Wolfsangel (7 page)

Oh yes, to the unknowing eye it must have looked like one great, frolicsome celebration.

‘I would have voted you Harvest Queen,’ Martin said. ‘Especially if you were wearing your nylons.’ He lowered his steady gaze to my legs.

I felt the blood rush to my face. ‘Don’t be silly, as if I could wear them here. Besides, Ghislaine’s the prettiest girl in Lucie, she deserves to be Harvest Queen. Anyway, who really cares about a silly crown?’

‘I would still have voted for you,’ Martin said with a smooth smile. ‘And I have another present for you. Do you want us to meet later? Near six o’clock?’

I thought for a minute, trying to master my rearing apprehension.

‘I know a good spot,’ I said. ‘Behind the Community Hall
.
There’s a secluded copse.
Just cross over rue Emile Zola and walk up a bit.
We won’t be seen there.’

My mind suspended in a blur of agitation, I barely recalled the rest of the festivities. I paid no attention to the whisper blowing across the square like a sly breeze; the rumour that a group of Lucie’s resistors had blown up a factory and taken German lives.

***

On the sixth chime of the church bell, I slunk away from la place de l’Eglise, alongside the church wall posters of Pétain’s fatherly face, a shiver rippling through me as I stepped into the shade of the mustard-coloured lime leaves.

I inhaled the sap-sweet air, the light shining a brilliant red-gold as the sun followed its westward arc towards the hills. I crossed rue Emile Zola and kept walking up to the Community Hall
,
continually scanning the street for curious eyes. 

Once behind the building, I slid into the thicket. Camouflaged in his almond-green uniform, I almost didn’t see Martin Diehl leaning against the oak trunk, his long legs entwined at the ankles.

‘I am happy you came, Céleste,’ he said, as he removed his jacket and spread it on the ground.

Fearful of saying the wrong thing, I kept silent as we sat side by side. Martin dragged a parcel from a pocket, and I tore the paper and pulled out a chocolate bar and a cylinder of lipstick.

‘You shouldn’t have. You spoil me.’

He took the gold-coloured cylinder. ‘Make like this with your lips,’ he said, pursing his own, and I struggled to stop my mouth quivering as he painted my lips with the scarlet-coloured gloss.

He leaned back, the blond head cocked as if admiring his art work. ‘So now, mam’zelle-I-like-to-win, I put you a challenge. You must eat all of the chocolate without smudging this lipstick.’

‘Easy,’ I said and began to eat the chocolate carefully, slowly, my lips spread wide. Besides the urge to meet his challenge, I’d not tasted real chocolate for so long and wanted to make it last.

‘Stop your tickling,’ I said, flicking his hand from my side, trying to mask the unease his touch stirred in me. ‘That’s cheating.’

I finished the chocolate and licked the silver paper, my mouth still stretched wide, and once it was clean I turned my unsmudged lips to him.

‘Look, perfect lipstick. Told you I liked to win.’

‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘So you did.’

He caught my hand, forcing me to meet his gaze. ‘Did you know your eyes are the same colour as the river? Grey-green, as the Vionne in a storm … river eyes and autumn hair.’

River eyes and autumn hair. It sounded like a famous actress.

‘Fiery hair, my mother says,’ I said. ‘To match a flaming temper. Though she’s the one with the real temper.’

‘I understand what you say,’ Martin said. ‘My mother was always preferring my two brothers over me.’

‘Mine too,’ I said, my lips curving in sympathy for that clever Boche boy who chose his words as precisely as he picked out the largest, ripest cherry from the mound at a market stall. ‘Oh I know I’m not beautiful and smart like my sister, or the funny, likeable Patrick.
I was the difficult middle one; the disappointment who wasn’t a boy to take over Papa’s carpentry business. I wasn’t even meant to survive birth.’

‘This is a strange thing to say, Céleste Roussel.’
His eyes didn’t shift from my face, as if he was truly interested; as if he sympathised with my childhood –– the woeful tale I hoped would encourage him to reveal things about his own past.

