The Lost Vintage

by Ann Mah

  “I guess.” But Heather looked unconvinced.

  “And isn’t that what you and Nico are here for? To teach Thibault and Anna a moral code—to give them an ethical conscience—so that nothing like this ever happens again?”

  She crossed her arms and sighed, but I could tell the point had hit home.

  “Of course,” I said slowly, the thoughts still forming. “Now it’s obvious why no one in this family has ever spoken of Hélène. Why they’ve kept her a total secret.”

  Even as I spoke, I was remembering a rare visit to my mother’s office when I was about ten years old. Her coworker Midori asked about our summer vacation and I told her we were going to visit my grandfather in France. “He lives in Burgundy. He’s a winemaker,” I said in response to her questions.

  Later at home, my mother pulled me aside. “Never say that Grandpère Benoît is a winemaker,” she said quietly, as if she didn’t want my father to hear. “Americans don’t understand what that means. It sounds pretentious.”

  “What should I say?” I barely knew what a winemaker was, let alone a long word like “pretentious.” But I knew I wasn’t supposed to lie.

  “Say he’s a farmer.” She shrugged. “After all, that’s the truth.”

  For years I had puzzled over this exchange, wondering why my mother always avoided personal questions. Was her coldness part of her genetic makeup? And did I carry it, too, this instinctive evasiveness? But now that I knew about Hélène, I was beginning to suspect that my mother’s reluctance to talk about her family history was, in fact, a practiced skill, something she and Uncle Philippe had perfected as children. Now that I knew about Hélène, the truth was obvious.

  They were ashamed.

  The next morning, I found the kids alone in the kitchen, a spray of multicolored frosted loops scattered across the wood counter.

  “Maman is out doing le jogging,” Anna informed me, pushing her brother’s hand away from the cereal box. “And Papa is in the cuverie.”

  “Who’s taking you guys to school?” I filled the electric kettle and rummaged in the cupboard for a tea bag.

  “Kate!” She giggled. “It’s Saturday!”

  “Oh, right.” I lifted a hand to rub my forehead. “I guess I stayed up too late last night.”

  Thibault turned huge brown eyes upon me. “Fur of the dog,” he said.

  “Hair of the dog,” I corrected him automatically. “Wait, what?”

  “Air of the dog. That is what you eat when you have a pain in the head, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Sort of.” I swallowed a laugh. “Anyway, I don’t have a headache. I just stayed up too late reading.”

  “Ouais. That’s what Maman usually says before she mixes a Bloody Marie.” He licked his index finger and turned a page of his Tintin comic.

  Waiting for the kettle to boil, I leaned my elbows on the counter and gazed out the kitchen window, noticing for the first time that autumn had crept across the vines, the leaves of bright green fading to soft russet. I’d slept with an extra blanket last night, and this morning I had warmed the bathroom with a space heater before steeling myself to undress for the shower. There was no doubt about it. The seasons had turned, and soon it would be time for me to return to California, reclaim my apartment from the Japanese professors on sabbatical at San Francisco State, find a new job, rejoin my Master of Wine study group, register for The Test—in short, free myself from this increasingly complex web of family secrets and resume my real life.

  The kettle churned angrily, and I poured scalding water over my tea bag, hoping the hot drink would chase away my fatigue. Last night, Heather and I had eaten a quick dinner of toast before she retired, pleading a migraine. Meanwhile, I’d stayed up far too late untangling a thicket of academic prose with only the help of a dated French-English dictionary. As far as I could tell, the article that Heather had found discussed the treatment of female collaborators after the Liberation in 1944. This period saw the épuration sauvage, or wild purge, a spontaneous and violent movement motivated largely by revenge, which sought to punish collaborators. Some of the most humiliating public punishment was reserved for “horizontal collaborators”—women who had slept with the enemy—their heads shorn in outdoor public spaces before they were forcibly stripped and painted with swastikas, the vitriolic crowds jeering and spitting as the women were marched about town.

