Hunting Ground

by J. Robert Janes

  I used to feed those leaves to my rabbits. In an apron, old skirt, socks, boots, beige cardigan, and faded blouse, I didn’t play favourites. One couldn’t afford to.

  There were five rabbits, and when I came to the buck, which had all the pleasures of mating and none of the responsibilities, I withheld the leaf but only for a moment. His dark blue eyes gazed dumbly at me. He was white and black and rusty brown, with big, floppy pink ears, and I wanted so much to call him Hitler.

  Instead, I would summon a tired disinterest and tell him, ‘Someday we’re going to eat you.’

  I had bought him in the market at Fontainebleau, had paid far too much, but even then, in those first few weeks, I had known how essential he would be. That part of me had remained practical—the no-nonsense Lily, sharpened, yes, by the years of practice Jules had given me.

  The other part was already dead. Jean-Guy and I would feed the rabbits and kill them one by one. If a doe didn’t produce, she’d be the first to see the pot. One quickly shaved life down to its essentials.

  France … What had happened? The château was in the Occupied Zone, nearly three-fifths of the country and the whole of its northern part. One needed a permit to do almost anything. One couldn’t go near the English Channel or Atlantic Coast, nor Belgium, Switzerland, or Italy, or into the Pyrenees to Spain, et cetera. All of these frontier areas were in what was known of as the Forbidden Zones, the zones interdites.

  There were regions within regions, and each of them in the zone occupée was under German military control. Those people had needed offices, and they had had to be billeted. I could understand this, but why had God insisted I look after three of them?

  There were windfalls lying about, the last of the pears. Each of the rabbits got one—sliced with my Opinel, the peasant’s standby, which never seemed to leave me then. Sliced so as to be pushed through the gaps in the wire.

  The buck saved nothing for a hungry moment. Neither did any of the does. They ate constantly as if there would never be a tomorrow, just like prisoners would, something I came to know only too well.

  ‘Maman?’

  ‘Oui?’

  ‘I’ve made something for Marie. It’s a doll’s house.’

  ‘Jean-Guy, you’re sister’s dead.’

  ‘NO, SHE ISN’T! SHE RAN AWAY!’

  I grabbed him by the arm and shook him violently. ‘Dead! Did you hear me? We saw the cross. They buried her in that field along with the baby.’

  The rabbits watched, chewing all the time while Jean-Guy’s dark eyes blazed in tearful rebellion. ‘Marie wasn’t wearing a dress!’ he blurted. ‘She was wearing her brown overalls! I saw her!’

  I wanted to slap his face. As always, my eyes rapidly misted at the mention of Marie, and I turned quickly from him. ‘Don’t you dare give me hope!’

  There were thousands missing—displaced people all over the country. Advertisements in every newspaper, but I was always like this to Jean-Guy. I wouldn’t go in search of Marie. I wanted to believe his little sister was dead.

  ‘Forgive me, please. I’m so tired today, I wish I could just go to sleep.’

  ‘You’re always tired. You’re not any fun. Make us some loaves of bread. Make Marie an elephant. Use the Germans’ flour!’

  Believe, hope, pray. Let him have his little dream even if it hurts.

  He was growing tall, was thin, was all I had. I smothered his jet-black hair with kisses, caressed his cheek, and let my hand linger on a shoulder. ‘All right, but first, could you look after the house? I need to be by myself. Let me go for a walk in the forest, to that old stone tower like we used to. If anyone asks, tell them I’ve gone to gather acorns. That, at least, is permitted for the present.’

  ‘Rudi helped me with the doll’s house. He made me measure things exactly. We first made a sketch, maman, and then a detailed plan.’

  ‘That was kind of him. Now go and paint it. Yes, that would be best. Tell Gefrieter Swartz that there’s some old paint in the storeroom.’

  ‘You don’t need to call him a private first class corporal, not when Herr Oberst is away. Rudi says that Rudi is good enough.’

  ‘And Obersturmführer Schiller, what does he say about it?’

  ‘He’s in the forest again, making sure there’s enough timber to make the charcoal and lumber the Reich needs. Rudi says they’re going to cut down all the trees. He says the lieutenant means business and that we must be very careful with him.’

