by Perrat, Liza
‘Girls!’ Miette’s mother called, from the doorway of the carpenter’s shop. ‘Come back inside, now.’ Busy cramming sweets into their mouths, Amandine and Séverine seemed not to hear her.
‘Time for lunch, children,’ Simon Laforge’s wife called to her three little ones. The chemist’s children too, ignored their mother.
I parked the bicycle and walked towards the bar. One of the Germans was standing at the card players’ table, asking for a light.
Miette’s grandfather handed him a box of matches and the German saluted, turned and walked away. The old man rolled his eyes, which brought muted laughter from the others.
‘Just how long are they going to stay?’ Monsieur Thimmonier muttered, around the Gauloise clamped between his lips.
‘Seems like they’ve been here forever,’ Miette’s grandfather said.
‘They might be gone sooner than we think,’ Robert Perrault senior said. ‘I’ve heard things are going well on the Russian front.’
‘Let’s just hope they’ll be on their way soon,’ André Copeau’s grandfather said.
With a wave to Robert and Evelyne Perrault, I disappeared into the toilet and locked the door. I bent down. No message from Martin. I scrawled a hasty note:
Meet me tomorrow, usual time, if you can.
40
‘I’m off out to gather the spring growth,’ Maman said the following afternoon. She took her basket from its hook on the kitchen wall and fixed the grey-green eyes on me as if she’d guessed where I was going. ‘Why don’t you come with me, Célestine?’
My mother had never asked me to accompany her when she gathered the herbs and flowers that she dried and stored in her special room. I should have been delighted after all those years but I knew she’d be gone for hours, losing herself in the woods and the valleys of the Monts du Lyonnais.
‘I … normally I’d have liked to,’ I said. ‘But I have other plans. I’ll come next time.’
My mother gave her chignon a pat and walked out, her basket swinging from her arm. From the kitchen window, I watched her cross the courtyard, thinking how strange it was to see her opening herself to me. Perhaps though, it was simply that even the coldest, most distant person needs some sort of company in the end, and I was her only choice. I watched her step through the gateway and disappear into the back garden towards the woodland path.
I filled the tin tub with hot water, and stripped my clothes off –– the trousers and blouse I wore, like Jacqueline –– and slid into the water. I scrubbed my skin until it tingled.
I’d been in my bath only minutes when I heard the rap at the door. I climbed out, hoping it was Dr. Laforge, or Père Emmanuel. The knock came again, more impatient.
I snagged my father’s old coat from the hook in the hallway. Traces of his yellow smell of sawdust still clung to it, and I draped it around my wet body and hurried down the hallway.
‘Who’s there?’
‘Requisition, madame.’
On no, not them again. I couldn’t imagine what more the Germans could possibly want from us. Like every other farm around, they’d almost stripped L’Auberge. I opened the door a crack and stared into the smug faces of Karl Gottlob and Fritz Frankenheimer.
Fear jolted through me. I went to shut the door but Karl jammed a shiny black boot in the doorway.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘We were expecting the abortionist. We were wondering where you’d got to, Céleste, weren’t we Fritz?’
‘We have almost nothing left on the farm,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to try elsewhere.’
‘But I see you have some goats, hens and a horse,’ Karl went on. ‘They’ll do us fine.’
‘Open up,’ Fritz said. ‘We’ve come on official business, nothing more.’
I had no choice, they’d only report me for being insubordinate so I opened the door wider.
‘Don’t take our animals,’ I said, clutching Papa’s coat tightly around me with one hand, the other fumbling for my pendant. ‘They’re all we have left.’
‘But we soldiers are hungry,’ Karl said. ‘How are we to fight a war on empty stomachs?’
‘That horse looks nice and juicy,’ Fritz said. ‘Tender flesh.’ He rubbed circles over his great paunch.
‘Gingembre? You want to eat Gingembre? No!’ My fingers tightened around the bone angel. ‘Our stomachs aren’t full either, but I’d starve before I ate my horse.’
‘Now, now, Céleste, don’t get nasty,’ Fritz said, pushing the door open wider. ‘It’s not our fault you French bungled up and lost the war.’
