by Fiona Valpy
As the last few people filed past the count’s coffin, the mayor’s secretary came to lock up the mairie for the night. Tomorrow, the funeral would take place in the church in Coulliac – which was large enough to accommodate all the mourners who would be there – before Charles Montfort, Comte de Bellevue’s body was laid to rest beneath the flagstones of the little chapel up at the château. Eliane and Madame Boin, who had been sitting on chairs against the wall, watching over the count for the final time, got to their feet.
‘I’m hearing that there’s been some serious fighting going on over your young man’s way,’ Madame la Secrétaire said to Eliane.
‘He’s not my young man anymore,’ said Eliane, but her heart still leaped with dread.
The mayor’s secretary shot her an astute look. ‘If you say so, Eliane. Anyway, I’ve heard they’ve done a good job of holding up les Boches. Where’s that brother of yours these days?’
Eliane shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. I haven’t seen him since he came to find us at the château after the Germans had gone.’
‘Keeping himself busy, I’m sure.’ The secretary patted Eliane’s hand sympathetically, noticing that the colour had drained from the girl’s face at the thought of the peril her loved ones might be facing. ‘Don’t worry; it will soon be over and those we love will come home safely, God willing. Go home now and get some sleep. You will need your strength for tomorrow.’
Yves woke her from a troubled sleep just after dawn. For a few moments, she was disorientated. She’d been dreaming that she was in the cavern beneath Château Bellevue again, and Mathieu had been there with her. She was trying to comfort him, because she could see he was in great pain, but as she did so she heard great rocks being rolled over the trapdoor above them and then the entrance to the tunnel collapsed. She realised that there was no way out. Frantically, she’d tried to claw at the stones that blocked the tunnel, her hands torn and bloody. Mathieu had watched her, helpless, and then in her dream the ground had begun to shake. Terrified that the cavern was collapsing in on them, she’d fought her way back to Mathieu and held him as he dissolved into the pale light that crept in through the windows of her attic room and she found her brother shaking her.
‘Wake up, Eliane, wake up!’
‘Yves? What is it? Are you alright?’
He nodded. ‘Something’s happened. In Tulle. I’m going over there to look for Mathieu. Will you come too? There may be some people in need of help. Bring Maman’s basket.’
‘Papa? And Maman?’
‘Leave them here. I don’t know what we’ll find; maybe it’s nothing, just rumours. Let them stay and look after Blanche. We’ll leave them a note to say where we’ve gone.’
They climbed into the truck and Yves accelerated along the track, swinging out into the road and turning east as the sun began to rise.
‘What have you heard?’ Eliane asked him, squinting into the light as the truck swayed around a bend in the road, its tyres skidding slightly in the dust.
With his eyes fixed grimly on the road ahead, Yves said, ‘There was fighting in the streets of Tulle. The maquisards almost managed to take the town from the occupying forces. But the Germans sent an armoured detachment from Brive as reinforcements. The boys were no match for them and in the end they fled.’
Eliane nodded, digesting this. ‘Did they get away?’
Yves pressed his lips together in a hard line and swallowed before he was able to reply. ‘Most did, I think. But the Germans rounded up everyone they could find, whether or not they’d been involved in the fighting. There have been reprisals.’ He stopped, apparently concentrating on steering across the narrow bridge over the river at Coulliac, one of the few that still remained intact after the carnage of the last few days.
Eliane’s blood seemed to freeze in her veins. ‘What sort of reprisals?’
Yves shrugged. ‘I can’t be sure. These are only rumours . . . There’s been no official word.’
She turned to look at his profile. He seemed so much older, all of a sudden, a stranger, his features no longer those of the carefree boy he’d once been. All the things he had seen and all the things he had done had etched lines into his face that appeared as pale as marble in the morning light, carved into something harder than it had ever been before. And, despite all he had seen and all he had done, he was still struggling to speak of what he had heard had happened in Tulle. His jaw was clenched and she saw the sinews in his throat tighten as he swallowed again, hard. And then he spoke.
‘There have been hangings.’
The silence was loud for a moment, ringing in her ears, making her dizzy.
‘Mathieu . . . ?’ She almost choked as she said his name.
‘I don’t know, Eliane.’ He shook his head, as if trying to shake off the images that had lodged themselves there. ‘I just don’t know.’
The most noticeable thing, as they entered Tulle, was the silence. It was a Saturday morning and the town should have been bustling with activity as its inhabitants congregated in cafés and outside shops. But instead an eerie atmosphere of stillness engulfed them as the truck negotiated the streets. And then, as they came around the last corner and reached the centre of the town, Yves stood hard on the brakes.
When they turned on to the main street, the scene was so surreal that it took them a few moments to register it. From each of the lampposts, as far as they could see along the road, a body was suspended, hanging heavy and motionless. From a distance, the figures looked almost peaceful, their hands appearing to be clasped behind their backs and their heads bowed as if in prayer.