  Never had there been such a beautiful autumn as in that year of 1940. For weeks on end, the skies, as if in punishment, had been clear. Perhaps God had granted the French a time of healing. Perhaps it was only the pause before another harsh winter. Oh, for sure, Paris had been declared an open city during the blitzkrieg, and I was aware that all the theatres and restaurants had reopened almost on the day of the Occupation and that there were already the beginnings of a black market. But this was all hearsay to me. Travel permits to visit the city were still very hard to obtain. Already there were rumours of food shortages and worse, and there was not enough fuel for cooking. In some suburbs of Paris, where there was no producer gas, communal kitchens had been set up in apartment blocks. Coal that used to come by barge no longer did because the Germans had seized all the barges for the invasion of England. Nearly one-third of all trains and other rolling stock had been sent to the Reich. Virtually all petrol-driven vehicles, including two-thirds of the buses, had been requisitioned solely for the use of the military or the French police. Then, too, there was the curfew, ending at five, which was four in the old time, Hitler having put us on Central European time. In consequence, the central market, Les Halles, the belly of Paris, was open for a few hours late in the day, and what was offered was pitiful. Farmers fed their milk to the pigs, and the children of Paris went without since the milk trains had also been stopped. France was being bled not yet of its people, except for the one-and-a-half million who were prisoners of war, but of its economy. The need for forced labour would come later.

  Having not even noticed the beauty of the trees, I reached the stone tower, and for a moment, that old familiar excitement came, but I deliberately shut it out and sat down to lean back and warm myself in the sun. I had to think about how I was going to cope. I was a British subject and by rights should have been sent to the internment camp at Besançon in the Franche-Comté, but so far the Germans hadn’t demanded this. Jules now had a very important job in Paris, and it must have been because of him that I’d been left alone.

  Rudi Swartz wasn’t so bad. Left to guard crates of statues and paintings that he couldn’t have cared less about simply because he didn’t know or care about such things, he had quickly made himself useful. He was forty-two years old, watery-eyed, a dumpling of a man with a wife, two sons, and a daughter back home on the family farm near Rendsburg in Schleswig-Holstein. Jean-Guy and he communicated by gestures and occasional words in broken German or French. I knew that Rudi liked it at the château. If he had to be stationed anywhere, it was by far the best of postings. After Poland, it was paradise. He had seen things done there that he hadn’t liked.

  And the others? I asked myself. The Oberst Gerhard Neumann, the colonel?

  Neumann made me nervous. It wasn’t sexual, wasn’t life-threatening in any sort of way, it was just that he believed he belonged and that everything in the house, apart from the children and myself, would eventually be his.

  The Lieutenant Johann Schiller was another matter. The scar down the left side of his face was one thing, his association with the Vuittons another, and his knowledge of myself, never admitted, yet another. I knew that he was in the SS because Nicki had told me this when I’d met him with Tommy, but because the army—the Wehrmacht—was in control of Occupied France and frowned on Himmler due to the excesses of the SS and the Gestapo in Poland and at home, Schiller had to be careful. As a result, he didn’t wear his SS uniform. Instead, he wore a Wehrmacht uniform and was ostensibly here as a forester. I think Oberst Neumann knew Schiller w
as SS, but he didn’t let on, just kept his distance and left well enough alone.

  So Schiller came and went and drove my little car, and I had to, of course, provide him with his meals and do his laundry, just as for the colonel. Rudi I fed, but to his great credit, he did his own laundry, and often that of the other two.

  I must have spent about twenty minutes at the tower. I didn’t want to leave. I found a pear in the pocket of my apron. Savouring each bite, I shut my eyes and let the tears come. Marie had loved pears. More than once, she had made herself sick on them. If only I hadn’t run from the car. If only …

  Something made me stiffen. Not knowing whether to cry out or not, I waited.

  ‘Lily, don’t turn. There’s a man hiding among the rocks and pines below you. He’s about five hundred metres from the face of the cliff and the same to your left. Just finish your pear and pretend to go to sleep. We’ll meet you late tonight at the potting shed. If you can, let us have the key to your mother’s farmhouse, a few matches, a scarf, and an old blue denim jacket, money, too, and a gun, a pistol or revolver, if possible.’

