Clean and gut the anchovies and rub inside and out with salt. Fill each one generously with rock salt and branches of salicorne. Place in the barrel with the heads facing upward and cover with salt by layers.
Another affectation. When you opened the barrel they would be there, standing on their tails in the gleaming gray salt, staring in mute fishy appeal. Remove what is needed for the day’s cooking and pack the rest into place with more salt and salicorne. In the darkness of the cellar they look desperate, like drowning children in a well.
Snip off that thought quickly, like the head of a flower.
My mother writes in blue ink, the script neat and slanting. Beneath it she has added something in a more careless hand, but it is in bilini-enverlini, an exotic scrawl in red grease pencil like lipstick: toulini fonini nisllipni.
Out of pills.
She’d had them since the beginning of the war, using them first with care, once a month or less, then more recklessly as that strange summer advanced and she smelt oranges all the time.
She wrote raggedly:
Y. does his best to help. It gives both of us a little relief. He gets the pills from La Rép, from a man Hourias knows there. Other comforts too, I guess. I know better than to ask. He isn’t made of stone, after all. Not like me. I try not to care. It’s pointless. He is discreet. I should be grateful. He looks after me in his way, but it’s useless. We are divided. He lives in the light. The thought of my suffering dismays him. I know this, and still I hate him for being what he is.
Then, later, after my father’s death:
Out of pills. The German says he can get some more, but he doesn’t come. It is a kind of madness. I would sell my children for a night’s sleep.
This last entry, unusually, has a date. That’s how I know. She was jealous with her pills, hiding the bottle away at the bottom of a drawer in her room. Sometimes she would take the bottle out and turn it over. It was brown glass, the label still showing a few barely legible words in German.
Out of pills.
That was the night of the dance, the night of the last orange.
Hey, Backfisch, almost forgot.“ Turning, he threw it carelessly, like a boy pitching a ball, to see if I’d catch. He was like that, pretending to forget, teasing me, risking the prize in the murky Loire if I was slow or clumsy. ”Your favorite.“
I caught it easily, left-handed. Grinned.
“Tell the others to come by La Mauvaise Réputation tonight.” Winked, eyes glinting cat-green with mischief. “Might be some fun.”
Of course, Mother would never have let us go out at night. Though the curfew remained largely unenforceable in the remoter villages such as ours, there were other dangers. Night hid more illicit goings-on than we could guess, and by then a number of off-duty Germans had occasionally taken to stopping by at the café for drinks. Apparently they liked to get out of Angers and away from the suspicious eye of the S.S. In the course of our meetings Tomas had mentioned this, and sometimes I heard the sounds of motorbikes on the distant road and thought of him riding home. I saw him clearly in my mind’s eye, hair blown back by the wind, the moonlight shining on his face and the cold white sweep of the Loire. The motorbike riders might have been anyone, of course. But I always thought of Tomas.
Today, however, was different. Emboldened perhaps by our secret time together, anything seemed possible. Slinging his uniform jacket over his shoulders Tomas waved lazily as he drove off, kicking up a cloud of yellow Loire dust beneath his wheels, and suddenly my heart swelled unbearably. Loss flooded through me in a hot-cold wash and I ran after him, tasting his dust, waving my arms for long after his bike vanished down the Angers road, tears beginning to crawl pink channels across my face’s mud mask.
It wasn’t enough.
I’d had my day, my one perfect day, and already my heart was boiling with rage and dissatisfaction. I clocked the sun. Four hours. An impossible time, a whole afternoon, and yet it wasn’t enough, I wanted more. More. The discovery of this new appetite within me made me bite my lips in desperation; the memory of the brief contact between us burnt at my hand like a brand. Several times I lifted my palm to my lips and kissed the burning place his skin had left. I lingered over his words as if they were poetry. I relived every precious moment to myself, with growing disbelief, as on winter mornings I still try to recall the summer. But it is an appetite that no amount of feeding can satisfy. I wanted to see him again, that day, that minute. I had wild thoughts of us running away together, of living in the forest away from people, of myself building him a tree house and eating mushrooms and wild strawberries and chestnuts until the war was over…
Cassis, Reine and Paul found me at the Lookout Post, the orange in one hand, lying on my back and staring into the autumn canopy.
“S-s-said she’d b-be here,” said Paul (he always stammered badly when Reine was there). “S-s-saw her g-oing into the w-woods when I was f-fishing.”
He looked shy and awkward beside Cassis, conscious of his scruffy blue dungarees (cut down from one of his uncle’s overalls) and his bare feet in their wooden clogs. Malabar was with him, tied with a length of green gardening twine. Cassis and Reine wore their school clothes, and Reinette’s hair was tied with a yellow silk ribbon. I always wondered why Paul dressed so shabbily when his mother was a seamstress.
“Are you all right?” Cassis’s voice was sharp with anxiety. “When you didn’t come home, I thought-” He cast a quick dark look at Paul, then one of warning to me. “You know who hasn’t been here, has he?” he whispered, clearly wishing that Paul would leave.
I nodded. Cassis made a gesture of annoyance. “What did I tell you?” he said in a low, furious voice. “What did I say, never to be alone with-” Another glance at Paul. “Anyway, we’d better be going home now,” he said in a louder voice. “Mother will be starting to get worried, and she’s making a pavé. You’d better hurry up and-”
But Paul was looking at the orange in my hand.
“You g-got another un,” he said in his slow, curious way.
Cassis gave me a look of disgust. Why couldn’t you hide it, stupid? Now we’ll have to share it with him.
I hesitated. Sharing was not in my plan. I needed the orange for tonight. And yet I could see Paul was already curious. Ready to talk.
“I’ll give you some if you don’t tell,” I said at last.
“Where’s it f-from?”
“Swapped it down the market,” I said glibly. “For some sugar and parachute silk. Mother doesn’t know.”
Paul nodded, then looked shyly at Reine. “We could all sh-share it now,” he said tentatively. “I’ve gotta knife.”
“Give it to me,” I said.
“I’ll do it,” said Cassis at once.
“No, it’s mine,” I said. “Let me.”
I was thinking rapidly. Of course I might be able to retrieve some of the orange peel, but I didn’t want Cassis to suspect.
I turned my back on them to divide the orange, slicing carefully to avoid cutting my hand. Cutting quarters would have been easy, slice down the middle, then slice again, but this time I needed to cut an extra piece, large enough for my purpose but too small to be immediately noticeable as missing from the rest, a piece I could slip into my pocket for later… As I sliced it I saw that Tomas’s gift was a Seville blood orange, a sanguine, and for an instant I was transfixed at the red juice dripping from my fingers.
“Hurry up, clumsy,” said Cassis impatiently. “How long does it take to cut an orange into quarters?”
“I’m trying,” I snapped. “The skin’s so tough.”
“L-let m-m-m-” Paul made a move toward me and for a second I was sure he’d seen it, the fifth piece, no more than a sliver really, before I slid it into my sleeve and out of sight.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I’ve done it now.”
The pieces were uneven. I had done the best I could, but still there was one quarter that was noticeably bigger than the rest, and another that was very small. I took the small piece. I noticed Paul gave the large one to Reine.
Cassis watched in disgust. “I told you you should have let me do it,” he said. “Mine isn’t a proper quarter. You’re so clumsy, Boise.”
I sucked my piece of orange in silence. After a while Cassis stopped grumbling and ate his. I saw Paul watching me with an odd expression, but he didn’t say anything.
We threw our pieces of peel into the river. I did manage to save one piece of mine in my mouth, but I threw in the rest, uneasily aware of Cassis’s eyes on me, and was relieved to see him relax a little. I wondered what he might have suspected. I transferred the bitten-off piece of peel into my pocket with the illicit fifth quarter, feeling pleased.
I just hoped it would be enough.
I showed the others how to clean their hands and mouths with mint and fennel and to rub under their fingernails with mud to hide the orange-peel stain, then we went home through the fields to where Mother, singing tonelessly to herself in the kitchen, was preparing dinner.
“Sweat the onion and shallots in olive oil with some fresh rosemary, mushrooms and a small leek. Add a handful of dried tomatoes, basil and thyme. Cut four anchovies lengthways and place in the pan. Leave for five minutes.
“Boise, some anchovies from the barrel. Four big ones.”
