The Lost Vintage

by Ann Mah

  “We were wrong.” Jean-Luc slumped against the kitchen table. “There’s nothing here.” He reached for the book again, leafing through it for the hundredth time, fanning the pages, which were soft, slightly yellowed, but otherwise pristine. Once again he examined the spine, the cover and its endpapers. Nothing.

  We had been sitting here all afternoon, puzzling over the book, trying to tease out its secrets. Outside, the shadows had lengthened and a chill was rapidly descending. Across the table, Jean-Luc’s head was bowed over the pages, his expression perplexed. “Are you sure she left a message here?” he asked.

  I searched my memory for details from the World War II books I’d read. A few of them had mentioned coded messages, which had played a large role in occupied France. “They used to put tiny pencil dots over letters, to spell out words,” I said. “Do you see any markings?”

  He shoved the book so that it slid across the table. “It’s over a thousand pages,” he said. “You want to inspect every one?”

  His irritation left a wake of silence in the kitchen. I could hear the tick of his watch, the soft crunch of a car passing on the dirt road behind the house. A bird chirping its high-pitched mating call.

  “Do you have a magnifying glass?” I picked up the book, smoothing the flyleaf. “What?” I said in response to his look of incredulity. “No one said this was going to be glamorous.”

  Jean-Luc rooted around the top drawer of his father’s old escritoire, shoving aside a handful of outdated francs and several desiccated fountain pens (did anyone in France ever throw anything away?), finally unearthing an ornate magnifying glass. Peering through the lens, I began the laborious task of inspecting every letter in the book. He pottered around the kitchen, emptying the dishwasher, wiping down counters, mixing vinaigrette in an old jam jar. “Salad and cheese okay for dinner?” he asked.

  “You’re cooking again?” I said. And then, “Sorry, sorry—I’ll stop saying that. That sounds delicious, thank you.”

  I returned to squinting at the old-fashioned type. By page twenty-six, I was already regretting my insouciance. By page forty-three, I was beginning to feel cross-eyed. By the time Jean-Luc set a bowl of salad and a wooden board of softly oozing cheeses on the table, I was downright dizzy. We ate quickly, swiping baguette across our plates to catch the last drops of vinaigrette, and then I doggedly resumed my task.

  Jean-Luc washed the dishes, and then came and stood behind me, so that his shadow fell across the page. “I need to answer some emails,” he said. “I was going to bring my computer in here, if you don’t mind.”

  “Pas du tout,” I assured him. And so he moved his laptop to the kitchen table and we sat in companionable silence, broken only by the click of the keyboard and swish of paper as I turned a page.

  An hour passed. Then another. Jean-Luc closed his laptop and began reading the newspaper. Despite my best intentions, my eyelids began to droop, my grip loosening on the magnifying glass, my head falling forward. I jerked myself awake, turned the page, forced myself to concentrate. The letters swam before my eyes, black lines and speckles against the light-colored surface. Speckles? I gripped the magnifying glass more tightly and peered at the text. There, in the middle of the page, was a soft dash above a “C.” Further along, I found another, above a “U.” Now my eyes were speeding through the paragraphs, finding other marked letters. I reached for a pencil, scribbling the sequence on a piece of scrap paper. “It doesn’t make any sense,” I muttered.

  “Comment?” Jean-Luc sounded disoriented, as if he’d been dozing behind the newspaper.

  “Look.” I scooted beside him. “These letters are marked in the book—but the message—it doesn’t make sense. It must be in code.” I showed him the piece of paper.

  C U S O Q U A T R E P L U S N A D E U X C O 3 D E V I E N T A U

  “Attends.” Jean-Luc grabbed the pencil. “CUSO QUATRE PLUS NADEAUX CO TROIS?” he muttered, trying to force the letters into words. “DEVIENT?” He frowned. “Wait. What if it’s a number?” He began scribbling.

  C U S O 4 P L U S N A 2 C O 3 D E V I E N T A U

  “Nope.” I groaned. “Still gibberish.”

  But he was staring at the page, the color draining from his face. “Bouillie bourguignonne,” he murmured.

  “What?” I could barely hear him. I shook my head, faintly irritated.

