Marlena de Blasi

by Amandine (v5)

  That she and Monsieur Catulle should marry held aloft as her cause, Kostancja de Bazin dispenses with the Sunday bagatelles, proceeds toward intimacy more directly. Inviting him to walk in her garden, she speaks of her impressions of the child, of her talent, which merits nurturing, of her “way of being,” which calls for sensitivity. “What would you say if I told you that my fondest wish is to devote myself to this child? Because I have no other commitments, shall we say, I can do that as you cannot. Just as—for yet another set of reasons—your housekeeper cannot. Let me have her, monsieur.”

  “No. The boche have spirited away three of my children, and I shall not have you making off with my fourth. That’s how I’ve come to think of her. She is my child.”

  “It is exactly because I know that you’ve come to think of her as yours that I ask.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Of course, you would come with her. Or, more deftly put, I would come to both of you.”

  “What are you saying? That you would surrender your little fiefdom here to come rule over my far more humble one. Is that your plan, madame?”

  “Not to rule over it but to grace it. You must admit that’s what it lacks, monsieur. My presence would serve as complement.”

  Catulle touches her cheek, barely touches it at first, testing it, wondering if all the womanishness of her might blemish under his farmer’s hands.

  “Are you truly prepared to give up all of this to—”

  “I think, monsieur, that I have been preparing for this all my life.”

  As though Monsieur Catulle had agreed to her proposal, Kostancja de Bazin begins to arrange things. She and her household set about packing, separating goods and chattel that might make the voyage two kilometers down the road to Monsieur Catulle’s home from that which might stay packed away in the storage rooms of the château. She sends to Paris for whatever bits and pieces of clothing are to be found to supplement Amandine’s wardrobe. She plans little teas and luncheons, and always Amandine is by her side. Her magnum opus, however, is to be a supper—as grand as her wits and her stores will allow—for twelve townspeople. A modest gala during which, Madame de Bazin is confident, Monsieur Catulle will announce that he and she, with the blessing of their darling Amandine, are engaged to be wed. Though she has not been thoroughly precise in explaining her plan to Monsieur, nor has he been thoroughly precise in accepting it, she trusts his comprehension, his moral sensibility. Despite the truth that Monsieur possesses these in abundance, he refuses his chair at the head of the table, sits among his neighbors and, when he stands, it is only to raise his glass to Madame’s generosity. Kostancja de Bazin bows her head, waves her hand against the praise, lifts the long oval sapphires of her eyes to her guests, and, through them, smiles all around the table. The moment lost, perhaps the battle, it is zal of which she thinks as she rises, leads her guests into the garden.

  CHAPTER XXXIX

  “WHAT DOES IT MEAN THAT THE AMERICANS HAVE DECLARED war?”

  “It means we’re less alone with the boche. It means that the boche won’t have such an easy time of it any longer. Less smug they’ll be about it all. Yes, less smug. And don’t ask me what smug means. Not right now. I must … I have something I must do …”

  Catulle bends to kiss the top of Amandine’s head, puts on his coat, his muffler, his basque. “Stay here this evening, please. It’s very cold and—”

  “I will. You didn’t have your walnuts, so I’ll crack them for you, set them in the pan. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  For the past month Catulle has frequently been absent from home. A few days, sometimes longer. He leaves without notice, returns just as abruptly. When Amandine asks Isolde where he goes, what he does, she says, He is doing what he must do. And when Amandine asks, What is it that he must do? Isolde doesn’t answer but says only: the war.

  What Isolde does not tell Amandine is that Dominique has been imprisoned in Paris. In the prison de la Santé. That her trial is set for early January and that Catulle has been meeting—openly or via the auspices of others—with those who might be willing and able to effect her case. Bribes, reason, Catulle is trying all of it. She has been accused of participation in the writing, printing, and distribution of Résistance pamphlets, work of which she is indeed guilty. Her sentence will likely be forced labor in Germany until, after she has been starved and worked close enough to death, she will be rewarded with a quick execution.

  Today, only days after the Japanese spectacle in the Pacific, Catulle has received news via Dominique’s group that her trial has been postponed, that she is being sent directly to a work camp in Germany. That she and eighty others from la Santé as well as Cherche-Midi will be sent to the labor camp in Germany called Krefeld. They will travel first by train and then by truck. And then they will walk. On average, thirty percent of the prisoners die of starvation and exposure along the last stretch of the journey.

  Though his own subversive work is muffled by layer upon layer of cover, Catulle is not wholly without notoriety among the boche, and thus the hazards, to himself and to Dominique, that his presence in the capital would present, he has examined. And discarded. Catulle will go to Paris this evening to ask permission to visit her. Now the bribes and the reason he will use to cause her escape.

  What will happen, though, even as he arrives in Paris, is that he will be detained. He will learn that he had been betrayed, marked out to the boche by members of his own group, those who had used the story, the true story of Dominique’s plight to lure him. Aided then by double agents, another Résistance group intervened, and it’s they who will take Catulle as he leaves the train in the Gare du Nord, they who will save him from the betrayal and set him on the next course of his life, lead him away—the tip of a pistol held in a paper sack against his spine—skulking into the dark belly of the station, out through some camouflaged door into a waiting van on the evening of December 10, 1941. The only way out of the Résistance is death.