I went down to the cellar with a dish and the wooden tongs so that the salt would not crack open the skin of my palms. I took out the fish, then the orange bag in its protective jar. I added the new piece of orange, squeezing the oil and juice onto the old peel to revive it, then chopped what was left with my pocketknife and tied it into the bag. The scent was immediate and pungent. I sealed the bag back into the jar, rubbed the glass clean of salt and placed it in my apron pocket so that no more of the precious scent could escape. I touched my palms briefly against the salted fish so that Mother would be deceived.
“Add a cupful of white wine and the parboiled, floury potatoes. Add cooking scraps-bacon rind, leftover meat or fish-and a tablespoon of oil. Cook on a very low heat for ten minutes without stirring or lifting the lid.”
I could hear her singing to herself in the kitchen. She had a monotonous, rather grating voice, which rose and fell at intervals.
“Add the raw unsoaked millet-hnn hnnn-and turn off the heat. Leave covered for-hnnn hnnn-ten minutes without stirring or-hnnnn-until the juices have been absorbed. Press into a shallow dish-hnn hnn hnnn-brush with oil and bake until crisp.”
With a keen eye to what was happening in the kitchen, I put the orange bag under the heating pipes for the last time.
I waited.
For a time I was sure it wasn’t going to work. Mother stayed in the kitchen, humming to herself in that tuneless dogged way. As well as the pavé there was also a cake black with berries and bowls of green salad and tomatoes. Almost a celebration dinner, though what we had to celebrate I couldn’t guess. Mother was like that sometimes; on good days there would be a feast, and on bad we would make do with cold pancakes and a smear of rillettes. Today she seemed almost fey, hair falling from its usually severe scraped-back style into casual tendrils, face moist and pink with the heat of the fire. There was a feverish quality about her, in the way she spoke to us, the quick breathless hug she gave Reine as she came in-a rarity almost as unusual as her brief episodes of violence-the tone in her voice, the way her hands moved in the basin, on the chopping board, with quick nervous flutterings of the fingers.
Out of pills.
A crease between her eyes, creases around her mouth, her strained, effortful smile. She looked at me as I handed her the anchovies and gave a smile of peculiar sweetness, a smile that a month ago, a day ago, might almost have softened my heart.
“Boise.”
I thought of Tomas sitting by the riverbank. I thought of the thing that I had seen, the oil-slick, monstrous beauty of its flank against the water. I wish. I wish. He’d be there tonight, I told myself, at La Mauvaise Réputation. Jacket slung casually across a chair back. I imagined myself, grown suddenly movie-star beautiful and refined, silk dress billowing out behind me, everyone staring. I wish. I wish. If I’d only had my rod…
My mother was staring at me with that expression of strange, almost embarrassing vulnerability.
“Boise?” she repeated. “Are you all right? Do you feel ill?”
I shook my head in silence. The wave of self-hatred that struck me was whiplash quick, a revelation. I wish…I wish…I made my face sullen. Tomas. Only you. Forever.
“I’ve got to check my traps,” I told her in my dead voice. “I won’t be long.”
“Boise!” I heard her call after me, but I ignored her. I ran to the river, checked each trap twice, certain that this time, this time, when I needed that wish…
All empty. I threw the small fry-bleaks, gudgeons, flat small-snouted eels-back into the river in sudden, searing rage.
“Where are you?” I screeched across the silent water. “Where are you, you sly old bitch?”
Below my feet the dim Loire flowed unmoved, brown and mocking. I wish. I wish. I picked up a stone from the bank and threw it as far as I could, wrenching my shoulder painfully.
“Where are you? Where are you hiding?” My voice sounded hoarse and shrill, like my mother’s. The air sizzled with my fury. “Come out and show yourself! Dare you! DARE YOU!”
Nothing. Nothing but the brown snaky river and the sandbanks lying half drowned in the failing light. My throat felt raw and scraped. Tears stung the corners of my eyes like wasps.
“I know you can hear me,” I said in a low voice. “I know you’re there.”
The river seemed to agree with me. I could hear the silky sounds of the water against the bank at my feet.
“I know you’re there,” I said again, almost caressingly. Everything seemed to be listening to me now, the trees with their turning leaves, the water, the burnt autumn grass.
“You know what I want, don’t you?” Again that voice, which sounded like someone else’s, that adult, seductive voice. “You know.”
I thought of Jeannette Gaudin then and the water snake, of the long brown bodies hanging up against the Standing Stones and the feeling I had had, earlier that summer a million years ago, the conviction.…It was an abomination. A monster. No one could make a pact with a monster.
I wish. I wish.
I wondered whether Jeannette had stood where I was now, barefoot and looking over the water. What did she wish for? A new dress? A doll to play with? Something else?
White cross. Beloved Daughter. Suddenly it didn’t seem such a terrible thing to be dead and beloved, a plaster angel at your head and silence…
I wish. I wish.
“I’d throw you back,” I whispered slyly. “You know I would.”
For a second I thought I saw something. Bristle black in the water, a shining silent something like a mine, all teeth and metal. But it was just my imagination.
“I would,” I repeated softly. “I’d throw you back.”
But if it had been there at all, it wasn’t now. Beside me a frog belched suddenly, absurdly. It was getting cold. I turned and went back across the fields the way I came, picking a few ears of corn to excuse my late arrival.
After a while I began to smell the pavé cooking, and I quickened my step.
I‘ve lost her. I’m losing them all.
It’s there in my mother’s album opposite a recipe for blackberry cake, tiny migraine-letters in black ink, the lines crossed and recrossed as if even the code in which she writes is not enough to hide the fear she hides from us and from herself.
She looked at me today as if I wasn’t there. Wanted so hard to take her in my arms but she’s grown so much and I’m afraid of her eyes. Only R-C keeps a little softness but Fra doesn’t feel like my child any more. My mistake was thinking children were like trees. Prune them back and they’ll grow sweeter. Not true. Not true. When Y. died I made them grow up too fast. Didn’t want them to be children. Now they’re harder than me. Like animals. My fault. I made them that way. Oranges in the house again tonight, but no one smells them but me. My head aches. If only she could put her hand on my forehead. No more pills. The German says he can get some more, but he doesn’t come. Boise. Late home tonight. Like me, divided.
It sounds like gibberish, but her voice in my mind is suddenly very clear. It is sharp and plaintive, the voice of a woman hanging on to her sanity with every bit of her strength.
The German says he can get some more, but he doesn’t come.
Oh, Mother. If only I’d known.
Paul and I read through the album little by little during those lengthening nights. I deciphered the code while he wrote down and cross-referenced everything by means of small cards in order to try to put events in sequence. He never commented, not even when I passed over certain sections without telling him why. We averaged two or three pages a night, not a great deal, but by October we had covered almost half the album. For some reason it seemed a less arduous task than when I’d tried it alone, and we would often sit late into the night remembering the old days of the Lookout Post and the rituals at the Standing Stones, the good days before Tomas. Once or twice I even came close to telling him the truth, but I always stopped just in time.
No. Paul mustn’t know.
My mother’s album was only one story; one with which he was already partly familiar. But the story behind the album…I looked at him as we sat together, the bottle of Cointreau between us and the copper pot of coffee simmering on the stove behind. Red light from the fire lit his face and outlined his old yellow mustache in flame. He caught me looking at him-seems he does that more and more often nowadays-and smiled.
And it wasn’t so much the smile as something behind the smile-a look, a kind of searching, wry look-that made my heart beat faster and my face flush with something more than the heat of the fire. If I told him, I thought suddenly, that look would go from his face. I couldn’t tell him. Not ever.
When I came in the others were already at table. Mother greeted me with her strange, forced cheeriness but I could tell that she was at the end of her tolerance. The smell of orange stung my sensitized nostrils. I watched her intently.
We ate in silence.
The celebration dinner was heavy, like eating clay, and my stomach rebelled against it. I pushed food about on my plate until I was sure she was looking elsewhere, then transferred it into my apron pocket for later disposal. I need not have worried. In the state she was in, I don’t think she would have noticed if I’d thrown it against the wall.
“I smell oranges.” Her voice was brittle with desperation. “Has any of you brought oranges into the house?”
Silence. We looked at her blankly, expectant.
“Well? Have you? Brought oranges?” Voice rising now, a plea, an accusation.
Reine looked at me suddenly, guilty.
“Of course not.” I made my voice flat and sullen. “Where would we get oranges?”
“I don’t know.” Her eyes were narrow with suspicion. “The Germans, perhaps. How should I know what you do all day?”
This was so close to the truth that for a moment I was startled, but I didn’t let it show. I gave a shrug, very conscious of Reinette watching me. I shot her a warning look.
