The Children's War

by Monique Charlesworth

  “Bravo, ma petite,” he said, laughing at her.

  “François the farmer,” she said. They looked at each other. He must see, now, how different she was. His hair was almost white. She had forgotten how it grew and the way his eyes smiled. In a little while, she had to look away.

  “Didn’t I tell you that that was what you’d end up doing?”

  “These villages support us. So we support them. Dig potatoes. Help with the harvest. The land is very poor. We live off it—no ration cards. From time to time we steal some.”

  When he went back to digging, she could look at him properly. He was being so kind and everything was simple; something about him was different. Perhaps it was to do with the betrayal. She pushed the bad thought away.

  “You like it, don’t you?”

  “It’s good to labour,” he said. “It’s good not to think.”

  For supper, madame offered white bean soup, coarse farm bread and onions, which Ilse sliced as neatly as she could while François washed himself outside at the well in the yard. The three of them sat to eat.

  “Madame—for you.” From behind his back, François magicked a tin of coffee beans, real ones, and held them out. The farmer’s wife was dumbfounded.

  “Will you make us some?”

  “On va se régaler,”109 she said.

  The old-fashioned grinder whirred; the aroma was magnificent. The three of them drank the coffee in silent enjoyment. François played with the empty glasses, three, two and one, until the pyramid was perfectly aligned. The day had gone fast. She knew the rules, understood not to talk too much to madame, not to ask anything about where she was or why. She helped wash the dishes, standing by her side. By eight o’clock madame was yawning, her head lolling. She wondered where the farmer was.

  “Where will mademoiselle sleep?”

  “She can have my bed.”

  His was the second bedroom, his bed the one she had already slept in. She washed in the basin set on a little stand near the window with the blackout curtain open onto the warm night and a breeze flowing in. She brushed her hair several times and put on her nightgown. She drew the curtain, lit the candle, sat on the bed and waited. Softly, François knocked on the door. He sat on the bed, pulled off the heavy boots. Then he stood, looking at her. “Excuse me,” he said politely.

  “Oh.”

  Ilse turned her back, hoped she was not blushing. Anyway, it was almost too dark to see. The rustling sound was him undressing. Then he came round to her side of the bed and blew out the candle. She waited. He went back to his side of the room and sat down on the bed, which creaked heavily.

  “So many Poles,” she said. “You must feel at home.”

  It was an exceptionally stupid thing to say, even for her.

  “From the mines, there are thousands of them near here. A big Polish community.”

  “Oh.”

  “Lie down, Ilse,” he said. “There’s plenty of room for two if we make ourselves small.”

  Stiffly, Ilse lay down, turned onto her side. When he lay down, the bed creaked again. She told herself to breathe. He pulled up the cover, lying with his arms crossed behind his head, and sighed heavily. The sigh turned into a yawn.

  “Good night, ma petite. Sleep well.”

  “François, what happened to the farmer?”

  “Poor man. Taken as a hostage. Nobody knows.”

  His breathing deepened.

  Ilse lay wide awake, becoming angry.

  “Am I to stay here?”

  “Hmmh? No.”

  “Then what do you want of me?”

  “This isn’t safe. I’ve arranged a place for you. High in the hills.” His voice was slurred with tiredness.

  “Far away, is that it?”

  She knew that she sounded cross.

  “It won’t be for long. Don’t worry, Ilse. The Allies are in Europe. We’ll take Italy. We’ll win the war,” he said.

  She did not trust herself to speak. He was going to sleep. She coughed, twice.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” she said in a tight voice.

  “Don’t you trust me to do the best for you?”

  “With my life,” she said.

  “Then what do you want of me?” He reached out, patted her on the shoulder. Ilse found nothing to reply. This question, the one he would never answer, went round and round her head.

