The Resistance

by Peter Steiner

  Louis had an acquaintanceship with firearms, and he had read about these pistols. They were called Liberators, and during the war the Americans and the English had dropped them in France by the thousands for use by resistance fighters. He turned the pistols over and examined them. He laid them aside. There was a small box of .45 caliber ammunition, which he also laid aside.

  Next he withdrew a stack of what looked like old handbills. The paper was dark and brittle. Only the once-oily rag over the pistols had kept it from turning to dust. Louis gingerly pulled the sheets of paper apart and saw that they were mimeographed copies of the same page. He carried one outside into the light, but he could not make out the words. The blue ink had faded almost beyond recognition.

  * * *

  Renard looked up from his work as Louis entered the office. He recognized Louis as the American who had recently bought the small house on the hill above where Pierre and Solesme Lefourier lived. Renard did not know much English. He waited for Louis to speak.

  “Bonjour, monsieur,” said Louis.

  His French sounded very American, but at least it was French. “How may I help you, monsieur?” said Renard.

  Louis placed a small wooden box on Renard’s desk. “Monsieur Renard, I am Louis Morgon. In restoring the house I bought, which is above—”

  “I know the house, monsieur,” said Renard.

  “In restoring the floor of the house I discovered some objects in the space underneath”—how did you say crawl space?—“which I think may be of interest to you.” He carefully withdrew the handbills and laid them on the gendarme’s desk.

  “What is this, monsieur,” said Renard, “and how does it concern me?”

  “Madame Chalfont at the hotel suggested I show this to you since your name—your family name, that is—appears on this … page.”

  “What is this, monsieur?” said Renard.

  “I am not certain, but I believe it is from the Second World War, from the period of the German occupation, and I believe the name mentioned, the Renard mentioned, might be a relative of yours. The Renard mentioned on the page”—what was the word for handbill?—“was also a gendarme in Saint-Léon. In any case, I thought it would interest you.”

  “May I see?” said Renard. Louis handed him one of the handbills. Renard leaned close to the paper, then held it up close to his face, then stepped to the window. The blue ink was impossible to decipher. “Are they all the same? Are others any easier to read?”

  “They are all more or less the same, monsieur. None of them can be read, at least not by me. But you see here?” Louis pointed. “Here is your name.”

  “May I borrow this, Monsieur Morgon?”

  “Of course. You may keep it. I hope you will tell me what it is when you figure it out.”

  Renard gave Louis a quizzical look.

  “It’s just that I’m curious,” said Louis. “History interests me.”

  At the end of the day Renard took the faded paper home. The house was filled with the smell of a roasting chicken. Renard laid the paper on the counter. Isabelle wiped her hands on her apron and stepped closer.

  “What is it?” she said, bending over for a better look.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “A clue maybe. To a mystery.”

  “A mystery or a crime?”

  “For now only a mystery. It’s from the war. It’s got Papa’s name in it.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  Renard began to set the table. “From Louis Morgon. You know, the new American. He found it in his house.”

  “Really?”

  “Under the floor. I’m going up there tomorrow to have a look. To see what else there is.”

  They sat down to eat.

  “Delicious,” said Renard.

  “Because of your father,” said Isabelle. She reached across the table and took his hand.

  “His name is there.”

  “It’s long ago,” she said.

  “That’s what he always says.”

  “I’m only saying, it’s not your responsibility.”

  When they had finished dinner and washed the dishes, Renard sat under a bright lamp and studied the faded paper with a magnifying glass. He held the paper close to his face and then at arm’s length. He made notes.

  “January twelfth or seventeenth, I can’t tell which. 1941. Issue one,” he said.

  “Issue one? Of what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think there were other issues?”

  “I don’t know.” Renard scanned down the page until he found Renard. “Here it is.… And here it is again. Renard.” Each time he saw the name, he touched it with his finger.

  After an hour of looking at the paper every way he could think of, Renard started seeing words where there weren’t any. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. So far he had deciphered very little. Nazi could … without assistance of compl[?] … Judge Herr Denis Tem[po/eig?] … shadows. The [Du?]quesne boys … denounced.

