The evening meal was the usual emetic blend of leftovers from the guesthouse. Anselm pushed something purple around his plate. There would be no knowing what it had been in its many previous lives. Afterwards, the community filed into the common room for recreation, where Anselm joined Wilf in his usual corner by the aspidistra that no one watered but yet miraculously never died. It was one of Wilf’s greatest attributes that he used events in his life as a prompt for research into things about which he knew nothing. After Schwermann’s arrival he had quietly buried himself in reading about the Occupation and its aftermath. He liked to share his findings and Anselm enjoyed his reported forays, marked as they were by the wonder of David Bellamy having found a new snail in the garden.
‘Wartime creates its own unique moral dilemmas,’ uttered Wilf with Delphic calm, inviting a request for more disclosure.
‘Why’s that?’ obliged Anselm.
‘Well,’ said Wilf, gratified and settling back, ‘there’s the strange case of Paul Touvier. A traditionalist Catholic but in the Vichy Milice. Pushed into it by his father and a priest. So he’s French, policing the French for the Germans. ‘
‘A collaborator,’ contributed Anselm obviously
‘Indeed. And his job was to combat the Resistance.’
‘Not a very devout thing to do.’
‘Bear with me, Father. For therein lies an interesting conundrum. The Resistance assassinated the Vichy minister of information in 1944. The Germans wanted reprisals. According to Touvier, they demanded the execution of a hundred Jews. He says he bargained them down to thirty, and ordered the deaths of seven, at Rillieux-la-Pape, as an appeasement to save the remaining twenty-three.’
‘Where’s the devotion in that?’
‘Well, there isn’t any of course. Only it set me thinking. Here is a man who will, in due course, be convicted in absentia of treason. I don’t know any more about him, and what he said was probably nonsense, but it occurred to me that it was only those who collaborated who were in a position to bargain with the Nazis if the opportunity arose. That is not, of course, a reason for collaborating. But it suggests an interesting abstract principle: in certain situations, only someone who’s lost himself can do the good deed, even though he can never make atonement for what he has done.’
A shared pause of reflection ensued. Wilf picked up a newspaper, found the crossword and said: ‘Even so, I can’t for the life of me understand why Touvier was hidden in a monastery.’
‘Pardon?’ said Anselm.
Wilf repeated his observation, frowning gravely at the first clue. ‘Fundamentalists, apparently Integristes. Not our cup of tea.’ A touch complicated, he added, because Touvier had been pardoned by Pompidou. Ten years later he went into hiding when it transpired he could still be prosecuted. He was eventually convicted of the Rillieux murders in 1994, the first Frenchman to go down for war-related crimes against humanity.
‘Hideously embarrassing for the Church when they caught him, of course,’ pursued Wilf, laying the paper on his lap, ‘if only because it dredged up the ecclesiastical compromises of the past.’ During the war, he said, the Church had been in a very difficult position. Petain and Vichy reintroduced support that had been previously withdrawn by a viciously anti-clerical state. An alliance grew that was far too cosy ‘It was all rather complicated.’
Slightly uneasy, Anselm left Wilf to his crossword. As he got ready to clean the refectory floor he all but heard another voice, whispering, and he saw the luminous eyes of Cardinal Vincenzi:
‘It’s all rather complicated.’