Wild Lavender

by Belinda Alexandra

  I stared at the light, trying to block out the image of the children fleeing from the German planes. Now it seemed that more innocent people were dead. ‘I am sorry,’ I told her, remembering the nonchalant way she had sat in the cellar peeling potatoes during the air raid. It must pain her to think of that now.

  There wasn’t enough power to run the elevator so I climbed the stairs. Cramps pinched my stomach and my legs trembled. By the time I reached my apartment, my skin was burning and I collapsed straight onto my bed. I awoke a few hours later, twisted in the cover. There were thuds and explosions in the distance but I wasn’t sure if they were real or I was imagining them. Somewhere in the cacophony sirens wailed and bursts of anti-aircraft fire split the air. I was sure those were real, but I didn’t have the strength to go down to the cellar. I prayed to my father to watch over me. I wanted to live so that I could fight, but it was taking all my effort just to breathe.

  The next thing I knew, the sun was on my face and Madame Goux was peering at me. ‘The fever has gone,’ she said, touching my forehead. ‘Just as well you didn’t shut the door behind you. I wouldn’t have known you were sick. The hospital is full of soldiers and there is no doctor to come to you.’

  I swallowed. My throat felt like sandpaper.

  ‘You have been lying there for two days,’ she said, moving to the window and peeking out of the curtains. ‘You would have died of dehydration if I hadn’t been here. I have been giving you sips of water through my douche hose.’

  I did my best to forget what she had said and tried to sit up. Nausea swept over me and I collapsed back on the pillow.

  ‘You won’t be getting up until you’ve had something to eat,’ she told me. ‘So don’t think about moving.’

  Outside the street was quiet. But from somewhere in the building came the woof of a dog, answered by the yaps of another.

  Madame Goux lit a cigarette and hissed out a stream of smoke. Combined with the airlessness of the apartment and stale sweat on my clothes, the smell made me gag.

  ‘What is happening with the war?’ I asked her.

  Madame Goux raised her eyebrows as if my question was as stupid as someone asking about the health of a terminally ill patient. ‘The government has left the city. Italy has just declared war on us.’

  ‘Italy?’ I tried to sit up again. This was a disaster. If Italy wanted to attack France, it would certainly start with the south. My family was far enough inland and away from the border to be safe for a while, but I thought of all those people travelling to Marseilles. How would they escape now?

  Madame Goux stubbed out her cigarette and sat on the leopard-skin chair, the only piece of furniture that had been a constant with me. When André and I had parted, all the furniture had been sold with the house. I stared at the chair, seeing for the first time how incongruous it was that I, who loved animals, had once coveted their skin and fur for clothes and furnishings. The human species was the most treacherous of all—and now we were on the verge of destroying each other.

  ‘Why did you come back?’ Madame Goux asked.

  ‘I wanted to fight,’ I said.

  It was a ridiculous statement for someone who couldn’t even sit up, but Madame Goux didn’t laugh. I told her about the American driver who had picked me up. ‘We have foreigners fighting for us,’ I said.

  ‘If that’s so,’ glowered Madame Goux, ‘she is the only one. The American president has sent us nothing but his sympathy.’

  ‘But the British are still on our side,’ I said.

  ‘Hah!’ she sneered. ‘You haven’t heard. They are withdrawing from the north. They are deserting us.’

  I squeezed my eyes shut. Nausea swept over me again. Everything was getting worse.

  I stayed in bed until early the following morning, when I couldn’t stand the fusty smell of my skin any longer. Everything turned white when I stood up. I leant against the wall until my vision cleared, then wobbled to the bathroom to have a splash bath and to brush my teeth. Those two actions alone exhausted me and I lurched back to my bed.

  I woke a few hours later to find myself covered in specks of soot. The sun was a fiery ball in the sky. I was sure that I was dreaming. Why was the sun so red and the sky so black? I shuffled to the window and looked out. Trucks were motoring down the street. Bedraggled men stumbled along the pavements, some of them bleeding from wounds to their faces and arms. One stopped and sat down in the gutter, laying his head on his folded arms and weeping. I peered at him more closely. He was wearing the uniform of a French officer.

