Her father made no comment. Renee sent him an angry look. Even in good times it had not been his way to speak of small matters. Now, since Gerard had gone away (for this was how the family thought of it), since then, he found little to say on any subject. His thoughts were hidden, sealed somewhere back in his head. He did not appear angry or sad. He continued to repair his shoes with skill and patience. But he kept to himself, kept even his eyes down, or away, so that Renee could not talk to him without a sense that she was intruding.
Never, of course, did he speak directly of the war, or of the presence of the Germans. None of them did. Day by day, Renee’s mother aired her bedding, shopped for food, chopped vegetables, washed clothes, with a weighty concentration that left no room for such talk. For her, it was enough to get through a day without trouble. Trouble was when M. Perrin ran out of bread before she reached the front of the line. Trouble was a hole in a pot that could not be repaired.
“What is happening to us? Why is this happening?” Renee might have asked. She wanted to know what to do about the war, what to think about it. After Gerard, she learned not to ask. Such questions brought only a shrug, a silence.
At night, in her cold bed, Renee heard her parents talk in their own bedroom. She heard the quick rumble of her father’s voice and the higher tones of her mother’s. She could not hear their words. What they spoke about, she never knew. Later, when she was older and the war was over and she had moved away, it seemed to Renee that from those nights dated her first bitter feelings of living separate, cut away from her parents. In their room, a magic circle of understanding, of explanation, closed around them. She imagined them asking each other questions that she was not allowed to ask, making answers she was not invited to hear. She lay alone in her bedroom, gazing up at the ceiling, and when she finally fell asleep it was because of loneliness that she fell, because there was nowhere else to go.
“Renee!” Her mother called again from upstairs, where a job waited. Renee turned, frowning, from the window. She was on her way across the room when, from outside, she heard footsteps approaching the shop door. The latch was lifted, then rattled. There followed a heavy knock.
“Look to see who it is,” her father ordered.
“It’s a German,” whispered Renee, catching sight of a uniformed shoulder through the window.
M. Fichet put his work aside and stood up.
“Open,” he told her uneasily.
The man who entered the shop a moment later was young, not much older than Renee herself, it seemed. He was no taller than her father, though his straight, stiff posture—or was it the stiff green uniform—gave an appearance of greater height. His hair was short, light brown; his face ruddy from the cold. His eyes darted at Renee, retreated with embarrassment, then settled on her father, who had moved over to stand behind the counter.
“Yes? What can I do for you?” M. Fichet said loudly. At the same time he motioned Renee away, upstairs. She took several steps toward the staircase and stopped. Suddenly, the German was feeling for something inside a pocket of his uniform jacket. She saw her father’s eyes light with fear.
“What do you have there?” called M. Fichet. The young soldier stepped toward him.
“Please excuse me,” he announced, “for intruding on you. Your shop is closed, I see, but …”
He drew from his pocket a squarish black object.
“It is my heel,” the soldier said. He glanced nervously at the object. “It has, well, as you see, it has come off!”
Renee let go an audible sigh of relief. M. Fichet leaned on the counter.
“Let’s have a look.”
“I am sorry, really! It happened just now in the street. I did not even know it was loose.” He spoke a heavily accented French. But it was accurate.
“Hand it here. Where is the boot?”
“But, I am in it!” said the soldier, full of confusion.
Renee suppressed an urge to laugh. They were not used to either confusion or apology from their German customers.
“You may sit there if you wish to take it off,” said M. Fichet solemnly. He pointed to the room’s only chair.
The soldier sat down and began, with a shy glance at Renee, to pull off his boot.
“Excuse me,” he said again, addressing M. Fichet. His face was redder than ever now. “I am sorry, but perhaps you could help me pull? They have always been a little tight.”
M. Fichet marched obediently around the counter to help, and after much twisting and yanking from either side, the soldier’s foot was at last pried free. But when it came forth—what was that? Renee put her hand over her mouth to stifle a laugh. The young soldiers sock was riddled with holes, and at its front, a must unmilitary white toe poked through the flannel.
The soldier blushed crimson and hid the toe behind a leg of the chair.
“You are certainly in need of repair!” said Renee, unable now to keep from laughing. Her father frowned a warning at her.
“It is not me but the stupid supplies,” muttered the soldier. He looked like a small boy sitting there, self-consciously hiding his foot from Renee’s eyes.
“The supply office has sent no socks. We are all this way. It is not just me!”
“Of course. The German army without socks. What a problem!”
A little grin twitched the soldier’s mouth.
M. Fichet looked sharply at his daughter. “Renee, go upstairs. Quickly!”
But she didn’t go. She didn’t always, these days, do just what her parents told her. She sat on a stair and watched her father nail the heel back into place. And though she did not speak again, not even to say goodbye, it seemed to her that she could have said many things and that the soldier would not have minded. He was too young to mind, perhaps. Or too embarrassed. Or too nice. Yes, that was it, Renee decided, thinking everything over in her room that night. He was not like a soldier at all. She remembered his terrible sock, and smiled.
