NINE
MARTHE
Chavaniac-Lafayette
February 1941
Just sign it, I tell myself, staring at the slip of paper on my school desk next to the pencil sharpener and the globe of the world. It’s another oath for teachers—this time, one of personal loyalty to Marshal Pétain. We’ll be dismissed if we don’t sign it. It’s just a matter of expedience. So why hesitate?
Maybe because rough sketches of Adrienne Lafayette litter my desk, and her big eyes seem to be judging me from more than a century ago . . .
I turn my chair so I don’t have to look at her. Now, after all, isn’t the time to develop a set of principles that’ll land me in the snow without a roof over my head. And for what—the satisfaction of sticking it in the old Marshal’s eye?
Our Latin master is talking about quitting, saying he has too much pride to sign. But pride is for suckers, so I slap my inky signature on the line and go up to the records office, where Anna is typing on an old machine that keeps sticking and Madame Simon is peering at a newspaper over the tortoiseshell rims of her cat-eye glasses. “What a disgrace,” the secretary-general of the Lafayette Memorial Foundation says, flinging the newspaper into the wastebin, then brushing at her tweed skirt as if the ugly headlines had spattered it with mud. I stoop to fish the pages out for the fireplace, but she stops me. “Leave it, Marthe. I know we can’t afford to waste paper, but Au Pilori is too poisonous for kindling.”
Au Pilori is an anti-Semitic newspaper in which prominent Jews are regularly denounced. We don’t often get copies here, but Madame Simon has Jewish blood, and I worry someone sent it to her for reasons other than general interest. I feel ashamed that I’ve come to turn in my oath of loyalty to the Marshal, who allows these denunciations to continue. I want to tell Madame Simon that I intend to be only as loyal to Marshal Pétain as he is to us, but I find I can’t justify myself. And Anna—who is now standing on the toes of her green spectator pumps to file something in a cabinet—shoots me a sympathetic look.
As for Madame Simon, she takes my oath without a word.
After my morning class, I retreat to my studio to blend charcoal lines and lose myself in thoughts about how to bring newer, modern Adrienne sketches to life as a sculpture. Clay is easier, faster, and requires a less expert touch. I can make mistakes in clay. But Adrienne and her saintly perfection seem to call out for stone. I’d love to try some rosy pink marble, with feather-fine chisel work . . .
I’m so consumed by these ideas that when Anna knocks at my door, I react much like I’ve been caught en flagrant délit. I hurriedly dust charcoal from my hands onto my overalls, and I’m disheveled when I fling open the door. “You didn’t come down to dinner,” Anna points out, a little worriedly. “And you let your fire die out!”
“I—I was distracted,” I say, blowing on my fingers, which I realize now are ice-cold. “I can’t wait for springtime. At the first thaw, Henri and I used to sneak into the woods at recess to find our favorite wild fruit tree and eat all the cherries even before they were ripe.”
“Cherries.” Anna moans, biting her lower lip in imagined pleasure. “I love them soaked in brandy and baked in a cherry clafoutis. When Henri returns, you’ll have to make him one.”
Afraid to think too much about Henri—or food—I cross my arms. “I don’t bake.”
“Luckily, you’ve got other talents,” she says, admiring my sketches. I hold my breath, wondering if she’ll notice the similarities. In portraying Adrienne, I’ve captured Anna’s eyes, the gentle slope of her shoulder, the almond shape of her mouth. If she notices the resemblance, she doesn’t say. “This is wonderful, Marthe! Actually . . . beautiful. What are you going to call it?”
“I don’t know.” I fiddle with my pencils. “Something laughably wholesome.”
Anna chuckles. “There’s nothing wrong with wholesome, ma chère.”
Ma chère. My mind turns the phrase over like a tumbler, smoothing out any rough edge, wondering if I really am dear to her, realizing how much I want to be. “You’re right. I guess we can’t be cynics about everything or we’d slit our wrists.”
She laughs. “Blasphemy!” While I’ve been sketching portraits and working my way through the dry history books about Lafayette’s wife, Anna, it seems, has been to the mayor’s office. She pulls two cards out of her pocket. “We just got these—we’re allowed to send them to the Occupied Zone and to our prisoners, I think. Even if you don’t have a current address for Henri, the Wehrmacht likely does. If nothing else, Germans are good record keepers . . .”