Give the game away, would you?
Reinette turned back to her cake. I kept on watching my mother. Staring her out. She was better at it than Cassis, her eyes expressionless as sloes. Then she stood up abruptly, almost knocking over her plate and half-dragging the tablecloth with her.
“What are you staring at now?” she cried at me, stabbing at the air with her hands. “What are you staring at, damn you? What is there to see?”
I gave another shrug. “Nothing.”
“That isn’t true.” Voice like a bird’s, sharp and precise as a woodpecker’s beak. “You’re always staring at me. Staring. What at? Thinking what, you little bitch?”
I could smell her distress and fear, and my heart swelled with victory. Her eyes dropped from mine. I did it, I thought. I did it. I won.
She knew it too. She looked at me for another few seconds, but the battle was lost. I gave a tiny smile, which only she could see. Her hand crept to her temple in the old gesture of helplessness.
“I have a headache,” she said with difficulty. “I’m going to lie down.”
“Good idea,” I said tonelessly.
“Don’t forget to wash the plates,” she said, but it was only noise. She knew she’d lost. “No putting them away still wet. No leaving-” Then she broke off, silent, staring into space for half a minute. A statue frozen midmovement, mouth half open. The rest of the sentence hung between us for an uneasy half-minute.
“Plates on the draining board all night,” she finished at last, and stumbled off down the passageway, pausing once to check the bathroom, where there were no more pills.
We-Cassis, Reinette and I-looked at one another.
“Tomas said to meet him at La Mauvaise Réputation tonight,” I told the others. “He said there might be some fun.”
Cassis looked at me. “How did you do that?” he said.
“Do what?” I echoed.
“You know.” His voice was low and urgent, almost fearful. In that moment he seemed to have lost all authority over us. I was the leader now, the one to whom the rest would look for guidance. The strange thing was that though I realized this at once, I felt scarcely any satisfaction. There were other things on my mind.
I ignored his question. “We’ll wait until she’s asleep,” I decided. “An hour, maybe two at most. Then we’ll make our way across the fields. No one will see us. We can hide out in the alley and watch out for him.”
Reinette’s eyes lit up, but Cassis looked skeptical. “What for?” he asked at last. “What are we going to do when we get there? We’ve got nothing to tell him, and he already left the film magazines-”
I glared at him. “Magazines,” I snapped. “Is that all you ever think about?”
Cassis looked sullen. “He said something interesting might happen,” I said. “Aren’t you curious?”
“Not really. It mightn’t be safe. You know what Mother-”
“You’re just chicken,” I said fiercely.
“I’m not!” He was, though. I could see it in his eyes.
“Chicken.”
“I just don’t see the point in-”
“Dare you,” I said.
Silence. Cassis gave a sudden pleading look at Reine. I began to stare him out. He held my gaze for a second or two, then turned away.
“Baby stuff,” he said with mock indifference.
“Double dare you.”
Cassis made a furious gesture of helplessness and defeat. “Oh, all right, but I tell you, it’s going to be a pointless waste of time-”
I laughed in triumph.
The Café de la Mauvaise Réputation, “ La Rép ” to its regulars-wooden floor, polished bar with an old piano standing beside it (of course, nowadays half the keys are missing and there’s a planter of geraniums where the works used to be), a row of bottles (no optics in those days) and glasses hanging on hooks under the bar and around. The sign has been replaced by a blue neon thing and there are machines and a jukebox, but in those days there was nothing but the piano and a few tables that you could move against the walls if anyone happened to want to dance.
Raphaël could play when he wanted to, and sometimes someone-one of the women, Colette Gaudin or Agnès Petit-might sing. No one had a record player in those days, and the radio was forbidden, but the café was said to be a lively place in the evenings, and we sometimes heard music from there even across the fields if the wind was blowing in the right direction. That was where Julien Lecoz lost his south pasture at cards-rumor had it he’d betted his wife as well, but no one would take him up on the offer-and it was the second home of the local drunks who would sit at the terrasse smoking or playing pétanque by the steps. Paul’s father was there often, much to our mother’s disapproval, and though I never saw him drunk he never seemed to be quite sober either, smiling vaguely at passersby and showing his big square yellow dentures. It was a place where we never went. We were territorial creatures and regarded certain places as peculiarly our own, though others belonged to the village, the adults, places of mystery or indifference, the church, the post office where Michelle Hourias sorted the mail and gossiped over the counter, the little school where we had spent our earliest years, but which now stayed boarded up.
La Mauvaise Réputation.
We stayed away partly because our mother told us. She had a peculiar hatred of drunkenness, of dirt, of loose living, and the place epitomized all of these to her. Though she was not a churchgoer she retained an almost puritanical view of life, believing in hard work, a clean house, polite, well-mannered children. When she had to walk past the place she would do so with her head lowered protectively, a scarf crossed at her thin chest, mouth pursed against the sounds of music and laughter from within. Strange that such a woman-such a self-controlled, order-loving woman-should have fallen victim to drug addiction.
Like the clock, she writes in her album, I am divided. When the moon rises I am not myself. She went to her room so that we would not see her change.
It was a shock to me to realize, after reading those secret passages in the album, that she went regularly to La Mauvaise Réputation. Once a week or more she went there, after dark and in secret, hating every moment and hating herself for her need. She did not drink-no. Why should she, when there were dozens of bottles of cider or prunelle or even calva from her native Brittany in the cellar? Drunkenness, she told us once in a rare moment of confidence, is a sin against the fruit, the tree, the wine itself. It is an outrage, an abuse, just as rape is an abuse of the act of love. She flushed then, turning away gruffly-Reine-Claude, the oil and some basil, quickly!-but the thought stayed with me. Wine, distilled and nurtured from bud into fruit and then through all the processes that make it what it is, deserves better than to be guzzled by some sot with a headful of nonsense. It deserves reverence. Joy. Gentleness.
Oh, she understood wine, my mother. She understood the sweetening process, the fermentation, the seething and mellowing of life in the bottle, the darkening, the slow transformations, the birth of a new vintage in a bouquet of aromas like a magician’s bunch of paper flowers. If only she had had time and patience enough for us. A child is not a fruit tree. She understood that too late. There is no recipe to take a child into sweet, safe adulthood. She should have known that.
Of course, drugs are still sold in La Mauvaise Réputation. Even I know that, and I’m not so old that I can’t recognize the sweet jazzy reek of pot over the haze of beer and frying. God knows I smelled it often enough across the road from the Snack-Wagon-I’ve got a nose, even if that idiot Ramondin hasn’t-and the air was yellow with it some nights when the bikers came. “Recreational drugs,” they call them nowadays, and give them fancy names. But there wasn’t really any such thing in Les Laveuses in those days. The jazz clubs of St Germain-des-Prés were still a decade away, and besides, they never really reached us, not even in the sixties. No, my mother went to La Mauvaise Réputation out of need, simple need, because that was where most of the trading took place. Black market trading, cloth and shoes and less innocuous things like knives, guns, ammunition… Everything had its place at La Rép, cigarettes and brandy and picture postcards of naked women, nylon stockings and lace underwear for Colette and Agnès, who wore their hair loose and reddened their cheekbones with old-fashioned rouge so that they looked like Dutch dolls, one high crimson spot on each cheek and a round bud on the lips, like Lillian Gish.
Round the back, the secret societies, the Communists, the malcontents, the would-bes and the heroes made plans. In the bar the talkers held court and passed little packages to one another or whispered in undertones and drank to future undertakings. In the woods a few wore soot on their faces and cycled to meetings in Angers, braving the curfew. Sometimes-very infrequently-you could hear shots from the other side of the river.
How Mother must have hated it.
But that was where she got the pills. She wrote it all in her album-pills for migraine, morphine from the hospital, three at a time first and then six, ten, twelve, twenty. Her suppliers varied. At first it was Philippe Hourias. Julien Lecoz knew someone, a voluntary worker. Agnès Petit had a cousin, a friend of a friend in Paris…Guilherm Ramondin, the one with the wooden leg, could be persuaded to exchange some of his own medication for wine or money. Small packages, a couple of tablets in a twist of paper, an ampoule and a syringe, a blister of pills. Anything with a morphine base. Of course there was no getting anything from the doctor. In any case, the nearest was in Angers, and all the supplies were needed to treat our soldiers. After her own supplies ran out she scrounged, sold, swapped. She kept the list in her album.
March 2, 1942. Guilherm Ramondin. 4 tablets morphine against 12 eggs.
