A Packhorse Called Rachel

by Marcelle Kellermann

  She rubs her hands on her torn apron, then invites me to sit down, saying: “Don’t worry yourself, I’ll put some heart in your belly, as we folks say.” It is my turn to get my bowl of soup, next to which she puts a large slice of cake with a candle she lights up, accompanying this friendly gesture with a grin that lightens instantly her broad tired face. I am moved to tears. I fall upon my bowl of soup as Nourse does with his; we both forget our manners!

  I spend the rest of the night in grandmother’s rocking chair in the kitchen. Before going to sleep my good fairy reminds me that her husband is an early riser - six o’clock - and that he must not find me here. I ask her with a smile “Or else there’ll be trouble?” She smiles faintly: “Oh aye, it’s best not to cross him. Come in as if you’d been in the mistle.”

  Poor woman! She has accepted fate as if it were her due. She is not fighting any more. I, at least, can console myself that fight I shall, I shall win the old man over. His wife has given up; she has arrived at the end of the long road. All that remains is her man who destroys himself and whose decay she cannot prevent. I compare myself to her and feel I am privileged; my future at least is not foretold.

  I open my eyes. The wood on the hearth crackles and gives off a wonderful smell of resin. On the ceiling shadows flicker to and fro. Tomorrow, which has turned into today, I’ll hold out my hand in friendship to Raboullet, yes, I’ll do it with a good grace. It must be possible to get round him, surely, if he reads books and counsels people? And I’ll get permission to use his bothy as my base.

  It’s one o’clock. I have five innocuous hours before me. If I were sleeping in a real bed (or even on the floor) I would turn over and sink into dreams of innocence. But in a rocking chair…Have you ever tried it?

  Nourse is barking loud enough to wake the dead. My watch says six o’clock. I jump out of the rocking chair only to end up, I’m sorry to say, on all fours on the matting, still heavy with sleep. I say “Oh shit!”, half raise my head and stare wide-eyed at two sturdy legs in corduroy trousers; the chair goes on rocking, it must have a life of its own jabbing me in the behind as it does so. I raise my head higher. Raboullet, newly shaven and spruced up, helps me get to my feet, and frowning like a master of an infants school says:

  “Musn’t swear like that, Mamzelle Henner!”

  “Ha!” I say, “You remember me!”

  “Well of course I do! You’re the German lass with her Alsatian tyke who’s pretending to be a Parisian, correct?”

  He hasn’t let go, the brute! I feel as if I could kill him, I don’t like the way he looks me up and down, crackling with sarcasm and openly suspicious. I pull myself together and say: “You’re unjust and unkind, Monsieur Raboullet!”

  “You, you’re having me on, lass! Yon identity card, I don’t believe it. Identity cards are thirteen to the dozen… it means nowt!”

  This pig-headed man persists in thinking that I am German or worse, a member of the militia or a Vichy spy come to poke my nose into his affairs, asking under threat: Your supplies, your money, your savings, where have you buried them? Your terrorists, I know where you’re hiding them. I’ll worm it out of you, you country bumpkin, thick and weather beaten as the stone from Volvic, that burnt stone spewed out of the volcanoes! And what about your sons, hey? Just the right age for the Waffen SS…or voluntary labour in Germany…or the Militia! We’ll crack your thick skull to make you talk. I’ve only to lift my little finger…I’ve got connections in high places, just try me!”

  On the brink of turning away and slamming the door on my way out I have a last try: I ask him:

  “But what else can I say to convince you? I…

  He interrupts me by putting his paw over my mouth, an unexpected move which incenses me. He says in a whisper, his black eyes like gimlets:

  “Why didn’t thy Gérard come with thee last night, eh? Tell me that!”

  “You kicked him out, remember?” I reply, “You’d shamed him, you have!”

  I am saved! Saved by these few words! Why didn’t I think of it before? His suspicions take wing like butterflies from their chrysalis, the atmosphere in the room lightens, the old bear gives ground. He deigns to answer: “He deserved it… he’s a fanatic, yon colonel, he gets lads killed the same age as mine…You don’t believe me? Well, go and ask him about his bolshie views!”.

  His face darkens, he says: “He’s a red! Don’t think like him! Don’t become a bolshie too, nom de Dieu!”.

  “So why are you harbouring him and his people at Savignole?”