‘You haven’t won,’ I said. ‘The Allies are coming.’
‘The Allies are coming, the Allies are coming,’ Karl sneered. ‘What a tiresome joke that’s become.’ He pushed past me into the hallway. ‘Now, what did Fritz say, Céleste? Don’t get nasty. We don’t like nasty girls.’
I stared at them, not knowing what else to say, as their sinister leers ran from my head to my toes.
Fritz stepped towards me and my heartbeat quickened. The milky grey-blue eyes stared into mine, his onion and cabbage breath rank on my cheek. He unsheathed his Luger, and, with the butt, traced a line down one side of my face. I shuddered, my eyes darting to the kitchen; at the beam of sunlight splicing through the window. Karl stood before me too, his legs spread, one hand fingering his own gun. There was nowhere to run.
I trembled all over. ‘T-take the goats, the hens, Gi-Gingembre. Whatever you want but please, leave me alone.’
‘Aw look, Karl,’ Fritz said, a crabby hand clawing at my coat front. ‘Little Céleste is scared. What a pity big strong Martin isn’t here to save her this time.’
Karl’s lips curved in a mean smile, his cat-eyes almost luminous.
‘No, please no!’ I tried to back away again. I knew I was begging and I hated myself for that. I jumped with fright as the fabric of my father’s coat sheared apart in Fritz’s hands.
He grabbed my angel necklace, ripped it from my neck and flung it aside. I heard it clatter on the tiles and I felt not only naked, but totally disarmed.
Fritz clutched one of my bare breasts and squeezed it hard. His doughy cheeks flushed red, he flung me backwards onto the floor. Bent over me, he jerked my legs apart.
Karl laughed his hideous, throaty cackle, and when I saw the bulge in his trousers, I gagged on the rising vomit.
‘No, no!’ I pleaded again. ‘Please, no!’
‘Shut up, bitch,’ Karl said.
Sweat pouring from his face –– the matte pink shade of a slaughtered pig –– Fritz fumbled with his trousers and, with a single stab, thrust into me. I gasped with the pain, so fierce it ripped through my entire body. I tried to clamp my buttocks together to close my legs, but it was useless. I was trapped, as helpless as a mouse in a crow’s beak.
‘No, stop, you’re hurting me!’
Karl laughed again. Fritz said nothing as he tore my flesh apart, hammering into my body –– a solid, unrelenting pounding that seemed to reach right to my womb with every stroke.
I closed my eyes and sucked my breath in, trying to tear myself from his clutch. My thighs ached more and more with each fresh stab, and pinned beneath Fritz’s huge hands, I felt my wrists would snap.
My body tightened into spasms as he battered me harder and harder. Droplets of his sweat, mixed with drools of saliva, moistened my breasts.
I fought to the edge of surrender; tried to scream. Fritz’s breath came hot and fast, the exhaled air rancid as sour milk. He grabbed my hair, wrenching my head backwards, forcing my eyes to meet his, glowering with furious triumph. He gave a single grunt and slumped, sweat-slick and heavy, on me.
He pushed himself off me, took a corner of my father’s discarded coat and wiped the sticky sheen from his rust-coloured fuzz.
When Karl Gottlob had taken his turn, they left me there, splayed on the uneven terracotta tiles like a wounded animal, shot purely for sport.
They swaggered away from L’Auberge without a backward glance.
I didn’t know how long I stayed there, too numb to move, but eventually I rolled onto my front and raised myself onto all fours. I crawled across to where my pendant lay, and clasped it in my bloodless fist, my tears leaking onto Maman’s waxed tiles.
41
When my mother returned from her gathering, I was crouched back in the washing tub.
‘What in God’s name has happened?’ she said. ‘The hens, the goats and Gingembre are gone.’
‘B-boche.’ My voice was no more than a husky whisper.
She dipped a hand into the tub. ‘This water’s stone cold. And you’re all a shiver, Célestine. Look at your arms, they’re raked raw.’
She didn’t say anything more as she hooked her arms beneath mine and half-carried, half-dragged me into the living room and lay me gently on the sofa.
