1943
Gunshots. Must be what woke her.
It’s not quite five in the morning. Hélène flinches. She hears the sound of boots. Then hears her own heart making more noise than the boots downstairs. Lucien’s not in the bed anymore. She thinks, the cellar. He’s gone down to the cellar as usual. Nothing can happen to him since there’s no light. Lucien has always been able to move in the dark.
She’s naked. Yesterday evening, they read until late. She grabs a dress. Buttons it up all wrong. Goes down in her bare feet.
They are in the kitchen at the bottom of the stairs. There are six of them. Two are in uniform, two in civvies, and the last two are French policemen Hélène’s never seen before. They smell of sweat and cigarette smoke. They undress her with their eyes, coldly. One of them is holding a gun. They say words she doesn’t understand.
Just then, four other men, two civilians and two officers, come up from the cellar with Lucien. Blood is trickling from his mouth. He’s very pale. He looks at her. She finds him thin. As if he’d already been gone a long time. As if he’d been deprived of everything for years, when in fact she’s just spent the night by his side. Lucien shouts at her:
“Don’t come down, go back up to the bedroom!”
But she doesn’t listen to him, she rushes down the stairs and says to him: “I’m coming with you.” Lucien says no. It’s the first time Lucien has said no to her.
Then she addresses the four men who are gripping him tightly:
“I’m coming with you. Let me come with you.”
One of the four leaves the group and slaps her, unbelievably hard, in the face. Hélène bangs her head on the banister and collapses, tasting blood in her mouth, hearing Lucien scream. She hears shots.
Hélène lies on the floor. She glimpses Lucien’s feet moving away. Just his shoeless feet dragging on the ground, as if attached to the legs of a collapsed marionette. She doesn’t have the strength to get up.
She can feel the howls in her chest. Those she’s stifling so Lucien doesn’t hear them. The two French policemen she’s never seen before go back down to the cellar.
She tries gripping onto the walls of the corridor to lift herself up but is overcome with dizziness. Before her head hits the floor again, she sees Simon. One policeman is holding him by the arms, the other by the feet. His skull has been blown apart by the bullets. He’s still wearing the gray sweater she knitted for him, in moss stitch. Knit one, purl one. She hears one of the policemen say, “Where do Jews get buried?” And the other one reply: “Don’t know that they do.”
At five-thirty, silence.
At six, Baudelaire finds her lying on the floor in the corridor and helps her up. Knit one, purl one is all she’s able to say to him.
Hélène and Baudelaire go down to the cellar and find Simon’s violin and hat on the floor. The few clothes she had made for him, burnt. His empty plate from that night’s meal placed on a wooden crate. The three of them had supper together in the cellar yesterday evening. A clear broth of turnips and potatoes. Simon was always happy to eat. Even when it was disgusting, Simon would smile.
She looks at the imprint of his body in the old mattress. Caresses what remains of him with the back of her hand. She sees again the blood and flesh where his smile should have been. His smile, knit one, purl one. She lies down on the bed, in Simon’s imprint, to offer to his memory what she never gave to him.
As the years passed, she had sensed Simon’s love for her changing, growing, as a child grows. The child that Lucien and she weren’t able to produce. Simon’s love had moved from childhood to adolescence, and, in recent months, had reached maturity. Like an adult. Lucien had noticed it, but had the good grace to say nothing. There were plenty of guys who looked lovingly at Hélène from the other side of the bar.
Where have they taken Simon’s body? Why didn’t they arrest her, too?
For days on end, the villagers try to track Lucien down.
He’d left the village in a truck on the day of his arrest. Hélène asks questions, implores, but gets no answer. She even cycles to the German HQ closest to Milly. A manor house commandeered by the Germans, set in open country at a place known as Le Breuil. She pedals away for hours. She succeeds in meeting an officer who speaks only broken French. He barks that Lucien was arrested for high treason, that he hid a Jew. She doesn’t understand the word he repeats in a menacing tone: Royallieu, Royallieu.
Terrified, she senses that she must leave, she senses that Lucien isn’t dead, and that she now has only one thing to do: stay alive. She gets back on her bike and pedals in the opposite direction, towards her café. Night is falling. It takes her hours to get home: every time she hears the sound of a motor, she dives into the ditch so as not to be seen.
When she finally arrives, it must be three or four in the morning. The village is silent. And yet she can still hear someone talking, denouncing them, her, Lucien, and Simon. Which customer was it?
She scratched her knees on the brambles. She’s bleeding, but isn’t in pain. Her back tire is punctured. She enters her midnight-blue bistro. She airs the entire place, and just sits at a table, waiting for the smell of the men, the sweat, and the cigarette smoke to go away. She thinks again of what the officer had repeated, “Royallieu.” What could it mean? She thinks again of Simon; no one knows where his body is.
In the silence of her café, as the wind blows through from all the half-opened windows and doors, she gradually becomes aware of it. Then, it’s obvious: the seagull isn’t there anymore. Hélène is so used to living with it that she hadn’t even noticed. She hasn’t heard it all day. Hasn’t seen it. Hélène goes back outside. The church is plunged in darkness. The sky is black. The quarter moon is hidden behind a large cloud. Nothing. She calls it, stands back and looks up at the roof of the café. Nothing.
The seagull has gone. It’s the first time since that day at school. It must have followed Lucien.
Hélène considers this; everything’s going so fast. For as long as she doesn’t see her seagull, Lucien will be alive.