The Lost Vintage

by Ann Mah

  21 AOÛT 1941

  For five weeks we have been spraying the vines with our homemade Burgundy mixture. Dare I say that the plants are responding? Even Papa agrees that the leaves appear stronger, healthier, no longer dusted with a sticky white web of fungus.

  “I can’t believe it,” Rose said, then sighed. “It’s like a miracle.” We had met at the cabotte to check our solution and eat an ad hoc picnic. I raised my tin cup to hers and we toasted our success with the last splash of apple cider.

  “Not a miracle.” My voice sharpened. “It’s science.”

  “Still,” she marveled. “Who would have thought that some boring old copper wiring could save your grape harvest? You said yourself that your father had completely lost hope.”

  “And now he thinks that even Les Gouttes d’Or will be worth bottling.”

  “Les Gouttes d’Or,” she said thoughtfully. “Why’s it called that?”

  “No one really knows.” I brushed crumbs from my lap. “I like to think it’s because the wine’s color resembles drops of gold.”

  “So in a way”—she cocked her head—“we turned metal into gold.”

  I laughed. “I suppose we did.”

  “That’s more than chemistry. It’s alchemy.”

  “Alchemy.” The very word sounded like a secret. “Alchemy,” I repeated, delighted.

  “That’s us.” Her smile broadened. “The Alchemists Club.”

  22 SEPTEMBRE 1941

  Another birthday come and gone: a week ago, I turned twenty years old. We didn’t celebrate—we were in the full midst of the vendanges, all of us dropping with fatigue—though Albert did gather a little panier of late blackberries for me, which we ate with a scrape of sugar.

  And so, another harvest has ended. Our grapes this year were not the most spectacular, but we had more bounty than others, and for that we were grateful. I give thanks that all of us—Papa, the boys, our neighbors, and I—brought them in together.

  21 OCTOBRE 1941

  I was in town today at the pharmacy—Benny has a cough and Madame sent me to try to buy a tincture for him—when I glimpsed Bernard outside. I hadn’t seen him for a few months—not since the last time he delivered scraps to the cabotte, which was mid-August at least. We passed each other on the street as strangers, not even making eye contact. Still, I noticed he was limping.

  This war has created strange friendships. A few months ago, I would have never guessed I’d be concerned about a shifty-eyed boy with a tongue too fast for his own good. But here I am, unable to sleep, worrying over how he got that limp.

  5 NOVEMBRE 1941

  Tonight we twisted the radio dial at least thirty times, desperate to find the voices from London. The Germans have become adept at jamming the signal, but with enough persistence we finally caught it. What a relief it was to hear those four notes of Beethoven—to think I once thought them gloomy! A few weeks ago, they began broadcasting snippets of coded messages, strange and unnerving sentences that dangle like severed limbs. Lisette is well. I like Siamese cats. It always rains in England. They sound so silly, it’s hard to believe the Allies would announce an invasion in this manner. But as we listen, I discreetly watch Papa’s face, trying to discern if they mean anything to him.

  9 DÉCEMBRE 1941

  I heard them talking last night—Papa and Madame—their voices sending vibrations of fury through the walls of the house.

  “Non, c’est pas possible! Not in my house,” Madame hissed. It’s astonishing how far her whisper can carry.

  The issue, I eventually grasped, is Papa’s clandestine activity, not his work as a passeur—which Madame suspects, but cannot prove—but rather the sheltering of people in our cellar. Apparently she found a heap of dirty rags by the bottom of the cellar stairs and was shocked to discover it was the tattered uniform of an English airman. “A uniform of an anglais! Covered in blood! How on earth did it get there?” By this time, she had given up the pretense of whispering.

  At first Papa vacillated—“C’était rien, chérie, just some old rags”—but then Madame confronted him with the missing food from the pantry: “Two kilos of potatoes, three tins of sardines, and a jar of cherry preserves! I think Hélène is stealing from us and selling on the black market!” That’s when Papa admitted that he’d taken some of her stock “for a few friends.”

  “What friends?”

  “Friends who need help.”

  “Who needs help more than your own family? Your growing sons? If you continue giving away food to these good-for-nothings, we won’t have anything left!”

