The Children Return

by Martin Walker

  “You had no news of your family, nothing from the woman who brought you to St. Denis, Tante Simone?” Pamela asked.

  “Not a word. We had no radio, never saw a newspaper nor even a postman.”

  The facteur would leave any letters at the mairie, and Sylvie would look in on the way to market. Michel had a small pension for his wounds, and once a month something would come in the mail and he could go to the post office and get the money. And he got ration books, Maya said, because she remembered him applying for two tobacco rations for him and Tante Sylvie so he could sell them in the market to buy needles and thread. There was no wool, except from unraveling old sweaters.

  “Then came the Sunday, June eleventh; I’ll never forget it because they came back from chapel and said the war was going to be over because the British and Americans had landed in Normandy and we could go home to Paris. They would take us to the big Protestant church in Bergerac where someone could get in contact with Tante Simone. There was such excitement!”

  She laughed at the memory and helped herself to more wine. “We were sure we’d soon be in Paris, back with our parents. But of course we had to wait until after market day because there were eggs and chickens to sell. Then we had to wait another day because the ration books hadn’t arrived at the mairie, and Sylvie thought we might need something for a bribe if we ran into the Milice.”

  Bruno winced a little at what the black-clad Vichy police had done to sully the name of his profession. The term was still used. Anytime there was a claim of police brutality in the papers somebody would be sure to say, “They were as bad as the Milice.”

  So they had set off in the donkey cart in the moonlight, David and Maya in the back with Dou-Dou, the Desbordeses up front with two fat chickens, their beaks and legs tied together. Just before dawn they crossed the Vézère River at Limeuil and took the old road to Trémolat, planning to cross the Dordogne at Lalinde.

  But there were armed men, Frenchmen, in the streets of Lalinde, and the bridge was blocked by a barrier of heavy stones, as tall as a man. The bell was tolling, and a priest told the Desbordeses they were expecting German troops to come by the main road from Bergerac, and they should turn back. But Michel had been insistent, and with his gueule cassée the résistants let their cart through the barrier on the bridge. Once over the river, Desbordeses took the dirt path up the hill that went through the woods to Couze and Mouleydier, the back way to Bergerac.

  Bruno now knew what was coming. The SS Panzer Division Das Reich, which had been based farther south near Toulouse, was battling its way north through Resistance ambushes to join the German defenses against the Allied landings in Normandy. An SS panzer division was twice the size of the usual Wehrmacht armored divisions. It had been equipped with new Panther tanks and twenty-millimeter flak cannons designed for use against aircraft but which could chew up a house in a few rounds. The orders from London had been blunt: slow the panzers at all costs. The longer the Division Das Reich took to reach Normandy the greater the chance that the invasion could succeed. Bridges had been blown, towns destroyed, Resistance fighters were gunned down in ditches as the ill-armed civilians tried to slow the armored columns. And two children and two simple peasants who knew little of the war save that Allied troops had landed were heading innocently into a battle zone.

  “I see you have some idea what happened to us at Mouleydier, Bruno,” said Maya. He tried to recall the details he’d read in the history books.

  “You got there in time for the first battle, when the Resistance held the bridge for a whole day,” Bruno said. “I know the Soleil group was there and some of the Cérisier company. There’s a man still alive in St. Denis who took part.”

  “I suppose you could say we took part in it, too. At least, we were casualties. I had no idea what was happening, but we were coming along the road from Varennes and I remember watching the little planes in the sky. I didn’t know they were spotting for artillery. Just as we got to the crossroads where you’d turn right to cross the Mouleydier bridge, mortar bombs erupted all around us. David pulled me off the cart and into the ditch. I was furious with him because it got me all dirty and I wanted to look nice for Maman.”

  The donkey had been killed, and both of the Desbordeses were wounded, Michel seriously in the leg and the stomach, Tante Sylvie in the arm but still able to walk. Some résistants took them to a makeshift clinic in a house on what was supposed to be the safe side of the river. Dou-Dou had disappeared. Maya remembered being put into the cellar with David and some other children, where they would be sheltered from the mortars.

