The Lost Vintage

by Ann Mah

  Soft afternoon light fell across the kitchen table and the house seemed to sigh. Nico and Heather had taken the kids to the f ête foraine, a seasonal fair in Mâcon that promised carnival games, spinning rides, and barbes à papa, which was what Anna and Thibault insisted on calling cotton candy.

  “You sure you don’t want to come?” Heather had asked me, shoving slip-knotted plastic bags into her purse. I looked at her quizzically, and she explained: “For emergencies. If the spinning cider bowls don’t make them puke, it’ll be that ride with centrifugal force—never mind. Of course you don’t want to come!”

  “I was hoping to have a quiet afternoon.”

  “That sounds like complete and utter bliss,” she said with a wistful sigh.

  “And I might look through Hélène’s stuff,” I added.

  “Ah,” she said. “That sounds less blissful.” Suddenly, Thibault slid across the floor on socked feet, slamming a hard stop into her thigh. “Ow! Thi-bault!” She bleated his name, two notes of warning.

  “SORRY!” he yelled without a shred of remorse. And then he threw his arms around her legs and gave her a giant hug.

  “Monkey pants.” Heather lowered her face to his head and covered him in a hundred kisses.

  Now, alone in the house, silence rang in my ears, broken only by the birds twittering in the garden. I reached into the box and pulled out one of Hélène’s cahier d’exercises. The cover read “La chimie”—chemistry—and the pages were covered with notes that looked like gibberish to my untrained eye: chemical formulas sprawling like spiderwebs, composed of letters and numbers of which I recognized only the most basic—H2O. Hélène’s writing was loose, almost illegible. Perhaps Nico would be able to decipher it? Even though I didn’t think it held any secrets, I left the notebook splayed upon the table, pushed to one side.

  Next “L’histoire”—history—filled with detailed notes on the Hundred Years’ War, le roi Henri IV, and various kingly decrees. After that, “La littérature” and a series of essay responses on recurrent themes in Voltaire. An enormous yawn escaped my lips but I doggedly looked at every page before reaching into the box again.

  My fingers brushed against satin, and I pulled out a thin stack of envelopes addressed to Hélène Charpin, Domaine Charpin, Meursault. Ahhh—letters? Had I finally found a relic of Hélène’s personal life? Now, this could be interesting! I slipped the ribbon from the packet, and pulled out the first letter, squinting to decipher the round, French hand. The stationery was brittle and yellowed, and the ink had begun to fade.

  The rest of the letter continued in a similarly scholarly vein, devoid of any personal questions or other bits of information. It was signed: “Amicalement, Rose.”

  Rose? Was she a classmate? I turned to the next letter, and the next, but all of them were of a similar nature, written in a friendly, affectionate tone, full of academic vigor but free of any news or gossip that would indicate a girlish friendship. Whoever Rose was—and judging from her writing, she seemed intelligent, energetic, and extremely scholarly—she revealed nothing about Hélène’s inner life. Sighing, I stacked the envelopes into a pile, retied the ribbon, and set them aside.

  I pulled the last notebook from the box, opening to find it filled with French grammar exercises. I was beginning to form a picture of life in the 1930s schoolroom and it was even duller and more rigid than I’d suspected. The writing blurred before my drooping eyelids: L’étude m’a toujours semblé une sorte d’égérie désintéressé . . . Red pencil slashed across the last word. Licking my index finger, I turned to the next page, and the next, until I reached the middle of the notebook, where the writing abruptly stopped. A blank page. Another. A third. And then, carefully drawn lines, columns, and rows—it was some kind of chart. I sat straight in my chair.

  The headings read “Appellation,” “Année” (year), “Quantité” (quantity). As I scanned the page, a line leapt out at me: “Les Grands Epenots, 1928, 35.”

  I shoved my chair back from the table, startling the cat, who leapt down with a yelp. Sprinting across the kitchen and up the stairs, down the long hallway to my room, I snatched up the notebook on my desk. “Come on, come on,” I muttered, flipping the pages until I found the scribbled line I’d been looking for: Les Grands Epenots, 1928, 35 bottles—check???

