In the Moon

by Alan Holmes

  Behind the house there was a fair-sized garden separating it from a second building that housed a spacious artist’s studio. It was in this studio that Grandpa had his architectural office. A greenhouse linked the two buildings at the main floor level. This glassed-in structure was really a bridge since the garden separating the two buildings was at the kitchen level, one floor lower. On the walls and ceiling of the greenhouse, Grandpa cultivated muscat grapes that grew on an extensive trellis. They grew there in profusion a good part of the year.

  In the main house, a long entrance hall at the same level as the bridge connected it to the front door. Since the greenhouse was kept at the same temperature as the main house, no door was needed where the two were joined. Upon entering the front door of the house, one looked down the entrance hall and straight into the green luminosity of the greenhouse tunnel. Clients arriving to visit Grandpa in his studio were thus ushered through a marbled entrance hall hung with fine paintings and continued on through a verdant tunnel from whose foliaged walls and ceiling hung huge bunches of muscat grapes. I can still see those plump, amber grapes all aglow, backlit by the morning sun.

  I remember the rooms of the house as sumptuous, with twelve-foot-high, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the street in front. The main floor of the house consisted of two huge rooms: a living room at the front and a dining room that opened onto a glassed-in “sunroom” at the back of the house. The sunroom, much like a greenhouse itself, overlooked the courtyard garden one floor below. Each of the two rooms on the main floor had a large marble fireplace, an immense crystal chandelier, and a room-sized oriental carpet.

  Above the mantle piece in the dining room was a six-by-ten foot oil painting entitled “L’Abondance.” The painting had been done around 1830, by Grandpa’s grandfather, Antoine. It represented four cherub-like, naked little boys frolicking in and around a mountainous pile of grapes interspersed with other ripe-looking fruit: melons, apples, cherries, pears, peaches and plums. The young children portrayed had been modeled by the artist’s sons and were painted life-size.

  Four of the five floors of the house were equally luxurious and well appointed. I never saw the fifth floor because it was exclusively the servants’ domain, and I was not supposed to go up there. A very large dumbwaiter connected all the floors to the kitchen in the basement.

  With the basement windows set high and near the ceiling, the basement should more correctly have been called a half-basement. The latter included the kitchen, a pantry, a larder, a wine cellar, a servants’ dining room and a “common room” for their use. All were spacious and well appointed rooms.

  In 1936, with just my two grandparents living upstairs, the servant staff had been reduced to Georgette, Philomène, and Matilde. These three elderly spinsters had their rooms on the fifth floor. Before World War I, when Mother and her two sisters had still been young girls, there had also been a resident manservant, who served as both gardener and butler.

  One of our activities in Brussels was walking a short distance down the gently sloping rue Berckmans to the Avenue de Waterloo. In Brussels, this avenue was about the equivalent of the Champs Elysées in Paris, a broad, tree-lined boulevard with wide sidewalks, elegant shops, restaurants and sidewalk cafés. 109 rue Berckmans was also close to several fine museums, including the Palace of Fine Arts, where paintings done by my great-great grandfather and statues sculpted by his son, Jules, were on display. Mother was very proud of her heritage and took us to see these works every time we went to Brussels.

  When the adults went off somewhere, Brenda and I were left in the care of Georgette, the “first cook.” Georgette had been in the household since my grandparents were first married. She was in her sixties and still spry and active in the running of the household. Her face and jovial demeanor reflected her good-natured approach to the world and a life filled with kindness. She had a special fondness for me because she had spent a year helping Nurse Khondakov take care of me when I was a baby and when Mother was away in Africa. Now that I was six, Georgette let me hang around the kitchen as she cooked and, like Françoise, she allowed me to “help” her with minor kitchen procedures.

  Four years after this visit, in 1940, when the Germans invaded Belgium, Georgette, who had no other family, stayed on with my grandparents. Philomène and Matilde went away to live with their own families in the countryside, where food might be more plentiful.