At the sound of the truck’s engine, one or two curtains stirred in the windows of apartments above the shops. Yves switched it off and the silence was far louder than the noise of the truck had been, pounding in their ears, making Eliane feel even more dizzy. Bile rose in her throat and she had to swallow hard as nausea threatened to overwhelm her. She took a deep breath and turned to reach for Lisette’s basket of medicaments. It was a small comfort to hold the wicker handle, even though she knew that the contents of the basket would be of no use to the figures hanging from the lampposts.
They climbed out, cautiously, and Yves slammed shut the driver’s door. The sound seemed to trigger something, as if it were an order releasing the people who were trapped in their homes, terrified and traumatised by what they had witnessed. One by one, doors opened and the inhabitants stumbled out into the street.
Yves opened his arms to catch a woman who seemed to be falling towards them, her body shaking uncontrollably. ‘It’s alright. You’re alright now,’ he said to her, trying to soothe her with words that felt meaningless. He turned to Eliane. ‘Take her,’ he said. ‘Look after her.’
He stopped a boy – no more than twelve years old – who was running up the street towards them. ‘Wait!’ Yves said. ‘Help me with these ladders. We need to get them down.’
A pair of ladders lay on their sides against the railings at the end of the street, tossed there casually after they’d been used for their murderous purpose.
‘My brother . . .’ the boy gasped, his face a mask of shock.
‘Which one is he?’ Yves asked, grimly.
‘Over there.’ The boy pointed to the third lamppost along, where the body of a skinny teenager was suspended.
Yves nodded. ‘We’ll get him down. You wait here with my sister.’
Several women – and one or two elderly men – had appeared now, and Yves directed them to help him place the pair of ladders against the first lamppost. ‘We need to work together, to bring them down gently,’ he said. ‘If you can help, then come and stand beneath me. Two people should steady the ladders; the others need to be ready to take the weight as we untie the ropes.’ A sturdy woman climbed one of the ladders and Yves the other. ‘I’ll take the weight off the line if you can untie the knots?’ he asked her. She nodded, intent on her task.
One by one, they brought down the bodies. There were more than ninety
in all, men and boys.
Eliane did her best to try to bring comfort to those who stood, watching, waiting for their father or their husband or their brother to be released from the rope that bound him by the neck. Outstretched arms received the bodies as they were passed down gently, and laid them out on the pavement. People brought blankets and sheets to cover the bodies, wrapping them tenderly in their makeshift shrouds.
As Yves worked, others arrived to help, bringing more ladders, offering supporting shoulders to those who were destroyed by grief.
It was harrowing work, but they didn’t pause for a second, moving methodically from one lamppost to the next. Eliane was about halfway along the street, crouching alongside a woman whose stomach was swollen in pregnancy as she knelt over the body of her husband, when she caught sight of a tall figure, weaving his way through the gathered mass of people and picking his way around the bodies stretched out on the ground.
She didn’t recognise him at first; his hair was so wild and his face concealed by a thick growth of beard, a typical maquisard. But something in the way he moved – a bear of a man but with a natural grace to his limbs – made her look more closely.
‘Mathieu!’ At first her voice was a whisper, her throat constricting so tightly that his name couldn’t escape. But then she found her strength and called out more loudly.
He turned his shaggy head towards the woman who was calling his name and, as he did so, she saw that his eyes were wild, filled with a terror that she’d never seen in him before.
Eliane straightened up and moved towards him, but even as she reached for him he looked past her in horror at the bodies still hanging in mid-air. She turned to follow his gaze, just in time to see Yves tenderly handing down the body of a young man into the arms of those waiting below to help. Tears were streaming down her brother’s face. And then she realised that it was the body of Luc that was being laid out at the edge of the road.
There were no words. Just a keening, like the cry of a wild animal in pain, as Mathieu knelt beside his brother’s body. Eliane stood next to him and watched, helplessly, her heart breaking as Yves moved his ladder to the next lamppost and helped bring down the body of Mathieu’s father to lay it beside Luc’s.
At such a time, when there was nothing that could be said, all she could think of were Gustave’s words as they had stood watching the beehives burn: ‘Stand tall, Eliane. Don’t let them destroy you, too. We will survive this. We won’t let them beat us. Courage.’ She crouched down, reached out and gathered Mathieu into her arms, holding him as tightly as she could manage, with the last of her remaining strength.
The bodies were buried in the graveyard: ninety-seven graves were dug; ninety-seven men and boys of Tulle laid to rest there. There were more rumours of the terrible retribution and devastation wrought by the German divisions as they moved on northwards to fight what would become their final battles on French soil. But the inhabitants of the little town of Tulle were so overwhelmed with the struggle to cope with their own personal grief that the stories from further afield didn’t make much of an impression on them at the time. It was simply impossible to come to terms with what had happened – an impossibility that the community would have to learn to live with, somehow.
Once the funerals were over, Eliane and Yves helped Mathieu into the truck and took him back to the mill house at Coulliac. He had no other family in Tulle and so the Martins opened their arms wide and drew him into theirs.
