I love it here now more than I ever did before. I love the landscape, the old stones of the houses, the rounded hills, and the dark woods, the birdsong and the river. It used to drive me mad, but now I love the fact that nothing ever happens.
Spring was beautiful this year, summer long and hot, but the season is on the turn now. The irises in the meadow have faded to brown, thin and dry as paper. Soon there will be nothing left of them but the stems waiting for next year, when it will all begin again. The crop fields are reverting to stubble, brown and bare. The earth is beginning to yield its harvest.
Except that now there is no need for food.
I am the only one left to tell you this story.
Listen to me. This is how it happened.
Elodie had to call Arianne three times to get her out of bed.
“I’ll wallop you!” she yelled up the stairs. “Don’t think you’re too old for walloping!”
The door to the attic bedroom creaked open and Paul’s tousled head appeared around the frame.
“She sent me to tell you there’s no school today.”
“And don’t think that means you can laze around all day!” shouted Elodie. Arianne rolled her eyes. Paul stepped into the room.
“You’re dressed,” she said. “Are you going to school?”
He pulled a face. “Mine’s not closed. It’s not like it’s a holiday or anything. Apparently, there’s been this train crash, so there are loads of soldiers in town, and there’s to be ‘no public meetings.’ And school’s like a public meeting. Apparently.”
“That’s rotten luck for you,” Arianne fought to keep her voice steady.
“Don’t you want to know more about the crash?”
“Tell me.”
“You know where the track comes round the bend, just before the bridge where Papa sometimes took us for picnics? It got blown up last night. Ari, are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“Only you’ve gone really pale.”
“I said I’m fine.”
“Will you write me a note so I can skip school?”
“What, after last time?” Arianne managed a smile. “Auntie’ll only find out again. And personally I could do without a month of extra chores.”
“You cut school the other day.”
She flushed. “That’s beside the point. And you’re not supposed to know about it.”
She stood up and walked across the bare floorboards to open the window. Behind her, she heard Paul kick the bedroom door, but she felt too weary to reason with him.
“Just go to school, there’s a dear,” she said. “And let me get dressed.”
“Will you see Luc today?”
“I don’t know.”
“I heard you come in last night.”
“You really should learn to mind your own business.”
“Paul!” Elodie was climbing the stairs. Arianne tried to steady her breathing. “Paul!”
“Look, I’m sorry,” said Arianne, but her brother had already gone.
* * * * *
She picked up her clothes from the floor where she had dumped them last night, struggled into them, and ran downstairs, tying a scrap of ribbon around her unbrushed hair as she went.
“So you’re up.”
Arianne, noting that Paul was not in the kitchen, hesitated before beating a retreat, aware that Elodie’s sharp black eyes had noted every detail of her appearance.
“I need to find Paul.”
“I sent him up to wash.”
“I’ll just go and . . .”
“Stay!” Elodie’s feet, when she sat against the backrest of her chair, did not reach the ground. Arianne fixed her gaze upon her great-aunt’s slippers, swinging beneath a pair of fragile ankles.
“Teresa Belleville came to find me after matins this morning in a terrible state. Luc’s not been home all night.”
“What?”
“I don’t suppose you know anything about that?”
“No,” mumbled Arianne.
“I won’t have trouble,” said Elodie.
The slippers were an abomination against Elodie’s sense of style, an indoor concession to her bunions. They were beginning to come apart at the seams. Arianne dragged her gaze away from her great-aunt’s feet to look her in the eye.
“There’s no trouble,” she said. Paul stomped into the room, saving her from further comment.
“I’m clean,” he announced.
Elodie gave a satisfied nod. Paul sat down to breakfast.
“Is there any fresh bread?”
“We’re out of tokens.” Elodie was scurrying around the kitchen, sweeping an assortment of objects—glasses, keys, comb—into her handbag. “Arianne, it’s my day at the presbytery. I want you to clean the house from top to bottom, and I want you to go to the butcher’s and wait for the andouillette he’s been promising me for three weeks.”
“Is that all?” asked Arianne.
“And you can give Paul his lunch.”
Arianne smiled at her brother. “I’ll make you some eggy bread with the old crusts if you pick up some milk on your way home.”
“Milk!” Elodie snorted. “As if milk could just be picked up! As if it flowed from taps!”
“You know Paul can get hold of anything,” said Arianne. He finally met her eyes. The corners of his mouth twitched.
“I won’t have thieving,” cried Elodie, but her great-niece and nephew had left the kitchen and were in the hall, hunting for his boots.
“Don’t be cross,” said Arianne when he was ready. “I can’t bear it.”
He threw his arms around her waist. She hugged him back. He smelled of sweat and grass.
“I’ll see you at lunch,” she said. “Be good.”
Paul’s sense of injury got the better of him within minutes of leaving home. He loved Arianne more than anything in the world. More than wandering through the woods on a day like this, more than his new knife, more even than Thierry Legros’s hunting bitch’s recent litter of pups. But a few months ago, when he was still the whole world to her, she would never have spoken to him like she had this morning. Besides, the day really did promise to be a corker, and she didn’t have to go to school. Making sure no one could see him, he slipped off the road to school into a side street next to the church, emptied the contents of his bag into a hollow wall he liked to use, and melted into the forest.
The rabbit at his first snare was still alive. He didn’t enjoy finishing them off, but it was a necessary evil. He grabbed this one with both hands, pulled the neck, and gave it a sharp twist. It broke with a satisfying crunch. By the time the bell rang for morning lessons, school was a distant memory.
Romy never set an alarm. Why should he, with his mother always there to wake him? His first thought when she came in was for Arianne. His second was that the light streaming in through his windows—he always slept with his shutters open—was brighter than it should be.
“It’s half past seven.” His mother’s voice was not much more than a whisper, the result of twenty-five years of marriage to his father. “There’s no school today. I would have let you sleep, but your father wants to talk to you when he’s finished opening the mill.”
“Oh God.” Romy’s heart sank. “What does he want now?”
She set about tidying his room, a pointless task because he would only untidy it when she was gone. He liked his things to be just so but had learned from long experience that it was pointless telling her. She moved from the collection of birds’ eggs on his mantelpiece to his desk.
“Don’t look at those!” he cried. She was holding his latest poems, his hopeless attempts at a sonnet to Arianne.
“Give them to me!”
She must be bad today, he thought, as his mother tucked his handwritten pages into a physics textbook, stacking that with a pile of detective novels.
“There was an accident last night.” She looked at him at last with troubled eyes. The last light had left them when his brothers left. The shadow of her latest bruise was still visible beneath her cheekbone. “They’re saying there was a bomb on the railway track, a train came off the rails. An awful lot of people died. I think he wants to talk to you about that.”
She would have stayed to help him dress if he had let her. He had to push her out of the room and even then he could hear her hovering outside his door. He limped over to his wardrobe. He would visit Arianne later, once the boring business with his father was over, and he wanted to look his best.
He finished dressing and opened his window. The saws down at the mill were running. His father would be home soon. People would be pressing him for answers, and he would be squeezing his informants, including his son, for information. Jo Dulac never cared too much about the truth of the reports he gave. The Milice needed guilty verdicts as surely as murderers needed victims. It didn’t really matter who paid the price, as long as somebody did. The ghost of an idea began to form in Romy’s mind, but he threw it out at once.
Joan of Arc would never betray one of her own.
“So what happens now?”
One of the new privates, just out of school by the look of him, sat by Alois Grand’s side, huddled in a blanket. The bandage wrapped around his head in the early hours by an overwrought medic was already slipping down over his eye, making him look even younger. He pushed it back up with an impatient gesture and bit his lip as he surveyed the makeshift camp the Captain’s men had set up a hundred yards from the railway line in the aftermath of the explosion.
“Why are we still here?” he asked.
“We’re waiting.” Alois was skinning a rabbit and did not look up as he replied.
“But why us? There were thousands of men on that train. They all left in trucks this morning. Those who weren’t dead.”
“I think you’ll find the dead went in those trucks as well. Or didn’t you see them?”
The young man shuddered at the memory—the worst of the wounded loaded into ambulances on stretchers, the dead thrown into closed trucks wrapped in makeshift shrouds. He stuck out his chin, stubbornly.
“Why are we still here?” he repeated.
“Mind yourself.” Alois held the rabbit up by its ears and slit it from breast to ass. Blood and innards spilled out, splashing the young man’s boots. “Captain caught these this morning,” he said. “There’s not a lot stops the Captain from going hunting. Not even something like last night. Even in Russia, he hunted most mornings.”
The private’s name was Jonas Bucher. His literature professor at school had had a secret fondness for the Russian nineteenth-century novel and shared his enthusiasm with a few selected students. He found that he could quite easily imagine the Captain galloping on horseback across a frozen steppe. Jonas had no love of army life, but he couldn’t deny that men like the Captain gave it a certain frisson.
“I would love to see Russia,” he sighed.
Alois Grand’s eyes, as black as the Captain’s were blue, fixed him with their famous stare. “Aye, well.” He shrugged, and turned his attention back to the rabbits. “Reckon Russia would be nice enough without a bloody great war in the middle of it.”
He roasted the meat on skewers pulled from his kit bag, and they ate it sandwiched between pieces of French bread, washed down with thin coffee. The Captain returned at the wheel of an Army jeep just as they were finishing, a nervous-looking man in French Milice uniform at his side and two armed privates in the back.
“Got us a little investigation in the area,” he called out to Alois. “Orders from on high.”
Alois Grand grunted. Jonas Bucher looked at him in surprise. The big man’s fists were clenched, his knuckles white.
“I need a fluent French speaker. Preferably one who can drive as well.”
“I speak French!” Jonas Bucher scrambled to his feet and saluted. His bandage slipped down again over his eye.
“Climb aboard then, soldier!” The Captain laughed and leaned out to pluck the bandage from Jonas’s head. “Can’t have an invalid driving me.”
Alois closed his hand over the open window of the jeep. He had a fleeting vision of himself immobilizing it, locked in an eternal battle of wills with the Captain.
He cleared his throat. His mouth was dry. “When do we head north?” he asked.
“All in good time,” said the Captain. “How was the rabbit?”
Alois let go of the car.
“We saved you some,” he muttered.
“I’m not hungry. You know it’s the sport I like,” said the Captain. He tossed his head at the French Milicien, indicating he should get into the back. “When you’re ready soldier.”
The Captain waved as the jeep leaped forward. Alois wiped his skewers on a cloth and announced that he was going to wash.
* * * * *
A stream ran amongst the trees. He followed its course upriver until the incline steepened, and he came to a place where a pool had formed. He fell to one knee, plunged his hands into the water, and splashed his face several times before standing again to undress.
He had jarred his shoulder in the crash and winced as he unbuttoned his shirt. Somewhere behind him a twig snapped, and he whirled round to face the noise, pulling his revolver from its holster. Another snap, and he caught sight of the rear end of a doe. The gun returned to its holster. Alois dropped to his knees.
Clara loved the river back home, even when it was raining and the mist hid it from view. She could walk for hours, pressed up against him under an umbrella, guessing at the silhouettes of the container ships sailing inland from the North Sea.
“Did you see it? Wasn’t it amazing?”
“Amazing.”
The memory felt more like a dream. He hadn’t seen the point then of ships one could not see but now, closer to home than he had been for years, he was beginning to understand. Something to do, he thought, with faith and with believing.
Birdsong, the gurgling of the stream, a breeze rustling the forest canopy. Alois Grand hugged his knees to his chest and closed his eyes, opened them and thought he caught a glimpse of something, a woman’s dress, a sheet of white blonde hair. He thought he heard her call and turned his head in the direction of the sound. Somewhere in the forest, a bird’s cry made a mockery of his imaginings.
