Wolfsangel (6 page)

10

‘Célestine, Patrick!’ Maman’s shrill voice cut up the stairs, jolting me from sleep as if she’d shaken me. ‘This farm won’t run on its own.’

I groaned, stumbled from my bed, and threw the shutters open onto the cold dawn. I breathed in the heavy autumn smell of ripeness and decay –– the scent of the Harvest Festival.

The crops harvested in summer and the last pears and apples picked, we looked forward to relaxing and enjoying ourselves at the festival. But with the summer drought, the autumn storms and the miserable harvest –– not to mention the occupation –– there seemed little to celebrate.

However, it was a week since Patrick and Olivier’s Resistance coup at that factory so we all assumed the boys were safe, which was good enough reason to celebrate.

I dashed water over my face, threw on my dress, emptied my night chamber pot and joined Maman and Patrick at the kitchen table. 

‘Hurry along, Célestine,’ my mother said, spreading strawberry jam on her bread –– the only fruit in abundance that year, maturing before the drought. ‘Have you forgotten the festival?’

‘
Oh là là
,’ I said. ‘As if I’d forget one of the few days of the year when something actually happens around here.’

‘You might stop moping about like some underpaid farmhand then,’ Maman said, pouring a dash of her
eau-de-vie
into the ersatz coffee that tasted like dishwater, and which we called
café Pétain
.

‘Underpaid? I’m not paid at all. And I don’t see why I can’t be more than a simple farmhand; do something different like … like Félicité.’ I tore off a hunk of bread, slapped on strawberry jam, and crammed it into my mouth.

‘Are you mad, girl?’ Maman shrieked, rising from the table and carrying her plate to the sink. ‘As if they’d let you into a convent.’

‘I didn’t say I wanted to be a nun. All I want is to finish school and get a proper job, so I can ––’

‘Don’t speak with your mouth full,’ she said, rattling cutlery and crockery in the sink. ‘You’ll get nowhere in life with your head in a book. Hard work and good clean soil under your nails is what pays off.’

My cheeks burned as she crossed to the oven and removed her last cakes and fruit pies, made once again from her stores beneath the herbal room. The Harvest Festival was one of the rare village events in which my mother participated, baking for days and draping mugwort over the door to ward off evil. ‘Now go and brush that crow’s nest hair,’ she said. ‘You never know who’ll be at the festival.’

‘As if it’s some cattle show and I’m the prize heifer up for sale!’

‘Be careful the Germans don’t take you at the next requisition then,’ Patrick said with a laugh. ‘They only want the best cattle.’ He ducked, avoiding my slap, and darted off outside to tend the animals.

‘Since the Wolfs are not allowed to enjoy the festival,’ I said, loading a tray with portions of tripe gratin, lamb’s foot salad, and
clafoutis
, moist with last season’s cherries, ‘the least I can do is take them up some tasty things.’

Maman fiddled with her chignon. ‘It’s not my fault those people are being rounded up and shipped off.’

‘What exactly, have you got against them?’ I said, steadying the tray with both hands.

‘I have nothing at all against them, Célestine. The only ones I despise are those pale-faced invaders. And I know we must all do our bit to protect them from such swine, but I’m simply not comfortable hiding that family. Besides, people don’t thank you for it. They just scarper off one day and you never hear from them again. Not a word of thanks.’

‘But the Wolfs are very grateful.’ I handed her the tray as I climbed the attic ladder. ‘Don’t they show that, with all the chores they do every night?’

‘
Humph
, maybe,’ she said as she climbed on a chair and passed me up the tray.

She said nothing more, but from her hesitation and the way she stayed perched on the chair, I sensed she’d have liked to go up into the attic and give her harvest food to the Wolfs herself –– a kind of peace offering perhaps. But she couldn’t, or didn’t dare, show the slightest bit of kindness; as if that would be a battle lost in our on-going conflict.

‘Your mother is so kind to share her harvest food with us,’ Sabine said. She took the tray and Max turned from his window seat, his brush held aloft.

‘Yes, please thank her for us, Céleste.’

‘Maybe you’ll be Harvest Queen this year?’ Talia said.