‘I was born early,’ I went on, easing my hand from his. ‘I came out blue and they couldn’t get me to breathe for ages. That’s why my father chose the name Célestine, because it’s a fragile mineral, which is sometimes blue. You’d think a mother would want to protect a baby like that, wouldn’t you? But to her I was simply the weakling, nuisance girl-child who needed extra looking after.’

‘But what a prize jewel Célestine became.’

‘Nobody calls me Célestine, except my mother.’

I paused, gathering my thoughts, trying to find that blend of friendliness, shyness and flattery; that mastery of conversation to get him on side.

‘I want to get my
Bac
,’ I went on. ‘You know, the
Baccalauréat
? Do you have that in Germany? And study at university and get a good job, but my mother wants me to stay in Lucie, on the farm, get married and have a swarm of babies. Just like Marshal Pétain want ––’

I clamped a hand across my mouth, as if chiding myself for revealing too much. ‘Oh dear, I don’t suppose I should be saying that to a …’

‘You can tell me what you want,’ Martin said. ‘Nothing we say to each other goes further than here. Deal?’ He took my hand again and gave it a brief squeeze.

‘Deal,’ I said. He didn’t drop my hand and I resisted a shudder, as his index finger grazed my palm.

‘So your brother is taking up the family business?’ he said.

‘My father was training him to become a carpenter,’ I said, my internal antennae twitching at his mention of Patrick.

‘That is until Papa left to work for … for the
Reich
. The clamp tightened around my heart again, at the thought of my dear father working for the enemy.

‘Your brother does not appear to do a lot of wood-work,’ he said. ‘Always in the village, hanging about and chatting with his friend. What is his name, the friend?’

‘Olivier.’ I saw no harm in saying his name; Martin could easily have discovered everything about Olivier. ‘Yes, they’ve been friends –– we all have –– since we were kids.’

‘They are not interested to work in Germany?’ he said.

‘No, of course not.’ The very idea made me feel ill. ‘Anyway, they’re not even nineteen yet, not old enough.’

He stood and pulled me to my feet. I thought he was about to try to kiss me again, and I skittered away from his hold.

‘I must be going back for supper,’ he said, lean fingers flickering across the almond-green trousers as he brushed them down. ‘I do not live at the barracks like the soldiers. Officers are billeted. I am at the Delaroche house.’

I nodded. ‘I know of the Delaroche house –– fancy, a castle almost.’

‘Yes, and like the good aristocrat, they eat on time. I must not keep them waiting.’

‘You know it’s dangerous for us to meet like this,’ I said. ‘On a normal day when people are bustling about everywhere. I could be severely punished. Shot even. Perhaps we should find a safer place?’

‘What of the riverbank, where you were swimming after the cinema?’

‘The riverbank?’ I said. ‘Well yes, I suppose it’s the perfect spot. It’s too cold to swim now, so nobody will go back till next summer.’

‘We could meet there one time a week, on my day off … if that is what you want, Céleste? As we said, we can leave messages in the toilet of the bar, if something happens and we cannot make it.’

I remained silent for a minute, raking together a suitable answer –– something that would make me sound eager for secret meetings; nothing that would betray my tightening nerves as I acknowledged we’d rolled the first dice, neither of us knowing whose number would come up.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Yes, I’d like that.’

Martin smiled. ‘Very good.
So,
gute Nacht
, Céleste Roussel.
Schlaf gut
.’

‘And
gute Nacht
to you too, Martin Diehl.’ It felt odd, saying the words in German, but I forced them, endearing myself to the officer and his hateful language.

As he slipped from the thicket, he laughed, perhaps at my accent, or my vulnerability, and how easily he imagined he was going to win the game; as simple as skimming river stones further than the next person.

I stood in the shadows for a moment, capturing the last haughty echoes of his voice.