  ‘I am dreaming,’ I told myself. ‘The French army is the grandest and the most powerful in the world.’

  Madame Goux came into the room, a bowl of soup on a tray. She put the tray on the bedside table and looked through the window over my shoulder. She was even more doleful than the last time we spoke.

  ‘They aren’t supposed to retreat through the city,’ she said. ‘They were ordered to go around it.’

  Her presence brought a sense of reality to the nightmare and my head cleared, but it still took a moment for what she had said to sink in.

  ‘Why around it?’ I asked.

  ‘I have heard a rumour that they aren’t going to defend Paris,’ she said.

  ‘Not going to defend it? What does that mean?’

  She clucked her tongue and gave a rueful laugh, shaking her head with her own disbelief. ‘It means we are going to be hostages to the devil and there’s not a thing we can do about it.’

  The next morning I woke up feeling stronger, thanks to Madame Goux’s care. It was ironic that we who had said so little to each other in all the years I had lived in the building were now companions in the unfolding tragedy of Paris. I climbed out of bed, washed and dressed, all in slow motion because I was still weak. I knew it wasn’t a good state to be in at the beginning of a war, because wars brought rationing and famine. It would have been wiser to stay in bed for at least another day, but I couldn’t. I wanted to find out for myself what was happening in the city.

  On the landing I was hit by a putrid smell. I descended the stairs and the stench became overpowering. It was ten times the stink of meat gone bad. Whatever it was must have disturbed Madame Goux too because she had left the front door open, despite her paranoia about looting. I knocked on her office door. She called me in and I found her sitting at her breakfast table drinking coffee.

  ‘What is that smell?’ I asked.

  ‘The whole city stinks,’ she said. ‘There are no garbage collectors. No sanitary trucks. The waste is piling up in the streets. Meat is going off in butchers’ shops and the food is spoiling in the other shops.’

  ‘But it seems to be coming from this building,’ I said. ‘Did the other tenants leave you their keys? It might be food rotting in their apartments.’

  Madame Goux glanced at me. ‘I think it might be Monsieur Copeau’s dog,’ she said. ‘I haven’t heard it bark for the past two days.’

  At first I didn’t make the connection. Monsieur Copeau’s dog was a Great Dane. According to Madame Goux, Monsieur Copeau had left the same day I had. Then I remembered the barking I had heard during my illness and I understood.

  ‘He left his dog behind?’ I asked.

  ‘They all left their animals behind, except for you.’

  I ran over the apartments in my mind. Madame Ibert didn’t have animals; neither did the family on the next floor because of their daughter’s allergies. Monsieur Nitelet, the man above me, did though: a Maltese terrier called Princesse and a West Highland terrier named Charlot, after Charlie Chaplin. But the smell was of decay, not dog faeces.

  ‘You let them starve to death?’ I cried. ‘Why didn’t you let them out?’

  ‘They are not my dogs,’ she said. ‘I’ve been throwing bones to the little ones but I couldn’t do anything about the other one. He is a watchdog. If I had opened the door, he would have eaten me alive.’

  Monsieur Copeau’s apartment was on the ground floor. She could have broken
a window, I thought, and let the animal out that way.

  Madame Goux read my mind. ‘I could have let him out but the police would have shot him anyway. A lot of dogs were left behind and the police have been killing them to prevent an outbreak of rabies.’

  ‘Mon Dieu!’ I said, remembering the stream of refugees. So many of those families with all their worldly goods piled onto wagons had taken their pets as well. What was wrong with the people of the eighth arrondissement? But I already knew the answer to that. They saw their animals as fashion accessories that could be discarded when they no longer suited them.

  But something wasn’t right. While Monsieur Nitelet was an arrogant man who could easily abandon an animal, every time I had seen the elderly Monsieur Copeau with his Great Dane he seemed to have real affection for the dog.

  ‘I heard the ones upstairs yapping this morning,’ said Madame Goux, taking a key out of her box and handing it to me. ‘You seem to forget I have had my own grieving to do and that I was busy taking care of you.’