  I didn’t even think when Tommy asked for this last. Dmitry Alexandrov hadn’t come back to collect his little cache. For all I knew, he could have been killed. The Lebels would be safest for them if caught, the Luger I would keep, and though it’s now in my hand, though I’m standing in the courtyard behind the kitchen, leaning against the bricks, looking out through the orchard towards that shed, I can still hear Schiller saying to me, ‘You were out walking today, madame?’ as if it had only just happened.

  As usual when the Oberst Neumann was away, the lieutenant ate alone in the main dining room, always by candlelight and always in Neumann’s chair. ‘Well?’ he demanded.

  ‘Is that a crime?’ I asked.

  He waited for me to place his dinner before him. A chicken casserole, buttered squash, creamed leeks, and potatoes, nothing fancy.

  ‘Why should it be a crime?’ he asked. ‘The woods were particularly beautiful today. You went for acorns, the Gefreiter said?’

  ‘The squirrels must have taken them all.’

  He gave a half-smile as he reached for the salt—always the salt first, even before tasting what was before him. ‘You could have had sacks of them.’

  ‘Can’t I just go for a walk?’

  He tried the casserole, but I could seldom tell if it was to taste with him. The long fingers wrapped themselves around one of our air-twist glasses. He was drinking a Château Mouton, the 1923, had access to the cellar and helped himself, always writing the bottle down on the list so as to compensate my husband in Occupation marks or the new francs the Germans had insisted on, at twenty of the one to the other. And since the cash couldn’t be taken out of France or sent home anyway, the soldiers emptied the shops and sent those things instead. Neat, wasn’t it? The shortages at home were solved, and everyone kept happy since the French love to sell things.

  ‘A walk?’ he said, to remind me of it. ‘Of course, yet you don’t tell me the truth?’

  The candlelight flickered on the scar that ran from the corner of the left eye to the chin, a glazed, long lens that accentuated the bluish shadow of well-shaven cheeks and the close-set deep blue eyes. ‘There was no attempt to lie, Herr Obersturmführer. I did intend to gather acorns to roast and grind for our coffee, but when I reached the tower, it was so lovely, and I was so very tired, I forgot about them.’

  Of a deeper shade than Dmitry’s, his hair was the colour of ripened flax, cut short, parted on the left and brushed back to the right. ‘Admit it, madame, you were there to meet someone. A lover?’ he asked without a smirk or smile.

  ‘No one, Herr Obersturmführer.’

  ‘You must get lonely.’

  ‘I simply don’t think about such things.’

  ‘All women do, especially the attractive ones.’

  ‘Is everything to your satisfaction? If so, I’ll see that Herr Swartz is fed.’

  ‘Ach, our Gefreiter Swartz, yes, yes …’

  I waited for him to finish what he’d been about to say, but he only shook his head. ‘It was nothing. You may go. Some coffee later, in the living room. You will join me then, Frau de St-Germain. I insist.’

  Merde, but the salaud had put the needle in anyway! And, of course, he wouldn’t let go of the Frau business, not him. Exceedingly handsome, he was arrogant beyond words, ambitious, and totally without conscience, though I was only to discover this last with time.

  A car passes by on the road near the house. I stand and wait. I hope, I pray it’s my husband and the rest of them, but the sound of it disappears in the direction of Arbonne. Dupuis will, of course, be back in Paris this morning. They’ll have a conference right away. Vuitton will tell him I’ve telephoned. That wife of his will insist that something be done. Jules … Jules will want to talk to me first and will refuse to understand that the past is everything for me.

  None of them will think of André de Verville until the last possible moment. They’ll leave him to fret and think seriously about killing himself. Of all of them, he’s their weakest link, so there is a little more time.

  I step back into the kitchen, try to remember how it was that night when Tommy and Nicki first came to me in the autumn of 1940.

  The kitchen was all but in darkness. Firelight flickered from the draught in the firebox to touch the scar. Schiller’s grey-green Wehr-macht tunic was unbuttoned, the jackboots newly greased and polished. It was 2:03 a.m., and I had thought the house asleep, had forgotten entirely that I was to have had coffee with him earlier.

