House with Blue Shutters, The

by Hilton, Lisa

  ‘Die, pig,’ she muttered urgently.

  She felt regretful as she straddled the animal and worked the knife through the throat, the eyes bulging out of its head. It was a shame to kill it so early. Cécile was very frightened. She was sure that no one connected her with Papie Nadl’s death, which was not what she had intended at all by her letter, but no one would believe her if it came out. And now they were leaving it was bound to come out. She had no idea what had happened to Papie, but she knew his arrest must be because of her letter. That was why the Germans had killed him. You had to look out for yourself, Emile had said, that was why he had accepted the STO call up.

  That was all the letter had been, Cécile told herself, looking out. She had no understanding that her pigs, if they came to light, would be a Milice matter, not for the soldiers. She had thought that if she were caught, they would have her letter and that would prove that she was an honest citizen, keeping her eye on others’ misdoings, so she would not be punished. Besides, Laurent Nadl was walking out with that Aucordier girl, who’d proved she was no better than she should be, just like her mother, who hadn’t been too proud to accept work from her and Emile, for all her daughter marched about the place as though she and that brother of hers made their own laws. That was what you got for charity.

  So it was as well to kill the pig in case anyone came snooping around, and she thought Madame Larivière would speak up for her if there was any trouble. She collected the blood in its basin and regretfully poured it down the privy; there was no time for making up puddings. As it was, the meat would be too bloody, there was no time to hang it right, but she set swiftly to work hacking at the carcass, wrapping a whole leg in a sack and adding a big slice of oozing loin. She would go over to the Larivière house on her bicycle after dark.

  She set off after a late supper, about ten o’clock. The pork was well-covered, but it would be impossible to disguise it if anyone looked. As she cycled down the lane from Saintonge, she saw the dim lights of two vehicles crossing the bridge over the Landine. Cécile panicked. She skewed the bicycle around and bumped along the verge, nearly falling into the ditch, which was alive with frogs at this time of year. One of the parcels fell into the water, but there was no time to retrieve it, she dragged the bike up the bank and plunged into the Teulière poplar plantation. Weaving through the trees, she thought she would stop at the old barn. She could hide the meat there, or, if it seemed safe, continue along the river bank until she was below the mayor’s home. Mosquitoes dived at her face, the frogs gurgled loud and happy. The barn came into view below her and she hurried, desperate to be safe inside its walls, but she saw that the walls were already illuminated with a soft glow from the open door, and there was the unmistakeable sound of William Aucordier’s violin.

  Cécile sat on the ground at the edge of the trees. There were cigarettes in her apron and she lit one. It was a habit she had picked up from Emile, and she needed her little cigarette now, it was one of the good things about her trips to Landi with the meat. They must be dancing again in the barn. She sucked at the smoke. Why? Everyone knew it was forbidden, she was taking a big risk herself being out at this time. Laurent Nadl must be behind it somehow. She had her suspicions about him, she had seen him coming out of the woods at Saintonge early in the morning a few months ago. He had raised a hand to her and driven off on that motorbike of his, looking quite normal, but now she began to wonder. Everyone in Castroux knew how he and Larivière had tricked the Milice, but they had vanished for good afterwards, the schoolteacher, Marcel Vionne, Nic Dubois, Jean Charrot. They were up to something, all of them. She had thought of writing another letter, but after what happened to Papie she had been afraid, and besides, they wouldn’t be able to prove anything. It was very warm, she smelt the tinny scent of the fresh pork through the sacking and began cautiously to push the bicycle towards the river. Either way then, she had a secret.

  Cécile was safely back in her kitchen by midnight. She changed into her nightgown, put her dirty clothes to soak, and washed her face and hands. As she splashed at the basin she thought she heard a noise, but it was not until she was reaching for the towel that it resolved itself into the sound of an engine. She blew out the lamp and leaped under the bedclothes, sure that the sound of her heart could be heard above the counterpane. There was a banging at the door. ‘Open up, open up!’ She mussed her hair to make it look more that she had been sleeping and took the bedside candle. As soon as she opened the door, three men in black clothes swept into the room like a gale. In a few seconds, it seemed, everything in her kitchen was overturned, plates smashed, the log basket and the chairs kicked over, pots spinning and ringing across the floor.