  Later, when he is able to take in these events and, in some part, their significance, it is of Amandine he thinks.

  But I am not dead. And Madame Isolde is not …

  I know, but you could be by tomorrow, and Madame Isolde could go for a walk and not ever come back because the boche decided to shoot her, let her fall into a ditch, and then cover her up with dirt. And where is Dominique, and where are your sons? Where is Solange’s mother? Where is mine?

  “He may not return for a very long time.”

  Amandine does not look at Isolde as she speaks but, her head resting on her upturned palm, she moves the torn pieces of her breakfast bread about on the white embroidered tablecloth. More than three weeks have passed since Catulle went away, and it was only this morning that Isolde was visited by a woman, ostensibly wanting to buy cheese, who informed her that Monsieur’s absence would be a long one, that he was well enough, that she and Mademoiselle should expect no further word, that she should close the house and take Amandine to stay with her in her village flat. There were a few words about practicalities. Now Isolde looks at Amandine, the child’s pallid face washed pink in a slant of January sun and, though she wants to take her in her arms, she says, “It’s no use mooning. This is what war causes. And we’re among the fortunate. You know that perhaps better than I.”

  No response. The pieces of bread are moved into yet another pattern.

  “Here’s what we must do. While you’re at school, I’ll begin covering the furniture, storing the silver, that sort of work. The field workers have nothing to do in this weather, so I can ask their help. We shall decide together, you and I, if there’s anything that we need or want to bring with us to my place. Certain valuables I shall store elsewhere. Then we’ll pack up our clothes and settle ourselves in the rue Lepic.”

  “Why do we have to leave?”

  “Efficiency. We can keep warm in my place with far less wood than we can stay barely clear of frostbite here. Safety. If the boche come by again, want to set up another
time in the village, this house will be as attractive to them as it was in the summer of 1940. If we’re here, they’ll send us away or, worse, we’ll be requisitioned along with the house. Made to do their bidding. No boche will be interested in my little flat. But it doesn’t matter if you or I understand or agree, it’s what he wants us to do.”

  One by one Amandine puts the pieces of bread into the cup with the now-cold milk, mashes them together. Begins to eat the pap with a spoon. “What about the garden?”

  “Nothing but six cabbages are left, and we can come to take one whenever we need it. We’ll wash the windows once a month, dust and scrub whatever and whenever, according to need. In the spring, we’ll work the garden just as we always do. We are not quitting the house but simply going to live elsewhere for the time being.”

  “Why don’t you tell me now that he’s never coming back?”

  “Because it wouldn’t be true. Don’t you think that I miss him, too? Everyone is missing someone, Amandine. Every last one of us. Eat your breakfast, do your work, and be off to school.”

  Amandine looks up at Isolde, perhaps shocked, perhaps hurt by her brusqueness.

  Isolde says, “When I look at you, I wonder if Madame de Bazin, her frilly snobbishness, has not deluded you. Parties and dresses and piano playing can’t make the war disappear.”

  “I never thought they would. I was—”

  “By the way, I shall see that your pianoforte is placed in the little salon, where the sun will warm it each morning. I shall wrap it in quilts. It won’t be harmed. Not by the cold, anyway.”

  Amandine rises, goes to where Isolde stands holding on to the back of Catulle’s chair.

  “Don’t you look at me with those eyes or …” Isolde sits in Catulle’s chair, pulls Amandine down upon her lap, rocks her.

  That winter of 1941–42, Amandine and Isolde pass in a quiet temperament of sympathy.

  While Amandine is at school, Isolde works either in the little flat or in Monsieur Catulle’s house. She milks the goats, makes the cheese. Feeds the hens and the rooster, takes the eggs, feeds the rabbits. Dispatches one every now and then to barter or stew. She queues for their rations, cooks and sews and, in a zinc pail wrapped in red and white cloth, she carries soup or an omelet or a cabbage pie to Amandine for her lunch. For nearly every supper, Isolde stands in front of the two-burner gas plate to cook her Norman galettes, consolation of her childhood. The traditional buckwheat long finished, she makes them with whatever flour or meal she finds or ferrets. Rubbing a trencher of lard—the same precious trencher she keeps for weeks at a time—across the hot pan, she pours in the batter from a small blue cream pitcher. Thin, lacy, crisp, she rolls them up with a smear of their own chèvre or some mash of vegetables. Sometimes they eat them with a whisper of sea salt and drink a tumbler of wine and, always and without telling one another, they wish that the others were with them.