March 16, 1942. Françoise Petit. 3 tablets morphine against bottle Calvados.
She sold her jewelry-the single row of pearls she is wearing in the wedding photo, her rings, the diamond-chip earrings she had from her mother-in Angers. She was ingenious. Almost as much as Tomas, in her way, though she was always fair in her dealings. With a little ingenuity, she managed.
Then the Germans came.
One or two at a time at first. Some in uniform, some out. The bar fell silent at their entrance, but they made up for that by their merriment, their laughter, the rounds they drank, standing up unsteady at closing time with a smile to Colette or Agnès and a careless handful of coins thrown onto the counter. Sometimes they brought women. We never recognized them, the fur-collared girls from town, girls with nylon stockings and sheer dresses and hair rolled into movie-star confections bristling with hairpins and plucked-thin eyebrows and red-black gleaming lips with white teeth and drooping long-fingered hands over wineglasses. They only came at night. Only with the Germans on the backs of their motorcycles, squealing with shrill delight as they sped through the night, hair flying. Four women. Four Germans. Every now and again the women changed, but the Germans stayed the same.
She writes about them in her album, her first glimpse of them.
Filthy Boches and their whores. Looked at me in my smock, smiled behind their hands. I’d like to kill them. Looked at them watching me and I felt old. Ugly. Only one has kind eyes. The girl beside him bored him, I could tell. Cheap stupid girl, stocking seams drawn on in grease pencil. I could almost feel sorry for her. But he smiled at me. Had to bite my tongue to stop myself from smiling back.
Of course, I have no proof that it was Tomas she wrote about. It might have been anyone in those few scrawled lines. There is no description, nothing to suggest it might have been him, and yet somehow, I am certain that it was. Only Tomas could have made her feel that way. Only Tomas could have made me feel that way.
It’s all in the album. You can read it if you want to, if you know where to look. There is no sequence to events. Other than with the details of her secret transactions there are scarcely any dates. But she was meticulous in her fashion. She described La Rép as it was, so clearly, that reading it years later I felt a thickness in my throat. The noise, the music, the smoke, beer, voices raised in laughter or drunken ribaldry. No wonder we were not allowed near the place. She was too ashamed of her own involvement, too afraid of what we might learn from one of the regulars.
On the night we crept over there, we were to be disappointed. We had imagined a secret den of adult vices. I’d expected naked dancers, women with rubies in their navels and hair down to their waists. Cassis, still feigning indifference, had seen Resistance fighters in his mind’s eye, black-clad guerillas with hard eyes beneath their night camouflage. Reinette imagined herself, rouged and pomaded, with a fur stole around her shoulders, sipping martinis. But that night, looking through the murky window there seemed to be nothing of interest. Only a few old men at tables, a backgammon board, a pack of cards, the old piano and Agnès with her parachute-silk blouse open to the third button leaning against it and singing… It was still early. Tomas had not yet arrived.
May 9. A German soldier (Bavarian). 12 high-dosage morphine tablets against one chicken, sack of sugar and a side of bacon.
May 25. German soldier (fat neck). 16 high-dosage morphine tablets against 1 bottle calva, sack of flour, packet coffee, 6 jars of preserves.
Then a last entry, the date deliberately vague:
September. T.L. Bottle 30 high-dosage morphine tablets.
For the first time she fails to write her own contribution to the deal. Perhaps it is merely carelessness-the writing is barely legible, scrawled in a hurry. Perhaps this time she has paid more than she cares to write. What was the price? Thirty tablets must have seemed a prize of almost unimagined riches. No need to return to La Rép for a while. No more bartering with drunken louts like Julien Lecoz. I imagine she might have paid a great deal for the peace of mind those thirty tablets gave her. What exactly did she pay for that peace of mind? Information? Something else?
We waited in what later became the parking garage. In those days it was no more than a dumping area for rubbish where the bins were kept and where deliveries-barrels of beer or occasionally merchandise of a more illicit nature-were made. A wall ran halfway along the back of the building, then disappeared in a tangle of elders and blackberry bushes. The back door was open-even in October it was stifling hot-and a bright yellow light fanned across the ground from the taproom. We sat on the wall, ready to drop down onto the other side if anyone came too near, and waited.
As I said, it hasn’t changed much. A few lights, some machines, more people, but still the same Mauvaise Réputation, the same people with different hairstyles, the same faces. Going in there today you might almost imagine yourself back there, with the old sots and the young men with their girls in tow and the smell of beer and perfume and cigarettes over everything.
I went there myself, you know, when the Snack-Wagon came, Paul and I hiding-just as Cassis, Reine and I hid the night of the dance-in the garage. Of course, there were cars in it then. It was cold too, and raining. The elders and the blackberry tangle have gone, and now there’s only tarmac and a new wall behind which lovers go, or drunks when they want to piss. We were looking out for Dessanges then, our Luc with his sharp handsome face, but waiting there in the dark with the new neon sign going blink-blink against the wet tarmac, I might have been nine again, and Tomas in the back room with a girl on each arm… Funny tricks time plays on you. There was a double row of motorbikes in the garage, gleaming wetly.
It was eleven o’clock. I felt suddenly stupid, leaning against the new concrete wall like a silly girl spying on the adults, the world’s oldest nine-year-old with Paul next to me and his old dog in tow on its inevitable leash of twine. Stupid and beaten, two old people watching a bar from the dark. For what? A burst of music from the jukebox, nothing I could identify. Even the instruments are alien nowadays, electronic things with no need for mouths or fingers to play them. A girl’s laugh, high and unpleasant. For a moment the door fanned open and we saw him clearly, a girl on each arm. He was wearing a leather jacket that might have cost two thousand francs or more in a Paris shop. The girls were silky and red-mouthed and very young in their thin-strapped dresses. I felt a sudden cold despair.
“Look at us.” I realized that my hair was wet, my fingers stiff as sticks. “James Bond and Mata Hari. Let’s go home.”
Paul looked at me in that reflective way he always has. Anyone else might not have seen the intelligence in his eyes, but I did. Silently he took my hand between his. His hands felt comfortingly warm, and I could feel the rows of calluses on his palms.
“Don’t give up,” he said.
I shrugged. “We’re doing no good here,” I said. “Just making fools of ourselves. Face it, Paul, we’re never going to get the better of Dessanges, so we might as well get that into our thick stubborn heads right now. I mean-”
“No, you don’t.” His voice was slow and almost amused. “You never give up, Framboise. You never did.”
Patience. His patience, kind and stubborn enough to wait out a lifetime.
“That was then,” I told him without meeting his eyes.
“You haven’t changed so much, Framboise.”
Maybe that’s true. There’s something in me still, something hard and not necessarily good. I still feel it occasionally, a hard cold something like a stone inside a clenched fist. I always had it, even in the old days, something mean and dogged and just clever enough to hang on for as long as it took to win… As if Old Mother had somehow got inside me that day and, going for the heart, had instead been swallowed by that inner mouth of mine. A fossil fish inside a fist of stone-I saw a picture of one once in one of Ricot’s dinosaur books-eating itself in its stubborn spite.
“Perhaps I ought to change,” I said softly. “Perhaps I should.”
I think that for a while I really meant it too. I was tired, you understand. Tired beyond anything. Two months on and we’d tried, God knows, we’d tried everything. We watched Luc. We reasoned with him. We built elaborate fantasies-a bomb under his trailer, a hit man from Paris, a shot from a sniper’s rifle at the Lookout Post. Oh, yes, I could have killed him. My anger exhausted me, but my fear kept me awake throughout the night, so that my days were broken glass and my head ached all the time. It was more than simply the fear of exposure; after all, I was Mirabelle Dartigen’s daughter. I had her spirit. I cared about the restaurant, but even if the Dessanges put me out of business, even if no one in Les Laveuses spoke to me ever again, I knew I could fight it out. No, my true fear-kept secret from Paul, barely acknowledged even to myself-was something far darker and more complex. It lurked in the depths of my mind like Old Mother in her slimy bed, and I prayed no lure would ever tempt it out.
I received two letters; one from Yannick and one addressed to me in Laure’s writing. I read the first with growing unease. In it Yannick was plaintive and cajoling: he had been going through a bad time. Laure didn’t understand him, he said; she constantly used his financial dependency as a weapon against him. They had been trying for a child for three years without success; she blamed him for that too. She had mentioned divorce.