  ‘Sorry, Madame,’ one of them sneered, ‘we just need to check you’ve nothing to hide. Your papers?’

  As Cécile went to the buffet, she saw through to the scullery. A black tunic was bent over the bucket under the sink.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Clothes, my work clothes.’

  ‘There’s blood here. Why?’

  ‘Pigs. We’ve a pig farm.’

  ‘Fucking too right.’ The tunic laughed, sniffing the air ostentatiously. It struck Cécile that he knew French very well, to swear like that.

  ‘I was killing a pig. I could show you the certificate. It’s all in order.’ Praying, praying that they wouldn’t ask to count the animals.

  ‘Let’s have them then.’ The one who had spoken first held out his hand.

  ‘I’ll just get a lamp. I need my shoes. Everything’s in the barn.’ The barn. Cécile turned around, squaring up to them. ‘Anyway, I don’t know what you’re bothering me for. My husband’s in Germany you know, a volunteer. Emile Chauvignat, you can check that too. Bothering people in their beds when there’s all sorts going on down there.’ She stopped as though she had made a mistake.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Nothing. I’ll get those certificates.’

  A black arm shot out and shoved at her, backing her against the edge of the fireplace. The cornerstone was warm behind her head.

  ‘What did you mean?’

  After that it was easy. Cécile took them up to the grenier from where, if they screwed up their big bodies to peer through the half-moon let in the stone, they could clearly see beyond the steep fall of poplars to the lights in the barn. After that, the pigs were forgotten.

  Karl was with Willi. They decided to drive back to the square and report to Haupsturmführer Hummel. Then, Willi said, they would surely go straight to the barn. Willi was excited, his eyes swift and gleaming. In the darkness of the truck Karl suddenly remembered him roaring from the trammel of the tank, firing blind, his sweater slick with blood like a seal. ‘Here we go again, boys,’ Willi muttered as the car swung down the lane. ‘Here we go.’

  JUNE 1944

  Prof felt sick as he inched his way along the parapet of the viaduct. The gun was strapped across his chest. He must not look down. He couldn’t understand why Moto had selected this task for him. Even after the months of target practice he could barely hit a rabbit for the pot. At least a man was bigger. Moto had tried to explain, ‘You’re too slow, Prof. All those books.’ He patted the remains of Prof ’s belly. ‘It’ll take you with it.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ said Prof stoutly, ‘if that’s what’s necessary.’

  ‘No good playing the hero. We need your brains.’

  It was true. Prof was proud of how he had worked out the plan for Moto. When they had the news that the Allies had truly landed in Normandy, Mula said that all units were concentrating on stopping reinforcements from reaching the coast. This would be the last big push. The idea was easy, but it was Prof who worked out the details against the timetable, which they had obtained from the coded telegram from Mula’s contact at the station in Toulouse. He had thought of how to time it, everything. But now it all depended on him getting it right, and he only had one chance.

  It was now ten minutes to midnight. Prof ’s feet moved wit
h heavenly relief into the wider space of the central alcove. He unstrapped the gun, knelt down in position, set the torch at his left. Lucky it was a clear night, he could easily make out the figure, dark silhouette against dark, as it moved along the bridge to the signal box. It was time. He depressed the button on the powerful torch, wiping his trembling hand swiftly on his trousers before bringing it up to the shaft. The figure turned immediately, one arm up over the eyes, the other going for his pistol.