11

We’d chosen to ignore the gossip flitting around at the Harvest Festival, so when they came to L’Auberge des Anges the following morning it was a jolt that startled me from my dreams like the bang of a single gunshot.

My eyes snapped open. I leapt up and ran to the window. Three black Citroën Tractions screeched into the courtyard. Seven or eight men, perhaps ten, in black uniforms, leapt from the cars and thudded up the steps
.

I stumbled into the hallway, and down the stairs, at the same time as Patrick and Maman. Black-gloved hands levelled pistols at our faces and, from a pocket, one of them pulled a bronze badge bearing an eagle and a swastika.

‘Gestapo,’ he said, through a moustache the colour of old tobacco, and barked a stream of commands at his men. I didn’t understand a single word, which only heightened my fear.

My trembling hand clutched Patrick’s arm as we shuffled into the kitchen. Maman didn’t even blink and I detected only the slightest quiver of her upper lip. I thought of Max and his family, hoping they’d taken refuge in the partition behind the panel. There hadn’t even been time to remember the plan, to stand below the pull-down ladder and cough twice.

‘What do you want with us?’ my mother said without the slightest grace.

‘Very sorry to disturb you, madame,’ the Gestapo man said. ‘But we’ve received information that a Resistance worker resides here. Patrick Roussel. We’d like to question him over the recent explosion at a factory, in which three German guards perished.’

‘I’m Patrick Roussel.’ My brother stepped forward, the vein in his temple pulsing like a panicked butterfly. ‘Don’t harm my mother or sister. They’ve done nothing wrong.’

‘We have no intention of harming your family,’ the moustached man said. ‘But we have orders to search these premises. The sooner we get it done, the sooner we can leave you in peace. So please, the ladies will wait here in the kitchen and you come with us, boy.’

He took my brother’s arm and headed directly for the cellar, as if he instinctively knew where it was, or someone had clearly explained to him the layout of L’Auberge.

Without a word, my mother and I sat opposite each other at the table. The men opened drawers and upturned Maman’s sugar, flour and coffee canisters that bore faded harvest scenes from last century. They inspected her gleaming pots and pans hanging from the rack above the cupboards, though what they expected we could conceal in them, I couldn’t imagine.

Maman didn’t give them a single glance, but stared straight ahead, her spine rigid, her arms folded tightly in her lap. I slid the egg-timer towards me and flipped it upside down.

‘… rice, noodles, salt, tins of sardines …’ we could hear the Gestapo man saying, from the cellar.

I kept my eyes on the stream of sand trickling slowly, surely, into the lower bulb of the egg-timer, as the Rubie clock
tock-tocked
its rhythmic, melancholy tones.

‘Black market … only for the black market,’ Patrick was saying, trying to fob him off with the cover story.

‘… Resistance group … informed … meetings,’ the man went on.

‘No, no … black market only,’ Patrick insisted.

No doubt the Gestapo officer suspected my brother was lying; that he was attempting to pass himself off as nothing more than a small-time black market dealer, but once the Gestapo discovered the propaganda sheets, the guns and dynamite, he would have certain proof of his suspicions.

‘… black market … serious crime,’ the Gestapo man went on. ‘… imprison you simply for that.’

The men divided up and started invading the rest of L’Auberge
,
room by room, and I pushed the hourglass aside and gripped the underside of the table.

Three of them entered the herbal room. My mother’s eyes tightened to slits, one hand leaping to her chignon. I knew she would be fearful not only for her precious remedies, but for her stocks of food, wine and cash secreted beneath the floorboards.

She needn’t have worried because the officers were out of there in less than a minute without touching a single glass jar. Their pale features seemed twisted in suspicion, or was it fear? Their blue eyes skimmed about, as if searching for something invisible to the human eye. Their shoulders quivered, like they were shrugging off a thing that had gripped them in that narrow, secretive den.

