The Resistance

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by Peter Steiner


  “We have a charming small room available. A last-minute cancellation, monsieur. You will be our guest,” said Madame Chalfont.

  “And there will be excellent food, monsieur. From our kitchen of course,” said Monsieur Chalfont. He leaned toward Louis as though he were sharing a great confidence. “The event is not to be missed.”

  “And dancing,” said Madame Chalfont. “There will be dancing.” Her eyes flashed happily.

  Louis did not like celebrations, but that night he celebrated. He did not like to dance, but he danced. He waltzed with Madame Chalfont, of course, and with Solesme Lefourier, who would later be his neighbor and then his lover.

  “You are American?” Solesme said as they were swept along with the crowd.

  “Yes,” said Louis.

  The Gypsy musician sang in a high, lonesome voice, lyrics that Louis thought could have been written for him.

  Charles the great has come at last,

  Come at last to stay.

  He knows not where he’s going, though

  He thinks he knows the way.

  “Are you here for a while?” said Solesme. Her mouth was close to his ear so he would be able to hear.

  “One night only,” he said.

  “Are you on the run then?” She laughed.

  “In a manner of speaking,” he said.

  Dance after dance they circled around the square until the crowds went home and the music stopped.

  After leaving Saint-Léon the following morning, Louis continued south. He walked for many more weeks, stopping finally in Santiago de Compostela in Spain, where Saint James, the apostle, is supposed to have first set foot in Europe, the final destination of pilgrims for many centuries.

  During all his walking a new idea had slowly found its way into Louis’s consciousness. It was that France, and more specifically the village of Saint-Léon-sur-Dême, were exactly where he longed to be. Louis did not know exactly how or why. Was it the celebration, the kindness of the Chalfonts, the feeling of Solesme in his arms, moving with him around the square to the music of the bal musette? He did not know what had brought him to this longing, but he did not doubt that it was as true as anything else he knew. He decided he should return to the United States and bring what he needed—mostly his books—back to France, and he should live in Saint-Léon.

  “France? Are you crazy?” said Sarah. Their divorce was final. “Christ, Louis. You’re unbelievable. You think it’s all right to just move away? Without discussing it with anyone? What about our children? Your children? What about Jennifer; what about Michael? You’re their father.”

  Louis did not have an answer for Sarah, or for Jennifer or Michael. In truth he had hardly ever been there for his children. He had been tending to his career when they were little. And now that they were teenagers, he was tending to his failure.

  Louis flew back to Paris and drove a rental car back to Saint-Léon. He took a room in the Hôtel de France while he looked at properties. A week later he drove south to a notaire’s office in Tours. And an hour after that he drove back north again. He patted the manila folder on the seat beside him to reassure himself that he had in fact done what he had just done. He had bought a house. In France. My God.

  The folder was stuffed with official documents, none of which he could read and all of which he had signed. After the signing, the notaire had with great ceremony opened a bottle of champagne. The two men had raised their glasses to Louis’s new home, which was in fact a disheveled and abandoned cottage on a hill above the village of Saint-Léon with a charming view and which had almost certainly never before had a champagne glass raised in its direction.

  The only other time Louis had driven from Tours, he had missed the turn toward Saint-Léon. This time it was the way home and he did not miss it. A small milestone said it was five kilometers to Saint-Léon. The narrow road wound between pastures and fields. Louis stopped the car just before town beside a little stream, which turned out to be the Dême.

  The water was swift and narrow. Louis broke the baguette he had bought earlier. Breadcrumbs exploded in every direction. He unwrapped the Gruyère and cut off a chunk. Since his long walk, whenever he ate this way—cheese and bread on an unfamiliar road—he felt happy. Louis sat on the bank of the Dême and tried to see through the murky water to the trout that were supposedly there. He tore off a crumb of bread and dropped it onto the surface. Something took it immediately.

  Louis tried to picture the house he had just bought. He couldn’t remember what it looked like. He was not even sure he could find the place. He sat back and let the sun shine full on his face.

  Louis found the way to his house without asking. He turned left up the small lane and then left again up the driveway. The house came into view.

  It had not been lived in since before the war. It had most recently served as a hay barn, and even that had been many years earlier. There were no trees around it, no bushes or flowers either. The roof was sagging badly, and there were gaping holes where slates had blown away. Windowpanes were broken and shutters were missing. The exterior walls had turned black with mold. Pieces of the carved cornice had fallen away. The door was held shut by a wooden peg on a wire stuck behind a bent nail.

  * * *

  Not long after the Second World War, the French regional authorities had decided to consolidate some of the police operations in the district. This meant that the small police outpost in Saint-Léon, along with several other village police stations, had been closed and relocated to the police barracks in the nearby town of Château-du-Loir.

  This had remained a satisfactory arrangement for more than twenty-five years. But now it had been decided, for political as well as administrative reasons, that police operations should again be dispersed among the various villages, and that Saint-Léon should once again have its own police station. Though Jean Renard had only recently graduated from the national police academy, he seemed an excellent choice to man the new outpost.

  “He’s very young, sir,” said the lieutenant studying Renard’s file. “Inexperienced.”

