“Were you thinking of anything in particular?” the saleswoman wanted to know.
Franca considered this — she hadn’t actually thought of anything at all — but Helene had already stepped in. “We were thinking of a summer dress. It should be short and tight. The young lady has a very pretty figure, and I think she should show it.”
The saleswoman looked Franca up in down with the air of an expert making an appraisal, then nodded. “Indeed. You really have no need of hiding under baggy sweaters. You have rather long legs. Short dresses should suit you well.”
She eagerly brought over a whole mountain of clothes. After feeling self-conscious at first, Franca was now beginning to enjoy the adventure more and more. In the dressing room she had them hand her article after article. She tried on dresses, skirts, pants, and colorful T-shirts. To her surprise she found she really could show off her body. She was much thinner than she had thought, and in fact she did have pretty legs. The saleswoman and Helene were delighted.
“You’re a whole different person when you dress this way,” said the saleswoman, and Helene added, “Every man will turn around for another look at you, Franca. You look fantastic.”
In the end, Franca bought two short, summery linen dresses, one in white and one in red; a few mini-skirts with T-shirts to go with them; a pair of shorts; and a strapless top that she intended to wear on walks on the beach, to let her shoulders get tanned. Helene wanted to pay for everything, but Franca said that what they had discussed was a single dress, and she wouldn’t accept anything more. She paid with the check card that was linked to the account she shared with Michael, and smiled at the thought that it would make him angry to see the debit. The final sum was rather large, but she thought about how much he had saved these last years, when she had never bought anything for herself. He probably gave his mistress expensive gifts, so she didn’t have to have a bad conscience in the least.
She was exhilarated and in a good mood when she left the shop, loaded up with bags.
“Come on, Helene,” she said. “I’ll take you out to eat somewhere. I’m dreadfully hungry.”
They wound up at Nino’s, an Italian restaurant that sat somewhat hidden away in a back courtyard. They ordered shrimp and then lasagna after that, accompanied by an entire bottle of red wine. Franca chose one of the most expensive kinds.
“My husband is paying for everything,” she said. “And that’s as it should be. So drink up and enjoy it, Helene.”
“You’re completely different,” Helene proclaimed. “It did you good to buy all those nice clothes, didn’t it? You’ve got more color in your face, and you’re smiling more.”
In fact it had done her good. Franca felt lighter and freer than at any other time in the last seven or eight years. It had been an impossibly pleasant feeling to look in the mirror and find herself beautiful. To see herself as that which she could be: an attractive, desirable young woman, with far more charm at her command than she had thought. If the weather stays good, I can see to it that I get good and tanned, she thought.
The waiter brought the wine.
“How nice to see you again, Mrs. Feldmann,” he said. “We haven’t seen you in a long time. Are you celebrating something?”
Helene’s features clouded over. “It is the beginning of my most difficult time. The stations of the cross,” she said in a grave voice.
The way the waiter looked it was clear he was working through whether or not he was expected to make something of this information. Obviously he couldn’t. He looked rather helpless.
“Madame?” he finally said, inquiringly.
Helene could put on a look like a wounded doe, and at this moment she did it better than ever. “It is the beginning of the time in which everything came to an end,” she explained. “I mean the time that ultimately led to my husband’s death.”
The waiter put on an appropriately aggrieved expression and followed with a kind of moment of silence.
Did he know they were speaking of a Nazi thug? Franca asked herself. She took a look at the waiter, a young, good-looking Italian, not twenty-five years old. He hadn’t experienced the Nazis’ reign of terror on the islands. He probably didn’t know a thing about it.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured, poured the wine, and saw to it that he got away.
Franca considered whether she should change the subject, and she racked her brains trying to think of what they could talk about. But Helene didn’t seem at all inclined to let herself be distracted from her melancholy thoughts.
“It doesn’t matter how much time goes by,” she said softly. “Always, whenever the spring comes, always starting in mid-April, it seems there’s not a year gone by between then and now. It’s as if it was yesterday … as if it had all just happened.”
“It’s not easy to be widowed that young,” Franca said, somewhat uncomfortably.
“Oh, you know, that wasn’t what was most awful about it.” She drank her wine quickly. Its effects soon showed, and her tongue began to loosen.
“The awful thing was the circumstances,” she said. “I’ll never get over them.” She stared into her glass. Already she’d drunk almost all of its contents. “You’ll find this shocking, perhaps, Franca, but the fact that Erich wasn’t there anymore has never caused me that much suffering. Our marriage was … not particularly happy. I was always depressed when Erich was around me. Only afterwards did this really become clear to me. In his presence, I couldn’t laugh, I couldn’t be carefree. I couldn’t be young. I was eighteen when I married him, and from my wedding day on I felt like an old woman who only happened to inhabit a young body.”
“He was probably a very difficult person,” said Franca, thinking of what Beatrice had told her. “Even an older woman would have had a hard time with him, but for an eighteen-year-old it must have been rather awful.”