We remained silent as they sifted through Maman’s drawers and cabinets, disturbing her orderly piles of papers and inspecting each dust-free ornament. They took great care not to damage or break anything as they upturned furniture, their hands running along seams checking for hidden compartments, secret openings.

Minutes passed, the Gestapo’s perfect manners and excessive politeness chilling me more than if they’d shouted, thrown things, or pushed us around.

The moustachioed boss returned to the kitchen with Patrick, whose wrists were clamped in handcuffs. I dared only a quick glance at my brother.

Chafed with anguish for the Wolfs, and how petrified they must be crouched behind the attic partition, I felt bewildered more than anything when one of the officers appeared carrying the plastic tubing with its small pump inset. In the shock and confusion of their arrival, I’d completely forgotten Maman’s illegal business.

They placed the tubing, coiled in its metal bowl, before her on the table, beside the emptied hourglass.

‘Explain, madame,
s’il vous plaît
,’ the boss man said. Maman said nothing. She braced her arms across her chest, pursed her lips in a hard line and her eyes widened with the cornered stare of a deer catching the hunter’s whiff.

‘There’s a drop-down ladder here,’ another one called from upstairs.

I felt I might faint, as I listened to him climb up to the attic. It was over for the Wolfs; over for all of us. I bit hard on my top lip, my full bladder pressing against my belly. I hadn’t had time to use the chamber pot before they forced us out from beneath our eiderdowns.

Please, Jacob, don’t cry out, don’t make a sound.

Over and over I repeated the words, silently willing the little boy to keep quiet, as the Gestapo soldier rattled about in the attic.

It seemed like an hour, but probably only several minutes had passed when he returned to the kitchen. He muttered something in German, which I gathered meant he hadn’t found anything. I glanced at my mother and swallowed my cry of relief.

‘You’ll have to come with us,’ moustache man said, pulling Maman to her feet and snapping handcuffs around her thin wrists.

He nodded at me. ‘
Bonne journée,
mam’zelle
.
’

‘But why? Where are you taking them?’ Tears bleared my vision, and I grabbed Patrick’s arm, trying to snag him from the German’s grip.

‘There are serious accusations against your brother,’ he said. ‘Not to mention the illegal business Madame Roussel is evidently conducting from her home. Please step aside, mam’zelle, we must leave now.’

I kept hold of Patrick. ‘No! Please don’t take them. You can’t!’

The German prised my fingers, one by one, from Patrick’s arm.

‘Look after things, Célestine,’ Maman said as the Germans tore her away from me too, and her eyes flickered, for the briefest instant, up to the attic.

I felt the urge to run back to her, to hug her and kiss each incurved cheek. I wanted to tell her I didn’t hate her, not at all; that I’d had enough of our eternal battle and only wanted peace. But I couldn’t, because we’d never touched or shown emotion. The very idea was bizarre.

From the kitchen window, I watched the shiny boots thunder back down the steps, impatient and heavy, then
click-clicking
across the cobblestones. I grasped my angel pendant, desperate for the comfort of the old bone.

The Gestapo hustled Patrick and Maman into the back seat of one of the cars, slammed the doors and screeched away. As if a harsh hand had shoved me, I reeled back from the window.

I filled a glass with water, my quivering hand spilling most of it over the tiles. As I sank into a chair and gulped the water down, Martin Diehl’s face hurtled into my mind. An arrest the very day after I’d spoken to him. Was that too much of a coincidence?

***

After the initial shock ebbed, my first instinct was to jump on a train to Valeria. Félicité would know what to do. I fleetingly thought about going to Uncle Claude’s farm, to see if Olivier and the others were safe, but if the Gestapo knew about Patrick there was every chance they knew about the rest of the boys. I ached to see Ghislaine and Miette, but the Gestapo could well be in the village and I had no desire to run into them again. I could have gone to Aunt Maude and Uncle Félix in Julien-sur-Vionne, but with my cousins being held prisoner I was reluctant to heap any extra misery on them. I knew though, whatever I did, however deeply I floundered in that black pit, the farm chores needed to be done first.