  The key was for Monsieur Nitelet’s apartment. I was aware that my concern for animals was beyond what most people considered normal, but I couldn’t bring myself to apologise to Madame Goux. I didn’t see Kira as an object to add warmth to my apartment whenever I needed it. I thought of her as part of my family. After all, I had sent her off to the south with as much concern as Minot had sent his mother.

  The strength I had saved to go to find out what was happening with the war was spent mounting the stairs again. I opened the door to Monsieur Nitelet’s apartment. It was empty of all its furniture and paintings except for a couple of chairs stacked in a corner. I caught sight of bones scattered across the floor. The two dogs scampered towards me. They were thin and looked at me with frightened eyes but wagged their tails just the same. To my surprise, a white cat with a ginger smudge above its eye and another smaller one near its nose sidled up to me. I hadn’t seen it before.

  ‘He took all his furniture,’ I muttered, ‘but he couldn’t be bothered taking you.’

  I lifted the cat into my arms—a female, I saw—and called to the two dogs to follow me to my apartment. They didn’t hesitate and padded after me down the stairs. I had plenty of cans of sardines stocked up; in fact, I had so many that there hadn’t been room for them when Minot and I had packed the car. I had planned to leave them outside the apartment in case anybody else needed them but I had forgotten in the rush. I opened three of the cans and scooped the contents into two bowls and filled another with water. Within a second three white balls of fur were lapping at the food.

  ‘If you had been mine,’ I told them, ‘I would have taken you and left the furniture.’

  I tied an apron around my waist and found an empty sack in the pantry, thinking of the dead dog downstairs. I had felt ill enough from dehydration. How awful to be left to die from starvation. It would have been kinder if the police had shot him.

  Madame Goux was waiting for me in the foyer. Where would we bury a dog that big? I wondered. At ten months of age, he had only been a puppy but was as big as a man. I watched Madame Goux insert the key into Monsieur Copeau’s front door and push it open. The smell was even more disgusting in the enclosed entrance way. I took the scarf from around my neck and tied it over my mouth.

  ‘Ready?’ asked Madame Goux, pushing the key into the lock of the second door. I nodded and she shoved the door open. The stench rushed towards us like a living thing, pressing its reeking claws into our faces and arms. Bile rose in my throat. Madame Goux ran to the window and threw open the curtains. She had trouble with the latch. I lunged towards her and cut my finger but managed to force it. Together we swung the windows open and leaned out, gulping mouthfuls of fresh air.

  A ‘woof’ sounded behind us. We spun around to see the dog lumbering into the room. His ribs were showing through his fawn coat and his eyes drooped, but he was alive.

  ‘Merde!’ spat Madame Goux. ‘I should have brought my gun.’

  But the dog didn’t look as though he intended to attack us. As if to reassure me, he rested his muzzle against my thigh. What was the smell then? It had to be more than garbage and dog faeces.

  ‘Did you see Monsieur Copeau leave?’ I asked Madame Goux.

  She shook her head. ‘No. I just assumed he did, like everyone else. Why?’

  I looked down the corridor from where the dog had come. It was gloomy and at the end of it was a half-open door that led to another room beyond.

  ‘Do you think the dog killed him?’ Madame Goux asked.

  I shook my head. ‘He’s guarding him, that’s all. He knows we’ve come to help.’

  The dog whimpered and turned back to the corridor, glancing over his shoulder to see if we were following. Madame Goux and I inched down the hall after him. The smell was so strong it was seeping into our clothes and clinging to our hair. I could taste it in the back of my throat.

  I pushed the door open. It was too dark to see anything. The window was blacked out; the only thing that gave it away was a glimmer of light through the side of the curtain. I stepped towards it, hoping that wherever Monsieur Copeau was, I didn’t stumble on him. Something brushed my shoulder. I screamed. Madame Goux pushed past me and ripped down the curtain.

  The dog let out a mournful howl and Madame Goux crossed herself. We gazed up at the body of Monsieur Copeau, suspended from the light fitting like a puppet on a string. I stared and stared but could not convince myself that it was a human being hanging there.