  He was sitting there waiting for me with a tulip glass in hand. The Walther P38 he always carried lay on the floor beside the bottle: dark green and mould-encrusted glass against gun-metal blue and the warm brick red of the floor tiles. I couldn’t have known then, but now do, that the P38 9 mm is a very rugged and reliable weapon.

  ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he demanded, taking in my corduroy trousers, hastily tucked-in nightgown of heavy, coarse flannel, the cardigan, the torch.

  ‘I thought I heard something at the rabbit hutches.’ I was still in the doorway.

  ‘What’s that in your other hand?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing, Herr Obersturmführer.’ I had quickly dropped the woollen socks and heavy sweater behind a chair.

  ‘Give me the flashlight, and I’ll check the rabbits for you. It’s not safe for a woman to go out at night. There are still too many transients.’

  ‘As you wish, Lieutenant.’

  ‘Johann … Please, Frau de St-Germain, it’s not always necessary to address me by rank.’

  ‘It helps to keep things in their proper perspective.’

  ‘So, the rabbits, yes. What was it you heard? A fox perhaps?’

  It had been a lie, and he knew it. ‘I couldn’t sleep. I thought I heard something.’

  ‘Brandy … do you like it, Lily?’

  Is he a little drunk? I wonder, and shake my head.

  ‘Then sit down anyway. This war will soon be over. Perhaps you had better get used to things.’

  ‘In what way?’

  Again, there is that smile. ‘In lots of ways. By telling me the truth, by no more late night walks without permission. After all, there is the curfew to consider.’

  And it’s against the law to be out there after it, even here.

  ‘We’ve heard reports,’ he says. ‘News travels fast. I just thought I should let you know.’

  ‘Reports of what, Herr Obersturmführer?’

  The drawstring of my nightgown is still undone, and as his eyes fall to it and my chest, he says, ‘The Wehrmacht and Oberst Neumann won’t always have the upper hand. Things will soon change. Security is bound to be tightened. The Gestapo …’

  ‘And the SS?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But aren’t you in the Wehrmacht, too?’

  Setting the brandy aside, he takes the torch from me but lets his hand linger on mine, then leaves the pistol lying on
the floor as he says, ‘I’ll check the rabbits for you.’

  The firelight flickers. Sparks erupt from a knot of pine, and these awaken me to the smell of drying herbs, yeast, soup, so many things as I glance again at what he’s deliberately left, my knowing Tommy and Nicki are waiting for me.

  Had he seen the rucksack I had packed for them and left ready in the storeroom? Had he already found the food, the wine, and the letter I had written, telling Tommy about Marie and where she was buried and that Jean-Guy still insisted she was alive?

  Had he found the two Lebel revolvers that were still wrapped in their oilcloths?

  Touching my throat, I waited. Staring at the stove and not at that gun was difficult, but had he left it loaded? I wondered. It was a question I couldn’t answer, though I knew that it was what he would have done.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said with a toss of his head and a grin. ‘All present and accounted for.’

  My back was to the stove, and he’d boxed me in, and I knew what he wanted of me, but he said, ‘Your flashlight, Frau de St-Germain.’

  Again, there was that grin. I pressed my knees together and held on tightly for I feared I was going to flood the place and he knew it, too. ‘Think it over,’ he says. ‘Don’t keep me waiting.’

  Leaves cling to what is left of the whitewashed glass of my little potting shed. I nudge the door open and step hesitantly inside. There are two trestle tables, one on either side of the heavy planks that form a narrow walkway between. Shards and pots, bulbs that have shrivelled up long ago, remind me of memories I want, so many of them.

  ‘Tommy …’ I managed and was in his arms and fighting for his lips. As I cried, he held me tightly.

  ‘Lily … Ah, mon Dieu, how I’ve missed you. Are the kids okay?’

  ‘There’s no time. I’ve brought you some things. Go now. Go quickly.’

  ‘Are there Germans staying in the house?’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Schiller?’ asked Nicki.

  I told them it wasn’t safe. ‘I’ll try to arrange something. The stream … the tower.’