  The résistants had machine guns, rifles, plenty of grenades and some bazookas that had been dropped from British aircraft by parachute. They fought off two probing attacks on the bridge, and then the battle erupted in the river just behind the house where the children were sheltering. The Germans had brought up a barge to attack the résistants in the flank, but the barge was sunk by a bazooka. The battle ended when the Royal Air Force launched a long-planned bombing raid on an ammunitions factory just outside Bergerac. Fearing that the résistants had called in air support, the Germans withdrew.

  “Monsieur Desbordes died two days later, and we were left with Madame Desbordes, whose wounded arm and shoulder had been treated by a doctor with the Resistance,” Maya went on. “She kept asking what had happened to her chickens and to the money her husband had in his pockets. My little brown paper parcel with my change of clothes had disappeared, like a lot of things. I remember the man who owned the tabac sitting on his threshold and crying because the résistants had cleaned out his stock.”

  Many of the people in the town had fled. A schoolteacher came and found Maya and David, and they were taken to the church with the rest of the children, where at least they had food and water. David went with some of the other boys to hunt for souvenirs of the fighting and came back with some empty cartridge cases. Tante Sylvie told the teacher they had come from St. Denis and were going to stay with cousins in Bergerac. Maya and David knew enough to say nothing.

  The next day Monsieur Desbordes was buried in a short ceremony, the one civilian who died as a result of the battle of June 15. When Tante Sylvie said he was a Protestant, the priest had not wanted to bury him in the church cemetery. The schoolteacher said Desbordes was obviously a veteran of the First World War, a gueule cassée, so the priest relented. The résistants took their own dead with them, to give the bodies to their families. Most of them had come from the area around Belvès, the priest explained.

  “Tante Sylvie fell ill with fever. I think her wound was infected,” Maya said, her voice very flat. “She became delirious, shouting at the priest, anybody she could find, demanding that someone take us all back to St. Denis. I was terrified she was going to start shouting that we were Jews from Paris, but she didn’t.”

  She stopped, sipped some water and then finished her glass of wine. Bruno, scanning Pamela’s bookshelves for a volume he knew was there, was counting the days in his head. He knew there had been a second battle of Mouleydier, the town’s day of tragedy. Had Maya gone through that as well?

  “And then the war came again,” said Maya. “It was the twenty-first. We were still living in the church, but all the other children had gone. They had people to look after them. We just had Tante Sylvie, who had become demented. Her wound stank, and I was terrified of her, but David kept trying to take care of her, persuade her to go back to the clinic. Finally he succeeded, but it was deserted, and we returned to the church. We raided vegetable gardens for food; I remember eating a lot of strawberries and raw zucchini.

  “This time the Germans came with tanks, at least David said they were tanks, but now I think perhaps they were those armored cars you see in newsreels with wheels at the front and tracks behind. It began with a lot of shooting, and then a Frenchman with a loudspeaker called on the résistants to surrender. They answered him with gunfire, and then the Germans came in firing cannons, and the résistants were defending. Suddenly the firi
ng stopped. The Germans seemed to withdraw, and people came out from their cellars. Tante Sylvie left the church and was walking up the main street. I was going to follow, but David held me back, and that was when the bombardment started. Mortars, artillery, heavy guns, I don’t know exactly. But within an hour Mouleydier was in ruins. And we never saw Tante Sylvie again.”

  Bruno rose and went across to the bookshelves and took down a book he had lent to Pamela. He leafed through to the page he wanted and read aloud:

  “ ‘Of two hundred houses, one hundred sixty-four were destroyed in the barrage and the fires. Twenty-two people were killed, three civilians including a nine-year-old boy, and nineteen résistants, most of them shot after being captured.’ ”

  “I knew the boy,” said Maya. “He was called Jean.”

  “ ‘Jean Bouysset,’ ” said Bruno, quoting from the book. “Then the armored column went on to Pressignac and burned that, too.”