‘Vile pigs,’ she said, the rage in her eyes matching the venom in her voice. She covered me with the crocheted blanket that always sat across her Napoléon III armchair and dabbed disinfectant on the bloody grazes streaking my arms.
She tucked my arms back under the blanket and as she bent to pull it up under my chin, I caught her homely scent of musky lavender, peppermint and wild thyme.
‘Stay put, Célestine, I’ll be back with tea.’
‘What is it?’ I said, as she lifted my head and held the steaming cup to my lips.
‘Camomile, an age-old herb. Used for virtually everything that is wrong with you.’
‘Even this?’ I said, sipping the warm infusion.
‘It will help for now,’ she said with a sigh, ‘but later, when you’re feeling strong enough, you’ll need to come upstairs to my bedroom.’
‘Your bedroom? God no, not that.’
‘Preventive treatment,’ she said, as she placed the teacup on the table and held a beaker to my lips. I tasted the bite of cognac.
‘Better to be on the safe side,’ she said. ‘Besides, it will give you a good clean out; help rid you of the demon filth of those monsters.’
‘I’ll never be rid of their filth.’ A single tear ran down my cheek, which I swiped away.
My mother’s lips narrowed into the firm line. ‘Don’t let them destroy you,’ she said. ‘You must not let them destroy you, like they destroyed …’
‘Like they destroyed what?’
Maman had lowered her eyes, and held her fisted hands in her lap.
‘Like me?’ I said. ‘You were going to say, “Like they destroyed me”?’
She refused to meet my questioning eyes.
‘Is that what happened to you?’ I said. ‘The terrible, secret thing?’
She didn’t move, her gaze still fixed beyond, on the peaks of the Monts du Lyonnais, a nauseous olive green in the afternoon sun, and when she finally spoke, it seemed she was reaching far into her past, seeing and feeling it all again.
‘It was 1914,’ she said with a sigh, as if emerging from the trenches; as if she’d run out of fight, and was ready to relinquish everything to the adversary. ‘The Great War had just begun. There was a young man, a boy really, though he seemed like a man to a naïve sixteen year old.’ She took a breath. ‘Axel, his name was, and after he fought in the bloody battle of the Marne he could no longer bear the war. He deserted from the German army … ran away and, somehow, ended up at L’Auberge. I found him hiding in the barn, exhausted, starving and wounded.’
‘Weren’t you scared? I said. ‘To find a German soldier here?’
‘Of course I was, but when he spoke of the terrible bloodshed, violence and savagery he’d witnessed, I was no longer afraid. I felt sorry for him, pity. So I hid him in the old witch’s hut in the woods.’
‘You know about the hut?’
‘You’ve grown; matured so this past year,’ she said, with a small, sad smile, ‘but sometimes I find you still such a child. Generations before you knew of that hut.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘So what about Axel?’
‘I took care of him,’ she said. ‘Used the skills my mother taught me to tend his wounds. I fed him and kept him warm.’
‘And you fell in love,’ I said.
She nodded. ‘I did. And I thought he did too.’
‘But he didn’t?’
‘One morning, when he was fit and strong again, he attacked me, brutally, without warning. I didn’t see it coming. Just like those German pigs did to you. Then he disappeared. Scarpered off and I never saw him again.’ She fell silent for a minute.
‘That’s the thanks I got for hiding him; for risking my life –– my family’s safety –– to take care of someone. And look at the price I paid –– what it made me! –– for falling in love with the wrong person. I’ve never been able to … to shake it off, it seems. The bitterness, the resentment.’
I wasn’t conscious of it, but my hand had crept from beneath the blanket and I laid it over hers, which was still locked into a fist.
‘Not even when you married Papa?’ She didn’t pull her hand away.
‘Your father has been a good husband, Célestine. He deserved better than me. There could never be any real romance. No passion. I think he only married me because he thought I’d make an efficient wife.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ I said.
‘When I said anything –– a single word –– against your German officer, it only drove you deeper into his arms, Célestine. Didn’t it? Isn’t that why it all started in the first place, simply to defy me?’ I thought I saw a glint of madness in the grey flecks of her green eyes. ‘I could never accept you and him.’
