Robert felt a familiar pang of sorrow remembering the day Luc had left them. They’d not learnt much about him; just that he was a lavender farmer from the Luberon who would rather fight the Germans than work for them. The five-year-old had hoped they’d live together forever but Luc had other ideas.
Robert arrived at the dilapidated gate of the cottage that swung crookedly off a broken hinge and indulged for a moment longer in his recollections. He looked at his right thumb, where a tiny, pearlescent scar traced across the pad. He could recall in vivid colour the bright, blooming red pain as he’d found the courage to draw a blade across that thumb in the summer of 1943, mimicking Luc. And then they’d joined bloods. Brothers.
‘I’ll come back,’ Luc had promised him.
And Robert had waited, surviving the war, and while the rest of Pontajou had begun to heal, Robert’s nightmare was only just beginning, for back into his cottage had returned his parents … both desperately changed, each deeply angry and resentful of the other.
Neither cared enough for the child in their midst and Robert’s life had plunged into a misery that he was glad his bright and beautiful grandmother never had to witness.
He rubbed the scar. ‘You didn’t keep your promise, Luc,’ he muttered, having never allowed himself to believe Luc might have died. ‘Liar,’ he cursed at the vision he still held of the broad, golden-haired Frenchman who had walked out of their lives and turned one last time at the end of the path and lifted a fist to Robert, reinforcing that he should stay strong until he came back for him.
Robert ran a trembling hand through his lank, dark hair and didn’t want to think about what had happened since then. He always regretted allowing recollections of his grandmother and Luc to surface; they did him no good.
The front door of the cottage opened loudly and Robert snapped his attention to his father.
‘Who have you been talking to?’ he demanded.
‘Louis, at the café.’ He schooled his features not to show the scorn he felt towards the small, dark figure who possessed only two moods: either rage or melancholy, each as ugly as the other and equally damaging. He didn’t know which he preferred to face. This morning it was rage. Robert sighed inwardly. This meant maintaining a distance, keeping his voice low.
‘Did you talk about me? Your useless father?’
‘No.’
‘Why did you go in there?’
He produced the bottle that he’d put in his pocket. ‘I got you this,’ he said, holding it out. He didn’t want to linger on that fraction of a second when he saw the self-loathing flare in his father’s eyes. When Robert returned his gaze, he saw his father’s eyes had dulled to their usual hostility.
‘You’ve got money to burn, eh?’
‘I earn it honestly for us.’
‘Well, you can help me earn some, then. Come on, let’s go shoot some rabbits.’ Robert baulked.
His father sensed the hesitation. ‘Don’t make me drag you, Robert. I need help.’
Yes, you do, Robert thought, and Louis’ words echoed in his mind that his father should be put in care.
‘Here,’ his father said, throwing something at Robert, and the smell of old liquor wafted past as the man lurched by him. He caught the bloodstained sack. ‘You can be my dog,’ he sneered. ‘You can fetch the dead.’
Robert placed the bottle just inside the gate and traipsed after the man. He was several inches taller but he was not nearly as muscled as his elder. With his flat cap, the obligatory cigarette hanging from his lip, wearing a soiled shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow, and a waistcoat over his old trousers and boots that had not seen a smear of polish in years, his father still managed to look intimidating. He possessed larger than average hands for a man of his size. Pity me, Robert thought, knowing how those large hands balled up into even larger fists that could pound ferociously like twin maces when they struck.
‘Come on, keep up,’ his father growled. ‘I should never have left you with your grandmother,’ he railed. ‘She turned you into an apron-clinger. She was a useless old woman,’ his father jabbed at his mother-in-law.
Robert was aware that his father had picked over his small box of trinkets; treasured memories of Marie. Her scarf, her favourite brooch, the tiniest bottle of lavender water, her Bible, the magnifying glass she used to read it with by candlelight, and her wedding band that Robert had eased from the dead woman’s finger. He didn’t have that keepsake any longer – his father had pawned it for francs to get drunk with.
