Wolfsangel (3 page)

‘Get that family out of here,’ she said, finally swatting at the fly with her tea towel. ‘I won’t conceal strangers in this house.’

‘But they deserve to feel safe.’

‘Safe? You must be joking, Célestine. Don’t you think I know what goes on in the cellar?’ Another sharp flap of the tea towel. ‘What your brother, Olivier, and their communist friends get up to? Someone will find out soon enough about their … their activities, and tell the police. No, L’Auberge is not a safe place at all. Besides, why can’t your sister take this family?’

‘She might. I need to speak to Félicité first, but for now I want them to feel safe and welcome here. Besides, Patrick and his friends are not communists, and nobody will say anything. Most people in Lucie are proud of our resistors. They’ve had enough of Pétain and Vichy; enough of the Germans. Everyone wants to help get rid of our occupiers.’

Maman shook her head. ‘How naïve you are. People –– yes even the friendly villagers –– are only interested in protecting themselves. Someone would inform the Germans of their … their
resistance
in a flash, if it suited them.’

I leaned against the table, clamping my scalded fingers in my armpit.

‘So what are we supposed to do, Maman? Enemy troops have overtaken our country, and they’re not going away. Should we just keep our heads down and accept that we’re now powerless, humiliated citizens? Or do we react?
Resist
? Besides, I know you’d never turn in that family upstairs.’ I waved an arm in the direction of her bedroom. ‘Would you?’

Maman’s eyes glittered the brilliant green of unripe grapes. ‘You’ve always been a stubborn little bitch, haven’t you?’ she said. ‘Right from the start.’

She set her mouth in a crabby line as she banged cutlery and crockery onto the blue and white checked tablecloth.

5

The next time I saw the German was on a hot August afternoon. Patrick, Olivier and I had called in to my uncle’s clog shop on the village square of Julien-sur-Vionne to give Uncle Félix and Aunt Maude some comforting words about my prisoner-of-war cousins, Paul and Jules.

Sprinkles of blond hair escaping his Wehrmacht cap, the German was lounging against the fountain wall with the same two soldiers who’d been with him that day at the market. As we walked from the shop, his strange, violet eyes met mine.

‘We meet again, mam’zelle.’ He bowed with a feline kind of grace and offered a pale hand. ‘Martin Diehl.’ He waved his other arm at the two soldiers. ‘Karl Gottlob and Fritz Frankenheimer.’

Karl Gottlob stood stiff and awkward, the cat-eyes as cold as ever. He said something in throaty German I didn’t understand.

‘
Pon-jour,
mam’zelle
,
m’sieurs,’ the chubby Fritz Frankenheimer said, and a fattened pig flashed through my mind.

‘Céleste Roussel,’ I said, shaking Martin Diehl’s hand. ‘And this is my brother Patrick and a friend, Olivier.’

The boys too, shook hands with the three men. Despite their polite nods, I caught the vein ticking in my brother’s temple, and Olivier’s jittery foot-tapping. So practised they were at hiding their animosity, a bystander might’ve believed they were truly pleased to make the Germans’ acquaintance.

‘Come on, we’ll miss the movie.’ Patrick tugged at my arm, he and Olivier sandwiching me between them as we headed for the queue snaking from
Le Renard Rouge
cinema.

‘Why do you insist on speaking to Germans?’ Patrick said.

‘Like your mother says, don’t forget they are the enemy,’ Olivier said. ‘Besides, you know how careful we have to be.’

‘Of course I know not to say a word about anything … to anyone, Boche or not,’ I hissed, the heat burning my cheeks as I glimpsed the Germans in the line behind us.

Lucie-sur-Vionne had no cinema, so we’d cycled into Julien-sur-Vionne that steamy afternoon –– a rare treat for which Uncle Claude was paying, in return for our harvesting help.

Apart from Lucie’s train line, Julien was much the same as our village, with its bustling square, small businesses, closely-built houses and centuries-old church. Its roads wound through orchards, fields and woods and, as Lucie was named for the Roman soldier, Lucius, Julien was named after Julius Caesar because an elderly villager claimed he’d passed by that way. 

I sat between Patrick and Olivier in the dark, smoke-stained cinema, aching to look like the actresses in
Hôtel du Nord
: the blonde, sultry Annabelle or the dark, slim Arletty, with her thinly-arched eyebrows. I dreamed of being on the big screen, fans admiring me, and imagined I was in Hollywood, driving up Sunset Boulevard in a limousine, sipping champagne and wearing one of my dozens of elegant dresses.

