Wolfsangel (5 page)

8

I hurried across la place de L’Eglise, my shopping basket swinging from my arm. I waved to Miette’s father in his carpentry shopfront, to the greengrocer and to old Monsieur Thimmonier lounging against the door of his wood-carving shop.

I saw they’d pasted more posters on the church wall. One was of a smiling German soldier handing out sandwiches to French children gathered around him. The caption underneath read:

Abandoned citizens, trust in the soldiers of the Third Reich!

Another poster used drawings to illustrate world domination by the English and the tyranny of the Jews, but most of them still began with the word
Verboten
.

Forbidden to be out between nine o’clock in the evening and five o’clock in the morning. Forbidden to keep firearms, forbidden to aid, abet or shelter escaped prisoners, or citizens of countries that are enemies of Germany. Forbidden to listen to the BBC.

Along the bottom of each poster, the warning, in black lettering, was underlined twice: ON PAIN OF DEATH.

I slipped into the butcher’s shop, where Ghislaine and her father were serving their last customers.

The butcher gave me his usual friendly nod and I followed Ghislaine from the shop, out the back to where she lived with her father and Marc.

Patrick, Olivier and the other boys were already bunched around the radio with Miette. Nobody spoke as Marc fiddled with the wireless knobs, an exasperating hum adding to the usual jamming efforts of Vichy and the Germans –– piercing sounds like the screeching of crickets.

We listened to the Germans’ false information such as claims they’d landed in England, and waited for the BBC’s Radio London, operated by General de Gaulle’s Free French Forces, to expose the truth –– the truth our occupiers tried to conceal.

‘Yesterday, September 8, 1943, Italy surrendered and now joins the war on Germany!’ the French speaker finally announced. ‘
General Eisenhower, commander in chief of Allied forces in the Mediterranean, says Italy has signed an unconditional armistice with the Allies; that all Italians who now help eject the German aggressor from Italian soil will have the assistance and support of the United Nations.’

‘
Putain!
’ Patrick said, jumping to his feet.

Marc punched a fist into the air. ‘This calls for celebration.’

‘The American armies are pouring across the Atlantic –– men, cannon and tanks,’ the speaker went on. ‘Victory is certain. Absolutely certain.’

We all looked at each other. Living, as we were, in continual fear of arrest for a simple remark, a violation of curfew or a minor black market transaction, such news brightened our spirits and filled our hearts with hope.

‘We’ll drive the filthy Boche out of our country yet,’ André said.

‘Don’t be so sure,’ Patrick said. ‘The war is far from won, or over.’

Olivier strode across to the window, stretching his legs. ‘The war might be looking up for us, but it’s looking worse for them.’ He nodded down to the square where Madame Abraham was closing her antiques shop. ‘They’re carting every last one of them off in cattle trains.’

‘I’ve heard they drag people from their homes at any time of day or night,’ Ghislaine said.

‘And children get home from school to find their parents have disappeared,’ Miette said. ‘Mothers come back from shopping to sealed homes.’

I thought of the Wolfs and how, despite the occupation, we could roam about in relative freedom, celebrating such small victories, while they were forced to stay hidden in a cramped attic.

‘Those poor people,’ I said. ‘It’s so unfair.’

‘But Madame Abraham should be safe, now she’s Madame Lemoulin,’ Miette said.

‘Until somebody tells the Boche,’ Gaspard said. ‘Then they’ll ship her off too.’

Ghislaine frowned. ‘But where exactly do they take them?’

‘To somewhere in Poland,’ André said.

‘Why would they take them to Poland?’ I said.

‘To work for the
Reich
in labour camps,’ Olivier said. ‘Like your father and Gaspard’s. The Nazis built thousands of these work camps for their regime.’

‘Poland’s supposed to be a very Catholic country,’ Miette said. ‘So they should treat the Jews well there.’

‘Oh yes,’ Marc said with a twist of his lip. ‘Yet isn’t France, the eldest daughter of the Church, behaving very badly towards them these days?’