It was not Clara. How could it have been? Alois lay full length on the bank of moss and plunged his head into the icy stream. Water tumbled onto the back of his neck. He closed his eyes and didn’t come up until he saw stars.
Any minute his father would be home. Romy checked his reflection in the mirror. He liked the way the new hairdresser in town had cut his hair so that it swept in a wing across his forehead. His horn-rimmed glasses made him look intellectual rather than plain shortsighted, and his best shirt, with only one small mend under the collar, was crisp and freshly laundered. Compared to most of the youth of Samaroux, he was positively dapper.
A door slammed downstairs, followed by the sound of footsteps. Romy leaped away from the mirror. His bedroom door flew open.
“Where were you last night?” His father never did waste time with preliminaries.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“After curfew.”
“Nowhere.”
“Don’t give me nowhere. I heard you come in, the racket you made. Where were you?”
“Walking.”
“Where?”
“In the woods.”
“Why?”
“It was nice. It was . . . poetic.”
“Bleeding poetic!” His father’s fist shot out and cuffed him on the ear. “You look like a pansy with your hair like that.”
“Thanks.”
“Where were you?”
“I told you, in the woods. This conversation . . .”
“Where? When? Why?”
“. . . is going round in circles.”
“I’ll give you circles.”
Romy smirked. A mistake. His father stepped closer. Nostrils flared, he looked like a bull about to charge. Romy took a step back.
“I want to be proud of you, son.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you do know what happened last night? Your mother told you?”
“Yes, sir!”
“And you heard nothing on your poetic walk? Nothing that made you think, that’s a bit odd? Nothing you think the people investigating this incident—they will investigate, you know they will—might consider interesting?”
His second’s falter was enough. Jo grabbed him by the wrist.
“You know something.”
“You’re hurting me!”
“I’ll hurt you a whole lot more if you don’t tell me what it is.”
“It’s nothing . . . Ow!”
Romy staggered toward the bed, nursing his wrist. Jo leaned against the doorframe, waiting.
“You know what’ll happen if you don’t say.”
No, thought Romy, I don’t know. I don’t know if you will beat me or take it out on Mother, use the horsewhip or your fists. I don’t know if you will lock me in the cellar or in my room. He remembered Arianne’s voice last night—proud, full of unshed tears—and stood a little taller. He might hate Luc and fear his father, but he would never betray her.
His father pushed himself away from the door and began to walk across the room. Romy shrank.
It wasn’t even as if he knew that much. Could he say just a little, enough to appease his father?
“Well?” asked his father.
“I heard a quarrel,” whispered Romy.
“What about?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who was it?”
“It was just a man, I mean a boy. And a girl.” He fell silent. His father sighed.
“Tell me this isn’t about Arianne Lafayette? Don’t waste my time.”
Romy fixed a point on the floor just short of his father’s boots.
“Girl like her, she’s never even going to know you exist. And do you know why?”
Perhaps, if he blinked, the tear collecting in the corner of his eye would not run down the length of his nose as it was threatening to do.
“Because you’re a loser. A pathetic, useless human being. What were you doing? Listening at her window, hoping to hear her at it with her lover?”
The tear exploded into a circle on the floor. Others followed. He did not dare look up.
“What was the quarrel about?”
Still Romy stared at the floor. He steeled himself for blows, but none came. He heard the door open. “Don’t leave your room.”
Romy drew his knees into his chest and wept.
Today was supposed to be as normal as possible, wasn’t that what Luc had said? So why hadn’t he come home last night? He would be all right—wouldn’t he? She had no proof that the train crash was his doing. She tried to recall his exact words. Two men. I have to meet them and hide them. Not, I have to blow up a train. Would he have told her, if that had been the case? And did he even know how to blow up a train? What if . . .
Arianne howled and shook her head to dispel images of Luc captured, Luc wounded, Luc lying dead somewhere in the forest. Luc was probably at Lascande, so carried away by his own heroism he didn’t see the point in coming home. Unless it was her fault, for not being nicer to him. . . . She threw off the apron she had donned to placate Elodie before she left, grabbed a basket, and braced herself to go out. Doubts assailed her as she opened the front door. What if Luc were to come while she was out? Would he wait? She should leave him a note. But saying what? And surely a note smacked of desperation? She compromised by leaving a notepad and pencil in the middle of the kitchen table and the back door unlocked. If he came, he could leave her a note! And she wouldn’t be long if she managed to avoid the long lines.
Perhaps, she thought hopefully as she walked toward the shops, it was all a mistake. Perhaps, trying to clear his mind after the night’s activities, he had gone for a run in the woods this morning. He often did that when there wasn’t school. It was perfectly possible that he had slipped out without waking his mother and not returned before she left for morning church. Probably right now he was home, eating breakfast, planning to come and find her. Possibly he was going to apologize and tell her he had changed his mind about leaving tonight.
She tried not to look for him too obviously but strained to catch a glimpse of him from the corner of her eye. No sign, and though she had not expected one, she was disappointed. She picked up the dried split peas Elodie wanted at the general stores, toyed with the idea of running home then shrugged, and joined the butcher’s line.
A hand tapped her on the shoulder. She whirled around, but her face fell at the sight of her cousin.
“No class.” Solange beamed. “So good.”
“So good,” Arianne assented.
“The parents are being awfully gloomy about the whole business, but I was thinking about a picnic. What do you think? Will you come with Luc? I’ll try and gather a bunch of jolly people.”
“I don’t know.”
“Ah, go on! You two never do things with the rest of us!”
“This line’s taking forever.”
“Ari, are you all right?”
Arianne’s face crumpled.
“Something’s wrong,” said Solange.
“We just had a fight.”
“But you two are OK? I mean, if you two aren’t OK . . .”
Gaspard Félix appeared at the door of his shop to announce he had run out of meat. The line dispersed, muttering.
“He promised Auntie an andouillette. She’s been waiting ages.”
“Sneak round the back of the shop when everyone’s gone. We don’t have to do the picnic, you know. We can just spend the afternoon together if you’d rather, just the two of us. It’s ages since we did that.”
“No, have your picnic.”
Solange looked hurt. Arianne kissed her, and she brightened. “Shall I call round anyway, in case you want to come?”
“Do that . . .” Arianne trailed off. Teresa Belleville had just stepped out of the baker’s shop farther up the street.
“I have to go.”
She called out as she drew closer, but either Luc’s mother did not hear or she did not want to talk. By the time Arianne reached her house, the door was already shut.
There was no point asking her anyway. It didn’t matter if Luc was home or not. She would stick to her guns. If he wanted her, he could come and get her himself.
* * * * *
Father Julien sat with Jarvis outside the Café du Commerce, wishing the mayor would stop asking difficult questions.
“It had nothing to do with anyone in the village, nothing at all,” he repeated.
“Who, then?”
“What are you so worried about?”
“What am I worried about?” The mayor stared at the old priest incredulously. “Didn’t you hear about what happened at Tulle? The reprisals there?”
“That was a completely different situation. There was a battle, hand-to-hand combat.”
“They hanged over a hundred people. From lampposts. As your mayor, I am ordering you to tell me what this village’s involvement was with last night’s explosion.”
“I’ve already told you. Nothing.”
“I know you’re hiding something.”
Father Julien sighed. “Léon, as your oldest friend, believe me when I say you know all you need to know. The men who blew up the tracks came from a different region altogether. By tonight, they will have left the area. They are nowhere in the village. The explosion took place ten kilometers from here. There is nothing to link it to us. As mayor of this village, it behooves you to keep calm. It would do no good at all if people saw you panic, no good at all.”
“So what was your involvement? Why would you even know about any of this, if it had nothing to do with you?”
The old priest shifted in his chair.
“Julien?” said the mayor. “I know you’re hiding something, and I know you’re worried.”
“I was asked to send someone to see them safe.”
“Oh for pity’s sake!”
“This is important work, Léon!” Father Julien leaned forward in his chair and clutched Jarvis’s sleeve. “Anything that slows the progress of German troops toward the north. . . . This is our time, don’t you see? Now is when we must draw on our reserves of courage, strike down the enemy in our land, stand shoulder to shoulder with our allies . . .”
“Who did you send?” asked Jarvis.
“You know I can’t . . .”
“Who?” hissed Jarvis.
“Luc Belleville,” muttered the priest.
“That child! That impetuous, hotheaded . . .”
“He is not as hotheaded as you think,” said Father Julien. “I have been preparing him for months, and I believe he is ready.”
“Where is he now?”
Father Julien said nothing.
“Julien?”
“He never came home this morning,” admitted the old priest.
“Jesus,” said Jarvis. “Dear God and Christ Almighty.”
Together, they watched Teresa Belleville cross the market square.
“Go and talk to her,” said Jarvis.
Father Julien grimaced as he drained his cup. He never would get used to the taste of chicory.
“I’m sure there’s a perfectly good explanation,” he said.
“There had better be, my friend.” Jarvis’s usually genial face was somber. “For all our sakes, there had better be.”
Romy obeyed his father, of course he did. When had he ever done anything but? He was still in his room and still moping when the Captain arrived, accompanied by the Milice officer and Jonas Bucher.
He opened his window to listen as his mother went out to greet them. The Milicien, Officer Plondier, knew his parents well. He did the talking. The soldiers—a private and a captain, Romy recognized the uniforms—stood beside him. The private held a notepad and pen. The captain frowned as he followed the conversation.
“We are looking for two men,” said Plondier.
“We’ve not seen anyone here.”
“We need to talk to your husband.”
The delivery boy was sent to the mill to fetch his father, who arrived minutes later. The Milicien introduced the officers and explained their visit. Last night’s explosion, two men seen running from the scene, no clues. They were investigating all the neighboring villages. Could he help?
The occupying army being hungry for wood, Jo Dulac had done well out of the war. Orders had doubled over the years of the Occupation and even if prices were lower and credit terms more awkward than he might like, he wasn’t complaining. His boys were earning real wages in a proper German factory, and there was bread and meat on his table. He knew what people said about him in the village, but he didn’t care. War was war. What mattered was being on the right side, and if that meant landing others in it—well, they were asking for it anyway. He took a personal pride in always having an answer, but this morning’s interrogations of his usual spies had drawn a blank.
“Gentlemen, I’m afraid I can’t help,” he said, and Romy savored his discomfort—the way he held out his hands, so obviously the underdog! “I’ve heard of nothing last night but a teenage lovers’ tiff.”
“Ah, young love.” The Captain’s voice was gentle, his French accented but correct. “So painful.”
Nobody seemed to know quite how to react to this. Romy smirked. The others looked away, but the Captain was already walking back toward the jeep, settling himself in the passenger seat with every appearance of ennui.
“We’ll be off then,” said the younger man, also in French. “Sorry to have troubled you. Officer Plondier says you have been very helpful in the past.”
Plondier shook Jo Dulac by the hand. “Could have been anyone,” he muttered when the others were out of earshot. “We got no warning about this one. Don’t be fooled by that Captain, neither. We’ve been around every village in a fifteen-kilometer radius, and he’s hopping mad. Frankly, it don’t matter who did it. Any old scapegoat will do.”
“Look into it, Monsieur Dulac,” called the Captain as the jeep moved off. “This lover’s tiff. You never know. A jilted lover is always—ah, my French is so rusty—like a loose cannon, I think that is the expression. I don’t care for cannons. Bring me news, shall we say, ah, before noon?”
The jeep took off in a cloud of exhaust. Jo turned back toward the house. Up in his room, Romy grabbed his boots.
“Romy!”
If he was quick, he could clear the landing passage and be out of the back door before his father reached the top of the front staircase.
“Romy!”