  “They’re not good-for-nothings,” Papa objected. “May I remind you, Virginie, that we are at war?”

  “And may I remind you,” she said shrilly, “that you have two small children? Benoît could fall ill again at any time! That food is his strength!”

  “It will hardly do Benoît any harm to give up a few spoonfuls of cherry jam. Believe it or not, chérie, there are actually people who need it more than our son.”

  “Who?” she insisted. “Who? One of those sweaty English slabs of roast beef? You think I don’t know what you’ve been up to in the cellar? You think I haven’t missed the linens from the closet? Didn’t see the disgusting rings left around the bathtub? The dishes washed like a slattern, piled wet upon the shelf? I’m not an idiot, Edouard—I know you’ve been hiding people down there. But it has to stop! Do you understand? It will stop.”

  “Chérie, please, you’re overreacting. I’m being very cautious.”

  “So it’s true?” She broke into unbridled sobs, which continued for several seconds, even as Papa remained silent. Finally she seemed to collect herself. “Edouard,” she said in a steadier tone. “I beg of you, please stop. Joséphine Fresnes says the Gestapo shoots résistants on the spot, just like that. And for what? This struggle—it’s not worth it. We should keep quiet, mind our own business, be patient, wait out the end of the war. Joséphine says—”

  “Joséphine Fresnes?” spat Papa. “Do you think I care about anyone from that stupid, spineless Cercle du patrimoine? Circle of Nazis is more like it.”

  “We are protecting our heritage,” insisted Madame.

  “You are cowards!”

  Silence. I imagined them at opposite corners of the room, Madame cast in sulks, Papa with his arms crossed, defiant. Despite my near constant anxiety, I was proud of him.

  Finally Madame spoke. “I’m sorry, Edouard,” she said in a soft voice. “It was wrong of me to get angry. Of course it’s not my place to tell you how to behave. And I admire you for doing what you believe to be right. But I also have a duty—to my children. Our children. I want you to know that I will be listening. I will be watching. And if you do not stop sheltering strangers in our home, the next time I hear someone down in the cellar, I will turn them in.”

  “Report me? Your husband? You wouldn’t dare.”

  “Noooo, perhaps not. But an English pilot? I could say he broke into the domaine. He’d be gone like that.” She snapped her fingers. “Taken to a POW camp.” I could practically hear the gears grinding in her mind.

  “Why, Virginie?” Papa shouted. “Why are you doing this? Don’t you care about our freedom?”

  “Non,” she replied. “I care about our safety.”

  A shrill wail rose from the boys’ room, followed by another—my brothers awakened by their parents’ argument, now frightened in their beds. I heard Madame open her bedroom door and run to them, the murmur of her voice soothing the boys as they cried, the sound of their tears covering the quiet sobs of our father.

  3 FÉVRIER 1942

  Cher journal,

  The cold is ravaging us like a pack of wolves. I have vowed not to complain in front of my brothers, but we are constantly frozen, constantly hungry. I thought last winter was the most bitter of my life, but this year is worse, with even less food and fuel. My fingernails are brittle and yellow, my legs covered in bruises that refuse to fade, my hair thinning. Yesterday we each ate a s
ingle potato, and then Albert and Benny fought over who would get the transparent scraps of skin.

  This morning I cycled to Beaune to visit the shops once again but, honestly, I had no hope of finding any food—I simply wanted to escape the house. Papa rarely emerges from his office—I think he’s started sleeping there. Madame has become unbearable, with a permanent toothache that swells her face so that her insults emerge slurred and almost incomprehensible. At the boulangerie, I happened to meet Rose, but it was too cold to queue outside and after a few minutes I said so.

  “Are you going home?” Rose asked.

  “Where else? There is nowhere to go these days.”

  “I have an Italian lesson,” she said. “Are you interested in learning Italian?”

  “You’re studying Italian? Why?”

  “I thought you might want to learn a few words. It’s a beautiful language.”