I stare resentfully at the interzone postcards. I see we’re supposed to circle or cross out preprinted messages such as in good health or wounded. And I hate the Nazis even more for treating us like animals without capacity to express ourselves beyond a circle or a strike. After so long without any word from Henri, I have a shaky moment where I wonder if it’d be worse for this damned card to disappear into the abyss of the wartime postal service or to get it back with the word killed in a circle.
Anna seems to know what I’m thinking. “It would be better to know, wouldn’t it?”
I’m not sure. I might prefer to live with delusions that Henri’s in a prison camp, tending to people, making them laugh, rather than to know if Henri’s gone—his roguish sense of humor, his dreams of becoming a doctor, just gone. “I don’t want to find out that I’m all alone, that I don’t belong anywhere, and that I don’t belong to anybody.”
Anna reaches for my hands. “Don’t say that.”
“It’s true. And unlike the cold, you never get used to it.”
It’s the orphan’s lament, but it shames me to complain—I hate myself for it. I can’t stand to look her in the eye, so I turn my back on her and the postcard, making it clear that I intend to get back to work . . . but she doesn’t let me. “Marthe, you’re not alone. You belong here at the castle. You belong to your friends.” She smiles. “You belong to me.”
You belong to me . . . I don’t know what she means by it. I don’t know what I want her to mean by it. I only know that her smile is angelic as newly fallen snow, whereas I suddenly feel like I’m boiling inside. If I didn’t know better, I’d almost think I had a crush on her—the sort silly girls used to have for boys in the orphanage. Feelings that make girls sigh and spy and write their names in a heart. I mocked them; I laughed at those feelings when they cropped up, telling myself I was too tough to have sappy thoughts like that. Even for Henri. And I scorned those feelings, because sometimes I had them for girls too . . .
Now Anna presses her forehead to mine to cheer me up. “You can be the sister I never had.”
“You have sisters,” I grumble.
“Yes, but I didn’t choose them.” Is she choosing me? That alluring idea is a cliff, and I’ll fall if I make one wrong move. At my silence, she gives my hand a squeeze. “If not sisters, then roommates, at least? Your fireplace is nicer than mine . . .”
“An artist likes her solitude,” I tease, but when she gives a little shiver, I give in. “I guess you can stay on the really cold nights.”
She beams like a girl used to getting what she wants. “I’ll be quiet as a mouse! And if you fill out your interzone card for Henri tonight, I’ll send it tomorrow with mine to my husband.”
At the mention of our men, I get hold of myself. “Thanks.”
I scratch the date on the card. Then I circle the words to tell Henri that I’m healthy, still at the chateau, and desperate for news of him. There’s no room to write more . . . no way to tell him how afraid I am for him, even if I could find words that I wouldn’t mind being seen by the censors. Even if I could understand the jumble of feelings seething inside me, seeming to slip further from my control by the day.
In March, we have two things to celebrate.
For one thing, Samir Bensaïd is back. Like Henri, Sam was taken prisoner in the Fall of France. He should be in a stalag somewhere in Germany, but he’s somehow here sitting in the old guardroom by the fire, hands squeezed between his knees.
“How did you escape, my dear boy?” asks Madame LeVerrier.
Sam explains, “On account of my dark skin, the Nazis didn’t know if they should transfer me to a prison camp or shoot me. And while they bickered about it, I grabbed one of their motorcycles and made off with it.”
“That took some real nerve!” I say, giving his shoulders a fond squeeze.
“I thought you might approve,” Sam replies, explaining that it’s taken him months to get back, get his papers in order, and be officially demobilized. “I’m sorry Henri’s still a prisoner,” he says, smile falling away. “I wish he could’ve escaped too.”
“Oh, you know he’ll be thrilled to hear that you got away,” I say. “He’ll make you tell him every detail when he’s released. Which I hope will be soon. The war can’t go on much longer, can it?”
“It’s over for me,” Sam says, taking a deep breath. “Now I just have to find a job.”
Fluent in several languages, Sam had wanted to be a diplomat and work in politics before the war. Given the current regime, he wants no part of that now.
“Not to worry, my boy,” Madame LeVerrier says, pressing a cup of tea into Sam’s hands. “We’ll find some work for you here at the castle—we need scouts, teachers, drivers, valets . . .”