Jo erupted on the landing and roared at the sight of the empty room. Romy was gone, flying down the back stairs as fast as his gammy leg allowed him. His mother’s bicycle was leaning against the wall. He seized it and leaped into the saddle. By the time his father burst out of the house, Romy was gone.
The Captain’s men had moved on after breakfast, piled into a convoy of trucks that carted them and their salvageable material a few kilometers across country to the edge of a lake where they had come to another halt. Tailgates were lowered and men jumped down, scattering around the shore to smoke or stretch their legs. There was room in the truck now to lie back. Alois turned up his collar and closed his eyes, tilting his head to the sky. Sunlight warmed his face.
Shadows over water, dawn breaking over the countryside, stars in the night sky above their cottage. The high notes of the flute she played so well.
Clara. Her name meant light.
The first time he saw her, she was standing with the sun behind her on the threshold of his forge, her dress a flimsy halo around her body, all long limbs and smooth curves, her features lost to the shadows. He blinked as she stepped into the forge and became more though not wholly ordinary, a fragile body in a simple dress, dark gold hair smoothed in the nape of her neck, the scent of bergamot and roses. “I’ve come about Frau Blume’s firescreen.”
Her eyes were violet colored, he saw.
“You are Alois Grand, the blacksmith?”
The screen was imitation Art Deco, black mesh with pewter flowers, copied from a picture of a country house her mother had shown him in a magazine. He had never made anything like it before.
“You’re an artist.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
She ran her fingers over the mesh of the screen before tracing the contours of a wrought-iron tulip.
“I wish I could make something like this.”
“I could teach you if you like.”
Nine years later, he still couldn’t believe he had said that. The thought of her in the forge! That hair streaked with sweat, those curves beneath a leather apron, that face reddened by work!
“I would love that.”
She smiled. He smiled back.
* * * * *
“What are you looking so happy about?”
The Captain had returned, and Alois ignored his question.
“What do we do now?” he asked.
“We wait.”
“What for?” asked Jonas Bucher.
The older men turned to stare at him.
“For orders,” said the Captain. “What else?”
Arianne was in the garden collecting vegetables to cook with the knuckle of ham she had managed to extract from the butcher in lieu of the andouillette, when Father Julien appeared at the gate.
“I am looking,” he announced, “for Luc.”
“Well, he’s not here.”
“I’m a little worried he doesn’t seem to be anywhere.”
“You’re worried? Don’t make me laugh.”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“There’s no point pretending.” Arianne glared at him. “I know all about your little circus.”
“Oh dear.” Father Julien walked over to sit on the garden bench, removed his glasses, and rubbed his eyes. Arianne followed him, merciless.
“Last night,” she said. “The bomb.”
“It’s best if we don’t talk about it.”
“That’s rich.”
“What did he tell you?”
“Is he hurt?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh God!” Arianne’s hands flew to her face. “He’s dead, I know he’s dead!”
“This is disastrous,” said Father Julien.
Arianne jumped to her feet. “I have to go and look for him. I have to find him.”
Father Julien gripped her by the wrist. “You have to stay here.”
“How can I?” she cried.
“Think, Arianne! A hotheaded young man, well known for his shame of his collaborationist grandfather, who makes a public scene at the arrest of a Jewish family and disappears days later, the morning after an explosion on the railway causes the death of numerous German soldiers? The Milice are already crawling all over the countryside. It won’t take them long to put two and two together.”
“Just let me run to Lascande to see if he’s there,” she pleaded.
“No, Arianne! Do you think they won’t know about you? Do you think, when they find you roaming alone in the woods, they won’t know you are out looking for him, and use you to lead them to the men he is hiding?”
“But they could find me here!”
“Better that. I can protect you here. Now, I’ve spoken to his mother. Luc left last night on the last train to visit family in the south. She would have gone herself, but she hasn’t been well. There was no time for him to say good-bye, we don’t know when he’ll be back. Is that clear?”
“Luc hates his family in the south.”
Father Julien tightened his grip on her wrist. “I said, is that clear?”
There was no sign now of the jovial priest who had taken her to the Bellevilles’ party only a few weeks before. His ferocity might have seemed comical had she not been so afraid.
“If Luc is hurt or killed, there is nothing you can do. They’ll be watching you. Believe me, they’re not stupid. Swear by Almighty God you will not go. If they have any reason to suspect anyone in this village, any reason at all, the consequences will be dire. Swear it!”
Arianne sobbed. “I swear.”
“Good.” He hesitated as he prepared to go through the gate. “Faith and love, child. This is when we need to be strong.”
He drew the sign of the cross over her head and was gone.
Jo Dulac didn’t go straight after his son. Instead, he made a detour through the village and stopped to speak to Teresa Belleville.
“He’s not here,” she said when she came to the door.
“Where is he, then?”
“He’s gone south to visit family,” she said calmly. “Not that it’s any of your business.”
Like hell, thought Jo. He ran into a group of lads off for a game of football and asked if they had seen Luc, but none of them had. Solange Lafayette was sunning herself on the market square with some other girls. She told him nothing either, but her cool gaze faltered when he asked if she knew about the boy’s quarrel with her cousin.
He pressed on to Arianne’s house but fell back when he saw her in the garden talking to Father Julien—he never had liked the priest, his way of looking at you as if your soul were on display. Jo had nothing to reproach himself with but still, a man’s soul was his own. The girl trudged back into the house when the priest was gone, and just by the way she walked, he knew the boy wasn’t with her. Time was pressing on. He weighed up his chances—Arianne Lafayette or his son, who was more likely to squeal? There was no contest.
* * * * *
The fountain in the woods had been a gift to the parish from its priest in 1837. It boasted naked cherubs with broken harps, a faded statue of the Virgin Mary, and a square pool at ground level, thick with weeds. Romy had never understood why a priest would donate a fountain, nor why having donated it he would choose it to be built such an impractical distance from the village.
The bench beside the fountain was damp, and the air was cold. His throat began to hurt, the legacy of an untreated bout of tonsillitis the previous winter. It wasn’t much of a hiding place, but he had run here often as a child to escape a beating, and he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. He closed his eyes and wondered—not for the first time—what would happen to him when he got home. He couldn’t think now what running away had achieved.
“Useless.”
So his father had found him.
“Did you really think I wouldn’t remember this place?”
“I didn’t think you cared,” muttered Romy, but Jo had him by the ear and was dragging him toward the road.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“Your lover boy’s vanished,” said Jo.
“So?”
“Stop messing about.” Jo had brought his beloved prewar Renault out for the occasion. He shoved Romy into the passenger seat and started the engine. “You wouldn’t have run if you didn’t know something.”
The car broke down a few hundred yards short of where the Germans had set up their new camp beside the lake, and they had to continue their journey on foot. Romy asked no more questions. He knew that in his father’s mind there was a dignity to a motorized entrance, even if the engine was powered by a wood-burning generator. What with Romy’s limp and the sweat rings flowering beneath his father’s armpits, turning up on foot just didn’t have the same authority.
They had reached the Limoges road. From their vantage point higher up the hill, he could see an agglomeration of khaki vehicles and men in feldgrau uniforms. He was reminded, absurdly, of the summer camps he had so loathed as a child.
“I suppose you think this is wrong.” Jo Dulac came to stand beside his son. “Telling on a school friend. You want to do the brave and decent thing.”
“Luc Belleville is not my friend,” said Romy, “but I don’t understand what it is you think he’s done.”
“He’s gone missing, that’s what he’s done. Look at you, standing up for your girl’s lover, all selfless and noble. Even if he hasn’t done anything yet, he will one day. So we shop him. They go after him and leave the rest of us alone.”
“I’ve got nothing to say to you. And even if I did, I’m not a snitch.”
“A snitch?”
Jo grabbed his son’s jaw and leaned into him, so close Romy could smell the sourness of his breath. “Is that what you think I am? Little coward. I fought in the last war. I’ve seen what people do to each other, given half the chance. Heard of Tulle, hero? They hanged a hundred civilians there last week and sent another five hundred to the camps. I don’t snitch, son, I contain. I give them what they want and stop the rot from spreading. You’ll do the same if you know what’s good for you.”
“I don’t know where he is!”
On Sunday I will go with you to Lascande. Something about the way she had said it. On Sunday. As opposed to now. Oh God.
“You do know,” said Jo. “I’ve never seen you look so guilty. And you’ll tell that Captain what he needs to know, even if I have to beat it out of you. If you make a fool of me now, I’ll kill you with my own hands.”
They found the officer who had come that morning sitting on a fallen tree trunk by the edge of the forest, cleaning a rifle. A big man sat beside him, apparently writing a letter. Jo coughed. The Captain looked up and frowned.
“Do I know you?” he asked in French.
He’s forgotten! Romy’s heart soared. He’s actually forgotten us!
Jo cleared his throat again. He looked smaller here. He might have done better than others out of the war, but compared to the Captain and this colossus, he looked as ragged as the rest of them. Even now he was tugging at the sleeve of his jacket, twisting it round to conceal the more obvious mend, the one that ran along the inside seam from his wrist all the way up to his elbow.
“You came to us earlier,” he said, and this time Romy winced at his obvious fawning. “I own the sawmill up at Samaroux. You asked me to investigate a quarrel. A lovers’ tiff?” Spoken out loud, the words sounded ridiculous, but the Captain’s brow cleared in recognition.
“Informant,” he told the big man. Romy winced again.
“Well?”
“My son.” Jo cleared his throat again. “My son overheard something.”
They were all looking at him.
“I . . .”
The Captain sighed. Jo Dulac glared at his son.
“It was nothing, really . . .”
The Captain’s fingers were long and tapered, his nails shaped and polished. They would look at home wrapped around a champagne flute or a cigar, those fingers, playing the piano or the violin. Right now, they were tapping the holster of his revolver. Romy gulped.
“Just tell me what you know,” suggested the Captain. The fingers had stopped drumming to settle on the handgrip of the revolver.
“Twenty-three German soldiers died last night.” Romy shivered. Did the man ever raise his voice? “If you know something, you had better tell me. I can’t answer for the consequences if you don’t.”
“He’s leaving,” Romy muttered. Even as he said this he knew that it would not be enough. The Captain raised an eyebrow.
“He wouldn’t say where.” Romy stared at the ground as he spoke. “She begged him and begged him to tell her, but he wouldn’t say. I think he’s going to join the Maquis.”
The Captain laughed. “That’s hardly news. Every able-bodied man in the country is trying to do the same. They all want to be heroes now the Americans are near, with their barefoot soldiers and the farm tools they use instead of guns.” He beckoned Romy closer and whispered against his ear. “You’re hiding something.”
Containment, his father had called it. He knew what Arianne would think of that. The bile rose from his stomach.
“Two men.” Romy’s mouth was so dry he could barely speak. “He had to hide them.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know!” he wept. “She asked and asked, but he wouldn’t say where. She doesn’t know, she kept asking, but he wouldn’t say!”
“Who else knows?”
“Nobody,” stammered Romy. The Captain grabbed him by the collar and pressed his thumb into his throat. Jo stepped forward. The big man held him back.
“Who else?”
“He has a mother,” said Jo.
Romy staggered as the Captain released him and stood bent over, coughing.
“A mother,” said the Captain. “Perhaps that will do.”
Arianne climbed the steep stairs up to her bedroom when Father Julien left and came to stand before her window.
Luc, stripped to the waist, standing in the stream with the water gleaming on his sunburned skin. Lying in the long grass at Lascande and on the moonlit hill, his lips on her neck, her throat. . . . He couldn’t possibly be dead!
She left her window and walked across the room to her washstand. The mirror that hung above it was tarnished at the edges, but it was serviceable enough.
