Piglettes

by Clémentine Beauvais

  The old lady’s called Adrienne, and, she tells us as if it weren’t out of the ordinary, she’s ninety-five. She’s almost always lived here, though she wasn’t born here… (She gets her key out to open the door to her tiny house, near the castle.) Tonight, she’s celebrating the birth, in Tokyo, of her first great-grand-niece. Her grand-nephew married a Japanese woman (something that Adrienne seems to find quite strange, but then again “they’d always been his type”.) So the little girl will “no doubt have slanted eyes”, but it “doesn’t matter too much”, she guesses, because “these days people come in lots of different colours”. Her name is Lola, middle name Kimiko. So you see, she might as well celebrate the news with someone. No, she’s never had children herself, though she would have liked to.

  “I’ve been living here alone since my two sisters died, one ten years ago, the other one last year.”

  Inside, the house is like any other rural house belonging to an old person: crochet dollies, a smell halfway between potpourri and bin bottom, yellowed photographs on dark wooden furniture. I look at one of them, showing three smiling, well-dressed ladies in their sixties in front of the castle.

  “My sisters and me,” Adrienne says.

  She flicks her key onto a little flower-shaped hook and tells us to make ourselves at home (tricky for the Sun, whose wheelchair is a bit too big to navigate the tiny, cramped living room—way too many coffee tables, chairs and empty boxes). We squeeze onto the sofa around a mangy dog who takes up all the space.

  Plop! Goes a bottle somewhere.

  “Champagne!” Adrienne says, bringing us five glasses.

  “Thank you, but my sister and I don’t drink,” the Sun tells her.

  “Not even fruit juice or something?”

  “If you’ve got fruit juice or something, sure.”

  She fishes a bottle of fruit juice or something from a cupboard, and pours Astrid and me a glass of champagne each.

  “Astrid,” I say to my blonde friend, “if you start telling us your most secret fantasies when you’re drunk, I solemnly promise to only take note of half of them.”

  “And if you stand up on the table and show us your knickers, I’ll only take three pictures.”

  “Deal!”

  We clink glasses. Astrid, as we already know, has a thing for champagne. I’m not yet used to the taste—a bit too frank, a bit too fizzy, with its bubbles like needles—bitchy, those bubbles, vaguely sneaky, compared with the big booming air pockets of a good old Perrier.

  “To Lola!” says the Sun, raising his glass.

  “To Lola,” the old lady confirms. “Would you mind looking at that thing they bought me, there, the… the tablet—would you mind looking to see whether they’ve sent me any pictures?”

  The Sun shows her the half-Japanese great-grand-niece from a variety of angles in the dozen photos taken by the happy parents.

  “I don’t know why he was always so keen to go to Japan. It was his thing. Then he found a Japanese woman. That said, she’s very nice. It’s like you,” she says to Hakima and the Sun. “You’re very nice, even though… even though…”

  “Even though we don’t drink champagne?”

  “Yes. But it’s good, it just means there’s more for the rest of us…”

  We help Adrienne prepare dinner: tagliatelle with courgettes from the garden, frozen burgers, lettuce, also from the garden—which needs to be carefully parted from all its slugs—and supermarket cherry tomatoes. Astrid runs to the trailer to get a few sausages, as a thank-you present to Adrienne.

  Meanwhile, we tell her about our lives, our journey, our reasons for it. She thinks it’s complicated and stressful.

  “That’s what society’s like, these days… I’d rather be sitting here quietly in my garden. That’s what I like about this place: it’s out of the way, and calm, and old. The castle hasn’t changed since the Renaissance. It won’t. The garden, you just need to look after it so it stays the same year in, year out. That’s good. Long-lasting.”

  Astrid comes back and begins to cook the sausages, expertly tossing them around a partly de-Tefloned pan.

  “Yet you must have moved around a bit,” I note, bringing the open champagne bottle to the table. “You told us you weren’t born here.”

  “Oh, that’s true,” says Adrienne, “but that… that wasn’t the same thing.”