  “Burgundy mixture! Look! Copper sulfate plus sodium carbonate.” He scrawled another line:

  CuSO4 + Na2CO3

  He frowned in concentration. “DEVIENT—that means ‘becomes.’”

  “So, Burgundy mixture becomes . . . A.U.? What’s that mean?” The letters tugged at my memory. Where had I seen those initials before?

  A.U.

  A.U.

  A.U.

  “Gold!” Jean-Luc shouted, and I started back in my chair. “Au. That’s the abbreviation for gold on the periodic table. Except . . .” He paused and shook his head. “It doesn’t make any sense. How does Burgundy mixture become gold?”

  I stared at the formula scrawled before us. “What if . . . it’s not gold?” I suggested. “Not exactly. But . . . drops of gold? Les Gouttes d’Or,” I breathed, as the pieces began to click into place. “If Hélène was making Burgundy mixture during the war, the fruit from the vines she treated would have become Les Gouttes d’Or. It’s genius.”

  “Except”—Jean-Luc’s shoulders dropped—“it doesn’t reveal anything about where she hid the wine.”

  Something was tugging at my memory, but I couldn’t grasp it. “A.U.” I closed my eyes and the vision of a dark room floated before me, needles of cold piercing a dry stone wall. I gasped. “La cabotte ! My great-uncle Albert’s initials on the wall. A.U. Albert Ulysse. But remember? His initials were there twice.”

  Jean-Luc shoved his chair from the table, and stood. “Come on.” He grabbed my hand and pulled me upright, then led me through the kitchen and out of the house, to his truck, opening the passenger door and guiding me inside.

  “But she can’t have hidden the wine at the cabotte,” I pointed out once we were bouncing along a dirt road that led through the vineyards. “There’s nowhere to put it.”

  “Non,” he agreed. “I think it must be something else that she concealed there—a map, peut-être?”

  We crested a gentle slope and the cabotte appeared. Jean-Luc pulled to the side of the road and we scrambled out of the truck. By this time, the sun had descended, leaving a mass of shredded clouds tinted with shades of pink, bronze, lavender. In the fading light, the vines were like a dark maze, but Jean-Luc was sure-footed, leading the way to the doorway of the small stone structure.

  It was colder inside, and darker, smelling faintly of wood smoke. Jean-Luc swung a flashlight around the cramped interior, so that it bounced off the rough walls, onto the patch of wall embellished with letters—Nico’s initials, Uncle Philippe’s, Grandpère Benoît, Uncle Albert, Great-grandfather Edouard. And there it was: Au. Kneeling to the ground, I began digging with my hands, swearing softly. “Hold on,” Jean-Luc said, before stalking off to the truck. A few seconds later, he returned with a shovel, handed it to me, and then held the flashlight while I plowed into the floor of the cabotte, turning over the earth, deeper, deeper. The clang of metal upon metal made my heart stop.

  A few more shovelfuls and I had unearthed an old biscuit tin, striped in yellow and blue. I pried off the lid, and Jean-Luc trained the flashlight on my hands as I withdrew something flat from within, unwrapping a waterproof cloth to reveal a cahier d’exercises—a school notebook—with a thick brown binding that looked familiar.

  “What is it?” Jean-Luc asked.

  My heart hammered in my chest as I opened the cover. By the thin beam of the flashlight, I peered at the careful French copperplate covering the pages:

  Cher journal,

  . . . Well, I am not sure how to begin this journal, so I will start with the facts, like a proper scientist. My name is Hélène Charpin and today I am eighteen years old . . .r />
  It wasn’t a map. It was a diary.

  6 JANVIER 1944

  Cher journal,

  Benoît’s birthday today. Madame showered him with presents, a pair of shoes, used of course, but only lightly scuffed, a lumpy woolen hat and sweater knit with her own hands, and—la pièce de la résistance for a ten-year-old boy—a shiny, toy-size trap with teeth as sharp as needles, all the better to catch squirrels, wild hares, or other small creatures. She also baked him a cake, humming as she beat together butter, sugar, eggs, walnuts. The fact that no one in the village has tasted cake for months, if not years, did not distress her in the slightest.

