Disturbing the Dark

by Wendy Hornsby

  Traffic headed into the village would be heavy from all directions, and parking would be worse than usual. It was a beautiful, clear and warm day, so Jean-Paul and I decided to ride bikes into town. From the bike jumble behind the potting shed, we choose two that had inflated tires and front baskets and headed out. We stopped first at the kitchen garden to tell Grand-mère that we were leaving. She was picking peas.

  “Grand-mère,” I said, nodding in the direction we had come. “Are you aware there’s a weeping woman sitting against the wall beside the garden gate?”

  Grand-mère peeked out from around the pea frames. “Is she still there?”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Could she be Fraulein von Streicher and you’ve refused to speak with her?”

  “If I won’t speak with her, how would I know who she is?” Grand-mère dumped a colander full of freshly picked peapods into the big pail at her feet. “Aren’t the peas lovely? I think the fertilizer slurry David put on the soil has made a great improvement. We’ll have them for dinner tonight. I think there will enough more by Monday to put up in the freezer.”

  Jean-Paul set the bike down to pluck a pea off the vine. He squeezed the pod open and with his thumb pushed the fresh little peas into his mouth.

  “Perfect,” he said, chewing happily.

  I asked Grand-mère, “Do you want us to ask her to move along? Perhaps see if she needs transportation?”

  “She’ll only come back,” Grand-mère said. “No, it’ll get hot where she’s sitting soon enough, and she’ll go of her own accord. So, where are you children off to?”

  “Dauvin is letting Maggie take lunch and a bag of toiletries to Guido,” Jean-Paul told her. “We’re hoping we’ll be able to speak with him.”

  Grand-mère stopped picking peas and turned to me. “You’ve been so worried, dear. How is Guido holding up?”

  “I spoke with him this morning. He had a rough night,” I told her. “But he has a good lawyer, and the American consul is coming to speak with him this afternoon. We’ll see.”

  Jean-Paul said, “They’re holding him under garde à vue, so they have only three days to bring charges. He could be out by Monday.”

  When they let Guido out, if they let him out, I wondered how long they could prevent him from returning to the States. When Olivia first made an issue of Guido’s attentions to Solange, I considered sending him straight home rather than having to deal with the inevitable fallout. As long as I’ve known him, Guido’s existence has been a constant muddle of broken hearts, his and theirs. The drama gets tiresome. But he is also tremendously talented in technical areas where I am not. Professionally, we were always a good team. Except when his love life intruded. Damn and blast, Guido, I fumed to myself. Damn and blast.

  Jean-Paul pulled me into his arms. With my face against his chest, I started breathing normally again. He said, “It’s too early to worry so much.”

  “Do you really have to leave tomorrow?” I asked.

  “We’ll see. I wish I could stay until you get tired of me.”

  “That will never happen,” I said.

  Grand-mère, the devil, had a happy smile on her face as she watched us. “Since you’re going into the village, will you run a little errand for me?”

  “Before I say yes,” I said, “promise me that shovels won’t be ­involved.”

  “No, no. Not this time.” She tapped my cheek for being saucy. “But if you would, I have a small package to deliver to Ma Mère at the convent. Marie repaired the gown Pierre’s nephew will wear for his baptism tomorrow; the garment is very delicate.”

  “We’ll be careful with it,” I said, walking my bike beside her as we headed toward the house. Out of the blue, I asked her, “Grand-mère, is Pierre related to us?”

  “Let me think how.” She handed the pail of peas to Jean-Paul and looked off into the distance for a moment. “Ma Mère and Marie are sisters. Their brother married a woman whose brother, Dauvin, married Pierre’s grandmother.”

  “If I followed that,” I said, “Pierre is my cousin Antoine’s second cousin by marriage, but he isn’t related to you or me. Not by blood, anyway.”

  “If you want to split hairs,” she said, “there is no blood relation between Antoine and Pierre, either. Pierre’s grandfather died during the war and his grandmother married Dauvin later. Why, is it important?”

  “No,” I said. “Jean-Paul’s mother asked that question yesterday and I didn’t know the answer. Something else she said made me wonder if you had some sort of issue with Pierre when he was a teenager.”

  “Pierre was a lovely boy.” Her answer was brusque. Clearly, there was something she was not saying. And she quickly changed the subject. “Tomorrow is Pierre’s nephew’s turn to wear the baptism gown. So, do get it to Ma Mère straight away. And don’t forget, there will be a party for the baby at the beach after church.”

  “Do we take gifts for the baby?” I asked, holding the back door for her.

  “No, we take food.” She picked up a canvas shopping bag from the kitchen table and gave it to me. Inside, I could see a tissue paper-wrapped parcel. “And while you’re at the market, if you don’t mind, would you stop at Armand the butcher’s stall? He usually parks his trailer in the forecourt of the church, under the old oak tree. You’ll know him by the smoke he puts out. For market-day lunches ­Armand cooks lovely saucissons over driftwood on a big brazier. Very smelly, and very delicious. Guido will be delighted if that’s what you take him to eat. Would you please ask Armand to add about two ­kilos of shaved ham to the platter he is putting together for the party? Tell him that Freddy will pick up the platter on his way to the beach tomorrow.”