‘Whatever rubbish the Germans and Vichy feed us on that thing,’ Patrick said, gesturing at the radio. ‘I say it’s all one big lie.’

***

The setting sun met the Monts du Lyonnais in a blaze of gold, and it seemed the whole of Lucie was out on la place de l’Eglise.

We sat on the terrace of Au Cochon Tué, toasting our victory with Robert Perrault’s wine, beer and orangeade.

‘They must be pleased victory’s in sight,’ Miette said, nodding at Yvon and Ginette Monbeau as they came across, the baker in a red shirt and blue trousers, his wife wearing a flashy skirt in stripes of red, white and blue. ‘The sooner this war’s over, the sooner they get to see their sons again.’

‘Robert and Evelyne Perrault too,’ Marc said. ‘The Boche are holding
three
of their sons prisoner.’

‘That’s if the bastard Nazis don’t kill them all first,’ Patrick said.

The old men were playing cards at their usual table, Monsieur Thimmonier’s scruffy dog slumped beside his master, his wagging tail painted in slashes of red, white and blue.

Père Emmanuel appeared from Saint Antoine’s, dodging the small children charging up and down the church steps mimicking the excitement of the adults.

Olivier’s cousins goose-stepped around, Uncle Claude scolding his boys half-heartedly. Since the arrival of the Germans, with boots to touch and marching to imitate, Justin, Gervais and their friends were no longer bored. Finally they had someone who talked to them; people who gave them sweets.

Justin and Gervais’ younger sisters, Paulette and Anne-Sophie, were jumping rope with Miette’s little sisters, while another group squealed and swung from the old gallows posts.

‘Come and celebrate,
Docteur
,’ Gaspard called to Dr. Laforge, who was striding from his surgery clutching his black bag. ‘Italy’s surrendered!’

The doctor lifted his arm in a wave. ‘One more home visit and I’ll be joining you.’

‘You’d think our doc would be the first one celebrating,’ André said.

I raised my eyebrows. ‘Oh?’

‘He despises the Germans more than anyone,’ Olivier said. ‘Uncle Claude told me his father –– old Dr. Pierre Laforge –– died a painful death from his Great War injuries. He said the soldiers brutalised his mother too.’

To my usual irritation, Denise Grosjean was batting her eyelids at every word Olivier uttered.

‘Bastard Boche,’ Ghislaine said, and swallowed a mouthful of wine.

‘Shush.’ I nodded at the doctor’s brother, Simon Laforge and his wife and children, heading across from the chemist.

‘Anyone fancy a game?’ Yvon Monbeau said, swinging his bag of
pétanque
balls.

Marc, Gaspard, Ghislaine, Miette and the others wandered off with him to play in the shade of the lime trees, André limping along behind.

‘Come on Olivier,’ Denise said, tugging at his arm.

He waved her away. ‘You go, I’ll join you soon.’

Her lips pursed in a pout, Denise stomped off towards the lime trees.

I was so busy smirking at Denise, I didn’t notice Martin Diehl at first, and those same two –– Karl Gottlob and Fritz Frankenheimer –– sitting with the cluster of Germans at a fringe table, their belts strewn across the top.

‘Idiot pigs,’ Patrick said. ‘Sitting here drinking with the rest of us, and no clue we’re celebrating their downfall.’

Fritz and Karl ogled me with seedy looks that made me squirm in my seat. Martin smiled as he ground his cigarette end into the cobbles, red sparks striking against the dull stone.

‘You’re staring at that officer again,’ Olivier said.

I jumped, startled at the sting of his words. ‘No, I’m not.’

‘You’ll never get to join our group,’ Patrick said, ‘if you go around grinning at the Boche. And don’t forget, it was his lot who took our father away.’

‘It wasn’t him personally, Patrick.’ I lowered my voice to a murmur. ‘Besides, I have a reason to stare at him. I have a job … a mission,’ I said, and told them of Félicité’s plan.

‘What?’ Patrick said, his dark eyes wide. ‘I can’t believe Félicité would suggest that.’

Olivier shook his head. ‘Bad idea, too dangerous. You know what happens to girls ––’

‘I also know how to be discreet,’ I said.