  François slept. She edged as close as she dared and smelt the smell of him on the nightshirt, the sweet fragrance of his skin, faintly olive-smelling with its little edge of coffee, of cigarettes. He had been up half the night, she told herself, he had laboured in the fields all day. It was only natural that he was tired. He did not want to touch her. It never occurred to him. She did not dare to touch him. She could not stop thinking about the woman in Pontacq, whom he had taken in the night. In due course, anger gave way to the weary, familiar feelings.

  The faint noise was the sound of a man screaming silently in his sleep, the bed rocking violently.

  “It’s all right, it’s all right.” She reached out, tried to calm him. He struggled wildly, the muffled noise rising until, with a huge effort, he sat upright in bed and let out a real scream. Sweat was pouring off him. His shirt was sodden.

  “Please, please—don’t—”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  He lay back, his chest heaving.

  “Was I screaming?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t be in a town. Not while this is going on. I have to stay in the country, where no one can hear me.”

  “Take off the shirt,” she said. He was shivering with cold. He threw it off. She told him to lie down and warm himself under the covers. Eventually he stopped trembling.

  “You can tell me,” she said. “Maybe that will stop the nightmares. If somebody else knows.”

  For a long time she listened to his quiet breathing. She was almost asleep when she heard his faint whisper.

  “You see, Ilse, it was bad luck. A resistant decided to squeal and they took him for a ride round Marseilles and he saw me almost immediately. Marcel ran. He got away all right, but of course they kept me.” His voice was weary. “We had very good papers. I wanted to try and bluff it through. Once you run, they know. Marcel was right and I was wrong. I had several months to think about it.”

  “How many months?”

  “Long enough. The time went slowly. I used to get news. You know, the FFI110 would cycle past the prison, call out the news from the BBC bulletins. For all the prisoners inside. To give us hope.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Shall I light the candle?”

  “No. I’d prefer not.” His voice was very even. She knew that tone.

  There was a long silence. In that darkness, she felt that she had never been so close to another human being. He exhaled, a long soft sound.

  “They brought in a child. A little girl. Jewish, of course, there were so many there. A little German Jewish girl. Pretty, dark hair, a little girl maybe ten years old. Her parents were in the building. How did he know, to choose a little girl?”

  He was a quiet voice in the silence of the night.

  “The German officer. He knew a nursery rhyme, he said. Do you know what happened to little suck-a-thumb? She knew the rhyme, she said it, to please him. Then he cut off a finger. The sound, the click. I hear the click. And she didn’t cry for a second—she didn’t cry for a moment—not to begin with. A click. You see, when the bone is cut through. Snap. It’s the click that wakes me, in the night.”

  Ilse swallowed.

  “It didn’t matter to him, what he did to her, because he wanted the information. And I was to watch—so much blood, Ilse, I have never seen so much blood. I see it when I close my eyes.”

  She waited, trying so very hard not to let the words go into her head.

  “Then he held up her hand and said, Shall I start on the other one? You know the rhyme, of Struwwelpeter? Are you familiar with th
e works of Heinrich Hoffmann? He is quite a connoisseur of little children who are naughty. You can save the other hand, if you want. Her parents are musicians. There is, of course, a famous concerto for one hand.”

  His voice went on and on in the darkness until the little girl died. Then he fell silent. Ilse breathed in and out until she thought she could control her voice.

  “Cigarette,” she said.

  “Let me find a match,” said François with the weary gentleness she remembered. He got out of bed, felt for the cigarettes, lit one for both of them. Then he turned, lit the candle that was stuck in an alcove in the wall. In the light of that sudden flame she saw his back. It was a mass of scars, from the neck down and around the sides and down to the buttocks. She touched it. His body shuddered away from her hand. He turned. In places, his back had the angry red of a fresh wound.

  “François, what did they do to you?”

  Hers was the high, thin voice of a child. She took a deep breath, steadied herself.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I am alive. You see, they left my face alone. They are monsters of the most subtle kind. When you see me coming, I look fine. So when you see me coming, if you know me, it is best to run away. That’s the rule. Those who know you avoid you. You have probably betrayed them. Because the torturers are right behind—infinitely wise, knowing exactly how to destroy a human, body and soul.”

