Page 21 of The Girl You Left Behind
I sounded, even to my own ears, as if I was protesting too much. “Look,” I continued, forcing myself to sound conciliatory. “Save me some meat. Bring it back in a napkin. I can promise you that, if the Germans are given rations enough to feast on, I will make sure I help myself to a share. I will not suffer. I promise.”
They appeared mollified, but I couldn’t tell them the truth. Ever since I had discovered that theKommandantknew about the pig, I had lost my appetite for it. That he had not revealed his knowledge of its existence, let alone punished us, didn’t make me joyous with relief, but deeply uneasy.
Now when I saw him staring at my portrait, I no longer felt gratified that even a German could recognize my husband’s talent. When he walked into the kitchen to make casual conversation, I became stiff and tense, afraid he might mention it.
“Yet again,” the mayor said, “I suspect we find ourselves in your debt.” He looked beaten down. His daughter had been ill for a week; his wife had once told me that every time Louisa fell ill he barely slept for anxiety.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said briskly. “Compared to what our men are doing, this is just another day’s work.”
My sister knew me too well. She didn’t ask questions directly; that was not Hélène’s style. But I could feel her watching me, could hear the faint edge to her voice whenever the question of theréveillonwas raised. Finally, a week before Christmas, I confided in her. She had been sitting on the side of her bed, doing her hair. The brush stilled in her hand. “Why do you think he has not told anyone?” I asked, when I finished.
She stared at the bedspread. When she looked at me it was with a kind of dread. “I think he likes you,” she said.
•••
The week before Christmas was busy, even though we had little with which to prepare for the festivities. Hélène and a couple of the older women had been sewing rag dolls for the children. They were primitive, their skirts made of sacking, their faces embroidered stockings. But it was important that the children who remained in St. Péronne had a little magic in that bleak Christmas.
I grew a little bolder in my own efforts. Twice I stole potatoes from the German rations, mashing what was left to disguise the smaller amounts, and ferried them in my pockets to those who seemed particularly frail. I stole the smaller carrots and slid them into the hem of my skirt, so that even when I was stopped and searched, they found nothing. To the mayor I took two jars of chicken stock, so that his wife could make Louisa a little broth. The child was pale and feverish; his wife told me she kept little down and seemed to be retreating into herself. Looking at her, swallowed by the vast old bed with its threadbare blankets, listless and coughing intermittently, I thought briefly that I could hardly blame her. What life was this for children?
We tried to hide the worst of it from them as best we could, but they found themselves in a world where men were shot in the street, where strangers hauled their mothers from their beds by their hair for some trivial offense, like walking in a banned wood or failing to show a German officer sufficient respect. Mimi viewed our world with silent, suspicious eyes, which broke Hélène’s heart. Aurélien grew angry: I could see it building in him, like a volcanic force, and I prayed daily that when he finally erupted, it would not come at huge cost to himself.
But the biggest news that week was the arrival through my door of a newspaper, roughly printed and entitledJournal des Occupés.The only newspaper allowed in St. Péronne was the German-controlledBulletin de Lille, which was so obviously German propaganda that few of us did more with it than use it for kindling. But this one gave military information, naming the towns and villages under occupation. It commented on official communiqués and contained humorous articles about the occupation, limericks about the black bread, and cartoonish sketches of the officers in charge. It begged its readers not to inquire where it had come from, and to destroy it when it had been read.
It also contained a list it called Von Heinrich’s Ten Commandments that ridiculed the many petty rules imposed upon us.
I cannot tell you the boost that four-page scrap gave to our little town. In the few days up to theréveillon, a steady stream of townspeople came into the bar and either thumbed through its pages in the lavatory (during the day we kept it at the bottom of a basket of old paper) or passed on its news and better jokes face-to-face. We spent so long in the lavatory that the Germans asked if some sickness were going round.
From the newspaper we discovered that other towns had suffered our fate. We heard of the dreaded reprisal camps, where men were starved and worked half to death. We discovered that Paris knew little of our plight, and that four hundred citizens had been deported from Roubaix by the Germans and put to work. It was not that these pieces of information in themselves constituted anything useful. But it reminded us that we were still part of France, that our little town was not alone in its travails. More important, the newspaper itself was a matter of some pride: The French were still capable of subverting the will of the Germans.
There were feverish discussions as to how this might have reached us. That it had been delivered to Le Coq Rouge went some way to alleviating the growing discontent caused by our cooking for the Germans. I watched Liliane Béthune hurry past to fetch her bread in her astrakhan coat and had my own ideas.
•••
TheKommandanthad insisted that we eat. It was the cooks’ privilege, he said, on Christmas Eve. We had believed ourselves preparing for eighteen, only to discover that the final two were Hélène and me. We spent hours running around the kitchen, our exhaustion outweighed by our silent, unspoken pleasure in what we knew to be going on two streets from ours: the prospect of a clandestine celebration and proper meat for our children. To be given two whole meals as well seemed almost too much.
And yet not too much. I could never have turned down a meal again. The food was delicious: duck roasted with orange slices and preserved ginger, potatoesdauphinoisewith green beans, all followed by a plate of cheeses. Hélène ate hers, marveling that she would be eating two suppers. “I can give someone else my portion of pork,” she said, sucking a bone. “I might keep a little bit of the crackling. What do you think?”
It was so good to see her cheerful. Our kitchen, that night, seemed a happy place. There were extra candles, giving us a little more precious light. There were the familiar smells of Christmas—Hélène had studded one of the oranges with cloves and hung it over the stove so that the scent infused the whole room. If you didn’t think too hard, you could listen to the glasses clinking, the laughter and conversation, and forget that the next room was occupied by Germans.
At around half past nine I wrapped my sister up and helped her downstairs, so that she could climb through to our neighbors’ cellar and then out through their coal hatch. She would run down the unlit back alleys to Madame Poilâne’s house, where she would join Aurélien and the children, whom we had taken there earlier in the afternoon. We had moved the pig the day before. It was quite large by then, and Aurélien had had to hold it still while I fed it an apple to stop it from squealing, and, with a clean swipe of his knife, Monsieur Baudin, the butcher, slaughtered it.
I replaced the bricks in the gap behind her, all the while listening to the men in the bar above me. I realized, with some satisfaction, that for the first time in months I wasn’t cold. To be hungry is to be almost permanently cold, too; it was a lesson I was sure I would never forget.
“Édouard, I hope you’re warm,” I whispered into the empty cellar, as my sister’s footsteps faded on the other side of the wall. “I hope you eat as well as we have done this night.”
When I reemerged into the hallway I jumped. TheKommandantwas gazing at my portrait.
“I couldn’t find you,” he said. “I thought you would be in the kitchen.”
“I—I just went for some air,” I stammered.
“I see something different in this picture every time I look at it. She has something enigmatic about her. I mean you.” He half smiled at his own mistake. “You have something enigmatic about you.”
I said nothing.
“I hope I do not embarrass you, but I have to tell you. I have thought for some time that this is the most beautiful painting I have ever seen.”
“It is a lovely work of art, yes.”