Between admiring the actresses, I caught Martin Diehl looking at me through the flickering dark. Seated with the group of Germans in one corner, the red glow of his cigarette illuminated his high cheekbones, and I slumped in my seat, hoping he’d not notice my dowdy dress, my bare lips and unpowdered face.

***

The audience filed back onto the square, blinking into the sunlight falling thick and golden on the cobblestones.

‘We’ve got a meeting,’ Patrick said, as we retrieved our bicycles. ‘We should be back at L’Auberge in a few hours.’

‘I suppose I’m still not allowed to come?’

‘I told you,’ he said, ‘this is not women’s business.’

‘You’re so unfair! Let me tell you that men would never cope with the pain of childbirth that we endure, so the human race can continue. Women would make much tougher soldiers and resistors than all those big-mouthed, honoured war heroes. Besides, you know I’d never say anything to betray you.’

‘Not intentionally,’ Olivier said. ‘But someone might force it out of you … someone you least suspect.’

Patrick and Olivier said nothing more and I knew they wouldn’t budge, so I tossed my head, swung a leg over the saddle and pedalled away furiously. I trilled the bell at pedestrians who got in my way, not slowing for anyone as I hurtled across the square, down the main road and veered off onto the path through the woods.

Sweat soon drenched my clothes and I flung the bike against a willow trunk and tramped down to the water’s edge. The Vionne blazed with a wealth of sun pennies and a butterfly, fluttering lazily from one rock to another, flitted off as I bent from the gravelly shore and gulped palmfuls of water.

I looked around. Nobody in sight except a few bold birds braving the heat. I tore my dress and underwear off and slid, naked, into the river.

I floated on my back, murmuring with the ecstasy of cool water against hot skin. The current tugged at me like a playful hand, slices of sun casting black shadows into the dark, furtive places on the riverbed.

I flexed my feet, wriggled my toes, and studied my hand, yellowed in that strange underwater light. I laid a palm against my stomach, tracing small circles, and caught my breath as my nipples hardened with the coolness, my small breasts peeking from the surface like milky islands.

When the water crimped my skin like a dried apple, I grabbed a clutch of dangling roots and hauled myself onto the bank.

I brushed stray weeds off, dried myself with my dress, and slipped the damp garment over my head. I shook my hair out, gathered flat pebbles and started skimming them across the water. It was so quiet I could hear the flutter of feathers in nests, the sound of pecking on bark, the fidgeting of insects in the grass.

A pebble skimmed over the water, but not one I’d thrown, and I stopped, my arm held aloft. Another stone flew past, bouncing three times across the water. I heard a rustling noise behind me, too loud for a bird, and spun around to the smiling face of Martin Diehl.

I swallowed my gasp, horrified the German might’ve glimpsed me naked.

‘Did you follow me from Julien?’

‘You pedalled away very fast. I thought I would never catch you,’ he said. ‘Why are you angry?’

‘Angry?’

‘Your brother and his friend. You looked so fierce at them, and cycling away in a hurry.’

‘Oh, that. It wasn’t important, just a silly argument.’

He removed his cap and jacket, and as he lit a Gauloise I glimpsed the powerful muscles move in his neck. But I kept my gaze guarded and low, fascinated by his gun peeping from its leather sheath.

‘You’re a good skimmer, Céleste Roussel.’

‘My father taught me. He taught me everything about this river; warned me about the currents and whirlpools, and made me promise never to swim here.’

A long arm reached out, fingertips grazing my wet hair. ‘Ah yes, I see you take much notice of him.’ I reeled from his touch and he shifted sideways, and sat on a boulder, casually crossing one long leg over the other.

‘This is for you.’ He pulled a brown paper package from a pocket. ‘You might have to come a little closer to reach it though.’ He patted a spot beside him.

I couldn’t help smiling at his stiff, stilted French, but kept observing him and the package warily. Accepting gifts from the Boche was regarded as collaboration.

‘For me?’ I edged towards his rock, but kept standing. ‘Why?’

‘You were admiring them at the market, no? You can open it.’

Despite my misgivings, I tore the paper off and pulled out a packet of nylon stockings.

‘Oh they’re lovely. I’ve never had any like this. Thank you, Martin Diehl.’

‘There is more where I got these,’ he said, as a small bird in a green suit perched on a log, cocking its head as if it too, was admiring the stockings. ‘What else do you like? Magazines? Lipstick? Chocolate? Real chocolate, not false, pale chocolate. I can get what you want.’

I laughed a nervy kind of cackle. Why was the German giving me presents? Surely not because of my looks –– the unmistakeable stamp of a plain, unworldly farm-girl.