Outside of his thoughts he could hear his father’s words, like the machine-gun fire that he heard in his dreams sometimes, railing at him in that rapid way for brooding over an old woman’s belongings. Normally Robert would just let the snide remarks flow over him like water over smooth stone. To show temper, to even show the slightest offence, was precisely the provocation his old man searched for, needed in fact, to then move onto his next level – physical violence. Robert had taught himself to get lost in other thoughts when his father was giving a tirade. But not today.
‘Shut up!’ he yelled. ‘You useless old drunk.’
He was frightened but didn’t regret the outburst. Maybe his father could end the emptiness by pulling the trigger on the rifle he’d just raised and pointed at his son.
His father turned. ‘What did you say?’
‘You’re a pathetic, self-pitying drunk, but not deaf,’ Robert surprised himself by accusing. ‘Do it. Go on, do something with your useless life that the villagers can at least remember Pierre Dugas for, other than being a filthy drunk and a coward.’
‘Coward?’ his father repeated in a whisper as though he didn’t understand the word. ‘I fought for—’
‘No, you didn’t, you cringing bastard. My grandmother fought for France. She’s the one who should have been given a medal for the number of times she looked a German army officer in the eye and lied to him. She ran messages, she took in the wounded at risk to her own life, and she kept me safe by taking the death that you should have suffered. Don’t talk to me about bravery. As for fighting for France?’ He laughed bitterly. ‘Well, if fighting for France is kissing the arse of your German overlord while you worked in a nylon factory while many of your friends took up arms and fought … put their lives on the line and really fought for France, fought for freedom, then you have a strange idea of patriotism. No, Papa, you obediently went for your STO like a good German stooge.’
His father remained silent, mouth open, in shock.
‘Go on, pull the trigger!’ Robert begged. ‘You’ll be doing me a favour. I hope they clap you in prison for my murder and let you rot. I wish you’d died in Germany. Then at least I could think of you proudly … my heroic father. So finish it, coward. Pretend it’s yourself or, better still, when you’ve killed me, turn the rifle on your own chest and blow yourself to hell, you bastard.’
He heard the safety catch release. It was going to happen. Good.
Robert closed his eyes and heard the explosive sound of the rifle, felt the ground reach up and smash him, and briefly when he opened his eyes with the helpless shock of pain, he saw the grey October sky turn black.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Strasbourg, France
After the funeral it was weeks of study and then mid-term exams before Max could get back to Lausanne, where he spent the entire break with his grandparents, remembering happier times, and using his presence to help lift the pall in the house. He chose not to raise the issue of his father with his grieving elders. Given his mother’s secrecy over Kilian, he wasn’t sure it was worth opening old and awkward wounds of a pregnant and unmarried daughter in the late 1930s.
Max had skimmed the letters once in a haze of regret after his mother’s death and wisely put them away until he could coolly face the knowledge that details of his father had always been within his reach. He was ready now. It was mid-November and cold enough to snow; the tourists had long disappeared and Strasbourg was once again a peaceful university town. Max was well
on top of his studies, which was handy because his mind was filled with the determination to find out more about Markus Kilian. His father was Wehrmacht, so presumably there were official records and perhaps a family – his mother hadn’t said whether he’d had siblings – but even if there were, Max didn’t want to meet those people yet. He preferred to learn about Kilian from the safer distance of people who had known him around the time of his death.
His father’s rambling letter from Paris had mentioned a handful of names; they were his starting point. There was also Lukas Ravensburg, who went by the name of Luc Ravens in 1946. As the letter was postmarked Inverness, Max had to presume that possessing a German name in Scotland that year was unwise, which may account for the variation.
Max strolled over the small ‘covered’ bridge, which had lost its timber roof centuries earlier but retained its name. He felt the familiar rise and dip of the cobbles beneath his sneakers as he entered the oldest part of Strasbourg – La Petite France – which he enjoyed. He looked out across the river and promised again that he would treat himself and friend Nicolas to a meal at the restaurant Au Pont Saint Martin. It overhung the water and during the summer months would bulge with an increasing number of international tourists gradually beginning to travel around Europe freely again. They would hang out over its balcony grinning for photos, trying to capture themselves in what he had to admit was a storybook setting of half-timberworked houses.