  After we had finished supper—potatoes fried in pork drippings for Madame and the boys, two bowls of watery cabbage soup for me—but before Madame had sliced the cake, we heard a motorcycle sputter in the driveway, then a quiet knock at the door. Madame went aflutter, as is her wont these days, opening the door to reveal the lieutenant. He kissed her on both cheeks before bowing to me, courteous as ever, and then turned to the boys and gave them each a bar of chocolate.

  “Oh, Bruno, you’re spoiling them!” Madame said in that horrible, breathless tone she uses with him, but the old Haricot Vert just grinned and plopped himself into a chair at the far end of the table. Papa’s chair. I began clearing away the supper dishes so that I wouldn’t have to look at his face.

  While I was washing dishes, Madame cut the cake, serving first the Haricot Vert, and then the boys. “And you, Hélène? A small piece?” she called out.

  “Non, merci,” I said automatically over one shoulder, remembering too late that my refusal could be construed as incendiary. “I’m—er, I’m not hungry.”

  “More for us, then!” said Madame in a laughing voice. The clink of metal on china indicated that they had begun eating.

  “Why isn’t Léna having any?” It was Albert, his small voice pitched like a clarion.

  “Ask her yourself, chéri,” came Madame’s reply.

  I scrubbed hard at a bit of potato stuck to the sauté pan. “I’ve eaten well tonight, ma puce,” I said finally.

  Silence again, broken eventually by the sound of the Haricot Vert clearing his throat. “Your sister is a young woman of great principle, Albert,” he said. “You should be proud of her resolve.” His words hung on the room’s warm fug before he continued: “Though, of course, it is silly and misguided. After all, we’re hardly the horrible enemy she believes us to be. Isn’t that right, young man?”

  Blood rushed to my face, but I remained turned toward the sink and hoped no one would notice. A second later, I heard the sound of a plate sliding across the table. “If she’s not having any, I’m not either,” Albert declared.

  “Albert!” Madame snapped. “Finish your cake!”

  “Non! J’en veux plus!”

  “Do I need to take you behind the woodshed?” she threatened.

  He fell silent and out of the corner of my eye I saw him fold his arms across his chest. I counted eleven ticks of the clock and then: “I’ll eat it,” said Benoît. “If he doesn’t want it.” He pulled the plate toward him and stuffed a huge forkful in his mouth.

  “Benoît,” Madame protested. But she fell silent when the Haricot Vert began to laugh.

  12 JANVIER 1944

  A note was slipped among the messages I gathered at the boulangerie. Unfolding it, I found a Paul Verlaine poem, copied in Stéphane’s hand, and a message:

  Learn this for the exam.

  So strange. What exam? I can’t think what he means, but just to be safe I have started memorizing the poem by heart. Here is the first stanza:

  Les sanglots longs

  Des violons

  De l’automne

  Blessent mon coeur

  D’une langueur

  Monotone.

  17 JANVIER 1944

  The Haricot Vert is here again. It’s the third time this week. I saw him pushing his motorcycle across the gravel driveway, and then he tiptoed up the path and through the back door. A few minutes later, socked feet began creeping down the hall to Madame’s room. I suppose she thinks they are being discreet with these late-night rendezvous, but I am not fooled—not when he appears at the breakfast table in the morning.

  How can she stand to be around him? Yes, he is polite, of course, in that stiff Germanic way, but his skin is obscenely ruddy with health, and his ice-grey eyes are as watchful as a hawk’s, seeing everything, observing everything. I do my best to avoid him, and I think that pleases him. As for Madame, well—she is indebted to him, and I think that pleases him as well.

  27 JANVIER 1944

  Albert was sent home from school today with a bloody nose. Fighting at recess, his teacher said. When I asked him about it, he said a group of boys had ambushed him in the schoolyard, taunting him and calling him names. “What names?” I asked him. Tears spilled from his eyes, drawing tracks down his dirty cheeks, before he buried his face in my shoulder and sobbed. “What happened?” I pressed him.

  “Maurice called me a collabo,” he said, the words muffled against me. “Then Claude joined in, and I was so angry I just swung out and punched him. J’suis pas collabo, Léna. Je suis pas.”

  I rubbed his back, even as my hands trembled with rage. He is eight years old; what does he know of collaborating? It is impossibly unfair.