According to Yannick, the loan of my mother’s album would change all that. What Laure needed was something to occupy her mind, a new project. Her career needed a boost. Yannick knew I could not be so heartless as to refuse…
I burnt the second letter unopened. Perhaps it was the memory of Noisette’s flat, factual notes from Canada, but I found my nephew’s confidences pitiful and embarrassing. I did not want to know any more. Undaunted, Paul and I prepared for a final siege.
This was to be our last hope. I’m not sure what we expected-it was only sheer obstinacy that kept us going. Perhaps I still needed to win, just as I had that last summer at Les Laveuses. Perhaps it was my mother’s harsh, unreasonable spirit in me, refusing to be beaten. Give up now, I told myself, and her sacrifice would have been for nothing. I fought for both of us, and thought that even my mother might have been proud.
I had never imagined that Paul would prove such an invaluable support. Watching the café had been his idea, just as it was he who discovered the Dessanges phone number on the back of the Snack-Wagon. I had come to rely heavily on Paul in those months, and to trust his judgment. We often sat guard together, a blanket tucked over our feet as the nights drew colder, a pot of coffee and a couple of glasses of Cointreau between us. In small ways, he made himself indispensable. He peeled vegetables for the evening’s cooking. He brought in firewood and gutted fish. Even though visitors to Crêpe Framboise were rare-I stopped opening altogether midweek, and even on the weekend the presence of the Snack-Wagon discouraged all but the most determined customers-he would keep watch in the restaurant, wash dishes, mop floors. And nearly always in silence, the comfortable silence of long intimacy, the simple silence of friendship.
“Don’t change,” he said at last.
I’d turned to go, but he kept my hand in his and I couldn’t pull away. I could see raindrops gleaming on his beret and against his mustache. Behind us, I could hear music from the café.
“I think I might have got something,” said Paul.
“What?” My voice was rough with weariness. All I wanted to do was to lie down and sleep. “For God’s sake, what now?”
“It might be nothing.” Careful now, with a slowness that made me want to scream in frustration. “Wait here. Just want to…you know…check something.”
“What, here?” I almost shrieked. “Paul, you just wait a-”
But he was already gone, moving with a poacher’s speed and silence toward the taproom door. Another second, and he was gone.
“Paul!” I said furiously. “Paul! Don’t think I’m going to wait out here for you! Damn you, Paul!”
But I did. As the rain soaked into the collar of my good autumn coat, creeping slowly into my hair and dribbling cold fingerlings between my breasts, I had plenty of time to realize that no, I hadn’t really changed all that much, after all.
Cassis, Reinette and I been waiting for over an hour when they arrived. Once we were outside La Rép, Cassis, shed all pretense at indifference and watched avidly through one of the smeared windowpanes pushing us back when we tried to take our turns. My interest was limited. Until Tomas arrived there could be nothing much to see, after all. But Reine was persistent.
“I want to see,” she wailed. “Cassis, you mean thing, I want to see!”
“There’s nothing there,” I told her impatiently. “Nothing but old men at tables and those two tarts with their mouths painted red.” I’d only caught a glimpse at the time, but how I remember. Agnès at the piano and Colette with a tight green wrap-over cardigan revealing thrusting breasts like cannon shells. I still remember where everyone was, Martin and Jean-Marie Dupré playing cards with Philippe Hourias-fleecing him, as usual, by all appearances-Henri Lemaître sitting by the bar with an everlasting demi and an eye to the ladies, François Ramondin and Arthur Lecoz, Julien’s cousin, discussing something furtive in a corner with Julien Lanicen and Auguste Truriand and old Gustave Beauchamp on his own by the window, beret pulled down over his hairy ears and a stub of a pipe jammed between his lips. I remember them all. With a struggle I can see Philippe’s cloth cap lying on the bar next to him, I can smell the tobacco smoke-by then the precious tobacco was heavily laced with dandelion leaves, and stank like a green-stick fire-and the smell of chicory coffee. The scene has the stillness of a tableau, the golden glow of nostalgia overridden by the dark-red flare of burning. Oh, I remember. I only wish I didn’t.
When at last they came, we were stiff and bad-tempered from crouching against the wall and Reinette was almost in tears. Cassis had been watching through the doorway and we had settled under the smeary window. It was I who heard them first, the distant sound of motorbikes getting closer on the Angers road, then blatting down the dirt track with a muffled series of small explosions. Four bikes. I suppose we should have expected the women. If we’d known how to read Mother’s album we should certainly have anticipated their arrival, but we were profoundly innocent in spite of everything, and the reality shocked us a little. I suppose it was because as they entered the bar we could see that these were real women-tight twinsets, fake pearls, one carrying her pointed high-heeled shoes in one hand, the other fumbling in her handbag for a compact-not especially pretty, not even very young. I’d expected glamour. But these were only ordinary women like my mother, sharp-faced, hair held back with metal grips, backs arched to an impossible camber by those agonizing shoes. Three ordinary women.
Reinette was gaping.
“Look at her shoes!” Her face, pressed against the smeared glass, was pink with delight and admiration. I realized that she and I were seeing different things, that my sister still saw movie-star glamour in the nylon stockings, the fur collars, crocodile handbags, fluffy ostrich feathers, diamond-cluster earrings, elaborate hairstyles. For the next minute she continued to murmur to herself in tones of ecstasy. “Look at her hat! Ohhh! Her dress! Ohhh!”
Cassis and I both ignored her. My brother was studying the boxes that had been brought on the back of the fourth motorbike. I was watching Tomas.
He stood slightly aside from the rest, one elbow against the bar. I saw him say something to Raphaël, who began to draw glasses of beer. Heinemann, Schwartz and Hauer settled themselves at a free table near the window with the women, and I noticed old Gustave drew away to the other side of the room with a sudden expression of disgust, taking his glass with him. The other drinkers behaved much as if they were used to such visits, even nodding to the Germans as they crossed the room, Henri giving the eye to the three women even after they sat down. I felt a sudden, absurd stab of triumph that Tomas remained unescorted. He stayed at the bar for a while, talking with Raphaël, and I had chance to watch his expressions, his careless gestures, his cap pushed back at a jaunty angle and his uniform jacket left hanging open over his shirt. Raphaël said little, his face wooden and polite. Tomas seemed to sense his dislike, but to be more amused than angry. He lifted his glass in a slightly mocking way and drank Raphaël’s health. Agnès began to play the piano, a waltzy tune with a brittle plink-plink on one of the high notes where one of the keys had been damaged.
Cassis was getting bored.
“Nothing’s happening,” he said in a sullen voice. “Let’s go.”
But Reinette and I were fascinated, she by the lights, the jewelry, the glassware, the smoke from an elegant lacquer cigarette holder held between painted nails, and I…Tomas, of course. It didn’t matter whether anything was happening. I would have derived equal pleasure from watching him alone and sleeping. There was a charm in watching him in secret like this. I could put my hands on the blurry glass and cup his face between them. I could put my lips to the window and imagine his skin against mine. The other three had been drinking more heavily, fat Schwartz with a woman on his knee, one hand riding her skirt higher and higher up her legs so that occasionally I was able to catch a glimpse of the top of her brown stocking and the pinkish garter that held it. I noticed too that Henri had moved closer to the group, ogling the women who screeched like peacocks at every pleasantry. The cardplayers had stopped their game to stare, and Jean-Marie, who seemed to have won the most, moved casually across the bar toward Tomas. Jean-Marie pushed money across the scuffed surface, and Raphaël brought more drinks. Tomas looked once, briefly, behind him at the group of drinkers and smiled. It was a short conversation, and it must have passed unnoticed by anyone who was not deliberately observing Tomas. I imagine that only I saw the transaction, a smile, a mutter, a paper pushed across the bar and quickly hidden in the pocket of Tomas’s coat. It didn’t surprise me. Tomas traded with everyone. He had that gift. We watched and waited for another hour. I think Cassis dozed. Tomas played the piano for a while as Agnès sang, but I was pleased to see that he showed little interest in the women who fawned over and caressed him. I felt proud of him for that. Tomas had better taste.
Everyone had drunk rather a lot at this stage. Raphaël produced a bottle of fine and they drank it neat in coffee cups but without the coffee. A card game started between Hauer and the Dupré brothers, with Philippe and Colette watching and drinks as stakes. I could hear their laughter through the glass as Hauer lost again, though there was no ill feeling, as the drinks were already paid for. One of the town women fell over onto her ankle and sat on the floor, giggling, hair falling over her face. Only Gustave Beauchamp remained aloof, refusing an offer of fine from Philippe and keeping as far from the Germans as possible. He caught Hauer’s eye once and said something under his breath, but as Hauer didn’t catch it, the German just looked at him coolly for a moment before returning to the game. It happened again though, a few minutes later, and this time Hauer, the only one of the group apart from Tomas who could really understand French, stood up, one hand going to the belt where he kept his pistol. The old man glowered at him, his pipe jutting out between his yellow teeth like the barrel of an old tank.