  “Oh my God,” I breathed. Had I just discovered an inventory of the secret cellar’s contents—a record of all the bottles stored there? My legs shook all the way to the kitchen. When I compared Hélène’s notes with my own, I found that the appellations, vintages, and quantities matched almost exactly. I hugged Hélène’s notebook to my chest, resisting the urge to press my cheek to its pages. For some reason that I didn’t fully understand, I felt close to tears.

  Half an hour later, I was still examining Hélène’s cellar list, comparing it to the information I’d gathered on my own, when I heard a sharp rap at the back door. “Coucou!” Jean-Luc stepped into the house. “Oh. Hi, Katreen,” he said, glancing away from me.

  “Hi.” I resisted the urge to cross my arms.

  He shifted his weight, looking as discomfited as I felt. “I stopped by to see Nico. Is he around?”

  “They’re at the fête foraine in Mâcon,” I told him. “They won’t be back until tonight.”

  “Ah. I guess I should’ve texted before I came over.”

  “I’ll tell him you stopped by.”

  Silence washed over the kitchen—even the birds had stopped singing—and, glancing out the window, I saw the afternoon had faded to dusk. I reached behind me and switched on the lights. Should I invite Jean-Luc to sit down? Offer him a drink? I felt suddenly conscious of the situation—alone with him, after so many years. I fidgeted with my pen.

  “You are studying?” he asked, impeccably polite. His eye fell on Hélène’s notebook, which I’d left splayed on the table. “Whoa!” he exclaimed with genuine surprise, peering more closely at the page. “You have to make bouillie bourguignonne for your exam? That really is serious.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “Bouillie bourguignonne. Burgundy mixture.” He pulled the notebook closer. “See?” He pointed at a scribbled line that read “CuSO4 + Na2CO3.” “Copper sulfate and sodium carbonate. We learned about it at the école de viticulture. They sprayed it on the vines to treat fungus.” His long fingers trailed down the page. “But, see, these quantities—that’s quite a big batch, if you’re just experimenting with the stuff. Maybe start with one hundred grams of copper, not ten kilos. And be careful of the sulfuric acid. Make sure to have lots of sodium bicarbonate on hand to neutralize, because it can burn a hole right through you.”

  My mind was churning, trying to make sense of this new information. How did it fit together with everything else I knew about Héléne? “It’s a fungicide?” I said, stalling for time.

  “Yeah, it used to be very common, especially before the war.” He turned the page. “These aren’t your notes, then?”

  I hesitated. Should I tell him about Hélène? He and Nico were so close, I felt sure it was only a matter of time before he learned the truth. “It’s—” To my surprise a flood of shame bottled the words within me. “A friend,” I said eventually. “They belong to a friend.”

  With this, something shifted in the atmosphere. Jean-Luc gently closed the cover of the notebook and said goodbye. After I heard his truck pull out of the driveway, I sat for a long time in the yellow light of the kitchen wondering if I had done the right thing.

  By the time Nico, Heather, and the kids came home, I had brought my laptop downstairs and started combing the internet for information on Burgundy mixture. The kids burst through the back door, their cheeks dabbed with face paint—butterflies for Anna, turtles for Thibault—with Heather and Nico trailing wearily behind.

  “Kate! Kate ! I went on the giant roller coaster four times and Anna won a fish!” Thibault galloped up to me.

  Anna held up a clear plastic bag filled with water, a flash of orange darting from side
to side. “I think I will name it Taylor,” she said. “Or maybe Swift.”

  Heather was taking in the table scattered with splayed notebooks and scribbled sheets of paper. A side plate smeared with melted butter and toast crumbs stood by my elbow. “Have you even moved from this spot?” she said, but there was a twinkle in her eye. “Thibault, Anna—time to get ready for bed. Upstairs—teeth and jammies, please. It’s late.” She clapped her hands.

  “What about Swifty? I have to find her a bowl!” Anna cried.

  “Not fair!” Thibault shouted. “Why does she always get to stay up late?”

  “I will find a bowl for the fish,” Heather declared. “Now, go. Up.”

  “Aw, Mo-om!” they chorused, but nevertheless they trooped out of the room and up the stairs.

