News of Our Loved Ones

by Abigail DeWitt

  Dedication

  In memory of my mother, Cécile DeWitt-Morette,

  and for Sarah.

  Epigraph

  To go home, one must become a refugee.

  —Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The War Liberation

  News of Our Loved Ones

  The Mother

  Mathilde

  Someone Else

  The Jew and the German

  After the War Ash

  The Ransom Ring

  The Visit

  The Sex Appeal of the French

  Les Mutilés

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Abigail DeWitt

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  The War

  Liberation

  Sirens. Was that what she’d heard? Yvonne dreamed about air raids when there weren’t any, slept soundly through the actual warnings. At first, every siren sent the whole family racing to the cellar; they crouched together in the dark, making themselves as small as possible, their faces hidden in their knees. But after a while, they gave up going downstairs. Yvonne and her sisters, Françoise and Geneviève, climbed into Maman’s bed, burrowing into the warmth of her covers; their stepfather, Oncle Henri, paced the room. Then even that was too much trouble. There was only so much fear a body could hold. If Yvonne heard anything during the night now, she pulled the pillow over her head.

  The hunger was worse, the craving for beef, pork, butter most of all. She wanted butter and marmalade on toast, buttery croissants still warm from the patisserie, a butter and ham sandwich, Maman’s kouign amann.

  It did seem to her that there had been sirens during the night, but who could say? She didn’t always hear things the way other people did. The confusion never lasted long, but there were moments when the buzzing of a mosquito sounded louder to her than a German parade; when the breathing of her classmates hurt her ears, though the teacher was inaudible.

  But the question of nighttime air raids was something else: no one was sure about those anymore.

  She rolled over in bed, staring at the faint ribbon of light that slipped through a crack in the shutters. She was so happy to be home, in her room with the red wallpaper and the curtains with their pattern of violets. It was the smallest room in the house, barely enough space for the bed, a child-sized armoire, and a three-legged stool. A single bookshelf hung on the wall above the armoire. Françoise’s room was bigger, though she was the baby, and there were three empty rooms—her older sister, Geneviève, had moved to Paris in September, her two older brothers had left home long ago—but Françoise’s room had to be reached through Maman’s, and the older children’s rooms, though light and airy, were at the back of the house. Yvonne preferred this one, with its balcony overlooking the street.

  She and Françoise had been sent home from school at the end of May along with the other boarders; the Allies were expected any day now and it would be better for all the girls to be with their families. Boarders wouldn’t have to take exams, they wouldn’t have to obey the nuns again until September. Not all of the nuns were cruel—two or three, beloved of the younger girls, were even pretty—but the ones who weren’t mean were mostly stupid. Vicious or insipid, they drained the pleasure out of every bright moment.

  When the Germans had come, her grandmother had pointed out at dinner that some of them weren’t so bad, some had perfectly decent manners, and Oncle Henri had left the table in disgust; Yvonne, allying herself with her stepfather for the first and only time in her life, had thought, It’s the same with the nuns. It’s stupid to make distinctions between them.

  She hated the nuns frankly and openly, which was possible only because Oncle Henri supplied the convent with coal, and though her boldness filled the other girls with awe, she had no illusions: if it weren’t for the coal, she’d be as obedient as the next girl.

  When she was twelve, in answer to a question from the Mother Superior about what she was thinking, Yvonne had looked up at her without flinching. “I would like to crush you,” she said, and she made a motion with her hands as if she were grinding something with a mortar and pestle. Nothing happened. The Mother Superior did not speak or move. She hardly even seemed to breathe. Yvonne would have thought she had imagined the whole thing if not for her racing heart.

  But she might have imagined last night’s sirens.