  There followed six lines that had almost completely disappeared. Then there were names: [?]ider, Chenu, Arn[?], Bertra[?], Renard … men[?tion]. Another interruption, then: Renard’s office and he is under … protectors have abandoned.

  “What do you think it is?” said Isabelle. She had brought coffee.

  “It’s a handbill of some sort. Look here: A French judge is called ‘Herr.’ Calling a French judge ‘Herr’ would probably be meant as a defamation. This could be from the resistance.”

  “Was there a resistance in Saint-Léon?”

  “I don’t even know that for sure.”

  “Are those names?”

  “Yes. There’s Renard. See?” He touched the word. “And here is … do you know anyone starting with A-R-N?”

  “Arnaud,” said Isabelle.

  “Right. Of course. Good,” said Renard and wrote it down.

  The next day Renard went to Louis’s house. “I’m pretty certain this is an underground newspaper,” he said, when Louis opened the door. “A handbill, really, from early 1941. About six months after the German invasion. My father is named. There are other names too: Chenu, Arnaud, Duquesne.”

  “There is no need to stand at the door, Monsieur Renard,” said Louis. “Please come in. I can offer you coffee—”

  “No, no, monsieur,” said Renard. “Thank you. I cannot stay. I only wanted to ask whether you have found anything else.”

  “Pistols,” said Louis.

  “Pistols? You found pistols?”

  “Little pistols. Liberators, they were called. Putting two and two together, I would guess they were hidden here by the resistance.”

  “Two and two?”

  “An expression in English. Do you not say that in French? I mean, the pages are a resistance leaflet, and they were in the same box as the Liberators. And they were hidden under the floor. It seems a safe conclusion.”

  “Were you a policeman in America, Monsieur Morgon?”

  “No,” said Louis. He could not tell whether Renard was being sarcastic.

  “May I see the pistols?” said Renard.

  “Of course,” said Louis, and turned to get them. Renard followed him inside. The box, the circulars, and the pistols were sitting on the kitchen table. “Be careful; they are loaded. I found them that way.” Louis turned on the stove. “I’ll heat up the coffee,” he said.

  “Thank you,” said Renard. He turned one of the pistols over in his hands. “How were they loaded?” he said.

  “Through the barrel. They were made as cheaply as possible. You pushed the shells in one by one with a pencil,” said Louis. “They hold five rounds. But the only way to unload them is to fire them. Here is the safety.”

  The two men sat at the table. Renard took his notes from his pocket and pointed out the words he had deciphered. Louis looked from Renard’s notes to the paper and back again. “May I?” he said. He wrote Renard’s words on another piece of paper and added some new words in between.

  Renard
peered at what Louis had written. “I don’t see those words you added,” he said.

  “I don’t either,” said Louis.

  “Ah,” said Renard.

  “But look. This most likely is a verb, isn’t it, between boys and denounced. Tell me if I am wrong. But I think it has to be a verb, and it has to fit this space. And it has to make sense. So it must be: The Duquesne boys were denounced.”

  “Or have denounced,” said Renard. “The Duquesne boys have denounced.”

  “Maybe,” said Louis. He considered for a moment. “Except denunciation would usually be made by one person at a time, wouldn’t it? By this Duquesne or that Duquesne, but not by the Duquesne boys together. That seems odd to me. So let’s try were.”

  * * *

  “Well,” said Isabelle that evening, “he sounds reasonable. And smart. Was this Morgon a policeman in America?”

  “I asked him the same thing,” said Renard. “He said no. But he knows about guns. And the way he thinks.… There’s one other thing about this document. The names all seem to be accused of … something.”

  “Of what?”

  “Well, probably collaboration.”

  “All of them?” said Isabelle.

  “All of them,” said Renard. “Papa too. But we don’t know why they were accused or by whom. They may have been named just because they were officials. Then again … maybe Papa … Who knows? In a case like this anything is possible.”