  “You cannot imagine how Mouleydier looked, burning, smoke everywhere, houses collapsed, streets full of rubble,” said Maya.

  There was no water, of course, and most of the wells had been blocked with charred beams from the houses. The schoolteacher was dead, but the priest fed them. The Germans retreated into Bergerac and the résistants took over the countryside and took David and Maya to a school where they stayed with some other children until the Germans left Bergerac in August. One of the schoolmistresses took them to the Protestant church there in a gazogène, one of the cars that had been modified to operate with charcoal gas that was kept in a large bag attached to the roof. The Protestant pastor somehow got in touch with Tante Simone. David and Maya stayed with a Protestant family until Simone could come and take the two of them back to Chambon where she lived.

  “In September, after the Liberation of Paris, we learned that our parents were no longer in the city. They had been taken to Germany,” Maya said, her voice empty of emotion as though she had said this so many times that she had no more tears to shed. “We didn’t learn until after the war that they had died in the camps. So we were orphans, living in a Jewish orphanage set up in a school near Chambon, and stayed there for four years until 1948 when we went to Israel.”

  There was silence around the table until Maya said, “There you have it, my story of two children of war, adrift in a battle and knowing that if people learned we were Jews we’d be dead. Now perhaps you understand why we never came back. There was nothing we wanted to return to, no Desbordeses, no Dou-Dou, not even the donkey. But I feel there are debts to be paid, to the scouts and the Protestants and to the people here, and just like David I want to pay them. And now I want to go to bed.”

  23

  Florence and her pupils had done the town proud, Bruno thought, as he followed Maya, Yacov and the mayor into the classroom. There was a blown-up photograph of the row of buildings that housed Maya’s attic as it now looked, and beside it an accomplished sketch on a large sheet of white paper showing how it would appear after the proposed transformation. The sketch was based loosely on Bruno’s idea of turning the ground floor of the buildings into a kind of arcade. He’d been assuming some simple pillars, but the sketch showed a series of stone arches that led into a covered space large enough for thirty or forty people where the entrance to the museum as well as a museum shop was meant to be. Another shop had been sketched in and listed as an art gallery. Above the museum entrance a sign had been inked in, reading MUSÉE HALÉVY DE ST. DENIS.

  The interior plan showed a handsome new staircase and an elevator, leading to two exhibitions on the first floor, one on the history of the Occupation and the Resistance in Périgord and the other on the history of St. Denis going back to the forty-thousand-year-old engravings in the cave of Bara-Bahau. On the next floor was a small movie theater and a large room where the role of the Protestant church and the scout movement in saving Jewish children could be featured. The attic was marked simply THE REFUGE, and a note said it would be decorated as Maya remembered it. The other attics in the buildings were to be turned into offices.

  Yves Peyreblanque, one of the older boys and the son of an ambulance driver, came forward and handed Maya a small bunch of flowers, and then Eglantine, the star of the girls’ rugby team that Bruno coached, made a small speech of welcome. The two of them led Maya to examine the sketches, asking if she had any questions.

  “What about the people who live in these houses now?” she asked.

  Another youth, Maurice Cordet, whose father was a tree surgeon, led her to an easel that held another blown-up photo of the disused cooperage. A sketch showed how it could be restored and turned into housing. Above the entrance was a plaque that read RÉSIDENCES HALÉVY. The final display showed a photo of the Desbordes farm as it was now and a sketch showing how it could be transformed, with a neat array of tents on the flat land by the stream.

  Florence stood back, letting her pupils make the explanations and then leading Maya to the final display. Two large tables had been covered with a cloth and behind them on the wall leaned a large cork board that was covered in old photographs and newspapers. One of them carried a photograph of Marshal Pétain with Hitler. Another blared out the words PARIS LIBÉRÉ. There was one exhibit that seemed to be missing, the space covered with a white cloth. Perhaps they had not had time to install it. Florence and the kids had done extremely well to get this project looking as good as it did.