  “No, thank you.” But as I turned to leave, a patrol group sauntered toward the bakery—they weren’t even German, but French police, those collabo bastards—demanding papers from everyone in sight. I recognized one of the gendarmes, a pale, blond boy, tall and thin. It was Madame’s nephew, Michel; he and I used to play hide-and-seek together in the vineyards. I handed him my documents, unsure of what to say. Should I greet him as a friend? Pretend we’d never met? I decided on the latter—I would wait for him to acknowledge me first. “Merci, mademoiselle,” he said, handing back my papers without a flicker of recognition. The pair turned to Rose, staring for a long time at her identity card. Michel’s eyes shifted between the two of us. “You are together?” he asked me. Yes, I told him, we are friends from school. “Be careful of the company you keep,” he said to me in an undertone.

  “How dare he,” I hissed under my breath when they had moved down the street.

  “It’s because I’m Jewish,” she said faintly. Her hands were shaking so that she could hardly return her documents to her pocketbook.

  I swallowed my outrage and squeezed her hand. “Are you all right?” I asked.

  She nodded but her grip indicated otherwise. “Come on,” I told her. “I’ll walk you to your lesson.”

  I accompanied Rose to a building on the place Marey, where we ascended two flights of stairs and knocked on a door. After several minutes, a man cracked it open, his face half-covered in a beard. “Bonjour, mon cousin,” Rose said, and he opened the door further and we stepped into a small reception area furnished with a desk and two chairs for visitors. Through a cracked door marked “privé” I glimpsed a large room filled with enormous machinery.

  “Your cousin?” I hissed to Rose as we lingered in the vestibule. “I thought you had an Italian lesson.”

  “Si, so parlare l’italiano,” the man said. He jerked his head at me. “Who’s she?”

  “A friend. She’s one of us,” Rose said.

  He crossed his arms and examined me, eyes dark blue and hostile. He was younger than I’d initially thought, though his beard, coupled with the shadows under his eyes, aged him. He shook his head. “Non.”

  “We can trust her,” Rose insisted. “She made the copper sulfate with me. Bernard can vouch for her. Please.”

  “Non.”

  “S’il te plaît,” Rose said again. “She is the daughter of—Avricourt.”

  Her words shot straight through me. Papa’s Christian name is Edouard, and Rose knows that—just as I know her father’s name is Marcel.

  “His daughter?” Flint Eyes was looking at me with a sliver less of suspicion.

  Rose nodded. “She is a brilliant chemist—and I need her help.”

  My help? With what? Panic circled me like a vise. “Wait,” I whispered. “What’s going on? I never said—”

  “She was with you at Sèvres?” demanded Flint Eyes.

  “We were at lycée together. She knows the laboratory better than I do, and Madame G. was always very fond of her.”

  “A lycéen?” He snorted. “She doesn’t even have proper training.” He moved to open the door.

  Despite my rising fear, I was beginning to feel rather indignant. “I won the Science Cup,” I informed him haughtily. “I would be at Sèvres if not for this stupid war.”

  “I’m sure.” He smirked.

  I drew myself to full height, which is as tall as most Frenchmen, though still—I was chagrined to find—half a head shorter than old Flint Eyes. “Disbelieve me if you wish.” I kept my voice cold. “But at this point, I doubt you’ll find anyone more qualified than I, nor anyone more loyal to France, and that is the God’s honest truth. I never lie.”

  After a pause, Flint Eyes simply laughed. “Does she have a bicycle?” he asked. When Rose nodded he conceded, “D’accord. She can come to the meeting on Thursday. And you—if you’re going to join us, you better learn how to tell lies.”

  God help me, cher journal. It seems, somehow, I have joined a circuit of the Resistance.

  25 FÉVRIER 1942

  We meet at various locations in Beaune: A barrel maker’s workshop on the rue des Tonneliers. The modest home of a sympathetic wine merchant on the rue de l’Arquebuse. The address on the place Marey, which is the atelier of an Italian printer who returned two years ago to Bologna. Flint Eyes—Stéphane (though that’s not his real name, of course)—is related to the printer somehow. Or perhaps that’s his cover? I don’t ask too many questions. He uses the printing equipment to produce tracts and create forged documents. They call me Marie—I chose the name in honor of my beloved Madame Curie. So far, I’ve attended three meetings, sitting next to Rose at the edge of the group. Each time, there have been five or six people, and I was not terribly surprised to find Bernard among them. They discussed distribution of newssheets and movement of hidden weapons. Stéphane leads the meetings. Now that he and I have met a few times, I am less affronted by his initial suspicion of me. Like all Resistance circuits, ours is extremely vulnerable to infiltration and betrayal—a mere slip of the tongue, either accidental or prompted by a beating from the Gestapo, and everything could be lost.