  Renard gazed into the garden, trying to imagine how it must have been for his father. What if he had been ordered to round up Jews or take hostages or hunt down resisters? There had been many collaborators among the police all over France.

  The garden’s high wall suddenly seemed insubstantial to Renard, useless, incapable of affording any protection against … anything. The evil in those times had been everywhere. Evil had seeped over and around and through walls and found its way straight into your soul.

  III.

  MAY 10, 1940. When the attack finally came, it did not come where the French generals had expected. The massive German army swept across the Low Countries—the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg—and through the Ardennes. Onesime Josquin, a rifleman, waited with his company on the Maginot Line. He and his comrades peered across the fields, past the tank traps and barbed wire. But all they saw were crows feeding on the abandoned wheat. The main German force was already past them, deep into France and halfway to Dunkirk by the sea.

  Onesime Josquin deserted his post and started west. After a day of walking he came upon trampled fields and pastures. Dead soldiers, mostly French, lay sprawled among bloated cows and horses with their stiff dead legs in the air. The stench was nearly as terrible as the sight. Onesime broke into a run and ran until he couldn’t run any more.

  After a few days he came upon a vast column of people going south. They were hardly moving, their way clogged by too many cars and trucks and bicycles, horse-drawn carts, hand trucks, and wheelbarrows—every manner of conveyance packed with people and belongings. In order to pass they had to move the carcasses of vehicles that had been strafed by German planes the day before. Some contained the corpses of their passengers.

  Food and gasoline had all but run out. The only things in abundant supply were fear and desperation. Onesime left the road and set off cross-country. He came upon a broad, swift river; he did not know which one. He swung his rifle in a great arc and threw it far out into the water.

  By June 14, German officers were relaxing in Parisian cafés and photographing one another in front of the Eiffel Tower. On June 22, France signed an armistice with Adolf Hitler. Under the agreement the seat of the French government moved from Bordeaux, where the old government had fled, to the city of Vichy. The Vichy government would administer most of the southern third of the country. The northern two-thirds, including the village of Saint-Léon-sur-Dême, where Onesime was bound, would be directly under German control.

  * * *

  A truck carrying fifteen people and their bundles wheezed and bucked and rattled to a stop. The driver thumped on the back window with his fist. Onesime had already slid his backpack to the edge of the truck’s wooden bed. He jumped down. The truck lurched away in a cloud of dust.

  Onesime blinked his eyes. Saint-Léon seemed like a splendid mirage, although the village was as plain then as it is today. But in the last few weeks, it had been transformed from a sleepy farm town into a scene of chaos and terror. The town was jammed with cars and trucks, and people milled about waiting for something good to happen.

  The Hôtel de France was filled to overflowing. The refugees stayed one night, several families to a room, each paying double or triple the normal rate. The next day they would be gone and others would take their place. At the Cheval Blanc across the square, only the bar was open despite desperate appeals from those who couldn’t find space in the Hôtel de France. The Cheval Blanc’s upstairs windows were shuttered and covered with cobwebs and dust. “Anything will do,” people begged, holding up their crying children. “Please. We’ll pay whatever you want.” Hubert, the barman, heard their pleas a hundred times a day. He did his best to meet their eyes, but all he could do was shrug. “I’m sorry, monsieur. I am only the barman.”

  Next to the Hôtel de France was a small mechanic’s shop. You could hear the sound of metal being hammered coming from the shop’s open doors. On the south side of the square between the two hotels, in a row of squat buildings, were the police station, a butcher with very little to sell, and an épicerie—a small grocery with mostly bare shelves. On the north side was a dry-goods store and a baker. At least the baker had bread, but only first thing in the morning. By nine he was sold out. The plane trees, lining the cobbled square and the boules pitch, had had their branches cut back to knobs the previous fall. Their leaves were only now coming into their fullness, casting dappled shade on the scene of desperation.