  “But it must hurt, the digging—the work—”

  “Pain is good for me. So I won’t forget.”

  Then she was quiet. They smoked in silence. Gradually, the tension went out of him. “Sometimes, if someone holds my head,” he said humbly, “sometimes I can sleep.” She knelt and held his head with her hands cupped round it. When at last his breathing deepened into sleep, she held herself together and was very still, for fear of waking him. While she held his head, he seemed to have peace.

  In order not to think about Struwwelpeter, Ilse thought about the art student with the white-blond hair who got on a train to Paris and joined the heroic Polish Legion and who drew so beautifully in the dust. He relaxed and slept more deeply. She could look as much as she chose. She prayed to her God for a moment’s rest for him. Many broke under torture. Most did. Marcel trusted him, evidently, for in reconnecting with a man returned from hell he had broken the most inflexible rule of them all. She knew so many things about François with absolute certainty. She was certain that he had given nothing away.

  She kept one hand resting on his head, for reassurance. Gently, fearful of waking him, she let the other hover above the latticework of scars which covered his back and upper arms, so that there was no whole skin left, red weals piled on one another, a contour map of her world with places where the blood oozed freshly, where the crust was broken anew. Every slight movement had to hurt him. Perhaps he sensed the hand. Perhaps she was hurting him even now. The light flickered as he turned, groaning very faintly. She held her breath, took his head back between her two hands. The candlelight laid its golden rim on his beautiful untouched profile.

  In the morning she came down the stairs.

  Whistling cheerfully, dominating the farmhouse with his presence, François held up a clutch of eggs. “We’ve been given a present. The hens have laid.”

  Hey presto, there was another little miracle he whisked from behind his back. “And madame has presented us with a little butter she has made.”

  She watched as the long fingers of the artist carefully cracked the eggs, one by one, into the ancient black skillet. They slithered in the pan. Her thoughts slid away from what lay beneath the shirt.

  As the dish was put before her, she tried to smile at him. He smiled back. The dark angel was gone. Ilse lowered her head and started to eat the eggs, slowly. She had not eaten anything so rich for a long time. It was important not to wolf them all down at once. Things went on, they went on and on. The fact that François could not be healed or helped did not change the way that she loved him.

  When she had eaten, he said it was time. She picked up her suitcase. Gaston, once more in the black uniform, had brought the car as far as it could go. Some of the men had returned.

  Ilse saw Marcel rolling a heavy milk churn along the ground and went over to him. “I didn’t thank you,” she said.

  When he smiled, as now, his solemn face lit up and he was suddenly charming. “You and I will meet again. One day, when the war is over. I am certain of it. You can thank me then,” he said.

  François walked with her to the car. “Have you heard of the military academy at Saumur?”

  “Yes,” she said, though she had not.

  “Marcel was there. He was a cadet when the Germans invaded. They had been taught the finest codes of honour. Nobody had ever told them that a French soldier could run away. And so these boys of sixteen saw it as their duty to fight.”

  Ilse waited. She did not think she could stand to hear another sad story.

  “These children raised the flag and held a bridge against the German advance for a whole day. While the rest of France collapsed. And the good folk of Saumur stoned them, from behind, so they should surrender faster and spare the town. Marcel is the best man I have.”

  She nodded. They had reached the car. Lightly, he kissed her on both cheeks.

  “Where am I going?”

  “A beautiful place.”

  She nodded again and tried to smile. She got in. The car bumped away down the track. François was waving. When she could no longer see him, Ilse grew calmer. Of course she knew what he wanted of her. She had always known it. She was the child whom he was going to save.

  SIXTEEN

  Pic de Baudon Mountains, December 1943

  Standing in the sacristy, brushing the rim of mud from the hem of the spare soutane so it would look decent for Sunday, Ilse heard old Totain talking to Père Lemusier. “It is a national tragedy for France. Look what they are sending here. An army of Jews, blacks and communists.” Totain was deaf. He had lost half his teeth and made a whistling noise when he spoke. Some counter-expostulations came from the curé, but the old man was not finished. “They are bombing us, mon Père,” he cried. “Us. Not Germany. They are bombing our cities. Our towns.” He was small, ruddy-faced, over eighty and full of opinions. Many of the village were red; not Totain.