‘I doubt that, Talia. Whoever would vote for me?’

‘Lots of boys,’ she said. ‘Because you’re lovely.’

I kissed her solemn face. ‘And you’re such a pretty girl, I bet you’ll be Harvest Queen one day.’

***

When the Germans arrived in Lucie seven months ago, they wanted a spacious, centrally-located place with running water to use as their barracks, so they requisitioned the girls’ school –– Ecole de Filles Jeanne d’Arc –– located between rue Emile Zola and rue Victor Hugo. With its high stone walls, the enclosed playground was handy too, for practising their manoeuvres we were forbidden to observe.

So Ecole de Filles Jeanne d’Arc was closed to the villagers but the boys’ school, which the girls had to attend, to the indignation of many mothers, was still running, and we watched all those school children parading around the fountain in their starched clothes decorated with dried flowers, fruit and nuts. They held candles and sang the vile Vichy tune,
Maréchal nous voilà!

‘Still trying to fool the Germans her name is Lemoulin,’ my mother said, narrowing her eyes at Rachel Abraham. ‘It won’t last, they’ll catch her out. They’ll catch them all out in the end.’

‘But what would the
Reich
want with an old woman?’ I said. ‘She’s not much use to them as a worker.’

‘No, not much use at all,’ Maman said, as we nodded greetings to other villagers passing beneath the vaulted entrance of Saint Antoine’s church. ‘Unlike your father. Now hurry along, the service is about to start. Even though it is all a lot of rot if you ask me.’

Religion was about the one subject on which my mother and I agreed, and we only attended church at Christmas, Easter and the Harvest Festival. But as much as Mass bored me, once inside Saint Antoine’s I was always in awe of the centuries-old granite monument.

We stood in the pews bathed in the autumn sun in soft sections of reds, greens and yellows reflected from the windows. I felt the power of the bronze organ pipes as Père Emmanuel’s voice spilled over the altar draped in pretty pinks and golds, and down across the flagstones.

‘This year has been difficult for all of us,’ the priest said. ‘There may be amongst you those who bear resentment against God. That He, supposedly omnipotent, can let such things as this war and the occupation happen. But it is not for us to question God, only to accept with patience, remembering the greater suffering of His Son.’ He rapped a fist in the air. ‘If you can think of your grief as an extension of that greater grief, then God will surely give you strength. Because our strength and our faith have served us well. Continue as such and we will emerge victorious!’

The bell chimed the end of Mass. ‘Now,’ he said, his expression softening, ‘let us name the Harvest Queen –– she who’ll wear the crown.’

The congregation traipsed outside as the music started up, and people began shouting out the names of the village girls.

‘Juliette Dubois!’ Patrick called. Miette giggled and blushed, though I’m sure she wasn’t the least bit surprised.

‘Agnes Grattaloup!’ Marc Dutrottier cried.
Everybody laughed, most of all Agnes, who was close on a hundred and had no idea there was a war going on.

I glanced at Denise, her eyes fixed on Olivier as if willing him to call her name.

‘Céleste Roussel!’ Olivier said.

I thumped his arm. ‘One of your silly jokes?’

Denise’s mouth folded into a pout as she stalked off, her backside wobbling like jam.

In the end André Copeau’s girl, the raven-haired Ghislaine Dutrottier, with eyes her father claimed had caught the sky in them, wore the Harvest Crown. André’s lips spread in a great silly grin as we toasted Ghislaine’s success.

‘Strange, isn’t it?’ Denise said to me. ‘How Ghislaine got those blue eyes when everyone knows that’s impossible, with two dark-eyed parents.’

I shrugged. ‘Who knows, maybe it can happen?’

‘Yes, I suppose anything can happen when odd types mix.’ Denise’s eyes flickered to the Germans, sitting together at the furthest tables.

My pulse quickened, my eyes darting to the soldiers and back to Denise. She couldn’t possibly know about Martin Diehl. Could she? Because if Denise Grosjean found out, the entire village would know. That would be the end of me. And the end of Félicité’s plan.

‘First dance is mine,’ Olivier said, sweeping me from my plate of steaming
boudin
and roasted apple. He whirled me through the crowd, the odour of ginger snaps, buttery crepes and hot
saucisson
in my nostrils, the autumn scent of hewn grass in my hair.

