I told you much of what she wrote was lies. Whole paragraphs of them, tangled into the truth like bindweed into a hedge, further obscured by the mad jargon she uses, lines crossed and recrossed, words folded and inverted so that each one is a struggle of my will against hers to extract meaning from the code.
Walking down by the river today. I saw a woman flying a kite made of plywood and oil drums. Wouldn’t have imagined such a thing could fly. Big as a tank but painted so many colors, and ribbons flying from the tail. I thought (at this point some words are obscured by an olive-oil stain, bleeding the ink a deep violet into the paper) but she leaped onto the crossbar and swung into the air. Didn’t recognize her at first, though I thought it might have been Minette, but (a larger stain here obscures most of the rest, though there are a few words still visible. Beautiful is one of them. Scrawled across the top of the paragraph she has written the word seesaw in ordinary script. Below, a scratchy diagram which might represent almost anything, but which seems to show a stick figure standing on a swastika shape.).
In any case, it doesn’t matter. There was no kite woman. Even the reference to Minette makes no sense-the only Minette we ever knew was an elderly distant cousin of my father, to whom people would kindly allude as “eccentric,” but who referred to her many cats as “my babies” and who could sometimes be seen suckling kittens at her breast in public places, her face tranquil above her sagging, scandalous flesh.
I’m only saying this so you’ll understand. There were all kinds of fanciful tales in Mother’s album, stories of meetings with long-dead people, dreams disguised as fact, prosaic impossibilities: rainy days converted to bright ones, an imaginary guard dog, conversations that never happened-some of them quite dull-a kiss from a friend long since vanished. Sometimes she mixed truth with lies so effectively that even I am no longer sure which is which. Besides, there is no apparent purpose. Perhaps it was her illness talking, or the delusions of her addiction. I don’t know if the album was meant for any eyes but hers. Nor does it act as a memoir. In places it is almost a diary, but not quite; the irregular sequence robs it of logic and of usefulness. Maybe this is why it took me so long to understand what was staring me in the face, to see the reason for her actions and the terrible repercussions of my own. Sometimes the phrases are doubly hidden, crammed between the lines of recipes in tiny scratching script. Maybe that’s how she wanted it to be. Between her and myself, at last, a labor of love.
Green-tomato jam. Cut green tomatoes into pieces, like apples, and weigh them. Place in a bowl with 1 kg. of sugar to the same weight of fruit. Awoke at three again this morning and went to find my pills. Forgot again that I’d none left. When the sugar is melted (to stop it burning add 2 glasses of water if required) stir with a wooden spoon. I keep thinking that if I go to Raphaël he might find me another supplier. I daren’t go to the Germans again, not after what happened. I’d rather die first. Then add the tomatoes and boil gently, stirring very frequently. Skim off the residue with a slotted spoon at intervals. Sometimes dying seems better than this. At least I wouldn’t have to worry about waking up, ha ha. I keep thinking about the children. I’m afraid Bele Yolande has honey fungus, have to dig away the infected roots or it will spread to them all. Allow to boil gently for about 2 hours, maybe a little less. When the jam sticks to a small plate it is ready. I feel so angry, with myself, with him, with them. With myself most of all. When that idiot Raphaël told me, I had to bite my lips till they bled so that I wouldn’t give myself away. I don’t think he noticed. I said I knew already, that girls were always getting into mischief, that nothing had come of it. He seemed relieved, and when he’d gone I took the big hatchet and chopped wood until I could hardly stand, wishing all the time it was his face.
You see, her narrative is unclear. Only in retrospect does it begin to make a little sense. And of course, she gave nothing away of her conversation with Raphaël. I can only imagine what took place, his anxiety, her stony impassive silence, his guilt. It was his café, after all. But Mother wouldn’t have given anything away. Pretending she knew was a defensive measure, throwing up a barrier against his unwanted concern. Reine could look after herself, she must have said. Besides, nothing really happened. Reine would be more careful in future. We could only be happy that nothing worse had occurred.
T. told me it wasn’t his fault, but Raphaël says he stood by and did nothing. The Germans were his friends, after all. Perhaps they paid for Reine the way they did for those town women T. brought with him.
What lulled our suspicions was that she never mentioned the incident to us. Maybe she simply didn’t know how-her distaste of anything that reminded her of bodily functions was acute-or maybe she thought it was something better left alone. But her album reveals her growing rage, her violence, her dreams of retribution. I wanted to chop at him until there was nothing left, she writes. When I read that for the first time, I was certain she was referring to Raphaël, but now I’m not so sure. The intensity of her hatred speaks of something deeper, darker. A betrayal, perhaps. Or a thwarted love.
Below a recipe for applesauce cake, she writes:
His hands were softer than I expected. He looks very young, and his eyes are the exact same color as the sea on a stormy day. I thought I would hate it, hate him, but there is something about his gentleness. Even in a German. I wonder whether I am insane to believe what he promises. I’m so much older than he is. And yet I’m not so old. Perhaps there’s time.
There is no more at this point, as if she is ashamed at her own boldness, but I find small references throughout the album, now that I know where to look. Single words, phrases broken by recipes and gardening reminders, coded even from herself. And the poem.
For years I assumed that it was fantasy too, like so many of the other things she mentions. My mother could never have had a lover. She lacked the capacity for tenderness. Her defenses were too good, her sensual impulses sublimated into her recipes, into creating the perfect lentilles cuisinées, the most ardent crème brûlée. It never occurred to me that there might be any truth in these, the most unlikely of her fantasies. Remembering her face, the sour turn of her mouth, the hard lines of her cheekbones, the hair scraped back into a knot at the back of her head, even the story of the kite woman seemed more likely.
And yet I came to believe it. Maybe it was Paul who started me thinking. Maybe the day when I caught myself looking at my reflection in the mirror with a red scarf round my head and my birthday earrings (a present from Pistache, never before worn) dangling coquettishly. I’m sixty-four years old, for pity’s sake. I ought to know better. And yet there’s something in the way he looks at me that sets my old heart lurching like a tractor engine. Not the lost, frantic feeling I had with Tomas. Not even the sense of temporary reprieve that was Hervé‘s gift to me. No, this is something different again. A feeling of peace. The feeling you get when a recipe turns out perfectly right, a perfectly risen soufflé, a flawless sauce hollandaise. It’s a feeling which tells me that any woman can be beautiful in the eyes of a man who loves her.
I have taken to creaming my hands and face before I go to bed at night, and the other day I brought out an old lipstick-cracked and clotted with disuse-and blotted a little of the color onto my lips before rubbing it off in guilty confusion. What am I doing? And why? At sixty-four, surely I’ve passed the age at which I could decently think of such things. But the severity of my inner voice fails to convince me. I brush my hair with greater care than usual and pin it back with a tortoiseshell comb. There’s no fool like an old fool, I tell myself sternly.
And my mother was nearly thirty years younger.
I can look at her photograph now with a kind of mellowing. The mixed emotions I felt for so many years, the bitterness and the guilt, have diminished so that I can see-really see-her face. Mirabelle Dartigen, the tight pinched features and the hair yanked so savagely back that it hurts to look at it. What was she afraid of, the lonely woman in the picture? The woman of the album is so different, the wistful woman of the poem, laughing and raging behind her mask, sometimes flirtatious, sometimes coldly murderous in her imaginings. I can see her quite clearly, not yet forty, her hair only touched with gray, her black eyes still bright. A lifetime of work has not yet stooped her, and the muscles of her arms are hard and firm. Her breasts are firm too, beneath the severe succession of gray aprons, and sometimes she looks at her naked body in the mirror behind her wardrobe door and imagines her long lonely widowhood, the descent into old age, the scraps of youth falling from her, the sagging lines of her belly dropping into pouchy flaps at her hips, the skinny thighs throwing the bulging knees into sharp relief. There is so little time, the woman tells herself. I can almost hear her voice now from beneath the pages of her album. So little time.
And who would come, even in a hundred years of waiting? Old Lecoz with his rheumy lubricious eye? Or Alphonse Fenouil or Jean-Pierre Truriand? Secretly she dreams of a soft-voiced stranger, in her mind’s eye she sees him, a man who could see beyond what she has become to what she might have been.
Of course, there’s no way I can know what she felt. But I feel closer to her now than I ever was, almost close enough to hear that voice from the brittle pages of the album, a voice that tries so hard to hide its true nature, the passionate, desperate woman behind the cold façade.
You understand that this is merely speculation. She never mentions his name. I can’t even prove she had a lover, let alone that it was Tomas Leibniz. But something in me tells me that where I might fail on the details, the essence of it is true. It might have been so many men, I tell myself. But my secret heart tells me it could only have been Tomas. Perhaps I am more like her than I would like to think. Perhaps she knew that, and leaving me the album was her way of trying to make me understand.
Perhaps, at last, an attempt at ending our war.
We didn’t see Tomas until over a fortnight after the dance at La Mauvaise Réputation. That was partly because of Mother-still half crazy with insomnia and migraines-and partly because we sensed that something had changed. We all sensed it; Cassis, hiding behind his comic books, Reine in her new, blank silence, even myself. Oh, we longed for him. All three of us did-love is not something that you can turn off like a tap, and we were already trying in our way to excuse what he had done, what he had abetted.
But the ghost of old Gustave Beauchamp swam beneath us like the menacing shadow of a sea monster. It touched everything. We played with Paul almost in the way we had before Tomas, but our games were halfhearted, pushing us to fake exuberance to hide the fact that the life had gone out of them. We swam in the river, ran in the woods, climbed trees with more energy than ever before, but behind it all we knew we were waiting, aching and itching with impatience, for him to come. I think we all believed he might be able to make it better, even then.
I certainly thought so. He was always so sure, so arrogantly self-confident. I imagined him with his cigarette hanging from his lips and his cap pushed back, the sun in his eyes and that smile lighting his face, that smile which lit the world…
But Thursday came and went, and we saw nothing of Tomas. Cassis looked for him at school, but there was no sign of him in any of his usual places. Hauer, Schwartz and Heinemann were also strangely absent, almost as if they were avoiding contact. Another Thursday came and went. We pretended not to notice, did not even mention his name to one another, though we may have whispered it in our dreams, going through the motions of life without him as if we didn’t care whether we saw him again or not. I became almost frenzied now in my hunt for Old Mother. I checked the traps I had laid ten or twenty times a day, and was always setting new ones. I stole food from the cellar in order to make new and tempting baits for her. I swam out to the Treasure Stone and sat there for hours with my rod, watching the gracious arc of the line as it dipped into the water and listening to the sounds of the river at my feet.
Raphaël called to see Mother again. Business at the café was poor. Someone had painted COLLABORATOR on the back wall in red paint, and someone had thrown stones at his windows one night, so that now they had to be boarded up. I watched from behind the door as he spoke in a low urgent voice to Mother.
“It isn’t my fault, Mirabelle,” he said. “You have to believe that. I wasn’t responsible.”
My mother made a noncommittal sound between her teeth.
“You can’t argue with the Germans,” said Raphaël. “You have to treat them as you would any other customer. It isn’t as if I was the only one…”
Mother shrugged. “In this village, perhaps you are,” she said indifferently.
“How can you say that? You were pleased enough yourself at one time-”
Mother lunged forward. Raphaël took a hasty step back, rattling the plates on the dresser. Her voice was low and furious.
“Shut up, you fool,” she said. “That’s over, do you hear? Over. And if I even suspect you’ve said a word to anyone-”
Raphaël’s face was sallow with fear, but he tried for bluster.
“I’m not having anyone calling me a fool-” he began in a shaking voice.
“I’ll call you a fool and your mother a whore if I want to!” My mother’s voice was hard and shrill. “You’re a fool and a coward, Raphaël Crespin, and we both know it.” She was standing so close to him that I could hardly see his face, though I could still see his hands splayed out either side of her as if in entreaty. “But if you or anyone talks about this-God help you, if my children get to hear anything because of you”-I could hear her breathing, harsh as dead leaves in the tiny kitchen-“then I’ll kill you,” whispered my mother, and Raphaël must have believed her, because his face was white as curd when he left the house, his hands shaking so badly he jammed them into his pockets.
“Anyone messes with my children, and I’ll kill the bastards,” spat my mother in his wake, and I saw him wince as if her words were poison. “Kill the bastards,” repeated my mother, even though Raphaël was almost down to the gate by then, half-running, head lowered as if against a strong wind.
They were words that would return to haunt us.
She was in vicious humor all day. Paul caught the lash of her tongue when he came to ask Cassis to play. Mother, who had been silently brewing trouble since Raphaël’s visit, launched such a fierce and unprovoked attack upon him that he was able only to stare at her, his mouth working, his voice locked into an agonizing stutter. “I’m so-so-so-so I’m so-so-so-”
“Talk properly, you cretin!” screamed my mother in her glassy voice, and for a second I thought I saw Paul’s mild eyes light with something almost savage, then he turned without uttering a word and fled jerkily toward the Loire, his voice returning as he did and ululating behind him in a series of weird, desperate trills as he ran.
“Good riddance!” shouted my mother after him, slamming the door.
“You shouldn’t have said that,” I said stonily to her back. “It isn’t Paul’s fault he stammers.”
My mother turned to look at me, her eyes like agates. “You would side with him,” she said in a flat voice. “If it was the choice between me and a Nazi, you’d side with the Nazi.”
It was then that the letters began to arrive. Three of them, scribbled on thin blue-lined notepaper and pushed under the door. I found her in the act of picking one up, and she crammed it into the pocket of her apron, almost screaming at me to get into the kitchen, I wasn’t fit to be seen, get that soap and scrub, scrub. There was a shrill note in her voice that reminded me of the orange bag, and I made myself scarce, but I remembered the note and later, when I found it pasted into the album between a recipe for boudin noir and a magazine cutting on how to remove boot polish stains, I recognized it at once.
We now what you’ve bean doing, it read in small, shaky letters. Weve bean watchen you and we now wat to do with colaboraters. Underneath she has written in bold red letters: learn to spell, ha ha! but her words look overlarge, over-red, as if she is trying too hard to appear unconcerned. Certainly she never spoke to us of the notes, though in retrospect I realize that her abrupt changes of mood might have been related to their secret arrival. Another suggests that the writer knew something about our meetings with Tomas.
Weve sene your kids with him so dont try to deny it. We now wat your game is. You think youre so good better than the rest of us well youre nothing but a Boch whoar and your kids are seling stuff to the germans. Wat do you think of that.
The writing might belong to anyone. Certainly the script is uneducated, the spelling atrocious, but it might have been written by anyone in the village. My mother began to behave even more erratically than usual, shutting herself in the farmhouse for most of the day and watching any passersby with a suspicion verging on paranoia.
The third letter is the worst. I suppose there were no more, though she might simply have decided not to keep them, but I think this is the last.
You dont deserve to live, it says. Nazi whoar and your stuckup kids. Bet you didnt now theyre selling us to the germans. Ask them wear all the stuff coms from. They keep it in a place theyve got in the woods. They get it of a man calld Lybnits I think hes calld. You now him. And we now you.
One night someone painted a scarlet C on our front door, and NAZI WHOAR across the side of the chicken hut, though we painted over it before anyone could see what had been written. And October dragged on.
Paul and I came back from La Mauvaise Réputation late that night. The rain had stopped, but it was still cold-either nights have got colder or I’ve begun to feel it more than I ever did in the old days-and I was impatient and bad-tempered. But the more impatient I got, the quieter Paul seemed to be, until we were each glowering at the other in silence, our breath puffing out in great billows of steam as we walked.
“That girl,” said Paul at last. His voice was quiet and reflective, almost as if he were speaking to himself. “She looked very young, didn’t she?”
