Hunting Ground

by J. Robert Janes

  Yet they’ve anticipated things, for Dupuis has now come up behind me, and so it goes, the one ahead, the other behind, the path running from the caves through the forest to the little clearing where I left my bicycle.

  Schiller must have traced it out that other time. Me, I thought I was so clever then, but when he discovers the bike this time, he can’t resist giving a snort of triumph, even though I’m almost upon him.

  He turns and I feel him grabbing for me, hear Dupuis breaking through, but the Luger’s jammed! Schiller’s now got a hold of me! Rolling over and over, I try to get at the knife in my pocket, try to hit him with the butt of the Luger, but it’s of no use. A forearm is pressed hard against my throat, and he’s straddling me. I can’t black out. I mustn’t! I’ve got to get that knife. The blade leaps, and I stab him hard at least twice, maybe more, and he screams, ‘Dupuis!’ and rolls off. ‘Dupuis, the bitch has cut the hell out of my leg!’

  Leaves, branches, trees—everything is in my way, and I know I must roll away from him and get up, but now it’s Dupuis. ‘Madame,’ he shouts. ‘Madame, your children …’

  Hitting the side of the Luger with the heel of my hand to clear the mechanism, I fire at him twice, but he’s darted aside, and I can hear him crawling through the bushes. ‘Madame,’ he gasps. ‘Madame …’ Is he wounded, afraid, terrified and wanting to beg, or has he simply lost that gun of his?

  Breaking through the woods, I reach the road and pause to catch a breath, hearing them still as they shout to one another, but they mustn’t find the Schmeisser in that carrier basket of mine. They’ll kill Matthieu if they do, so there’s no other choice. Me, I have to go back, must circle round.

  As the dawn breaks, I see them on the road below me. The right leg of Schiller’s trousers is soaked with blood and he’s limping badly, has made a tourniquet that might not be working as well as it should since it’s high up on that thigh. One arm is draped over Dupuis’s shoulders and when they get to that little car of André’s, it’s Dupuis who reaches for the handle only to have Schiller shout, ‘Don’t! Look first.’

  They’re both badly shaken by the sight of the grenade I’ve wired to that door handle, and they search the line of the forest for me. There’s fear in those looks but also the thought that I must be insane and that they’ll never really be able to figure out exactly what I’ll do next.

  Finally, it’s Dupuis who cries out, ‘Madame, your children are alive!’

  My children. Those faces haunt me. They’re all so little, so gaunt-eyed. One asks for water, another for bread, and I have to tell them I have none.

  This they accepted. The oldest, a boy of seven or eight, sagely nodded and said, ‘Water tastes so good, isn’t that right, madame, but bread is much better.’

  ‘Have you seen two children from the Fontainebleau area? One is a girl of nearly nine, the other a boy of twelve. She has lovely soft brown hair and hazel eyes; his hair is black and the eyes are very dark.’

  ‘Their names, madame?’

  I told them, but they shook their heads, and I heard the shrieks and felt the blows from one of the guards. It was not the first time for me. ‘Sprechen verboten, ja? Verboten!’ the guard shrieked. Always so many simple things were forbidden and always I had to search if I could.

  Michèle tugged at my arm. For this, she was punched, kicked, and hit with the butt of a rifle. Somehow I dragged her to one side. ‘Your ribs?’ I asked only to see her shake her head and try to swallow.

  The children were marched away. It was a long line of them that day. They were going for a picnic, eh? Down to the pretty little house with its garden gate of fir bows and its smoking chimneys. There’d be soup, bread, and maybe some cheese. Yes, cheese, real cheese, and warm milk.

  My hands clasped Michèle’s head. The fuzz of her hair was still so soft I found it hard to resist stroking. It was so like Marie’s.

  ‘They’re dead, Lily. You know this. They died at the house. You do remember, don’t you?’

  Simone de Verville found us, and we three went off to report for duty. We’d be sorting shoes that day, maybe handbags, who knew. They’d be baling them for shipment once we’d got them sorted.

  There were mountains of clothes in the shed they called Canada. No one else seemed to be around, but it was warm in there and perhaps as safe as any place could be in that little corner of hell.