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “No, dear,” she said. “Except, will you see if that woman is still sitting there?”

  I went out through the garden gate and took a look. The woman was no longer against the wall where we’d seen her earlier. Would she be back? Probably.

  With the baptismal gown in the basket of my bike and Guido’s duffel of essentials in Jean-Paul’s, we started on our way toward the village, a distance of about five miles from the estate. I wanted to avoid whatever was going on around the sewer-trench gravesite, so we went out through the front gate instead of shortcutting along the farm access road.

  Traffic on the village road was heavy, but it moved right along. Gaston had warned us about the American motorcycle club that was coming through the area that Saturday. We met them head-on as we approached town and were nearly blown off the road. The riders weren’t rude or aggressive, but the sheer number of them seemed to take up all the available air and pavement. At the first opportunity, we turned off onto a narrow side road and came into the village behind the convent. I was familiar enough with the layout of the building to remember a walkway that led from the convent’s back gate into the close, the walled garden at the center of the massive sandstone edifice.

  The convent looked ancient, Romanesque with a later Gothic addition. But the entire structure was actually built postwar. The original building was leveled by Allied bombs after D-Day and ­rebuilt later to appear as much like the original as possible. During the rebuilding, modern plumbing and wiring were added as part of the nation’s general facility upgrade during le Grande Trente, the thirty-year period of postwar modernization. But the character of the architecture and the place of the convent in its village remained intact.

  We left the bikes and Guido’s bag in the close and made our way along the labyrinthine interior corridors to the abbess’s office.

  “Here you are,” Ma Mère said, rising from her desk when we tapped on her open door. “Élodie called to say you were on your way. Monsieur Bernard, how lovely to see you again.”

  “And you, Ma Mère.” He bowed slightly as he took the hand she offered.

  After la bise, I set the shopping bag on her desk and she took out the tissue-wrapped bundle.

  “Perhaps you haven’t seen the gown, my dear.” Carefully, she laid
open the tissue to reveal a delicate silk garment trimmed in exquisite handmade lace. The fabric carried the patina of age, the brightness of the original white mellowed to the tones of a string of old pearls. I was afraid to touch it.

  I said, “It’s beautiful.”

  “You couldn’t possibly remember, of course. But you wore the same gown when your mother presented you to the Church for holy baptism, just as she had when Élodie handed Isabelle to the priest at the font. Can you imagine ever being so small?”

  I asked, “Does every child in the parish wear the gown?”

  “Oh, no, dear.” Gently, she folded the tissue back over the garment. “A small group of women made the lace and sewed the gown for the presentation of a very special child. Since then, all of their children, and their children, have worn it.”

  “It’s very old?” I asked.

  She smiled as she tucked in a stray ribbon. “The silk came from an American parachute, my dear.”

  “Retrieved in 1944?” I asked.

  She nodded once as her hands disappeared into the sleeves of her habit. “It doesn’t seem like very long ago at all. And forever ago at the same time.”

  A young nun with a sweet Asian face entered the office from a side door and stood there silently.

  “May I offer you coffee?” Ma Mère asked us. “Or perhaps lemonade?”

  “Thank you,” Jean-Paul said. “But another time, I think. We have been sent on errands.”

  Without a word, the little nun disappeared back through the door. We took that as our cue and said our good-byes. As she saw us out, the abbess turned her attention to Jean-Paul.

  “How is Karine?” she asked him.

  “My sister?” He seemed taken aback by the question. “You know Karine?”

  Ma Mère dropped her head in a little nod. “When she was still a girl, she spent the better part of a summer with us.”

  The memory tumblers suddenly seemed to align for him. “I didn’t realize this is where my parents sent her. I was away at school at the time, buried in the prépas, and so most of the world passed me by.”

  “Karine is well?”

  “Yes, she’ll be pleased to hear you asked about her,” he said. “She and her husband have two children, a boy and a girl, though they’re hardly children anymore. Her son will sit for his baccalauréat in May. Karine teaches painting and sometimes exhibits her work.”

  “And she is happy?”

  “Karine is Karine, as happy as she decides to be.”

  Ma Mère ushered us to the door and waved us on our way. We collected Guido’s bag from the bike basket, and leaving the bikes where they were, went out to join the market day crowd.

  The village square was an irregular quadrant bordered on one side by the vast stone convent, a lovely Romanesque parish church opposite, with the mairie, where Gaston presided over town business, and the gendarme barracks on either side between them. A tall plaster cameo with the profile of Marianne, the symbol of the French hearth and home, embellished the front of the mairie. She seemed to face down the large French national tricolore waving from the top of the gendarmerie, the local headquarters of the national police; the yin and yang of French officialdom.

  On Saturdays, the generally quiet square teemed with activity. Vendors walked among the crowds offering samples of their wares to lure buyers to the stalls lining the streets, sometimes on both sides. The sweet, earthy smells of fresh produce combined with the heavier scents of cheeses and meats, of seafood fresh from the water, and the smoke from what we would call barbecues in America all blended into one delicious gastronomic mélange. It was lunchtime, and I was hungry.