“He was moody, depressive, quick-tempered, vindictive, and sentimental,” said Helene, and Franca thought her list of Erich’s character traits was astonishingly precise and objective. “Only after he was dead could I start living. So …” She didn’t say what she was thinking out loud. Some superstitious fear seemed to hold her back.
“Well, no matter,” she said instead. “He was the person that he was. He couldn’t escape his own nature any more than the rest of us. And it was all a very long time ago.”
She listened to the words’ echo, seemed to look back through the years to a time when she had been young and had still believed that life would keep at least some of its promises.
“It was a very long time ago,” she repeated.
“How …” Franca began carefully. “I mean, how did your husband die?”
It seemed in fact to hurt her still to think or speak about it.
“Hitler’s Germany lay in ruins,” she said. “I’m sure you know how horrible the end was? A kind of Armageddon. The victors’ tribunals loomed, and it was clear that you couldn’t expect leniency. On May 9th, 1945, the German occupation force here on the island surrendered. More than a week before, on May 1st, Erich took his own life.”
“He killed himself?”
“Like his Führer. That is to say, he intended to do the same as the Führer and put a bullet through his head. I don’t know if at the last moment he lost courage or if he didn’t do it correctly … the bullet hit him in the middle of the chest. He wasn’t dead right away, not by any means. He bled to death. For hours. He was in terrible agony.”
“Were you with him?”
Helene nodded. “The whole time. I held his head in my lap and spoke soothingly to him. I told him everything would be alright … but there was no doctor to be found, that was the problem. Everything was in total chaos, it was all helter-skelter. No one was interested in Erich’s fate. At some point he became feverish, he cried for help … it was brutally hot … plus the hunger, the blood …” Sh
e shuddered.
“Never,” she said, “will I forget that frightful day. Never have I experienced something so gruesome. And I hope never again to experience something like it again until I meet my own end.”
She didn’t wait for the waiter but rather poured herself more wine.
“Maybe we should talk about something else,” she said finally.
Back at the house, Franca tried on her new clothes once more in front of the mirror in her room. She twisted and spun around, smiled at her own image. Her face looked too pale, somehow, she thought. It had suited her old sweatshirts and worn-out pants, but now it spoiled the full impression. She rummaged in her makeup bag and produced mascara and lipstick. Carefully she applied mascara around her eyes and looked upon the result with delight: her eyes looked far more expressive, they seemed larger and brighter. Should she do her lips as well? The lipstick was a rather loud red, she had gotten it as a free sample at a drugstore.
Whatever, she thought, I can always just wipe it off again.
The effect was surprising: the red harmonized perfectly with the color of the linen dress she wore, and it went wonderfully with her blond hair. Her lips, fuller and more sensuous than usual, lent her face a seductive air. She looked very womanly, more self-possessed and more commanding.
No longer like a frightened rabbit, she thought, but rather like …
She thought about what kind of animal she would have particularly liked to be compared to. Cats were her favorite animal.
A cat? she asked her image and smiled. Of course, she was a slender, lithe cat, with green eyes and a bright, shiny coat. She smiled again and then she thought, Oh God, what nonsense! How can a grown woman have such an idiot thing in her head? With the back of her hand she quickly wiped the lipstick from her mouth. It was stupid of her to suddenly want to turn into a femme fatale. The role didn’t suit her, she’d never played it, and for good reason. There was no sense in putting on a chic dress, painting her face and then believing she had become a different person. A seductive woman had more than just elegant clothes and showy make-up. She had to radiate self-possession, assurance, and confidence in herself and in the effect she had on others. She had to embody composure and authority.
And Franca felt miles away from all these qualities. She wasn’t even sure if it was just that she’d lost them. She feared she’d never had them to begin with.
There was a knock at the door and Beatrice stuck her head in the room. “Franca? Am I intruding? I wanted …” She broke off and said in amazement, “Oh, but you look good! Is the dress new? It looks magnificent on you!”
Franca tugged at the zipper. “I … it was just a dumb idea … Helene thought I should buy myself something to wear, but …” She was almost panicking from not being able to get the zipper down.
Beatrice stepped inside. “This time Helene didn’t have a bad idea. You’re an attractive woman, Franca, and you should show everyone. Come on, I’ll help you with the zipper. Otherwise you’ll tear the dress apart!”
Franca slipped the dress off like a second skin she didn’t feel right in.
“But the question is,” she said, “what do you buy something like that for! It’s got to have some kind of purpose, and in my case it’s just useless and superfluous!”
Beatrice fixed her with a look. “How old are you?”
“Thirty-four.”
“Thirty-four! A wonderful age! I tell you, Franca, the next dozen years will be the best years of your life. Take advantage of them, for God’s sake! Don’t pull back into yourself now, and don’t think that there’s no use to it all anymore!”