In the months that followed, Renee saw this soldier often about the town. He was a low-grade officer of some kind who ran errands for those of higher command.
“And what great job do you do in this war?” she asked him once, teasing again because he always looked so young and serious, a little like Gerard, she thought. Her father would have spoken to her angrily if he had heard. He would have warned her to be careful. She didn’t care. She was tired of his warnings.
“Oh, not very much,” Hans had answered. (She knew his name by this time.) “It is my French. They think I speak well.”
“And do you?” she asked, passing him by on the street. Their conversation was never more than this, quick comments in passing. It was dangerous to be seen talking.
“You must know that better than I,” he had answered, and marched straight on, with his eyes looking up the street.
She liked this. She liked: “They think I speak well.” His answer seemed to put them together on a side against the others, against the stupid war itself.
“Have your socks come in yet?” Renee teased.
“Unfortunately, no.”
“You must be in shreds by now.”
“In blisters, you mean!”
He was certainly better looking than the other boys she knew. He held himself proudly, while they tended to slouch and scowl. (“But, of course,” her father would have said. “His army has beaten our army”)
Spring came, then summer, the fourth summer of occupation. Renee’s worn brown coat was packed away. She wore light skirts and blouses, never as pretty as she wished, not “in style,” but clean, well ironed. A neighbor who was proficient at such things cut her hair in a becoming fashion.
She was not a schoolgirl anymore. She worked in her father’s shop. She shopped for her mother. At night, she practiced her violin and dreamed of concerts, of her debut in a brilliant concert hall. She longed for peace, for release from the tension of watching, waiting, of never having enough. She didn’t care what kind of peace it was. Any kind would do, just so the war woul
d end and life could begin again. Any kind of life, anything different.
She looked out for him specially now, a matter of general interest, she told herself His uniform looked different to her than those of other soldiers. He wore it differently, without arrogance. When other soldiers walked through town, they marched blind, careless of the people who scrambled aside to make way. Hans moved among the townfolk respectfully. He had charge of a truck, but did not race it down the street the way others did. He drove carefully, full of responsibility. Renee saw him stoop to pat the head of Mme. DeGrelle’s stringy dog. She heard him speak quietly, though firmly, to a rowdy group of children playing in the street with a ball.
She thought he watched her, too. Stepping out of the shop for an errand, Renee’s first thought was to see if he was there, if he had noticed. And when he did notice, she was pleased and walked faster, suddenly became more businesslike.
“I was in Paris for two days,” he said one time. “I brought you something.”
It was a piece of sheet music, a Schubert waltz.
“But, how did you know?” asked Renee.
“Play it tonight,” he said. “I will walk past your house and listen.”
She played it for an hour, nonstop.
“I love music,” he told her afterward. “You play very well.”
He was lonely himself, so far away from home. She saw it in his eyes, which lingered upon her for just an instant too long when they met. She had not thought of German soldiers being lonely before. She had not thought of them singly at all, but only as some monstrous wave that had swept over France, fastening it down tight with fear. Hans was not fearsome in the least. He seemed, if possible, rather frightened of her.
She began to wonder about his family, his mother, for he was certainly someone’s son. She saw a letter poked out of his pocket, or was it a military document? She wasn’t sure. Then, he came closer, and she identified the mark of the post. The thought that there were those who wrote to him, who cared enough about him to write, frightened her a little. For some days, he seemed too human, too real, and she did not look in his direction.
Perhaps he was hurt. A few days later came the note, which he delivered personally to her in the shop while her father’s back was turned. (She liked this daring act from one who seemed so shy.) She did not respond at first. His written French was not as good as his spoken. It reminded her that he was German.
Then she answered, for no particular reason that she could think of. Perhaps it was boredom. Maybe it was to have a secret against her parents, against the whole world for that matter. She didn’t know. She didn’t care.
Later, when they had begun to meet secretly in the little forest, when there was time to talk, she teased Hans about his bad spelling.
“I almost didn’t answer your first note,” she said. “A six-year-old might have done better.”
“My mother learned French as a child,” he told her. “She taught me to speak a little, but not how to write it down.”
He talked about his family, about his two sisters at home, about his mother, a schoolteacher, about his father who was a farmer. He liked to tell about his home. He missed it badly. He disliked the army, he said. There was no one to talk to.
“I want to have a farm of my own,” he told Renee. “A dairy farm would be best. I know a lot about cows.”
He was shy to the end, serious, deferential. It was left to Renee to say out loud what as time went on they both felt together.
“It’s so stupid, so crazy,” she exclaimed. “Nobody wants to fight. Everybody wants to live. We are all on the same side really. Why are people so stupid that they can’t see it?”
“I believe this, also,” Hans assured her. “But what can you do? This is the real world.”
The little forest was very beautiful that fall. It lay on land which had been owned by a rich farming family. They had gone away at the start of the war, to England, people said. So, the fields had turned to weeds and brush, and the woods behind the fields were open to whoever wished to go there. It was not a good place to walk. The trees were young and spindly, and bushes of all kinds grew among them. It was a good place to hide, to sit in one spot surrounded by vivid green walls, and to talk.
