“I thought the food goes inside the house, not the other way round.”
He stood in the doors of the kitchen, leaning on the frame and observing her with a slight frown.
“I thought you left for work,” Kamille muttered breathlessly, not thinking of anything better to say.
She could have lied that she was only restocking the shelves or taking the excess food to the pantry under the stairs, but since she was dressed in her coat and wearing a hat, her attire was a giveaway sign that she was up to something quite different.
“I forgot my papers.” Jochen glanced her over and then shifted his gaze to the basket. “I thought you complained that you couldn’t get any of this even with ration cards, and that was the reason why you asked me to bring it to you. Only, judging by the fact that you’re planning to take all this someplace other than your own kitchen tells me otherwise.”
“Jochen, I…” Kamille stumbled, feeling the heat slowly flushing her cheeks with a bright red color. Unlike her sister, who would dare lie at her last confession had she not been an agnostic, Kamille had never been good at lying. “I was only…”
She touched the handle of the basket nervously, noticing the irritation in his tightly pressed lips. Jochen had not been in his best disposition during the last two weeks, after an attack on men in his charge had happened. He was either constantly absent, spending all of his time trying to investigate the matter in order to find the perpetrators, or he came home exhausted and in a foul mood after dealing with another reprimand from his commanding officers. Kamille could only imagine how this stunt of hers would anger him now.
“Where are you taking this food?” he demanded, sighing.
“I…” She dared raise her eyes to meet his and saw bitter disappointment in his gaze as if she had betrayed him in the worst way possible. No, please, don’t be mad at me, I beg of you, flashed in her mind while she fought the tears already gathering in her eyes. Not you now, not like Charles back then… “I was going to take it to the church.”
“The church?”
“Yes.” Lies again. She loathed herself for deceiving this man, who was always so open and honest with her, yet how could she tell him that all the food was for Violette’s former teacher and her little daughter, who were both Jewish? They never discussed that subject matter, but Kamille assumed without asking that Jochen shared the views of his fellow countrymen. So, lies it was; she simply had no other option. “There are so many displaced, poor people in need going there daily for their rations that I just felt compelled…”
“You’re sharing our food with them?” Jochen finished her thought and shook his head in reproach. At least he was smiling, just a little, but it was still something. “Kamille, you can’t possibly feed every person in need in Paris.”
“I know that. But at least I know that I tried…”
He snorted softly and walked over to her. Kamille readily stepped into his embrace as soon as he opened his arms to her.
“Such a wonderful, kind woman you are,” he said, placing a gentle kiss on her temple. “But, Kamille, really? A church?”
“They have orphans there… And I’m a mother myself, and I can’t stand seeing children suffer.”
At least this statement was true. The way Lili’s eyes lit up every time Kamille produced a candy or a butter croissant from under the checkered napkin made all the deception and anxiety worth it.
“I understand, but, my darling, understand me too: I’m not supposed to bring you food at all, and especially in the quantities I’ve been taking recently – all because you told me that a lot of food items were unobtainable. And here I am, stealing butter, flour, sugar from under my commanders’ noses for you, and you go and take it all to the church? And what if someone sees you on the street with all these goods, what will you tell them? That it came from your generous tenant? I’ll get another administrative punishment on my list, that is getting far too long already, and we still haven’t caught those communists, who sabotaged one of our paramount operations. Maybe the Kommandant will have enough of it and will send me away to the front. I’m ready to go back into fighting of course but is that what you want?”
He sounded reproachful again. Kamille didn’t blame him, so she only hid her face on his chest, clenching her hands tighter on top of his leather belt with its holster on top of his military overcoat.
“No, of course not. Please, forgive me. I won’t do it again, I promise. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“You didn’t upset me, Kamille,” he replied in a mild voice. “In other circumstances, I would be even proud of you and your generosity. But not now, not during the war… It’s just… irresponsible.”
“Yes, you’re right, it is.” Kamille nodded several times readily. “I wasn’t thinking what I was doing, and I certainly didn’t know about the possible ramifications my actions might have for you. I’m sorry, I truly am!”
“Hush, not a word anymore.” He kissed her lightly on the lips and moved a lock of dark hair away from her brow. “I have to go get those papers and run back to the Kommandatur. Horst must be getting antsy waiting for me in the car.”
“Will you be back for dinner?” Kamille held her breath, hoping for a positive reply.
“I don’t know.” He lowered his eyes. “But I’ll try my best.”
Kamille waved at him through the window, after he had left the house with a folder under his arm, and turned back to the countertop, eyeing the basket with a pained expression on her face.
She paced the kitchen for several minutes, trying to decide what was worse: risking Jochen’s fate and his feelings towards her (as she wasn’t sure how lenient he would be if he happened to catch her doing the same thing a second time), or leaving Augustine, who had already become her close friend, and her little girl Lili to fend for themselves in this cruel world, where they most likely wouldn’t survive the winter.