  “He’s smart,” said the captain in charge. “He’ll make a good policeman. Besides, he’s from Saint-Léon. People there know him. They’ll trust him. He’ll fit in better than a stranger might.”

  “What about his father?” said the lieutenant.

  “His father?” said the captain.

  “The old gendarme, Yves Renard. You know—the war, his collaboration, prison in Russia,” said the lieutenant. “That could be a problem.”

  “It’s ancient history,” said the captain. “Besides, it has nothing to do with young Renard.”

  “Not yet thirty years. Not ancient enough for some people,” said the lieutenant. “I’m not talking for myself, Captain,” he added quickly. “But for some it’s not a very long time in the overall scheme of things.”

  The son, Jean Renard, received the appointment and showed up one sunny spring morning for his first day of work. Those having their coffee on the terrace at the Hôtel de France watched as he parked his car in front of the old police station. He turned the iron key in the office door. It was probably the same key his father had used before him. The door swung open with a groan.

  Renard—even his wife, Isabelle, called him Renard—stepped inside and pulled back the heavy curtains. Dust swirled in the slanting morning sun. He carried boxes of files inside and stacked them next to the large wooden filing cabinet. He dropped the box containing current files on top of the desk with a thud, making the dust swirl again.

  Renard wiped off the chair with his hand and sat down. He went through the box to remind himself of what needed to be done. There were a few bulletins and notices that needed posting on the bulletin board. There were some recent incidents that needed looking into. There was a thick dossier about a troublesome property dispute that had gone on far too long. He decided he would start with that. But even that could wait a bit. He looked around the office.

  The room had been us
ed for storage for decades. All but one of the old filing cabinets and stacks of excess furniture had been removed in anticipation of his arrival. The desk, a couple of chairs, one file cabinet, and a few other rudimentary pieces of furniture were all that remained. Along with the dust.

  Renard spent the rest of the day cleaning and arranging the furniture to his liking. He took out all the desk drawers and emptied them into a garbage bin. He swept and mopped the floor. By the end of the afternoon the office was in a reasonable state. “Not bad,” he said with a satisfied clap of his hands.

  Renard locked the office and walked over to the Hôtel de France. He looked around. The hotel was covered with flowering vines, just as it always had been. The Hôtel Cheval Blanc had been closed at the end of the war and had remained so ever since. Cars and bicycles came and went. A moped clattered by. People shopped for supper, bought bread, vegetables, meat. They moved among the various shops, stopping on the square to visit with neighbors.

  “So how was your first day?” said Claude, the waiter, as he poured Renard a glass of wine.

  “As a first day should be,” said Renard. “Quiet.”

  “Renard!” cried Madame Chalfont. She rushed up and embraced the policeman. “Congratulations. And welcome home. Claude,” she instructed the waiter, pointing at the glass in front of Renard, “that is on the house.”

  “Oui, madame,” said Claude.

  “Merci, madame,” said Renard.

  “Ha,” said Claude when she had gone. “Your first day on the job, and already you’ve been bought off.”

  II.

  LOUIS MORGON HAD SPENT his first weeks in Saint-Léon removing trash from outside and inside the house. Soon there were great mounds of broken plaster, slabs of rotting wood and crumbling cement, broken slate and glass, old tires, old clothes, rusting appliances, and other junk at the top of his driveway. He hired someone to haul it all away. He stood on a stepladder and swept down the ceilings and walls with a broom until he was covered with dust and could not stop coughing and sneezing.

  He found someone to repair the roof. “It will need replacing before long,” said the roofer.

  “Before long?” said Louis.

  “In the next few years,” said the roofer. “See there? The nails are breaking. They’re rusting through. We use aluminum or stainless nails these days. And the charpente—the wood—needs attention.”

  Louis put new panes in the windows where there was serviceable woodwork. He bought glazing compound, rolled it into snakes, pressed it along the panes, and smoothed it with a putty knife. He hired a carpenter to build new windows where they needed replacing. The carpenter did such a nice job that Louis hired him to make a new front door as well. Louis pronounced the door and windows “belles.” The carpenter shrugged. “It is what I do, monsieur,” he said.

  Eventually Louis’s belongings arrived from the United States, a few clothes and mementos and boxes of books. “There are more books back at the post office,” said the mailman. “They keep arriving.”

  “I know,” said Louis, shrugging. “I apologize.”

  “He must be a professor or something,” said the mailman. It was six o’clock in the afternoon, and he was having a glass of wine at the bar on the square.

  “What’s he like?” asked his friend.

  “Nice enough, I think,” said the mailman. “A gentleman. Judge for yourself. There he is.”

  Louis crossed the square in front of them on his way to the hardware store. He saw the mailman and his friend sitting at the bar and gave a courtly nod in their direction.

  At first Louis had dinner most evenings at the Hôtel de France. Whenever he arrived, one of the Chalfonts, usually Madame, greeted him with exclamations of delight, ushering him to a table by a front window, which soon became “his” table.

  “Ah, Monsieur Morgon, your table is waiting. My husband has something in the kitchen he made specially for you.”