  Any minute now, Maman would call her down to breakfast, to a watery bowl of chicory that satisfied no craving. Why go down when her bedroom, even in the early morning gloom, was so beautiful and was hers alone? She wanted to open her shutters and breathe in the smell of honeysuckle and seagulls, of the dusty pear trees across the road, but then everyone would know she was awake and there would be no excuse for staying in bed. She gazed up at the spines of her books, at Mirabelle’s lone porcelain foot sticking out from the shelf. The doll sat with the books, placed with the other M’s (Molière, Montesquieu) to keep things in alphabetical order. A sock dangled from Mirabelle’s foot and below her stood the small armoire, with its fleur-de-lis, its fluted edges—who had done this, Yvonne wondered, carved the wood so beautifully? On the rickety stool was an old lamp, and even it, with its shade partly burned through, seemed to Yvonne a kind of miracle.

  Her throat tightened. She might see him today. Why shouldn’t he bicycle down the street at two o’clock as he’d always done and glance up at her balcony? She didn’t know his name. She didn’t even know where he had been headed every day last summer when he rode past, staring up at her. For weeks she hadn’t met his gaze. She would catch sight of him, turning the corner onto their street—always between 1:50 and 2:05—his head bare, red hair ruffled by the breeze and his face open, handsome, easy. One arm dangled by his side and the other barely touched the handlebar. Instantly, she glanced down. She felt his eyes on her, felt the heat of his gaze the entire length of time it took for him to reach the end of the street—a one-minute ride that seemed to take hours—though she couldn’t have known in the beginning if he even noticed her. When he was right below the house, she saw a blur in her peripheral vision, that was all.

  And then one day—her heart had been sore all morning, like something she’d swallowed the wrong way—she glanced out when he would be approaching the house and he was right below her, staring up. The next day she looked again. And then for days, weeks, she stared at him the whole length of his ride and he stared back, turning to look over his shoulder when he reached the end of the street. They were the happiest days of her life, of all her sixteen years, those two weeks when, for a minute or two every afternoon, she and the red-haired boy looked nakedly at each other.

  Though she was starving, she couldn’t eat, and the feel of her bones pressing up through her skin thrilled her. Hip bones, clavicle, shoulder blades, jawbone: wherever her skin grew taut, she imagined his hand. The world was glazed with light and the Germans made no sound at all. I love you, she thought, watching him ride toward her. And even when he wasn’t there: I love you, I love you, I love you.

  She heard his voice sometimes. When she was coming out of the bathroom, while she was waiting in line for food. It was deep and sudden and always a little too close. He’d speak more softly, she thought, if he knew it hurt her. Like sandpaper on an open sore. She hadn’t known that pleasure and fear were so alike.

  But she was never afraid when she saw him. She stared right into his eyes, irises as blue as the early morning, and smiled at him.

  And then one day, he stopped. He parked his bike in front of her house and called up. “Hello!” he said, his voice
so much milder than she had imagined. He bowed. She stifled a laugh—beads of sweat were rolling down her sides—and called back, trembling: “Hello!”

  That was the end of it: Oncle Henri burst through the front door, told the boy to stop gawking, went upstairs, and slapped Yvonne in full view of the street. She never met his gaze again, though for the rest of the summer she still stood on the balcony every day from 1:50 to 2:05, her mouth dry and her throat sore, staring at him. She prayed for him to look up, to see her suffering, to know that she loved him, but he looked straight ahead. The day before she went back to school at the end of the summer, she whistled a tune from childhood as soon as he appeared on the street, but he didn’t glance up. The whistle died in her throat and the only sound was the whisper of his tires on the pavement. And then, in front of the house, he paused. He climbed off his bicycle, slipped something under a rock, climbed back on, and vanished.

  That evening, just before curfew, when the street was nearly dark, she slipped out and found his note. You are a bird.