I forced a smile to cover my unease, and mask the prods of doubt at his interest in me; at his curiosity in my spat with Patrick and Olivier, cycling off to their meeting without me.

‘Why do you smile, Céleste Roussel?’

‘Nothing … your funny accent.’

‘Ah, the bad school-boy French. You did not learn German?’

‘Your French is very good. But no, sadly, I didn’t learn German.’

‘Why is this sad? So you cannot listen to our plans at the garrison?’

‘What? Listen to what plans?’

‘Do not worry, Céleste Roussel, I am only making a joke.’

‘Oh. Well, my mother didn’t let me stay at school long enough to learn anything much.’

‘Your mother is the healer-woman of the village, yes? She believes teaching you the special medicine is more important than school?’

‘Not likely. My mother thinks I’m too stupid to learn anything. Anyway, I’m not the least bit interested in all that herbal stuff, and if her remedies are no longer handed down to future generations of L’Auberge, she’ll only have herself to blame.’

‘Why do you call it L’Auberge des Anges?’ Martin said, grinding his cigarette butt beneath a black heel. ‘It is not an inn.’

‘Not these days. Now it’s just a simple farm. We don’t even have crops any longer, only the orchard and Maman’s kitchen garden and a few animals. My father said it was once the greatest farm in Lucie, but it ran into hard times during the Revolution. The farmer and his wife turned it into an inn –– The Inn of Angels.’

We were silent for a moment, listening to the
gaa, gaa
laugh of the green bird until it flew off into the hot twists of light. I fingered the packet of nylons again. Martin Diehl probably got them on the black market, but didn’t my mother say the black market was for everyone; that we should all have the right to the same things, and almost everyone was practising it to some extent?

‘Well,’ I said, imagining Talia’s happiness. ‘If you really can get more things I’d like some paints … and brushes and paper.’

‘So you are not only a champion pebble skimmer, you are an artist too?’ His lips curved into a smile, showing impossibly white teeth.

‘I dabble in a bit of painting now and then,’ I said, with a flippant wave. ‘Nothing serious.’

He lit another Gauloise and gathered more pebbles.

‘There are rivers where I was a boy,’ he said, flicking his stones across the surface. ‘We were swimming too, and skimming the stones.’ He squinted into the distance, to a point where the Vionne parted around a sandbank, ruffles of current lapping the edges. ‘And many orchards and fields, just like your village.’ He still clipped his words, but the voice had become faraway, like a melancholic background song.

‘You’re not a bad skimmer either, Martin Diehl,’ I said, throwing my own stones, which bounced further than his did.

‘My friends and I would have skimming competitions when we were young,’ he went on. ‘One of the boys had a beautiful sister. He would steal her underwear, and the one who skimmed his stone the best, got to keep the underwear for a night.’ He laughed and shook the blond head, as if recalling the silliness of boyhood games.

‘So, did you ever win?’

He frowned. ‘Win?’

‘The skimming competitions?’

The muscles in his shoulder tightened beneath the starched shirt as he skimmed another stone, further and more smoothly than the last. ‘I always won, Céleste Roussel.’

‘Oh,’ I said, not really sure what to say. ‘Well, me too, I like to win.’

He caught me unaware then, as he reached across and took hold of my pendant. I lurched back, imagining the same hand levelling a revolver, a machine-gun or a grenade.

‘An unusual pendant.’ He stroked the angel between his thumb and forefinger. ‘It seems old. A family … how do you say? Heirloom?’

‘I don’t think it’s worth much,’ I said, keeping my gaze away from his peculiar, indigo eyes. ‘But yes, a kind of talisman passed from mother to daughter. My grandmother believed the souls of all the women of L’Auberge are trapped inside this old bone.’

‘Very fine work,’ Martin said. ‘What is the bone from?’

‘Oh I don’t know … no one really knows. Some say a carpenter carved it for his wife two centuries ago from seal, ox or walrus tusk. Another family legend says it was sculpted long before that, for a famous midwife from the times of the Black Plague. But some think it was even earlier, and is from the bone of a mammoth. Though I can hardly believe that.’

Martin let the pendant go, his fingertips sweeping the damp hair strands splayed across my shoulders. He bent and kissed me, catching me so off-guard I almost choked.

I jerked away, my eyes darting about the tangle of willows, searching for prying eyes. ‘What are you doing? You can’t just … just kiss me like that. You’re a …’

‘A Boche? Germans are the same as all men, Céleste Roussel.’

I swivelled around, ready to stomp off, but he caught my arm.

‘Let me go!’ I shook off his grip. ‘Do you know what happens to girls if they’re caught with one of you? They shave our heads and parade us about the village for people to shun, and spit at.’