  ‘You … yes, you,’ said another guard.

  Michèle stepped forward and he said, ‘Behind the bales.’ That was all, but in Deutsch.

  The knife lays in the mud- and rag-strewn black earth that is constant to us. There’s blood on its blade. The SS possessed such beautiful knives but it’s cold and suddenly I’m freezing for I know I can’t escape.

  I’ve done such a terrible thing. Me, I’ve killed the guard who attempted to rape Michèle in the shed they call Canada. The bastard lies beside his knife, only he’s not here, not now, and I’m in the woods, have come for my bicycle, yet can still hear Michèle sobbing her heart out.

  With difficulty, I stoop to pick up my knife and wipe its blade on the leaves before closing it up and slipping it into a pocket. I wish I could have killed Schiller like I did that guard. They shot one hundred women and beat countless others senseless because of it, but they never thought to ask us. For a long time afterward, Simone and I kept a close watch on Michèle.

  My bicycle is where I had left it. Schiller hasn’t touched the carrier basket. The Schmeisser is safe.

  ‘Some soup, a little bread, and ham, please, and half a glass of wine to which water will be added. Just a taste, you understand. The red, I think. Yes, yes, that will do and then a coffee with lots of milk, but later you understand.’

  The proprietor of Barbizon’s Coq Royal looks at me as if I’ve just demanded the world, but I couldn’t care less. This place still reeks, and he doesn’t know me, not really. There were always too many Germans here. In the autumn of 1942, the Résistance from Melun asked me to deliver to the proprietor one of their little black pasteboard coffins: Its lid had a cross at the top, then the name, and finally the cross of Lorraine with a V for Victory on either side, and all in white chalk. The man had ignored repeated warnings. An example had needed to be made.

  His wife’s brother came from Chailly-en-Bière to take over the business, but if you ask me, he was no better, yet I must have something to eat and a place to rest, and daren’t go back to Matthieu’s for fear Schiller and Dupuis will find out about him. So I sit here by the window where I can watch my bicycle and the street, and I have a cigarette and try to think.

  That whole business at the caves was far too close for me. I can’t be dropping from the present into the past and back again like that. They’re bound to catch me out. And I’ve hurt my left hand. The middle finger is stiff, the others only a little less. Have I sprained it?

  Schiller was only partly right about the cave. Tommy did seal it up, but there was far too much to hide. Some was simply left with the German lorries we had borrowed. Some went to the loft above Clateau’s slaughterhouse and then, piece by piece, to other places.

  Luck … we had such luck. The Germans did find the warehouse where Matthieu Fayelle and others had emptied a lorry, but they never once connected it to Matthieu. This I still can’t understand.

  The soup comes. This pig of a proprietor has spilled it and his thumb is wet, but such things shouldn’t bother me, not after what I’ve been through. I set the cigarette aside, but its smoke trails up, and suddenly I’m reminded of things and can’t stand the sight of it. Too many memories. Every one of those SS and Gestapo or gestapistes français knew how terrifying the upward curling of cigarette smoke could be. Never mind touching the burning end of it to my breast or using the leather belt or holding me underwater for what seemed like hours. Just sit me naked and helpless before them and let that smoke curl upwards in silence. Me, a mother whose two children they had killed!

  Through the window, the main street of Barbizon seems strange—hauntin
gly so. It’s odd to see it like this after knowing for so long that I’d never see it again. The pâtisserie is over there under its flaking gold letters and doing a reasonable business. Two middle-aged women have just come out: brown coats, hats pulled down, no stockings yet, and nothing new. Their woollen socks have lost their elastic. It was always so hard to replace. The wind even tugs at their hats and tries to open their coats, as laughing, they turn away, and I watch them pass the milliner’s without a look, and finally the burned-out, boarded-up skeleton of Clateau’s butcher shop.

  That fire must have come late in 1943 after he’d been killed. The family would have been sent to the camps, not even into forced labour, and my guess is that none of them survived, for by then the Germans were being very thorough.

  Reminded of my hunger, I eat my soup. I’m really very good at this, but the ham I must cut into tiny pieces. And the bread … what can I say, but that it’s like my own. So good, I must extract every morsel of flavour and keep a crust for my pocket.