  The tables carried objects from the period of the Occupation, ration books and faded blue packets of cigarettes marked VENTE RESTREINTE, whose sales were restricted to troops. Bruno saw a Wehrmacht helmet and a French one, well-worn sabot clogs carved from wood, and a dress dyed in blue (the original markings from the flour sacks from which it had been made were still visible). There were armbands with the Cross of Lorraine and others marked FFI, for the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur, and a handwritten receipt for food and wine, signed in the name of the FFI by a Capitaine Bousquéret.

  “We went to all our grandparents asking what they might have in their attics, everyday items that came from the period,” said Yves, the youth who had given Maya the flowers. “My great-grandfather was given that receipt, and now we’re trying to track down the captain’s family to see if they have any mementos of him. We just wanted to give you an idea of the kind of things we’d like to see displayed, and we’re glad we did it. We all learned a lot.”

  He stood back to let Maya look at the various items. Another of the pupils pressed a button on a small music box and the strains of “J’attendrai” began to fill the room. She smiled faintly, and her fingers traced the outlines of a piece of cloth in the shape of a star, in faded yellow.

  “Strictly speaking, that’s not from here, but from one of the members of our family who lived in Perpignan,” said a slender youth whom Bruno recognized from his rugby classes. He was Daniel Weiss’s son Samuel, who played a good game on the wing.

  “This is much, much more than I expected,” Maya said, haltingly, speaking to the pupils. “You’ve all done very well and I want to thank you for all your hard work and your very creative ideas.”

  “There’s one final item we found, or rather that the mayor found in the basement of the mairie,” said Eglantine, and steered Maya to the wall display where she removed the white cloth.

  “It’s a copy of the marriage register that records the wedding of Michel and Sylvie Desbordes in 1917. And now you’ll need this,” the girl said, handing Maya a magnifying glass. “We only just tracked it down, so we didn’t have time to enlarge it. It’s from the newspaper Liberté du Sud Ouest from May 1917.”

  The headline read SOLDIERS MARRY BEFORE RETURNING TO THE FRONT, and there was a small photograph of three young men in army uniforms with their brides, each of the women carrying a bouquet.

  “The couple on the left is Michel and Sylvie.”

  “It’s before he was wounded,” Maya said, peering through the glass at the face in the photograph. “I never really knew what he looked like before. And that’s her
, Tante Sylvie, looking so young.”

  She turned to look at her grandson and beckoned him across to look at the couple who had taken her in and then died in the attempt to get her and her brother home and reunited with their family. Maya’s eyes were glistening with tears as she took Yacov’s hand and gave him the magnifying glass to peer in turn at the wedding photo of the long-dead Desbordeses.

  “Without those people I wouldn’t be here today nor would you.” Her head was shaking slowly as if in disbelief that so many echoes and memories of her youth could have survived and been brought back for her to remember.

  “You young people have done an amazing job,” Yacov said, turning to face Yves and Eglantine, Samuel and the others. “Believe me, you have touched me today.”

  Bruno waited for the “But …” Yacov was a lawyer, trained to take no decision in the heat of the moment but only after sober and prolonged reflection. Bruno expected him to say that any further decision about the memorial would have to await discussions with the mayor, a meeting of the family trustees and detailed cost estimates. Yet Yacov remained silent, looking expectantly at his grandmother almost as if urging her to voice support for the plans.

  The mayor chose that moment to cough discreetly and step forward.

  “On behalf of the town, I’d like to add my own few words of appreciation for the hard work of our youngsters and their dedicated teacher, Madame Florence Pantowsky,” he said. “I’d also like to pay tribute to the creative imagination of our chief of police here, who has been at the heart of this project from the start. It’s a very impressive generation of young citizens we have here, and it gives me great confidence for the future of St. Denis. I think the traditions of humanity and decency that Monsieur and Madame Desbordes displayed are being upheld by these children of our town today. And these youngsters tell me, madame, that irrespective of the eventual decision of the Halévy Foundation, they will go ahead and pursue this project of a museum, on their own if need be. And now perhaps we’d better let them return to their studies.”