We can afford to hire because we’re suddenly in the black again, which is our second reason for celebration. From New York, Madame Beatrice sent money and supplies to us via an American ship that was allowed through the British blockade. It’s our first shipment in nearly a year. Milk, vitamins, children’s clothing, and medicine—all stamped with the Stars and Stripes. Despite the damp weather, it’s like a festival day at the castle. Everyone on staff makes a line to relay wooden crates, cardboard boxes, and metal tins from the back of the truck into our storerooms. The only one not on hand to celebrate is the baroness, who went to Marseilles to liaise with the Red Cross to make sure we got this shipment.
When the weather gets warmer, we take our classrooms out into nature.
Dr. Anglade says direct sunlight and fresh air are part of the cure here at the Lafayette Preventorium. There’s a scientific explanation having to do with vitamins and ultraviolet rays that I’ve never understood. But from what Henri told me, infections spread easier inside. The main idea is to get the kids outside as much as possible, even if it’s chilly. So I gather my students and take them for a lesson sitting at outdoor picnic tables.
Afterward, Faustine Xavier is supposed to take them to the kitchens, where the students of the household management class often make our Sunday luncheon, but the baroness cancels that plan, because we don’t have any food to spare if one of the girls gets inattentive and burns something. As a result, I’m enlisted to take a troop of girls and comb the woods for edible leaves, nettles, roots, and stems now that our long, hungry winter is over.
Faustine should really come with me, since it’s her class, but she begs off. “I fear I might be coming down with a little something,” she says, exaggerating a cough beneath her tight lace collar. “Besides, why not take the baron’s daughter? You two are virtually inseparable these days.”
It’s true, we are. But something about the way Faustine says it bothers me, and later, when I tell Anna—who tromps along in the forest with me, wearing her best red lipstick, a stylish swing coat, and impractical shoes—she only laughs. “I ran into her on the stairs coming out of your room one morning, and she gave me an evil eye like a filthy-minded biddy.”
Anna doesn’t seem worried; in fact, she laces her arm in mine and says, “I forgot you were a Girl Guide, Marthe!”
“I’ve got all the badges,” I boast. “Camping. Fishing. First aid. Foraging.”
I don’t tell her that when I was ten, Henri, Sam, and I learned the hard way that red-capped toadstools are poisonous unless parboiled—and the induced vomiting was only slightly less memorable than the hallucinations.
“Look for wild garlic for our soups.” I stoop to show the girls the broad-leafed plant and teach them to rub it for the telltale scent. “Look for rosemary and fennel. If you fill your baskets, I’ll show you how to make flower salads.”
Little girls love learning they can eat wild pansies, elderflower, borage, poppies, and violets, and I watch them fan out while I gather a bouquet for Anna, who crinkles her nose. “What’s this?”
“Lunch. Weren’t you listening?” When Anna sniffs at the bouquet, pensive, I worry I’ve done something wrong. “What’s the matter?”
She sighs. “The Marshal isn’t coming to visit the kids in the preventorium after all.”
She says this like it’s a tragedy, but I’m unexpectedly flooded with relief.
“He’s decided to visit a school in Le Puy instead,” she explains. “But you mustn’t think your work has been wasted. In fact, my father is likely to meet with the Marshal and explain our mission at the preventorium. Papa is even willing to take you—and some of your sketches.”
I’m careful not to seem ungrateful. “I don’t know . . .”
“I’ll loan you my best dress. The one with the indigo stripes. It will really bring out your pretty blue eyes. And just think, maybe the Marshal will like your artwork and want to shake your hand.”
Despite blushing at Anna’s compliment, I can’t help but cringe. I know we need the Vichy government’s help to keep the preventorium running. We need more doctors, a new X-ray machine, blankets, soap, and countless other things. And I know I should just keep my mouth shut about it, but I confess the truth. “I don’t want to meet Pétain, and I’m glad he’s not coming here.”
“You shouldn’t be,” Anna scolds me. “It would’ve been a great honor! Don’t you know how often Maman and Aunt Bea wished to get Pétain’s uniform from one of his great battles to put next to the others in our museum?”
She means the uniforms of Generals Foch and Joffre—other heroes of the Great War. I know how loved Pétain used to be by the people who lived in this castle, but that’s changing now. “That was before he shook hands with Hitler.”
