In the heart of Annecy, Henry stood by a canal threading its way through the city. Just as the lake was cradled within mountains that rose sharply from its shores, the canal was framed tightly by rose and gray-green stucco buildings. Pots of geraniums, hanging from wrought iron balconies and bridges, reflected as red dots in the still waters as the entire street replicated itself upside down in the blue mirror. Moored boats floated in water and clouds. Here and there snow-white swans drifted by, asleep, heads bent under wings. Henry was amazed they hadn’t been stuffed for Sunday dinner. Annecy’s aura was so peaceful, so intact compared to the destruction of Vassieux. Maybe Madame was all right after all.
Henry had never really made it into Annecy before. He’d hidden in Madame’s elegant house on its edge. But he remembered that the canal linked the lake with a river. Her walled mansion was by a river. So he followed the canal. Along the waters came the sound of conversation, laughter, dickering. He began to see people with baskets, filled with fish or handfuls of rutabagas or onions.
“Il y a des oeufs à vendre!” A man trotted by Henry and shouted across the canal to a friend that there were eggs for sale.
The friend started jogging a parallel route. “Et quoi d’autre? Tu sais?”
“Des cerises!”
“Superbe!” The man darted across a bridge to join the other and the two continued to lope down the street.
Eggs for sale. And cherries. Henry followed.
Around a bend the small street opened into a square jammed with people and carts. Nothing was in abundance, but the townsfolk seemed ecstatic that any food was for sale. Henry couldn’t get near the egg vendor, so many crowded him. But he did approach a woman selling milk from huge tin jugs. Her donkey cart was pulled by a massive dog. It looked mighty antsy harnessed up, clearly unused to the job. There was no way Speed would stand still for pulling that thing, thought Henry. He wondered what might have happened to her pony—confiscated, eaten?
“Combien?” Henry asked how much for a cup.
“Avez-vous votre carte de rationnement?” she asked.
Henry had no ration card.
The woman shrugged. “Tant pis.” Tough luck.
Henry looked over at a wagon with knots of dark flat bread and started for it.
“Vous ne pouvez pas acheter du pain si vous n’avez pas une carte de rationnement.” The woman stopped him, saying he’d need a ration card for the bread as well. She looked him up and down coldly, assessing.
Henry tried to gauge what she was thinking. She was slim, angular, her skin sallow, but with ten more pounds on her she’d be rather pretty. He couldn’t tell her age exactly, but she was probably not much older than he was. It was her slightly cunning expression that aged her.
In a lowered voice, she offered to sell him a ration card for bread for 150 francs. Henry wondered how she’d come by it. Was it stolen, or counterfeited? How much trouble could he get into for using it if he were caught?
His stomach growled loud enough for her to hear. She smirked. Henry tried to decide if he should spend the equivalent of three dollars for the card. He’d have to pay more for the bread itself. He’d already eaten three cans of Spam, taking him down to nine. He better save them for days he was crossing open country. “D’accord,” he agreed, explaining he only had American dollars.
The woman’s eyebrows shot up. For a moment a desperate eagerness crossed her face before she adopted a nonchalant disinterest. She could not change American money, she said, what did he take her for, a bank?
Henry began to see the game. The smallest bill he had on him was a fiver. That would take him down to $191. As he considered, he noticed the dog’s ribs, her toe tapping nervously. What was he going to do, chintz a girl who obviously had lost her farm horse, whose dog was skin and bones, and who was that worked up about the idea of five bucks? His good heart got the better of him.
Henry pulled out his five dollar bill and looked over at the bread cart again. The loaves looked dry and hard. He’d sure love a cup of that milk. Would she give him a cup for a pack of Camels?
Again, the girl’s eyes widened momentarily at his offer. Then she veiled them, looking down, pretending it was a big imposition on her, but she could see he was hungry, so out of pity she’d take the cigarettes. When she gave him the tin cup and took the cigarettes and money, her hands trembled.
Henry sat down on his bag with the milk and the tiny loaf. The milk tasted slightly sour, but he needed it to get the barley bread down. When he handed the cup back to the girl and strode off, he heard her snigger and say to the bread girl what a fool he was. She would have given him all the milk for one pack of Camels. She planned to make eighty francs off each individual cigarette.
Henry kicked himself. The sea captain had said that he could live off those Camels for a month if he were smart about it. Well, he’d better wise up, hadn’t he, if he expected to eat in France.
“Monsieur?”
A boy about Pierre’s size and age stopped him. He held a long flat basket laden with big, gorgeous cherries for sale. “Vous voulez acheter des cerises? Une poignée pour quinze francs?”
Fifteen francs for a handful of cherries. That was only thirty cents. Henry did have two quarters in his pocket. And a half pack of gum. The boy looked so hopeful. Henry’s resolve to be more money savvy instantly faltered—this boy reminded him too much of Pierre. Henry would just be more careful about his money tomorrow.
He asked the boy if he would take fifty cents, American. He handed him the gum, a gift.
The boy grinned, delighted. “Pour moi?” he asked.
Henry nodded and asked in muddled French if he needed a ration card for the cherries.
The boy shook his head. Most fruits and vegetables were not rationed, just meat and eggs, and bread, and milk, and wine, and sugar, and paper, and leather, and coal, and…The boy trailed off, perhaps realizing that it was easier to say what was not rationed.
He wrapped a handful of the deep red fruit in a scrap of newspaper.
Henry was about to ask the boy where he lived when a woman fluttered up in great excitement over the cherries. She must have heard Henry talking with the boy and spoke to him in English. “Excuse me, sir. I must see the year’s first cherries.” She was well dressed, but like them all, thin and pale. A flush of happiness lit up her face as she surveyed the fruit. “Mon Dieu. Elles sont belles.” She patted the boy’s face, telling him that his farm must be doing well, that he brought her hope for a better season, of France blooming again.
The boy beamed back. “Oui, madame, elles sont excellentes cette année.”
She purchased two handfuls, the boy heaping them. Henry was startled to see tears on her cheeks as she gently balanced the cherries. She turned to him, with a smile that was both embarrassed and jubilant. “Today, my son’s name is on the list of released prisoners. He is coming home. I will make a clafoutis for him with them. It is his favorite. He loves cherries, since he was a boy.”
She tiptoed away as if any jostle might bruise the precious fruit. “My son is coming home,” she said to anyone she encountered. “My son.”
People parted to let her pass.
Watching, Henry’s throat tightened. He remembered Lilly’s face when she saw him standing in their driveway, alive; Madame Gaulloise’s voice when she spoke of her own son in a Nazi POW camp; Pierre’s mother explaining why she risked her life to work in the maquis—for her son’s freedom.
Then he recalled crawling over the wall to Claudette’s orchard, when he was starving—what a gift the cherries growing there had seemed.
Ever so carefully, instead of eating them himself, Henry tucked the cherries into his coat to save for Madame Gaulloise and her son in case they somehow had survived.
He continued on.