‘Take,’ said Fritz One in French, thrusting it at Pierre. Pierre looked round, hoping somehow to be saved. ‘Take.’
‘What now? Me?’ Reluctantly, he took the sandpaper. ‘Merde.’
Fritz One strolled back to his colleagues who had formed a small semi-circle, their arms folded, their helmets pushed back on their heads.
And so Pierre began work, starting not at the beginning but at the ‘m’, the letter that had so mocked him. The sun beat down on his back and he soon broke out in a sweat. His hand ached as he rubbed and rubbed at the paint which, predictably, proved mightily hard to remove. Every now and then, the door would swing open, causing each passer-by to stop and look disdainfully at what he was doing. No one spoke to him. The soldiers giggled. One of them shouted at him. He turned to find the German taking a photo. Finally, they tired of the attraction and melted away. Only Fritz One remained, to ensure Pierre didn’t slack. After half an hour, drenched in sweat and thoroughly miserable, he asked for a break. ‘Nein,’ said Fritz One, motioning for him to carry on. Pierre hoped to God the major couldn’t see him from the other side of the square, basking in the sun with his coffee. Indeed, he hoped no one would see him at this, his greatest humiliation. But, of course, at some point every person he had ever known, or so it felt, passed by and asked him what he was doing. ‘You can give me a hand, if you want,’ he’d said to Xavier. But no, Xavier had things to do, slapped him on the back, wished him good luck and, mounting his pushbike, buggered off on his merry way. The worst, of course, was the appearance of Claire, looking gorgeous in a lime-coloured blouse, her brassiere clearly visible beneath the fabric, and a rose-patterned skirt, the picture of gaiety. ‘Poor Pierre,’ she said. ‘They should find the idiot who did this and get him to do it. It’s not fair you should have to. Must go. Bye bye!’
Half an hour on, and Pierre was only half done. He needed a drink and both his hands throbbed. Fritz One kept guard still, pacing up and down. Pierre looked across at the café. The policeman had gone but sitting in his place, laughing and talking with the major, was Claire. How comfortable they looked together. Pierre groaned. Could the day get any worse?
*
Some thirty minutes later, exhausted and thoroughly dejected, Pierre had finished. He had managed to scrape the red lettering off but the words were still visible as he had also removed much of the blue paint beneath. The doors would need re-painting. He was thirsty and hungry. For now, Fritz One seemed prepared to let him go. He sat down on a bench near the war memorial. Realising he had a few centimes in his pocket, he decided to treat himself to a coffee at Café Bleu.
Claire and the major were long gone but most tables were full of German soldiers leaning back on their chairs, helmets to the side. Many were singing, clapping their knees in time. An elderly French couple occupied the table nearest the door, trying their best to ignore the boisterous Germans near them. Having been outside for too long, Pierre was relieved to experience the cool and darkened interior. It was the town’s smartest café – a two-toned red-and-white linoleum floor, a bookshelf full of ornamental books, framed pictures of cockerels hanging from the walls above the dado rail, a standard lamp, and a glass case full of crockery. The place smelt pleasantly of real coffee and cigarette smoke. In an annex on one side, a couple of soldiers played table tennis, while others watched and cheered, their shirtsleeves rolled up. The only thing that spoilt it was a framed portrait of Hitler with his silly moustache and icy stare. He wondered whether its placing, next to the door of the gents’ toilet, was accidental. He hoped not. He sat at a table for two beneath Hitler, decorated with a long glass vase and a single flower, and ordered a black coffee and a single cigarette. A waiter in black and white returned with his coffee, cigarette and a clean ashtray. ‘What’s that awful song they’re singing?’ he asked the waiter.
‘Keep your voice down. That’s their Horst Wessel song. They’re always singing it.’
‘Their what?’
‘Named after some dead Nazi martyr.’
Pierre leant back and allowed the rush of nicotine to pulse through his veins. The coffee, syrupy and strong, helped revive him. Things, he concluded, were not going well. His first act of sabotage had backfired in ways he would never have imagined and he had been chastened in front of the whole town and particularly in the eyes of Claire. He would finish his coffee and then seek out Kafka and demand he be allowed to join whatever he had formed.