‘You, discreet?’

‘Wait,’ Patrick said. ‘It might just work, and help us. But for God’s sake, be careful. And don’t let that thug get
too
close.’

The boys drained their glasses and sauntered over to join the
pétanque
game, Olivier turning back to me, and shaking his head.

I kept my gaze away from the Germans as I sat alone, listening to the card-playing men shouting encouragement as the metal balls rolled through the dust and clanged against each other. His tail flapping like a patriotic flag, Monsieur Thimmonier’s dog kept trying to clamp his jaws around one of the balls, the
pétanque
players shooing him away.

I ambled into the empty bar, picked up the telephone and called the convent.

‘He’s here,’ I said, when Félicité came on the line. ‘At Au Cochon Tué, with just about everybody in Lucie. I caught him staring at me again.’

‘You’re certain you want to do this?’ I sensed the doubt in my sister’s soft voice. ‘If you think it’s too difficult, too risky, that’s all right, I understand.’

‘Olivier thinks it’s a dangerous charade and I’ll never pull it off, but I want the Boche gone as much as everybody else, and this seems the only chance to do my bit.’

‘That’s good then, Céleste, let me know how it goes.’

I hung up and turned to head for the toilet, but the tall figure of Martin Diehl blocked my path. There was still nobody inside Au Cochon Tué but I felt my tremor as he bent close, fearing he might try to kiss me again, right there, where anybody could walk in and catch me.

‘You telephone to a secret admirer?’ he said, with a sly, collaborative kind of look.

‘No … no, I haven’t got an admirer. I was calling my … a family member. We don’t have a telephone; don’t even have electricity, up at L’Auberge.’

He nodded towards the villagers outside, his face so close I felt his breath on my earlobe, his familiar scent of laundered cloth and something like fresh apples flaring my nostrils.

‘Such a party, you would think the French had won the war,
n’est-ce pas
? Your brother and his friends are most happy.’

‘Everybody is pleased,’ I said. ‘Not only my brother and his friends.’

‘But you do think us Boche are stupid, yes?’ he went on. ‘We have radios too, Céleste Roussel. Of course we know you are drinking to the surrendering Italians.’

‘Well, it is good news for us,’ I said, my eyes flickering around the bar again.

‘Yes, I can imagine. You French might beat us after all. But enough joking, I wanted to give you this.’ He held out a brown paper parcel.

‘Are you crazy?’ I hissed. ‘Anybody could walk in.’ With another nervous glance about me, I took the parcel.

‘Do not worry so, I am watching the door. I was going to leave your present in the toilet. I am thinking it is a good place to leave notes for each other. That is, if you want … if you would like us to meet again?’

‘Meet again? Well … all right, why not? I’d like that, Martin. And yes, leave me a note down behind the cistern. Thank you for the present, it’s kind of you.’

I hurried into the cubicle, bolted the door, and eased the paper off. I stared, in awe, at the different-coloured paints and a variety of brushes –– round, flat and fan-shaped. There was a roll of paper too –– beautiful thick sheets, slightly rough to the touch.

I pushed my unease aside as I thought of Talia and Max’s pleasure, and ignored my rising fear of playing that blind man’s bluff; that lethal pantomime. The parcel wedged beneath my coat, I almost galloped up the hill to L’Auberge.

9

‘I don’t know how we’re going to survive this year,’ Maman said, scrutinising the orchard fruit, split and rotting on the branches, the trunks sitting in puddles of water, their exposed roots decaying.

‘What with the summer drought baking the soil rock hard, and this month’s storms turning it all into one great mush. Not to mention those extra mouths to feed.’ She raised her eyes towards the attic. ‘I thought your sister was taking them?’

‘It takes time to organise something like that, Maman.’

‘Well let’s hope it doesn’t take much longer,’ she said, holding her apron down against the breeze, which caught the scent of lavender, peppermint and thyme that clung perpetually to her. ‘Now stop dreaming, Célestine, we have our work cut out gathering what’s left of the fruit. Some at least will serve for jam or liqueur.’