‘Did you hear?’ Denise said, sidling up to us again, her mouth bursting with sugary crepe. Whatever she had to say, I was sure it was only another ruse to get Olivier’s attention.

‘People are saying the police know who blew up that factory last week.’ She raised her eyebrows at Olivier, as if expecting him to spill the whole story. ‘The one the Germans use to make parts for tanks and aeroplanes.’

‘Don’t believe everything you hear, Denise,’ Olivier said.

‘Believe me or not,’ she went on, ‘someone in that group is a traitor.’

‘How do you know this?’ I said.

‘Everybody’s talking about it,’ Denise said. ‘Get the potatoes out of your ears, Céleste. It’s only a matter of time before the police arrest the lot of them.’

‘Just another gossipy rumour,’ Olivier said, with a wave of his hand. He let me go and swirled Denise off into the crowd, who, in her giddy excitement, dropped her crepe.

I dropped into a chair beside Patrick and bit into one of Yvon Monbeau’s perfectly risen
soufflés
. ‘Do you think it’s true?’

‘Denise Grosjean talks straight from her fat arse,’ Patrick said. ‘Everything that comes out is
merde
.’

Despite my brother’s casual reassurances, I kept glancing nervously at the boys, but they continued swaggering about, grinning and getting drunker on beer and atmosphere. I did catch a few whispers though, between André, Marc and Gaspard, and Olivier’s foot tapping up, down, up, down.

‘To
le maréchal!
’ Fritz Frankenheimer cried, raising his beer glass.

‘To Marshal Pétain!’ the other Germans echoed.

Everyone looked around, and it seemed each of us was trying to mask our reluctance as we raised our glasses with the Germans to old man Pétain.

The chemist’s wife, Madame Laforge, lifted her gaze skyward and, behind the Boche’s backs, people started sending their usual little signals to each other.

‘They think we like them,’ Miette’s mother confided to mine. ‘When all we really like is swindling them. I mean everybody knows the grocer is watering down the milk he sells them,
and
charging a hundred francs for a bottle of Chablis.’

‘Olivier’s uncle is charging them five francs for a single egg,’ Ginette Monbeau said with a laugh. ‘Not to mention those pigs Claude slaughters illegally, selling the meat to the Boche at an outrageous price.’

‘Well let’s hope they’ll all soon be at the bottom of the English Channel,’ Maman said with a scornful sneer.

Yes, it seemed we’d invented a whole language of gestures and remarks to show we were still free in spirit, whilst under the thumb of the fair-haired occupiers.

I was sure the Germans noticed our sly exchanges but since so few of them understood French, they appeared to interpret them as admiration for their powerful physiques, their confidence, their starched uniforms, and kept smiling politely at us.

I hadn’t noticed him approaching, but Martin Diehl’s tall frame appeared, looming over me. He offered a creamy hand. I caught Maman’s disapproving stare, and hesitated. But all the villagers were dancing with Germans, and the drums and brass instruments that gave the tunes a victorious, heroic tone urged me to dance. After all, it had been forbidden for so long, it would be a shame to waste that rare occasion for which they’d waived the ban, not to mention the opportunity to delve a little deeper into the mind of Martin Diehl.

I flicked Maman a defiant look, tugged my dress down and took his hand. As he pulled me close and we danced to Edith Piaf’s rich voice belting out
L’Accordéoniste
, I was sure the officer could feel my heart pummelling against his chest, or at least hear its rapid beats. I wondered if his heart too, was drumming with the first tenuous throbs of our unofficial combat.

I glanced across at Maman again and almost laughed aloud as Karl Gottlob took her hand, muttered something close to her ear and forced her into a jig. They moved together like a single stiff rake, Karl with his mean cat-eyes and Maman obviously struggling not to cringe.

All the Germans joined in, singing the loudest with their throaty accents and with such gusto you’d have thought they truly belonged in Lucie. Fritz Frankenheimer looked like a pig in high heels, dancing with Agnes Grattaloup, who appeared to be enjoying herself without any notion that her partner was a Boche.