  I sense my questioning irritates him. He owes me no explanation, that’s for sure. But he relents, suddenly talking like a headmaster, dropping his patois forcé on me when it suits him. He declares:

  “He and I share opposite political views but when he came to my house, in poor shape and hungry I gave him shelter. Then we talked. I let him have Savignole, temporarily, mind! Costs me nothing and if it means helping towards the end of this guerre de merde, so much the better, see? It’s all in my own interest. Ideals, like yours and his, pardon, I have none.”

  I can’t argue with him. Anyway, I too have come to Raboullet ‘in poor shape and damn hungry’. Like the colonel, I want Raboullet’s other bothy. Like the colonel I’ll make him relent. Yes, I will.

  I react in becoming pompous: “There are more important matters to settle than political ones; they are hungry at Savignole, colonel Gérard and his people are depending on me to bring them food. I’ve given my word that help will come, and as long at it will be necessary. I’ll bring them food- if it’s the last thing I’ll ever do”. (To be frank, I don’t think I was quite so direct…but near enough). Raboullet looks at me, sideways, intrigued. He raises his eyebrows, heavy ones, he doesn’t quite know what to do next. I seize this moment of hesitation to make contact. Reaching for his hand I ask: “Will you help me and sell me some food? Besides; a packhorse needs a stable, since that’s what I’ll be from now! Please, Monsieur Raboullet, please, let me have your bothy! Let me have it!

  Raboullet was going to let me have it, but HIS way…Raboullet had become single-minded. I am pleading…I am weak. What next? His body language is explicit enough: Raboullet the lecher is going to have a go at me. It’s like the savage games, sometimes fatal, animals play when they confront each other for the first time, not knowing the opponent’s strength. Contact is made to find out, they get excited by that contact, they want to win, then it’s no holds barred. Will the fight (the game) ever end? It always does. They turn away injured, exhausted. The confrontation has been necessary; it has put an end to desire and fear. The two adversaries have sounded each other out, they know each other’s strength, smell, feel. They’ve grazed each other’s skin, bitten into fur and flesh, blood spurting out. After the fight they become friends, or foes, or they make love. Desire has been assuaged, pride resolved, fear gone.

  Our game, Raboullet’s and mine, begins in earnest.

  I get up, run my fingers through my hair for something to do. If I smoked, I would light a cigarette. This gesture of mine brings out the animal in Raboullet. He approaches as if invited. I step back. He comes forward. I retreat no further. Come on, Rachel, don’t be a prude, Raboullet wants to touch you, well let him, it’s part of his game and part of your mission. What mission? You’re a member of the Resistance now, I tell myself. Not as resistant as all that, not at this time of day, early in the morning. Just got up. Well, sort of…I’m not too proud, either. I’m Judith in Holophernes’ tent, though not quite. To believe Jean Giraudoux’s Judith, she had her night of love! She went through the tumult of the senses, of ecstasy, and then she killed her lover to save her people from bondage. Yet…yet fulfilled as a woman, she left the tent liberated and triumphant. Me? I’m letting myself be pawed by a lustful, drunken peasant who’s exploring the top half of my body with his big, hairy hands. He gropes at one of my breasts, then the other; the nipples become erect, it’s inevitable. He is very pleased with the effect he is producing. My heart is beating wild
ly. It has never happened to me before, I mean being pawed not wanting it. I grit my teeth, I feel no ecstasy in this situation! I tell myself that at least I’m liberating my people from Nazi bondage, that perhaps in some way I’m coming to the aid of Visachel and those who disappeared with him to the concentration camps. Visachel! Listen! I’m doing this for you! It isn’t too much, really…

  Holophernes from the Auvergne murmurs “Tha’s a grand lass” and “Tha’s a virgin, right?”

  Help! He has fallen back into the rough language of the mountains and of the hills. His paw searches for the answer lower down. Oh God Almighty! What shall I do? He starts to unbutton the flies of his corduroy trousers - I bet he put his Sunday best ones for the occasion!

  - I escape from his grasp, manage a laugh (rather forced). To loosen the tension I hear myself say:

  “You’re not going to have me on the kitchen floor, are you?” At this he does his flies again. I allow a necessary interlude for the rutting animal to collect itself. He does. Slowly. Mumbling to himself. It’s a groan more like. Defeat accepted. Momentarily. Enactment postponed.