  That was all. She read it over and over and gave it a thousand meanings, seeing in the slope of his letters such declarations of love, such caresses, but that’s all it was, the four words, tu es un oiseau. The tu was everything, as if they’d already kissed, as if he had already cupped his hand around the back of her neck and pulled her toward him, pressed his lips against hers; as if she had already smelled him, felt the coolness of his body, the muscles of his hands, as if she had felt her teeth press against the inside of her lips as they did when she pressed her own palm to her mouth, imagining. The tu and the bird, that she was a bird, that he should say so, the knowledge of her so intimate. But what could she say in return? She stayed up late, composing a long letter in which she described not only the depth of her love but all the members of her family and the color of her room and her hatred of the Germans and all the things they would eat together, the two of them, when the war was over. The letter was seventeen pages long and it was three in the morning before she finished it and then she folded it up and put it in a notebook. She took a clean sheet of paper, wrote thank you, and, though it would kill Oncle Henri to know that she was violating curfew—putting them all at risk for her own purposes!—she slipped through the front door and left the note under the same rock where he had left his.

  * * *

  “Yvonne!” her mother called. “Are you still asleep?”

  She closed her eyes and dozed a little.

  “Yvonne!”

  And then, because it was hopeless, they’d call her down no matter what now, she rose and opened her shutters and gasped at the freshness of the air, the smell of the salt, of the honeysuckle. It was not possible that the world could be so beautiful. It had rained while she slept, and the sky was still low and velvety, the color of smoke. She closed the curtains to dress and turned on the lamp: the walls turned crimson and the armoire glowed like roasting chestnuts—none of this was possible, she thought. She made up her bed, smoothing the violets on her bedspread with the flat of her palm and this, too—the bed, the motion of her own hand, seemed impossibly beautiful to her.

  But Maman was waiting downstairs with a list of chores and Yvonne must hurry or be met already—so soon into her vacation—with her mother’s disapproval. (Because surely they wouldn’t call the girls back to school now? Surely this was the beginning of summer vacation. Either the Allies would come and there’d be too much fighting, or they wouldn’t and everyone would keep expecting them from day to day.) It was as if Maman turned to stone when she was displeased, her face suddenly cold and remote.

  She hurried downstairs, hurried in the bathroom, and found her mother and Françoise at the table drinking their bowls of chicory. Oncle Henri was already weeding the garden and it struck Yvonne that, though she had wanted to stay in her room, though she loved her red walls and her armoire and had not wanted to be called down, even this—the long table, the bowls of foul liquid, her mother’s sagging face and Oncle Henri’s profile through the window—was more beautiful than she had ever realized. Françoise slurped her chicory, her long black braids falling down her back, her chair a little closer to Maman’s than it needed to be. She was fifteen, mostly fun—she laughed at Yvonne’s jokes—but she still clung to Maman, always standing slightly behind or next to her, pulling her chair closer to Maman than necessary; and Maman relied on Françoise as she never relied on Yvonne, asking her to fetch things, to unfasten the back of her dress, find the cream for her feet, even when Françoise had schoolwork to do.

  Maman smiled faintly at Yvonne; she always looked tired now. “The rain’s let up. I thought we’d weed the lawn around the steps.”

  “We might die today,” Yvonne said, breezily.

  Françoise, half asleep, kept her head over her bowl of chicory, forcing the liquid down with tiny, labored sips.

  “Did you hear the sirens?” Maman asked.

  “I think so.”

  “I thought so, too,” Maman said, putting down her napkin though her chicory was only half drunk. “Brush your teeth, girls, and then we’ll get to work.”

  And though it was a long time to lunch, and longer still until the hour between one and two when the family rested and Yvonne stood out on her balcony, she didn’t mind weeding today. Françoise hummed mindlessly beside her, and all the flowers were blooming, the roses and the peonies and the foxglove. The heads of lettuce were full and healthy, all in their rows, and the sweet peas covered the fences. She remembered the poem she’d memorized for English, the lark’s on the wing . . . all’s right with the world, and, resting on her haunches, looking up at the dove-gray sky, she thought, Yes. It is. She would see him today.