I grabbed my coat, stumbled down the steps and went through the motions, my hands working separately from my brain as I filled the buckets with water and brought them inside. It was only as I finished milking the goats, and covered the pail with a muslin cloth, that I remembered the Wolfs.

I shovelled together a breakfast of coffee, milk, bread and apricot jam and hurried up to the attic. The family were still crouched in the partition behind the false panel.

‘Don’t be afraid,’ I said. ‘They’ve gone.’

‘They arrested Patrick and your mother, didn’t they?’ Sabine said. ‘How terrible. Where did they take them? Will they be all right? What will you do?’

I patted Sabine’s arm, trying to calm her as much as myself. ‘I don’t know where they’ve taken them. And I truly have no idea what to do, yet.’

Jacob clung to his mother’s skirt with one hand. In the other, he clutched the soldier with the red coat. Max remained silent, as if the terror had stolen his voice.

‘Will the Germans come back and find us and take us away?’ Talia said, a single tear running down her cheek.

Sabine stroked the hair from her daughter’s forehead. ‘Don’t fret, my girl, Céleste won’t let that happen.’

‘No, of course I won’t,’ I said, but in that instant I did not feel capable of helping, or protecting, a single person. I knew though that I had to do something –– I could not remain at L’Auberge in that state of bewildered stupor a second longer.

‘I need to see my sister,’ I said. ‘I’ll be back as soon as I can.’

Sabine gave me a hasty hug. ‘Take great care, Céleste.’

***

The half hour I waited for the train seemed endless and I hopped from one foot to the other, my eyes continually scouring around for the slightest glimpse of a dark Gestapo uniform, or for any other Germans who might be tailing me.

Once with Félicité, in that same sparse and unfriendly visitors’ room, my words spewed out in a gibber.

‘Slow down, take deep breaths,’ my sister urged. She fidgeted with the silver cross that dangled from a black cord around her neck until eventually I got the whole story out.

‘I think all of this,’ I said, tracing the groove of a deep scratch on the desk top with my fingernail, ‘the war, the occupation, has been bearable up to now because we’ve been taking it one day at a time. Every day people look after their families, their animals, their crops. We live from day to day but nobody seems to plan for tomorrow. All we say is, “Good, another day when nothing really bad has happened”.’

I looked up at my sister. ‘Well now something really bad has happened, and you know what? I don’t have a single plan for tomorrow.’

Félicité sat opposite me, behind the tatty desk.

‘Céleste,’ she said, cupping a hand over my fisted ones. ‘Besides the problem of Maman and Patrick, and most certainly the other boys, the family in L’Auberge attic is in great danger. We’ll have to move them immediately, even if their papers are not finalised. Now I’m going to have to trust you with certain information; to depend on you to keep it to yourself.’

‘What information? Of course you can trust me.’

Félicité drew her hands from mine.
‘I know that, and I’m sure, with this business with the German officer, you’re learning to think with your head, not your heart. Now,’ she said. ‘You should know there are more of Lucie’s villagers involved in our brother’s group –– people the other boys, besides Olivier and Patrick, don’t know about for … for safety reasons. They have the contacts, do the organising, rather than go out on missions, like the boys. They might be able to help us with these terrible arrests.’

Even after my sister confided the “trusted information” to me and I began to grasp it all; to understand the people and the stakes involved, I was still stunned.

‘I never imagined people like priests and doctors would be involved in such illegal activity,’ I said. ‘But I suppose it’s no more surprising than nuns harbouring children in their convent.’

‘We all want to help, Céleste. People from every walk of life are keen to do their bit.’

‘I might’ve guessed,’ I said. ‘Only the other week I saw Père Emmanuel stand by doing nothing as his Sunday school group giggled at a scarecrow wearing a German helmet. And I suppose they did grow up in Lucie together, he and Dr. Laforge.’