  ‘Who’s there?’ it called as Prof fired, aiming just below the pale blur of a face. He closed his eyes as he squeezed the trigger. When he opened them, the figure was no longer visible. Almost immediately he heard the first of the explosions behind him. He was shaking. ‘Don’t hurry, don’t look,’ he repeated aloud, ‘don’t hurry, don’t look.’ The chant became the rhythm of the approaching train as the rails began to hum, fields of space below him. He gained the bank and scrambled up, rolling down and sideways into the scrub, covering his ears as it blew. The noise took every part of his body and hammered it into the ground. His face was in the earth, he tried to breathe, but his heart was banging in his head with the vibration, he couldn’t force it back into his chest. Gasping, he spread his arms and clawed at the earth, trying to pitch his weight against the booming echo that threatened to pull him up with the tornado of sound. Then he was gone from himself, gone beyond thought until he arrived, sprinting beneath the sky alive with fireworks of bullets, at the track above the viaduct where Moto was waiting. ‘Good work, Prof.’ He heard only his own blood in his ears, louder by far than the screams of the dying.

  For the present, Hummel was reporting to Bernd. He knew the orders. He had thirty men, ten of his own division as well as Bernd’s Gestapo. He had strolled along the river bank many times, enjoying the picture of the tall poplars along the stream turning through the seasons. He moved the boys at a jog, weapons down. They fanned out silently around the building and Hummel was proud to see how swift and supple they were, moving softly through the dark. They were not to shoot, though they all knew well how to make it look as though they were going to. When he saw that the doors were open he had a better idea than storming in. He beckoned the men back.

  Watching for a moment, Hummel thought that the scene inside the barn looked like a painting, a Brueghel illuminated by La Tour. The few oil lamps set on the bosses of the uneven pale stone walls blended the end of the space into deep gentle shadow from which the faces of the dancers emerged briefly, a kaleidoscope of feature and expressions. A row of wooden clogs stood along a wall, a table was covered in jugs and cheap thick water glasses, stained with wine that changed from ruby to plum as the dancers wove in and out of the light, moonbeams through stained glass. To Hummel’s surprise, the music was supplied by the idiot lad he had seen around the village, one huge ear cocked towards a violin that he handled in an odd, undisciplined manner. For a long while, as the dancers gradually stopped and fell silent, the boy played on, oblivious, played all the while the black ghosts ranked still in the doorway, and when he stopped, his sleeve plucked gently by one of the young women, he looked astonished, it seemed to Hummel, not by the presence of the soldiers or the sour fear that came off his companions, but by the quality of the silence.

  Hummel looked to Sternbach. ‘Tell them to separate, women on the left, men on the right.’ Sternbach repeated the order in French and the people obeyed like chastened children. Separated, there were far fewer men than women, none of them young. The idiot held his violin to his chest like a baby. First, Hummel’s men worked along the two lines, examining papers. Many were unable to produce anything. They emptied out the bags and bundles heaped by the clogs, shone their torches along the point where the walls met the beaten earth floor. One of the women called out something, Hummel inferred that she was explaining she was not from Castroux, that she had come from one of the other villages. The violin case was found and the boy made a high chirruping noise, craning his head forward anxiously as the men on either side of him patted at his shoulders as though soothing a horse. When Hummel saw what the case contained he was relieved. This was what Bernd had wanted, and he had found it.

  As always when she woke in the night, Madame Larivière thought that Jean-Claude must have come home. René had taken to locking the door of an evening, so he must have used his key. She looked around the bedroom for René, bewildered, before she realized that the shouting she heard below must be connected with the banging she had heard faintly through her dream. Still there was time to feel the quick clenching ache of loss. She pulled her shawl over her nightgown and went down to the kitchen. The air was cool, a soft breeze from where the door had been. René was bent over the table in his pyjamas, his arm twisted up behind his back, held there by a blond man in a black tunic. Madame Larivière screamed. There were more of them crowding through the doorway, pushing into the house, surging over it like huge beetles. ‘It’s all right,’ René called, ‘just get me my clothes.’ Madame Larivière was unable to move or to understand what was happening.

  ‘Go on.’

  She moved back to the staircase, but one of them blocked her way. He followed her into the bedroom and stood behind her as she fumbled for the trousers and shirt René had draped over the chair. She caught a glimpse of him in the glass and saw he had his gun out. It was pointing at her.

  One of them spoke French. He asked her for her husband’s papers.

  ‘He’s the mayor,’ she said stupidly.