  Though the war raged on, though she craved a fistful of butter, still, the damp wind silvered the leaves and the roses grew up the garden wall. And Maman, sweating beneath her hat, wordlessly taking the shears from Françoise, was beautiful, with her fat knees, her rings of sweat. Even Oncle Henri, digging at the far side of the yard, with his cold face, his list of rules and chores, was beautiful. For she was loved.

  She gazed at the rust-colored stones in the wall, and at the rabbit hutch with its dark, musty smell so redolent of stew, of the rabbits’ tiny pelts stitched together into coats, their bodies smooth and shiny after they’d been skinned. It had horrified her in the first winter of the war that Maman killed them and that she herself was required to skin them; the first several times she’d wept with Maman standing over her, correcting her technique—you must pull just so, so that the skin comes off in one piece—but now all she thought of was the warm, slippery meat, the soft fur, the glistening bodies, and this was not only because she was in love, but because she was ravenous after her bowl of chicory and a morning outside. And because no matter how warm she grew working in the garden, she hadn’t forgotten the cold of the winter, or the chilblains she could never scratch hard enough.

  For lunch they had omelets and salad, though there was no oil for the dressing, no butter for the eggs. But now she didn’t mind: soon they would all take their naps, and she could go out onto her balcony.

  “I’d like to talk to you both after you’ve finished the dishes,” Maman said to Yvonne and Françoise.

  “I’m so tired, Maman,” Yvonne said, dry-mouthed, her throat so tight it hurt to speak. She dried the last of the plates. “Could we talk later?”

  “Well, of course,” said Maman. “Let’s all have a nap.”

  Her head ached, and her throat, her heart, and the minutes passed more slowly than when, as a small child, she and Françoise had waited in the schoolyard for their mother to pick them up.

  The clock struck the quarter hour and Yvonne jumped, her eyes fixed on the end of the street.

  The hour came, the quarter past. He was not coming.

  Maman knocked on her door. “It’s late, Yvonne.” And in her mother’s voice, she heard the truth: they would all be dead soon. Maman had known what she was waiting for, had given her the extra fifteen minutes so that she cou
ld die happy. Maman could not have known that he wasn’t coming, that—what? He’d found another girl? Moved away, died? Maman wouldn’t have been watching the street all these weeks and months, she would simply have known that Yvonne would watch it as soon as she came home, and Maman would have allowed her, because they were dying; when you were dying, you could do anything.

  But he hadn’t come. She had waited faithfully, and he had forgotten her. She would die without him—her body revolted as if she’d swallowed something rotten: she couldn’t die. Then she began to laugh, a trembling so fine it was barely more than a hum. What choice was there? Soon—in a week? A few hours? She would simply cease.

  The world had seemed so vivid that morning only because she was dying. For though she had loved the boy with the red hair, though it had been delicious to feel herself loved—tu es un oiseau—still, the sudden beauty of the walls, of the polished wood, of her mother’s sweat-stained dress—what were they but the rapture of farewell?

  “I’ll be right there, Maman.” She turned from the balcony and, without thinking, almost pulled the shutters closed, the windows, as if it were time for bed. Her chest burned, but her mother was waiting for her, with her kind, sagging face, her fat arms. Yvonne opened the door, and there was Maman, white with irritation. She wasn’t thinking of death at all.

  The boy with the red hair did not love her, her mother’s face was stiff and disapproving as a nun’s (more so, because no one gave Maman extra coal). They would be dead soon and everyone went on with his work, as if it were a day like any other, as if it meant nothing at all to leave the honeysuckle, the sea cliffs, the footless leg of Mirabelle.

  “It’s too late to have the talk I wanted to have with you,” Maman said, sharply. “Oncle Henri wants you to get right to your studies.”

  But what could Maman have wanted to talk about, since apparently, she realized neither that Yvonne was in love, nor that they were going to be killed soon? Yvonne’s behavior at school? The need to economize? The coming chores? She reached up on impulse and put her palm to Maman’s cheek. “I’m sorry I overslept, petite Maman,” she said, and kissed her.