I was annoyed by the seeming irrelevance. “What girl, for heaven’s sake?” I snapped. “I thought we were going to find a way to get rid of Dessanges and his grease wagon, not to give you an excuse to ogle girls.”
Paul ignored me. “She was sitting next to him,” he said slowly. “You’ll have seen her go in. Red dress, high heels. Comes to the wagon pretty often too.” As it happened I did remember her. I recalled a vague sulky blur of red mouth under a slice of black hair. One of Luc’s regulars from town.
“So?”
“That was Louis Ramondin’s daughter. Moved to Angers couple of years ago, you know, with her mother, Simone, after the divorce. You’ll remember them.” He nodded as if I’d given him a civil answer instead of a grunt. “Simone went back to her maiden name, Truriand. The girl would be fourteen, maybe fifteen, nowadays.”
“So?” I still couldn’t see the interest in this. I took out my key and fitted it into the front door.
Paul continued in his slow thoughtful way. “Certainly no older than fifteen, I’d say,” he repeated.
“All right,” I said tartly. “I’m glad you found something to liven up your evening. Pity you didn’t ask for her shoe size too, then you’d really have something to dream about.”
Paul gave his lazy smile. “You’re actually jealous,” he said.
“Not at all,” I said with dignity. “I just wish you’d go dribble on someone else’s carpet, you dirty old lecher.”
“Well, I was thinking,” said Paul slowly.
“Well done,” I said.
“I was thinking maybe Louis-being a gendarme and all-maybe he’d draw the line at his daughter being involved-at fifteen, maybe even fourteen-with a man-a married man-like Luc Dessanges.” He gave me a little look of triumph and amusement. “I mean, I know times have changed since you and I were young, but fathers and daughters, specially policemen-”
I yelped. “Paul!”
“Smokin‘ those sweet cigarettes too,” he added in the same reflective tone. “The kind they used to have in the jazz clubs, way back.”
I stared at him in awe. “Paul, this is almost intelligent.”
He shrugged modestly. “Been doing some asking round,” he said. “Thought something might come to me sooner or later.” He paused. “That’s why I took a little time in there,” he added. “Wasn’t sure if I’d be able to persuade Louis to come over and see for himself.”
I gaped. “You brought Louis? While I was waiting outside?”
Paul nodded.
“Pretended I’d had my wallet taken in the bar. Made sure he got an eyeful.” Another pause. “His daughter was kissing Dessanges,” he explained. “That helped a bit.”
“Paul,” I declared, “You can dribble over every carpet in the house if you want to. You have my full permission.”
“I’d rather dribble over you,” said Paul, with an extravagant leer.
“Dirty old man.”
Luc arrived at the Snack-Wagon the next day to find Louis waiting for him. The gendarme was in full uniform, his usually vague and pleasant face wearing an expression of almost military indifference. There was an object in the grass beside the wagon, something that looked something like a child’s trolley.
“Watch this,” said Paul to me from the window.
I left my place at the stove, where the coffee was just beginning to boil.
“Just you watch this,” said Paul.
The window was open a crack, and I could smell the smoky Loire mist as it rolled over the fields. The scent was nostalgic as burning leaves.
“Hé là!” Luc’s voice was quite clear where we stood, and he walked with the carefree assurance of one who knows himself to be irresistible. Louis Ramondin just stared at him impassively.
“What’s that he’s got with him?” I asked Paul softly, with a gesture toward the machine on the grass. Paul grinned.
“Just watch,” he advised.
“Hey, how’s it going?” Luc reached in his pocket for his keys. “Must be in a hurry for breakfast, hein? Been waiting long?”
Louis just watched him without a word.
“Listen to this.” Luc made an expansive gesture. “Pancakes, farmhouse sausage, egg and bacon à l’anglaise. Le breakfast Dessanges. Plus a big pot of my very blackest, very meanest café noirissime, because I can tell you’ve had a rough night.” He laughed. “What was it, hein? Stakeout at the church bazaar? Someone molesting the local sheep? Or was it the other way around?”
Still Louis said nothing. He remained quite still, like a toy policeman, one hand on the handle of the trolley-thing in the grass.
Luc shrugged and opened the Snack-Wagon door.
“I guess you’ll be a bit more vocal when you’ve had my breakfast Dessanges.”
We watched for a few minutes as Luc brought out his awning and the pennants that advertised his daily menus. Louis stood stolidly beside the Snack-Wagon, seeming not to notice. Every now and again Luc sang out something cheerful at the waiting policeman. After a time I heard the sounds of music from the radio.
“What’s he waiting for?” I demanded impatiently. “Why doesn’t he say something?”
Paul grinned. “Give him time,” he advised. “Never quick on the uptake, the Ramondins, but once you get them going…”
Louis waited fully ten minutes. By that time Luc was still cheery but bewildered, and had all but abandoned any attempt at conversation. He had begun to heat the cooking plates for the pancakes, his paper hat tilted jauntily back from his forehead. Then, at last, Louis moved. Not far-he simply went to the back of the Snack-Wagon with his trolley and vanished from sight.
“What is that thing, anyway?” I asked.
“Hydraulic jack,” replied Paul, still smiling. “They use them in garages. Watch.”
And as we watched the Snack-Wagon began to tilt forward, ever so slowly. Almost imperceptibly at first, then with a sudden lurch that brought Dessanges out of his galley quicker than a ferret. He looked angry, but he looked scared too, taken off balance for the first time in the whole of this sorry game, and I liked that look just fine.
“What the fuck d’you think you’re doing!” he yelled at Ramondin, half incredulous. “What is this?”
Silence. I saw the wagon tilt again, just a little. Paul and I craned our necks to see what was going on.
Luc glanced briefly at the wagon to make sure it wasn’t damaged. The awning hung askew and the trailer had tilted drunkenly, like a shack built on sand. I saw the look of calculation come back into his face, the careful, sharp look of a man who not only has aces up his sleeve, but who believes he owns the whole pack.
“Had me going there for a minute,” he said in that cheery, relentless voice. “Hey, you really had me going. Knocked me sideways, you might say.”
We heard nothing from Louis, but thought we saw the wagon tilt a little more. Paul found that from the bedroom window we could see the rear of the Snack-Wagon, so we moved for a better view. Their voices were thin but audible in the cool morning air.
“Come on, man,” said Luc, a flicker of nerves in his voice now. “Joke over. Okay? Get the wagon back on its feet again and I’ll make you my breakfast special. On the house.”
Louis looked at him. “Certainly, sir,” he said pleasantly, but the wagon tipped a little farther forward anyway. Luc made a rapid gesture toward it, as if to steady it.
“I’d step away if I were you, sir,” suggested Louis mildly. “It doesn’t look very stable to me.” The wagon tipped another fraction.
“What do you think you’re playing at?” I could hear the angry note in his voice returning.
Louis only smiled. “Windy night last night, sir,” he observed gently, with another touch at the hydraulic jack at his feet. “Whole bunch of trees got blown down over by the river.”
I saw Luc stiffen. His rage made him graceless, his head jerking like that of a rooster getting ready for a fight. He was taller than Louis, I noticed, but much slighter. Louis, short and stocky, had spent most of his early life getting into fights. That’s why he got to be a policeman in the first place. Luc took a step forward.
“You just let go of that jack right now,” he said in a low, threatening voice.
Louis smiled. “Certainly, sir,” he said. “Whatever you say.”
We saw it in a kind of inevitable slow motion. The Snack-Wagon, perched precariously on its edge, swung back as its support was removed. There was a crash as the contents of the galley-plates, glasses, cutlery, pans-were suddenly and violently displaced, hurled into the far side of the wagon with a splash of broken crockery. The wagon continued to move backward in a lazy arc, propelled by its own momentum and the weight of its displaced furniture. For a moment it seemed as if it might right itself. Then it toppled, slowly and almost ponderously, onto its side into the grass of the verge with a crash that shook my house and rattled the cups on the downstairs dresser so loudly that we heard it from our lookout in the bedroom.
For seconds the two men just looked at each other, Louis with an expression of concern and sympathy, Luc in disbelief and increasing fury. The Snack-Wagon lay on its side in the long grass, sounds of tinkling and breakage settling gently inside its belly.
“Oops,” said Louis.
Luc made a furious dash at Louis. For a second something blurred between them, arms, fists moving too fast for me to see properly. Then Luc was sitting in the grass with his hands over his face and Louis was helping him up with that kind expression of sympathy.
“Dear me, sir, how could that have happened? Taken over faint for a moment, were we? It’s the shock, it’s quite natural. Take it easy.”
Luc was spluttering with rage. “Have you-any-fucking-idea what you’ve done, you moron?” His words were unclear because of the way he held his hands in front of his face. Paul said later that he’d seen Louis’s elbow jab him neatly across the bridge of the nose, though it all happened a bit too quickly for me to catch. Pity. I’d have enjoyed seeing that.
“My lawyer’s going to take you-to the fucking cleaners-be almost worth it to see you-shit, I’m bleeding to death-” Funny, but I could hear the family resemblance now, more pronounced than it had been before, something about the way he emphasized syllables, the thwarted squeal of a spoiled city boy who’s never had anything denied him before. For a moment there I could have sworn he sounded just exactly like his sister.
Paul and I went downstairs then-I don’t think we could have stayed indoors for another minute-and out to watch the fun. Luc was standing by then, not so pretty now with blood dribbling from his nose and his eyes watering. I noticed he had fresh dogshit on one of his expensive Paris boots. I held out my handkerchief. Luc gave me a suspicious glance and took it. He began to dabble at his nose. I could tell he hadn’t understood yet; he was pale, but he had a stubborn kind of fighting look on his face, the look of a man who has lawyers and advisors and friends in high places to run to.
“You saw that, didn’t you?” he spat. “You saw what that fucker did to me?” He looked at the bloody handkerchief with a kind of disbelief. His nose was swelling nicely, and so were his eyes. “You both saw him hit me, didn’t you?” insisted Luc. “In broad daylight? I could sue you for every-fucking-penny-”
Paul shrugged. “Didn’t see much myself,” he said in his slow voice. “We old people, we don’t see as well as we used to-don’t hear as well either-”
“But you were watching,” insisted Luc. “You must have seen…” He caught me grinning and his eyes narrowed. “Oh, I understand,” he said unpleasantly. “This is what it’s all about, is it? Thought you could get your pet gendarme to intimidate me, could you?” He glared at Louis.
“If this is really the best you can do between you-” he pinched his nostrils shut to stop the bleeding.
“I don’t think there’s any call to go casting aspersions,” said Louis stolidly.
“Oh, you don’t?” snapped Luc. “When my lawyer sees-”
Louis interrupted him. “It’s natural you should be upset. The wind blowing over your café like that. I can understand you didn’t know what you were doing.”
Luc stared at him in disbelief.
“Terrible night last night,” said Paul kindly. “First of the October storms. I’m sure you’ll be able to claim on the insurance.”
“Of course it was bound to happen,” I said. “A high-sided vehicle like that by the side of a road. I’m only surprised it didn’t happen earlier.”
Luc nodded. “I see,” he said softly. “Not bad, Framboise. Not bad at all. I see you’ve been hard at work.” His tone was almost coaxing. “But even without the wagon, you know there’s a lot more I can do. A lot more we can do.” He tried a grin, then winced and dabbed at his nose again. “You might as well give them what they want,” he continued in the same almost seductive tone. “Hé, Mamie. What do you say?”
I’m not sure what I would have answered. Looking at him I felt old. I’d expected him to give in, but he looked less beaten at that moment than he’d ever been, his sharp face expectant. I’d given it my best shot-our best shot, Paul and I-and even so Luc seemed invincible. Like children trying to dam a river. We’d had our moment of triumph-that look on his face, almost worth it just for that-but in the end, however brave the effort, the river always wins. Louis had spent his childhood by the side of the Loire too, I told myself. He must have known. All he had done was get himself into trouble too. I imagined an army of lawyers, advisors, city police-our names in the papers, our secret business revealed… I felt tired. So tired.
Then I saw Paul’s face. He was smiling that slow sweet smile of his, looking almost half witted but for the lazy amusement in his eyes. He yanked his beret down over his forehead in a gesture that was somehow final and comic and heroic at the same time, like the world’s oldest knight pulling down his visor for a last tilt at the enemy. I felt a sudden crazy urge to laugh.
“I think we can…ah…sort it out,” Paul said. “Maybe Louis here got carried away a little. All the Ramondins were a little…ah…quick to take offense. It’s in the blood.” He smiled apologetically, then turned to address Louis. “There was that business with Guilherm…who was he, your grandmother’s brother?” Dessanges listened in growing irritation and contempt.
“Father’s,” corrected Louis.
Paul nodded. “Aye. Hot blood, the Ramondins. All of ‘em.” He was lapsing into dialect again-one of the things Mother always held most against him, that and his stutter-and his accent was thicker than I ever remember it back in the old days. “I remember how they led the rabble that night against the farmhouse-old Guilherm at front with his wooden leg-and all for that business at La Mauvaise Réputation -seems it’s kept that bad reputation all this time-”
Luc shrugged his shoulders. “Look, I’d love to hear today’s selection of Quaint Country Tales from Long Ago. But what I’d really like-”
“‘Twas a young man started it all,” continued Paul inexorably. “Not unlike yourself, I’d say he was. A man from the city, hein, from the foreign…who thought he could wrap the poor stupid Loire people round his finger.”
He gave me a quick look, as if checking an emotional barometer somewhere in my face. “Came to a bad end, though. Didn’t he?”
“The worst,” I said thickly. “The very worst.”
Luc was watching us both, his eyes wary. “Oh?” he said.
I nodded. “He liked young girls too,” I said in a voice that sounded dim and distant to my own ears. “Played them along. Used them to find out things. They’d call that corruption nowadays.”
“Course in those days most of those girls didn’t have fathers,” said Paul blandly. “‘Cause of the war.”
I saw Luc’s eyes kindle with understanding. He gave a small nod, as if marking a point. “This is something to do with last night, is it?” he said.
I ignored the question. “You are married, aren’t you?” I asked.
He nodded again.
“Pity if your wife had to be involved in all this,” I went on. “Corruption of minors…nasty business…I don’t see how she could avoid getting involved.”
“You’ll never get that one to stick,” said Luc quickly. “The girl wouldn’t-”
“The girl is my daughter,” said Louis simply. “She would do-say-whatever she felt was right.”
Again, the nod. He was cool enough, I’ll give him that.
“Fine,” he said at last. He even managed a little smile. “Fine. I get the message.” He was relaxed in spite of everything; his pallor came from anger rather than fear. He looked at me directly, an ironic twist at his mouth.
“I hope the victory was worth it, Mamie,” he said with emphasis. “Because come tomorrow you’re going to need every bit of comfort you can get. Come tomorrow your sad little secret is going to be splashed across every magazine, every newspaper in the country. Just time for a couple of phone calls before I move on… After all it really has been such a dull party, and if our friend here thinks his little bitch of a daughter even began to make it worthwhile-” He broke off to grin viciously, at Louis and gaped as the policeman’s handcuffs snapped sharply over first one wrist, then the other.
“What?” He sounded incredulous, close to laughter. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing now? Adding abduction to the list? Where do you think this is? The Wild fucking West?”
Louis gave him his stolid look.
“It’s my duty to warn you, sir,” he said, “that violent and abusive behavior cannot be tolerated, and that it is my duty-”
“What?” Luc’s voice rose almost to a scream. “What behavior? You’re the one who hit me! You can’t-”
Louis looked at him with polite reproach. “I have reason to believe, sir, that given your erratic behavior you may be under the influence of alcohol, or some other intoxicating substance, and that for your own safety I feel it my duty to keep you under supervision until that time-”
“You’re arresting me?” demanded Luc, disbelieving. “You’re charging me?”
