Camille peeped through the bedroom curtain, the clenching tightness in her shoulders not easing even after her husband walked out the door. The clank of rusty hinges carried through the still morning air as Jean-Paul yanked open the garden gate. His gait was slightly bowlegged, a legacy of rickets and malnourishment, a poverty-stricken childhood. He turned south, where the road forked toward the village of Noyelles-sur-Mer. A cloud obscured the horizon, dimming the early sunlight, and for a moment all Camille could make out was Jean-Paul’s silhouette, the canvas knapsack turning him into a hunchbacked monster.
A slight injury early in the war and his stated occupation of railway worker, essential to the war effort, had allowed him to avoid further military duty. Jean-Paul used to come home between shifts, but as the tolls of war mounted and more men enlisted, the railway put their remaining crew on longer and longer shifts, sometimes for seventy-two hours at a time. But even those absences weren’t long enough for Camille.
Moments later a small donkey cart came over the rise, their neighbor the farmer Fournier with a load of winter cabbages. Old Fournier was easy to recognize, his broad figure draped in an indigo-blue smock and driving a red cart, bright slabs of color against the dull yellows and browns of harvested fields. The scene could’ve been painted by Cézanne.
The cart stopped and Jean-Paul climbed on beside the farmer. It was market day in St. Valery-sur-Somme, across the canal beyond Noyelles, undoubtedly Fournier’s destination. Jean-Paul would jump off at the Noyelles train station for another long shift on the Nord, the northern railway line. Camille didn’t know what else her husband might be doing and she didn’t want to know. What mattered was that he would be away.
She lay on the bed and gave in to a moment of weariness, waited until her churning insides calmed, nausea subsiding as her body understood it was safe for her muscles to loosen and breathing to slow. She turned over so that she faced the window, not wanting to smell Jean-Paul’s hair oil on the pillow, the sour sweat of his body on the sheets. She’d change the bed when she came home from work. If he was away overnight, then she could sleep alone in luxury, her limbs sliding under clean linens scented with lavender, her body longing for . . . no. She wouldn’t think about him. Or about what she had to do on her own.
At the mirror, she pressed more powder above her left cheekbone. The bruise beside her hairline had faded since the previous evening and as long as she stayed indoors, away from bright sunlight, it wouldn’t be obvious. She tied a kerchief around her head and tugged a stray lock to fall across the yellowing mark.
In the kitchen, she boiled some water and dropped a few dried mint leaves in a mug. Their coffee, carefully meted out each morning, was reserved for Jean-Paul. She didn’t mind going without coffee, but of all the rationed foods, she missed sugar the most. After a slice of last night’s baguette with some cheese, it was time to go. She rolled up a clean calico smock and stuffed it in her satchel for the ride into town.
As Camille cycled to the post office, the sun finally broke free of the cloud bank, casting an amber glow across the horizon beyond Crécy Forest. For a moment she thought she heard cannon fire, then reminded herself that fighting in their region had ceased. The rumbling noises more likely came from the reverberation of trucks carrying soldiers to the front. After years of war, her ears were attuned to real or imagined sounds of artillery. Thankfully, since the fighting near Cambrai ended in October, the front lines had been moving steadily east, away from the Somme Valley.
The tide had turned against Germany and its allies, or so the newspapers declared. There were rumors of peace negotiations and news of civilian unrest in Germany, where the kaiser was being pressured by his own government to abdicate. There was talk of an armistice but until then, the fighting continued. But the end was in sight, everyone said. And then their armies would demobilize, their men return from the front.
And she would give up her job at the post office.
Brightening skies promised a clear day, a rare thing this time of year. The walk to Noyelles didn’t take long, less than an hour, but after work she wanted to drop by the château in case there was some sewing work to pick up, so she had taken her bicycle and attached the small, homemade trailer to the back. She pedaled slowly through familiar farmland, the shrubbery along the road brown and soggy, bereft of summer’s lush foliage. She passed the château and barely gave it a glance. It held too many memories, not all of them pleasant.
Another ten minutes and she reached the fence surrounding the Chinese Labour Corps camp. The yard was already busy, smoke and steam rising from the kitchens, men queueing up outside the mess hall. The camp had been built more than a year ago but Camille still couldn’t get used to the sight of its ugly barbed wire fencing. It resembled a stockade more than a camp.
At the post office, she tied on the calico smock and began her half day of work. She started by sorting through mail that had come in the previous afternoon. Her heart clenched briefly at the sight of French Army stationery. In the days and weeks after Rossignol, after Verdun, after the Somme, it seemed as though tragedy cascaded through her hands with every piece of mail. Families destroyed, lives maimed and forever changed. There were only two such envelopes today, thank goodness, but it was still too many.
