“There, go to look.”
The yellow sweater falls to Amandine’s knees, and a wide ruffle of tulle—shirred by the tight band of the sweater—shows beneath it. The effect pleases Amandine, and she runs to find her well-seasoned socks and the old-fashioned high-top oxfords that Madame Aubrac had given her.
Solange wears her boots and a hand-me-down résistante jacket. Still laughing as they descend the stairs, they find Dominique by the fire, and they twirl and curtsy for her approval, then fall upon the rose and blue rug, the chiffon and the tulle bouffant about them.
“I’m honored to be dining with two such splendid creatures. Had I known we were dressing, I would have—”
“You’re already perfect,” Amandine tells Dominique.
“At least let me put my boots on before I offer you aperitifs. And surely we need music. And I think Amandine should have some flowers in her hair.”
Dominique places a record on the gramophone. “Folk songs from the Poitou,” she announces as she pours yellow gentiane into two small, thick glasses. For Amandine, cassis syrup and water.
“I’ll return in a moment. Just a moment in the garden,” promises Dominique.
“Why didn’t we have aperitifs in the convent?’ Amandine asks Solange. “And why weren’t our uniforms made of chiffon? We could have done good deeds and prayed and sung plainsong in chiffon just as well as we did in gray serge, don’t you think we could have, Solange?”
“Perhaps. Yes, I think we could have. Can you imagine how chiffon might have changed us all? Who could be cruel in a dress that billows?”
“I think Mater might have tried.”
“Yes, she might have tried. If Paul were here, perhaps we would have found a dress for her. Yes, a dress for Paul. You in your tulle and I in my chiffon and she, what dress would you have chosen for Paul?”
Dominique enters holding out a branch of pussy willow, which she is bending into a circle. A wreath. Holding it in one hand, with the other she opens the drawer in a small table, rummages about, pulls out a short length of string. Winds it about to fasten the two ends of the branch together. She bites the string. Holds out the wreath to Amandine. “Let’s try it,” she says.
A bit too large, it falls to the middle of her forehead, exulting her eyes. Amandine runs to see herself in a mirror, says, “It looks like the crown Jesus wore on the cross.”
Amandine begins to pull at the pussy willows already tangled in her hair.
“No, no, leave it, please. It’s like the corona that held Beauty’s wedding veil, do you remember?” asks Solange.
Dominique has begun to sing along with a sad voice coming from the gramophone, and Amandine, forgetting about her crown, goes to sit next to her.
“Mon père m’a donné un mari. My father has given me a husband, but it’s you that I love. I love you, don’t forget me,” sings the unhappy bride of the Poitou. Dominique urges Solange, and Amandine sings with her.
“I love you, don’t forget me.”
Dominique goes to the table where the gramophone sits, kneels to search about in the case of records that is stored in a cabinet below it. “Ah, here it is. Do you know this one?”
She puts the needle down on a record, sits back on her heels, closes her eyes.
A woman sings in German, and Solange and Amandine close their eyes, too, and Dominique half whispers, half sings the words along with the deep, throaty voice. When it’s finished, Dominique opens her eyes, sings the last line one more time.
“Wie einst, Lili Marlene.”
“Why do you sing boche songs?” Amandine wants to know.
“Tell me the words,” says Solange.
“It’s not really a boche song. I mean, it was written by a German. During the Great War. But the words are not about patriotism or politics or ideology, not about war at all but about soldiers. It’s a soldiers’ song. The words are about loneliness, about being separated from your love. The same sentiment as the song from the Poitou. I love you, don’t forget me. German, French, English, American, Russian, the words have been translated into many languages. I heard a Spanish version of it once. In fact, it has become a theme of sorts with, with many of us résistants.” She stage-whispers this last, laughs.