A laugh erupted from a table of soldiers nearby. Much back-slapping ensued. In a peculiar sort of way, Pierre realised he rather envied them. They were men, doing men’s work, united by their uniforms. Pierre had nothing – no sense of belonging. Just a vague feeling that the honour of France had to be salvaged, but this gave him no satisfaction – it was too big a concept, too nebulous, to mean anything on a practical level. He needed direction, to belong, to have a leader. He needed Kafka.
He was suddenly aware of a soldier standing over him, barking at him in an unpleasant tone. ‘Out,’ said the soldier in German. ‘Get out of this seat.’
‘I’m sorry?’ The man, all six foot of him, was a lieutenant.
‘I need this seat. I need to work,’ said the lieutenant in heavily accented French, waving a file at Pierre.
‘Yes, you can sit here, if you want,’ said Pierre, motioning to the chair on the other side of the table.
The German considered the offer. With a shrug of the shoulders, he sat down.
Pierre finished his cigarette, trying to hide his discomfort at sharing a table with a Boche. The German ordered a hot chocolate in bad French, then, pushing his peaked hat further up his head, opened his file and started to read. Pierre considered the man while trying not to. He wished he had something to read. The German seemed incredibly young – not more than a few years older than himself, but his face looked hard, his skin tight. He thought of the major’s son.
The German looked up and caught Pierre staring at him. ‘What are you looking at, little froggy?’ he said in German.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You speak German? No? Good.’
Pierre smiled.
‘So, what’s it like to drink your coffee beneath a picture of the Führer, eh? That’s how it should be,’ he said, nodding.
Pierre nodded back. ‘Yes.’
‘You’re a fawning little shit, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
The German laughed and Pierre found himself laughing too. ‘Are you a little Frenchie froggy, yes?’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘Ha! That’s my boy.’ The German glanced up worriedly at Hitler’s portrait. ‘We should not speak like this in front of the Führer, you scum.’ Abruptly, he stood up and, facing the painting, saluted his leader, his arm outstretched. ‘I’m sorry, mein Führer, forgive me my language.’
It was time, thought Pierre, to make a hasty exit. Rising to his feet, he quickly realised, was a mistake – the German thought that he too wanted to pay his respects to Hitler.
‘Salute the Führer.’
‘Yes.’
‘Go on then,’ said the German, elbowing Pierre hard in the arm.
‘Ow. What?’
The waiter appeared at his side, carrying a tray with a number of dirty cups and saucers. ‘Lieutenant Neumann wants you to do the Hitler salute.’
‘What? Me?’
The lieutenant barked, ‘Show some respect, Frenchie boy,’ his arm still outstretched.
‘He doesn’t look too happy,’ said the waiter. ‘I’d do as he says, if I was you.’
‘I can’t,’ said Pierre, his stomach caving in. ‘Not that.’
The German turned to him, his eyes ablaze with anger. ‘You salute the Führer, you little French frog.’
‘Just get it over and done with,’ said the waiter. A German customer called him over. ‘I won’t say anything,’ he said as he left, balancing his tray.
And so Pierre found himself in Café Bleu standing next to a rabid Nazi who resembled a fury on the ve
rge of tears, in front of a painting doing a Hitler salute. It was the final humiliation; he just hoped to God no one had seen him.
*
Pierre worked furiously, hacking away at the stone, sweating beneath his goggles. He changed them for his sunglasses. The yard at this time of day offered not an inch of shade. The hens had taken to their pen. Only Maurice the cockerel remained outside. He wasn’t going to let a bit of heat keep him from his duty. The incident with the Nazi had proved to Pierre that all Germans were bastards; that he’d been a fool to allow himself to be charmed by the major. He was a German, serving Hitler, and by default no better than the bastard lieutenant. He would no longer listen to the major’s whinging and waxing lyrical about his precious son. He was a Nazi too; they were all fucking Nazis. They had no right to be in his country and he would do whatever it took to play his part in kicking them out. He was relieved his father wasn’t around; he needed to be alone, to think. His father was always out now. He, at least, had found a purpose, a cause. His mother popped her head round the kitchen door, asked him if he was hungry. Hungry? He felt weak with hunger. Even his mother had a cause, albeit one she didn’t relish, the cause of finding food on a daily basis. And it could only get much worse. At the moment, only luxury things like cakes, butter and real coffee, seemed to have disappeared, almost overnight. Now, only the cafés frequented by the Krauts, had them.