  ‘Tell the priest,’ said René in Occitan.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  The man struck René across his face with the end of his pistol. Madame Larivière watched as her husband’s mouth bloomed red. Then they said something in their own language and she felt herself being pushed outside, a hand on either arm. René was climbing into a car, trying to keep one hand to his bleeding jaw. Behind her she could smell burning, she was too frightened to look back. ‘It has begun,’ she thought. As she was marched along the road in her nightgown she said the Hail Mary to herself, and though the stones hurt her bare feet she was determined not to stumble, in case it looked as though she was afraid. It was only when she saw where they were taking her, saw the faces gathered inside, that she tried to struggle. But the faces were watching her, then she tried to make it look as though she was shaking off those black arms so as to make her way into the church alone.

  JUNE 1944

  Normandy. Everyone knew they were going to Normandy. The Americans would be there. Karl thought he would write to his parents in the train if he made it, but now he sat on his cot and awkwardly scribbled a letter to Ursula, clutching a candle in his left hand. His wife. Willi had been right of course, but he couldn’t really say he had any feelings for her, or the child, beyond a sense of duty that seemed increasingly abstract in all respects. The thing he would do now was for Oriane.

  Willi collapsed on his cot without even bothering to undress, and in a few minutes he was snoring. Karl waited a little while more, then moved out into the darkness without bothering to try to be quiet. It would look better if it seemed as though he was going for a piss or a last cigarette. It took him fifteen minutes on foot to reach the Mairie. He wondered if the women were watching him from where they had been rounded up in the church. The lads outside were smoking in a huddle, giving a desultory glance now and then to both the locked doors. He caught a little of their conversation. Normandy, Normandy.

  Karl explained that William Aucordier, the idiot, was wanted at the chateau. They didn’t question him, just went inside and in a few minutes the boy was marched out between them, still clutching his violin. Karl spoke in French, ‘Hello, William. Don’t worry. Oriane is waiting for you.’

  When he heard his sister’s name, the boy’s grey, tear-stained face became radiant with a smile and he took Karl’s proffered hand trustingly, though Karl tried to twist his own features into an expression of disgust for the benefit of the watch.

  At the bridge they took the track that
led around the hill, making their way slowly past the shrine to where the path led up into the chateau wood. The frogs splashed and sang around them in the brook and Karl shone his torch cautiously from time to time, anxious not to slip into the teeming slimed water. He had the key in his pocket. As they moved into the thicker cover of the trees, Karl heard the sound of a motorbike somewhere on the other side of the hill. He pulled William down next to him in the prickling scrub, close enough to smell the sweat in his jacket, praying the boy would not make any of his stupid noises. But William seemed to think they were playing a game, he lay silent with his ear cocked to the ground and it occurred to Karl that this peculiar musician could hear things that other people could not. They breathed for ten minutes or so in the leaf mould.

  Just as Karl was about to move on, there was an explosion of life from the direction of the house. He heard cars starting up, whistles blowing the reveille, though it was still the middle of the night. There must have been a message then, on the bike. New orders? Karl thought of Bloch, of the gun they had found in William’s case. If something had happened, he could shoot William now, make something up, get away with it. Then, distinctly, the sound of boots marching towards them. He scrabbled desperately further into the undergrowth, thorns tearing at his face and hair, and clapped a hand over William’s mouth as a dull moon of torchlight appeared beside them. He held his breath as the party came past, six of them.

  ‘This Nadl’s got something to do with it, for sure.’

  ‘We’ll have him.’

  ‘They’ve gone for the other one too. Larivière.’

  ‘Bastards.’

  So they were heading for Murblanc, the farm where the old man had lived.

  Whatever was happening, Karl saw that it was imperative he get back to be seen and counted. He hardly waited for the sound of the men to die away before dragging William up and almost sprinting the last steep stretch to the abandoned bridge. His hand was so wet he dropped the key twice before he got the door open. At the last minute he grabbed the violin from his arms, trust him to start plucking it or some idiocy. He wanted to throw it in the bushes, but if it was found nearby it would be too risky. He would hide it, then break it into pieces when he had time. Now he had to get back to the house.