  “The punishment of head shaving,” the authors wrote, “which dates back to the Bible, when it was considered a purification process, was used in France throughout the twentieth century. In 1918, French women who consorted with German soldiers had their heads shaved; the Nazi party also shaved the heads of German women who were having relations with non-Aryans or foreign prisoners. In short, there is a long history of these femmes tondues”—shorn women—“as well as the practice of female shearing as punishment for sexual infidelity.”

  The authors cited Hélène midway through the article. “Women accused of horizontal collaboration were punished by the vigilante justice of the épuration sauvage,” they wrote. “Horizontal collaborators were often prostitutes, although there were also many teenage girls who acted out of bravado or boredom, young mothers desperate to feed their hungry children, or women who simply worked for German soldiers, as is the case of one cleaning woman at a German military headquarters. Female Gestapo informers like Hélène Charpin, Marie-France Gaucher, or Jeanne Petit were more vulnerable scapegoats than their male counterparts, whose punishments were meted out during the épuration légale”—legal purge—“conducted from 1944 to 1949 . . .” I skimmed the rest of the article looking for more information about Hélène, but found no other mention of her name.

  Now, as I removed the sodden tea bag from my cup, I felt again the shock of revulsion. Though the authors of the article had been generally sympathetic toward these horizontal collaborators—pointing out that the humiliation they’d suffered post-Liberation had been largely motivated by sexism and repressed fury stemming from France’s emasculating defeat—Hélène’s crime was far worse than sleeping with a German soldier. She was an informer. A traitor. I struggled to connect the ugly words on the page with the items we’d found—the girlish clothes, the biography of Marie Curie, the lycée diploma. My hand slipped on the handle of my mug and hot liquid splashed on my wrist. “Ow!” I reached for a paper towel and bent to mop up the puddle.

  “You okay, Kate?” Thibault slipped from his chair and carried his cereal bowl to the sink, a tidal wave of milk threatening to slop from the sides.

  “Sure, sweetie—ooh, be careful with that!”

  “No problem!” he said as his bowl clattered into the sink. “I’m-going-to-play-now-see-you-bye!” And with a soft pounding of bare feet, he was gone.

  “Should I be worried that he’s up to no good?” I asked no one in particular. The family cat, Chaussettes, appeared from nowhere and began lapping drops of milk from the floor.

  “Probably.” Anna glanced up from the glossy pages of Elle magazine. “But Maman got rid of all the matches last week.” She winked and returned to reading an article headlined “How the Stars Wear Denim!”—complete with a photo of a leggy Gisele Bündchen “en jean.”

  I found myself hesitating outside the cellar door. I hadn’t wanted to upset Heather by poking around down there this morning—but if she was out maybe it was a good time to look for more information about Hélène. “If you need anything,” I called to Anna, “I’ll be in the cave, okay?”

  “D’accord!” She flipped the magazine over and pulled another from the stack in front of her. There were no sounds emerging from Thibault’s preferred play area—the front hallway—(though maybe that was a bad thing?) so I headed downstairs.

  Now that I knew about the secret chamber behind the armoire, I wondered if someone long ago had created the disarray on purpose. My foot brushed against a heap of old clothes. In the excitement of the day before, I had left them piled on the floor, and now I knelt to stuff them into a plastic sack, knotting th
e top so we could take it to the dump later.

  Sudden anger bloomed within me and I kicked the bag, spilling half the clothes across the floor. They were so guarded—my mother, my uncle—protecting these nasty secrets. Gestapo informers like Hélène Charpin . . . I shuddered, and the armoire’s broken mirrors turned my horrified face into a hundred fragments. Oh, Hélène, I thought. How could you? Why did you?

  A bang from the door caused me to start. “Heather?” I called to the nimble feet that were running down the stairs.

  “Kate?” It was Nico, his stocky figure winding through the boxes. “How are you doing? Bruyère told me everything before she passed out last night. And she woke up angrier than I’ve ever seen her—she actually went running. That hasn’t happened since my father told her women shouldn’t pursue advanced degrees . . . before Thibault was born.” He smiled briefly.

  At the sight of my cousin, tears pricked my eyes. “I’m having a hard time accepting all of this,” I admitted. “How are you?”