‘The Wolfs would be more than happy to help,’ I said. ‘If you’d let them out of the attic in the daytime, instead of only at night to use them as slaves for the heavy housework, and getting Max to fix everything that breaks down.’

Still far from pleased about having them at L’Auberge, I think Maman had resigned herself to their presence because she hadn’t ordered me to get “that family” out of her home again. She appeared simply to regard them as a nuisance; extra bodies messing up her tidy home, strangers tarnishing her clean smells of wax and floor polish. And she never looked Max and Sabine in the eye, as they quietly went about their nocturnal tasks.

‘I have been thinking about that,’ she said. ‘It may be our only way of salvaging something from this disaster. And it would be impossible for anyone to come up here to L’Auberge without us seeing them.’ She gazed again, at her wasteland of putrid fruit as it plopped to the ground, macerating into a great sugary, insect-riddled soup. ‘Besides, it’s only right they pay their way. People can’t expect free lodgings, no matter who’s chasing them.’

‘They don’t expect anything, Maman. They’d love to help and if you’d bother to get to know them, you’d see how nice they are. Nice, normal people, and the children are so sweet.’

‘Nice and normal they may be, but nobody will be sweet, Célestine, if we’re caught. You know that, don’t you? You know the consequences?’

‘We’ll keep a special watch out,’ I said, hurrying indoors and up the stairs.

‘Céleste!’ Talia cried, as I climbed the attic ladder. ‘Come and look at Papa’s paintings.’

She grabbed my hand and pulled me from the last step, up into the attic. ‘My father is the best artist, really.’

I kissed Sabine and little Jacob, and Max pivoted around from his chair in front of the window, a brush gripped between his teeth.

‘Look,’ Talia said, pointing out the window, ‘this painting is of that side of the farm and the courtyard.’

‘Your papa certainly is a talented artist,’ I said, my eye following Max’s clump of lavender shrubs down to the bricked well, and its spray of red roses. Heavy brown strokes outlined the wooden gateway of L’Auberge with its Lyonnais-style cornice. He’d sketched the U-shaped courtyard too, the sunlight stippling the timbers of the outhouses and my father’s wood-working shed. He’d used the same deep brown for the oak door, and shuttered the windows in a rich green.

‘And those are the back steps leading up to the door,’ Talia said.

‘Oh yes, I can see that.’

‘And footprints too.’ Talia pointed out the faint depression in the middle of each stone step.

‘The steps of every person who’s lived at L’Auberge,’ I said.

‘Even ours,’ Talia said. ‘But we don’t really live here, do we Papa? We’re going home soon, aren’t we? And Maman’s going to set up a gallery for your paintings.’

Max gave her a distracted nod. As always when he was painting, he seemed to vanish into his coloured dabs and smears. Or perhaps it was the fear of his daughter’s questions that stopped him meeting her trusting eyes.

I peered over his shoulder at the beginnings of a sketch of the Monts du Lyonnais, and the Vionne River pleating the hills.

I stared at the patches of grey, where the river should be. ‘I’ve never seen a painting made from the start. That’s strange, why isn’t the river green?’

‘Look,’ Max said. ‘Look at the river.’

Through the window, I caught my mother’s glare, her arms planted on her hips. I waved at her and mouthed, ‘Coming.’

‘Is the river green?’ Max said.

‘Yes, it’s green.’

‘Look again, what colours do you really see, Céleste?’

I squinted. ‘Oh yes, I can see grey, and brown and yellow and a darkish rust. I’ve never seen the Vionne that way before.’

‘Nothing is how it looks to the naked eye,’ Max said. ‘You have to concentrate, look closer, to see how things truly are.’

Max gave me a satisfied art-teacher smile, but only his lips moved, the anguish trapped as ever in the dark eyes behind the spectacles. Beneath her joyous facade, Sabine hid her fear well from Talia and Jacob, but I was certain the children had begun to sense their father’s desperation.