  I, on my part, have gone as far as my “sacred mission” will permit and no further. (Sorry, but grandiloquence is perfectly appropriate here I think. No irony intended). He says:

  “Tha’s a virgin, lass. I know.”

  I look him in the eye: “Monsieur Raboullet, I haven’t come here to play games with you, but to help our comrades at Savignole. I need your cooperation, your good will …whether I am a virgin or not!”

  He snorts and turns his back on me. He makes his way to the dresser loaded with an impressive number of bottles of wine. He grabs a large glass, goes over to the table, sits down and without saying a word fills his glass, empties it and wipes his mouth with a check handkerchief taken from his trouser pocket. From the other pocket he takes an ancient leather tobacco pouch and his pipe, fills and lights it, letting out slurping noises. He seems to be thinking. I sit down beside him. He looks at me, then looks straight ahead. In no time the bottle is emptied. Another one is opened. He drinks. I can’t accept the reasons his wife gave me for his drinking. The Occupation has little to do with this dreary ritual, it reaches him only peripherally. Think if you can of the eroded mountains of the Auvergne scorching ceaselessly the inner soul of the men and women who toil in their midst. Think of Raboullet’s daily responsibility as the boss of a large estate subjected to regular inspections by Vichy’s “Intendants” and the obligatory deliveries of food on the spot.

  Think! Think of the obese and weary wife who must have been so desirable in her youth and has ceased to be so…of the local girls Raboullet lusts after but who turn and run, mocking him in defiance…of the farm hands who fear and hate him… of the children who are fed up with the old man’s bouts of temper and drunkenness and keep away from him as much as they can…

  And there’s more: think of the helplessness of country folk in the face of the heavens which can ruin all their efforts in a trice? It can take one night to freeze the potatoes if a plague of Colorado beetles hasn’t stripped off all the leaves first It takes only a week of incessant rain to rot the mown hay; a single flurry of late snow or a gale or one late frost to make the buds of the fruit trees come to nothing, or a drought such as last year’s when the fallen russets were riddled with maggots.

  So you drink…to forget the war. Oh aye, the war! Well, tha knows, us folk don’t like it. No. But these days our lads are like pigs in clover, the Jerries leave ‘em be as they are farm workers, working for the Jerries mostly. So, while there isn't much coffee nor sugar about, all t’same we don’t do too badly. We can make a bob or two…black market, tha sees. It’s no so bad…

  I wondered, and still do, who provoked more contempt in the eyes of country folks: the occupant’s compulsory requisitions or the townies begging on their knees for ham, cheese or even butter, their pride left at the door, their wallets wide open lures, stuffed with banknotes… the ultimate temptation.

  7.

  Morning Rituals.

  Before launching into the episode of the Savignole bothy, this misty, shimmering April morning, as the day slowly sheds its kapok cover, and after I have bathed in my stream which I was to call Clairefontaine after the French ‘comptine’ of the same name, I must finish the story of my first days with Raboullet.

  Like the 2nd of February, the 22nd was decisive. But whilst the former was dragged down into the mud of treachery, the latter ended in the clear waters of hope. This day marked the beginning of my life as a member of the Maquis.

  Raboullet’s generosity through the weeks and months of toil and pain before the partial Liberation of France (in the summer of l944) was a gift to me, and to me alone. So he persisted in saying. Each potato, chunk of cheese, smoked ham, home made pâté, …was an offering from Raboullet to ‘his’ Rachel. Yet, his acts of kindness towards me didn’t stop there, –I’ll come to those a little later. Was I gratified, I asked myself ? Yes. And no. I lived in the fear of asking too much of this man who transformed himself before my eyes to please me - the reasonable prices he charged us, the amount of food he tucked into my rucksack unflinchingly, the use he allowed me to make of Jean, his shepherd, the personal contact he made, in the end, with the Maquisards of Savignole in spite of his reluctance to have anything to do with those “terrorists”- yes, all this and much more to tell when I come to it.