“We sing it precisely because the boche have banned it, pronounced it sentimental and romantic and inconsistent with the cause of the fatherland. But the boche who were here played it every evening. Once, when I was washing up in the kitchen, one of the men came in unexpectedly and heard me singing along in German. When I saw him I stopped, of course, embarrassed, but he motioned for me to continue, and he stood there listening to me. Well, I sang it with all my heart, I sang it as though it was the only song in the world, and when it was over, he came to the sink, placed his hands on my arms, and he kissed me. He went back to the others without telling me why he’d come to the kitchen in the first place. I think many of us who are living through these times understand that there is much that’s quite the same about us. Dreams, fears. Here, I’ll teach you the words in French.”
Cross-legged on the blue and rose carpet, breezes from the wide, unbolted windows blowing the scent of rain-crushed lilacs about the room, they sing and sing until they sing better and better and Dominique rises, turns up the volume.
“Now we’re ready to sing with her,” she says.
Dominique settles herself back between Solange and Amandine. “Here we go then.”
The three are Dietrich’s French chorus, and they sing until tears fall, each one weeping for her own reason. On a late April evening smelling of lilacs during a war in which fifty million people will die for reasons already then obscure, they sing “Lili Marlene.”
It is past midnight, closer to one in the morning when Solange awakens. She’s been sleeping on the carpet in front of the now waning fire while Dominique sleeps on the sofa and Amandine on the chaise longue. Not wishing their soirée to end, they’d eaten their cheese and apricots and drunk some tea sweetened with the juices from the fruit and told stories until the first, then the second, then the last one fell asleep. The last was Solange. She rises from the carpet, goes to fix the quilt tighter about Amandine. She stirs up the fire, places a log over the red ash. She sits on the floor near Amandine and strokes her forehead where the pussy willow wreath still sits, moving her fingers among the thick black curls smelling of wood smoke.
“Darling, can you hear me? Will you wake up for a moment?”
Amandine sits upright, looks about, “Is it time to go?”
“No, no, darling, lie down again. I just wanted to tell you that I’m going out to the garden, maybe down to the river if I can find it. Or to the village. I didn’t want you to be worried if you awakened and didn’t see me. I’m not tired at all and—”
“I want to come, too, wait for me.”
“No. Absolutely no. I’ve just stoked the fire and it will be lovely and warm here in a few moments and I want you to sleep awhile longer. Besides, you must keep Dominique company.”
“She snores. Sort of like Philippe.”
“You do, too.”
“Why can’t you sleep?”
“It’s hard to explain. We’re very close to home now.”
“How close? Can we walk?”
“We could, but I think Dominique is arranging things for us. We’ll see tomorrow.”
“Will things change when we get there?”
“What things?”
“Will you be the same?”
“Of course. Will you?”
“Of course.”
“The greatest change will be that we can stay put. No more traveling. And there will be more people to love. More people to love us.”
“I know. But I like it when there’s only you and me. I like the feeling when there’s only you and me.”
“We’ll never lose that.”
“Never?”
“Never.”
“Not even when I’m big?”
“Not even then. That reminds me. Your birthda
y. In six more days, you’ll be ten years old. Up into the double numbers. And do you know what?”
“Uh-uh.”
“It’s possible, it’s very possible that we’ll be home by then. And Grand-mère Janka and Magda and Blanchette and Chloe will make a cake for you and a birthday supper and—”
“Will they have sugar for a cake?”
“I don’t know, but they’ll find something.”
“Will you give me the package from the lady with the eyes like a deer?”
“What, where did that idea—?”
“I know I’m supposed to wait until I’m thirteen but—”
“And it’s exactly until you’re thirteen that you must wait. That’s the pact.”
“Okay. It was fun singing with Dominique, wasn’t it?”
“Very much so.”
“I love you, don’t forget me,” sings Solange in a soft hurdy-gurdy voice.
“I love you, don’t forget me,” sings Amandine in the unhappy bride’s tremolo.
They sing it together, and then each one puts her hand over the other’s mouth to stop the laughter.
“Here, I’ve poured a little more tea into your cup. Are you thirsty?” asks Solange.
“Not now.”
“Then try to sleep, and when you wake, I’ll be right here.”