For a moment the tension between them was paralyzing. I saw Raphaël make a movement toward Tomas, who was watching the scene with unruffled amusement. A silent exchange passed between them. For a second or two I thought he might let it go on, just to see what might happen. The old man and the German faced each other, Hauer fully two heads taller than Gustave with his blue eyes bloodshot and the veins in his forehead like bloodworms against his brown skin. Tomas looked at Raphaël and smiled. What do you think? said the smile. Seems a pity to step in just when things are getting exciting. What do you think? Then he stepped forward, almost casually, to his friend, while Raphaël maneuvered the old man out of harm’s way. I don’t know what he said, but I think Tomas saved old Gustave’s life then, one arm round Hauer’s shoulder and the other gesturing vaguely in the direction of the boxes they had brought with them on the back of the fourth motorcycle, the black boxes that had so intrigued Cassis and which now stood against the piano waiting to be opened.
Hauer glared at Tomas for a moment. I could see his eyes narrowed to cuts in his thick cheeks, like slices in a piece of bacon rind. Then Tomas said something else and he relaxed, laughing with a troll’s roar above the sudden renewal of sound in the taproom, and the moment was over. Gustave shuffled off into a corner to finish his drink, and everyone went over to the piano where the boxes were waiting.
For a while I could see nothing but bodies. Then I heard a sound, a musical note much clearer and sweeter than that of the piano, and when Hauer turned toward the window he was holding a trumpet. Schwartz had a drum. Heinemann an instrument I did not recognize. The women moved aside to allow Agnès to reach the piano, then Tomas moved back into my field of vision with his saxophone slung over one shoulder like an exotic weapon. For a second I thought it was a weapon. Beside me Reinette took in a long wavery breath of awe. Cassis, wide awake now and his boredom forgotten, leaned forward, almost pushing me out of the way. It was he who identified the instruments for us. We had no record player at home, but Cassis was old enough to remember the music we used to listen to on the radio, before such things were forbidden, and he’d seen pictures of Glenn Miller’s band in the magazines he loved so much.
“That’s a clarinet!” He sounded very young, suddenly very like his sister in her awe over the town women’s shoes. “And Tomas has got a saxophone-oh, where did they get them? They must have requisitioned them-trust Tomas to find…Oh, I hope they play them, I hope they…”
I don’t know how good they were. I had no point of comparison at all, and we were so flushed with the excitement and the wonder of it that anything would have charmed us. I know it seems ridiculous now, but in those days we heard music so seldom-the piano at La Mauvaise Réputation, the church organ for those who went to church, Denis Gaudin’s violin on July 14 or Mardi Gras, when we danced in the streets… Not so much of that after the war started, of course, but we still did for a while. But now the sounds-exotic, unfamiliar sounds as unlike La Mauvaise Réputation ’s old piano as opera from barking-arose from the taproom, and we drew closer to the window so as not to miss a note. At first the instruments did little but make odd wailing sounds-I imagine they were tuning up, but we didn’t know that-then they began to play some bright sharp-sounding tune that we did not recognize, though I think it might have been some kind of jazz. A light beat from the drum, a throaty burble from the clarinet, but from Tomas’s saxophone a string of bright notes like Christmas lights, sweetly wailing, harshly whispering, rising-falling above the half-discordant whole like a human voice magically enhanced and containing the entire human range of softness, brashness, coaxing and grief…
Of course, memory is such a subjective thing. Perhaps that’s why I feel tears in my eyes as I recall that music, music for the end of the world. In all probability it was nothing like what I remember-a group of drunken Germans hammering out a few bars of jazz blues on stolen instruments-but for me it was magic. It must have had some effect on the other patrons too, because in a few minutes they were dancing-some alone and others in pairs, the town women in the arms of the card-playing Dupré brothers and Philippe and Colette with their faces close together-a kind of dance we had never seen before, a kind of gyrating, bump-grinding dance where ankles went over and tables were shunted by rotating backsides and laughter shrilled over the sounds of the instruments and even Raphaël tapped his foot and forgot to look wooden. I don’t know how long it lasted. Maybe less than an hour. Maybe just a few minutes. I know we joined in, gleeful outside the window, jigging and gyrating like small demons. The music was hot, and the heat burnt off us like alcohol in a flambée, with a sharp, sour smell, and we whooped like Indians, knowing that with the volume of sound indoors we could make as much noise as we pleased and still remain unheard. Fortunately I was watching the window all the time, because I was the one to see old Gustave leave the place. I gave the alarm at once, and we dived behind the wall just in time to see him stumbling out into the freshening night, a stooped dark figure with the glowing bowl of his pipe making a red rose on his face. He was drunk, but not debilitated. In fact, I believe he had heard us, for he stopped alongside the wall and peered sharply into the shadows at the back of the building, one hand pressed against the angle of the porch to stop himself from falling.
“Who’s there?” His voice was querulous. “Is there anybody there?” We kept quiet behind the wall, stifling giggles.
“Anybody?” repeated old Gustave, then, apparently satisfied, muttered something barely audible to himself and began to move again. He came as far as the wall, knocked out his pipe against the stones. A spark shower floated down onto our side, and I clapped my hand onto Reinette’s mouth to stop her from screaming. Then, silence for a moment. We waited, barely daring to breathe. Then we heard the sound of him pissing luxuriantly, endlessly against the wall, giving out a little old-man’s grunt of satisfaction as he did so. I grinned in the dark. No wonder he’d been so eager to know if anyone was there. Cassis nudged me furiously, one hand over his mouth. Reine made a disgusted face. Then we heard the sounds of him fastening his belt buckle again, and a few shuffling steps toward the café. Then nothing.
We waited for a few minutes.
“Where is he?” whispered Cassis at last. “He hasn’t gone. We’d have heard him.”
I shrugged. In a sliver of moonlight I could see Cassis’s face shining with sweat and anxiety. I gestured toward the wall. “Look and see,” I mouthed. “Maybe he’s passed out, or something.”
Cassis shook his head. “Maybe he’s spotted us,” he said grimly. “Just waiting for one of us to stick our head up-and pow!”
I shrugged again, and carefully looked over the top of the wall. Old Gustave hadn’t passed out, but he was sitting on his stick with his back to us, watching the café. He was quite still.
“Well?” said Cassis as I ducked back behind the wall.
I told him what I had seen.
“What’s he doing?” said Cassis, white with frustration.
I shook my head.
“Damn the old idiot! He’ll have us waiting here all night!”
I put my finger to my lips. “Shh. There’s someone coming.”
Old Gustave must have heard them too, for as we ducked farther behind the wall into the blackberry tangles we heard him come over. Not as quietly as we had, and if he’d come over a few meters to the left he would have landed right on top of us. As it was, he fell into a mess of brambles, cursing and flailing with his stick, and we retreated even farther into the thicket. There was a kind of tunnel where we were, made up of rolls of blackberry hedge and goosegrass, and for youngsters of our age and agility it looked as if it might be possible to crawl along underneath until we reached the road. If we could do that, we might be able to avoid climbing back over the wall altogether, thus enabling us to escape unseen into the darkness.
I had almost made my mind up to try this out when I heard the sound of voices from the other side of the wall. One was a woman’s voice. The other spoke German only, and I recognized it as Schwartz.
I could still hear the music playing in the bar, and I guessed that Schwartz and his lady-friend had crept out unremarked. From my vantage point in the blackberry tangle I could see their figures dimly above the wall, and I gestured to Reinette and Cassis to stay where they were. I could see Gustave too, some distance from us and unaware of our presence, huddled against the bricks at his side and watching through one of the cracks in the masonry. I heard the woman’s laughter, high and a little nervous, then Schwartz’s thick voice saying something in German. He was shorter than she was, bullish next to her slim figure, and the way he leaned into her neck seemed oddly carnivorous, as did the sounds he uttered while doing so, slurping, mumbling sounds like a man in a hurry to finish his dinner. As they moved from behind the back porch the moonlight caught them garishly, and I saw Schwartz’s big hands fumbling at the woman’s blouse-Liebchen, Liebling-and heard her laughter shriller than ever-hihihihi!-as she thrust her breasts into his hands. Then, they were no longer alone. A third figure came from behind the porch, but the German seemed unsurprised by his arrival, because he nodded briefly at the newcomer-though the woman seemed oblivious-and turned back to the business in hand while the other man looked on, silent and avid, his eyes gleaming out of the darkness of the porch like an animal’s. It was Jean-Marie Dupré.
