What had he said? Had he confessed to phantom deeds, or real ones? With all his meager strength he turned himself toward them and held out his hands, pleading silently for forgiveness.
He recovered slowly. It was June before he could properly strip the udder on the milk cow. Rebuilding a sawhorse, he counted twenty hammer strokes before a nail was thoroughly driven. He had all his life taken physical strength for granted and was appalled at how slowly it returned to him. At times he feared he would never again be the same.
Then, in the late autumn of 1943, they had a visitor, a boy from the village down below. After a whispered conference, he was invited in and fed lavishly. The food and wine made him loquacious. He had come to enlist the services of Christophe for the Cambras maquis, he said. Everyone could do something, even Christophe. There were Sten magazines to be loaded, bicycle wheels to be repaired. He spoke grandly of one Lucien, who would lead them to glory in forays against the hated Germans. Christophe might well be allowed, after sufficient service, to fire one of the formidable Stens.