  During World War II, Georgette was active in the underground resistance movement despite her advanced age. In the servants’ rooms, she ran a “safe-house” for Allied airmen who had been shot down over Belgium. The fifth-floor rooms were ideal for this purpose, having the advantage that if a search of the house were ever initiated by the Gestapo, the flyers could escape over the rooftops. Georgette had gained ample experience in the art of smuggling black market food during World War I, and thus managed to provide food for the airmen, some of whom were wounded.

  Georgette tended the wounded herself. Calling a doctor was too risky and therefore out of the question. People suspected of underground activities were interrogated and tortured by the Gestapo until they revealed what they knew. The usual way to persuade a person to talk, and one that seldom failed, was to have the prisoner watch the torture of a close family member. The penalty for participating in the underground resistance movement was death by firing squad. The fewer the people who knew about underground activities, the safer it was for everyone. No one was told anything that he or she didn’t absolutely need to know.

  The flyers stayed at 109 rue Berckmans for a few days, or sometimes months, until they were fit to travel and properly equipped to do so. Then, they were moved from one safe house to the next in a chain of safe houses until they eventually reached a place where it was possible to arrange a crossing of the Channel for their return back to England. Civilian clothes and fake identification cards had to be procured for the flyers before they could attempt the move to the next safe house. All of this required great ingenuity and extreme stealth.

  My grandparents were not part of this clandestine operation and were never told about it. There was nothing they could have added to what Georgette was already doing for the flyers, and they might have ended up being interrogated by the Gestapo. All these details were revealed to Mother after the war by Katrine, a neighbor who was part of the same underground “cell” as Georgette.

  But Granny (who survived the war) added some details to the story. She told Mother that Grandfather was well aware that Georgette’s household expenses had increased dramatically since the arrival of the Germans in Brussels. The money Georgette requested weekly for household needs grew beyond reasonable bounds, and since he was sure that Georgette would never do anything dishonest, he didn’t question the increase, surmising that Georgette was somehow contributing to underground activities. He also knew better than to ask questions.

  Two years into the German occupation, Grandpa died very suddenly of unexplained causes. Katrine said that Georgette had obtained (on the black market) enough “special” food for a small celebration of his seventy-third birthday. She maintained that the Gestapo had intercepted the black market food and had somehow laced it with poison in an effort to put an end to such contraband. She cited as proof the fact that Grandpa was in sound health on his birthday but that, on the following day, he awoke with violent stomach convulsions which were almost immediately followed by his death. All the symptoms of poisoning were present, Katrine insisted. But of course, there was no going to a doctor or to the authorities, no autopsy.

  Pursuing the subject, Mother pointed out that her mother and Georgette had both participated in the modest celebration and had suffered no similar symptoms. Katrine stood by her theory, explaining that through the underground network she had heard of several similar cases elsewhere in Brussels at the time. She also postulated that the poison might have been in the form of a micro-capsule, localized in a small portion of the food and
thus would have affected only the person who ate that portion.

  A week or so after Grandpa’s death, the Gestapo banged on the front door, forced it open and, armed with sub-machine guns at the ready, marched in, twelve strong. This was described to Mother by the toyshop owner, whose shop was across the street and who saw the Germans arrive at 109 rue Berckmans and break down the door.

  Without saying a word to Granny in her wheelchair in the dining room, they searched the house. Granny later told Mother she thought that Georgette had probably tried to hide in the dumbwaiter, for she heard the soldiers struggling with the small elevator, which seemed to be stuck. When the men finally succeeded in bringing the dumbwaiter to the level of the dining room, Granny heard both their exclamations of satisfaction and Georgette’s terrified whimpering. They dragged Georgette away and finished searching the house, but apparently found nothing else. No one ever saw Georgette again, and no funeral was held until the end of the war, when it was finally confirmed that she had been shot by a firing squad. She is honored in a group memorial dedicated to those killed while working for the underground movement in Brussels.