Was this what he saw when he looked at her? She reached around to undo the fastenings of her dress, letting it fall in a pool at her feet. Round shoulders, small breasts, the pleasing curve of her waist. . . . Turning to look at herself from the side, she could see every one of her ribs in the mirror. Did he think her scrawny? She remembered the feel of his hands working their way down her back, vertebra by vertebra, the sweep of his fingers.
She threw herself on the bed. Her mother had hand stitched her counterpane, an American-style quilt, as a present for her eighth birthday. Pink, white, and green, made of different fabrics, with a square of rose-colored toile at the center onto which she had embroidered Arianne’s initials in looping silk. Arianne had been ecstatic. Thank goodness! Marielle had laughed. Because that is the last time I ever make anything like it! She curled into a ball and pulled the counterpane close about her.
“Ari? Ari, where are you?” A clatter of feet on the stairs heralded Solange’s eruption into the room, less groomed than usual in a summer dress and faded espadrilles, her blonde mane hanging down her back, her cheeks flushed from the run up the stairs.
“There you are! I couldn’t find anyone for the picnic. Oh my God, you’re in your underwear! Is Luc here? Oh no, Ari, you’ve been crying!”
Solange threw herself to her knees by her cousin’s bed and gathered her in her arms.
“There, there,” she murmured. “I’m here, I’ve got you. There, there.”
“You sound like your mother.” Arianne sniffed and attempted a smile.
“Sometimes, chérie, I feel like my mother. Now then. Talk to your Auntie Sol.”
Solange climbed onto the bed, lay down beside Arianne, and pulled the counterpane over them both so that it covered their heads. “Do you remember, we used to lie like this when we were little? Now, is this all about Luc?”
Arianne sniffed again.
“Did you know Jo Dulac was out looking for him? Where on earth is he?”
“He’s gone south to visit his family,” whispered Arianne.
“What? He hates his family! Oh Ari, don’t cry! Where is he really?”
“I don’t know!” wailed Arianne. “And I’m not allowed to look for him!”
“Who says you’re not allowed?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“And why not?”
“It’s dangerous.”
“Yes, well. Luc is dangerous. That temper. We’ve known that since the beginning.”
The wind picked up outside and blew in through the open window. Arianne shivered despite the thick padding of the counterpane. Solange tightened her arms around her and thought of summer afternoons at Lascande, the blue horizon, the way the low rays of the sun played around Luc and Arianne’s shadows, making them shimmer, giving them haloes.
“Where would you look for him, if you went? Where would you start?”
Arianne turned onto her side to look at her and smiled sadly.
Of course, thought Solange. Where else?
“You should go,” she declared. “Right now, before you change your mind.”
“But Father Julien . . .”
“Shh . . .” Solange put a finger to her cousin’s lips. “Don’t tell me. Ari, this is Luc. The boy who lit you up inside, who made you smile again? It doesn’t matter what anybody says.”
She threw back the counterpane and jumped to her feet.
“Come on, Ari, right now!”
She held out her hand to help her cousin up.
“Now, do you have everything you need?” she asked seriously.
“Need?”
“You know!” Solange sighed. “To stop the little babies . . . ”
“Oh!” Arianne blushed. “I didn’t think of that.”
“Lucky you have me then! Maman’s got everything you need at home. Not that she knows I know. . . . Now, pull yourself together, wash your face, get dressed, brush your hair, and I’ll be back. It doesn’t do to be unprepared.”
“You’re mad!” Arianne started to laugh. Solange stopped by the bedroom door and beamed at her.
“I love you,” she said. “I want you to be happy.”
Solange ran down the stairs, as noisily as she had come up. Arianne fell back against her pillow, still laughing.
“You will ride in with us,” said the Captain when Romy asked to return to the village.
“I would rather walk.”
“You will ride with us,” repeated the Captain as he strode away. Jo sat a little distance away on the ground. Romy was left alone with Alois Grand. The big man held out a packet of cigarettes. Romy hesitated before taking one, and they smoked together in silence.
“This boy,” asked Alois at last. His French was slow and hesitant. “He is your friend?”
“No!”
“The girl then.”
“She has done nothing wrong.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“Yes,” said Romy. “She is my friend. At least, she was.”
He gazed around the camp, looking for a way out.
“There is nowhere to go.” Alois looked almost sorry. “If you run, I will shoot you. I am afraid you are screwed, my friend. You are completely screwed.”
Screwed, Romy repeated to himself. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
A new contingent of soldiers had arrived from the barracks at Limoges, fresher and better dressed than the tired men from the train. They came in a convoy of armored vehicles, guns at the ready, with ammunition belts around their waists and shoulders. They stopped by the lake. A man in an officer’s uniform jumped out of the leading vehicle and strode toward the Captain.
“What are they talking about?” Romy asked Alois.
“Orders.”
“What orders?”
The big man shrugged again, “To find our man. Wait and they will tell us.”
A cloud passed before the sun, blocking the light. A movement in the trees caught Romy’s eye. He blinked. A small creature was crawling down the hill and came to a stop behind a hawthorn bush. Romy glanced around to check nobody was watching and peered closer. The cloud moved on and a ray of sunlight fell upon the shaking bush, illuminating, for a split second, a head of unmistakable red. Romy’s heart lurched.
“I need to pee.”
“So pee,” said Alois.
“Somewhere private?” He indicated his poor leg. “It’s not as if I could run away.”
The big man tossed his head toward the trees.
Romy limped with as much nonchalance as he could muster toward the woods, where he made a show of unbuttoning his fly, standing with his legs apart and his back to the camp.
“I need you to do something for me,” he muttered.
“Sod that,” said Paul. “I don’t run errands for turncoats.”
“This isn’t a game!”
“Are you going to pee, or what? You look a right idiot with your willy hanging out like that.”
“It’s the only way I could get away,” hissed Romy. “I need you to get a message to your sister.”
“Suppose I just want to stay here and watch the soldiers?”
“I need you,” enunciated Romy, “to run back to the village as fast as you possibly can, find your sister, and tell her to run. Run and hide. Got it?”
Paul was listening now. “What’s she done?” he whispered.
“It’s not her, it’s her loser boyfriend. Run and hide. That’s all. I’ve got to go, or they’ll smell a rat. Run, Paul. And don’t screw up.”
He turned, praying that nobody was watching him or if they were, that they had not seen Paul. He needn’t have worried. Every eye was turned toward the Captain, talking to them beside the lake from a makeshift platform in the back of a jeep. A light scamper from the bushes behind indicated that Paul was on his way. He felt himself go limp with relief.
Ten minutes later, the Germans were gone, flattened grass and the charred circles of their fires the only traces of their passage.
“Go now,” Solange had said. “Before you change your mind.”
Arianne dressed quickly when her cousin had gone, though her fingers fumbled with her buttons, and her shoes slipped several times from her hands. Quickly, quickly! She prayed that Luc was waiting for her at Lascande, that he had guessed she would come looking for him, that he was not angry with her. Surely, she thought now, if he was dead, she would know? Surely she would feel it?
Yes, Luc was alive. He had to be. In that moment, realizing she could not live without him, Arianne made a decision. If she found Luc, if he was well enough to leave this evening to join the Maquis as he had planned, she would go with him. Her courage faltered as she remembered Father Julien’s warning, but when she looked out of her bedroom window, she saw only the village roofs and a tabby cat sunning himself on the garden wall. Samaroux looked as quiet as it ever had. She ran downstairs to pull her father’s old rucksack from the wardrobe on the landing. Socks, underwear, a warm jersey. The family photograph from his desk, her toothbrush, the picture drawn for her in kindergarten by Paul—what else did one need for a life on the run? She threw in her candle, some matches, and a pair of corduroy trousers.
The church bells began to ring for midday. Two stories down, she heard the front door open. Paul, home for lunch! How was she going to explain this to him? I’m sorry, I’ll be back, one day you’ll understand. . . . The bells stopped, and she realized it was too early; Paul would only just be leaving school. The footsteps grew closer, too slow for her little brother. Who, then? Her bedroom door swung open.
“So you’re leaving,” said Elodie. She stood in the doorframe, her eyes on the rucksack Arianne clutched to her chest.
Arianne nodded.
“To look for the boy.”
“Yes.”
“They say it’s him blew up that train.”
“That’s not true.”
“I didn’t say it was.”
Elodie sat, not without grace, on the edge of the bed. Arianne, after a moment’s hesitation, sat beside her.
“I have to do this,” she said. “I have to go.”
“France will stand or fall whether you stay home or not. But I suppose you are your father’s daughter. Have you told your brother?”
“I haven’t had the chance.”
“You thought you’d leave it to me to explain, you mean.”
The old lady’s wrinkles broke into an unfamiliar smile. “Sweet Lord, Arianne, I never dreamed when your father left you in my care just how difficult it would turn out to be.”
“We don’t mean to be difficult.”
“You’re wild, the pair of you.” Elodie reached out her hand. After a moment’s incomprehension, Arianne took it in her own.
“I had a sweetheart myself, once.”
Arianne forced herself to be patient.
“What happened to him?” she asked.
“Oh, he married someone else. Mother wouldn’t let me because he was going to Indochina.”
“Auntie I really have to . . .”
“I would have liked to go to Indochina. I heard he came home and retired near Angoulême. He’s still there today, as far as I know, surrounded by his doting family. And here I am, with you two.”
“We love you . . .”
“Please. Love is complicated enough as it is without making a song and dance of things. So your brother’s not home.”
“Not yet,” muttered Arianne.
“You know he skipped school again today.”
“What?”
“His teacher stopped by the presbytery during morning break. I do hope Paul will be better soon, she said. Pointedly.”
“But he promised!”
“Since when does he keep his promises? Arianne, you are fifteen years old and more of a child than you think, but I won’t try to stop you doing what you imagine is right. Just, before you go, think of your brother. I am old. I don’t think I can manage him on my own.”
“You’re blackmailing me!” cried Arianne.
“Yes,” said Elodie modestly. “I believe I am.”
Arianne dropped her head to her knees and closed her eyes. “It’s not fair,” she said. “Why do I always have to think of him?”
“Because you’re all he has.”
The air in the bedroom where they sat was still, the light from the windows a pale gray that showed up the dullness of walls in need of painting. No sound here either, other than the occasional shout of a child making his way home for lunch, the sudden cackle of a magpie. The clock struck the half hour. Arianne sat bent double over her knees. Paul then, not Luc. Not a new life of love on the run, but everything she had always known, domesticity and waiting. She hated for people to see her cry, but this time she could not stop herself.
“He might return,” said Elodie.
“And he might not.”
Into the silence of the stairwell came a new sound from outside, an unfamiliar sound they had somehow failed to notice while they were talking. Engines, not just one, but several. More than several—the wood of the stairs beneath Arianne’s feet shook with the rumble of traffic.
“What is going on?” she thought she heard Elodie say, but she couldn’t be sure because at the same moment they heard the back door flung open and the clatter of Solange running up the stairs shouting Ari, Ari, it’s too late, they’re here!
Romy had ridden into Samaroux in the German convoy, two dozen feldgrau oblongs bristling with guns. It was lunchtime, and the village was deserted. Behind the lace curtains and shutters half closed against the midday sun, he imagined people rising from their kitchen tables to look at them, but nobody came out. Only Mayor Jarvis put down his soup spoon with a feeling of dread and reached for his jacket as the convoy ground to a halt across the market square from his home.
“I’m frightened,” he told his wife. She stood before him to straighten his tie, and then helped him into his jacket.
“They won’t stay long,” she said.
They might! he wanted to cry. They might do anything.
“I can always warm lunch for you when you come back.” She smiled, and he saw that she was afraid, too.