  * * *

  Solesme Lefourier called on him not long after he moved into his house. He was working on the windows when she came walking up his driveway. She was carrying a package. Solesme had a deformed back, which caused her to walk with a peculiar motion. The way she walked—a kind of skipping step, as though she were starting to dance—was the first thing Louis loved about her.

  “I’ve brought an onion tart for your lunch,” she said.

  “Did you make it?” said Louis. She laughed. Of course she had made it. He peered under the cloth covering it. “It looks delicious. Would you like to join me for lunch? I’ll make a salad.”

  “My husband, Pierre, is waiting for his lunch. But thank you. Another time.”

  “It was very kind of you to bring it.”

  “It is my pleasure.”

  Louis thanked her again and watched as she walked back down the driveway.

  A week later Solesme invited Louis to dinner. “The tart was wonderful,” he said.

  Solesme asked Louis about life in Washington.

  “Washington is, in its way, a small provincial city. It has its charms.”

  “What was your life like?”

  “Oh, I worked in government,” said Louis. “Then for a short while I wrote articles and taught political science. It was an ordinary, uninteresting life.”

  “I remember that you walked here. But why France?”

  Louis explained as well as his French allowed that someone had suggested he should come to France. It would be the perfect antidote for his malaise.

  “And was it the perfect antidote?” Solesme wondered.

  “I think it was,” said Louis. “Your dinner is delicious. The chicken roasted with lemons. Can I have the recipe?”

  “Of course,” said Solesme. “You roast a chicken with lemons.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Lots of garlic, if you like it. I do. And cut the lemons in half.”

  Throughout the dinner Solesme’s husband, Pierre, loomed silently like a monument, like the Sphinx, full of portent and indecipherable significance.

  “He is a troubled man,” said Solesme later. They were having coffee in Louis’s kitchen. “He has had a difficult life.”

  “I am sorry to hear it,” said Louis.

  “Everyone of his generation had a difficult life. It doesn’t matter,” said Solesme, stirring the little cup.

  “It doesn’t matter?”

  “To you, I mean. Don’t trouble yourself about it.”

  “How has his life been difficult?” Louis said.

  “It was before I knew him.”

  “But how?”

  “I don’t know. He hasn’t told me,” Solesme said. “He was still in Paris.”

  “Was he in the war?”

  “Why are you asking all these questions?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Louis. “You’re right. It’s none of my business.”

  Louis and Solesme became lovers. She sometimes spent afternoons with him. “Do you think Pierre suspects?” Louis said. They lay on his bed. Her head was cradled in his arm. She did not answer. “Does Pierre…?”

  “He was in the war,” she said. “I know he was wounded somehow, but I don’t know where or how. After the war he … when I first knew him he used to make vague allusions. He liked the expression ‘the dogs of war.’ He said he was one of the dogs. He talked about ‘doing business.’ About ‘customers’ and ‘clients,’ French and German. Before he stopped talking altogether. My brother said something once that made me think Pierre was a smuggler and that he had to get out of Paris in a hurry.”

  “How do you live with someone who has stopped talking?”

  “It’s not as bad as you might think,” said Solesme. She turned and smiled at Louis. “It means they stop asking questions.” Louis could not stop asking questions.

  Other people Louis had met in his short time in France mentioned the war sooner or later. It always seemed to come up. He had not expected that the war would still be so alive.

  “But why would that surprise you
?” said Solesme. “We French still have royalists six generations after the last king was guillotined. And Dreyfus is still an open wound. This war that killed many tens of thousands and tore France apart only ended thirty years ago. Less. And the recriminations and retribution went on full steam for years after that. For every score that was settled, there are still a hundred that were not.”

  * * *

  By late summer the windows, the front door, the roof on Louis’s house had been repaired. Sagging timbers under the ceiling had been shored up with a new beam and supporting posts at either end. Louis left the old plaster walls as they were, patching them where they needed it but not doing much else. They were mottled and stained, but Louis decided he would wait and see whether they really wanted painting. He liked seeing their history.

  The floors were made of red clay tile. Around the edges of the living room and kitchen the tiles were in good shape, but in the center, the business part of the floor, some tiles were cracked, broken, or missing altogether. The carpenter who had done the windows and doors had found some old tiles in a barn he was working on. They were a reasonable match, and he persuaded the farmer to sell them to Louis.

  As Louis was removing some of the broken tiles and their underlayment, which was also crumbling, something in the crawl space below caught his eye. He got a flashlight and shined it into the darkness. He saw what looked like a cloth package. There was no way into the crawl space, but it was shallow enough so that Louis could lie on his side and, with his arm fully extended through the hole in the floor, reach the package with his fingertips. After a few tries, he got hold of it and hauled it up. It was covered with dust and mold.

  Louis undid the wire that held it together, and pulled back the rotting canvas. There was a wooden box of the kind a small machine or implement might have come in. The wooden lid was set in tracks and, after some prying and tapping, it slid aside. Inside was an oil-stained cloth, and wrapped in that were six little pistols. Each had been stamped out of a single piece of metal, which had then been folded over to form the crude weapon. Louis could tell from their heft that they were loaded.

 

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