  Katrine said she had heard the commotion and had fled the area because of her association with Georgette. Two days later, she worked up enough courage to return to the neighborhood, not knowing what had happened or what she would find. She entered 109 rue Berckmans via a communal garden gate and found Granny still in her wheelchair, where she had waited patiently and in helpless silence for two days.

  Granny was taken to a convent where she was well known as a lifelong benefactor of the order. She lived there in the care of the nuns for another nine years, and was alert, able to read, and to converse intelligently with her visitors until her death. The nuns said she lived in a state of continual pain, but firmly refused any kind of a pain-killer and never uttered a single complaint.

  When Mother brought Brenda and me to rue Berckmans before the war, Georgette used to play with us when she could find the time to do so. We loved her attention because she was a happy soul, young at heart, with a good sense of humor, and a generous nature. Later, when I was old enough to appreciate her venerable age, I marveled at the way Georgette had gone up and down stairs while playing these games with us. She ranks among the people I hold most dear.

  On our return to Ville-d’Avray in early May, I was well enough to play in the garden, but I was still too weak to push the newly repainted locomotive up the sloping paths. My locomotive stayed parked in the low spots of the garden until Raimond had a minute to push it up the hill for me, which he did about four times an hour when he was working in the garden.

  I returned to the Cours Boutet de Monvel about a month before the end of the school year. I had been away for over two months due to my illness and the trip to Brussels, so my performance in class was now even more dismal than it had been before my abscence.

  The Cours Boutet de Monvel was a two-year school, and at the end of the second year, they held a prize giving and graduation ceremony. An assortment of toys was laid out on a table at the front of the classroom, and Mademoiselle de Monvel called each child in turn to the table to choose a toy. The order in which we were called for the collection of our prize was based on our scholastic standing. To no one’s surprise, I was the last one called up to the table.

  What did come as a surprise was that there was actually a choice of toys left when my turn finally came. One student was absent, so there were two items. The prizes available to me consisted of a forlorn little toy car, cheaply and poorly made of stamped sheet metal, or a boxed tea set that one of the little girls in attendance might have chosen for her dolls. I stood there contemplating this pitiable choice for some time. I really wanted neither.

  Finally, I grudgingly chose the dolly tea set. The class and the parents at the back of the room had been watching these proceedings with some interest, since I had a reputation for being the class character. Mademoiselle de Monvel couldn’t resist making fun of my situation and said, “Well, Monsieur Alain, are you planning a tea party for your dolls?”

  There was a burst of laughter and, when it subsided, I explained my choice. “No. The car is not to scale with my electric trains et a l’air d’être de la camelote (and appears to be a piece of junk). I have a little sister who might perhaps enjoy the tea set for her dolls.”

  I doubt that any of the students knew what “scale” was, but I don’t think the word was lost on the parents at the back of the room, several of whom did some subdued clapping. Among them was Mother who, for once, in what must have been a rough year for her, now seemed proud of me, even though I was last in the class. Afterwards, she and I went out for tea and pastries at a certain marvelous pastry shop just around the corner, on the Place de la Madeleine—Fauchon’s—the one where I had waylaid the hapless Miss Parris. As we enjoyed our patisseries and a cup of tea, Mother let me know I had done just fine as far as she was concerned.

  In June, we went to Hardelot, where we rented a different house for the summer. Due to my appendicitis, Mother had been unable to go there in April to renew the rental of Le Green Cottage. At the last minute, in late May, she had been able to arrange a rental of the Villa Sombra. Despite considerable dinner-table debate that summer, we never figured out how this villa came by its name, which has the flavor of “shade” or “shadow” in Spanish.

  The house was on the corner of a block of contiguous houses, and its two exposed outer surfaces faced south and west, respectively. Both sides therefore received copious sunlight after about nine o’clock in the morning. The house had several generous bay windows and could not be called a dark or shady house by any stretch of the imagination. Nor were its cream-colored stucco exterior or its maroon timbers and shutters any further clue as to the reason for its name.