He leant on the bridge, nestling his chin deeper into the thick scarf his grandparents had given him on his recent trip home, and looked out at the picturesque scene. In medieval times this had been a part of the city where its tanners made good use of the waterway to transport the animal hides they dried in the lofts of the neighbourhood’s sloping roofs. During the ensuing centuries the border city of Strasbourg had flip-flopped in ownership between France and Germany. It often confused visitors, who remarked that its name sounded German and they had assumed it was. Locals shrugged. Strasbourg was Alsatian before it was anything! But Germany was just a few miles away – a couple of stops on the train. His mind slipped to its most recent history – a time of German occupation – during which it was forbidden to speak French in Strasbourg and where so many of its men were sent to fight in Russia as German slaves.
His father had fought in Russia; he might even have had men of Strasbourg under his command. Max shook his head, a mixture of emotions escalating the rhythm of his heartbeat so that he became aware of it pounding beneath all the winter layers. Anger, guilt, shame, even; his father was part of the machine he and most of his fellow students despised.
I didn’t want you to hate him. This is what his mother had been referring to; why she’d not told him about his father any earlier – he had been a German colonel in an army that had brought so much ruin to Europe.
Had Kilian been Nazi, firm in the faith of the Aryan?
His mother had assured him Kilian was a good man with strong principles, but whether his father had committed the atrocious war crimes that kept Max awake at night, he wasn’t sure. His letters suggested otherwise, for it was clear he was in exile in Paris. His mother believed that he’d refused to obey a directive from Berlin. This gave him hope, a thin strand of admiration that his father defied Hitler at the height of the war and on the bloodiest of all battlefields.
Wondering whether his father was Nazi was another likely reason he hesitated to make contact with Kilian’s family if they could be found; he’d admitted only to himself that he was frightened of what his digging might unearth.
Nevertheless, he remained dogged in his determination to learn about his father’s death. He needed to build a picture around his last few months when that letter had been written to his mother, discover the truth behind his killing and why a Frenchman had stayed with him and then gone to so much trouble to not only mail his father’s letter but accompany it with one of his own. And so he had taken the first tentative step and written to one of the people mentioned in his father’s letter … the first person, in fact, and probably the easiest to track down.
A return letter had arrived this morning from Regensburg. Max had anticipated it, looking out for it each day for the past week or so. He had pounced on the envelope in his pigeonhole at the student digs that morning but then became unnerved. It was hours later and still sealed and Max could feel it almost like a pulse in his breast pocket, demanding to be read.
His mother had accused him of a tendency to become obsessively focused on something. Ilse Vogel had known that once she’d opened Pandora’s Box – as Max had now come to think of that shoebox – it had the potential to poison him. And yet knowing she was dying, how could she not tell him the one truth he had craved since childhood?
Max knew that without the motivation to find out more about his background, he might have given in to his grieving state of mind, left university and returned to Lausanne for a while. His mother had assured him he would have money. The truth was well beyond even his estimates; when her will was read it was obvious that if he didn’t work a day of his life it wouldn’t matter. His studies became purely academic now, unlike those of every other student he knew. Guilt loaded upon guilt.
Better to be busy, best to be distracted and committed to a project. Studies were not enough. But Kilian gave him the outlet, the focus. Kilian gave him the pathway, drowned out all the words of condolences, removed him from the everyday.
‘Max, do you think you’re depressed?’ his professor had bluntly enquired recently.
He’d straightened in his chair, unable to hide his shock. ‘Why do you ask that, sir?’
The law lecturer had shrugged slightly. ‘Intuition.’