  “Just now”. he had said one fine afternoon in April while my rucksack was being filled again to the brim: “I’ve got other fish to fry than to worry about what motivates them comrades of yours to risk their lives as they do.” He was obviously in a specially good mood (having had less to drink than usual) but taking the opportunity of letting me know in no uncertain terms that his liberalities were only a reprieve. One day all these fanatics would have to be put in their place if they persisted in spreading their “egalitarian rubbish and shoving us all into co-ops!” I confess his old- fashioned reactionary opinions irritated me, they did not quite fit with the new idea I had formulated about the man. Generous and tolerant towards me –and eventually towards our maquis– he could also be bloody intolerant and hidebound when he chose to be so. But as I said before the more I got to know that country - so rich in the valleys, so barren up on the hillsides where you had to work with your feet planted on different levels- and the packhorse Rachel had learnt a thing or two about those treacherous landscapes, beautiful to the eye, pitiless on the feet - the better I came to understand the historical reasons for the rough, instinctive tightfistedness of the Auvergnat, his pathological obsession with losing his money well hidden in woolen stockings - his freedom and his fierce independence.

  * * *

  After finishing the second bottle of the day and broaching the third, Raboullet remembers that it is nearly seven o’clock and his wife hadn’t yet got up to put the coffee on the hearth and the white cheese on the table. He springs up and roars through the door leading to the bedrooms, “Shake yourselves, women! I want my coffee?” And he sits down again with an air of who-is-the-master-in-this-house? Then he questions me about the incident in the cowshed. So, his wife had already told him! I had better defend the Spanish labourer. After all, he hadn’t touched me I said. Raboullet cuts me short; “My business!” he says. I held my tongue.

  “You’ve got something up your sleeve, I can see that,” he says, patting my hand in a fatherly way, changing the subject.

  The animal! As if he didn’t know …

  “Let me rent your bothy, Monsieur Raboullet, the one that’s empty…”

  This was to be my second plea within a short time. Was he driving my patience to the limit of endurance and enjoying it?

  “I never rent my bothys.” he says.

  He shook his head, had a drink and his eyes met with mine. Just look at you! You are not made for it, lass”. I protest:

  “You shouldn’t go by appearances, Monsieur Raboullet… a packhorse is tough and that’s what I’m meant to be from now on, remember!” />
  I don’t think he heard me. He takes his glass, drinks, stands up and shouts even louder than before: “Are you all dead up there?”

  Two women’s voices called out simultaneously: “Coming …coming!”

  He comes and sits down again, has another drink and says: “He’s mad, yon colonel. You’ll die of cold and hunger like as not!” I agree:

  “I suppose I shall!”

  He scratches his head: “‘What do you want to do there?”

  “Watch the Boche convoys…store food for the comrades. They say your bothy is in an ideal spot for doing both things. That’s all, really.”

  He says; “But why don’t you stay at the Savignole bothy? It’s a proper dwelling I had built years ago. There’s a proper stove… and more…”

  “I know. Colonel Gérard decided otherwise. He must have his reasons.”

  “His reasons! His reasons! They are selfish reasons, they are! You know what I think? The Boche will have a field day if they find you in that bothy all alone! Thought of that?” (As if I hadn’t! But what is the good of telling him?) He goes on:

  “What will you tell them, the Krauts? That you’re on holiday? That you’re living in that hovel to commune with nature?” And the raspy laughter follows.

  I make no answer because I don’t like his sarcasm…I’m not in the mood.

  He doesn’t like my silence and breaks it:

  “Don’t expect me to get you out of the mess, my girl! If they come asking me questions I’ll tell them that I don’t know you…that you’re a squatter…”

  Raboullet looks at me narrowly to see what effect his discouraging words have on me.

  “You can tell them what you like” I throw at him in contempt.”

  He is about to answer me back but is interrupted by the appearance of Madame and his eldest daughter, the rather pretty, plump red-head. They seem only half awake, poor things; the night had been all too short for them. We greet each other in a friendly fashion and Madame begins to grind the coffee, or rather the toasted lupin grains which look like coffee beans but aren’t, of course. She has to force the grinder round - there must have been chick peas in there! - and then puts the whole lot into a pan where some milk was just coming to the boil. The daughter, Adèle, puts a great round loaf of bread on the table, some onions, soft goat cheese and quince jelly which she places in front of me with a smile. At the same moment the farm labourers come in one by one, mumbling ‘Patron’, and the sons after them, muttering ‘Papa’. Ten labourers, three sons. The other daughters, including the twins, must still be in bed, knocked out by last evening’s birthday party.