  Although it overlooked the digue (promenade), the beach and the sea, Villa Sombra was not nearly as nice as Le Green Cottage of the previous summer. It was at the north end of the digue and some distance away from my beloved tennis court amphitheater, where everything of importance in Hardelot took place. The remoteness of the villa in relation to the rest of Hardelot was why Father eventually declared that he preferred Villa Sombra to Le Green Cottage. He loved solitude and had a well-developed aversion to crowds of any sort.

  The villa’s nicest feature was a rotunda-style terrace at its southwest corner. This circular terrace was large enough to accommodate the dining table so that we ate most of our meals while enjoying the view, the sounds of the sea, and some magnificent sunsets.

  That summer’s activities were much the same as those of the previous summer, except for one important addition. Mother suddenly decided that it was time for me to learn to ride a bicycle. She rented a small bike for me and, for several days, she spent half-hour sessions holding onto the bike as I wobbled along beside her. She was afraid to let go of me for fear I’d fall and scrape myself on the rough asphalt. However, it became increasingly clear to me that I would never discover the wonder of riding a bike until she released me, something she appeared reluctant to do.

  One day, when Mother was away playing golf, I asked Raimond if he would teach me to ride my bike. Since it was low tide, he proposed that we go out on the exposed sand bars for the lesson. He carried my bike down the seawall and, when we reached our beach cabin, removed his shoes and socks and rolled up his trouser cuffs. This done, he carried the bike across the strip of dry, soft sand and out onto the smooth, hard expanse of wet sand. There, he held the bike while I mounted it and, still holding onto it, ran as fast as he could and eventually catapulted me off by giving me one final, mighty push. As he did so he yelled, “Pedal! Pedal like mad and keep pedaling!”

  His instructions had been essentially the same as Mother’s, but she had never allowed me to move faster than a walk. The speed I now traveled made all the difference. Sure enough, pedaling like mad, I found myself flying along at what seemed like breakneck speed, but upr
ight and completely stable. I was experiencing one of life’s great moments! I kept on pedaling and, since I had the whole beach to myself, I soon discovered that I could turn without any danger of falling over. I started making wide circles around Raimond, who was clapping and encouraging me on with “Bravo Alain! Bravo!”

  Finally, as I passed close by him, I yelled, “How do I stop?” The bike was fairly rudimentary and had no brakes; nor did it have freewheeling, so the pedals had to turn if the wheels spun. Before my triumphant launching, we hadn’t discussed the important detail of how to stop.

  As I zoomed past him again, Raimond yelled, “Just stop pedaling!”

  “I can’t do that—I’ll fall down!” I yelled back on the next flyby. For indeed, my initial instructions had been clear: pedal or perish! I was convinced that if I stopped pedaling, I would keel over in a disastrous crash and be annihilated. Not even the trusted Raimond could now talk me into stopping my pedaling. Would I be forced to keep on pedaling like this forever, and what would happen to me when the tide came up? On each successive pass, I repeated, “I can’t stop pedaling! I mustn’t stop pedaling, or I’ll fall and be killed!”

  Raimond was still laughing and repeating his refrain to stop pedaling, but started a deliberate walk along the beach as I continued to ride circles around him, all the while pedaling like mad and vociferously demanding a resolution of my crisis each time I orbited close to him.

  Raimond’s plan became clearer when he stopped walking and stood beside a huge pile of seaweed. As I passed by him once more, he yelled, “Just ride into the pile of seaweed! That will stop you safely!”

  Half-plausible instructions at last! I looped around once more, screwed up all my courage and, still pedaling furiously, charged full speed into the seaweed. My wheels and pedals were immediately entangled in the kelp, and the bike came to an abrupt halt. To my surprise, I was still upright, in one piece, and with my two feet resting on the mounds of seaweed on either side of the bike.