By the time Jarvis crossed the square, the convoy had already split up. Two vehicles remained where they were, including the Captain’s. Two returned to the entrance of the village. The rest were deployed around the village, to block the minor roads heading out toward the farms and hamlets.
“Routine inspection,” announced the Captain when Jarvis, having introduced himself, muttered offers of assistance. “A few questions to ask. The boy here will show me around.”
Romy looked sick. Out of the corner of his eye, Jarvis saw the curtain of the presbytery twitch and thought he caught a glimpse of the priest’s bald pate. He felt a surge of anger toward his old friend.
“As mayor of this community,” he said with a firmness he did not feel, “I insist upon accompanying you.”
“Ah, well,” said the Captain, and Jarvis noted how Romy shuddered at his voice. “If you absolutely insist . . . You”—he pointed at Jo Dulac—“get out. Give the man your place.”
Teresa Belleville knew they were coming. Ever since her son had told her last night that he was leaving, ever since she heard about the derailment this morning, she knew that they would come looking for him, with that conviction born of fear, the sort of fear only a parent can feel that twists the guts and hollows the heart and makes them cry, when their worst nightmares are confirmed. I knew it! I knew no good would come of it! It was already the ghost of Teresa Belleville who opened her front door to the knock of the Captain’s driver. The Captain asked his questions in German. Jonas Bucher acted as interpreter. Two more soldiers stood by the door.
“He has gone to visit my family in the south,” intoned Teresa.
“When did he get permission for this journey?”
“Yesterday.”
“Monsieur le maire, is this true?”
Jarvis, caught off guard, did not play his part well. He was not sure, he mumbled. There were so many applications to travel, so many permits required. He would have to check. Though yes, now he came to think of it, Luc had applied for permission to travel. It was all coming back to him; of course he had. He had a grandfather in Aix whom he loved very much.
The Captain slapped him. Jarvis’s blue eyes filled with tears.
“You remember no such thing,” said the Captain, in French. The mayor did not contradict him.
The Captain nodded for his men to come forward.
“Where is your son?” he asked again.
Teresa started to cry with the second slap across her face but did not budge from her story.
“He has gone to Aix.”
Slap.
“In the middle of term?”
“My father is ill.”
Slap.
“Why did you not go yourself ?”
“I have not been well, I am not well enough to travel.”
She threw up when they punched her in the stomach and soiled herself when they kicked her. When the Captain gave the order for the needles to come out, she admitted she was lying but refused to say where Luc had gone.
“I don’t know.”
Bang went a needle under the nail of her left thumb.
“He wouldn’t say.”
The index of her right hand.
“He was trying to protect me.”
The ring finger of her left hand, the one that still bore her wedding band, and they could get no more out of her than screams.
It took less than fifteen minutes. By the time the Captain and his henchmen left, no wiser than when they arrived, Teresa Belleville was a rag upon the kitchen floor, blood seeping from her tortured hands and dry sobs shaking her body. Seated at her kitchen table, Jarvis wept. Jonas Bucher fumbled his way out of the house and threw up in the garden. Romy followed the Captain back to the jeep with the odd disjointed motions of a puppet.
This time when they passed through the village, the windows of Samaroux were crowded with faces. Some people clenched their fists and made for their doors, but more people held them back, praying they would not be next. Father Julien slipped into his church and fell to his knees before the altar. Solange left her bedroom window, the one which looked straight into Teresa Belleville’s home, slipped out of her parents’ house, and ran back to Arianne.
“Who are they?” demanded Elodie. “What are you talking about?”
“Soldiers,” gasped Solange. “Everywhere! They came to Luc’s house, with the mayor and Romy.”
“Romy?”
“I saw them arrive from my bedroom window. You know I can see straight into their parlor. I was in my room, I was about to come back. . . . They hit Monsieur Jarvis and then oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, Luc’s mother! I knew I shouldn’t have said anything!”
Solange burst into tears.
“Said what?” insisted Elodie. “To whom?”
“Romy’s father! He asked me where Luc was, and I said I didn’t know! But I didn’t! I didn’t know then!”
Arianne squared her shoulders.
“I’m going to see her.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” snapped Elodie. “You’ll get out of this house this minute and hide. If they’re after Luc, they’ll come looking for you next. We’ll get word to you somehow when it’s safe.”
“But . . .”
“Hurry up, child, for heaven’s sakes!”
Arianne reached for her rucksack. Elodie drew her into a brief and astonishing hug. “God keep you,” she whispered.
“I’m sure you’ll have words for Him if He doesn’t.” Arianne tried to smile.
“Absolutely right. Now run before I . . .”
Two stories down, someone hammered on the front door.
Elodie stifled Solange’s scream with her hand. “Roof,” she hissed at Arianne. She found time for another wry smile. “Oh yes, I know about the roof. Solange, lock the window after her, then get back here and follow me downstairs. And let me do the talking. I won’t have you spoiling everything with hysterics.”
Arianne shot out of the window. Solange twisted the handle shut after her and dashed for the stairs. She emerged into the kitchen with Elodie on her arm, every inch the concerned great-niece, just as the Captain’s henchmen burst into the room.
Arianne crawled to the edge of the roof and stopped. An armed sentry stood beneath the holm oak on the street side. On the garden side, the fields were crawling with soldiers. She crept back to the chimney stacks. Curled into a ball, there was just room enough for her to hide.
Paul stopped running as he came into Samaroux, slid out of the woods onto one of the minor roads, saw that it was blocked, and slid right off it again. The long run had cleared his mind, and he took his time thinking about what to do. If this road was blocked, it stood to reason that all the others would be, too. So he would have to come in through the fields. He considered skirting around the village to come up through his own garden, but it would take too long. The German convoy was well ahead of him, but he didn’t know yet if they had gotten to Arianne. In fact—he frowned—he knew nothing other than the few words the traitor Romy had told him. The traitor Romy. He rolled the words around his mind, his imagination feeding on what Elodie referred to with a sniff as the wrong sort of comic, picturing Romy’s head on a spike, Romy hanging from a lamppost, Romy bound for the village stocks. . . .
Run and hide. If he slithered down this bank, he would come out by the cemetery. The place gave him the creeps, but he’d scaled the wall often enough for a dare and at least it brought him out on the right side of the village. It meant going past school, but he’d cross that bridge when he came to it.
No time to stop at his mother’s grave, but he crossed himself as he ran past the end of her row. He ran out through the little gate on the other side, smoothing down his hair to look halfway respectable, using the palm of his hand and a bit of spit to clean the fresh grazes on his knee. To his left, a German jeep barred the road out of town two hundred meters away. Farther on, two more stood on either side of the market square. There was no one about save the soldiers in the vehicles, who clocked him, he was sure of that, but did not react. He made himself as small as possible as he walked past school but no irate teacher hauled him in. He began to breathe again when he reached the church, but froze when he turned the corner toward home.
Another jeep blocked the street, level with his house, and a guard stood posted beneath the old holm oak.
Inside the house, Elodie was putting on a splendid show.
“Is this the girl?” The Captain nodded at Solange as the women entered the kitchen. Romy shook his head. Solange looked at him with open loathing. Elodie announced that she was rather busy and could anyone please tell her what was going on?
“Where is my niece? Where indeed?” she cried in response to Jonas Bucher’s first question. “I’d be grateful if anyone could tell me that!”
“She’s bluffing,” said the Captain in German. “Press her harder. And Bucher, for Christ’s sake . . .”
“Sir?”
“Pull yourself together, man. You’re shaking like a girl.”
Jonas cleared his throat, but Elodie ignored his attempts to tell her everything would go better if she just told the truth and pressed on with her rant.
“Here I am, run off my feet, seventy-six years old and still struggling to support my nephew’s children, and they cannot even bother to come back for lunch! And I issued clear enough instructions, believe me. Go to the butcher’s, I said, then bake the sausage. But would madam listen? Oh no! It’s all, I’ve got a day off school, and I’m not your servant, and Miss Flibbertigibbet flutters off to goodness knows where, and here is her poor cousin come looking for her as well, hoping to spend the afternoon with her so they can catch up on their schoolwork . . .”
“If you could just tell us . . .”
“A nice andouillette, I told her, because I knew the butcher would have some today, but I come home and what do I find? A knuckle of ham, which I’ve yet to put on myself, and no hope of eating it until tonight and even then the peas won’t have had long enough to soak!”
“It is imperative . . .”
“Christ!” said the Captain. “What is it with these people and their food?” He pushed Jonas out of the way and came to stand before Elodie.
“Grandmother, we have to find your niece. She has been consorting with a known criminal. If you can’t tell us where she is, we are going to have to search your house. If I find you have been lying to me, I will shoot you.”
“Shoot me anyway!” Elodie burst into tears, calculated that the Captain would not be receptive to physical contact and threw herself into Jonas’s arms. “Shoot me anyway, and spare me from these ungrateful children!”
“There, there.” Jonas patted her back. “It’s not so bad.”
“Known criminals!” sobbed Elodie. “Her brother cutting school! And the andouillette!”
She clutched at Solange, who led her away from Jonas Bucher to a seat at the kitchen table. Solange, feeling daring, allowed herself a reproachful look at the soldiers. The Captain grabbed her chin in his hand and forced her head back.
“Do you know where she is?” he demanded.
Solange’s porcelain skin was flushed, her lower lip trembled with fear, but her wide blue eyes met his full on. He held them for a moment, and in the depths of his own eyes, she read some unexpected light—not lust, not even contempt, something almost like regret. She shook her head. The light flickered and died.
“Search the house,” said the Captain.
They went up to her room, of course. Looked under her bed, ripped through her wardrobe, even emptied her chest of drawers. One of them rattled the window. Up above, Arianne stifled a moan.
“Low roof. She could have got out through there.”
“If she did, she’s long gone. And anyway, it’s locked.”
They tore through Paul’s room and took his stash of cigarettes, through Elodie’s wardrobe full of carefully mended dresses, through the untouched sanctum of her nephew’s study.
“Nothing, sir.”
The Captain looked about him at the kitchen.
“My grandparents lived in the country,” he said. Again, the light in his eyes flickered and died.
“Ring the church bells,” he said. “It’s time to bring them in.”
Alois led one of the parties to empty the neighboring farms. He rode shotgun in an armored jeep, rifle at the ready. His brow beneath the rim of his helmet was furrowed, his eyes half closed in apparent concentration, but his mind was somewhere else.
How different it was here from the east, he thought. These fields of green corn on which kernels of fruit were just beginning to ripen, these light woods of oak and elm and beech, these houses nestling in the landscape. Campion and buttercups blazed in the hedgerows. They passed an open meadow in which a herd of cows were grazing, and the smell of the farmyard hit him, the warmth of fresh milk, the tang of manure. He sucked it in and noticed that others in the jeep did the same. Nothing like the smell of cows, he smiled faintly, to stir memories of childhood. The beasts here had hides of caramel, soft hair that curled over their faces. They were different from the cows back home, but their eyes were just as dumb. They turned their heads as the jeep bounced past. Some of the younger ones leaped away. One crapped. None of them stopped chewing. Such were the priorities of the animal kingdom, thought Alois. Perhaps this was why they made one think of childhood. They reminded one of a time when eating and crapping were all that mattered.
He could not remember when he last felt this peaceful. The villages in the eastern territories had been miserable affairs, their inhabitants even more so, the result of centuries of oppression, he supposed, the Communists taking over where the tsars had left off. The weather couldn’t have helped, either. Nor the sight of an invading army. . . . The thought of the Russian winter made him shiver, and he tilted his head again to the rays of the French sun. One day, he told himself, he would come back here to visit with Clara and Wolf. She would lie on a rug in a meadow while he taught the boy to fish; they would sunbathe and picnic and everything would be all right again.