As he was eating his bread and cheese, wishing it were so much more, his father returned, looking mildly perturbed. Although, mused Pierre, the emotional distance between perturbed and euphoric covered very little ground with his father. And he seemed continually entrenched in neutral, viewing a world that induced no feeling great or small, for the better or the worse. He remembered, before the war, his mother once returning with a brace of herring, a rarity, bought from a travelling fishmonger. She slapped the fish down on the kitchen table, remarking Georges was no longer the only cold fish residing in the house. A twitch of the moustache was probably the only response she got.
Georges sat down, stood up, paced up and down.
‘Are you OK, Georges?’ asked Lucienne.
‘I’m fine, Lucienne.’ He then did something that Pierre had never seen before – he reached out for his wife, took the bread knife she was holding and placed it on the table, then put his arms around his wife and hugged her. Why, wondered Pierre, did this unexpected and totally out of character show of affection worry him so?
*
Most of the population had never had a car. Georges once did, an old Daimler inherited from his brother, the tightrope walker, but even that had died a death a few years back. Now, all the family had was Pierre’s bicycle. A few businesses owned a truck and that was about it. But they had mostly been requisitioned by the Germans – cars, lorries, motorbikes, the lot, together with the petrol. While the German staff drove round in their front-wheel drive Citroens, all that was left for the locals were the bikes. And whatever the farmers had – tractors mainly. The ‘cemetery boys’, as Pierre’s father always called them, were allowed to keep their old wagon, and this battered four-stroke was now outside their bungalow, a small black monstrosity of a vehicle. The cemetery boys were, in fact, two bent old men, whose combined age, by Pierre’s reckoning, must have been 120. Standing in the yard, hands on hips, soggy cigarettes on their lips, they admired Georges’s handiwork, the Algerian headstone. Pierre made a half-hearted attempt at sweeping the yard, causing the hens to scatter in a cloud of dust and downy feathers. The two of them were mirror images of each other – both scrawny old men in dirty dungarees, skin as tough as leather, grey hair beneath their flat berets, thin moustaches, both smoking. ‘Very nice,’ said one, his voice gruff with age.
‘It wasn’t difficult,’ said Georges.
‘At least you spelt “France” proper.’
‘And what have we got here, young Pierre?’
‘It’s my sculpture,’ said Pierre, sweeping, wishing now he had left the tarpaulin over his work.
The man stroked his chin. ‘Is it meant to be a woman?’
‘Has she got any clothes on?’ asked the other.
‘It’s classical.’
Both men laughed raucously. Even Georges guffawed while Pierre bristled.
‘Classical, eh? Is that what you call it? And you feel qualified to carve the female form in all its glory, eh?’
Pierre blushed. ‘I’ve – I’ve got a book on Renaissance art. It’s Botticelli.’
‘Botcha what?’
He was about to tell them its name but held back. He realised he hadn’t even told his father its name, nor his mother. Only the major knew. He feared anyone else would only consider it pretentious, and mock him.
‘Come on, boys,’ said Georges. ‘We need to press on.’
‘In a hurry, are we, Georges?’
Georges didn’t answer but it was enough to stir the men into action. They may have been ancient, mused Pierre, but they were strong. Between them, they hoisted up the headstone and, with Georges guiding them, urging them to be careful, carried it out through the yard door and round the front of the house, grunting, and onto the back of the truck. Pierre followed. The truck sagged with the weight of the headstone.
With the tailgate secured and with much wiping of hands, they were ready to leave. ‘Where’s your new family pet then, Georges?’ asked the first chap, grinding his cigarette into the pavement with his boot.
‘Our what?’
‘I hear you’ve got your very own Kraut?’
‘Oh, our family pet. Very funny. I don’t know where he is. Have you seen him, Pierre?’
‘Me? No. He’s out.’
‘Well, I worked that much out for myself.’
‘So what’s he like then?’
‘I don’t know; I have very little to do with him.’
Apart from long discussions about music, thought Pierre.
‘You haven’t poisoned his soup yet?