‘But I’ve handed in my assignments, attended all lectures … I haven’t been drunk or disorderly. I’m not moody or—’
‘No, but you do seem distracted. You’re one of my smartest, Max, if not the brightest, of my students in a long time. Even though you carefully don’t show it, I know your mother’s death has hit you hard but I don’t see any sign of that grief. If you were getting drunk or you were snapping at people or disappearing to your rooms, I’d understand it. But …’ He shrugged again.
‘But what, Professor?’
‘Well, it just feels recently as though you’re on automatic. You’re conscientiously here where you should be and yet why do I get the feeling that you’re here in body only? Why do I sense that your mind is wandering away? That you are entirely cut off from the rest of us?’
Out of all of his university heads, Max respected Professor Joubert most. He’d been determined to study law with him for his master’s and had been chosen amongst only three students to enjoy one-on-one attention with the old man – something of a legend around the halls of the university for the way he could inspire young minds, motivate youthful spirits to soar.
Max liked him enough to tell him the truth without censoring himself.
‘Well,’ Joubert had said after he finished and a suitable pause had been left for the professor to absorb his charge’s passion. ‘Given that you are not only a talent at law but a scholar of modern history, I suspect the hunt for the background to your father, digging about in recent history, to be wholly appropriate and indeed nourishing.’
‘Really?’ Max had said, feeling relief that someone he admired was giving him permission to dig around in Nazi records.
‘Of course. And I agree with you, Max, it is another way of grieving … a constructive one, too. You will likely have something to show for the endeavour.’
‘It fills the emptiness.’
The older man had nodded thoughtfully. ‘Be sure, though, Max, that you are ready for discovery. It sounds as though you’ve spent a lifetime wondering about him and now the doors have opened a crack. If you walk through, you need to prepare yourself to accept whatever you find. The eastern front was an ugly place to be. So many Jews slaughtered in their villages, so many Russians brutally massacred.’
‘We were massacred in Russia too, professor,�
�� he defended, thinking of his grandmother’s tears at all the young Germans being cut down on the whims of ‘that maniac’.
‘We?’
Max cringed, remembering how he’d blushed. ‘Sorry, I mean the German army on retreat was brutalised and everything and everyone in its wake.’
Joubert had shrugged. ‘We need your generation to understand that war takes far more than it gives. And that the only way forward is through peace, education, money being put into the right hands and strong legal bindings. As a young lawyer, you might take that on board.’
Max had nodded thoughtfully. ‘I read your paper,’ the professor continued. ‘It’s good. No, it’s very good. I’m clearly worrying unnecessarily.’
‘Don’t worry about me, sir. But this is something I am driven to do.’
‘I can see that. Don’t let it consume you. And if you ever want to talk about it, my door is open to you any time.’
‘Thank you.’ He’d shaken his head. ‘I barely know where to begin.’
‘The German National Archives,’ Joubert had said, standing and removing the pipe he’d been puffing on gently, filling his study with a sweet-smelling fog. ‘The Nazis, if they were anything, were dedicated record keepers to the point of obsession. Koblenz is your starting point.’
Max knew he’d gaped at his elder.
‘Happy hunting, Max.’
So now his pathway was clear. The German National Archives beckoned. Max turned away from the canal to head down the cobbled streets towards the towering cathedral and found a small brasserie sitting beneath its shadow. There were not many places to choose from to eat in the old quarter but he assumed it was only a matter of time before demand would see this whole area full of cafés and taverns selling the local food that Alsatians were so proud of.
They’d have to get rid of the traffic, though, that wound along a ribbon of tarmac around the imposing cathedral. Tourists caught their breath as they turned the corner at place Gutenberg or rue Merciere, glimpsing the cathedral’s imposing structure in the heart of the city. Max liked to sit inside its peaceful walls of rose-pink stone when he was swotting for exams. He’d find a quiet corner, close his eyes – as though in prayer – and run through all the case studies he needed to recall for his law exams. It was a better space than the university library and he could focus far quicker in the cathedral and without distractions from fellow students. In summer the venue became noisier, greeting visitors who came to witness the marvel of its astronomical clock in the south transept as animated figures paraded before Death, marking hours. He could never tire of it either.
The French Promise Page 15