“Not unless I’m obliged to, sir,” said Louis reproachfully. “But I’m sure these two witnesses here will testify to abusive, threatening behavior, violent language, disorderly conduct-” He gave a nod in my direction. “I’ll have to ask you to accompany me to the station, sir.”
“There is no fucking station!” screamed Luc.
“Louis uses the basement of his house for drunk and disorderlies,” said Paul quietly. “Course, we haven’t had one for a while, not since Guguste Tinon went on that bender five years ago-”
“But I have a root cellar that is entirely at your disposal, Louis, if you think there’s a danger he might pass out on his way into the village,” I suggested blandly. “There’s a good strong lock on it, and no way he could do himself any harm…”
Louis appeared to consider this. “Thank you, veuve Simon,” he said at last. “I think perhaps that would be for the best. At least until I can work out where to go from here.” He looked critically at Dessanges, who was pale now with something more than rage.
“You’re crazy, all three of you,” said Dessanges softly.
“Course, I’ll have to search you first,” said Louis calmly. “Can’t have you burning the place down or anything. Could you empty your pockets for me, please?”
Luc shook his head. “I just don’t believe this,” he said.
“I’m sorry sir,” persisted Louis. “But I’ll have to ask you to empty your pockets.”
“Ask away,” retorted Luc sourly. I don’t know what you’re expecting to get from all this, but when my lawyer hears about it…“
“I’ll do it,” suggested Paul. “I don’t suppose he can reach his pockets with his hands cuffed, anyway.”
He moved quickly, in spite of his seeming clumsiness, his poacher’s hands patting Luc’s clothing and abstracting its contents-a lighter, some rolling papers, car keys, a wallet, a packet of cigarettes. Luc struggled uselessly, swearing. He looked about him, as if expecting to see someone to whom he might call for help, but the street was deserted.
“One wallet.” Louis checked the contents. “One cigarette lighter. Silver. One mobile phone.” He began to open the packet of cigarettes and to shake out the contents into his palm.
Then, on Louis’s hand, I saw something I didn’t recognize. A small irregular block of some blackish brown stuff like old treacle toffee.
“I wonder what this is,” said Louis blandly.
“Fuck you!” said Luc sharply. “This isn’t mine! You planted it on me, you old bastard!”-this to Paul, who looked at him in slow-witted surprise. “You’ll never get it to stand-”
“Maybe not,” said Louis indifferently. “But we can try, can’t we?”
Louis left Dessanges in the root cellar as promised. He could keep him for twenty-four hours, he told us, before he had to charge him. With a curious glance at both of us and a careful lack of expression in his voice, he informed us that we had that time in which to conclude our business. A good lad, Louis Ramondin, in spite of his slowness. Too like his uncle Guilherm for comfort, though, and that I suppose blinded me at first to his essential goodness. I only hoped he’d not have cause to regret it soon enough.
At first Dessanges raved and yelled in the root cellar. Demanded his lawyer, his phone, his sister Laure, his cigarettes. Claimed his nose hurt, that it was broken, that for all he knew there were bone shards working their way into his brain right now. He hammered against the door, pleaded, threatened, swore. We ignored him, and eventually the sounds ceased. At twelve thirty I brought him some coffee and a plate of bread and charcuterie and he was sulky but calm, the look of calculation back in his eyes.
“You’re just delaying the moment, Mamie,” he told me as I cut the bread into slices. “Twenty-four hours is all you’ve got, because as you know, as soon as I make that phone call-”
“Do you actually want this food?” I snapped at him sharply. “‘Cause it won’t hurt you to go hungry for a while, and that way I wouldn’t have to listen to your nasty talk any more. Right?”
He gave me a dirty look, but said nothing else on the subject.
“Right,” I said.
Paul and I pretended to work for the rest of the afternoon. It was a Sunday, and the restaurant was shut, but there was still work to be done in the orchard and in the vegetable garden. I hoed and pruned and weeded until my kidneys felt like hot glass and sweat ringed my armpits. Paul watched me from the house, not knowing I was also watching him.
Those twenty-four hours. They itched and fretted at me like a bad case of nettle rash. I knew I should be doing something, but what I could do in twenty-four hours was beyond my ability to decide. We had foiled one Dessanges-temporarily, at least-but the other was still as free and full of malice as ever. And time was short. Several times I even made it to the phone booth in front of the post office-manufacturing errands just so I could be near it, once even going as far as dialing the number but cutting it off before anyone answered as I realized I had absolutely no idea of what I ought to say. It seemed that wherever I looked I saw the same terrible truth staring out at me, the same terrible set of alternatives. Old Mother, with her mouth open and bristling with fishhooks, her eyes glassy with rage, myself pulling against that dreadful pressure, biting against it like a minnow on a line, as if the pike were some part of myself I was struggling to tear free, some black part of my own heart writhing and thrashing on the line, some terrible, secret catch…
It came down to one of two options. My mind might play with other possibilities-that Laure Dessanges might promise to leave me alone in exchange for her little brother’s release-but the deep-down practical part of my mind knew that they wouldn’t work. We’d only gained one thing by our actions so far-time-and I could feel the prize slipping from me second by second even as I racked my brains to find out how I could use it. If not, by the end of the week Luc’s prediction-your sad little secret is going to be splashed across every magazine, every newspaper-would stand before us in hard print, and I’d lose everything; the farm, the restaurant, my place in Les Laveuses… The only alternative, I knew, was to use the truth as a weapon. But although that might win me back my home and my business, who could say what the effect might be on Pistache, on Noisette, on Paul?
I gritted my teeth in frustration. No one should have to make that choice, I wailed inwardly. No one.
I hoed at a line of shallots so hard and so blindly that I forgot myself and began to gouge at the ripening plants, sending the shiny little onions flying with the weeds. I wiped sweat from my eyes and found I was crying.
No one should have to choose between a life and a lie. And yet she had, Mirabelle Dartigen, the woman in the picture with her fake pearls and shy smile, the woman with the sharp cheekbones and scragged-back hair. She’d given it up-all of it, the farm, the orchard, the little niche she had carved for herself, her grief, the truth-buried it without a backward glance and moved on… Only one fact is missing from her album, so carefully collated and cross-referenced, one thing she couldn’t possibly have written because she couldn’t possibly have known. One fact remains to complete our story. One fact.
If it wasn’t for my daughters and for Paul, I told myself, I’d tell all of it. If only to spite Laure, if only to rob her of her triumph. But there Paul was, so quiet and unassuming, so humble in his silence that he had managed to get past my defenses before I even realized it. Paul, always something of a joke with his stammer and his ratty old blue dungarees, Paul with his poacher’s hands and his easy smile. Who would have thought it would be Paul, after all these years? Who would have thought that after so many years I would find my way back home?
I almost phoned several times. Mirabelle Dartigen was long dead, after all. I had no need to haul her about the weird water of my heart like Old Mother on her line. A second lie would not change her now, I told myself. Nor would revealing the truth at this point allow me to atone. But Mirabelle Dartigen is a stubborn woman even in death. Even now I can feel her-hear her, like the wail of wires on a windy day-that shrill, confused treble which is all that remains of my memory of her. No matter that I never knew how much I really loved her. Her love, that flawed and stony secret, drags me with it into the murk.
And yet. It wouldn’t be right. Paul’s voice inside me, relentless as the river. It wouldn’t be right to live a lie. I wished I didn’t have to choose.
It was almost sunset when he came to find me. I’d been working in the garden for so long that the ache in my bones had become a screeching, jarring imperative. My throat was dry and full of fishhooks. My head swam. Still I turned away from him as he stood silently at my back, not speaking, not needing to speak, just waiting, just biding his time.
“What do you want?” I snapped at last. “Stop staring at me, for heaven’s sake, and get on with something useful!”
Paul said nothing. I could feel the back of my neck burning. At last I turned round, flinging the hoe across the vegetable patch and screaming at him in my mother’s voice.
“You cretin! Can’t you keep away from me? You miserable old fool!” I wanted to hurt him, I think. It would have been easier if I’d been able to hurt him, make him turn from me in rage or pain or disgust, but he faced me out-funny, I’d always thought I was better at that game than anyone-with his inexorable patience, not moving, not speaking, just waiting for me to reach the end of my line so that he could speak his piece. I turned away furiously, afraid of his words, his terrible patience.
“I made our guest some dinner,” he said at last. “P’raps you’d like some too.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want anything except to be left alone,” I told him.
Behind me I heard Paul sigh. “She was just the same,” he said. “Mirabelle Dartigen. Never would take help from anyone, no, not even from herself.” His voice was quiet and reflective. “You’re a lot like her, you know. Too much like her for your own good, or anybody’s.”
I bit back a sharp reply and would not look at him.
“Set herself aback everyone with her stubbornness,” continued Paul. “Never knowing they’d have helped her if she’d said. But she never said, did she? She never told a soul.”
“I don’t suppose she could,” I said numbly. “Some things you can’t. You…just…can’t.”
“Look at me,” said Paul.
His face looked rosy in the last flare of the sunset, rosy and young in spite of the lines and the nicotine mustache. Behind him the sky was a raw red barbed with clouds.
“Comes a time someone has to tell,” he said reasonably. “I’ve not been reading your ma’s scrapbook for all this time for nothing, and whatever you might think, I’m not quite such a fool as all that.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to say that.”
Paul shook his head dismissively. “I know. I’m not smart, like Cassis or you, but seems to me sometimes that it’s the smart ones get lost the soonest.” He smiled and tapped his temple with one extended knuckle. “Too much goin‘ on in here,” he said kindly. “Far too much.”
I looked at him.
“See, it isn’t the truth that hurts,” he continued. “If she’d seen that, none of this might ever have happened. If she’d just asked them for help, ”stead of goin‘ her own way like she always did-“
“No.” My voice was flat and final. “You don’t understand. She never knew the truth. Or if she did, she hid it, even from herself. For our sake. For mine-” I was choking now, a familiar taste rising up from my sour belly, cramping me with its sourness. “It wasn’t up to her to tell the truth. It was up to us-to me.” I swallowed painfully. “It could only have been me,” I said with an effort. “Only I knew the whole story. Only I could have had the guts-”
I stopped to look at him again. His sweet and rueful smile. His stooped shoulders, like those of a mule who has carried long and heavy loads in patience and peace of mind. How I envied him. How I wanted him.
“You do have the guts,” said Paul at last. “You always did.”
We looked at each other. Silence between us.
“All right,” I told him at last. “Let him go.”
“Are you sure? The drugs Louis found in his pocket-”
I gave a laugh, which sounded strangely carefree in my dry mouth. “You and I both know there were no drugs. A harmless fake, that’s all, which you planted on him when you went through his pockets.” I laughed again at his startled look. “Poacher’s fingers, Paul, poacher’s hands. Did you think you were the only one with a suspicious mind?”
Paul nodded. “What will you do then?” he asked. “As soon as he tells Yannick and Laure…”
I shook my head.
“Let him tell them,” I said. I felt light inside, lighter than I had ever felt before, thistledown on the water. I felt laughter rising up inside me, the mad laughter of a person who is about to throw everything she possesses into the wind. I put my hand into my apron pocket and drew out the scrap of paper with the telephone number written on it.
Then, thinking better of it, I fetched my little address book. After a moment’s searching, I found the right page.
“I think I know what to do now,” I said.
Apple and dried-apricot clafoutis. Beat the eggs and flour together with the sugar and melted butter until the consistency is thick and creamy. Add the milk little by little, beating all the time. The final consistency should be a thin batter. Rub a dish generously with butter, and add the sliced fruit to the batter. Add cinnamon and allspice and put into the oven at a medium temperature. When the cake has begun to rise, add brown sugar to the top and dot with butter. Bake until the top is crisp and firm to the touch.
It had been a meager harvest. The drought, followed by the disastrous rains, had seen to that. And yet the annual harvest festival was something we usually looked forward to with anticipation, even Mother, who made her special cakes and left bowls of fruit and vegetables on the window ledge and baked loaves of extravagant and intricate loveliness-a wheat sheaf, a fish, a basket of apples-to sell at the Angers market.
The fair was always held at the end of October, and that day all the Sunday-schoolers would file around the fountain (paganly decorated with flowers, fruit and wreaths of corn, pumpkins and colored squash hollowed and cut into lantern shapes) dressed in their best clothes, holding candles and singing. The service would continue in the church, where the altar was draped in green and gold, and the hymns, resounding across the square where we would listen, fascinated by the lure of things forbidden, dealt with the reaping of the chosen and the burning of the chaff. We always waited until the service was over, and then would join in the festivities with the rest while the curé remained to take confession in church and the harvest bonfires burnt smoky-sweet at the corners of the bare fields.
It was then that the fair would begin. The harvest festival with wrestling and racing and all kinds of competitions-dancing, ducking for apples, pancake eating, goose racing-and hot gingerbread and cider given out to the winners and losers, and baskets of homemade produce sold at the fountain while the harvest queen sat smiling on her yellow throne and showered passersby with flowers.
This year we had hardly seen it coming. Most other years we would have awaited the celebration with an impatience greater than Christmas, for presents were scarce in those days and December is a poor time for celebration. October, fleeting and sappy sweet with its reddish gold light and early white frosts and the leaves turning brilliantly, is a different matter, a magical time, a last gleeful defiance in the face of the approaching cold. Other years we would have had the pile of wood and dead leaves waiting in a sheltered spot weeks in advance, the necklaces of crab apples and bags of nuts waiting, our best clothes ironed and ready and our shoes polished for dancing. There might have been a special celebration at the Lookout Post (wreaths hung on the Treasure Stone and scarlet flower heads dropped into the slow brown Loire), pears and apples sliced and dried in the oven, garlands of yellow corn plaited and worked into braids and dollies for good luck around the house, tricks planned against the unsuspecting and bellies rumbling in hungry anticipation.
But this year there was little of that. The sourness after La Mauvaise Réputation had begun our descent, and with it the letters, the rumors, graffiti on the walls, whispering behind our backs and polite silences to our faces. It was assumed that there could be no smoke without fire. The accusations (NAZI WHOAR on the side of the henhouse, the words reappearing larger and redder every time we painted them over), coupled with Mother’s refusal to acknowledge or deny the gossip, along with reports of her visits to La Rép exaggerated and passed hungrily from mouth to mouth, were enough to whet suspicions even more keenly. Harvesttime was a sour affair for the Dartigen family that year.
The others built their bonfires and sheaved their wheat. Children picked over the rows to make sure none of the grain was lost. We gathered the last of the apples-what wasn’t rotten through with wasps, that is-and stored them away in the cellar on trays, each one separate so that rot couldn’t spread. We stored our vegetables in the root cellar in bins and under loose coverings of dry earth. Mother even baked some of her special bread, though there was little market for her baking in Les Laveuses, and sold it impassively in Angers. I remember how we took a cartload of loaves and cakes to market one day, how the sun shone on the burnished crusts-acorns, hedgehogs, little grimacing masks-like on polished oak. A few of the village children refused to speak to us. On the way to school one day someone threw clods of earth at Reinette and Cassis from a stand of tamarisks by the riverside. As the day approached, girls began to appraise one another, brushing their hair with especial care and washing their faces with oatmeal, for on festival day one of them would be chosen as the harvest queen and wear a barley crown and carry a pitcher of wine. I was totally uninterested in this. With my short straight hair and froggy face I was never going to be harvest queen. Besides, without Tomas nothing mattered very much. I wondered if I would ever see him again. I sat by the Loire with my traps and my fishing rod and watched. I couldn’t stop myself from believing that somehow, if I caught the pike, Tomas would return.