  “Jean!” said Onesime. The man pushing the bicycle with a flat tire stopped and turned to look. Jean did not recognize his own brother. “Jean,” Onesime said again. “It’s me!”

  Jean dropped the bicycle and ran as best he could through the tangle of cars and people to embrace the apparition with the knapsack. He held Onesime’s head and kissed his cheeks. “Oni,” he said as tears ran down his own cheeks. “Oni, I didn’t think we’d ever see you again.”

  “And yet here I am,” said Onesime, and Jean kissed him all over again. The two men steered each other through the crowd of refugees toward the Cheval Blanc. Two or three men stepped to the sidewalk to see who else had come back from the dead. They clapped Onesime on the back, took his knapsack, pushed him onto a stool, and stood a glass of beer in front of him. Then the questions began. “Where were you?” “What did you see?” “How did you get home?”

  “It was a short war, but not short enough. We were ready; we were up to it,” said Onesime. “But the generals lined us up in rows, and the Germans went around us. The generals expected the Germans to do the same thing they did in the Great War. The fucking generals.” He spit toward the door. The other men were silent. “Who else made it back?” he asked.

  “So far Raymond is back. Let’s see; who else?”

  “Léon, Henri, they’re back.”

  “Léon got shot up pretty bad. François, Gilles, Jean Luc, they’re all missing. Prisoners of war, let’s hope.”

  “Merde,” said Onesime. “The generals.”

  “Let’s not forget Paris, that whole rotten bunch.”

  “I can’t say I’m glad to see the Germans, but…”

  “But what?”

  “Well, it means the end of the damned Republic, doesn’t it?”

  “Maybe now they’ll get serious.”

  “Are you crazy? They’re firing one idiot and appointing another. And de Gaulle is abandoning ship.”

  “Who?”

  “De Gaulle, a general. He went to England. He’s been making grand speeches on the radio.”

  “Good riddance.”

  �
�Let’s go home, Oni,” said Jean.

  Onesime drained his beer. Everyone clapped him on the back again. They patted Jean too. He had his brother back. Onesime slung his pack over one shoulder. Jean collected his bicycle, which lay where he had dropped it, and the two men walked up the hill out of town, trying to decide how best to arrive at their mother’s house without giving her a fright. Of course she saw them coming up the lane. She recognized Onesime’s pigeon-toed walk and raced from the garden to embrace him.

  That night Onesime burned his uniform, his pack, and everything else left over from his brief war. He poked at the embers until everything was ash. He gathered up the charred metal buttons and buried them in the garden. There was no telling what they might do with deserters if they caught them.

  There was plenty of work to be done around the place, and Onesime threw himself into it. The house needed attention. The barn and sheds did too. The garden needed digging. They needed to plant more tomatoes and beans and squash. There was little food for sale anywhere, and now there was one more mouth to feed.

  Riding his bicycle to a cousin’s house one afternoon to get more garden seed, Onesime came over a rise and saw below him the highway leading south. A stream of refugees reached as far as he could see. They moved slowly but urgently, jostling and pushing to get ahead, raising great clouds of orange dust, which hung in the hot, still air. Along the side of the road were burned-out cars and the carcasses of horses and people. Even from this distance he could smell the stench of death and hear the sounds of pandemonium.

  * * *

  It had been a warm spring. The fields were golden with wheat that was ready to cut. In many families there was no one to cut it. Cows grazed in the Dême Valley, and the fences were arranged, as they still are today, so that the cows could wander back and forth across the shallow stream to wherever the grass was sweeter. The mud stirred up by the cows did not deter the fish or the fishermen. Then, as now, the Dême and its even smaller tributaries were rich with trout.

  Prosperity had visited France in the nineteenth century. And for a few years even Saint-Léon had been a lively and prosperous place, with four hotels and a number of decent restaurants, several tailors and dress shops, and a railroad station outside of town from which you could take the train all the way to Paris. By 1918, however, when the Great War had ended, so had Saint-Léon’s brief flirtation with prosperity. It had slid back into being one poor farm town among countless others.