Anna makes a face. “I know. It’s terrible that he had to do that. But war makes people do terrible things. We just need to keep people’s spirits up and keep our opinions to ourselves. Just think, if the Marshal likes your work, you could be famous too.”
I pretend that doesn’t matter to me. It does. I always wanted to be a somebody in the world, but I’m starting to think I’d rather be a nobody in this world.
Gone with winter went my last excuse not to visit Henri’s mother.
My bicycle needs a new tire, so I start out on foot until a cabbage wagon passes, and I convince the farmer to take me as far as the fountain in Paulhaguet, where the oxen stop to drink. From there I walk to the Pinton farmhouse, a squat structure of black volcanic stone. Given the harsh winter, I expect the farm to be run-down, so I’m surprised to see the old sagging thatched roof has been replaced, and the broken fence Henri’s mother was always nagging him to fix has been mended. A skinny brown cow moos from its pen, but no one answers when I knock. Smoke billows from the chimney, so I knock again, but it isn’t until I start for the barn that Madame Pinton finally throws open the door of the main house and motions me inside.
In kerchief and black sweater over an old polka-dot peasant dress, she busies herself with a pot of herb tea on the hearth. It’s a point of French pride to offer hospitality, and she pours me a bowlful like it’s breakfast. I take it, acutely aware of her ring on my finger, with its unique gold wreath. Anna convinced me that for this visit, I should wear it on my finger instead of on a chain around my neck so as not to insult my future mother-in-law.
“You have news of Henri?” she asks brusquely.
“Not yet, madame . . .”
Most everyone in the local villages who has sons, husbands, and fathers in those German prison camps has heard from them by now. Even Anna received a short note back from her husband. But nothing from Henri.
I’m worried sick, and Madame Pinton must be too.
So I say, “Sam escaped, though, and he saw Henri’s capture last summer, so at least we know he was alive then.”
She shakes her head, the deep lines of a difficult life etched onto her face. “Do you know what I think? I think Henri escaped too. I think he’s with General de Gaulle.”
Now that’s a curveball I didn’t see coming. Not that I believe it; it’s been nine months since the disaster at Dunkirk, and if Henri is now walking around London with the Free French Forces, sipping Earl Grey during the Blitz, surely he’d have got word to us by now. No, what gives me whiplash is Madame Pinton bringing up de Gaulle—and saying the rogue general’s name like he’s the Second Coming.
Nine months ago, hardly anybody in Auvergne had ever even heard of de Gaulle, and if they had, they spat his name as a troublemaker. Has that changed? Madame Pinton is of good old French peasant stock—one of those rural farmers the Marshal venerates as the salvation of France. In fact, a portrait of Pétain dangles precariously from a nail above her old iron stove. Yet here she is, hoping her son has gone off to fight for the same rogue general the Marshal has tried in absentia and condemned to death.
Not knowing how to make sense of this, I sip the tea. “Is—is there anything I can do to help you get along?”
“Non, I have boarders now.”
“Boarders?”
“Jews,” she says. “French Jews from Paris. The father was in the army; now he helps on the farm. His oldest girl helps cook and sew. I give them a warm bed and soup and they’re content.”
Not like you, Marthe, she means. You could never be content as the wife of a country doctor, cooking and sewing and raising livestock on this farm.
I try not to wonder if she’s right; instead, I remind myself that if I’d married Henri before he mobilized, she’d be in the place of a mother to me now. Softening her is probably a lost cause, but I give it a try. “I brought something for you.”
I hand her a little sketch of Henri. One I drew on his sixteenth birthday when he still had a gap between his teeth. The drawing is precious to me, but I feel like he’d want his mother to have this one. And, taking it, she almost smiles. “I’ve heard you’re drawing for those rich LaGrange ladies with their big hats now.” I start to remind her that it was rich ladies with big hats who saved us both from certain poverty, but before I can get a word in, she grinds out, “I didn’t put my husband in the ground so the Boche could steal my country and bring back feudal days with nobles in the castles again!”
I almost laugh at this absurd gripe, because the current situation in France is a dark tragicomedy. Our royalist fringe is propping up the old Marshal, who now has more power than any French king going back for centuries. Still, Anna and her family never act like their noble titles are anything more than honorary. “The LaGranges aren’t like you think.”