Harvest festival morning was cold and bright, with the dying-ember glow peculiar to October. Mother had stayed up the night before-out of a kind of stubbornness rather than a love of tradition-making gingerbread and black buckwheat pancakes and blackberry jam, which she placed in baskets and gave to us to take to the fair. I wasn’t planning on going. Instead, I milked the goat and finished my few Sunday chores, then began to make my way toward the river. I had just placed a particularly ingenious trap there, two crates and an oil drum tied together with chicken wire and baited with fish scraps right at the edge of the riverbank, and I was eager to test it out. I could smell cut-grass on the wind with the first of the autumn bonfires, and the scent was poignant, centuries old, a reminder of happier times. I felt old too, trudging through the cornfields to the Loire. I felt as if I’d already lived a long, long time.
Paul was waiting at the Standing Stones. He looked unsurprised to see me, glancing briefly at me from his fishing before returning to the cork floater on the water.
“Aren’t you going to the f-fair?” he asked.
I shook my head. I realized I hadn’t seen him once since Mother chased him from the house, and I felt a sudden pang of guilt at having so completely forgotten my old friend. Maybe that’s why I sat down next to him. Certainly it was not for the sake of companionship-my need for solitude was stifling me.
“Me n-neither.” He looked almost morose, almost sour-faced that morning, his eyes drawn together in a frown of concentration that was unsettlingly adult. “All those idiots getting d-drunk and d-dancing about. Who needs it?”
“Not me.” At my feet the brown eddies of the river were hypnotic. “I’m going to check all my traps, then I thought I’d try the big sandbank. Cassis says there are pike there sometimes.”
Paul gave me a cynical look. “Never g-get her,” he told me tersely.
“Why not?”
He shrugged. “You j-just won’t, that’s all.”
We fished side by side for a time, as the sun warmed our backs slowly and the leaves fell yellow-red-black, one by one into the silky water. We heard the church bells ringing sweet and distant across the fields, signaling the end of Mass. The festival would begin within ten minutes.
“Are the others going?” Paul shifted a bloodworm from its warming place in his left cheek and speared it expertly onto the hook.
I shrugged. “Don’t care,” I said.
In the silence that followed I heard Paul’s stomach rumble loudly.
“Hungry?”
“Nah.”
It was then that I heard it. Clear as memory on the Angers road, almost imperceptible at first, growing louder like the drone of a sleepy wasp, louder like the buzz of blood in the temples after a breathless run across the fields. The sound of a single motorbike.
A sudden burst of panic. Paul must not see him. If it was Tomas I must be alone-and my heart’s sick lurch of joy told me, told me with a clear rapturous certainty, it was Tomas.
Tomas.
“Perhaps we could just have a look in,” I said with fake indifference.
Paul made a noncommittal sound.
“There’ll be gingerbread,” I told him slyly. “And baked potatoes and roasted sweet corn…and pies…and sausage in the coals of the bonfire.”
I heard his stomach rumble a little louder.
“We could sneak in and help ourselves,” I suggested.
Silence.
“Cassis and Reine will be there.”
At least I hoped they would. I was counting on their presence to enable me to make a quick getaway and back to Tomas. The thought of his closeness-the unbearable, hot joy that filled me at the thought of seeing him-was like baking stones under my feet.
“W-will she be there?” His voice was low with a hate that might in other circumstances have surprised me. I never imagined Paul to be the kind who bears grudges. “I mean your m-m-m-” He grimaced with the effort. “Your m-m-m-Your m-m-m-”
I shook my head. “Shouldn’t think so,” I interrupted, more sharply than I intended. “God, Paul, it drives me crazy when you do that.”
Paul shrugged indifferently. I could hear the sound of the motorbike clearly now, maybe a mile or two up the road. I clenched my fists so hard that my fingernails scarred my palms.
“I mean,” I said in a gentler tone. “I mean it doesn’t matter really. She just doesn’t understand, that’s all.”
“Will she b-be there?” insisted Paul.
I shook my head. “No,” I lied. “She said she’d be clearing out the goat shed this morning.”
Paul nodded. “All right,” he said mildly.
Tomas might wait at the Lookout Post for an hour or so. The weather was warm; he would hide his motorbike in the bushes and smoke a cigarette. If there was nobody around he might risk a dip in the river. If after that time no one had appeared, he would scribble a message for us and leave it (perhaps with a parcel of magazines or sweets carefully packed in newspaper) at the top of the Lookout Post, in the fork under the platform. I knew this; he’d done it before. In that time I could easily get into the village with Paul, then double back as soon as no one was watching. I would not tell Reinette or Cassis that Tomas was here. A burst of greedy joy at the thought. Imagining his face lit up by a smile of welcome, a smile that would be mine alone. With that thought I almost rushed Paul toward the village, my hot hand tight around his cool one.
The square around the fountain was already half filled with people. More people were filing out of the church, children holding candles, young girls with crowns of autumn leaves, a handful of young men fresh from confession-Guilherm Ramondin among them-ogling the girls prior to reaping a new crop of sinful thoughts. More, if they could get it; harvest was the time for it, after all, and there was precious little else to look forward to… I saw Cassis and Reinette standing a little way away from the main body of the crowd. Reine was wearing a red flannel dress and a necklace of berries, and Cassis was eating a sugared pastry. No one seemed to be talking to them, and I could sense the little circle of isolation around them. Reinette was laughing, a high, brittle sound like the scream of a seabird. A little distance away from them my mother stood watching, a basket of pastries and fruit in one hand. She looked very drab among the festival crowd, her black dress and head scarf jarring against the flowers and bunting. At my side I felt Paul stiffen.
A group of people by the side of the fountain began a cheery song. Raphaël was there, I think, and Colette Gaudin, and Paul’s uncle, Philippe Hourias-a yellow scarf tied incongruously about his neck-and Agnès Petit in her Sunday frock and patent shoes, a crown of berries on her hair. I remember her voice rising above the others for a moment-it was untrained, but very sweet and clear-and I felt a shiver raise the hairs on the nape of my neck, as if the ghost she was to become had walked prematurely over my grave. I still remember the words she sang:
A la claire fontaine j’allais me promener
J’ai trouvé l’eau si belle que je m’y suis baignée
Il y a longtemps que je’t‘aime
Jamais je ne’t‘oublierai.
Tomas-if it had been Tomas-would be at the Lookout Post by now. But Paul at my side showed no sign of mingling with the crowd. Instead he looked at my mother’s figure across from the fountain and bit his lips nervously.
“I thought you said she wouldn’t b-be here,” he said.
“I didn’t know,” I said.
We stood watching for a while as people refreshed themselves. There were jugs of cider and wine resting on the ledge around the fountain, and many of the women had, like my mother, brought loaves and brioche and fruit to distribute at the church door. I noticed that my mother kept her distance, though, and few came near enough to claim the food she had so carefully prepared. Her face remained impassive, however, almost indifferent. Only her hands gave her away, her white, nervous hands clenched so tightly against the basket’s handle. Her lips were bitten white against her pale face.
I fretted. Paul gave no sign of leaving my side. A woman-Francine Crespin, I think, Raphaël’s sister-held out a basket of apples to Paul, then, seeing me, let her smile stiffen. Few people had missed the writing on the henhouse wall.
The priest came out of the church. Père Froment, his weak mild eyes bright today with the knowledge that his people were united, his gilt crucifix mounted on a wooden pole and held in the air like a trophy. Behind him, two altar boys carried the Virgin on her yellow-and-gold dais decorated with berries and autumn leaves. The Sunday-schoolers turned to the little procession with their candles held in the air and began to sing a harvest hymn. Girls primped and practiced their smiles. I saw Reinette turn too. Then came the harvest queen’s yellow throne, carried out from the church by two young men. Only straw after all, with head and armrests made of corn sheaves and a cushion of autumn leaves. But for a moment with the sun shining on it, it might just as easily have been gold.
There were maybe a dozen girls of the right age waiting by the fountain. I remember them all: Jeannette Crespin in her too-tight communion dress, redheaded Francine Hourias with her mass of freckles that no amount of washing with bran could fade, Michèle Petit with her tight braids and eyeglasses. None of them could hold a candle to Reinette. They knew it too. I could see it in the way they watched her, set slightly apart from the others in her red dress with her long hair unbound and berries woven into her curls, with envy and suspicion. With a little satisfaction too: no one would vote for Reine Dartigen as harvest queen this year. Not this year, not with the rumors flying about us like dead leaves in the wind.
The priest was speaking. I listened with mounting impatience. Tomas would be waiting. I had to leave soon if I was not to miss him. At my side Paul was staring at the fountain with that look of half-stupid intensity in his face.
“It has been a year of many trials…” His voice was a soothing drone, like the distant bleating of sheep. “But your faith and your energy have brought us through once again.” I sensed impatience akin to mine from the people in the crowd. They had already listened to a long sermon. Now was the time for the crowning of the queen, for the dancing and the celebration. I saw a small child reach for a piece of cake from her mother’s basket and eat it quickly, unnoticed, behind her hand, with furtive, greedy bites.
“Now is a time for celebration.” That was more like it. I heard a low shushing from the crowd, a murmur of approbation and impatience. Père Froment felt it too.
“I only ask that you show moderation in all things,” he bleated, “remembering who it is that you are celebrating-without Whom there could be no harvest and no rejoicing-”
“Get on with it, Père!” cried a rough, cheery voice from the side of the church. Père Froment looked affronted and resigned at the same moment.
“All in good time, mon fils,” he admonished. “As I was saying…now is the time to begin our Lord’s festival by naming the harvest queen-a girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen-to rule over our celebrations and to wear the barley crown-”
A dozen voices interrupted, crying out names-some of them quite ineligible. Raphaël yelled out “Agnès Petit!” and Agnès, who wasn’t a day under thirty-five, blushed in delighted embarrassment, looking for a moment almost pretty.
“Mireille Dupré!”
“Colette Gaudin!” Wives kissed their husbands and shrieked mock indignation at the compliment.
“Michèle Petit!” That was Michèle’s mother, doggedly loyal.
“Georgette Lemaître!” This was Henri volunteering his grandmother, aged ninety or more and cackling wildly at the joke.
Several young men called out for Jeannette Crespin, and she blushed furiously behind her hands. Then Paul, who had been standing in silence at my side, suddenly stepped forward.
“Reine-Claude Dartigen!” he called loudly, without stammering, and his voice was strong and almost adult, a man’s voice, quite unlike his own slow, hesitant drawl. “Reine-Claude Dartigen!” he called again, and people turned to look at him curiously, murmuring. “Reine-Claude Dartigen!” he called once more, and walked across the square toward the astounded Reinette with a necklace of crab apples in his hand.
“Here. This is for you,” he said in a softer voice-but still with no trace of a stutter-and flung the necklace over Reinette’s head. The little red-and-yellow fruit glowed in the reddish October light.
“Reine-Claude Dartigen,” said Paul for the fourth time, and, taking Reine’s hand, led her the few steps to the straw throne. Père Froment said nothing, an uneasy smile on his lips, but allowed Paul to place the barley crown on Reinette’s head.
“Very good,” said the priest said softly. “Very good.” Then, in a louder voice; “I hereby name Reine-Claude Dartigen this year’s Harvest Queen!”
It might have been impatience at the thought of so much wine and cider waiting to be drunk. It might have been the surprise of hearing poor little Paul Hourias speak without stammering for the first time in his life. It might have been the sight of Reinette sitting on the throne with her lips like cherries and the sun shining through her hair like a halo. Most of the villagers clapped. A few even cheered and called out her name-all of them men, I noticed, even Raphaël and Julien Lanicen, who had been at La Mauvaise Réputation that night. But some of the women did not applaud. Only a few abstained, only a handful, but enough. Michèle’s mother, for one, and spiteful gossips like Marthe Gaudin and Isabelle Ramondin. But they were still few, and although some looked uneasy they joined their voices to the rest-some even clapped as Reine threw flower heads and fruit from her basket at the Sunday-schoolers. I caught a glimpse of my mother’s face then as I began to creep away, and was struck by the sudden look on her face, the sudden soft, warm look-cheeks flushed and eyes almost as bright as in the forgotten wedding photograph-the scarf pulling from her hair as she almost ran to Reinette’s side. I think I was the only one to see it. Everyone else was looking at my sister. Even Paul was looking at her from his place at the side of the fountain, the stupid look back on his face as if it had never left. Something inside me twisted. Moisture stung my eyes so sharply that for a second I was sure that some insect-a wasp, perhaps-had landed on my eyelid.
I dropped a pastry I had been eating and turned again, unnoticed, to go. Tomas was waiting for me. Suddenly it was very important to believe that Tomas was waiting. Tomas, who loved me. Tomas, only Tomas, forever. For a moment I turned back, fixing the scene into my mind. My sister the harvest queen, the most beautiful harvest queen ever crowned, the sheaf in one hand and in the other a round bright fruit-an apple, maybe, or a pomegranate-pressed into her palm by Père Froment, their eyes meeting, he smiling in his sweet sheepy way, my mother, the smile freezing on her bright face in a sudden gesture of recoil, her voice coming to me thinly over the sound of the merry crowd-What’s that? For God’s sake, what’s that? Who gave you that? Not an apple then, I realized, or even a pomegranate. The harvest queen’s prize was an orange.
I ran then, while attention was diverted from me. Almost laughing, with the invisible wasp still stinging at my eyelids I ran as fast as I could back to the river, my thoughts a blur. Every now and again I had to stop to quiet the spasms that cramped my stomach, spasms eerily like laughter but that sent tears spurting from my eyes. That orange! Stored with care and love for just this occasion, kept hidden in tissue paper for the harvest queen, globed in her hand as Mother-as Mother…The laughter was like acid inside me but the pain was exquisite, rolling me to the ground, tugging at me like fishhooks. The look on my mother’s face convulsed me whenever I thought of it, the look of pride turning to fear-no, terror-at the sight of a single, tiny orange. Between spasms I ran as fast as I could, calculating that it might take ten minutes to arrive at the Lookout Post, adding to that the time we had spent at the fountain-twenty at least-gasping with fear that Tomas might already have left.
This time I’d ask him, I promised myself. I’d ask him to take me with him this time, wherever he was going, back to Germany or into the woods on the run forever, whatever he wanted as long as he and I-he and I…I prayed to Old Mother as I ran, brambles snagging at my bare legs unheeded. Please, Tomas. Please. Only you. Forever. I met no one on my mad run across the fields. Everyone else was at the festival. By the time I reached the Standing Stones I was calling his name out loud, my voice shrill as a peewit’s in the silky silence of the river.
Could he already have gone?
“Tomas! Tomas!” I was hoarse from laughing, hoarse with fear. “Tomas! Tomas!”
I almost didn’t see him, he was so quick. Sliding out of a stand of bushes, one hand clamping around my wrist, the other over my mouth. For a second I hardly even recognized him-his face dark-and I struggled wildly, trying to bite his hand, making small birdlike sounds against his palm.
“Shh, Backfisch, what the hell are you trying to do?” I recognized his voice and stopped struggling.
“Tomas. Tomas.” I couldn’t stop saying his name, the familiar scent of tobacco and sweat from his clothes filling my nostrils. I clutched his coat close to my face in a way I would never have dared two months ago. In the secret darkness of it, I kissed the lining with desperate passion. “I knew you’d come back. I knew you would.”
He looked at me, saying nothing. “Are you alone?” His eyes looked narrower than usual, wary. I nodded.
“Good. I want you to listen.” He spoke very slowly, emphatically, enunciating every word. There was no cigarette at the corner of his mouth, no gleam in his eyes. He seemed to have got thinner in the past few weeks, his face sharper, his mouth less generous.