The jeep juddered to a halt, and its occupants leapt to the ground. They had arrived at a farmhouse. Even now, with the adrenaline pumping through his veins and the rush of blood in his head, Alois noticed how moss and lichen clung to the tiles of the roof, enhancing the illusion that it seemed to be growing out of the ground. He bellowed an order for the occupants of the farm to come out. He shouted in German, and so loud it was barely comprehensible to his own men, but it didn’t matter. His meaning was clear enough.
The farmers here were old and could not run. He shuffled out of his barn holding a spanner; she stepped out of the dairy with her head held high. A girl came out behind her, wiping her hands. Both wore scarves to tie back their hair and smelled of buttermilk and sweat.
“How many more?” demanded Alois in French.
The old farmer nodded toward a meadow adjoining the barn. An old farmhand walked toward them, leading a cow heavy with calf. He did not look at the soldiers.
“Any more?” asked Alois in French.
From inside the house, a baby began to wail. Alois tossed his head. The girl ran into the house and came back out with the child.
“Where’s the father?”
“Gone to town,” spat the farmer. “He’ll not be back till evening.”
“Search the house.”
They made a thorough job of it. Ripped open cupboards, overturned beds, smashed through the pantry. Searched everywhere a man could have hidden, and many places where he couldn’t. No sign of the son, of course. He’d probably made a run for it the minute he heard them coming. The soldiers spilled back out of the house. The farmer and his wife waited, resigned. The girl had turned away from them to nurse her baby, but she pried it off her breast and buttoned up her dress when the men re-emerged. Bring them in, the Captain had said. Alois gritted his teeth and tried to ignore the child’s whimpers.
“Village,” he said, with a toss of his head. “Routine inspection.”
They stared back, as dumb as one of their cows. One of the men hit the farmhand with the flat of his gun, kneed him in the small of the back growling allez, go!
Allez! The word all French farmers use to get their cattle moving. They began to walk, the farmers very straight, the farmhand’s head bowed in shame, the daughter-in-law with her fretting baby, walked away from their home along the unpaved track lined with wild flowers, looking for all the world as if they were going for a family walk, except for the jeep that followed. They crossed others on their way, farmhands working in the fields, children walking back to afternoon school. As the procession grew, the soldiers jumped down from the car to walk alongside them, guns cocked, missing nothing.
Routine inspection, said Alois whenever anybody asked.
He knew that he would never come here again.
Picot had told Luc to keep a lookout while he rested in the armchair in the kitchen at Lascande, legs sprawled out before him, his rifle on his knees. Luc wasn’t sure exactly how he was to keep watch, since Picot had forbidden him to go outside and also to open windows. Stripped to the waist, a blanket around his shoulders, he paced from room to room, peering out where he could through cracks in the shutters, before settling in the living room, from where he could just glimpse a corner of the drive.
“Who are you waiting for?” asked Baptiste.
The injured man lay behind Luc on the sofa, also wrapped in a blanket, two of Madame Lascande’s once pristine tea towels pressed against his stomach wound.
“I bet it’s a girl,” whispered Baptiste. “No one ever looked so hopefully for the Milice.”
Luc moved away from the window.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“Great,” croaked Baptiste. “For someone with a piece of train in his stomach.”
Luc scowled in the direction of the kitchen. “He should have let me go for a doctor.”
“You know he couldn’t do that, not in broad daylight. We got here too late. You were covered in blood. People would have noticed.”
“My shirt’s almost dry now.”
“It’s too late.” Baptiste tried to keep his eyes open, but they fluttered shut. “They’ll be looking for you,” he whispered.
“I am going for a doctor,” said Luc through gritted teeth. “And nobody is going to stop me.”
“Actually, you’re coming with me.” Picot appeared in the doorway, rifle at the ready. “Something’s going on,” he said. “We need to find out what.”
* * * * *
Avoiding the main paths, Luc led Picot through the woods to the top of the hill above Lascande.
“What are we listening for?” he whispered.
“Engines.”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“Well I did.” Picot held up his hand. “Shh!”
“Now what?”
“Bells. Can’t you hear them? Listen!”
They broke out of the trees’ cover and lay on the ground in the long grass.
“Church bells,” whispered Luc. “Coming from Samaroux.”
Picot’s eyes were glued to his field glasses. “Look down there.”
Luc looked and saw a column of people walking before an army jeep, flanked by German soldiers. An old man stumbled. A young woman helped him up.
“Over there.”
Picot took the field glasses back and trained them onto an armored vehicle parked across the road that led from Lascande to the village. “They’ve blocked it off. The whole countryside is crawling with them. Christ, that must have been close. We must be just outside their search radius.”
“What are they looking for?” asked Luc.
“Us,” said Picot.
In the silence that passed between the two men, everything was brought sharply into focus—the hum of insects, the sweet smell of the grass, the way it swayed in the wind high on the hill. The pealing bells calling the people of Samaroux home.
“I have to go,” said Luc.
“I can’t let you do that.”
“I have to.”
Luc began to run, scrambling down the hill in a half crouch, but Picot was fast on his feet and tackled him to the ground.
“If you go back there, they’ll kill you.” Picot had one knee on Luc’s chest, his hands around his throat. “They’ll kill you, but not before they’ve tortured you into telling them where we are. Don’t think you’ll be able to resist them, because you won’t. And I am damned if I will let you and your misguided principles compromise the work that Baptiste and I are doing.”
“If you were a real hero,” gasped Luc, “you would give yourself up as well.”
“Do you really think that would make a difference?”
Luc roared and elbowed Picot in the ribs. The older man grunted and twisted the boy round so that he lay on his front. He grabbed Luc by the hair and forced his head up until he gasped for breath.
“You’re going nowhere,” he hissed.
* * * * *
Back at Lascande, Picot kept his gun trained on Luc as he checked the living room windows.
“All locked,” he said. “I wouldn’t try to break them. You’ll only hurt yourself and you’d have to rip out the frames in order to open the shutters. I’m not tying you up because I want you to look after Baptiste.”
“You can’t just leave us here! I’m supposed to show you the way!”
“I’m sure I’ll manage without you.”
Picot backed out of the room, his gun still pointing at Luc, stepped outside, and turned the key in the lock. Luc roared and threw himself at the door. When pounding on it proved futile, he took off his shoe and hurled it at a windowpane. The glass shattered. He began to hammer away at the frame.
“Luc?” Baptiste’s voice was weak.
“What is it?”
“Please don’t leave me.”
Luc sank to the floor and sobbed.
From where he was hiding behind a fire hydrant, Paul heard the Captain’s jeep tear up the village street toward the market square. He looked back at home: Elodie and Solange appeared in the doorway, flanked by soldiers. His great-aunt made a big show of locking the front door. Solange was crying. Arianne was nowhere in sight.
There was no way he could get home, not with that sentry by the wall. Paul slipped after the others, moving in the shadows.
The loudspeakers started as he drew level with the church.
All inhabitants of Samaroux to gather on the market square, I repeat, all inhabitants to gather on the market square.
The voice grew louder. A tank—an actual tank!—was crawling up the road toward him, the soldier with the loudspeaker standing in the front. Behind it, Paul could see the street was full of people, soldiers banging on doors, villagers stumbling out of houses, some in slippers, one still wearing his napkin tucked into his collar. Four-year-old Felicia Brest marched out of her parents’ house with her bowl and spoon and carried on eating as the swelling crowd shuffled toward the market square.
Sod this, thought Paul. A drainage ditch ran along the side of the church. He dropped into it. Nobody saw him.
There was a hollow there, just big enough for him. He knew it well, having discovered it a few years back hunting for a ball. At this time of year, the entrance was overgrown with nettles, and he was wearing short trousers. The tank was rumbling closer. He gave a yelp of pain as the nettles brushed his legs, and he rolled in. Clods of earth fell from the ceiling as the tank rolled overhead. He had grown in the months since he had been here last, and the walls of his shelter pressed against him. The church bells started to ring.
* * * * *
From her vantage point on the roof, Arianne saw what looked like all of Samaroux walking toward the market square. There were no gunshots, no beatings. She assumed they must be emptying the houses to look for Luc. They would move on when they realized he was not here, but she would get to Lascande before them. She tried not to think about his mother.
Her whole body ached from crouching. She shifted, dislodging a tile. It hung by one corner, wedged into place by a clump of moss. She nudged it back toward her with her foot and slipped it into her rucksack. Back against the chimney, she thought of what she would say to Luc. How would she tell him about Teresa? She saw herself arriving at Lascande, the relief on his face, felt his embrace, the stubble on his cheek, smelt his familiar smell. Where would she tell him? In the scullery with her back against the cool damp walls, or in the kitchen, on the old armchair without its springs? He would kiss her, would carry on kissing her as they made their way through the house, cupping her face in his hands, drinking her in, he would tell her he always knew that she would come; he would lead her upstairs to the four-poster bed with its velvet curtains—she would have to tell him by then. She felt ashamed of her next thought, that perhaps after all this he would not leave. Perhaps he would just lie low for a while and return when the fuss had died down, to look after his mother. The price to pay for keeping him.
The loudspeakers were starting again. Arianne strained forward as far as she dared to listen.
The Captain thrust a loudspeaker at Jonas Bucher.
“Loud and clear, soldier. If I hear your voice shake, I’ll have you court-martialed. Ready?”
“Sir?”
“I’m promoting you to official interpreter. What’s the name of this lad we’ve been looking for?”
“Luc Belleville, sir, I think.”
“Here goes then. People of Samaroux! Last night a terrible crime was committed against the Army of the Third Reich by a member of this community. His name was Luc Belleville.” The Captain stared at Bucher. “Well? What are you waiting for?”
“Gens de Samaroux,” stammered Jonas. “La nuit dernière un crime terrible a été commis . . .”
“Not to me, soldier,” snarled the Captain.
“Un crime atroce a été commis la nuit dernière contre l’armée du troisième reich!” bellowed Jonas, turning to the crowd. “Par—euh—Luc Belleville.”
“I want you to tell me where he is.”
“Je veux que vous me disiez où il est.”
“This boy . . .” the Captain nodded toward Romy, and a soldier pushed him forward, “has helped me. Now it is your turn. I’m sure you know the rules. If I cannot find the culprit, somebody must pay.”
Romy stood before the crowd with his face drained of color and a cold sweat bathing his palms. The crowd stared back, hostile, but Gaspard Félix, the butcher, stepped forward.
“Sometimes,” he mumbled, “I mean often, he likes to roam the woods.”
“We’ve searched the woods, fool.” The Captain answered Félix directly, and the crowd stirred at the revelation that he spoke French. “Where does he go?”
The butcher gulped and wiped his hands on his apron.
“I’ve got men beating the woods in a three-kilometer radius. How much farther do you propose I go?”
Gaspard Félix trembled.
“How much time do you propose I devote to the hunting of this wretch? Answer me!”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“You don’t know.”
The Captain seized the butcher by the collar and dragged him to the top of the church steps. He gestured for Jonas Bucher to follow him.
“It is obvious to me that Luc Belleville did not act alone.”
“Il m’est évident que Luc Belleville n’a pas agi seul,” yelled Jonas.
“I am giving the accomplices of Luc Belleville the chance to step forward now. I will count to twenty. If nobody comes forward, this man will be shot.”
“Je vais compter jusqu’à vingt. Si personne ne se manifeste, cet homme sera exécuté.”
Monsieur Félix began to cry.
“So count, soldier,” sighed the Captain.
“Me?” said Jonas.
“No, you incompetent fool, Father Christmas. He’s standing right behind you.”
One, two, three, four . . .