“Fat aristos?” asks Madame Pinton, gulping her tea. “I heard they fled the country like émigrés at the start of the war . . .”
She flings both aristos and émigrés like the insults they’ve been ever since the French Revolution, and I have to explain, “They didn’t flee at the start of the war. They were in America because the baron was on a mission to get Roosevelt to sell us warplanes.”
“And how did that turn out?”
I grind my jaw, wondering if she’s just determined to be petty! “My point is, they could’ve stayed in America. Instead, they came back to keep the preventorium running. We’re doing good work there.”
“Teaching children to bow and scrape to the Nazis while your baron makes deals with his friends in Vichy . . .”
He’s not my baron, and I didn’t come here for an argument, but she’s asking for one. “That’s rich coming from the woman who has a picture of the Marshal over her stove!”
Madame Pinton glowers, leaving me to try to make sense of nonsense. Maybe she thinks the Marshal is playing some kind of double game. That only his advisors in Vichy are wicked. Who knows what she thinks, or what anyone else thinks? Lately public opinion is like a surreal painting, where contradictory beliefs and prejudices melt together like Dalí’s clocks.
I think Madame Pinton is ignorant and muleheaded. She grunts as if she thinks the same about me, and would like to be rid of me. Truthfully, I’m just as eager to go, but when I get up to leave, I hear wailing from upstairs in the wood-beamed loft. “Is there—is that a child?”
Madame Pinton folds her arms over herself and calls up, “It’s all right. You can come down. Like I said, it’s only my son, Henri’s, girl.”
A family comes down from the loft. The father—a man wearing a tricolor pin on his collar—introduces himself as Uriah Kohn. He’s trying to quiet the sobbing, curly-haired kid he’s got over one shoulder. There are two older children too, a coltish brunette wearing thick knee socks, whom I judge to be about thirteen, and a boy—only a little younger—who hasn’t quite grown into his big ears.
“I’m Marthe Simone,” I say.
“Bonjour, mademoiselle,” says Monsieur Kohn shamefacedly. “This is my son, Daniel,” he says, reaching to give a quick mussing-up of the boy’s hair over his too-big ears.
The boy grins at me.
Then the father glances to the coltish teen. “My daughter Josephine.”
The crop-haired Josephine does not grin; I can tell she hasn’t decided if I’m worth knowing, and I like her for that. Then the father presses his lips to the forehead of the crying kid in his arms, who is racked by a worrisome, rattling cough. “This is my little Gabriella. It’s her sixth birthday, but she’s not so happy today.”
I can see that. Her cheeks are rosy from crying, and her wild hair is matted with tears. I notice her skin is also glistening. “She looks feverish.”
“It comes and goes,” her father replies.
Working with frail children on a daily basis, I know that a cough—even a fever—isn’t necessarily anything to panic about, but the scabby lesion on Gabriella’s ear sends a prickle down my spine, because I’ve learned the telltale signs of tuberculosis. “She needs to have that looked at.”
Madame Pinton says, “Dr. Boulagnon has been treating her in exchange for eggs and cabbages. He recommends admittance to the Lafayette Preventorium.”
I nod. “That’s best. We have X-ray and ultraviolet-ray machines and the most advanced pediatric care in Auvergne.” When I see the child’s father already shaking his head, I add, “The preventorium isn’t too far. A short drive; you could walk it in an hour and a half if you had to.”
“No,” says Monsieur Kohn, very firmly.
“It’s a charitable foundation,” I stress, because they must be hurting for money if they’re paying the doctor in cabbages. “I’m sure something can be worked out.” Before he can object, I quickly rattle off the requirements. “All you have to do is have Dr. Boulagnon fill out a medical report, sign an authorization, submit a family history and a school certificate of vaccinations and good conduct. I’ll get you the forms; it’s easy as pie.”
He looks torn, but tells his children, “Go do your chores.”
Josephine mopes to the rustic door, but out of the corner of my eye I see Daniel stick out his tongue before he disappears into the yard.
Then Monsieur Kohn addresses me. “I’m sorry, mademoiselle. I know you mean well, but with times being what they are, we can’t call attention to ourselves.”
“Then it’s strange you’ve come to Auvergne.” This is a rural, almost tribal, place where people aren’t always friendly to strangers; he wouldn’t stand out so much in a city like Marseilles.