‘Leave him alone,’ said the other as they climbed into their truck. ‘They’re not a bad lot, these Krauts. They’ll sort out the commies for us, that’s for sure. This country’s gone soft. Not like your generation, eh, Georges?’ He turned on the ignition and the old truck spluttered into life. ‘Dig out your old bayonet, Georges; show them what we’re made of.’
The truck bounced down the road, billows of black smoke in its wake. Emerging from the cloud of fumes, returning home with bulging shopping bags, was Pierre’s mother.
‘Do you still have your bayonet, Papa?’
‘Don’t be daft.’
‘Hello, boys,’ said Lucienne. ‘Good news – plenty of marrows today.’
‘Is that what you’ve got in those bags. Anything else?’
‘No,’ said Lucienne, lifting a bag as if in triumph. ‘Just marrows. I’ve been to church as well.’
‘Great. Well, I have to be off.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Out.’
‘Where?’
‘To get my wages from the town hall – for the headstone.’
‘Good, we could do with the money.’ Lucienne went indoors, huffing. That, thought Pierre, was a hint that he should have carried her bags. Instead, he ran after his father, quickly catching him up. ‘Papa, can I come with you?’
His father looked straight ahead. ‘To the town hall?’
‘No, I mean... I want to help.’
‘With what?’
‘With... whatever it is you do.’
His father laughed – heartily, a laugh that pierced Pierre.
‘Go home, boy. Help your mother stuff a marrow. Have you slaughtered Madeleine yet?’
Pierre stopped and watched his father saunter down the lane, shaking his head. As he returned home, the White Venus beckoning, he remembered his father and Kafka remonstrating with Monsieur Breton, the undertaker, for wanting to claim payment for his work on the Algerian.
He passed through the kitchen where he found his mother stroking a marrow as if it were a cat. ‘Are
you OK, Pierre?’ she asked.
‘The world is full of hypocrisy, isn’t it, Maman?’
‘Yes, Pierre, I suppose it is.’
*
An hour later, Pierre was on his way to the library. His father’s dismissive laugh was bothering him still, disrupting his concentration. Georges still hadn’t come back and the longer he took the more agitated Pierre felt. Giving up on the White Venus, he covered it with the tarpaulin and decided to head for the library – to see if he could find his father there, plus, of course, the library always had the additional bonus of Claire’s presence.
He slipped out of the house before his mother had chance to allot him an errand. He knew the library would probably be closed – it was often closed. No one in this town ever read. They’d probably read even less now, now that the major had stripped the shelves of all the interesting books. He thought of calling on Xavier but decided against it. He wondered whether fifty, sixty years hence, he and Xavier would resemble the cemetery boys. What a thought and not altogether an unpleasant one. Assuming of course they weren’t all German citizens by then. He passed the baker’s – the queue seemed to be longer with each passing day. He noticed Xavier’s pushbike leant up against the wall. So his mother also got him to do the bread run. He resisted hiding his friend’s bike, just to see the expression on his face.
He could see from a distance that the library doors were closed. He thought, nonetheless, he’d go investigate. Madame Picard was walking her dog, the little white terrier, on the grass, a small yappy little thing with a short tail. He saw it do a shit right near the tree he and Xavier had sat against.
Sure enough the library doors were locked. Yet one of the windows above him was slightly open. Disappointed, he walked round the building treading delicately on the gravel path but to what purpose he wasn’t sure. He arrived back at the point he started from. He’d not seen or heard anything. He noticed a brick had fallen out from the sidewall. Without a second thought, Pierre had wedged his boot in the hole and clambered up the wall, grabbing the windowsill. It wasn’t easy; he could feel his foot slipping. With some effort, he managed to lever himself up and was able to peer through the window. Inside it was dark but there at the counter he saw a figure, perhaps two. His foot slipped and he fell. He looked about. Madame Picard had gone; no one else was around. Someone was inside the library; he had to see who it was. He climbed up to the window a second time, pushing his boot into the hole as far as it could go. Holding onto the windowsill, he pressed the side of his face against the glass. He gasped. Something like a sledgehammer hit him on the chest. His legs turned to jelly. Unable to prevent himself, he fell, landing in a heap on the gravel path. His eyes blurred over. A pain gripped his heart.
The White Venus Page 8