The soldiers on the edge of the square kept their guns trained on the crowd. The people of Samaroux shifted. From where he stood, Alois saw how some of the younger men eyed the soldiers from beneath lowered lids, assessing their chances. Do not run, he muttered under his breath. You fools, whatever you do, do not run. . . . nine, ten, eleven, twelve . . .
Father Julien finished saying his prayers and stepped forward on the count of fifteen.
. . . sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen . . .
On the count of twenty, Romy joined him.
The loudspeaker on the market square had stopped. The clock struck the hour. Three o’clock, and the air was still. Arianne strained forward to listen. A lark rose from the fields behind her, and she was struck by the fancy that if she reached out far enough, if she could just stand on tiptoe on the ridge pole, she might be able to touch it.
The lark’s song faded, carried on the breeze.
We are no longer ourselves, the Captain once told Alois in a Belorussian stable. This was how he justified his actions. It was not he who ordered his men to fire the machine guns that sent the first five hundred into the gravel pit. Not he who walked among the dying and the dead, shooting anybody that moved, or who gave the act of ethnic cleansing the rules and structure of a blood sport. Not he, not really he, who stood before the massed villagers of Samaroux on the market square on this quiet day in early summer, staring at a village priest and a boy.
“How very . . . unimaginative,” he said. “The priest with a taste for self-sacrifice and the traitor with a conscience.”
A look passed between the two before him. The priest nodded a fraction before turning to the Captain.
“We two are responsible.”
“The boy who stands beside you now betrayed you earlier.”
“And now he is paying the price.”
“I know what you people do to those who betray you, you so-called Résistants. You’re as merciless as the rest of us. Don’t pretend you don’t want to tear him to pieces.”
“God tells us to forgive.”
“God also tells you not to kill, but that didn’t stop your lot last night.”
“We are angry.”
“So am I,” growled the Captain. “But at least I’m not a hypocrite.”
“Not a hypocrite, no.” Father Julien smiled. “Though I think, perhaps, you are the devil.”
“I don’t believe you,” hissed the Captain. “I don’t believe this child was responsible for what happened to my men, I don’t even know what this lad we’ve been chasing has to do with it. But someone has to pay. I’ll show you what the devil can do.”
As two privates hustled Father Julien into the church, Alois had a fleeting vision of a different scenario—anarchy, the Captain annihilated, the morning’s explosion forgotten as the army of the Third Reich roared northward toward home. They would cross the border in secret, mend roofs, tend livestock, hide until the end of the war. They would become human again.
The vision did not last long.
“Time for plan B,” murmured the Captain, and as Alois’s vision faded, he saw that the boy Romy was back in the crowd and that his father was holding him by the hand. He could not avoid this, then. There had never been any other plan, only this one, the one they had rehearsed so many times before in the villages of Eastern Europe.
“Time for plan B,” repeated the Captain, and fired his gun to give the signal.
They were coming back! If she craned her neck enough, Arianne could just make out the edge of the market square where a column of children stood in a double-file line along the wall of the church. No sign of Paul but that didn’t mean anything from this distance. She shuffled to her right. The ranks of women came into view and she saw—she was almost sure—Elodie’s crown of gray curls, the bright pattern of Solange’s dress.
They were coming down the street. Thierry, Marc, Jérôme, and a dozen other men she knew, but why were there soldiers with them? A dozen of them, carrying rifles, with more following with heavier equipment.
“Halt!” They stopped in front of her house, and she drew back. She heard another order, but did not understand it. Her first thought was to run. What with the cries of protest from the village men, the shouted orders, the repeated slamming into the garden door, it was possible they would not hear her. . . . She had stuffed her shoes in her rucksack before climbing out of the window. The thing was to do it now, while they could not see her.
They were kicking in the broken door in the wall, the door beside the holm oak that led into the old dog run beneath her. She heard the sound of breaking glass, and the group of men she had seen walking down the street were herded in—she recognized Thierry’s voice as he intoned the Marseillaise.
“Silence!” shouted a German voice.
“Oh go to hell,” said Thierry, but the singing stopped.
Arianne risked a look behind her. Other men were being marched down the street. She recognized Sol’s father, Gaspard Félix, and farmer Legros. She thought she heard a cry to halt as they drew level with the Renault garage and watched with mounting dread as they were pushed inside.
Something terrible is going to happen, she thought. Soldiers were pouring in from everywhere. They were wheeling heavy machines down the street, machines which looked like . . .
I can stop this. They are looking for Luc. I can help them find him.
The moment she thought it she knew it was the right thing to do. Quick, now, before you change your mind . . . she remembered Solange’s words from earlier as she scrambled to her feet. Quick, now! Turn him in, turn yourself in! Tell them what you know!
A volley of shots rang out, and the world exploded. She felt the house shake beneath her under the impact of the machine guns. She covered her ears to block out the screaming, closed her eyes and clamped her mouth onto the fabric of her dress. The screaming gave way to moans. Arianne pressed her fingers harder into her ears and tried to pray.
No words came, only images. Her father nursing his pipe, her mother’s hair against the white of her pillow, Luc on the terrace at Lascande with a tray of tea and biscuits. . . . There were new sounds now, grunting and shuffling as bodies were dragged across the dog run into the house. Arianne stuffed her fists into her mouth. Luc’s eyes, Luc’s mouth, Luc’s smile . . . the images no longer came.
The moaning had finished and now she could hear whooping and the sound of engines. A jeep screeched to a stop by the house. Down below, she caught a glimpse of a soldier spreading straw around the dog pen. Somebody laughed.
They were burning everything. Smoke was rising, around the village, around her. It carried the smell of kerosene and something else, acrid and sweet and nauseating at once. Soldiers were still gathered in the road below her, shouting words she did not understand. Sparks flew up around her, and the smoke grew thicker. She could no longer see the street but the soldiers’ voices were growing more distant as they made their way back to the market square.
They had gone. No one saw Arianne as she crept off her perch and half crawled over the roof, or heard her cry as she threw herself off. She landed badly but ran barefoot over grass and gravel until she reached the edge of the orchard. There was a gap in the old stone wall where the foundations had collapsed. Elodie was always complaining about it, ever since the deer had broken in. Arianne threw herself through it. Brambles tore at her arms and caught at her rucksack. She shrugged it off her shoulders and glanced back.
No one had come after her. She yanked herself out of the brambles and fell onto the grass, nursing her swelling ankle.
Paul considered every part of his body, focusing on a few square inches at a time, and concluded that everything hurt. His neck and shoulders ached from not being able to sit straight, his legs had gone dead, his back was stiff, and his arms were covered in nettle rash. Worst of all—and this had almost driven everything else from his mind—his bladder was stretched to its bursting point. He had passed the point of nearly wetting himself, and moved on to a throbbing cramp that made him worry that he was doing some serious damage to his tackle. Sounds were muffled in his underground bunker. He had been aware of somebody shouting through a loudspeaker, then of somebody counting. A gunshot right above him made him leak a little. He tried to listen more carefully then, but it was very quiet. He maneuvered himself round so that he could lie on his side with his shorts undone, pointing into the grass outside his lair. The Captain’s second gunshot sped things up, and everything felt better. He rolled his shoulders just a little and wriggled his toes to get some feeling back into his legs.
His sense of relief did not last long. As he became aware of the dampness of the ground beneath him—he had not succeeded, then, in peeing outside his den—he heard the sound of wailing. Now that the blood was not pounding in his ears he could hear muffled gunshots—not directly above him, like last time, but farther away toward the village, though hard to make out where with all the screaming. His stomach cramped, and he worried that now he might soil his pants. It was cold beneath the ground. He pulled his knees up toward his chest and wrapped his arms around them. He tried to blink back his tears. Then, realizing there was no one to see him, he let them fall.
Some of the women tried to break away. One, with a baby on her hip and a toddler clinging to her hand, had to be struck several times before she understood she could not go home. Her little girl began to scream. The woman hoisted her onto her free hip and joined the throng being herded into the church.
“What are they doing?” stammered Jonas. “Why are they going into the church?”
“Well it’s not to pray, is it?” said Alois through gritted teeth. The young soldier’s panic was getting to him. He wanted to tell him to find someone else to stick to, except that none of the other men could be trusted not to shoot him. With the exception of the new recruit, they all wore the same expression, one he knew only too well. Eyes glazed, faces shining, they were wound so high one wrong word from Bucher could be the end of him.
“Just do as you’re told,” muttered Alois. “And for Christ’s sake stop asking questions.”
A wooden rattle rolled out from the sea of feet. A child ran after it, a girl with round limbs and pudgy knees and tangled hair falling into her eyes. Jonas leaned down to pick up the toy. Alois willed him not to look at her, but it was too late. Jonas and the girl were smiling at each other.
“I’ve got a sister,” said Jonas.
“Stop!”
A figure was fighting its way out of the church, pressing against the crowd. The priest, his black robes covered in dust, struggling to walk with his hands tied behind his back. Damn, thought Alois. What the hell were we supposed to do with him?
“I will not allow this!” The old man spoke passable German, for a Frenchman.
“I’m not in charge,” said Alois.
“Find me the one who is!”
The Captain came. The priest stumbled free of the crowd and emerged on the front steps. His cassock was torn, his cheek badly grazed. He had lost his glasses. He blinked, looking lost.
“You,” said the Captain. “I’d forgotten about you.”
“What are you doing with these women and children?”
“They’re going to church, father. Perhaps you could read them a lesson.”
“Why?”
The Captain shrugged and waved his arm toward the burning village. “Where else can they go? What was it our Lord said before he died? I will prepare my father’s house for you.”
“Don’t you dare quote scripture at me!” spat the priest.
“I don’t have time for this,” sighed the Captain.
“I will not let you deface the house of God.”
“Fine.” The Captain turned to Jonas and Alois. “Private Bucher, shoot the priest.”
“I . . .”
“Do it!”
The priest fell to his knees. Alois turned away, but out of the corner of his eye, he saw the old man murmur as he crossed himself, and felt a grudging respect.
“These are innocent people,” said the priest. “God will have retribution.”
“There are no innocents in war,” said the Captain. “Only winners and losers. Now, please, Private Bucher.”
Jonas screamed and fired. Father Julien fell to the ground, his body bouncing under the impact of a second bullet.
* * * * *
Fifty soldiers stood around the church, their rifles trained on every exit. A dozen more pushed the last women and children into the building while two soldiers placed a large box in the middle of the central aisle and lit the strings that trailed from it. The box exploded, belching gas. The last of the fleeing soldiers slammed the doors shut.
The walls of the church were a meter thick in places. From where Alois stood, the sound of the screaming inside was muted. He saw a figure appear at a window and watched it topple back into the building under a volley of bullets.
“Too slow,” said the Captain.
His men smashed more windows and hurled in incendiary grenades, threw open the doors to machine gun the crowd. When they were sure there were no survivors, they piled straw and poured paraffin over the bodies and set them alight.
As he watched black smoke billow up into the sky, Alois knew that it was carrying what was left of his soul to hell.
Paul heard somebody whimper, closer than the screaming from the church, and realized that the noise was coming from him. He cried properly then, real sobs, not caring if anyone heard him. A timber from the roof crashed into his ditch, and he howled. Smoke began to fill his den.
Every spring, Elodie smoked out the moles that wreaked havoc in her garden.
“They have to come out,” she explained. “Or they will suffocate.”
“But when they come out, you will kill them.”
“They don’t know that. They care only about the most immediate danger.”