  Today I listened as they threw about outlandish proposals of theft and sabotage. How can we break into the ammunitions depot at the Château du Clos de Vougeot? How feasible is it to steal a shipment from one of the region’s smaller train stations? How long can a man hide inside a wine barrel? Stéphane considered each of these ideas with more patience than I would have thought him capable. How difficult is it to create explosives? At this last question, everyone turned to Rose—or, rather, I should call her Simone—and suddenly I understood our role in the circuit. “We’re considering several possibilities,” Rose said. Stéphane nodded his approval and moved on to the next topic.

  I spent the next ten minutes in agony, so terrified I saw black spots floating before my eyes. Create explosives? Of course I had read about it. But where would we find the materials? The equipment? And what if we were caught? The threat of imprisonment in some squalid cell—or, worse, the horror of an impromptu execution—makes me sick with fear. I had just resolved to tell Rose and Stéphane that I could not continue with the group when the meeting came to an end. Unlike last week when the group dispersed without even a farewell, today Stéphane beckoned all of us closer. “Venez nous rejoindre,” he said—“come join us”—and noticing that I hung behind, his hand closed upon my own, his grip gentler and more reassuring than I would have suspected. Bowing his head, he began to sing “La Marseillaise,” and the rest of us joined in, not a rousing chorus, but a whispered, defiant refrain. “Allons enfants de la Patrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé!” It had been over two and a half years since I last sang those words. Glancing at the other faces in the group, I saw that I was not the only one moved to tears. And suddenly I knew—as sure as the laws of chemistry—that remaining passive is no longer prudence. It has become cowardice.

  2 MARS 1942

  Rose sent me to talk to Madame Grenoble—“She’s always liked you,” she said, though I’m not sure that’s true—so this afternoon I cycled to our f
ormer high school. I found Madame G. in her classroom grading exam papers. She seemed surprised to see me, greeting me with a distracted smile and hovering above her desk as I lurched through the pleasantries and into my request. I wanted to keep abreast of my studies, I told her. I was hoping to use the school laboratory for special sessions, as I had done two years ago when I was preparing for the baccalauréat.

  “You always were my most diligent student,” she said with a smile. “It’s such a shame that your studies had to be interrupted by this . . . situation.” She brushed an invisible speck of dust from her sleeve, her hand smooth and white, the nails painted pale pink. “Yes, I do think something could be arranged.”

  “Oh, Madame, thank you!” A smile stretched across my face, even as I strove to keep an appropriate level of excitement in my voice. “I can’t tell you what this means to me. I’ve been feeling so despondent these past few months.”

  But she waved away my thanks. “What course of study are you planning to follow?”

  “Well, Rose still has her textbooks from Sèvres and we thought we would use the same syllabus.”

  “We? Rose?”

  “You remember Rose Reinach, n’est-ce pas? My rival?” I said, only half joking.

  “Bien sûr. I remember her very well.” Madame’s eyes were suddenly veiled, her smile thin. Or was I imagining things?

  “We meet sometimes to go over our books. She’s as eager as I am to continue working.”

  “Didn’t Mademoiselle Reinach get expelled from Sèvres for moral turpitude?”

  I flinched and hoped she hadn’t noticed. “That’s an unfair rumor,” I said.

  She hesitated, the muscles moving delicately in her throat. “You know, technically I can only allow students access to the laboratory—not even other faculty members are permitted.”

  I sensed the window of opportunity closing, and moved quickly to stop it. “S’il vous plaît, Madame,” I pleaded. “We are only asking for a spare hour here or there, and we won’t waste your time, or any supplies. We simply hope to deepen our knowledge of science.” I spoke in my most earnest schoolgirl tones.