She paused to look at a postcard addressed to Marie-France Fournier, Old Fournier’s youngest girl, from her cousin Thérèse. Thérèse, bolder than most, had left Noyelles to take a factory job in Paris. Camille knew Marie-France had wanted to follow her cousin, work at a factory and earn money of her own, but both her brothers had enlisted and now only she and her mother were there to help work the fields.
Camille read the untidy handwriting.
Ma chère cousine, I spend all day filling artillery shells and the evenings strolling past store windows filled with elegant things. What fun we could have, if only you could come to Paris. Your loving Thérèse who misses you.
If only you could come to Paris. Those scribbled words seemed meant for Camille. She longed to see Paris again. If she had taken a factory job there, she could’ve spent her days off visiting museums and galleries—the ones still open—to stand in front of paintings that changed how she saw the world. But, of course, it was impossible since she was a married woman. And Jean-Paul was scornful of women who worked in factories.
“No respectable female would leave their husbands and homes,” he said, “only low-class women. Unmarried and willing to work alongside dirty foreigners. Whores.”
But when the postal service began hiring women to replace men who had gone to war, it was all right with Jean-Paul for his wife to work at the post office. It was a respectable job in town with modest but welcome wages. Camille suspected the real reason Jean-Paul agreed was that it gave him a chance to get friendlier with the Dumonts, the postmaster and his wife, who were prominent citizens of Noyelles.
Before the Nord railway line got so busy and Jean-Paul was away all the time, he liked to visit the post office around closing time, when Camille was tidying the back rooms, ostensibly to walk her home, but really because he wanted to socialize with the Dumonts. Jean-Paul and M. Dumont talked about the war, the price of food, and often as not, the disruptions caused by foreigners in their little town. British, Canadian, and Australian soldiers were stationed there. And there were also Chinese workers. On principle, Jean-Paul didn’t like foreigners, not even refugees from neighboring Belgium, and the Chinese were decidedly foreign. He grumbled at newspaper photographs of brigades arriving in Marseilles from Indochina, at accounts of British troops and Indian Sikhs marching through France on their way to the front. But at least they were soldiers.
“It’s one thing to bring soldiers from our colonies to help us fight, even if they’re only short little Orientals,” he said, “but these Chinois aren’t going into battle for us. Digging and carrying. That’s all they’re doing.”
“Digging trenches, loading fuel for tanks and vehicles, repairing roads and railway tracks after aerial attacks. The machinery of war has many parts, Jean-Paul,” M. Dumont said. “Napoleon was a brilliant tactician because he understood the logistics of supplying his armies. He could’ve run a modern postal system.” M. Dumont liked pointing to the postal service as a model of efficiency.
He droned on a little longer, reminding his audience that using Chinese labor for the manual work of the war freed up more French and British to fight. That the Allies wouldn’t have brought in workers from so far away, at such expense, unless they desperately needed the manpower. Manpower to unload and load cargo at the docks and supply depots, plow and plant fields so that farms still grew wheat for bread, work in armaments factories so that tanks and guns didn’t run out of ammunition
But while Jean-Paul didn’t like the Chinese, he didn’t mind making money off them. When he heard that the workers liked buying Western clothing, Jean-Paul ransacked the armoire in Camille’s father’s bedroom, then went to the camp on a payday with a sack full of her dead father’s clothes.
“They paid me what I asked for, the stupid chintoks,” he boasted. “So many of them all wanting these old clothes so much they barely haggled.”
A few days later, Camille saw a tall Chinese strolling along the main street in Noyelles, one hand straightening the lapels of a familiar waistcoat. Her annoyance faded when she saw how gently the man touched the garment’s brocade front and brass buttons, pride and pleasure evident in his face. Jean-Paul shrugged when she pointed at the man, wearing the waistcoat he had sold behind her back.
“They’re like children,” he said contemptuously. “Dressing up in our clothes, putting everything on the wrong way. He’s got it buttoned over that ridiculous tunic.”
“But you’re the one who sold it to him,” she said, her voice just above a whisper. She winced as his fingers tightened on her arm. Then he loosened his grip to make a slight bow as an elderly couple walked past. The mayor, M. Etienne Gourlin, and Mme Gourlin.
Camille shook her head at the memory.
She finished sorting the mail into four bags and set them down by the back door for Emil to pick up. She put a dried-out carrot from her cellar on top of the bags, a small treat for the donkey that pulled Emil’s mail delivery cart.
No, she thought, Jean-Paul didn’t have a problem taking money from the Chinese.
And he’d kill her if he ever found out she was in love with one.