Solange buttons her jacket, slips into her boots, takes a shawl from a hook near the door, and walks out into the night. She wanders near the lilacs, brushes her face against them, snaps a branch from a bush.
What is it about tonight? A kind of greediness. After all these days of measuring and arranging, accepting mercy, accepting gall in whatever doses they were offered and then today, Dominique said, “The only things anyone hunts around here are wild hares.” Another world. The music, the strange yellow liqueur, a chiffon dress, the truth that we are nearly there. Almost home. From Languedoc to Bourgogne. Ten months. Ten times ten lifetimes. I love you, don’t forget me.
“I love you, don’t forget me,” she sings as she walks, swinging the branch of lilac, stepping through the pinewood, down a beaten-earth path and onto the cobbles of the village square. The dark is penetrated only by a wavering light leaking from between the church doors. Somewhere leaves tap on a windowpane.
Strange that the church would still be lit. I’ll bring the lilac inside.
Solange runs up the steep wooden steps of the church and opens the doors. Before she registers what she sees, hears, she knows that she must run. Run back to Amandine. Take the little girl in her arms and run and run and never look back.
“Bonsoir, mademoiselle. How lovely that you have volunteered.”
“Yes, yes, a volunteer …”
“An elegant volunteer. You needn’t have dressed for the occasion, and look, an offering, flowers for us, ah, you French women are like no others.”
Their laughter wet, salacious, three SS strut down the center aisle toward Solange. Two SS take her arms, the other rips off her shawl, unzips her jacket, runs his black-leathered fingers over her breasts. He slaps Solange lightly under the chin. “A buxom angel come to save us, huh?”
Their laughter louder, black-leathered fingers crush the flesh of her arms, drag her into some darker place. A side chapel. One of them slaps her cheek with a pistol butt, throws her down onto the stone floor. She still holds the lilac. The receding stomp of boots on stone. Stillness. Shadows of marble saints quiver in rolling fans of torchlight and the yellow fire of votives. From where she lies, she sees that the same three SS who greeted her surround a man. One SS strikes a match, holds its pointed blue flame to the eye of the man whose arms are held by the other two SS. Closer yet, the SS holds the flame, brushing it across the eye, across the other eye. The SS leaves the flame to linger on the eyes of the man—the lids held open by a fourth SS beckoned to assist in the finale. The flame wavers and is spent in the breath of the man’s scream.
In another sweep of torchlight, Solange sees two small boys who sob “Papa, Papa,” from the bench where they’ve been seated to observe the SS at work upon their father. Dark again, quiet again. Back to black. Until, in the next sweep of light, she sees a woman brought out from somewhere to stand where the man had stood a few moments before. One SS holds her by the hair, two by the arms. The Match Man asks her something. In a very soft voice he asks her again and, when she spits in his face, Match Man laughs, shouts something and shouts it louder, and a uniformed woman holding a child runs to where they stand. The child screams, tries to hold its arms out to its mother, but the uniformed woman restrains it. Match Man holds his flame aloft, leans his face into the child’s, nuzzles its nose, gurgles baby words to it, brings the flame down, runs it across its head, singeing the pale fuzz of hair, touching the flame to its ears, its cheeks. The mother screams, “Clovis.” Match Man turns abruptly. Asks another question. Choking, begging for her child, she says it again. “Clovis.” Match Man takes the child from the uniformed woman’s hands, places it in its mother’s embrace. The SS watch as both mother and child grow calm. Match Man and the others disperse, leaving the mother to her freedom. As she walks toward the doors of the church, Match Man turns, aims, shoots. He shoots the woman, who has just declared the name of her husband’s resistance cell. Its leader. It was her heart that Match Man was after. Where she held the child. At such close range. A single bullet.
On a late April evening smelling of lilacs during a war in which fifty million people will die for reasons already then obscure, on this night when they sang “Lili Marlene” and “I love you, don’t forget me,” and drank “gentiane” and ate cheese and apricots and slept by the fire, on the night of the day when Dominique told her, “The only things anyone hunts around here are wild hares,” on the night when she was certain they were almost home, the same night when she told Amandine to go back to sleep, that she would be there when she woke, this was the night Solange walked into the war. Across the blurred secret edges of it and into the gore of its pluck. This is how it happened.