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes to tuck you in!” Heather called after them.

  “Quoi de neuf?” Nico opened the fridge and removed a bottle of fizzy water.

  “Yeah, what’s up? Did you find anything juicy in Hélène’s stuff?” Heather handed him a couple of glass tumblers, then squatted to open a low cupboard and began removing vases and other vessels. “This one’ll work for now, right?” She held up a cube vase and eyed the goldfish.

  “Oh, nothing big—just an inventory list of the secret cellar!” I said. I slid the notebook toward them.

  Nico started choking on his glass of water. “Putain,” he swore, when he had finally stopped sputtering. “A cellar list? Are you serious?” He picked up the notebook. “How in the hell did you find this?”

  Quickly, I told them about discovering the list in Hélène’s cahier d’excercises and comparing her information to my own. “I mean, obviously I haven’t yet inventoried the entire cave—but the numbers I do have match up almost exactly.”

  “C’est incroyable!” Nico shook his head in disbelief.

  Heather shivered. “And to think Louise almost got her hands on it.”

  “Yeah, well.” I pushed forward the other notebook. “As it turns out, there’s also something else.”

  “Burgundy mixture?” Heather read. “Do you know what that is?” she asked Nico.

  “Copper sulfate with sodium carbonate,” he said. “I remember it from the école de viticulture. Of course it’s rarely used anymore, with all the synthetic compounds now available.”

  “Apparently, it’s relatively easy to make,” I added. “Forms these beautiful blue crystals.” I pushed my laptop toward them, open to a page titled “How to Create Copper Sulfate.”

  Heather moved behind me to check out the screen. “Sodium carbonate,” she said. “That’s washing soda.”

  “Yeah, it says here that sulfuric acid is really corrosive, but sodium bicarb neutralizes it.”

  “No, not sodium bicarbonate. Sodium carbonate.” Her hand gripped my shoulder. “Don’t you remember? We found an entire case of it downstairs—the washing soda.” She gasped. “The holes! On the skirts of Hélène’s dresses. I thought they were from moths, but obviously moths don’t eat cotton. You guys, I think those holes were from sulfuric acid. What if Hélène was making the Burgundy mixture herself?”

  “A young girl? During that era?” Nico scoffed. “Would she even know how?”

  “But these are her notebooks,” I pointed out. “So obviously she knew the formula.” I thought for a moment. “Maybe she had a passion for chemistry. There’s a packet of letters from a school friend, all about thermal expansion. And there was that biography of Marie Curie in her suitcase.”

  “Well, I suppose it’s possible,” Nico conceded.

  “No,” said Heather thoughtfully. “The question isn’t if she made the Burgundy mixture. She definitely did make it—I am positive. The question is how. And where.”

  “And why,” I added.

  The three of us stared at each other, equally mystified, until a small voice floated down the stairs.

  “Mamaaaan! Tu es oùuuuuuu? Come tuck me in noowwwww!” called Thibault.

  “Keep thinking about it,” Heather said, as she started toward the stairs. “I bet the answers are staring us right in the face.”

  13 FÉVRIER 1941

  These are the places I have hidden this journal: In a hatbox on the top shelf of my armoire. In the bottom drawer of my desk. Beneath a pile of stockings in my dresser. But still I am unsatisfied. All these places are too obvious—if the Boches ever search our home, surely my armoire, desk, or dresser would be the first places they’d look? Oh, who am I kidding—the Boches? It will more likely be Madame who ransacks my room—I feel sure she snoops when I am not home. I must keep looking for a safer hiding spot.

  15 FÉVRIER 1941

  There is a loose floorboard in my room, near the window, and I have settled on keeping this notebook in the hollow below. My only worry is that it creaks so volubly whenever anyone steps there, I fear that I’ll give it away as I obviously tiptoe over it. But I moved the carpet a meter to the left and, visually at least, the spot looks unremarkable, just a bit uneven, which you can scarcely discern unless you know what you’re looking for.

  3 AVRIL 1941

  Cher journal,

  Forgive my trembling hand. I should not be writing this. I am bound to silence—I have promised not to tell a soul. If this diary is found it will mean dire consequences for him—and probably me as well, for keeping the secret. But if I don’t tell someone, I will burst, and so I scribble the words here: Papa is a résistant.