  Ilse finished the soutane, started chiselling away the thick clumps of mud that clung to his shoes. So bent by arthritis that he could scarcely walk, the curé nevertheless visited his flock daily. She dug with the blunt knife, levering off the heavy mass at a snail’s pace, careful not to remove the soles at the same time. Patiently, her employer expounded the strange facts of war. She ducked out of sight when Totain passed; she would see him soon enough at mass. She knew the Latin by heart. Much could be deduced from the solemn tone of it and from the grammar, which was a little like German, and the words, which were a little like French. The words were fascinating. It was harder to like the people.

  Violent winds swept through this tiny hamlet. Père Lemusier said this remote village would be beautiful in the summer; he spoke of bees and honey and fields of herbs. It was safe here; François had sent her here for that reason. The watchdogs knew everyone; there was an outhouse with a corrugated-iron roof she was to go to, if strangers came to the village, if the dogs barked. She had been dropped near a farmhouse and the farmer had offered the barn to sleep in, in return for working in the fields. Within days, the priest had heard about her and come slowly hobbling up the steep slope to ask if she would work for him. Yet his tiny stone house, leaning up against the church for protection, barely had room for him. She was especially grateful now that winter was here, because the cardboard soles of her shoes soaked up the water and then froze, and she was very susceptible to chilblains. The hot red itching which made any shoes a torment was her particular affliction. She was very fortunate. In the towns, where they had no fresh vegetables, epidemics of boils and carbuncles were breaking out.

  When she had cleared up the supper dishes, Ilse chopped dri
ed herbs, breathing in the sweet smell. In spring and summer, Père Lemusier collected wild rosemary, sage and basil, verbena, savory and wild thyme, and dried them. The herbs supplemented his income and gave flavour to the simplest meals. On winter evenings he laboured to sew his little sachets, the tiny needle held in fingers gnarled like tree roots. With perseverance and time, those fingers taught her, anything could be accomplished.

  The curé went to bed early; Ilse slept in the kitchen. Often she woke, remembering the words of François, railing at her inability to forget them, to marvel at the silence. In this quiet place, with nobody to talk to, a person who kept very still might in time hear the voice of God. The curé heard it, even if she could not. She wanted to ask God why she was cursed, why she had always to live without those whose affection and company she so greatly craved. As she made her confession, week by week, her mind grew calmer. She had been angry and hateful to her father and they had quarrelled; she had not loved him. She had told lies. She had felt rage against her mother for abandoning her. She had been unkind and jealous of Renée, impatient and cruel. In the calm dark of the confessional she laid these burdens down.

  That bitter winter there were only deaths, no births. In the mountains, Père Lemusier said, death came closer when the light was low. Twice he was called out to the dying in the middle of the night and the next afternoon she found him, lying quietly on a pew with fingers interlaced, sleeping as peacefully as a child. Ilse, too restless and too young to sleep so much, sat up late. Her fingers were so cold that sometimes she pricked them and did not realise it until tiny spots of blood bloomed and browned the fine muslin. Then she stuck the needle through the work and, closing her eyes, thought about the pink dawn over Meknès and what Toni would be doing that day, and pictured her high heels moving through the souk. When the wind made the door rattle and the candles guttered so low that she could not see, she would crouch over the dying embers of the fire and call up the heat of Morocco, and wonder about the future. She felt certain that Toni would live, though she was not sure of any of the others. Perhaps knowing how to survive was a defining characteristic of the Poles, like their courage and their recklessness. Always, her wilful thoughts crept back to François. She possessed almost nothing, but still she held on to that empire of dreams that Albert had spoken of. This told her that, though she might feel that her soul had become French, her bones would remain German forever.