I thought back to our conversation around the Dutrottier’s radio. We were hearing more and more stories of deportations, of families separated, of windowless trains and barbed-wire camps; vague, frightening whispers that raked the air like a foul wind.

‘Look, Céleste,’ Talia said. ‘I did a painting too. It’s our house.’

A great sun shone over the home the Wolfs had been forced to flee. Talia’s garden was a shower of bright flowers, with enormous birds perched on tree branches. A fluffy grey cat sat at the foot of the trunk, eyeing the birds.

‘When the war is over,’ I said, ‘you’ll be able to show me your lovely home, and Cendres.’

Max shot his wife a glance, removed his glasses, and rubbed the lenses with his shirttail. ‘Let’s pray that day comes soon.’

***

‘About time,’ my mother said, as we all assembled in the orchard. ‘I wondered whatever you were all up to.’

She nodded at Talia and Jacob. ‘For a start, this is no place for those children.’ She flicked a wrist at the swarm of wasps that had wedged themselves into the crevices in the fruit. ‘They’ll only get stung and cry. Take them into the kitchen, Célestine. Tell them not to touch anything until I get there, then they can help me store the fruit.’

I was disappointed she still wouldn’t address the Wolfs directly, but pleased, and slightly embarrassed, at that first modest attempt at empathy.

Maman distributed thick gloves and the wooden tongs she used for plucking boiled garments from the tub, and we began gathering the half-rotten fruit, flinging it into her large jam-making saucepans.

‘I can’t be near wasps, Céleste,’ Sabine whispered. She let out feeble whimpers, and looked fearfully at my mother, who was waving her tongs about, commanding the operation like a fierce general.

‘Do you think the fruit will gather itself?’ Maman said who wasn’t afraid of any insect; of anything at all really. She heaved her shoulders. ‘Oh, never mind. Go inside and supervise your children until I get there. Then you can help with the jam.’

Sabine’s eyes glistened as she scurried away from the humming black mass.

‘My wife’s allergic to wasp stings,’ Max said. ‘She loses her breath and gets wheezy.’

‘It’s all right,’ I said, pitying him his frustration –– a man powerless to help, or even defend, his wife. ‘We’ll finish off.’

If my mother had the slightest notion of friendliness or kindness, I might have kept trying to break down those battle lines between us. But it was becoming more and more difficult to tolerate –– let alone love –– that insensitive, mocking creature.

When we’d gathered the last of the apples and pears we lugged the great saucepans into the kitchen, where Sabine and the children began placing the better fruit in trays.

‘Separate each one,’ Maman ordered, ‘so the rot won’t spread.’ Her face grim, she set about storing the rest in the cellar for making chutney, jam and pies, and her tart pear liqueur.

The fruit episode over, the Wolfs trundled back up to the attic, and Maman exchanged her stained apron for a clean one. Patrick appeared in the kitchen and began stuffing bread and slices of cured ham into his bag.

‘Going out on another coup?’ I said, following him outside, and down to the courtyard. ‘Where is it tonight?’

‘A factory,’ my brother said, the vein in his temple flickering as he strapped the bag to the back of his bicycle. ‘But I’ve told you, best stay out of it, then nobody can force information out of you … especially not that Boche officer.’ He dragged his beret over his ears and swung a leg over the bicycle.

‘He won’t get a thing out of me,’ I said, waving as he disappeared down the hill into the twilight. ‘Keep safe.’

As night fell, and I snuffed out my bedside candle, I knew I would barely sleep. How much longer would Patrick and Olivier get away with these sabotage attacks? Were the police arresting them that very moment? I kicked the sheet off my clammy body, sick with the thought of the Gestapo marching them away, handcuffed.

I got up and stared from the window at the crowd of stars burning in the navy bowl of sky. The shadow of a clutch of oak leaves mottled the moon, and the silence was absolute, as if all of Lucie had sunk into a mournful kind of sleep.

As the church bell chimed midnight, the moonlight outlined the figure of my brother crossing the courtyard. They were safe. One more storm averted, and one more success for our resistors.

Patrick’s step creaked on the middle stair and I lapsed into a restless sleep.