At twilight, l’heure bleu, the blue hour just before darkness falls, a convoy of nineteen SS traveling by auto and jeep and motorcycle on a road north of Auxerre was ambushed by the Résistance. Je me défend. A colonel was among the three SS who were killed. Two résistants were captured. Preliminary investigation has disclosed that one of the two is a resident of this village. A model occupied village. Reprisals will begin at dawn. In Auxerre. And here. Thirty French men, women, and children in each place. The normal reprisal quotient is ten for one. This exalted number is in honor of the colonel. The villagers who are being interrogated in the church were pointed out by collabòs. By their neighbors.
Rising from the floor, Solange walks to the two small boys who still sit on their bench. She holds them, says nothing. From their trembling bodies, she takes as much comfort as she gives. One of them touches the gash on her cheek. Kisses it. She thinks of Magdalen Aubrac. When I see my husband or Lily, I never know if it will be the last time. Interrogation, torture, execution. From outside the church, screams, shots, the deafening thud of boots on the cobbles. The boots like hooves then on the wood of the steps.
SS heave open the church doors and, with the noses of machine guns, herd townspeople inside. The doors of the church are barricaded, the outside walls surrounded, the village sealed. The interrogation will continue through the night. Thirty people will be chosen. The others, many of them beaten to the edges of death, will be freed.
Hours pass, and no one has come to where Solange still sits with the two small boys. When the long leaded windows of the church show a yellow-rose light, two SS come to escort Solange. A group of men in long dark coats stand at the front of the church, and they laugh as one of the SS picks up the hem of the chiffon dress. Holds it gingerly in the tips of his fingers. A page for a bride. She and twenty-nine others are marshaled out the doors, down the wooden steps. They are lined up neatly along the length of a deep trench, freshly dug against the front wall of the church. Villagers stand in front of their houses, cro
wd in the grassy square. Starched pinafores over their dresses, sweaters against the new day’s cold, the women stand together, hold hands. The butcher is buttoning his smock, a cigarette between his teeth. The curé and the young Jesuit who was his assistant—they, too, disclosed by the collabòs—swing from the branches of an elm tree. The man who owns the café stands on his terrace and weeps. He turns then, bends to some kind of work, fumbles with something, some sort of apparatus, it’s difficult to see. A gramophone on a table covered in red oilcloth. The needle spurts, scratches, and then Dietrich sings. The volume so loud, the sound distorted, her voice reigns above the SS captain’s shouts to his firing squad. The villagers begin to sing, and their volume, too, is strong, stronger. How Dietrich’s chorus has grown. And at that moment, Amandine can be seen.
Right then, right there where the cobbles of the village begin, where the beaten-earth path ends. Having awakened, searched for Solange, she has come to the village to find her. Solange, from her place in line along the trench, faces the square. She sees Amandine, she hears Dietrich.
The gunfire Amandine thinks is part of the play. The pageant. She looks to where the players fall. She sees Solange drop delicately into the trench, the ice blue dress billowing around her.
Amandine thinks, Ah, look how beautifully she falls. I told her she would be just as beautiful as the ballerinas in Swan Lake, and there she is, the dying bird. Look at her, my Solange.
The guns are still then, and the acrid white smoke clears.
The play is over. How well the townspeople play their parts, so still they are in that hole. Like the just-killed birds the hunters would leave on the scullery table in the convent, the brown-and green-feathered birds lolling warm and soft, one or two still writhing. Yes, it’s the end of a play. She’ll get up now and see me. Come running to me.
The villagers are still singing. They sing in French while Dietrich sings in German. Tous deux, Lili Marlène. Wie einst, Lili Marlène. The record ends, the needle scratches round and round, the bells in the steeple ring six, and a north wind scuttles low along the cobbles as the squad points its guns downward, turns in formation to leave the square. Others shovel dirt into the trench.
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