  The police didn’t collect Monsieur Copeau’s body until the afternoon. If he had left a note, we never found it. But the police said it was the eighth suicide they had picked up in the area that morning and that they could guess the reason. Monsieur Copeau had fought the Germans in the Great War.

  While Madame Goux cleaned out Monsieur Copeau’s room, I burned my clothes in the kitchen stove then scrubbed myself from head to foot. I could still smell the stink of decay, but once I had washed the Great Dane and rubbed him down with eau de cologne, I knew that the smell was more vivid in my memory than it was evident anywhere else. I fed the Dane meatballs from a can, before lying down on the sofa. The cat perched herself on top of a cupboard. She didn’t seem afraid of the large dog but kept her distance just the same. The two smaller dogs inspected their new friend, sniffing his tail and leaning on his back. I tried to remember what Monsier Copeau had named his dog. It was something Italian and, I remembered thinking, a bit kitsch.

  ‘Bruno,’ said Madame Goux, coming in the door with a tray of bread and cheese. After all we had been through that morning I was surprised to find I had the appetite to eat it.

  ‘Bruno,’ I said, stroking the Dane’s head.

  ‘Don’t get too friendly with him, I’m going to have to shoot him,’ Madame Goux said, slicing up the bread.

  Charlot and Princesse pricked up their ears.

  ‘Why?’ I asked, sitting up. ‘He doesn’t have rabies.’ I was grateful to Madame Goux for helping me while I was sick, but in every other regard she got on my nerves.

  Madame Goux passed me a plate before answering. ‘He’s too big. We won’t be able to feed him.’

  ‘I’ll worry about that,’ I told her. ‘You are not to touch him.’

  She turned down her mouth and made a pfff sound. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘we may want to keep him to shoot and eat later.’

  The sight of Monsieur Copeau’s body had been traumatic, yet the horror of it was eclipsed by my desire to find out what was happening in Paris. I stepped into the street at around four o’clock. The sun was still shining. It could have been a brilliant summer’s day like any other in Paris, but there was nothing usual about the city itself. There was no one on my street and, as Madame Goux had warned me, the mounting rubbish on the pavements reeked almost as badly as Monsieur Copeau’s apartment had.

  I walked along the Champs élysées towards the Grand Palais but could not find an open newspaper stand anywhere. I crossed Pont Alexandre III to the Left Bank to try
my luck there. I had a sudden desire to revisit the area I had lived in when I first came to Paris and made my way down the Boulevard Saint Germain. A policeman was at work directing the refugee traffic. There were no more cars, just hundreds of bicycles and carts pulled by oxen or donkeys. Some people were on foot, pushing wheelbarrows and prams stacked with household goods.

  I found an open kiosk and asked the vendor for Le Journal.

  ‘There is no more Le Journal, Mademoiselle,’ she said. ‘Just Edition Parisienne de Guerre.’

  I must have looked puzzled because she explained that the remaining volunteer staff of Le Journal, Le Matin and Le Petit Journal had all combined to produce the latest newssheet, The Paris War Edition.

  I bought the newspaper. Like all the other papers that had been published in the last few weeks, it was a single sheet printed on both sides. The headline read: ‘Hold On. All the Same’.

  What did that mean? I sat down in a café that had no coffee but could offer me some weak tea, and read about the orders that were being given to bakers, pharmacists and food stores to remain operating or face prosecution. Factory workers had been told that they should not leave their posts or they could be charged with treason. ‘Fine example,’ I muttered, remembering how their bosses had fled to safety in foreign countries.

  The interesting thing about the paper was that there were no blanks where the authorities had suppressed information. The censorship department must have left the city too.

  I walked on towards the métro Odéon. It was obvious that not many store owners were paying attention to the authority’s threats. Most had their shutters down or signs in their windows that read ‘Closed until further notice’. I did find one place open and bought some extra cans of condensed milk and some more tins of meatballs. I had an apartment full of ‘guests’ to think about now.

  There was a huddle of people gathered around the métro entrance. I stopped to look at what they were reading. A notice had been put up by the Prefect of Police saying that ‘in the grave circumstances now being experienced in Paris’ the Prefecture of Police would continue its work and was relying on the people of Paris to ‘facilitate the task’.