“I want you to listen carefully.”
I nodded my obedience. Whatever you want, Tomas. My eyes felt bright and hot. Only you, Tomas. Only you. I wanted to tell him about my mother and Reine and the orange, but sensed that this was the wrong time. I listened.
“There may be men coming to the village,” he said. “Black uniforms. You know what that means, don’t you?”
I nodded. “German police,” I said. “S.S.”
“That’s right.” He spoke in a clipped, precise tone very unlike his usual careless drawl. “They may be asking questions.”
I looked at him without comprehension.
“Questions about me,” said Tomas.
“Why?”
“Never mind why.” His hand was still tight, almost painfully so, around my wrist. “There are things they might ask you. Things about what we’ve been doing.”
“You mean the magazines and stuff?”
“That’s right. And about the old man at the café. Gustave. The one who drowned.” His face looked grim and drawn. He turned my face to look at his, coming very close. I could smell cigarette smoke on his collar and on his breath. “Listen, Backfisch. This is important. You mustn’t tell them anything. You’ve never seen me. You weren’t at La Rép the night of the dance. You don’t even know my name. All right?”
I nodded.
“Don’t forget,” insisted Tomas. “You don’t know anything. You’ve never spoken to me. Tell the others.”
I nodded again, and he seemed to relax a little.
“Something else too.” His voice had lost its harshness, becoming almost caressing. It made me feel soft inside, like warm caramel. I looked at him expectantly.
“I can’t come here again,” he said gently. “Not for a while, anyway. It’s getting too dangerous. I only just managed to get away with it last time.”
I was silent for a moment. “We could meet at the cinema instead,” I suggested shyly. “Like we used to do. Or in the woods-”
Tomas shook his head impatiently. “Aren’t you listening?” he snapped. “We can’t meet at all. Not anywhere.”
Cold prickled over my skin like snowflakes. My mind was a surging black cloud.
“For how long?” I whispered at last.
“A long time.” I could feel his impatience. “Maybe forever.”
I flinched and began to shake. The prickling had turned to a hot stinging sensation, like rolling in nettles. He took my face in his hands.
“Look, Framboise,” he said slowly. “I’m sorry. I know you-” he broke off then, suddenly. “I know it’s hard.” He grinned, a fierce but somehow rueful grin, like a wild animal trying to mimic friendliness.
“I brought you some things,” he said at last. “Magazines, coffee.” Again that tight, cheery grin. “Chewing gum. Chocolate. Books.”
I looked at him in silence. My heart felt like a lump of cold clay.
“Just hide them, won’t you?” His eyes were bright, the eyes of a child sharing a delightful secret. “And don’t tell anyone about us. Not anyone at all.”
He turned to the bush from which he had sprung and pulled out a parcel tied up with string.
“Open it,” he urged.
I stared at him dully.
“Go on.” His voice was tight with enforced cheer. “It’s yours.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Ah, Backfisch, come on…” He reached out to put his arm around me, but I pushed him away.
“I said I don’t want it!” It was my mother’s voice again, screamy and sharp, and suddenly I hated him for bringing it out of me. “I don’t want it, don’t want it, don’t want it!”
He grinned at me helplessly. “Ah, come on,” he repeated. “Don’t be like that. I only-”
“We could run away,” I said abruptly. “I know lots of places in the woods. We could run away and no one would ever know where to find us. We could eat rabbits and things…mushrooms…berries…” My face was burning. My throat felt sore and parched. “We’d be safe,” I insisted. “No one would know…” But I could see from his face that it was useless.
I can’t,“ he said with finality.
I could feel tears welling up in my eyes.
“Can’t you even’s-stay for a while?” I sounded like Paul now, humble and stupid, but I couldn’t help it. Part of me would have liked to let him go in icy, prideful silence, without a word, but the words stumbled out of my mouth unbidden.
“Please? You could have a cigarette, or a swim, or we c-could go fishing-”
Tomas shook his head.
I felt something inside me begin to collapse with slow inevitability. In the distance I heard a sudden clanking of metal against metal.
“Just a few minutes? Please?” How I hated the sound of my voice then, that stupid, hurt pleading. “I’ll show you my new traps. I’ll show you my pike pot.”
His silence was damning, patient as the grave. I could feel our time slipping from me, inexorably. Again I heard the distant clanking of metal against metal, the sound of a dog with a tin can tied to its tail, and suddenly I recognized that sound. A wave of desperate joy submerged me.
“Please! It’s important!” High and childish now and with the hope of salvation, closer to tears than ever, heat spilling from my eyelids and clogging my throat. “I’ll tell if you don’t stay, I’ll tell, I’ll tell, I’ll-”
He nodded once, impatiently.
“Five minutes. Not a minute more. All right?”
My tears stopped. “All right.”
Five minutes. I knew what I had to do. It was our last chance-my last chance-but my heart, beating like a hammer, filled my desperate mind with a wild music. He’d given me five minutes. Elation filled me as I dragged him by the hand toward the big sandbank where I had laid my last trap. The prayer that filled my mind as I ran from the village was a yammering, deafening imperative now-only you only you oh Tomas please oh please please please-my heart beating so hard that it threatened to burst my eardrums.
“Where are we going?” His voice was calm, amused, almost disinterested.
“I want to show you something,” I gasped, pulling harder at his hand. “Something important. Come on!”
I could hear the tin cans I had tied to the oil drum rattling. There was something in the trap, I told myself with a sudden shiver of excitement. Something big. The tins bobbed furiously on the water, rattling the drum. Below, the two crates secured together with chicken wire rocked and churned under the surface.
It had to be. It just had to be.
From its hiding place beneath the banking I pulled out the wooden pole that I used to maneuver my heavy traps to the surface. My hands were shaking so badly that at the first try I almost dropped the pole into the water. With the hook secured to the end of the pole I detached the crates from the floater and pushed the big drum away. The crates bucked and pranced.
“It’s too heavy!” I screamed.
Tomas was watching me in some bewilderment.
“What the hell is that?” he asked.
“Oh, please…please…” I was heaving at the crates, trying to drag them up the steep banking. Water ran out of the slatted sides of the boxes. Something large and violent slid and thrashed about inside.
At my side I heard Tomas’s low laugh.
“Oh, you Backfisch,” he gasped. “I think you’ve got it at last. That old pike…Lieber Gott, but it must be huge!”
I was hardly listening. My breath rasped my throat like sandpaper. I could feel my bare heels in the mud, sliding helplessly toward the water. The thing in my hands was dragging me in inch by inch.
“I’m not going to lose her!” I gasped harshly. “I’m not! I’m not!” I took one step up the bank, pulling the sodden crates after me. Then another. I could feel the slippery yellow mud beneath my feet, threatening to bring my legs from under me. The pole dug cruelly into my shoulders as I fought for leverage. And at the back of my mind, the rapturous knowledge that he was watching, that if only I could drag Old Mother from her hiding place, then my wish…my wish…
One step. Then another. I dug my toes into the clay and dragged myself higher. One more step, my burden getting lighter as water poured from the crates. I could feel the creature inside hurling itself in fury against the sides of the box. One step more.
Then nothing.
I pulled, but the crates did not move. Crying out in frustration, I threw myself as far as I could up the banking, but the crate was stuck fast. A root, perhaps, dangling from the bare bank like the stub of a rotten tooth, or a floating log wedged in the chicken wire. “It’s stuck!” I cried desperately. “The damn trap’s stuck on something!”
Tomas gave me a comical look.
“It’s only an old pike-” he said, with a hint of impatience.
“Please, Tomas…” I gasped. “If I drop it…she’ll get away…reach down and pull it loose…please…”
“I’m not getting mud on my uniform,” Tomas observed mildly.
He shrugged and took off his jacket and shirt, leaving them neatly on a bush.
My arms trembling with the effort, I held the pole while Tomas investigated the obstruction.
“It’s a clump of roots,” he called to me. “Looks as if one of the slats has come free and got caught in the roots. It’s stuck tight.”
“Can you reach it?” I called.
He shrugged. “I’ll try.” Pulling off his trousers to hang them beside the rest of his uniform. Leaving his boots beside the banking. I saw him shiver as he entered the water-it was deep there-and heard him swear comically.
“I must be crazy,” said Tomas. “It’s freezing in here!” He was standing almost to his shoulders in the sleek brown water. I remember how the Loire parted at that point, the current just hard enough to make little pale frills of foam around his body.
“Can you reach it?” I yelled to him. My arms were filled with burning wires, my head pounding furiously. I could still feel the pike-still half in water-as it flung itself mightily against the sides of the crate.
“It’s down here,” I heard him say. “Just below the surface. I think-” A splashing sound as he ducked momentarily and resurfaced sleekly as an otter. “A little farther down-” I leaned against the pull with all of my weight. My temples burnt and I felt like screaming in pain and frustration. Five seconds…ten seconds…almost passing out now, red-black flowers blooming against my eyelids and the prayer-please oh please I’ll let you go I swear I swear just please please Tomas only you Tomas only you forever only-
Then, without warning, the crate released. I skidded up the banking, almost losing my grip on the pole as I did, the freed trap almost bouncing after me. With blurred vision and the taste of metal in my throat I dragged it to safety on the bank, driving splinters of the broken crate under my fingernails and into my already blistered palms. I tore at the chicken wire, stripping the skin from my hands, certain that the pike had got away… Something slapped at the side of the box. Slap-slap-slap. I was suddenly reminded of Mother and how she used to scrub us when we wouldn’t get washed, sometimes until we bled. The fierce wet sound of a washcloth against an enamel basin-Look at that face, Boise, it’s a disgrace! Come here and let me see to that-
Slap-slap-slap. The sound was weaker now, less persistent, though I knew a fish could live for minutes-even twitching for as long as half an hour after it was caught. Through the slats in the darkness of the crate I could see a huge shape the color of dark oil, and now and again the gleam of its eye, like a single ball bearing rolling at me in a stripe of sunlight. I felt a stab of joy so fierce it felt like dying.
“Old Mother,” I whispered hoarsely. “Old Mother. I wish. I wish. Make him stay. Make Tomas stay.” I whispered it quickly so that Tomas wouldn’t hear what I was saying, and then, when he didn’t come up the riverbank immediately I said it again, in case the old pike hadn’t heard the first time: “Make Tomas stay. Make him stay forever.”
Inside the crate, the pike slapped and floundered. I could make out the shape of its mouth now, a sour downturned crescent whiskered with steel from previous attempts at capture, and I was filled with terror at its size, pride at my victory, crazed, engulfing relief… It was over. The nightmare that had begun with Jeannette and the water snake, the oranges, Mother’s descent into madness…it all ended here on the riverbank, this girl in her muddied skirt and bare feet, her short hair scruffed with mud and her face shining, this box, this fish, this man looking almost a boy without his uniform and with his hair dripping…I looked around impatiently.
“Tomas! Come and look!”
Silence. Only the small sounds of the river plapping against the muddy hollow of the bank. I stood up to look over the edge.
“Tomas!”
But there was no sign of Tomas. Where he had dived down there was an unbroken creamy smoothness the color of café au lait with only a few bubbles on the surface.
“Tomas!”
Maybe I should have felt panic. If I’d responded there and then maybe I would have caught him in time, avoided the inevitable somehow…I tell myself this now. But then, still dizzy with my victory, my legs trembling with exertion and fatigue, I could only remember the hundreds of times he and Cassis had played this game, diving deep under the surface of the water and pretending they were drowned, hiding in hollows under the sandbank to resurface red-faced and laughing as Reinette screamed and screamed… In the box Old Mother slap-slapped imperiously. I took another couple of steps toward the edge.
“Tomas?”
Silence. I stood there for a moment, which seemed like forever. I whispered, “Tomas?”
The Loire hissed silkily beneath my feet. Old Mother’s slapping had grown feeble in the crate. Along the rotten riverbank the long yellow roots reached into the water like witches’ fingers. And I knew.
I had my wish.
When Cassis and Reine found me two hours later I was lying dry-eyed by the river with one hand on Tomas’s boots and the other on a broken packing crate containing the remains of a big fish, which was already beginning to stink.
We were still only children. We didn’t know what to do. We were afraid-Cassis perhaps more than the rest of us, because he was older and he understood rather better than we did what would happen if we were linked with Tomas’s death. It was Cassis who dived under and found Tomas under the banking, freeing his ankle from behind the root that had snagged him and pulling his body out. Cassis too who removed the remainder of his clothes and bundled them together, tying them with his belt. He was crying, but there was something hard in him that day, something that we had never seen before. Perhaps he used up his lifetime’s reserve of bravery that day, I thought afterward. Perhaps that was why he fled later into the soft forgetfulness of drink. Reine was useless. She sat on the bank throughout, crying, her face mottled and almost ugly. It was only when Cassis shook her and said she had to promise-to promise!-that she showed any reaction, nodding dimly through her tears and sobbing, Tomas, oh, Tomas! Perhaps that was why in spite of everything I never really managed to hate Cassis. He stood by me that day, after all, and that was more than anyone else did. Until now, that is.
“You have to understand this.” His boy’s voice, unsteadied by fear, still sounded oddly like an echo of Tomas’s. “If they find out about us, they’ll think we killed him. They’ll shoot us.” Reine watched him with huge terrified eyes. I looked over the river, feeling strangely indifferent, strangely unaffected. No one would shoot me. I’d caught Old Mother. Cassis slapped me sharply on the arm. He looked sick, but dogged.
“Boise! Are you listening?”
I nodded.
“We have to make it look as if someone else did it,” said Cassis. “The Resistance or someone. If they think he drowned…” He paused to glance superstitiously at the river. “If they find out he went swimming with us…they might talk to the others, Hauer and the rest…and…” Cassis gave a convulsive swallow. There was no need to say more. We looked at one another.
“We have to make it look like…” He looked at me, almost pleading. “You know. An execution.”
I nodded. “I’ll do it,” I said.
It took us a while to understand how to fire the gun. There was a safety catch. We took it off. The gun was heavy, greasy-smelling. Then came the question of where to shoot. I said the heart, Cassis the head. A single shot should do it, he said, just there at the temple, to make it look like a Resistance job. We tied his hands with string to make it look more authentic. We muffled the sound of the shot with his jacket, but even so the noise-flat and yet with a peculiar resonance that went on and on-seemed to fill the whole world.
My grief had gone deep, too deep for me to feel anything but an enduring numbness. My mind was like the river, smooth and shiny on the surface, filled with cold beneath it. We dragged Tomas to the edge and tipped him into the water. Without his clothes or identity tags, we knew, he would be virtually unidentifiable. By tomorrow, we told ourselves, the current might have rolled him all the way to Angers.
“But what about his clothes?” There was a bluish tinge around Cassis’s mouth, though his voice was still strong. “We can’t risk just tipping them into the river. Someone might find them. And know…”
“We could burn them,” I suggested.
Cassis shook his head. “Too much smoke,” he said shortly. “Besides, you can’t burn the gun, or the belt, or the tags.” I shrugged disinterestedly. In my mind I saw Tomas roll softly into the water, like a tired child into bed, again and again. Then I had the idea.
“The Morlock hole,” I said.
Cassis nodded.
“All right,” he said.
The well looks much as it did then, though someone has placed a concrete plug over it nowadays so that children don’t fall in. Of course, we have running water now. In my mother’s day the well was the only drinking water we had apart from the overspill from the rain gutter, which we only used for watering. It was a giant brick cylindrical affair, rising some five feet off the ground, with a hand pump to draw off the water. At the top of the cylinder, a padlocked wooden lid prevented accidents and contamination. Sometimes, when the weather had been very dry, the well water was yellow and brackish, but for most of the year it was sweet. After reading The Time Machine, Cassis and I had gone through a phase of playing Morlocks and Eloi around the well, which reminded me, in its grim solidity, of the dark holes into which the creatures had vanished.