It didn’t occur to me then that Tomas might have arranged this meeting. This spectacle in exchange for something else: a favor perhaps, or a tin of black market coffee. I made no connection between the interchange I had witnessed between them in the bar and this-in fact I wasn’t even sure what this was, it was so far removed from the little knowledge I had of such things. Cassis would have known, of course, but he was still crouching behind the wall with Reinette. I beckoned to him frantically, thinking that perhaps this was the time-while the three protagonists were still absorbed in themselves-to make good our escape. Nodding, he began to move toward me through the thicket, leaving Reinette in the shadow of the wall, only her white parachute-silk blouse visible from where we waited.
“Damn her. Why doesn’t she follow?” hissed Cassis at last. The German and the town woman had moved closer to the wall so that we could hardly see what was going on. Jean-Marie was close by them-close enough to watch, I thought, feeling suddenly guilty and sick at the same time-and I could hear their breathing, the thick piggy breathing of the German and the harsh excited breathing of the watcher with the high muffled squeal of the woman between them both, and I was suddenly glad I couldn’t see what was happening, glad that I was too young to understand because the act seemed impossibly ugly, impossibly messy and yet they were enjoying it, eyes rolling in the moonlight and mouths gaping fishily, and now the German was thudding the woman against the wall in short, percussive bursts, and I could hear her head and her backside hitting the bricks and her squealing voice-ah! ah! ah!-and his growling-Liebchen, ja Liebling, ach ja-and I wanted to stand up and run for it there and then, all my cool falling from me in a great prickly wave of panic.
I was about to follow my instinct-half-standing, turning toward the road, measuring the distance between myself and escape-when abruptly the sounds stopped and Schwartz, very loud in the sudden stillness, snapped, “Wer ist das?”
It was then that Reinette, who had been moving softly toward us all the time, panicked. Instead of freezing as we had done when Gustave challenged the dark, she must have thought the German had spotted her, because she stood up and began to run, startling with the moonlight on her white silk blouse, and fell into the blackberry bushes with a cry, twisting her ankle to one side and sitting there wailing with her ankle held between her hands and her white face turning helplessly toward us and her mouth moving desperately and without words.
Cassis moved quickly. Swearing beneath his breath he ran through the thicket in the opposite direction, elder branches whipping at his face as he ran and brambles snagging barbs of flesh from his ankles. Without a backward look at either of us, he vaulted the wall on the other side and disappeared onto the road.
“Verdammt!” It was Schwartz. I saw his pale moony face over the top of the wall and flattened myself invisibly into the bushes. “Wer war das?”
Hauer, who had joined him from the back room, shook his head. “Weiss’nicht. Etwas über da!” he pointed. Three faces appeared over the top of the wall. I could only hide my own behind the dark foliage and hope that Reinette would have the sense to make a dash for it as soon as possible. At least I hadn’t run away, I thought contemptuously, like Cassis. Dimly I realized that back in La Rép the music had stopped.
“Wait, there’s someone there still,” said Jean-Marie, peering over the wall. The town woman joined him, her face white as flour in the moonlight. Her mouth looked black and vicious against that unnatural pallor.
“Why, the little trollop!” she said shrilly. “You! Get up this minute! Yes, you, hiding behind the wall! Spying on us!” The voice was high and indignant, maybe a little guilty. Reine stood up slowly, obediently. Such a good girl, my sister. Always so quick to respond to the voice of authority. Much good it did her. I could hear her breathing, the quick panicky hiss in her throat as she faced them. Her blouse had pulled out of her skirt as she fell, and her hair had come down and blew about her face.
Hauer said something softly to Schwartz in German. Schwartz reached over the wall to haul Reinette over onto their side.
For a few seconds she allowed herself to be hoisted, unprotesting. She was never the quickest thinker, and of the three of us she was by far the most docile. An order from an adult-her first instinct was to obey without question.
Then she seemed to understand. Perhaps it was Schwartz’s hands on her, or maybe she understood what Hauer had murmured, but she began to struggle. Too late, Hauer was holding her still while Schwartz stripped off her blouse-I saw it go sailing over the wall like a white banner in the moonlight. Then another voice-Heinemann, I think-shouted something in German then my sister was screaming, high, breathless cries-ah! ah! ah!-of disgust and terror. For a second I saw her face above the wall, her hair flying out around her, her arms clawing the night, and Schwartz’s beery grinning face turned toward her, then she disappeared, though the sounds continued, the gluttonous sounds of the men and the town woman shrilling in what might have been triumph, “Serve her right, little whore! Serve her right!”
And through it all the laughter, that piggy heh-heh-heh that cuts through my dreams even now some nights, that and the saxophone music, so like a human voice, so like his voice…
I hesitated for maybe thirty seconds. No more, though it seemed like more to me as I bit my knuckles to aid concentration and crouched in the undergrowth. Cassis had already escaped. I was only nine-what could I do? I told myself-but even though I only understood very dimly what was going on still I could not leave her. I stood up, opened my mouth to scream-in my mind’s eye Tomas was nearby and would stop the whole thing-except that someone was already climbing clumsily over the wall, someone with a stick with which he lashed at the onlookers with more rage than efficiency, someone who roared in a furious, cavernous voice, “Filthy Boches! Filthy Boches!”
It was Gustave Beauchamp.
I ducked back into the undergrowth. I could see very little of what was happening now, but I was aware of Reinette grabbing what was left of her blouse and running whimpering back along the wall to the road. I might have joined her then but for curiosity and the sudden elation that washed over me as I heard the familiar voice calling through the pandemonium, “It’s all right! It’s all right!”
My heart leaped.
I heard him push his way through the little crowd-others had joined the fight now and I heard the sound of old Gustave’s stick connect twice more with a sound like someone kicking a cabbage. Soothing words-Tomas’s voice-in French and German: “It’s all right now, calm down, verdammt, calm it, can’t you, Fränzl, you’ve done enough in one day.” Then Hauer’s angry voice and confused protests from Schwartz.
Hauer, his voice trembling with rage, shouted at Gustave, “That’s twice you’ve tried it with me tonight, you old Arschloch!”
Tomas shouting something unintelligible, then a great cry from Gustave cut off suddenly by a sound like a sack of flour hitting a stone granary floor, a terrible thwack against the stone, then silence as shocking as an icy shower.
It lasted thirty seconds or more. No one spoke. No one moved.
Then, Tomas’s voice, cheerily casual: “It’s all right. Go back into the bar. Finish your drinks. The wine must finally have got to him.”
There was an uneasy murmur, a whisper, a flutter of protest. A woman’s voice-Colette, I think: “His eyes-”
“Just the drink.” Tomas’s voice was brisk and light. “An old man like that. Doesn’t know when to stop.” His laugh was utterly convincing, and yet I knew he was lying. “Fränzl, you stay and help me get him home. Udi, get the others inside.” As soon as the others had returned to the bar I heard the piano music begin again, a woman’s voice lifting in a nervous warble to the tune of a popular song. Left alone, Tomas and Hauer began to talk in rapid, urgent undertones.
Hauer: “Leibniz, was muss-”
“Halt’s Maul!” Tomas broke in sharply. Moving to the place where I guessed the old man’s body had fallen, he knelt down. I heard him move Gustave, then speak to him a couple of times softly, in French.
“Old man. Wake up, old man.”
Hauer said something rapid and angry in German, which I did not catch. Then Tomas spoke, slowly and very clearly, and it was more from the tone of his words than the words themselves that I understood. Slowly, deliberately, the words almost amused in their cool contempt.
“Sehr gut, Fränzl,” said Tomas crisply. “Er ist tot.”
Out of pills. She must have been desperate. That terrible night, with the scent of oranges all around her and nothing to which she could cling.
I would sell my children for a night’s sleep.
Then, under a pasted-in recipe clipped from a newspaper, in writing so small my old eyes needed a magnifying glass to make out the words:
T. L. came again. Said there had been a problem at La Rép. Some soldiers got out of hand. Said R-C might have seen something. Brought pills.