  The atmosphere is relaxed as we start to eat, sitting around the mahogany table, using blackened silverware that must be a family heirloom. I feel like I’ve brushed against a potentially interesting, but also sensitive, topic. After another glass of champagne, I go up to second gear. “Where did you and your sisters spend your childhood?”

  “Our childhood?” She gulps down some champagne, then a big chunk of bread, which stretches the wrinkly skin of her throat. “In Nevers, a few hours’ drive from here.”

  “Nevers? We’re supposed to be cycling there tomorrow. Do you go back often?”

  She shakes her head. Never. She hasn’t been back since she was sixteen.

  “When was that?”

  “When I left? In 1945. With my sisters.” Astrid whistles to indicate that 1945 was so long ago that everything was probably in black and white back then—the city must have changed so much since that the lady would find it unrecognizable. She probably remembers woods, fields and little gardens, and now it must be piles of buildings, car parks and supermarkets. Adrienne seems to agree:

  “I’ve never wanted to go back.”

  “Why did you leave at such a young age?”

  It takes some time for our host to reply to this. She spends that time slicing through three different cheeses (Reblochon, Morbier, Cabécou) and drinking another mouthful of champagne.

  “Because of my sister Marguerite—we left for her sake.”

  We pick small home-grown strawberries from a bowl, waiting for the story to come. It finally does.

  “She was fifteen, I was sixteen and Lucile, our older sister, was eighteen. We were as naive as the little birds. We had great dreams—we wanted to live together, travel and work together. We weren’t even thinking of getting married; come the end of the war—because of course, at the time, we were at war: Nevers was in Nazi-occupied France—come the end of the war we thought we’d go to America and open a shop there.”

  “But clearly,” says Astrid, “it didn’t work out that way.”

  (Astrid, world rubbing-salt-in-the-wound champion.)

  “No,” Adrienne replies. “Marguerite fell in love with a man in our village. She met with him almost every day in the woods and the countryside. They were, er—good friends.”

  “Was he in the Resistance or was he a collaborator?” Hakima asks.

  “Hakima!” the Sun grumbles.

  “Neither,” the old lady whispers.

  “Not everyone was in the Resistance or a collaborator,” Astrid explains in a teacher’s voice. “It’s a highly simplified vision of what happened in France during the Second World War.”

  “But they told us at school…”

  “That’s because you’re young. They put it like that so you wouldn’t get confused. But when you get to our age, you’ll do the Second World War in History again and you’ll see it’s much more complicated than that. That’s what Madame Adrienne means: he was neither resisting nor collaborating; he was keeping himself alive, that’s all.”

  Or maybe that’s not all. The Sun’s onto something: “That good friend of your sister’s, was he French?”

  “No,” says Adrienne, “he wasn’t.”

  “What was he, then?” asks Hakima.

  The Sun frowns and whispers something into Hakima’s ear.

  “Oh,” she goes. “That makes me think, we don’t know any Germans, do we?… No, we don’t.”

  I do. It’s him who doesn’t know me.

  “So what if he was German?”

  “So what? Hakima, France was at war with Germany.”

  “Oh, right. So they should have killed each other, and inst
ead they were going out. But when you think about it, if everyone had done that, then we wouldn’t have needed to be at war or anything. It’s like that documentary we saw, remember, where the Jewish and the Palestinian people, you know, they were living together and eating together instead of the Jewish people killing the Palestinians all the time.”

  The Sun coughs. “Ahem, Hakima, Astrid’s right, it’s a bit more complicated than that, those things—”

  “But you always say the Palestinians keep getting killed by the J—”

  “Hakima, please…”

  Adrienne nods, but she seems to think it was actually quite simple. It simply meant her little sister could never marry her lover.

  She starts again, “At some point, Nevers was bombed.”

  “By the Germans,” Hakima suggests.

  “No. By the Allies.”

  “Who?”

  “France’s allies.”

  “What? But why?”

  (We’re getting to the limits of the Year 8 History curriculum.)

  “They were trying to liberate France. But the bombing killed a lot of civilians. Anyway, a few months later, Nevers was liberated.”

  “By the Allies?”

  “Yes, by the Allies.”