‘I didn’t feel anything for him in the beginning, but he seemed to admire me,’ I said and I told her, then, of Félicité’s plan.
‘Your sister suggested such a thing? I can hardly believe that of Félicité.’
‘Well she did, and I failed my mission. But now I know it can’t go on. There are other things … far more important things I must concentrate on. But all the same, Martin is good to me, and kind. He’s not like other Ger ––’
‘They’re all the same,’ she snapped, pulling her hand away and fidgeting with her chignon. ‘The devil’s blood flows in every one of their veins. Just don’t let them crush the life from you too.’ She gathered up the teacup and the cognac beaker and turned to go back to the kitchen. ‘Now you’d better come upstairs. Best to get it over and done with.’
Over and done with. I feared, as with Maman, that thing would never be over and done with.
***
‘Go to your room and rest now,’ Maman said, coiling her tubing into the empty bowl on the stand next to her bed. My insides full of soapy water, my body still stiff and raw, I could barely move.
‘If you hate the Germans so much,’ I said, nodding at the bar of soap she was storing in its special box. ‘How come you’ve got proper soap, when nobody else has any? We don’t have money to buy things like that on the black market so you must be getting it from the Boche. And why do they let you keep up this business when they obviously know about it?’
My mother sat on the bed beside my outstretched legs. ‘After Axel’s betrayal, I thought I was rid of the Germans, rid of them forever. But no, back they came into my life, and this time they took your father to work for them –– to work for them! I understood immediately, that if they weren’t to break me again, I had to beat them at their own game.’
‘Their own game?’
‘All I do is feed them harmless information,’ she said, ‘in return for things I need, like soap, and to keep my business going.’
I shook my head as if I hadn’t heard properly, searching her unflinching eyes.
‘It was you? You told the Boche about Madame Abraham’s false papers? And that Monsieur Thimmonier made anti-German remarks, and Raymond Bollet and René Tallon were hiding guns? It was you who sent them to raid Robert Perrault’s wine cellar?’
I took a breath, couldn’t stop myself shaking. ‘You told them about Uncle Claude hiding horses and slaughtering his pigs to sell the
meat? I can’t believe you’d do such a thing to our friends; to Olivier’s uncle.’
She started pulling at her apron, straightening it. ‘As I’ve told you countless times, it’s a matter of survival, Célestine. Those nasty little extortionists –– Gottlob and Frankenheimer –– simply use the information to claim objects or money from these people for themselves, and to send back home. Don’t think they’re any better off in Germany than us. They have nothing there either.’ She sniffed. ‘Besides, whatever I say, no real harm comes to those people.’
‘No harm!’ You can’t truly believe that? You denounce friends, people we know. And what about Ghislaine’s father?’
‘It was a tragedy the poor man took his life,’ she said. ‘But I was not responsible.’
‘Maybe not directly,’ I said, ‘but he’d lost his wife, the war took his son, his daughter. Having to close his shop –– because of what you said –– was the last straw.’
Maman kept on as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘Madame Abraham’s antique shop is still open. She’s still here in Lucie, not in some camp ––’
‘They steal her best antiques!’ I said. ‘They go back every week, demanding more and more. Miette told me the poor woman lives in terror, fearful she won’t be able to satisfy their weekly orders.’
‘Giving up useless knick-knacks is far preferable to being deported, Célestine. Haven’t you heard what they’re doing to her kind in those camps? Death camps, that’s what they are.’
I caught my breath, thinking of the Wolfs. ‘Yes, I’ve heard but nobody’s certain. We have no proof.’
She tugged at her apron again. ‘Times are hard, Célestine, which makes people hard. We live in a dark era, where stocks of compassion have run out and there is no more generosity. Each for himself or for the few people he cares about. We’re all wearing masks; all engaged in bluff and counter-bluff.’ She pushed at invisible meshes of hair. ‘You are well aware I despise the Germans, and now you have my reasons for this hatred, but I absolutely need their cooperation if we are to get through this occupation; if we, and L’Auberge, are to survive the war.’