  “Pff.” He puffed out his cheeks. “Fine.” But his face had clouded over. “It seems impossible,” he said eventually. “Our family, we are good people. I just can’t believe it’s true. But then I keep remembering little things. Like Grandpère Benoît—he never, ever wanted to talk about the war. Do you remember?”

  I shook my head.

  “Chloé and I used to beg him for stories about his childhood, but he would turn silent and tell us he preferred not to think about it. ‘ Ce n’était pas heureux’—it wasn’t happy.” Nico frowned and his face fell into deep lines so that I caught a glimpse of him in twenty years’ time. “And of course this is all so much more painful because Bruyère is Jewish.” His chin dropped to his chest.

  Silence fell between us, hanging heavy in the chill, moist air. Upstairs, something small and hard fell with a clatter and rolled across the floor. Beside me, Nico had shifted his gaze to the armoire. “So, this is it?” He extended a tentative hand. “There’s really a cave hidden behind here?”

  “Oh, right, the secret cellar!” In the aftermath of yesterday’s discoveries, I had forgotten everything except the horrific revelations about Hélène. Now, as we turned toward the armoire, I sensed my cousin’s curiosity and my own spirits lifted a fraction. “You must be dying to see it. Look, it’s this last compartment—no, the panel at the very back. Push right here. See?” He leaned through the opening and then, with a hop, he was up and over to the other side. “Do you need a flashlight?” I called. “Here.” I thrust mine through the window.

  Several minutes later, he came barreling back through, breathless. “C’est incroyable,” he gasped. “Unbelievable. Who could have built this? The hideout in the corner . . . do you really think it was used by the Résistance?”

  “I thought so at first, because I found those pamphlets. But now I don’t know.”

  “And the wine! Obviously I didn’t have time to examine each bottle, but from the little I saw, I swear that I’ve never seen such a collection of vintages . . . some of the most exceptional millésimes of the twentieth century . . .” His voice faltered. “It is, at the same time, both horrible and wonderful. This could be—” He shifted his weight, staring at the floor. “Kate,” he said finally, “I don’t know how much Bruyère has told you about our concerns.”

  “She hasn’t told me anything,” I reassured him. Was he finally going to reveal why they’d been acting so cagey?

  “We have made some bad investments. Bad decisions. Refinancing at the wrong time.” He winced. “I’m sure you’ve been wondering why we’re cleaning out the cellar. The truth is, we are hoping to open a bed-and-breakfast—nothing too elaborate, just a simple endeavor to bring in a bit more income. After all, we have this huge house, and we’re rattling around in it . . . and Bruyère likes to cook, and have visitors . . . and we both want the kids to be exposed to people from different places.”

  “It’s a perfect plan,” I said with genuine enthusiasm.

  “Except for my father.” Nico sighed. “He’s dead set against the idea. But Bruyère and I thought that if we got everything prepared to start renovations . . . well, it would be very difficult for him to say no.”

  It was all starting to make sense—Heather and Nico’s reticence, their rush to clean out the cellar—and especially their horrified silence when I’d suggested this exact idea to Uncle Philippe. “You guys should’ve told me!” I exclaimed, slapping a hand to my forehead. “I would have been more discreet.”

  “Yeah.” Nico scuffed a foot on the floor. “We . . . well, we felt embarrassed. Honestly, we’ve been struggling for a while, trying to figure out a way to keep the domaine.” He swallowed. “This wine—it could be the miracle we need.”

  “It might be worth a lot of money,” I agreed. “But it’s hard to judge without knowing the exact contents of the cellar, and examining the condition of each bottle.”

  “You know about rare wine, n’est-ce pas?”

  “I’m not an expert. But, yes, I’ve studied it for The Test. And, as you know, I’d like to work at an auction house one day, dealing with vintage wine sales.”

  “So you can help us? You can create a cellar list—an inventory of this cave—so that we know exactly what is inside?”

  I instinctively took a step back. “But that could take ages! I have to go home, back to San Francisco. Get ready for The Test and actually take it.”

  “But this would be wonderful preparation for The Test!”

  “What about Heather? She was so angry last night, I thought she might burn this house to the ground.”