But the hanging of his father and his brother had been too much for him to bear; he had lost the ability to speak, struck dumb by grief and the trauma of what he’d seen. Lost deep within his shock, he didn’t shed a tear. He seemed frozen, uncomprehending, distant, locked away in the silent prison of his mind, and Eliane began to despair of ever being able to reach him again. Day after day, she sat with him beside the river, talking to him softly, speaking words of hope and love that she thought might unlock the prison of silence in which he was held.
News began to trickle through again – not just rumours now, but reports in the newssheets and voices over the airwaves: there was a bitter battle raging in the north; the Germans were fighting for survival along every front, but thanks to the Allied Forces, supported by the determined efforts of the Resistance fighters across France, the tide of the war had turned, irreversibly.
On a grey morning, when storm-clouds bruised the summer sky, Mathieu sat beneath the willow’s weeping branches, hands clasped around his knees, head bent forward, gazing dully at the river flowing by. Eliane stood watching him for a few moments, her heart bleeding with grief for the man she loved, who was surely still somewhere within that empty-eyed shell, if she could only find the key to unlock his pain, if only she could reach him. A shaft of sunlight pierced the clouds suddenly, and the light glinted on the steel coils of the barbed wire that still clad the riverbank. Beyond the wire, as the clouds parted, the sunshine fell on to the weir, making the water sparkle with a million dancing lights.
All at once, Eliane knew what she had to do.
She ran to the barn and pulled a pair of rusty shears from beneath a pile of disused tools. Without looking at Mathieu, she strode down the riverbank to where the tangle of wire barricaded the weir. The shears were stiff to open, but she managed to prise apart the jaws. She placed them around a strand of the wire, gathered all her strength into her thin arms and jerked the blades closed. It took a few, frantic chops, but eventually the strand bent and then snapped, springing apart as it recoiled. She started on the next strand. And then a pair of strong hands took the shears from her and she stood aside to let Mathieu hack at the wire. He made short work of it, pulling away the severed coils, ignoring the cuts where the barbs snagged his hands, breathing heavily as he forced the blunted, rusted blades of the shears to close again and again. The last strand sprang apart and he threw the shears down. Eliane stepped out on to the weir, not bothering to kick off her shoes, and stretched out a hand to him.
At last, he looked her in the eye. Her steady, grey gaze seemed to cut through the wire that had trapped his mind and her smile melted the ice that had gripped his heart. The two of them walked out into the middle of the river and then she turned to face him. The storm clouds were moving off now, rolling back to reveal the blue of the summer sky behind them. And as they did so, she saw that same clarity reveal itself in his dark eyes as they were washed clean by the tears that began to pour from them.
She took both his hands in hers and they stood there in the middle of the river with the water foaming about their ankles, the sound of it carrying off the gut-wrenching sobs that were wrung from him as his tears dropped into the frothing veil that covered the weir.
When he grew calm again at last, she leaned close to him and kissed his face, tasting the salt of his tears. ‘I love you, Mathieu,’ she said.
He drew back to look at her face again, the face that he had missed for so long. And his voice was cracked and hoarse, but it was his own voice, returned at last.
‘I love you, Eliane,’ he replied.
Abi: 2017
Eliane’s house is located a couple of valleys across from Château Bellevue, halfway up a hillside whose sun-baked, south-facing slopes, clad with still more vines, stretch up behind her little stone cottage to the high-lying woodlands beyond. Just as Eliane foresaw, it seems that Mathieu eventually managed to find a position as winemaker at a local château so that they could marry and have a home of their own.
I feel nervous as Sara parks the car on the verge outside the cottage door. We’ve been invited to morning coffee with Eliane and Mireille. I’ve already developed such a clear picture of the Martin sisters in my head, through hearing the story of their lives during the war years, and I wonder whether I’ll be disappointed if they turn out to be completely different. Of course, I’m not expecting to see the young women they were back then, Mireille with her head of dancing, dark curls and Eliane with her straight, honey-blonde hair – in fact I probably won’t recognise them at all o
n the basis of the images of them that I’ve imagined, now that they’re both not so far off their hundredth birthdays.
Sara leads me past the front door, where pale-pink roses scramble in an exuberant profusion, and make our way round to the back, following a driveway that leads on up the hill to a much larger house – presumably the vineyard’s château – that is just visible among the trees above us.
The back door of the cottage stands ajar, and as Sara knocks on it I turn to look around at Eliane’s garden.
Held within the embrace of the hillside, three neat vegetable beds have been cut into the rich brown earth: I can identify the scarlet flowers of runner beans, which climb up a row of wigwam-shaped poles, and at the end of the row, bright-yellow sunflowers, taller than my head, turn their faces to follow the sun as it makes its daily procession across the sky. In the nearest bed, juicy-looking tomatoes hang in tempting clusters and courgettes nestle beneath them among the thick leaves of their own sprawling vines. Terracotta pots are planted with an array of herbs that exude their potent, medicinal-smelling perfume into the air around us. A little further up the hill, where the garden meets the vines, several trees form a line of shelter. And beneath the trees there are three white beehives. The sight of them makes me smile.