  (Hakima smiles, satisfied that this episode at least is understandable.)

  “And of course,” Adrienne says, “they shot lots of people in the streets.”

  “They shot who?… Germans?”

  “Yes, but also French people who had collaborated with the Germans—or who were suspected of having done so. They shot Marguerite’s friend.”

  “Oh, no!” Hakima moans. “I knew it. I knew it would be a sad story. At least they didn’t shoot her—they can’t have done because there’s a picture of her over there looking all old.”

  “They didn’t, no. They generally didn’t do that to women.”

  But the Sun, Astrid and I know what they did to women.

  “Women who’d slept with Germans had their heads shaved,” Adrienne mutters. “Afterwards they paraded Marguerite through the village like that, in front of everybody.”

  She dumps her strawberry stalks and cheese rinds into a small bowl and downs what’s left of the champagne, probably rather flat by now.

  “And since they thought Lucile and I might have slept with Germans too, they did the same to us.”

  “What? That’s so unfair!” screams Hakima, who’s really a good audience for this kind of storytelling. “You hadn’t done anything wrong!”

  “Hakima,” the Sun groans, “it was also unfair for their other sister. She hadn’t done anything wrong either.”

  Adrienne nods. “We were skinny, bald, humiliated. As soon as we set foot outside, people would hurl insults at us. People we hardly knew cursed us in the most horrible way. We were shamed—all the time. It wasn’t easy, you know.”

  “Yes,” pipes Astrid. “We do know.”

  She’s not wrong. It’s not the same thing, but we know.

  “We locked ourselves underground, in our parents’ cellar, waiting for our hair to grow back. It wasn’t too bad; we played games together. We grew even closer than before.”

  “Good strategy,” I say. “Strength in unity.”

  “A year later, we came out again. But people still remembered, and we were still getting abuse thrown at us. We had to go away.”

  “To America?”

  “No, to here. An aunt told us the castle of Longuemort was looking for a couple of wardens. Instead, we offered them a trio of very respectable sisters. They said yes. We settled down and stayed.”

  “For eighty years?”

  “Pretty much. In the end we did spend our lives working together, just as we’d always wanted.”

  She sinks back into her chair and stares at the chandelier, calmly.

  “But not in the real world,” murmurs Astrid, being her usual tactful self. “You cut yourselves off from the real world.”

  “The real world hadn’t given us anything we liked. It’s not easy to get over such abuse, such humiliation. It’s not easy to get over a war. You want to crawl under your bed and never get out again, if you see what I mean.”

  “I do,” says Kader softly.

  “The four of you—I’ve heard your story on TV, you know,” says the old lady. “I was very moved by it.”

  She said those last few words reluctantly, as if she didn’t want to admit that she might be moved by anything.

  Later, before we go to bed—she offered to let us sleep in her sisters’ bedrooms, but that would have been weird, so instead we pitched our tents just outside in the garden—I walk up to her and ask, in an annoyingly shaky voice, “Adrienne, your—your little sister—I was wondering, do you think… do you think he manipulated her? The German, I mean? Do you think—do you think maybe because he was strong and powerful, he impressed her and everything, and he knew he could get—I don’t know, maybe food or something—by being with her? You think he was exploiting her?”

  “Oh, no. She was in love with him, that’s all. He was nice.”

  “But men take advantage of their power sometimes.”

  “Yes, that happens. It does.”

  I visualize that very young girl from Nevers, throwing herself into the arms of her German lover in a field, all in black and white, of course, because it was so long ago. And then the German is shot. And now he’s lying in a pool of blood, blood that’s streaming from the holes in his uniform. In a black-and-white world, blood is black.

  But then again, maybe it was wrong, what they did.

  Sometimes you just aren’t allowed to be together, and that’s that.

  For example, in France, if a teacher sleeps with a student, the teacher can be sent to prison.