  “Ehzaire doesn’t care about the wine. She just wants to get rid of it. She detests the idea that we might profit in any way from the collaboration.” His eyes pleaded with me. “But the thing is, Kate—the domaine—it is in danger of repossession. We could really use this money. I thought that if you stayed and talked with Heather, and were able to give us a proper estimate for the wine, well”—he glanced away—“maybe she might change her mind.”

  I took a deep breath, but before I could say no, the image of the hidden cellar flashed before me—not the piles of antique wine bottles swathed in mold, but the hideout in the corner—the desk and its contents. The Resistance literature. Who had left it there? I had spent half the night racking my brain, but still none of it made sense: How on earth did those things end up in the same house as a known Nazi sympathizer?

  “Okay,” I found myself saying. “I’ll see if I can change my ticket again. But only if Heather agrees. And only for a few weeks.”

  “Mais bien sûr, I understand.” His face had begun to relax. “Merci, Kate— merci infiniment. I can’t express to you how much help this is. Above all, I know you’ll be discreet, because you’re part of the family. You’re one of the few people who understand how sensitive this situation really is.”

  A blaze of late-autumn sunshine transformed the fading vineyards into a bank of dancing flames. I lingered behind the others so that the sound of their voices drifted to me on the breeze, relishing the sun soaking through the dark fabric of my coat, the strength of my stride as the terrain steepened. And then, nearing the top of the slope, a view of golden vines tumbling to a toylike village—a white steeple piercing the cluster of buildings—and, even here, the faint clang of church bells chiming the hour. Sunday in France, I thought, was forever an idyll.

  Ahead of me, Heather slowed and separated from the group, lifting a hand to shade her eyes.

  “You okay?” I asked when I caught up to her.

  She was staring at the view, her expression difficult to read. “It’s so beautiful,” she said. “I almost never walk up here, so I forget. But the way the vineyards ripple across the landscape . . . it’s gorgeous. It almost makes me forget about the other stuff.” She pressed her lips together. “Almost.”

  A gust of wind shook the leaves with a silken whisper, raising a chill across my back. “At least we got out of family lunch today,” I said.

  “I know. N
ico was so relieved when he remembered Papi and Mémé were taking the kids to the circus in Dijon. At this point, I think he’s afraid of what would happen if Papi and I were alone in a room together.”

  In the distance, the others paused to turn and wave at us. “Allez, les filles!” Jean-Luc called.

  “Do you want to head back to the house?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Let’s catch up to them. Nico said he wanted to go to the cabotte. After all these years, can you believe I’ve never been inside?” We set off at a brisk pace, steadily closing the gap between us and the four figures in the distance.

  Shortly after lunch, Jean-Luc’s truck had appeared in the driveway, the tires spraying gravel before he popped out to invite us on a Sunday afternoon hike. Louise was with him, greeting us with considerably less enthusiasm; Walker completed the trio, his usual, quirky, inscrutable self.

  Heather and I scrambled up the slope, the steady, upward climb preventing conversation. The autumn colors were lavish even as they crisped brittle around the edges—nature’s last spectacle before winter stole away the vineyard’s vibrancy. We reached the others as they paused to admire the view. A small, oval hut appeared to float on a sea of undulating leaves, a dash of stony white capped by a slightly domed roof.

  “Isn’t it adorable?” I drew out my phone and snapped a photo. “You see these cabottes all over Burgundy, but I’ve always thought ours was the prettiest.” Ever since we’d camped here as children, the hut had enchanted me. I still remembered the stories Uncle Philippe had told us, tales of the tough old vignerons of yore who relied on these cabottes in the days before cars, tending the vines until dark, sleeping inside, and waking at dawn to continue their labor.

  “How’d they keep warm?” Heather asked.

  “You build a fire right inside, in the middle,” Nico said. “Just move the roof tiles apart to make a hole for the smoke to escape—sort of an ersatz chimney.” He nodded at Jean-Luc and me. “Do you guys remember? Papa used to let us build the fire when he brought us out here. Come on,” he strode ahead. “I’ll show you.”