We waited until night was almost falling before returning home. We carried the bundle of Tomas’s clothes, hiding it in a thick patch of lavender bushes at the end of the garden until nightfall. We brought the parcel of magazines too-not even Cassis was interested in looking at it after what had happened. One of us would have to make some excuse to go out, said Cassis-by that, of course, he meant I should have to do it-quickly retrieve the bundle and throw it, along with the unopened parcel, into the well. The key to the padlock hung on the back of the door with the rest of our house keys-it was even labeled “Well,” Mother’s passion for neatness being what it was-and could easily be removed and replaced without Mother noticing. After that, said Cassis with that unaccustomed harshness in his voice, the rest was up to us. We had never known, never heard of, a Tomas Leibniz. We had never spoken to any German soldiers. Hauer and the others would keep their mouths shut if they knew what was good for them. All we had to do was look stupid and say nothing at all.
It was easier than we expected. Mother was having another of her bad spells and was too preoccupied with her own suffering to notice our pale faces and muddy eyes. She whisked Reine away to the bathroom immediately, claiming she could still smell the orange on her skin, and rubbed her hands with camphor and pumice until Reinette screamed and pleaded. They emerged twenty minutes later-Reine with her hair bound up in a towel and smelling strongly of camphor, my mother dull and hardmouthed with suppressed rage. There was no supper for us.
“Make it yourselves if you want any,” Mother advised us. “Running about the woods like gypsies. Flaunting yourselves in the square like that…” She almost moaned, one hand touching her temple in the old warning gesture. A silence, during which she stared as if we were strangers-then she retired to her rocking chair by the fireside and twisted her knitting savagely in her hands, rocking and glaring into the flames.
“Oranges,” she said in her low voice. “Why would you want to bring oranges into the house? Do you hate me so much?” But who she was talking to was unclear, and none of us dared answer her. I’m not sure what we would have said anyway.
At ten o’clock she went to her room. It was already late for us, but Mother, who often seemed to lose track of time during her bad spells, said nothing. We stayed in the kitchen for a while, listening to the sounds of her preparing for bed. Cassis went to the cellar for something to eat, returning with a piece of rillettes wrapped in paper and half a loaf of bread. We ate, though none of us were very hungry. I think perhaps we were trying to avoid talking to one another.
The act-the terrible act we had committed-still hung in front of us like a dreadful fruit. His body, his pale Northern skin almost bluish in the dapple of the leaves, his averted face, his sleepy, boneless roll into the water. Kicking leaves over the shattered mess at the back of his head-strange that the bullet hole should be so small and neat at the point of entry-then the slow, regal splash into the water… Black rage blotted out my grief. You cheated me, I thought. You cheated. You cheated me!
It was Cassis who broke the silence first. “You ought to…you know…do it now.”
I gave him a look of hate.
“You ought to,” he insisted. “Before it gets too late.”
Reine looked at us both with those appealing heifer’s eyes.
“All right,” I said tonelessly. “I’ll do it.”
Afterward I went back to the river once again. I don’t know what I expected to see there-the ghost of Tomas Leibniz, perhaps, leaning against the Lookout Post and smoking-but the place was oddly normal, without even the eerie quietness I might have expected in the wake of such a dreadful thing. Frogs croaked. Water splashed softly against the hollow of the bank. In the cool gray moonlight the dead pike stared at me with its ball-bearing eyes and its jagged, drooling mouth. I could not rid myself of the idea that it was not dead, that it could hear every word, that it was listening…
“I hate you,” I told it softly.
Old Mother stared at me in glassy contempt. There were fishhooks all around its mean toothy mouth, some almost healed over with time. They looked like strange fangs.
“I’d have let you go,” I told it. “You knew I would.” I lay in the grass beside it, our faces close to touching. The stench of rotting fish mingled with the dank smell of the ground. “You cheated me,” I said.
In the pale light the old pike’s eyes looked almost knowing. Almost triumphant.
I’m not sure how long I stayed out that night. I think I dozed a little, for when I awoke the moon was farther downriver, glancing its crescent off the smooth milky water. It was very cold. Rubbing the numbness from my hands and feet I sat up, then carefully picked up the dead pike. It was heavy, slimed with mud from the river, and there were the jagged remnants of fishhooks crusted into its gleaming flanks like pieces of carapace. In silence I took it to the Standing Stones, where I had nailed the corpses of water snakes all through that summer. I hooked the fish through its lower jaw onto one of the nails. The flesh was tough and elastic; for a moment I wasn’t sure the skin would break, but with an effort I managed. Old Mother hung openmouthed above the river in a snakeskin skirt, which trembled in the breeze.
“At least I got you,” I said softly.
At least I got you.
I almost missed the first call.
The woman who answered was working late-it was ten past five already-and had forgotten to switch on the answering machine. She sounded very young and bored, and I felt my heart sink at the sound of her voice. I blurted my message through lips that felt oddly numb. I’d have liked an older woman, one who would remember the war, one who might remember my mother’s name, and for a moment I was sure she’d hang up, she’d tell me all that ancient history was finished now, that no one wanted to know any more…
In my mind I even heard her say it. I stretched out my hand to cut the connection.
“Madame? Madame?” Her voice was urgent. “Are you still there?”
With an effort: “Yes.”
“Did you say ”Mirabelle Dartigen‘?“
“Yes. I’m her daughter. Framboise.”
“Wait. Please wait.” The voice was almost breathless behind the professional politeness, all trace of boredom gone. “Please. Don’t go away.”
I had expected an article, a feature at most, maybe with a picture or two. Instead they talk to me about film rights, foreign rights to my story, a book… But I couldn’t write a book, I tell them, appalled. I can read, all right, but as for writing… At my age too? It doesn’t matter, they tell me soothingly. It can be ghostwritten.
Ghostwritten. The word makes me shiver.
At first I thought I was doing it as revenge on Laure and Yannick. To rob them of their little glory. But the time for that is over. As Tomas once said, there’s more than one way of fighting back. Besides, they seem pitiful to me now. Yannick has written to me several more times, with increasing urgency. He is in Paris at the moment. Laure is suing for a divorce. She has not tried to contact me, and in spite of myself I feel a little sorry for them both. After all, they have no children. They have no idea of the difference that makes between us.
My second call that evening was to Pistache. My daughter answered almost at once, as if she were expecting me. Her voice sounded calm and remote. In the background I could hear Prune and Ricot playing a noisy game, and a dog barking.
“Of course I’ll come,” she said mildly. “Jean-Marc can look after the children for a few days.” My sweet Pistache. So patient and undemanding. How can she know what it feels like to have that hard place inside? She never had it. She may love me-perhaps even forgive me-but she can never really understand. Perhaps it’s better for her this way.
The last call was long-distance. I left a message, struggling with the unfamiliar accent, the impossible words. My voice sounded old and wavery, and I had to repeat the message several times to make myself heard against the sounds of crockery, talk and the distant jukebox. I only hoped it would be enough.
What happened next is common knowledge. They found Tomas early the next morning, and nowhere close to Angers. Instead of rolling with the current far away, he’d been washed up on a sandbank half a mile from the village, to be found by the same group of Germans who found his motorbike, hidden in a stand of bushes under the road from the Standing Stones. We heard from Paul what was rumored in the village: that a Resistance group had shot a German guard who had caught them out after the curfew; that a Communist sniper had shot him for his papers; that it was an execution by his own people following the discovery that he was trading German army-issue goods on the black market. The Germans were suddenly all over the village-black uniforms and gray-conducting house-to-house searches.
Their attention to our house was perfunctory. There was no man there, after all, simply a pack of brats with their sick mother. I answered the door when they came knocking and led them around the house, but they seemed more interested in what we knew about Raphaël Crespin than anything else. Paul told us later that Raphaël had disappeared earlier that day-or maybe some time during the night-disappeared without a trace and taking his money and papers with him, while in the basement of La Mauvaise Réputation the Germans had found a cache of weapons and explosives big enough to blow up all of Les Laveuses twice over.
The Germans came to our house a second time and searched it from root cellar to attic, then seemed to lose interest altogether. I noticed in passing-with little surprise-that the S.S. officer who accompanied the search party was the same jovial red-faced man who had commented on our strawberries early that summer, on the same day I first saw Tomas. He was still red-faced and jovial in spite of the nature of his investigation, scruffing my head carelessly as he went by and making sure the soldiers left everything neat after their passage.
A message in French and German went up on the church door, inviting anyone with knowledge of the affair to volunteer information. Mother remained in her room with one of her migraines, sleeping during the day and talking to herself at night.
We slept badly, visited by nightmares.
When it finally happened, it was with a sense of anticlimax. It was over before we even knew about it, six o’clock Tuesday morning against the west wall of Saint-Benedict’s church, close to the fountain where only two days before Reinette had sat with the barley crown on her head, throwing flowers.
Paul came to tell us. His face was pale and blotchy, one prominent vein standing out on his forehead as he told us in a voice that was one long stammer. We listened in appalled silence, benumbed, wondering perhaps how it could have come to this, how such a small seed as ours could have blossomed into this bloody flower. Their names fell against my ears like stones falling into deep water. Ten names, never to be forgotten, never in my life. Martin Dupré. Jean-Marie Dupré. Colette Gaudin. Philippe Hourias. Henri Lemaître. Julien Lanicen. Arthur Lecoz. Agnès Petit. François Ramondin. Auguste Truriand. Playing through my memory like the refrain of a song that you know will never leave you alone, surprising me out of sleep, pounding through my dreams, counterpointing the movements and rhythms of my life with relentless precision. Ten names. The ten who had been at La Mauvaise Réputation the night of the dance.
We gathered later that it was Raphaël’s disappearance that decided it. The cache of weapons in the basement suggested that the café owner had connections with Resistance groups. No one really knew. Perhaps the entire outfit was a blind for carefully organized Resistance activity, or maybe Tomas’s death had been a simple case of retaliation for what had happened to old Gustave a few weeks earlier, but whatever it was Les Laveuses paid a heavy price for its little rebellion. Like late-summer wasps, the Germans sensed the end coming and retaliated with instinctive savagery.
Martin Dupré. Jean-Marie Dupré. Colette Gaudin. Philippe Hourias. Henri Lemaître. Julien Lanicen. Arthur Lecoz. Agnès Petit. François Ramondin. Auguste Truriand. I wondered if they fell silently, like figures in a dream, or whether they wept, pleaded, clawed at one another in their efforts to escape. I wondered whether the Germans checked over the bodies afterward, one still twitching and staring but silenced at last with the butt of a pistol, one soldier lifting a bloody skirt to expose a sleek stretch of thigh… Paul told me it was over in a second. No one allowed to watch, and other soldiers training their guns at the shuttered windows. I imagine the villagers still, behind their shutters, eyes pressed avidly to cracks and knotholes, mouths half open in stupid shock. Then, the whispering, their voices lowered, stifled, spilling words as if words might help them understand.
They’re coming! There’s the Dupré boys. And Colette, Colette Gaudin. Philippe Hourias. Henri Lemaître-why, he wouldn’t hurt a fly, he’s hardly sober ten minutes in the day-old Julien Lanicen. Arthur Lecoz. And Agnès, Agnès Petit. And François Ramondin. And Auguste Truriand.
From the church, where the early service was already beginning, a sound of voices raised. A harvest hymn. Outside the closed doors, two soldiers standing guard with bored, sour faces. Père Froment bleats out the words while the congregation mutter along. Only a few dozen people today, their faces harsh and accusing, for rumor has it the priest has made a deal with the Germans to ensure cooperation. The organ blats out the tune at top volume, but even so the shots are audible outside against the west wall, the muted percussion of the bullets as they strike the old stone, something that will stick in the flesh of every member of that congregation like an old fishhook, half healed over and never to be pulled out. At the back of the church someone begins to sing “ La Marseillaise,” but the words sound beery and overloud in the sudden lull and the singer falls silent, embarrassed.
I see it all in my dreams, clearer than memory. I see their faces. I hear their voices. I see the sudden, shocking transition from living to dead. But my grief has gone down too far for me to reach it, and when I awake with tears on my face it is with a strange feeling of surprise-almost of indifference. Tomas has gone. Nothing else has any meaning.
I suppose we were in shock. We didn’t speak to one another about it, but went our separate ways, Reinette to her room where she would lie on her bed for hours, looking at her movie pictures, Cassis to his books, looking increasingly middle-aged to me now, as if something in him had collapsed, me to the woods and the river. We paid little attention to Mother during that time, though her bad spell continued as before, lasting longer than the worst of them that summer. But by then we had forgotten to fear her. Even Reinette forgot to flinch before her rages. We had killed, after all. Beyond that, what was there to fear?
My hate had no focus as yet, like my rage-Old Mother was nailed to the stone, after all, and could not therefore be blamed for Tomas’s death-but I could feel it moving, watching, like the eye of a pinhole camera, clicking away in the darkness, noting everything, noting. Emerging from her room after another sleepless night, Mother looked white and worn and desperate. I felt my hate tighten at the sight of her, shrinking to an exquisite black diamond-point of understanding.
You it was you it was you
She looked at me as if she’d heard.
“Boise?” Her voice was shaking, vulnerable.
I turned away, feeling the hate in my heart like a nugget of ice.
Behind me, I heard her stricken intake of breath.
Next it was the water. The well water was always sweet and clean, except when the weather had been exceptionally dry. That week it began to run brownish, like peat, and it had an odd taste to it, something bitter and burnt-tasting, as if dead leaves had been raked into the cylinder. We ignored it for a day or two, but it only seemed to get worse. Even Mother, whose bad spell was finally coming to an end, noticed it.
“Perhaps something’s got into the water,” she suggested.
We stared at her with our customary blankness.
“I’ll have to go and look,” she decided.
We waited for discovery with an outward display of stoicism.
“She can’t prove anything,” said Cassis desperately. “She can’t know.”
Reine whimpered. “She will, she will,” she whined. “She’ll find everything and she’ll know-”
Cassis bit his fist savagely, as if to stop himself from screaming. “Why didn’t you tell us there was coffee in the parcel?” he moaned. “Didn’t you think?”
I shrugged. Alone of all of us, I remained serene.
Discovery never came. Mother came back from the well with a bucketful of dead leaves and proclaimed the water clear.
“It’s probably sediment from the river swells,” she said, almost cheerily. “When the level drops, it will run clear again. You’ll see.”
She locked the well’s wooden lid again, and took to carrying the key at her belt. We had no opportunity to check it again.
“The parcel must have sunk to the bottom,” decided Cassis at last. “It was heavy, wasn’t it? She won’t even be able to see it unless the well runs dry.” We all knew there was little chance of that. And by next summer, the parcel’s contents would be reduced to mush at the bottom of the well.
“We’re safe,” said Cassis.
Recipe for crème de framboise liqueur.
I recognized them at once. For a while I thought it was just a bundle of leaves. Pulled it out with a pole to clear the water. Clean the raspberries and wipe off the bristles. Soak in warm water for half an hour. Then I saw it was a parcel of clothes tied together with a belt. I didn’t have to go into the pockets to know at once. Drain the water from the fruit and place in a large jar so as to cover the bottom. Thickly layer over with sugar. Repeat layers until jar is half full. At first I couldn’t think. I told the children I’d cleared the well and went to my room to lie down. I locked the well. I couldn’t think straight. Cover the fruit and sugar with Cognac, making sure not to disturb the layers, then fill with Cognac to top of jar. Leave for at least eighteen months.