  I don’t think he would have told me, except I found them this morning. I was halfway to Beaune on my bicycle when I realized I’d forgotten the boys’ ration books. I immediately turned back to fetch them. Benoît and Albert are entitled to additional quantities of milk and meat, and Madame—who was at a Cercle du patrimoine meeting—would have boxed my ears if I hadn’t brought their extra food home. I pedaled back furiously, banging the door as I entered, and to my shock, I found Papa sitting at the kitchen table with two strange men.

  “Ma choupinette!” Papa exclaimed, and his cheeks drained of color, though he forced a smile. “I wasn’t expecting you! I just ran into some old friends and we were sharing some lunch!”

  Cher journal, it was ten o’clock in the morning and Papa had no plate before him. The other men looked up from their boiled potatoes—which they were supplementing with two tins of potted meat, a hard-boiled egg each, and a generous handful of radishes and spinach from the garden—and nodded at me. “Bonjour, mademoiselle,” said the younger one—blue eyes, brown hair, and a striking flame-colored beard. From his accent, I immediately deduced that he was not French—and was, in fact, very probably English. The men returned to their food, devouring it in seconds, and Papa peered into a pot simmering on the stove, spearing them each another potato.

  “I forgot the ration books,” I announced, and fetched them from a tin on the mantelpiece. “Au revoir,” I said politely and left the house before anyone could respond. As I was mounting my bicycle, Papa came out the door.

  “Léna,” he said quietly. “You surprised me. I didn’t think you’d be home until later this afternoon.”

  “What are they doing here?” I whispered as fiercely as possible. “Why are you helping them? Papa, surely you must know how dangerous this is? We—you—could be arrested, or worse!” My voice shook.

  “We will talk about this later,” he said firmly. “For now, I must request that you do not mention this to anyone. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Good.” He cut me off. “Now, you should be on your way to Beaune. It’s best if you’re not here right now. We’ll talk later.”

  I cycled to Beaune, and stood in the ever-interminable lines—ninety minutes outside the boucherie for a morsel of steak, forty minutes at the cobbler only to learn that the soles of Benoît’s shoes will need to be replaced with wood, because leather is simply no longer available. The whole time, I fretted over what I’d seen in the kitchen. How had Papa met those men? Were they the only people he had helped—or would the
re be others? I was so worried, I skipped the line at the boulangerie and pedaled straight home to find Papa before Madame returned.

  He was in the potager, clipping asparagus, which have been shooting like mad. “Ah, you’re back,” he said. “Any luck today?”

  “A bit of steak for les garçons.”

  “Good, good. Your belle-mère will be pleased.” He snipped gently at a stalk.

  “Papa, what I saw this morning—those men—who are they? I am frightened.” I tried to keep my voice steady.

  “Moi aussi,” he said quietly. “Yes, don’t look so surprised. I, too, am afraid, ma fille.” Silence, broken by the clipping of his secateurs. “But do you know what I decided?” He turned from the asparagus and our eyes met. “I decided that I am more afraid of becoming rotten inside than I am of imprisonment—or even death. I thought I was going mad, literally mad, for not doing something, for not reacting somehow. Now at least I have some semblance of self-respect.”

  “It is true, then?” I swallowed. “You are a . . . résistant?” I mouthed the last word, even though there was no one within earshot.

  He set the shears gently on the ground. “I am a passeur. Do you know what that means?”

  “Non.”

  “As you know, there are often . . . people . . . who need assistance on their journey . . . south.”

  South. That means only one thing. The Demarcation Line. La France Libre. And beyond—England, the United States. Freedom.

  “We give them a bit of food, a safe place to rest, until we can help guide them to the next stop on their journey. We are a small network, but I cannot express to you the relief of working together with these like-minded comrades—” He bit back the rest of his sentence. “Well. I mustn’t tell you too many details.”

  “A safe place to rest,” I repeated. And then his meaning dawned on me. “You mean here? At the domaine? But where?”

  “The wall that we built in the cellar—I made some modifications.”