  Armand’s meat stall was easy to find. We just looked for the densest plume of smoke and walked toward it. Armand, it turned out, had a strong Bretagne accent that I couldn’t manage with my emergent ability with French, so Jean-Paul took over. He gave the butcher Grand-mère’s instructions and ordered saucissons en croûte for four people for our lunch. Armand slashed a long baguette from end to end, slathered the bread with homemade brown mustard and local sweet butter, and then laid long, thick grilled pork sausages straight off the fire into the slit. With three quick hacks of his big knife, he had four sandwiches on his cutting board. These he wrapped in white paper and stacked into my canvas market bag.

  During all of this, Jean-Paul and Armand kept up a conversation about pig slaughtering and the onerous burden of the European Union food processing regulations on small artisanal producers. I couldn’t always follow what they were saying, so my attention drifted off to the crowd and the festival atmosphere of an active market day in summer. Two of the cheese stalls were covered with butcher paper and closed, which seemed unusual at the height of the day. There was a stir of some sort at a bakery stall and out of curiosity I turned to see what was up.

  A tall, fair, raw-boned woman, probably in her late seventies, seemed to stumble into the road in front of the baker’s stall as if she had been pushed. When she found her footing and straightened up again, I recognized her. Here was the weeping woman, Erika von Streicher Karl, herself.

  After brushing off her skirt and taking a deep breath, she looked around the square, seemed to find what she was looking for, and marched down the middle of the street until she came to a stop at the flower stall of ancient Mme Cartier, our family’s cheesemaker’s maternal grandmother. Mme Cartier was roughly Grand-mère’s age, somewhere north of ninety. Her hips bothered her, so she sat among her buckets of bright, fresh flowers in a folding canvas chair. Erika came up beside her, startling the old dear by thrusting a sheaf of ­papers under her nose. Mme Cartier took the papers because she truly had no alternative, perched some reading glasses onto her nose, and took a look at what she’d been given. She was two stalls over, and the crowd was noisy, so I couldn’t hear what she said when she’d had a look. But I understood the hand that flashed up and slapped the German woman soundly across the face. Then she ripped the papers into shreds and spat on them as the wind made the bits dance around her feet.

  The breeze wafted the shreds toward us. One of the fragments collided with my leg. I peeled it off, and to my profound dismay, saw the uniformed chest of a man with the same eagle- and swastika-embossed buttons running down the front of his tunic that I had unearthed from the carrot-field grave Thursday night. Obviously, Erika had been showing around a set of old photographs that had been scanned into a computer and printed onto plain paper. I handed the fragment to Jean-Paul and scurried around, trying to scoop up as many of the rest of the bits as I could.

  Erika saw what I was doing and made a beeline toward us. She held out her hand to me, and said, “Please.” She wanted the torn scraps. I wadded them, walked over to Armand’s brazier and used his long fork to push them into the coals until they caught fire. Erika followed me, protesting. “All I want,” she started, but I grabbed her by the elbow and marched her away, into an alcove at the side of the church where we were out of view of the crowd.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I demanded, steamed by her brazenness.

  “My father was here in the war,” she said in heavily accented English. “He was such a fine man. I hoped to find someone who might remember him. He was lost during the war, you see. Missing in action.”

  “Oh, there are people around here who remember him all right. But not as a fine man. Dear God, woman, he was the invader. The occupier.”

  “Well, yes.” Her arms went out to the side. “But there was an ­accord signed; we became allies, the French and the Germans. We were on the same side.”

  “Where the hell did you study history?” I said.

  She sniffed at that. “My mother told me all that I needed to know because in school we did not talk very much about that time.”

  “That’s clear,” I said. “The uniform your father wore is still inflammatory. Hell, if someone today walked down a street anywhere in Europe wearing your father’s Nazi uniform, he would be arrested. Don’t you understand that?”


  “I understand this: My father was just another man caught up in world events, like the men here. That does not make him a criminal. So, why won’t anyone talk to me?”

  “If you had to come looking for people who knew your father, couldn’t you have found some pictures of him in civilian clothes?”

  “I thought people would recognize him more easily if they saw him in photos taken here, as he looked when he was here.”

  I had to turn away from her. She was either crazy or stupid and I had no idea what to do next, other than maybe slapping her other cheek, which I did not do, though sorely tempted. Jean-Paul was standing nearby, making sure that things with Erika didn’t get out of hand. I gave him a little wave and he started toward us.

  I turned to her. “Exactly what is it that you hope to gain here?”

  “You have to understand,” she said. “I was very young when my father went away to war. I don’t have many memories of him, except that he was very tall and very kind. He made a good life for his family. I remember our beautiful house and the gardens, a maid and a nanny. We had music lessons. And then, after the war, the Russians came, and everything was different. We lost our home, our position, all of our comforts. My mother, my brother and I had to share a single room. There was no toilet, no water. My mother went to work cleaning the train station. A woman of refinement, she had to scrub away the scum left by lesser people. It was a terrible humiliation for all of us.”

  “You really should go to the library and check out a couple of books about what your father and men like him did during the war,” I said, stepping away from her and taking Jean-Paul’s arm for support.