The writing is neat and close-written in the strange hieroglyphics she uses when she wants her words to remain secret. I can almost hear her voice as she speaks, the slightly nasal intonation, the matter-of-factness of the terrible conclusion.
I must have done it. I’ve dreamed of violence so often and this time I must have really done it right. His clothes in the well. His name tags in the pocket. He must have come round again and I did it shot him stripped him and threw him into the river. I can almost remember it now but not quite, like a dream. So many things seem like dreams to me now. Can’t say I’m sorry. After what he did to me what he did what he let them do to Reine to me to the children to me.
The words are illegible at this point, as if terror has taken over the pen and sent it skating across the page in a desperate scrawl, but she takes control again almost immediately.
I have to think of the children. Can’t think it’s safe any more for them. He was using them all the time. All that time I thought it was me he wanted, but it was the children he was using. Keeping me sweet so he could use them some more. Those letters. Spiteful words, but that’s what it took to open my eyes. What were they doing at La Rép? What else did he have planned for them after? Maybe it’s a good thing, what happened to R eine. It spoiled things for him, at least. Things finally got out of control. Someone died. That wasn’t in his plan. Those other Germans were never really a part of it. He was using them too. To take the blame, if that’s what it took. And now my children. I have to think of the children. Can’t think it’s safe any more for them. He was using them all the time. All that time I thought it was me he wanted, but it was the children he was using. Keeping me sweet so he could use them some more. Those letters. Spiteful words, but that’s what it took to open my eyes. What were they doing at LaRép? What else did he have planned for them after? Maybe it’s a good thing, what happened to Reine. It spoiled things for him, at least. Things finally got out of control. Someone died. That wasn’t in his plan. Those other Germans were never really a part of it. He was using them too. To take the blame, if that’s what it took. And now my children.
More of the mad scrawl.
I wish I could remember. What did he offer me this time for my silence? More pills? Did he really think I could sleep knowing what I’d paid for them? Or did he smile and touch my face in that special way as if nothing had changed between us? Was that what made me do it?
The words are legible but shaking, forced into control by a mighty effort of will.
There’s always a price. Not my children, though. Take someone else. Anyone. Take the whole village if you like. It’s what I think to myself when I see their faces in my dreams. That I did it for my children. I should send them to Juliette’s for a while. Finish up here and collect them when the war’s over. Safe there. Safe from me. Send them away my sweet Reine Cassis Boise most of all my little Boise what else can I do and when will it ever end?
She breaks off here-a neat recipe in red ink for rabbit casserole separates this from the final paragraph, which is written in a different color and a different style, as if she has thought about this at length.
It’s all arranged. I’ll send them to Juliette’s. They’ll be safe there. I’ll make up some tale to keep the gossipmongers happy. I can’t leave the farm like this, the trees need care over the winter. Bele Yolande still has signs of fungus, I’ll have to sort that out. Besides, they’ll be safer without me. I know that now.
I can’t begin to imagine what she must have felt. Fear, remorse, despair-and the terror that at last she was going insane, that the bad spells had opened a nightmare door from her dreams into the real world, threatening everything she loved… But her tenacity cut through it all. This stubbornness I inherited from her, the instinct to hold, to hold on to what was hers if it killed her.
No, I never realized what she was going through. I had my own nightmares. But even so I had begun to hear the rumors in the village, rumors that grew ever louder and more menacing and that Mother, as always, failed to deny or even to notice. The graffiti on the henhouse had begun a trickle of ill will and suspicion that now, after the executions at the church, began to flow more freely. People grieve in different ways, some silently, some in anger, some in spite. Rarely does grief bring out the best in people, despite what local historians like to tell you, and Les Laveuses was no exception. Chrétien and Mirielle Dupré, shocked into brief silence at the death of their two boys, turned upon each other, she shrewish and vicious, he boorish, glaring at one another over the pews in church-she with a new bruise over one eye-with something close to hate. Old Gaudin turned in upon himself like a turtle getting ready for hibernation. Isabelle Ramondin, always a spiteful tongue at the best of times, became milky and false, looking at folk from her huge blue-black eyes, her soft chin trembling tearily. I suspect maybe she started it. Or maybe it was Claude Petit, who had never had much of a good word to say for his sister while she was alive, but who now seemed the picture of fraternal grief. Or Martin Truriand, who would inherit all his father’s business now that his brother was dead… Seems like death always brings out the rats from the woodwork in any place, and in Les Laveuses the rats were envy and hypocrisy and false piety and greed. Within three days it seemed that everyone was looking askance at everyone else, people gathered in twos and threes to talk in whispers and fell silent as you approached, people broke into unexplained tears one minute and knocked out their friends’ teeth the next, and little by little even I realized that the hushed conversations, the sideways glances, the muttered imprecations all happened most often when we were around, when we went to the post office to collect the mail or to the Hourias farm to fetch milk or to the hardware shop for a box of masonry nails. Every time, the same looks. The same whispers. Once, it was a stone flung at my mother from behind a milking shed. Another time, clods of earth thrown at our door after curfew. Women turned away without greeting us. More graffiti, this time on our walls:
NAZI WHORE, one read. Another, on the side of the goat shack, read, OUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS DIED FOR YOU.
But Mother treated it all with indifferent contempt. She bought her milk from Crécy when the Hourias farm ran dry and posted her letters in Angers. No one spoke directly to her, but when Francine Crespin spat at her feet one Sunday morning on the way back from church Mother spat back, right in Francine’s face, with remarkable speed and accuracy.
As for us, we were ignored. Paul still spoke to us occasionally, though not when anyone else was there to see. Adults seemed not to notice us, but from time to time someone like crazy Denise Lelac might give us an apple or a piece of cake to stuff in our pockets, murmuring in her cracked old voice, “Take it, take it, for God’s sake, it’s a pity you children should be caught up in such a business,” before hurrying on her way, her black skirts dragging in the sour yellow dust and her shopping basket clutched tightly in her bony fingers.
By the next day everyone was saying that Mirabelle Dartigen had been the Germans’ whore, and that was why her family had been spared retribution. By Tuesday some people had recalled that our father had once expressed sympathy for the Germans. On Wednesday night a group of drunks- La Mauvaise Réputation, had never reopened, and people grow bitter and violent drinking alone-came to yell abuse at our closed shutters and to throw stones. We stayed in our bedroom with the light off, trembling and listening to the half-familiar voices, until Mother went out to break it up. That night they went quietly. The following night they left noisily. Then came Friday.
It was just after supper. It had been gray and dank all day, as if an old blanket had been thrown across the sky, and people were hot and prickly. Night brought little comfort, rolling a whitish mist across the fields so that our farmhouse seemed an island, mist seeping damply under doors and around window frames. We had eaten in silence as had become usual, and with little appetite, though I remember Mother had made an effort to make what we liked best. Bread freshly baked and scattered with poppy seeds, fresh butter from Crécy, rillettes, slices of andouillette from last year’s pig, hot sizzling pieces of boudin in its grease, and black buckwheat pancakes toasted in the pan, as crispy and fragrant as autumn leaves on the plate. Mother, trying hard to be cheerful, served us sweet cider from earthen bolées but took none for herself. I remember she smiled constantly and painfully throughout the meal, sometimes giving a sharp bark of false laughter, though none of us said anything funny.
“I’ve been thinking.” Her voice was bright and metallic. “Thinking we may need a change of air.” We looked indifferently at her. The smell of grease and cider was overpowering.
“I was thinking of going to visit Tante Juliette in Pierre-Buffière,” she continued. “You’d like it there. It’s in the mountains, on the Limousin. There are goats and marmots and-”
“There are goats here,” I said in a flat voice.
Mother gave another of those brittle, unhappy laughs. “I should have known you’d have some objection,” she said.
I met her eyes with mine. “You want us to run away,” I said.
For a minute she pretended not to understand.
“I know it sounds like a long way to go,” she said with that forced cheeriness. “But it’s really not that far, and Tante Juliette will be so pleased to see us all-”
“You want us to run away because of what people are saying,” I said. “That you’re a Nazi whore.”
Mother flushed. “You shouldn’t listen to gossip,” she said in a sharp voice. “Nothing good ever comes of it.”
“Oh, so it isn’t true, then, is it?” I asked simply to embarrass her. I knew it wasn’t-couldn’t imagine it to be true. I’d seen whores before. Whores were pink and plump, soft and pretty, with wide, vapid eyes and painted mouths like Reinette’s cinema actresses. Whores laughed and squealed and wore high-heeled shoes and carried leather handbags. Mother was old, ugly, sour. Even when she laughed, it was ugly.
“Of course not.” Her eyes did not meet mine.
Insistently: “So why are we running away?”
Silence. And in the sudden silence we heard the first harsh murmur of voices outside, and in it the clanking of metal and kicking of feet, even before the first stone hit the shutters. The sound of Les Laveuses in all its petty spite and vengeful anger, people no longer people now-no Gaudins or Lecozes or Truriands or Duponts or Ramondins-but members of an army. Peering out of the window we saw them gathered outside our gate, twenty, thirty or more of them, mostly men but some women too, some with lamps or torches like a late harvest-procession, some with pocketfuls of stones. As we watched and light from our kitchen spilled out across into the yard, someone turned to the window and threw another stone, which cracked the old wooden frame and sprayed glass into the room. It was Guilherm Ramondin. I could hardly see his face in the flickering reddish light of the torches, but I could feel the weight of his hate even through the glass.
“Bitch!” His voice was hardly recognizable, thickened with something more than drink. “Come out, bitch, before we decide to come in there and get you!” A kind of roar accompanied his words, punctuated by stamping, cheering and a volley of fistfuls of gravel and clods that spattered against our half-closed shutters.
Mother half-opened the broken window and shouted out. “Go home, Guilherm, you fool, before you pass out and someone has to carry you!” Laughter and jeering from the crowd. Guilherm shook the crutch on which he had been leaning.
“Brave talk for a German bitch!” he yelled. His voice sounded rough and beery, though his words were barely slurred. “Who told them about Raphaël, eh? Who told them about La Rép? Was it you, Mirabelle? Did you tell the S.S. that they killed your lover?”
Mother spat out of the window at them. “Brave talk!” Her voice was shrill and high. “You’re one to be talking bravery, Guilherm Ramondin! Brave enough to be standing drunk outside an honest woman’s house, frightening her kids! Brave enough to get sent home in the first week of battle while my husband got killed!”
At this Guilherm gave a roar of fury. Behind him the crowd joined in hoarsely. Another volley of stones and earth hit the window, sending pieces of earth spattering across the kitchen floor.
“You bitch!” They were through the gate now, pushing it up and off its rotten hinges with ease. A dog barked once, twice, then fell quiet with a sudden yelp. “Don’t think we don’t know! Don’t think Raphaël didn’t tell anyone!” His triumphant, hateful voice rang out even above the rest. In the red darkness below the window I could see his eyes as they reflected the firelight like a crazywork of broken glass. “We know you were trading with them, Mirabelle! We know Leibniz was your lover!” From the window Mother hurled a jug of water onto the nearest members of the crowd.
“Cool you off!” she screamed furiously. “You think that’s all people can think about? You think we’re all at your level?”
But Guilherm was already through the gate and pounding on the door, undeterred. “Get out here, bitch! We know what you’ve been doing!”
I could see the door trembling on its latch beneath the pressure of his blows. Mother turned to us, her face blazing with rage.
“Get your things! Get the cash box from under the sink. Get our papers!”
“Why-but-”
“Get them, I tell you!”
We fled.
At first I thought the crash-a terrible sound that shook the rotten floorboards-was the sound of the door coming down. But when we returned to the kitchen we saw that Mother had pulled the dresser across the door, breaking many of her precious plates in the process, and was using it to barricade the entrance. The table, too, had been dragged toward the door, so that even if the dresser gave way no one could enter. She was holding my father’s shotgun in one hand.
“Cassis, check the back door. I don’t think they’ve thought of that yet, but you never know. Reine-stay with me. Boise-” she looked at me strangely for a moment, her eyes black and bright and unreadable, but was unable to finish her sentence, for at that moment a terrible weight crashed against the door, splintering the top half right out of the frame, exposing a slice of night sky. Faces reddened by fire and fury appeared in the frame, boosted up onto the shoulders of their comrades. One of the faces belonged to Guilherm Ramondin. His smile was ferocious.
“Can’t hide in your little house,” he gasped. “Coming to get you…bitch. Coming to pay you back for what…you did…to-”
Even then, with the house coming down about her, my mother managed a sour laugh.
“Your father?” she said in a high, scornful voice. “Your father, the martyr? François? The hero? Don’t make me laugh!” She raised the shotgun so that he could see it. “Your father was a pathetic old drunkard who’d piss on his shoes more often than not when he wasn’t sober. Your father-”
“My father was Resistance!” Guilherm’s voice was shrieky with rage. “Why else would he go to Raphaël’s? Why else would the Germans take him?”
Mother laughed again. “Oh, Resistance, was he?” she said. “And old Lecoz, I suppose he was Resistance as well, was he? And poor Agnès? And Colette?” For the first time that night, Guilherm faltered. Mother took a step toward the broken door, shotgun leveled.
“I’ll tell you this for nothing, Ramondin,” she said. “Your father was no more Resistance than I’m Joan of Arc. He was a sad old sot, that was all, who liked to talk too much and who couldn’t have got it up if he’d stuck a wire through it first! He just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, just like the rest of you idiots out there! Now get yourselves home! All of you!” She fired a single shot into the air. “All of you!” she yelled.
But Guilherm was stubborn. He winced when the shards of pulverized wood grazed his cheek, but did not drop down.
“Someone killed that Boche,” he said in a more sober voice.
“Someone executed him. Who else but Resistance? And then someone tipped them off to the S. S. Someone from the village. Who else but you, Mirabelle? Who else?”
My mother began to laugh. In the firelight I could see her face, flushed and almost beautiful in her rage. Around her, the ruins of her kitchen lay in pieces and shards. Her laughter was terrible.
“You want to know, Guilherm?” There was a new note in her voice, a note almost of joy. “You really won’t go home until you know?” She fired the gun again into the ceiling, making plaster fall like bloody feathers in the firelight. “You really want to fucking know?”
I saw him flinch at the word more than at the blast from the shotgun. It was all right for men to swear in those days, but for a woman to do so-a decent woman, at least-was almost unthinkable. I understood that in her own words she had condemned herself. But my mother didn’t seem to have finished.
“I’ll tell you the truth, shall I, Ramondin?” she said. Her voice was breaking with laughter, hysteria, I suppose, but in that moment I was sure she was enjoying herself. “I’ll just tell you how it really happened, shall I?” She nodded gaily. “I didn’t have to report anyone to the Germans, Ramondin! And do you know why? Because I killed Tomas Leibniz! I killed him! Don’t you believe me? I killed him!” She was dry-firing the shotgun, though both barrels were empty. Her capering shadow on the kitchen floor was red and black and giant. Her voice rose to a scream. “Does that make you feel better, Ramondin? I killed him! I was his whore all right, and I’m not sorry! I killed him and I’d kill him again if I had to! I’d kill him a thousand times! What d’you think of that? What do you fucking think of that?”
She was still screaming as the first torch hit the kitchen floor. That went out, though Reinette began to cry as soon as she saw the flames, but the second one caught the curtains, and the third the cracked ruin of the dresser. Guilherm’s face at the top of the door had vanished now, but I could hear him shouting orders outside. Another torch-a sheaf of straw much like those from which the harvest queen’s throne was made-came flying over the top of the dresser and landed smoldering in the center of the kitchen.
Mother was still screaming, out-of-control, “I killed him, you cowards! I killed him and I’m glad I did and I’ll kill you, every one of you, any one of you tries to mess with me and my children!”