  Tommy came back in the spring of 1942. I remember it was Jean-Guy who first discovered we weren’t alone. We’d gone into the forest and were heading for the stone tower, but Marie wanted to check the bathing pool, so we went first to the stream that was a little to the west of our usual route, perhaps a kilometre. The leaves were very green, and I remember thinking there would be a good crop of wild raspberries along the roadsides that year, but we’d have to be careful that others didn’t get them first. I was settling back into the routine of being my old self and trying hard to forget the war and its Occupation that might never end.

  I had the gardens to think about, the fields, rabbits, chickens—the geese at mother’s farm. So many things. The hope, I confess, that the Germans would leave me alone and that the Résistance wouldn’t call on me.

  ‘Maman, there are ships,’ said my son. I know Marie was intrigued. Both timidly advanced to the edge of the pool we had made with stones and mud.

  The sails were of one-hundred-franc notes skewered on masts of sharpened sticks, the hulls patiently whittled out of bits of driftwood. ‘Bonjour, Lily. Bonjour, Jean-Guy and Marie.’

  Automatically, I turned away in a flood of tears to search the woods for the enemy while he tousled Jean-Guy’s hair, only to have my son yank his head away as Tommy reached for Marie’s, his grin the same.

  He was armed, of course. There was a rucksack and a Schmeisser. ‘How have you been?’ he asked. ‘Missing me a little?’

  Setting the knife and fork down, I swallow hard and have to shut my eyes, but the memory keeps coming back, and I can’t stop it though I try, for in the camps they forbade us to even remember and tried their best to wipe it all out, but Tommy’s so close, I can feel his kisses still, the very breath and warmth of him, and I don’t ever want to let those go.

  It was Marie who tugged at his sweater and said, ‘We have two SS guards, monsieur, and the colonel. The Lieutenant Schiller has been sent to Russia.’

  ‘And the inspector?’ he asked of my daughter.

  She was very firm with him. ‘Still asking his questions. Only yesterday I have seen him go into the Tabac Ribault. Me, I waited fifteen minutes, you understand, but he didn’t come out, so we know he’s working with Monsieur Ribault who is a dirty collabo.’

  Only then, did I notice how Jean-Guy was looking at Tommy, and when the sails were taken off the little ships and bankrolled to me because children didn’t have money like that, and he knows his friends and the shopkeepers would only notice and start talking, the thanks he gave were empty.

  ‘I don’t know what’s come over him,’ I said later that night when I went to Tommy by myself. ‘Ever since the robbery, he’s become increasingly distant. Jules and the Vuittons were here when I was in Paris and maybe they put pressure on him.’

  ‘The son of an important family. You have to remember the boy’s growing up. Jules can’t have been all that bad or you would never have married him.’

  ‘Women make all kinds of mistakes this Occupation only reinforces.’

  He added another dry stick to the tiny fire he’d built among some screening boulders. There was no possible warmth except for the mind and soul. ‘What will you do?’ he asked.

  ‘Lie low for a while. My SS guards watch me all the time. Neumann has been repeatedly eyeing the contents of the house and has made another list of his own: the small things that can be easily taken. He’s edgy, Tommy. It can’t have been easy for him having that train robbed. He’ll be worrying about the Russian front just like the rest of them.’

  ‘Was Schiller really sent there?’

  There were so many things we didn’t know. One guessed simply because that was all one could do. ‘Maybe yes, maybe no, but deep inside me, I have to feel he’s near.’

  ‘And Dupuis?’

  ‘Just like Schiller, he believes I was involved in the robberies, but more than this perhaps, that I’m the key to the rest of you, so they both tolerate a modicum of freedom for me as they wait to see what I’ll do. I can’t become involved again, Tommy. I mustn’t. I don’t want to be the one who leads them to you and Nicki and the others.’

  ‘Marie seems very reliable.’

  ‘She and Jean-Guy argue vehemently. For days on end, she won’t speak to him, but when I ask, it’s always some stupid thing, never the real reason.’

  ‘Could she take a message into Fontainebleau?’