Anger swelled from deep within him, breathing life back to his cramped limbs. That it should come to this! Cowering below ground like a helpless blind creature, smoked out by the Nazi equivalent of his great-aunt! There was no room in the den for Paul and his fury. To hell with the soldiers, their tanks, and their guns. To hell with the burning church and whatever else was going on out there! Paul erupted onto the market square with a bellow of rage, ready for anything. Through the smoke, he made out the shapes of soldiers with guns. Guns that had been trained on the church but that now were all on him. He turned and saw more men behind him. He froze. So did they. There was no way out.
Footsteps, and the smoke appeared to dissipate around the figure of a single man who strode toward him out of the gray, flanked by another soldier and the giant he remembered from the lake.
The leader stopped a few feet from Paul and examined him gravely. The big man did not look at him. The boy—Paul saw now that he was just a boy, only a little older than Luc—appeared to have been crying. He registered the fact without emotion, then dragged his eyes back to the leader.
“Well,” said the Captain. “What the hell do we have here?”
* * * * *
The Captain, Alois knew, was close to his breaking point. He knew it from the feverish glint in his eyes, and the tone of his voice, which for all its calm bordered on the hysterical. The slight frown, the pursed lips testified to his anger toward the people and circumstances that had allowed this to happen. The kid would have to be dealt with. Someone would have to kill him, but the solitary killings were always the hardest. Especially when the target was a child. Orders were orders, but everyone had a limit.
The Captain cleared his throat. “Private Bucher.”
“Sir?” Jonas sounded as if he were dying.
“Nothing.” It seemed even the Captain had a conscience. “Alois, I don’t suppose you . . . ”
“No, sir.”
“Even if I order you . . .”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“What difference,” murmured the Captain, “can one more make?”
“I won’t shoot a child in cold blood, sir.”
Together, they stared at the boy. He was filthy, his face streaked with dirt, his limbs covered in scratches, his clothes torn, his extraordinary red hair matted with grime. He half crouched before them like a cornered animal.
“I suppose it is a child,” mused the Captain. “Though it hardly looks like one. Where did it come from? Underground?”
“I believe so, sir.”
“But people don’t live underground, Alois. People live in houses. Animals live underground. That’s completely different.”
“With respect, sir, this child is not an animal.”
“When did you last talk to a child, Alois?”
“A long time ago, sir.”
“Hardly an expert then, are you? Private Bucher!”
“Sir!”
“Explain the rules of play to the prisoner.”
“He doesn’t know the rules, sir.”
“Well, then you tell Private Bucher, Alois, and he can translate. Is he or is he not my official interpreter?”
Alois took Jonas to one side to explain. “I won’t do it,” said Bucher. He began to cry again. “You can’t make me.”
“I’ll deal with him later,” said the Captain when Alois reported back.
He led the boy to the center of the square himself. From a distance, there was something almost intimate about the sight. The way they walked, with the Captain leaning forward, his hand on the boy’s shoulder, the boy’s face raised toward him—they could have been father and son out for a Sunday morning stroll.
“All done.” The Captain walked back to Alois’s side. “I told him to make for the far wall. I think it’s best if we focus on that one. If he gets past it, we let him go. I said he shouldn’t go back toward the village, there are too many houses burning, it would be dangerous.”
“Dangerous?”
“And I also told him it’s only me who’ll be shooting. That’s fair, isn’t it? To be honest, I don’t think the men would be too happy if I asked them. I mean, you don’t want to do it, and you’re completely used to this sort of thing.”
“Used to it . . .”
“Alois, I do believe you’re going senile in your old age.” The Captain drew his pistol from his belt. “On my count, give the signal. And for God’s sake stop repeating everything I say.”
Before the Occupation there was probably an animal fair on the village square on the first Saturday of every month, just like there was at home. Children would have petted horses and wet-nosed calves just separated from their mothers, chickens would have squawked in cages. There would have been bartering and negotiation, the smell of dung and fried food, the cries of cowmen and horse traders. But now there were several dozen soldiers on the edge of the square, indistinguishable from each other through the smoke. Burning buildings on three sides. A boy standing straight as an arrow in the center, his eyes trained on the wall of the only house not burning. Three men standing together. One with a pistol, another with a rifle, the third with his face in his hands. No sound but the crackling of fire.
“One,” said the Captain, and Alois raised his pistol.
The boy had been the same age as Wolf, and when they found him he was frozen solid.
“Two.”
The wind picked up, blowing fat clouds across the summer sky. A shaft of sunshine pierced the pall of smoke that hung over the square. Sun danced on ash, a pillar of light.
“Three.”
Clara. Her name meant light.
The Captain could hit a running rabbit from the back of a galloping horse. He could hit a single starling midflight. Once, after a vodka-induced argument in Belorussia, he had shot a button off another officer’s tunic from forty paces, before passing out cold for fourteen hours. The square was wide open. The kid didn’t stand a chance.
A cloud scudded over the sun. The pillar of light vanished only to reappear stronger than before when the cloud moved on. The Captain stood a few feet before him, but his eyes were trained on the boy. The pistol felt heavy in Alois’s hand. He raised it slowly. It would be so easy . . . so easy . . .
“For Christ’s sake, Alois, what are you waiting for?”
“I . . .”
“You!” The Captain barked at one of the privates on the edge of the square. “Give the signal.”
“Sir!”
The private’s pistol cracked, and the boy was running, and the Captain had taken his first shot. He missed by inches. On purpose, of course. He reloaded. His face was flushed. He was laughing. He was not here anymore, but on the heathlands of home, shooting hare, pheasant, deer. There was no sign now of the man close to his breaking point.
The Captain was enjoying himself.
His rifle was pressed against his cheek. The boy was fast. Two chances left, if he was quick about it. His finger was on the trigger, squeezing.
The sun grew brighter. A sob broke through Alois Grand’s lips. He dropped his gun. The boy, with an uncanny sixth sense, swerved to the right as the bullet whistled past him. The Captain swore.
The pillar of light was burning now, but nobody else appeared to see it. It swayed gently as the breeze blew through the swirling ash giving it, for a fleeting moment, the shape of a woman.
A woman dancing. A woman beckoning. A woman smiling upon him with forgiveness in her eyes, telling him what to do.
The line of the Captain’s cheek, smooth against the wooden rifle butt. Two bales of hay in a stable, a half-drunk bottle of vodka. A forest clearing, a bonfire for the dead. A gramophone record playing Puccini. The index finger of a manicured hand, pulling back a trigger. The long pale fingers of Clara as she worked. A single rose on his son’s bedside table.
Alois howled and threw himself against the Captain.
Baptiste had died hours ago.
Luc sat on the floor with his back against the wall, watching him. There was no light coming through the chink in the shutters anymore.
Soon, he thought. Soon, I will break out and go.
He tried to move but his limbs would not obey him.
Footsteps. His body came to life, and he was on his feet, bolting to hide behind the door, straining to listen. Whoever was there had a key. There was no sound of a door being forced, but someone was walking down the passage toward the kitchen, was in the kitchen now. Someone walking slowly with dragging steps, someone crying, someone calling out in a very small voice.
“Luc?”
“Ari!” he bellowed. “Oh my Christ! Ari! I’m in here!”
* * * * *
In the big bedroom at Lascande, Arianne sat curled in Luc’s lap in one of the gilt-edged armchairs. Their eyes were red from crying, their arms locked around each other. She tried to move, but he would not let her go. She pulled his head to her shoulder and pressed her cheek to his hair.
“It was my fault,” he whispered.
“No,” she murmured. “No, no, no.”
He got up and walked over to the window.
“Don’t open it,” she begged.
“No one’s going to come now.”
He leaned his hands on the sill.
“What should we do?” he asked.
“I don’t know. You’re shivering. Come away from the window.”
She coaxed him toward the bed then limped to the bathroom, where she washed in freezing water. He was asleep when she returned. She lit a candle and placed it in a lamp, then pulled the covers up around him and dropped kisses on his closed eyelids, just as she remembered her mother doing to her. He stirred and she tiptoed away carrying her lamp, back to the gilt-edged armchair where she sat and stared into the night.
Out in the woods, Paul stumbled, moonlight on his flaming hair. Every inch of him was filthy, and his face was streaked with tears. He did not think of where he was going, but he knew that there was only one place. A bend appeared in the road, and he saw the iron gates, standing ajar. He slipped through them, still keeping to the shadows. In the window at the end of the house, he saw his sister’s lantern.
The forest was dark and still. Paul stopped for a moment and breathed it in. Then he squared his shoulders and walked the small remaining distance toward the light.
Who knew that once you died you could see so clearly?
Samaroux burned on long after the soldiers left. Hours dead, and I saw everything. I saw the rats and crows nosing around the few corpses that had not been set alight, the dogs hungry for their evening meal. I saw the body of Alois Grand, killed by the bullet meant for Paul, and I saw Jonas Bucher and the pistol with which he took his own life. I saw a man crawl out of the cornfield where he hid when they took his family, and I saw villagers returned from town, bawling like babies. I saw my parents, my school friends, my neighbors. All dead. I saw Arianne and Paul and Luc, crying in the big house at Lascande.
I could have loved him, too. Oh, not like she does! She’ll love him till the day she dies. Me, I just fancied him. I saw him from my bedroom window and I thought, I’d like some of that. Those cheekbones, those lips! That breath of fresh air, straight up from the south! We could have had fun. I wish we had. I wish . . .
Mainly I wish that I were still alive.
We might have stopped it, too, Romy and Father Julien and I. We all knew where Luc was hiding, or at least where he was heading to. We could have led them straight there, but we didn’t. I wonder if it would have made a difference?
I think about a lot of things, now that I am alone. Our lies and betrayals, our quarrels and silences, our messy sacrifices. I think of all the things we do for love.
I think about Luc and Arianne together at Lascande and about what it means to be a hero.
I think that I loved her, and I’m glad she’s still alive.
I think, I did not want to die.
* * * * *
I should leave now.
I should follow the others. Mother and Father and Elodie, Thierry and Marc and Jérôme, Father Julien and Mayor Jarvis and Monsieur Félix. Romy and Alois and Jonas.
They’ve all gone. There’s only me left now.
The liberating armies never did come to Samaroux when the war ended. What would have been the point? They marched down other village streets, down boulevards strewn with flowers, cheered by girls who fell in love and children hopeful for sweets, while the pavement here vanished under grass and dirt. Those who do come walk our streets in silence, and the flowers they bring are for our common grave. Alois’s wife came, with her little boy. Monsieur Félix’s son returned from fighting with the Allies. Joseph Dupont’s brother, whose name is really Golstein and who escaped to England at the beginning of the war. And Arianne.
She came with her father and Paul and Luc. Her father drove them in a secondhand Citroën with a Bordeaux number plate. Bordeaux, where her mother studied! Close enough to remember, far enough to forget. She wore a new dress, and she looked so pretty.
They all cried except her. My uncle fell to his knees in the dirt and howled, and Luc cried quietly in front of the church. Paul made straight for his old house, climbed into the ruins of it, and refused to come out, but Arianne came to the graveyard. She laid wild carnations on her mother’s grave and then she came to us and sat on the grass right where we are all buried together.
“Hello, Sol,” she said.
That was all, but it was enough. She sat for a long time, and through her silence, I felt everything. Her grief, her confusion. Her hopes, too, for the future. I like to think it helped her, coming back. I like to think she felt me, too.
And then she also left.
I should stay. Who would speak for us if I went, too? Years from now when people stray here, I could tell this place’s secrets. Stop a while, I could whisper to them. See how the shadows sway in the breeze? Children were born here, fought, and made up. People loved and laughed and died. It wasn’t always like this. Stop a while, and I will tell this place’s story.
But then again . . . the sky is bright and beckoning, and I am quite alone. Where once I had a body, I now see earth and trees and stone. I have become insubstantial as the air, and I find I do not mind.
It is time for me to leave this place.
It is time for me to go.