Cassis tried to take her arm and she flung him back against the wall.
“The back door!” I called to him. “We’ll have to go out through the back!”
“What if they’re waiting?” whimpered Reine.
“What if!” I yelled impatiently. Outside, rumors and catcalls, like a fairground turned suddenly savage. I caught my mother by the arm. Cassis took the other. Together we dragged her, still raving and laughing, to the back of the house. Of course they were waiting. Their faces were red with firelight. Guilherm barred our way, flanked by Petit the butcher and Paul’s father, Jean-Marc, looking slightly embarrassed but grinning like a sickle. Too drunk, perhaps, or perhaps still too wary, building themselves up to the act of murder like children playing double-dare, they had already set fire to the henhouse and the goat shack. The stench of burning feathers married with the dank chill of the fog.
“You’re not going anywhere,” said Guilherm sourly. Behind us the house whispered and snickered as the flames took.
Mother reversed the butt of the old rifle and, with a gesture almost too quick to see, punched him in the chest with it. Guilherm went down. For a second there was a gap where he had been and I leaped through it, pushing under elbows and wriggling between an undergrowth of legs and sticks and pitchforks. Someone tried to grab me, but I was slick as an oiled eel, scrabbling away into the hot crowd. I felt myself pinned, suffocated between a sudden surge of bodies. I clawed my way to air and space, barely feeling the blows that fell upon me. I sprinted across the field into the darkness, taking cover behind a stand of raspberry canes. Somewhere far behind me I thought I could hear my mother’s voice, beyond fear now, enraged and screaming. She sounded like an animal defending her young.
The stink of smoke was getting stronger. In the front of the house something collapsed with a splintering crash, and I felt a soft buffet of heat reach me across the field. Someone-I think it was Reine-screamed thinly.
The crowd was a shapeless thing, all hate. Its shadow reached as far as the raspberry bushes and beyond. Behind it I was just in time to see the far gable of the house collapse in a spray of fireworks. A chimney of superheated air rose redly into the sky, sending spume and fire-crackers squawking into the gray sky like a geyser of flame.
A figure broke from the shapelessness of the crowd and ran across the field. I recognized Cassis. He made a dash for the corn, and I guessed he would make for the Lookout Post. A couple of people started to follow him, but the burning farm held many of them hypnotized. Besides, it was Mother they wanted. I could make out her words now over the twin throats of the crowd and the fire. She was calling our names.
“Cassis! Reine-Claude! Boise!”
I stood up behind the raspberry canes, ready to run if anyone came toward me. Standing on the tips of my toes I glimpsed her briefly. She looked like something in a fisherman’s tale, caught on all sides but thrashing furiously, her face red and black with fire and blood and smoke, a monster of the deep. Some other faces I could see too: Francine Crespin, her sheep-eyed saintly face distorted into a scream of hatred; Guilherm Ramondin like something back from the dead. There was fear in their hatred now, the kind of superstitious fear that can only be cured by destruction and murder. It had taken them a long time to get to it, but their killing time had come. I saw Reinette slink out from one side of the crowd into the corn. No one tried to stop her. By then most of them, blinded by blood lust, would have been hard put to recognize who she was, anyway.
Mother went down. I may have imagined a single hand rising above the grimacing faces. It was like something from one of Cassis’s books: Plague of Zombies or Valley of the Cannibals. All that was missing were the jungle drums. But the worst part of the horror was that I knew these faces, glimpsed mercifully briefly in the gleeful dark. That was Paul’s father. That was Jeannette Crespin, who’d almost been harvest queen, barely sixteen and with blood across her face. Even sheepy Père Froment was there-though whether he was trying to restore order or was himself contributing to the chaos was impossible to tell. Sticks and fists hammered onto my mother’s head and back, she holding herself tight like a curled fist, like a woman with a baby in her arms, still screaming defiance, though muffled now by the hot weight of flesh and hate.
Then came the shot.
We all heard it: the yark of a large-gauge weapon, a double-barreled shotgun perhaps, or one of the antique pistols still hoarded in farm attics or under floorboards in villages all over France. It was a wild shot-though Guilherm Ramondin felt it scorch his cheek and promptly voided his bladder in terror-and heads whipped round curiously to see from where it had come. No one knew. Beneath their suddenly frozen hands my mother began to crawl, bleeding now from a dozen places, her hair dragged out so that the scalp showed slick in patches, a sharp stick actually pushed through the back of her hand so that the fingers splayed out helplessly.
The sound of the fires-biblical, apocalyptic-was now the only sound. People waited, remembering perhaps the sound of the execution squad in front of Saint-Benedict’s, trembling before their own bloody intentions. A voice came (from the cornfield, perhaps, or from the burning house, or even the sky itself), a booming, authoritative man’s voice, impossible to ignore or to disobey.
“Leave them!”
My mother continued to crawl. Uneasily the crowd parted to let her through, like wheat before the wind.
“Leave them! Go home!”
The voice sounded a little familiar, people said later. There was an inflection they recognized, but could not quite identify.
Someone cried out hysterically, “It’s Philippe Hourias!”
But Philippe was dead. A shiver went through the people. My mother reached the open field, staggering defiantly to her feet. Someone reached out to stop her, then thought better of it. Père Froment bleated something weak and well-meaning. A couple of angry cries faltered and died in the superstitious silence. Warily, insolently, without turning my face away from their collective gaze, I began to make my way toward my mother. I could feel my face burning with the heat, my eyes full of reflected firelight. I took her good hand.
The wide dark expanse of Hourias’s cornfield lay before us. We plunged into it without a word. No one followed us.
We went to Tante Juliette’s. Mother stayed a week, then moved away, perhaps out of guilt or fear, ostensibly for the sake of her health. We only saw her a few times after that. We understood that she’d changed her name, reverting to her maiden name, and had moved back to Brittany. Details after that were sketchy. I heard she was making a reasonable living in a bakery, baking her old specialties. Cooking always was her first love. We stayed with Tante Juliette, moving away ourselves as soon as we decently could, Reine to try for the movies for which she had so long yearned, Cassis escaping to Paris under a different name, I into a dull but comfortable marriage. We heard that the farmhouse in Les Laveuses had been only partially gutted by the fire, that the outhouses were mostly undamaged, and that only the front section of the main building was completely destroyed. We could have gone back. But word of the massacre at Les Laveuses had already spread. Mother’s admission of guilt, in front of three dozen witnesses, her words-I killed him! I was his whore and I’m not sorry-as much as the sentiments she had expressed against her fellow villagers, sufficed to condemn her. Soon after the Liberation a brass plaque was dedicated to the ten martyrs of the Great Massacre, and later, when such things became curiosities to be contemplated at leisure, when the ache of loss and terror had diminished a little, it became clear that the hostility against Mirabelle Dartigen and her children was unlikely to dwindle. I had to face the truth; I would never return to Les Laveuses. Never again. And for a long time I didn’t even realize how badly I wanted to.
The coffee’s still boiling on the stove. Its smell is bitterly nostalgic, a black burnt-leaf smell with a hint of smoke in the steam. I drink it very sweet, like a shock victim. I think I can begin to understand how my mother must have felt, the wildness, the freedom of throwing everything away.
Everyone has gone. The girl with her little tape recorders and her mountain of tapes. The photographer. Even Pistache has gone home, at my own insistence, though I can still almost feel her arms around me, and the last touch of her lips against my cheek. My good daughter, neglected for so long in favor of my bad one. But people change. At last I feel I can talk to you now, my wild Noisette, my sweet Pistache. Now I can hold you in my arms without that feeling of drowning in silt. Old Mother is dead at last, her curse ended. No disaster will strike if I dare to love you.
Noisette returned my call late last night. Her voice was tight and cautious, like mine; I pictured her leaning as I do, her narrow face suspicious, against the tiled surface of the bar. There is little warmth in her words, coming as they do across cold miles and wasted years, but occasionally, when she speaks of her child, I think I can hear something in her voice. Something like the beginning of softness. It makes me glad.
I will tell her in my own time, I think; little by little, drawing her in. I can afford to be patient; after all, I know the technique. In a way she needs this story more than anyone-certainly more than the public, gawking at old scandals-even more than Pistache. Pistache doesn’t bear grudges. She takes people as they are, honestly and with kindness. But Noisette needs this story-and her daughter, Pêche, needs it too-if the specter of Old Mother is not to raise its head again one day. Noisette has her own demons. I only hope I am no longer one of them.
The house feels oddly hollow now everyone has left, uninhabited. A draft skitters a few dead leaves across the tiles. And yet I don’t feel quite alone. Absurd, to imagine ghosts remaining in this old house. I’ve lived here so long and never felt a single shiver of a presence, and yet today I feel… Someone just behind the shadows, a quiet presence, discreet and almost humble, waiting…
My voice was sharper than I intended. “Who’s there? I said, who’s there?” It rang with a metallic sound against the bare walls, the tiled floor. He stepped out into the light and I was suddenly close to laughter, closer to tears at his presence.
“Smells like good coffee,” he said in his mild way.
“God, Paul. How do you manage to walk so quietly?”
He grinned.
“I thought you…I thought…”
“You think too much,” said Paul simply, moving toward the stove. His face looked yellow-gold in the dim lamplight, his droopy mustache giving him a doleful expression belied by the quick light in his eyes. I tried to think how much he’d overheard of my story. Sitting in the shadows like that, I’d quite forgotten he was there.
“Talk a lot too,” he said, not unkindly, pouring himself a cup of coffee. “Thought you’d be talking all week, the way you went at it.” He gave me a quick, sly grin.
“I needed them to understand,” I began stiffly. “And Pistache-”
“People understand more’n you give ‘em credit for.” He took a step toward me, put his hand against my face. He smelled of coffee and old tobacco. “Why did you hide yourself for so long? What good was it goin’ to do?”
“There were…things…I just couldn’t bear to tell,” I faltered. “Not to you, not to anyone. Things that I thought would bring the whole world crashing down around me. You don’t know…you’ve never done anything like-”
He laughed, a sweet uncomplicated sound. “Oh, Framboise! Is that what you think? That I don’t know what it’s like to keep a secret?” He took my dirty hand in both of his. “That I’m too stupid even to have a secret?”
“That’s not what I thought-” I began. But it was. God help me, it was.
“You think you can carry the whole world on your back,” said Paul. “Well, listen to this.” He was lapsing into dialect again, and in certain words I could hear a tremor of his childhood stutter. The combination made him sound very young. “Those anonymous letters-remember the letters, Boise? The ones with the bad spellings? And the writing on the walls?”
I nodded.
“Remember how she h-hid those letters when you came into the hall? Remember how you could tell she’d got one because of the look on her face, and the way she’d stamp about, looking scared-and angry-and h-hateful because she was scared and angry, and about how you hated her specially on those days, hated her so much you could have killed her yourself?”
I nodded.
“That was me,” said Paul simply. “I wrote ‘em, every one myself. Bet you didn’t even know I could write, did you, and a pretty poor job I made of it for all the work I put into writing ’em. To get my own back. Because she called me a cretin that day afront of you-and Cassis-and Reine-C-C-C-” He screwed up his face in sudden frustration, flushing furiously. “Afront of Reine-Claude,” he finished quietly.
“I see.”
Of course. Like all riddles, clear as starlight when you knew the answer. I remembered the look on his face whenever Reinette was around, the way he would flush and stammer and fall silent, even though when he was with me his voice was almost normal. I remembered the look of sharp and untinctured hatred in his eyes that day-Talk properly, you cretin!-and the eerie wail of grief and fury that trailed across the fields in his wake. I remembered the way he would sometimes look at Cassis’s comic books with a look of fierce concentration-Paul, who we all knew couldn’t read a word. I remembered a look of appraisal on his face as I gave out the pieces of orange; an odd feeling at the river of sometimes being watched-even that last time, that last day with Tomas…even then, God, even then.
“I never meant for it to go so far. I wanted her to be sorry. But I never meant for that other stuff to happen. It got out of my hands, though. Like those things do. Like a fish too big to reel in, that takes your line away with it. I tried to make amends, though. At the end. I did try.”
I stared at him.
“Good God, Paul.” Too amazed even to be angry, even assuming there was still a place left in me for anger. “It was you, wasn’t it? You with the shotgun, that night at the farm? You hiding in the field?”
Paul nodded. I couldn’t stop staring at him, seeing him, perhaps, for the first time.
“You knew? All this time, and you knew everything?”
He shrugged. “You all thought I was soft,” he said without bitterness. “Thought all that could be going on right under my nose and that I still wouldn’t notice…” He gave his slow, sad smile. “Suppose that’s it now, though. With you and me. Suppose it’s over.”
I tried to think clearly, but the facts refused to lock into place. For so many years I’d thought that Guilherm Ramondin had written those letters, or perhaps Raphaël, or a member of one of the Families… And now to hear that all the time it was Paul, my own sweet, slow Paul, barely thirteen years old and open as the summer sky… Begun it and ended it too, with the hard, inevitable symmetry of seasons turning. When I finally spoke it was to say something entirely different, something that surprised us both.
“Did you love her so much, then?” My sister Reinette, with her high cheekbones and her glossy curls. My sister the harvest queen, lipsticked and crowned with barley, with a sheaf of wheat in one hand and an orange in the other. That’s how I’ll always remember her, you know. That clear, perfect picture in my mind. I felt an unexpected prick of jealousy close to my heart.
“The same way you loved him, perhaps,” said Paul calmly. “The way you loved Leibniz.”
The fools we were when we were children. The hurting, hopeful fools. I spent my life dreaming of Tomas, through my married days in Brittany, through my widowhood, dreaming of a man like Tomas with his careless laughter and his sharp river-colored eyes, the Tomas of my wish-you, Tomas, only you forever-Old Mother’s curse made terrible flesh.
“It took a little time, you know,” said Paul, “but I got over it. I let go. It’s like swimming against the current. It exhausts you. After a while, whoever you are, you just have to let go, and the river brings you home.”
“Home.” My voice sounded strange in my ears. His hands over mine felt rough and warm as an old dog’s pelt. I had the strangest picture of us both, standing there in the failing light like Hansel and Gretel, grown old and gray in the witch’s house, finally closing the gingerbread door behind them.
Just let go, and the river brings you home. It sounded so easy.
“We’ve waited a long time, Boise.”
I turned my face away. “Too long, perhaps.”
“I don’t think so.”
I took a deep breath. This was the moment. To explain that it was all over, that the lie between us was too old to erase, too big to climb over, that we were too old, for pity’s sake, that it was ridiculous, that it was impossible, that besides, besides-
He kissed me then, on the lips, not a shy old-man’s kiss but something else altogether, something that left me feeling shaken, indignant and strangely hopeful. His eyes shone as slowly he drew something out of his pocket, something that glowed red-yellow in the lamplight…
A string of crab apples.
I stared at him as he drew the necklace gently over my head. It lay against my breasts, the fruit glossy and round and shining.
“Harvest queen,” whispered Paul. “Framboise Dartigen. Only you.”
I could smell the good, tart scent of the little fruit against my warming skin.
“I’m too old,” I said shakily. “It’s too late.”
He kissed me again, on the temple, then at the corner of the mouth. Then from his pocket again he drew a plait of yellow straw, which he placed around my forehead like a crown.
“It’s never too late to come home,” he said, and pulled me gently, insistently toward him. “All you have to do…is stop moving away.”
Resistance is like swimming against the current, exhausting and pointless. I turned my face toward the curve of his shoulder as into a pillow. Around my neck the crab apples gave off a pungent, sappy scent, like the Octobers of our childhood.
We toasted our homecomings with sweet black coffee and croissants and green-tomato jam made to my mother’s recipe.