Franca slipped into shorts and a T-shirt. “I just thought I looked so foolish, twirling around here in front of the mirror. It suddenly seemed so ridiculous to me.”
“I believe rather that you’re slowly starting to become normal. Do you know what? Right now you’re going to come with me and the dogs on a nice, long walk. You’ve just got to get a bit of a tan!”
As they went along the cliff path, high above the sea, three excited dogs running wild around them, Franca said, “I ate lunch with Helene today. She told me about her husband’s death. It must have been rather awful then.”
“It was,” Beatrice affirmed. “You know that he shot himself in the chest? He suffered through long death throes. And there was no doctor to be had.”
“Not even Mae’s father?”
“He was also out somewhere else on the island. It was all helter-skelter at that time. Everywhere there was a pressing need for doctors. Many people here were half starved, you know. The islands had been cut off from the outside world for almost a year. The issue of nutrition had long before become a highly critical problem.”
“Helene seemed like she had barely gotten over the way her husband died.”
“She showed an astonishing amount of bravery that day. She really stayed by him till his last moment. Hour after hour. There are some who would have run away for certain. But she stuck it out.”
Beatrice was silent, thinking. “That was one of the few moments,” she said then, “when I really admired her.”
The path now led more steeply downhill, it grew narrower and stonier. The dogs ran down it, barking loudly, wagging their tails, carefree.
Franca looked on in admiration at the grace and ease with which the seventy-year-old Beatrice tackled the descent. She tried to imagine her as a young girl meeting a young man on a bright, late summer night among the cliffs and caves, a situation that meant mortal peril, but that nevertheless neither of them had been able to resist.
“Did you ever meet with Julien again in the open?” she asked. “Like on that first night?”
They had made it to the bottom. A sign was fastened to the stone wall that fenced the street off from Petit Bôt Bay that prohibited dogs from entering the bay beginning on May 1st, and so they could still bring them along with them to the beach. They clambered over a few boulders and stood in the bright sand. The sea was peaceful and smooth that day, it flowed up to the shore in calm waves, ran over the sand as white foam, left silt and algae and tiny mussels behind. The dogs raced along the surf, wild and leaping. Beatrice looked out over the water, breathing in deep and with a kind of happiness filled with affection.
She loves this island, Franca thought. It’s a part of her. It made no difference where she’d once longed to be — now she could no longer live anywhere else.
“We still went out at night often,” Beatrice said in answer to Franca’s question. “You have to understand that Julien had to be in hiding for four years. There were times when he could hardly take it anymore. That cramped garret where the walls were so slanted he could only fully stand up in one spot, the boredom … he was a young, strong man, he couldn’t just read books all day, morning, noon, and night — not for years. On top of this there was the depressing news out of France, constant worries about family, friends. Sometimes when he was sneaking out at night it almost seemed like he was testing the possibility of being caught. As if he took the risk in full awareness, just to finally bring about a change. He might almost have longed to be shot and put an end to it all.”
“But he was putting you in danger too!”
“It wasn’t the case that we always met up when he went out at night,” Beatrice explained. “He often set out alone, and I’d only find out about it the next day or days later. Even hearing about it afterwards I would start trembling. The state of things for the Germans was growing worse on all fronts, it was a bit like with cornered animals. They became more and more dangerous. In the beginning they had gone around like conquerors, they’d strutted and boasted and had been just all-around unpleasant. But being drunk on their victory had also made them a bit more careless, you could get more past them, could do your own things. Then, slowly, the air began to get thinner. They weren’t drunk on victory any longer. None of them could o
penly doubt the final victory, but I think only very few of them still believed in it. They became more aggressive, they sensed threats everywhere they went. The catastrophe of Stalingrad had finally brought about the turning point. Things were going downhill, no matter how loudly those in power across the Channel might claim the opposite. It was the beginning of the end. I tried over and over again to make this clear to Julien. I said I was certain that he wouldn’t have to hold out much longer, but my words didn’t really reach him. His despair intensified.”
“He loved you still?” Franca asked.
Beatrice sat down on a boulder and patted the stone next to her with her hand in invitation. “Come sit. I’d like to feel the sunshine on my face for a bit. I’ll tell you about mine and Julien’s love, and you can decide if it was even love at all.”
“You don’t think so then?” Franca sat. The boulder felt wonderfully warm and smooth. A mild breeze blew and sprinkled her lips with salt. What a magnificent day, she thought.
“Like I said,” Beatrice replied, “I’m of the view that for Julien I was primarily a connection to life. He needed me, I was the last bastion against ultimate despair. It may sound self-aggrandizing, but I think I was the one who prevented him from losing it, from giving himself up or from becoming so incautious that they’d have had to nab him. That was what I meant in his life … and this was more pivotal, perhaps, than the fact that we — in whatever way it was — loved one another.”
GUERNSEY, SUMMER 1943
The Rose Gardener Page 27