Kamille recalled the immense gratitude with which every basket was met, and how relieved Augustine looked whenever another portion of supplies was handed to her, meaning that her little daughter wouldn’t go starving for another two weeks. It seemed that ration cards weren’t doing her any good either, as, being Jewish, Augustine was allowed to stand in line for food only within a certain time period, at the end of the day, and by then all the meager rations were long gone. Kamille remembered how excited Augustine had been to proudly tell her that she had managed to get chicken insides the other day, and what a delicious soup she made with them. With real meat! she exclaimed, her eyes sparkling.
Kamille grabbed the basket resolutely, threw a napkin on top of it and proceeded to the exit, coming to terms with her decision at last. Tears stood in her throat as she pictured Jochen’s disappointed face in her mind, and the way he would walk out of the door without uttering a word. However, he was right about one thing: it wasn’t time for such sentiments now. It wasn’t time for egotistical sentiments, when another mother and little girl, who could have been her daughter, were struggling to stay alive. Walking out of the door, Kamille knew she’d made the right choice.
20
Giselle set the table absent-mindedly, going through long-forgotten motions. That was something her mother taught her, the always soft-spoken, always smiling, kind and sweet Madame Legrand. The tablecloth needs to be smoothed out so that there are no wrinkles; the candles go in the middle, together with a crystal decanter with wine; plates and silverware need to be perfectly parallel to each other, and the napkins have to be folded in a way that they can stand on top of the plate without leaning to one side, or (God forbid!) falling. Of course, the secret to a perfect napkin is to starch them thoroughly…
Seven-year-old Giselle was still interested in her mother’s – a poster housewife’s – teachings; at fifteen, not so much.
“Why on earth would I want to waste my time on starching napkins day after day if they end up being dirty after the first meal?” she would argue, much to her mother’s dismay.
“What do yo
u mean, why?” the gentle woman would inquire, confused by the strange question that had apparently never even crossed her mind. “My dear, it’s your duty as a future wife and a mother: to create a home for your future husband that he will want to come home to. To set the table for him when he comes from work, to make him feel comfortable so he can rest after an exhausting day…”
“Well, what if I don’t want to get married?” Giselle would shrug dismissively, leaving all the dishware on the table for her little sister to sort out.
Unlike her, Kamille had always had much more interest in domestic affairs, preferring to help her mother around the house instead of staring out of the window with a somber look, like Giselle often did, dreaming of the day when she would have a much better view than the wall of the neighboring building.
“You’re saying such nonsense, Gigi, really. What will you do without a husband?”
“I know what I won’t do: I won’t have to spend my life cooking dinners and starching damned napkins every day,” Giselle would grumble in response.
Kamille, little Maman’s twin, with two neat braids, in contrast to Giselle’s always messy bun, would start laying out the cutlery with intentional noise to show Maman that she, unlike her big unruly sister, was a good daughter and did everything by the book.
“But, chéri, that’s a woman’s natural place in this world, to be a wife and a mother.”
Her mother never gave up her attempts to convince her, God bless her heart. Giselle would only shrug again. “I guess, I will have to respectfully disagree.”
“My dear, you’re being plain silly now…”
“I wasn’t born for starching napkins, Maman.”
“What were you born for then?”
“To do things that actually matter.”
Kamille always shot her wary glares after such statements, statements that she couldn’t quite comprehend. Giselle would only turn away back to the window. She sometimes wished that she was born a normal girl, like Kamille. She wished her poor mother didn’t have to cross herself and whisper a prayer whenever her oldest daughter spouted some blasphemy about the uselessness of the Church, or start another dispute with her father with a cynicism that was far too harsh and unbecoming for a young girl of her age.
Giselle wished that she didn’t have that fire burning inside of her, which wouldn’t let her sleep at night and made her strive for things that others feared or shunned. She admired people who others avoided – the ones who shamelessly made their fortunes in the new age right after the Great War. She never felt a pang of conscience when defending those new people’s “atrocious” ideas, that were too forward or too immoral for people like her parents. She read “Crime and Punishment” when she was only fifteen and calmly proclaimed at a family dinner that she didn’t understand Raskolnikov and why he chose to give himself up… She for one wouldn’t. Her mother gasped and crossed herself once again, and her father only looked at her strangely.
“What? A crime is not a crime if you’re not caught, is it?”
“You’re too young to understand Dostoyevsky, daughter,” her father spoke, and his voice trembled slightly for some reason, maybe from a horrifying realization that his daughter was indeed a very different child from the other two, and on the contrary, understood Dostoyevsky all too well, and simply disagreed with him. “It’s not about not being caught. It’s about the inner struggle, about a human being’s morals, about… conscience at least.”
“You killed men on the front, Papa. Did you have moral qualms about that?”
“Of course I did,” he barely whispered in reply.
Giselle went quiet for a few moments, pondering something, and then proclaimed in the same calm voice, “I don’t think I would.”
“It’s a human life you’re talking about…”
Giselle was so immersed in her memories that she didn’t notice that she was sitting for some time without moving, holding a sharp knife in her hand that she had ready for cutting meat. Its edge glistened seductively in the candlelight.