  Except that, as Mum’s told me a million times, she was twenty-five years old when it happened. At twenty-five, you’re well over the age of consent. (“It’s not ethical to go out with your students anyway,” I said. “Perhaps, but it’s not illegal, Miss Know-It-All.” “It’s not ethical. It’s pathetic-al.” “Maybe it’s not ethical, maybe it’s pathetic-al, but you wouldn’t be born, Mireille, if I hadn’t made that decision at that time.”)

  What I now know is that when Mum chose to become a high-school teacher in a small provincial town, she wasn’t wasting her time. She was taking her time. She was taking her time to write a response to Klaus.

  Being and Bewilderment: Towards a Philosophy of the Unexpected. I’ve read it. It goes against Klaus’s philosophy.

  Klaus thinks human nature is all about planning and mapping. Human beings create programmes, plans, maps, predictions. Human beings are creatures who know there’s such a thing as tomorrow, and that it needs to be prepared for, predicted, prophesied.

  Patricia Laplanche, my mother, thinks the opposite. She writes that what’s unique in human nature is that we find joy in surprise, in newness, in the unexpected. Human beings make plans and draw maps, sure—but that’s not what makes us human. If anything, that’s what makes us animals. Animals plan things too. Bees sculpt honeycombs, cats calculate the trajectory of their paws towards the butterfly they want to catch (except Fluffles, who’s a lame butterfly hunter). But human beings are only properly human because they draw novelty and the unexpected from this well-ordered world. Art, emotion and life are what happen when plans, programmes and predictions fail.

  Klaus’s condom tears, and the unexpected happens: an unexpected little piglet. Me.

  Did Mum go to Bourg-en-Bresse to run away from the real world? She never told Klaus she was pregnant by him. They’d already “stopped seeing each other” when she realized. It was almost too late to have an abortion: for a few weeks she just thought she was a little sick, and then she found out she was expecting me. She decided to keep me—why? As a souvenir? No: because she felt she could handle it. It’s the only explanation she’s ever given me: “I don’t know, Mireille, stop nagging me with that. I felt like I could handle it, that’s all.”

  “I think you
made the wrong choice. In retrospect, I mean. Seeing what I turned out to be like, personally, I’d have aborted myself.”

  “Goodness, my dear girl, you can’t imagine how much I’m looking forward to the time when you’ll stop wallowing in morbid thoughts. For now, you could at least make an effort and dress up as a goth.”

  “But can you believe it? I could, I should never have existed. It makes me dizzy just thinking about it.”

  “Indeed. All those quiet afternoons and evenings I could have had…”

  “Don’t listen to her, Mireille,” says Philippe Dumont, “we’d be bored without you…”

  The Bresse Courier, 10th July 20XX

  THREE LITTLE PIGLETTES TROTTING TOWARDS NEVERS

  EXCLUSIVE—Mireille Laplanche, the spokesperson for the “Three Little Piglettes”, has told our newspaper that the young girls and their now famous sausage trailer will stop for a lunchtime sale in the small town of Cercy-la-Tour in the Nièvre region, before reaching Nevers in the early evening.

  Mireille Laplanche, Astrid Blomvall and Hakima Idriss were expected yesterday in Gueugnon, but never made it there, spending the night instead near the castle of Longuemort. “We’re a little behind schedule,” Laplanche confided, “but we’re still planning on being in Paris on the morning of 14th July.” The teenagers’ journey has triggered an unexpectedly passionate response from bloggers and social-media users; the three friends, who self-define as “piglettes”, remain evasive as to what they are intending to do once in Paris for the national holiday, a silence that has been feeding wild speculations on the Internet.

  H.L.

  Are the Three Little Piglettes just seeking attention, or do they have a good reason for cycling to Paris? Join the conversation on Leprogrès.fr.

  The selfie generation! The reality-TV generation! Me, me, me! Don’t give those poor girls the attention they’re thirsting after. Celebrity is a fickle friend!

  GillesDeroyLoquart

  I must say I am surprised that nobody seems to be questioning the following: 1) the fact that these very young ladies are selling sausages, in other words, are working; do they have the required licence and necessary training? and 2) the potential risks for them of such a long and arduous journey. All three of them being extremely obese the possibility of heart attacks is very real. Permissive parenting endangers children and the rest of society!