“I have a sentimental attachment to the area,” he says.
I don’t ask what it is. Even so, what does he expect? This isn’t occupied Paris; we’re still France, after all, aren’t we? “Trust me, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more isolated spot than Chavaniac. It’s a tiny village surrounded by woods.”
“I know where it is,” he says.
“Then you know there’s not a German soldier in sight.”
“Not yet,” Monsieur Kohn says grimly. “I have family in Poland. If you knew what the Nazis are doing there, you’d know how much worse things will get for us here. The detention camps in France are just a start.”
A spike of frustration that he’s not getting adequate care for his daughter makes me clench my jaw. “You should worry about tuberculosis! French citizens don’t have to worry about refugee camps.”
“I’m French for now,” he says bitterly; he explains that it’s bad enough he’s been dismissed from the military because he’s Jewish. Worse to live with the knowledge that our government has been withdrawing citizenship from naturalized Jews.
The injustice of it—and the fear and uncertainty that it’s sowing—is brought home to me, and too obvious for me to argue. “Again,” says Monsieur Kohn, “I know you mean well, but we can’t have records that make us easy to find. I should put my little girl down to bed now. It was nice to meet you, mademoiselle.”
He disappears so swiftly I can’t get another word in, and when Madame Pinton walks me to the door, I hiss, “Where is the mother? Someone needs to have some sense. Tuberculosis is contagious, and you’re all in close quarters here. It can be deadly.”
“The mother is already dead,” says Madame Pinton. “Death takes people like her—not disappointed old women like me.” She looks down at my drawing of Henri and sighs. “If my son were here, he’d know what to do.”
“I know exactly what he’d do. Henri would get that kid admitted to the preventorium tout de suite.”
She eyes me. “Or he’d talk the doctors into treating the child on the side so no one knows they’re Israelites.”
I frown at her suggestion; there isn’t any on the side. There are strict procedures. I couldn’t bring a kid into the examination hall or the X-ray lab without paperwork for Dr. Anglade to examine and hand off to Madame Simon for her file cabinets. “I’ll send you the forms in case Monsieur Kohn changes his mind. But there’s nothing else I can do.”
None of this should be my problem—but it is my problem, because failing to report being exposed to contagion is grounds for dismissal at the preventorium, ever since a teacher accidentally exposed her students to scarlet fever and we had an epidemic in the village. Dr. Anglade says tuberculosis isn’t that easy to catch if you’re not breathing the same air for a while, but I can’t take the chance. I’m brooding about it when I finally get back to the castle and trudge my way up the stairs of the square tower.
Fortunately Madame Simon is still behind the gleaming walnut expanse of her large desk, a stylish pleated turban on her head and a gold pendant dangling from her neckline as she organizes folders.
“I wasn’t sure you’d still be in the office,” I say, keeping my distance.
“I want to get our staff’s paperwork ready for the new law.” She means the one that will soon require every French person to carry an identity card. “How can I help you, mademoiselle?”
I see my own file in the stack and absently thumb through it. “I visited Madame Pinton and came into contact with a little girl—she was coughing, feverish, and I noticed a lesion.”
Madame Simon looks up sharply, because although she’s not a doctor, she’s a well-respected expert in public health. “A lesion or a rash?”
She’s worried about measles, which by some miracle I’ve never had, so I’m not immune. “A lesion. I think.”
“Well, Dr. Anglade is going to say Better safe than sorry. You’ll have to take a week off and go into quarantine. I’ll ask Madame LeVerrier to take over your classes and have meals sent up for you. Let us know if you get so much as a sniffle.”
“Okay.”
I’m about to put down my file and go when Madame Simon asks, “What about the child? Has she been seen by a physician?”
“The village doctor in Paulhaguet . . .” I begin, intending to explain, but my words trail off when I see something in my paperwork that makes the world drop beneath my feet.
“Is something wrong?” Madame Simon asks.
Yes, something is wrong. Something so wrong that my knees—and my voice—actually wobble. “Where did this file come from?”
Madame Simon tilts her head. “I pulled it from the record cabinets. Why?”
“I have a birth record,” I say, my eyes focusing on the one thing that absolutely shouldn’t be on that page.
My mother’s name.