  ‘No! I absolutely forbid such a thing.’

  ‘I have to contact Matthieu and through him, Paul Tessier. We’re moving over to the offensive. Now that America’s in the war, it’s only a matter of time until the Allies invade the Continent.’

  Pearl Harbour—yes, I’ve forgotten to mention it—7 December 1941. But you do see how small our war here really was? We learned of this tragic event both from the BBC French broadcast and the German-controlled Radio-Paris. We also knew that as Tommy had said, it would only be a matter of time.

  ‘We’ve a parachute drop in ten days, Lily, near that abandoned airfield.’

  The caves and my mother’s farm.

  ‘Just hang on for a little longer. As soon as the drop’s done, we’ll clear off and leave you out of it. Some of the arms are to be smuggled into Paris. Marcel is working for us.’

  ‘You’ll all be arrested!’

  ‘Somehow I’ve got to contact Tessier. He’s the only one who can teach the others how to handle the explosives that will be dropped.’

  ‘I’m not hearing this. I’m really not! And where, please, do you intend to hide stuff like that?’

  ‘As far from the caves as possible. The loft of Clateau’s slaughterhouse probably.’

  ‘Ah, nom de Dieu, why? Barbizon is a little place that’s crowded with Germans and collaborators!’

  Not only had he a place in mind, he let me say it: ‘My coach house, among the crates.’ Aghast that he should even think of such a thing, I offered an alternative: ‘The Poulins, Tommy. Yes, we must take it to their farm. Henri and Viviane will help us. It’s far enough from the drop zone and won’t arouse suspicion.’

  Me, I knew he had planned it all along, for he finally said, ‘We’ll have to check the location out.’

  I remember nodding with dread at this while gazing into the fire, remember saying, ‘You want me to go there tomorrow to ask them, and if I do, Marie must take a message to Matthieu? That restaurant of his is so full of the enemy, Tommy, the French ones especially will know who the hell my daughter is!’

  ‘But she runs errands for you? The post office, the shops, eggs even to the mayor.’

  And he’d done it again. Led me straight to where he wanted. ‘All right, I’ll ask her to take Matthieu some eggs first thing in the morning. Jean-Guy can take five to the mayor, so as to divide the responsibility and silence the argument.’

  ‘Nicki will go to the Poulins with you.’

  ‘And yourself?’

  ‘Will be watching your backs.’

  The surface of the millpond is dark and still, th
e geese tightly flocked before the door where Viviane used to feed them. They question, they wait, they crane their necks in expectation and complain to one another as I lean the bike against a tree and walk towards them. Me, I know what I’m about to find. Even so, I don’t take chances. The Luger is in my hand, the Schmeisser Matthieu got for me in the carrier basket beneath a blanket that hides it.

  The geese see me and crane their necks my way. They fidget—the whole flock moves in unison, eddying in uncertainty only to flow right back to the doorstep as a burst of autumn sunlight makes their feathers a starker white against the russet hues of the fallen leaves and the chalk-white of the stucco.

  Rubbing the glass of a windowpane, I peer inside. Grey-haired and tied to a chair, Viviane sits before a cold stove, and I know Schiller’s cut her throat.

  The geese move towards me only to ebb, then wait. They’re in a constant state of flux, the poor things. Finding the pail of feed in the barn, I toss them handful after handful, throwing it towards the pond until the racket of them is more than I can bear and they’ve parted enough for me to see Henri.

  Mired in their puddled excrement and feathers, he lies face-down. Though I’ve seen far too much of this, I bite my knuckles to stop the tears, for it’s not just that they’re gone. It’s all my fault and I know this. Am I softening, or is it simply my memories of this place and the pond that once held so much for me and the others?

  The water’s cold, and I know I can’t go bathing, but on that spring day in 1942, it was deliciously warm in the shallows, and through the spray I could see and hear Tommy laughing at me. He had such a good laugh, strong and full, such a wonderful body. We came together—splashed—chased one another until we fell into each other’s arms among the tall grass and wild flowers, me touching his hair and his brow, and thinking of Henri Poulin who might be watching, though the pond seemed empty of his punt when I sat up to look.