  Of course, I’ve received my own share of hard stares in town, accidental jostles that were not accidental, globules of spittle narrowly dodged. My friends from the circuit think my situation could be useful if the Haricot Vert ever lets slip any information, though of course he never does. But why hadn’t it occurred to me that the same aggression could trickle down to the schoolyard? I held my little brother close, wishing I knew how to protect him. What can I do? What can I say?

  1 FÉVRIER 1944

  Laundry day. I was in the scullery, so absorbed in scrubbing the bloodstains from Albert’s shirt that I didn’t see Madame until she spoke. “Is that blood? Is it Benoît’s?”

  My fingers were numb and swollen from the icy water, so perhaps I spoke more shortly than I intended. “It’s Albert’s.”

  “What happened?” she cried.

  I wrung the shirt gently, trying to avoid tearing the threadbare fabric. “He got into a fight at school.”

  “Chuh!” she spat. “I told him to stop picking fights with the other boys. Well, it’s obvious that he needs to be punished. First there was that dreadful outburst on Benoît’s birthday, and now this. He’s turned into a horrible little beast. You’ve spoiled him, Hélène. I’m sorry, but I really must blame you for this behavior.”

  “Moi?” I choked on my incredulity. “You are blaming me? Do you know why he was fighting, Virginie? The kids at school called him a collabo. A collaborator!”

  “Who? Who said that?” She spun round to face me. “How dare they! Just wait ’til I tell Bruno—those little brats will regret ever opening their smug little mouths. And as for their self-righteous parents . . .” Her hands balled into fists.

  An image flashed before me of the Haricot Vert and his underlings banging on the doors in the village, dragging our neighbors and their children from their homes. Oh, cher journal, how I wished I could snatch back my hasty words! Instead, I attempted to recant: “It was nothing—just a childish squabble. I have no idea who said it. Albert did not tell me. I think that probably he doesn’t remember.”

  Her nostrils flared. “Forget it,” she snapped. “I’ll find out myself.” She stalked from the room, and a minute later the door of her room slammed shut.

  Recounting this now, my heart is breaking. Why can’t she see what she is doing? It’s bad enough that she’s destroying her own reputation—how can she also destroy the lives of her children?

  4 FÉVRIER 1944

  I was hurrying out of the house with my shopping basket over one arm when Madame stopped me. “Oh, good, Hélène, there you are. I need to speak with you. Come into the salon.”

  I winced but followed her into the room that she
has reclaimed as her own with furniture polish, plumped cushions, and a merry little fire that she feeds dry logs without the slightest twinge of conscience.

  She sank into the sofa and nodded at me to sit in the armchair opposite. I perched on the edge of the seat, aware of her huge blue eyes searching my face. “Tell me.” She picked at a loose thread on her dress. “Before your father . . . left”—she paused delicately—“did he mention anything to you about les caves?”

  Despite the crackling fire, the fine hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. “Les caves?” I repeated, stalling for time. “Not that I recall. Were you thinking about something specific?”

  She blinked, a cold reptilian flicker. “Before the Germans arrived, didn’t he say something about hiding the more valuable bottles?”

  “Hmm, did he say that?” I frowned, hoping it would conceal my thoughts. Was it possible that Papa never told Madame about the secret cave and the treasure we hid there? When I think back to that winter before the Occupation—four long brutal years ago—and all the afternoons Papa and I spent in the cellar, toiling in clammy semi-obscurity . . . he had said he would tell her about it “eventually.” In the end, had he decided not to? If that was the case, I certainly wasn’t going to give away the secret. I took a deep breath, willing myself to keep my voice steady. “He never mentioned anything to me,” I said.

  Her lips thinned, but she maintained a pleasant expression. “Are you sure?” she pressed me. “Bruno says—” She caught herself with a cough. “I mean, we all know that every winemaker in the region tucked away his best bottles before the Occupation. That’s simply common sense. The Führer remains eager to procure the best French wines. Did you know Goebbels simply adores Burgundy? It would be foolish not to take advantage of this interest.”

  I stared at her in disbelief. The Führer? Goebbels? Did she really just mention these animals like they are perfectly normal beings, and not the espèces de connard causing unspeakable misery?