  Each day when she returns from school Amandine takes from the hook by Isolde’s door the long, flat black iron key to Catulle’s house and walks the hundred meters to it from the rue Lepic. She walks through the house, tries to find the scent of his pipe smoke, climbs up to the bedrooms and walks through them, pats the beds, looks out the windows, practices the daily rite that he practiced, wonders what the house will feel like when everyone returns. Sometimes she uncovers her little spinet, takes off her mittens, leaving the black fingerless gloves she wears under them, plays a few scales, part of an étude, and then closes the lid, puts all the quilts back in place, locks the door and pulls it tight. On her way back to the rue Lepic, she stops on the bridge with the high wooden walls that curve like the hump of a camel. Standing where she and Catulle used to stand, she looks down at the water and up at the sky and considers her day.

  Evenings, Isolde and Amandine sit by the stove, where Amandine studies or reads aloud and Isolde—in preparation for their return—knits with the unwound wool of sweaters she’d knitted years before for Dominique and her brothers. They speak of Monsieur as though he was in the next room.

  Amandine visits Madame de Bazin on Tuesdays, if not every one of them. They talk and drink tea and often leave the pianoforte closed under its ruby silk shawl. Less lustrous her eyes, less curvaceous her form, Madame tells Amandine she goes often to Paris. The reasons she leaves unsaid. And there are people about, guests perhaps—ghostly and half glimpsed—who pass in the halls. Amandine understands that Kostancja de Bazin, too, has taken on some quiet work in the name of France.

  One day there is a large package, a box wrapped in white paper, sitting on the table in front of the sofa where Amandine and Kostancja de Bazin like to sit. “Open it, ma petite, it’s something I made for you from something made for my … Well, it’s a long story, but do open it.”

  “What is it? It’s so heavy and—”

  “Oh, don’t be so careful, tear the paper, there, slide it off, ah, I can’t wait to know if you’ll—”

  “Oh. What is … It’s so beautiful. Is it really for—”

  “Of course it’s for you. Here, let’s try it. Slip your arms through, there. Come to look in the glass in the hall …”

  Kostancja de Bazin has made for Amandine a kontusz, a small replica of the many-colored coats that Polish nobles once wore as emblems of sympathy for their peasants. It is like the kontusz that Amandine’s maternal grandfather—Antoni Czartoryski—once wore. Count Antoni Czartoryski who, some twenty-five years before, on his estate hunting lodge near Krakow, murdered his baroness mistress, sister of Amandine’s young father, Piotr Droutskoy, and then shot himself. Madame de Bazin has fashioned Amandine’s kontusz from an heirloom bedcover embroidered in a folkloric country scene depicting the Mazur region of Poland near Warsaw, the place where Madame de Bazin’s mother was born. Green and red on a black ground, its length falls to Amandine’s knees, its full split sleeves end at the elbow.

  Amandine turns round and round in front of the glass, runs about the halls and then out the main door and onto a veranda, letting the wind make a sail of the coat’s fullness, laughing, skipping until she sees that Madame has come outside, is gesturing that she should stop. Amandine runs to where Madame de Bazin waits, falls into her arms.

  “I knew you would love it, that it would be just right for you,” Madame tells her.

  “Oh, I do love it, and it is just right, but I won’t wear it until Monsieur returns and then—”

  “You know, it’s not necessary that you wear it ever. I just wanted you to have it. Perhaps someday I’ll tell you the story of—”

  “The story of the coat?”

  Kostancja de Bazin looks at Amandine, smoothes back the curls from her forehead, looks deeper into her eyes. She thinks, There is such a pure beauty in her loneliness. Soon she will begin to hold it tight to her, to understand that her sort of solitude is not caused by loss nor can it be relieved by discovery. It’s there, the zal, always there. Most especially when she smiles.

  “Well, yes, of the coat but another story, too, or maybe it’s not a story so much as some thoughts that I’d like to tell you. Someday.”

  CHAPTER XL

  AND THE SOMEDAYS PASSED. AND THE WEEKS AND MONTHS. THREE years’ worth and more, though the boche never returned nor did Monsieur Catulle, nor did Kostancja de Bazin tell Amandine her story or her thoughts.

  Isolde and Amandine lived much as they’d lived that first winter after Catulle had gone away and, each spring and summer, they went back to open up Monsieur Catulle’s house and planted the garden and helped the old men who worked the fields and they scrubbed and polished and washed the linens and the curtains, left them to dry in the sun. They never stopped talking about Monsieur as if he were in the next room or across the meadow, coming up the road, a tall, burly angel sauntering through the dusk.

  Amandine went to the bridge each evening, crossed her arms over her chest, whispered to Solange how she loved her. Back in the rue Lepic, she studied and read, helped Isolde to cook. After supper, after baths in the old zinc tub, after p
rayers, after all, they would lie, holding hands, in the little cupboard bed and tell one another they were living the life they were meant to live, and both of them knew it was true.

  And on that day in May 1945 when villagers began screeching up and down the road and old men danced and young women wept and laughed with their heads thrown back before they wept again, on that day when the war was over, Isolde and Amandine began to worry about Monsieur, about Dominique and Pascal and Gilles in another way. You see, while the war raged, one could tell oneself that everything would change when it ended, and so now that it had, what was it that they would tell themselves?