It’s a human life you’re talking about…
I don’t think I would…
The door opened, sending amber candle flames into a dancing frenzy. Ominous shadows scattered around the table as Giselle’s lips slowly moved into a crooked grin. She hastily hid the knife, placing it next to the platter with a silver lid on top of it, which preserved the meat, just delivered from the nearby restaurant, from getting cold, and stood up to greet her guest.
“Smells delicious.” Karl planted a kiss on her lips, sliding an approving glance over the table.
“You know perfectly well that I didn’t make it.”
“You’ll learn with time.” He offered her an encouraging smile, moved her chair up and headed to the bathroom to wash his hands.
“Do I look like an exemplary German hausfrau yet?” Her eyes took on some strange, almost feral look in the uneven light of the candles, but the smile was in place when Karl returned to the table.
“Not yet,” he jested, not noticing anything, too busy pouring blood-red wine into their respective glasses. “But you will. With time.”
He smiled and raised his glass in a toast. Giselle sipped the ruby liquid, observing him over the rim of her glass.
No. I definitely will not.
“My mother would be delighted with the changes you’re making in me,” Giselle responded, unfolding a perfectly starched napkin over her lap.
“Maybe I’ll get an Ausweis for them both one day. I think I’d like to meet them.”
Giselle didn’t reply but noticed yet another subtle hint on her account. Recently he had started asking her all sorts of rather strange questions, such as whether her relatives were healthy, who worked where and who was married to whom (“Shatsky? Not Jewish, is he?” “Mais non, bien sûr non, Charlie. A white Russian émigré, which my cousin was lucky to meet right after that terrible Revolution. An Orthodox Christian turned Catholic and a Count on top of it. Such a refined gentleman. You would love him.”). He also wanted to know if anyone among her relatives were sympathetic to the Communist Party (“What nonsense! We’re all proud representatives of the intelligentsia; who would want to deal with that red flag-wielding riff-raff?”).
He was planning something about her, thinking that he was always twenty steps ahead of her. Only, he didn’t take into consideration that his opponent also did the same, and if she were right in her assumptions, soon the chance would present itself to find out if she really would.
Marcel sat rigidly, watching himself closely, trying not to give himself away by a twitching of his leg or nervous gulping, which would show how terrified he was. The local Wehrmacht headquarters was swarming with the Boches, and seeing all these gray-clad men marching along the wide hallway in their shiny boots was more than enough to make even an innocent person nervous. And Marcel was anything but innocent, and who knew how insightful his interrogator would be.
Forty agonizingly slow minutes passed before Philippe finally came out from the room used for questioning, grinning and unharmed, to confidently stride up to the row of chairs where Marcel sat.
“You’re up next, brother,” the communist leader said, with that single word reminding Marcel, who was already pale with fear, to keep up with their ruse, according to which the two were blood brothers.
It was the late Claude Bussi’s papers that he carried to prove his identity after Philippe had generously offered them to him all those months ago, when the Resistance was just a newborn idea. It all seemed so far away and impossible even to conceive now.
“Don’t fret, just answer their questions. You have nothing to hide.”
As if on cue, a female secretary, also wearing a uniform, called out his name, and Philippe slapped Marcel on his shoulder as if sharing his courage and confidence with him. It was easy for Philippe to be confident; he had gone through similar interrogations many times, even before the war had started and France was still free and independent. It was just routine questioni
ng, Philippe reassured him a day earlier, when a German soldier showed up at the factory and read out the names on his list who were prescribed to appear at the Wehrmacht headquarters the following morning for questioning. They had called the others for a similar examination before, and everyone had managed to return unscathed so far. The Boches were looking for communists in particular and called out the names of those who were on government lists dating back to the times of the Republic. Philippe and his comrades were on it of course, but Marcel wasn’t.
“Why are they calling me then?” he had whispered to Philippe in a trembling voice the day before. “They’re onto something. They know it was me…”
“They know nothing. Otherwise, they wouldn’t bother to invite you in such a kind manner to the Kommandatur. They would have simply dragged you outside and shot you, my friend,” Philippe replied with almost infuriating calmness. “The only reason why you’re on that list is that you’re a brother of a ‘notorious communist’ and a friend of his communist friends. They think you might also be a communist, that’s all. There’s nothing to it, so stop panicking. You’ll give yourself away in a second if you do. Just stay calm and feign ignorance. They’ll let you out in no time.”
Marcel recalled Philippe’s encouraging words as he walked along the hallway, approaching the doors of the room where his interrogator awaited him. The carpeted floor felt like the road to the gallows, and Marcel hardly managed to collect himself before entering the small anteroom.
A young orderly sat at a table typing something and lifted his head, with chestnut hair neatly parted on one side, to look at the newcomer.
“Claude Bussi?” he inquired, checking the list sitting in front of him.
Marcel blinked a few times, breaking into a cold sweat as recognition washed him over in a nauseating wave. It was the same German he had seen lounging on Kamille’s windowsill when he had first arrived in Paris with the two boys in tow, looking for a place to hide them. A few seconds passed before he realized that there was nothing to be afraid of and that the German couldn’t possibly recognize him because he had never seen Marcel before. He answered as confidently as possible. “Yes.”
The Indigo Rebels: A French Resistance novel Page 19