The most difficult part was getting to the woods, and then getting home again, without arousing suspicion. They knew the danger. Danger was in every person passed on the street, in every shape of a person across every field. German or French, it didn’t matter which.
They came separately to the wood, with ready excuses. Mushrooms and berries to gather, for Renee. Suspicious movement around the empty farmhouse, for Hans. They knew they could be shot, or worse. They knew there were no excuses really for what they were doing. Once there, however, in the woods, privacy was so complete that all other worlds seemed to dissolve. Or so it was for Renee, who would lie on her back looking up at the wide, blue sky as if it were a window thrown open just for her. Hans sat nearby, planning out his farm. He built pastures and fences and little structures out of sticks.
“This is my barn,” he explained with such childlike solemnity that Renee laughed. “And this, adjoining, will hold the tanks for milk,” he continued, frowning at her. “I will have a very modern dairy and the cows will all be milked by machine. I’ve read about it. It can be done.”
“So, is this what the army does? Reduces its soldiers to little boys playing with sticks?” Renee asked. “You need a vacation, I think.”
“Laugh if you like, but I am quite serious,” Hans answered. “I will do these things and must make plans. Here, hand me that branch over there and I’ll show you my idea. Dairy farms can make money, these days. I don’t intend to be a dull-brained farmer standing out in the sun with a rake. This is a business I’m talking about. We could make it work.”
“We?” Renee asked, teasing.
“Yes, we,” Hans replied, and the way he looked at her made her blush and smile.
They brought food and spread picnics between them. In Paris, Hans could buy little twists of good bread and sweets long since vanished from the local shops. He brought news, too, stories of disagreement, disarray among the German commanders; stories of incidents in Paris. They laughed about these over the food because here, in the wood, such things were properly distant.
“You are getting fat!” Renee teased, though he was as straight and lean as ever.
“And you. We must put some meat on your poor old bones,” Hans said seriously, then laughed at himself because it was what his mother always said.
They did not begin to touch, to move close together, until the weather turned cool and closer seemed the natural direction to move. Hans was shy about this as well, so Renee took the lead.
“Is this real?” he asked once, looking into her eyes. “Do we really love each other?”
“Yes!” Renee answered fiercely. “This is real. It is the only thing that’s real.”
If the forest had been special before, now it became doubly so. It became a place to think about during the long boring hours of work, a place to dream about when all other dreams were dead.
“What will we do when winter comes?” Hans asked.
“Something,” Renee said. “We’ll think of something.”
This was how they lived, day by day. It was how everyone lived during that war. But for Hans, winter never came.
Strangely, Renee could never remember later what they had talked about, what they had done, on their last day in the forest. She supposed it was because that day was no different from others which had preceded it. There had been a small picnic, probably; perhaps a letter from a friend in Germany for Hans to translate for her. (“At home, I have many good friends,” he had told her. “You will like them.”)
The afternoons had grown shorter and colder, she recalled. That day, the sun was already low in the sky when they walked from their hidden place toward the edge of the trees.
She was behind him, three yards or so, moving slowly in order not to break or ben
d the bushes. They were always careful not to leave trails which might point to where they met. They were careful, too, to separate at the woods’ edge, to take different routes back to town.
“Everyone for himself,” they had agreed, early on. Should one of them be detained, caught, the other must not feel an obligation to reveal himself.
Renee was walking behind Hans when she heard a series of twigs snap away to the left. She stopped, on guard. Hans walked on, hearing nothing, unaware that she was not following. Reassured by this, she was about to go on, to call, “Wait!” when up ahead bushes moved. Flew apart. Shots rang out—five, six, a clatter of gunshots that melted together in her ear to make a terrifying crash.
Renee saw Hans twist and fall backward, as if a powerful wind had blown him suddenly down. It happened so fast that she did not feel herself fall but found herself cowering on the ground, grasping clumps of weeds in her fists. Next came a period of. time during which she did not think, did not hear, did not see. She lay clenched on the ground, a blind fist herself.
After a while, the woods moved around her again, and she was aware that she was alone. She saw that the sun had gone from the sky and that the forest had grown dim.
Renee rose to her knees. Waited. She got to her feet. She crept toward the place where Hans had fallen. The woods seemed empty now, but she was afraid of the dark places behind the bushes, and went slowly.
She reached the place and saw Hans lying face up on the ground. His eyes were closed, his head turned slightly to one side. A wound was there, underneath. She did not try to look at it or to touch him. She walked around him in a circle.
A little wind blew by her. It rustled the leaves and made her imagine footsteps in the forest. She crouched in brush and waited, but she was shaking badly now, and could not distinguish between noises.
Crouching, Renee watched Hans. His body covered more ground than she would have expected. He was a giant fallen down over the little bushes, between the young trees. And like a giant, he made the place around him seem small and tight. She knew he was dead. The wind knew it, too. It played with him, flipping a bit of his hair back and forth over his forehead.
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