Could those pills have been thirty high-dosage morphine tablets? For her silence? Or were the pills something else entirely?
Paul came back half an hour later. He wore the slightly sheepish expression of a man who expects to be scolded, and he smelled of beer.
“I had to buy a drink,” he said apologetically. “It would have looked odd if I’d just stayed staring at them.”
By then I was half soaked and irritable. “Well?” I demanded. “What’s your big discovery?”
Paul shrugged. “Maybe nothing,” he said reflectively. “I’d rather…ah…wait till I’ve checked a few things before getting your hopes up.”
I looked him in the eye. “Paul Désiré Hourias,” I declared. “I’ve waited for you in the rain for ages. I’ve stood in the stink of this café watching for Dessanges, because you thought we might learn something. I haven’t complained once-” He gave me a satirical look at this point, which I ignored. “That makes me practically a saint,” I said sternly. “But if you dare to try to keep me in the dark-if you so much as think about it-”
Paul made a lazy gesture of defeat. “How did you know my middle name was Désiré?” he asked.
“I know everything,” I said, without smiling.
I don’t know what they did after we ran away. A couple of days later old Gustave’s body was found in the Loire by a fisherman outside Courlé. The fish had been at him already. No one mentioned what had happened at La Mauvaise Réputation, though the Dupré brothers seemed more furtive than ever and an unusual silence hung over the café. Reinette didn’t mention what had happened, and I pretended I’d run off at the same time as Cassis, so she didn’t suspect what I’d seen. But she had changed in some way. She seemed cold, almost aggressive. When she thought I wasn’t looking she would touch her hair and face compulsively, as if checking for something out of place. She avoided school for several days, claiming she had stomach ache.
Surprisingly, Mother indulged her. She sat with her, mixing her hot drinks and talking to her in a low, urgent voice. She moved Reinette’s cot into her own room, something she had never done before for either me or Cassis. Once I saw her give her two tablets, which Reinette took reluctantly, protesting. From my spy place behind the door I caught a snatch of their conversation, in which I thought I caught the word curse. Reinette was quite ill for some days after the pills, but recovered soon enough, and no more was said about the incident.
There is little relating to this in the album. On one page my mother writes R-C fully recovered under a pressed marigold and a recipe for wormwood tisane. But I’ve always had my suspicions. Could the pills have been some kind of a purgative, in case of an unwanted pregnancy? Could they have been the pills to which Mother refers to in the journal entry? And was T. L. Tomas Leibniz?
I think Cassis might have guessed something, but he was far too absorbed in his own affairs to take great notice of Reinette. Instead he learned his lessons, read his magazines, played in the woods with Paul and pretended nothing had happened. Perhaps for him, nothing had.
I tried to talk to him about it once.
“Something happened? What do you mean, something happened?” We were sitting at the top of the Lookout Post, eating mustard sandwiches and reading The Time Machine. It had been my favorite story all summer, and I never tired of it. Cassis looked at me, his mouth full, his eyes not quite meeting mine.
“I’m not sure.” I was careful what I said, watching his placid face over the hard cover of the book. “I mean, I only stayed a minute longer, but-” Difficult to put it into words. There were no words for that kind of thing in my vocabulary. “They nearly caught Reinette,” I said lamely. “Jean-Marie and the others. They…they pushed her down against the wall. They tore her blouse,” I said.
There was more, if only I could find the words. I tried to recall the feeling of horror, of guilt that had come over me then, the feeling that I was about to witness some ugly, compelling mystery, but somehow everything had become unclear, grainy, like images in a dream.
“Gustave was there,” I continued desperately.
Cassis was getting irritable. “So?” he said in a sharp voice. “So what? He was always there, the old tosspot. So what’s new about that?” And still his eyes refused to meet mine, lingering on the page, skittering to and fro like dead leaves in the wind.
“There was a fight. A kind of fight.” I had to say it. I knew he didn’t want me to, saw his fixed gaze deliberately avoiding me, concentrating on the page, the page, and wishing I’d shut up.
Silence. In silence our wills fought each other, he with his years and his experience, me with the weight of my knowledge.
“Do you think maybe-”
He turned on me then, ferociously, his eyes bright with rage and terror. “Think what, for Christ’s sake? Think what?” he spat. “Haven’t you done enough already, with your deals and your plans and your clever ideas?” He was panting, his face hectic and very close to mine. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough?”
“I don’t know what…” I was almost in tears.
“Well, think, why don’t you?” yelled Cassis. “Let’s say you suspect something, shall we? Let’s say you know why old Gustave died.” He paused to watch my reaction, his voice lowering to a harsh whisper. “Let’s say you suspect someone. Who’re you going to tell? The police? Mother? The fucking Foreign Legion?” I watched him, feeling wretched but not showing it, staring him out in my old insolent way.
“We couldn’t tell anyone,” said Cassis in an altered voice. “Not anyone. They’d want to know how we knew. Who we’d been talking to. And if we said”-his eyes flickered away from mine-“if ever we said anything-to anyone-”
He broke off suddenly and turned back to the book. Even his fear had gone, replaced instead by a wary indifference.
“It’s a good thing we’re just kids, isn’t it?” he remarked in a new, flat voice. “Kids are always playing at stuff. Finding things out, detectives, things like that. Everyone knows it isn’t real. Everyone knows we just make it up.”
I stared at him. “But Gustave-” I said.
“Just an old man,” said Cassis, unconsciously echoing Tomas. “Fell in the river, didn’t he, drinking too much wine. Happens all the time.”
I shivered.
“We never saw anything,” said Cassis stolidly. “Not you, not me, not Reinette. Nothing happened. All right?”
I shook my head. “I did see. I did.”
But Cassis would not look at me again, retreating behind the pages of the book, where Morlocks and Eloi warred furiously behind the safe barriers of fiction. And every time I tried to talk to him about it subsequently he pretended not to understand, or to think I was playing some kind of make-believe game. In time perhaps he even came to believe it himself.
Days passed. I removed all traces of the orange bag and the orange peel hidden in the anchovy barrel, and I buried them in the garden. I had the feeling that I wouldn’t be using them again.
She writes:
Woke at six this morning, for the first time in months. Strange, how everything looks different. When you haven’t slept it’s as if the world is sliding away bit by bit. The ground isn’t quite in line with your feet. The air seems full of shiny stinging particles. I feel I’ve left a part of myself behind, but I can’t remember what. They look at me with such solemn eyes. I think they’re afraid of me. All but Boise.
She’s not afraid of anything. I want to warn her that it doesn’t last forever.
She was right about that. It doesn’t. I knew that as soon as Noisette was born-my Noisette, so sly, so hard, so like myself. She has a child now, a child I’ve never seen except in a picture. She calls her Pêche. I often wonder how they manage, alone, so far away from home. Noisette used to look at me like that, with those hard black eyes of hers. Remembering now, I realize she looks more like my mother than me.
Not long after the dance at La Rép, Raphaël came to call. He made some excuse-buying wine or something-but we knew what he really wanted. Cassis never admitted it, of course, but I could see it in Reine’s eyes. He wanted to find out what we knew. I imagine he was worried-more so than the rest because it was his café, after all, and he felt responsible. Maybe he was simply guessing. Maybe someone had talked. In any case he was nervous as a cat when my mother opened the door, his eyes darting into the house behind her then out again. Since the dance, business at La Mauvaise Réputation had been bad. I’d heard someone at the post office-it might have been Lisbeth Genêt-saying that the place had gone to the dogs, that Germans came there with their whores, that no decent person would be seen there, and though no one had yet made the connection between what happened that night and the death of Gustave Beauchamp, there was no saying when the talk would begin. It was a village, after all, and in a village no one can keep a secret for long.
Well, Mother didn’t give him what you’d call a warm welcome. Maybe she was too conscious of us watching them, too much aware of what he knew about her. Maybe her illness made her sharp, or maybe it was just her naturally surly temperament. She saw him only once more, and two weeks later he was gone and everyone else who had been at La Rép the night of the dance was dead.
Mother makes only one reference to his visit.
That fool Raphael called. Too late as usual. Told me he knew where he could get me some pills. I said no more.
No more. Just like that. If it had been another woman I wouldn’t have believed it, but Mirabelle Dartigen was no ordinary woman. No more, she said. And that was her last word. To my knowledge she never took morphine again, though that too might have been because of what happened rather than from sheer force of will. Of course, by then there were to be no more oranges, ever again.
I think even I had lost my taste for them.