Bella... A French Life (15 page)

My mother always called my father Rody, and on the love letter she wrote him after he passed away and which Marius and I slipped between his ice-cold, stiff fingers – fingers, which would never hold our hands again - that was also how she addressed him.
My dear dear darling Rody
.

Standing at my father’s side, the axe and the logs he had chopped, at their feet, my mother grabbed me by both my ears, by the lobes, and twisted them with all her might, so that I cried out with pain.

“You little bitch! Go to your room!”

I ran to my room to sit in a corner, my knees pulled up and my hands over my aching ears and I cried tears of shame. Sorrow and shame. Sorrow, because I knew everything there was to know about what the Germans did in the Second World War from books I helped myself to - ok, to be honest, which I had stolen - on the Wednesday afternoons on which our class was taken to the lending library in Avranches.

And shame not only because I had hurt my wonderful father, but because I did not want anyone to know I was half German.

Only years later, I was already studying medicine at the Sorbonne in Paris, did my mother ask me what happened at school that day and when I told her she turned around and walked away without having said a word, but that night I noticed that the Desmarais coat of arms was no longer hanging on the wall in the first floor corridor.  That it hung nowhere. What she had done with it, I never discovered.

That night, I again pulled the blanket over my head.

-0-

Chapter Nineteen

It would probably need a Sigmund Freud to explain why on some mornings the smell of Chartreux Hospital fills this house. This is so again this Friday morning. My nostrils are filled with the smell - I can even call it stench - of a mixture of stale urine, bloody bandages, weeping wounds, sweat, bland hospital soup, ether, and the mouthwash which the nurses gave the patients to get rid of their malodorous morning breath.

I wonder if Colin could also smell it this morning. He has gone out now. After breakfast - this morning I skipped having a croissant - he came in search of me and found me here in my library room.

He stood at the door, not stepping in.

“I will be out for a while, Bella.”

I told him he would not have to tell me when he was going to go out.

“I just thought …”

He did not finish the sentence.

I heard him rev the motorcycle’s engine.
Vroom vroom vroom
!

For a moment I thought the engine would not take because when Marius’s bike has been standing in the rain as Colin’s has done since his arrival last Wednesday, the engine sometimes stalls.

The phone rings. I pick up the library room connection. It is Marion.

“How’z it?”

She is always in a good mood.

“I’ve taken a guest for the winter, Marion.”

“Who’s it? Anyone interesting? Not an old geriatric dear in need of a doctor?”

“It’s a young English writer. Well, not exactly young.”

“Like how old? Is he in a bath chair and in need of care, because in that case I am going to call you stupid.”

“Our age.”

“Mmm. Is he nice?”

“What do you mean by nice, Marion?”

I do so hate the word
nice
.

“Like does he have body odour, Bella? That would definitely make him not nice.”

“For goodness sake, Marion!”

“So he
is
nice.”

“He’s a guest, Marion!”

“Mmm. Sounds promising.”

“Why did you call?” I ask.

I want to change the direction her remarks are steering us.

“To ask how you were, Bella.”

“I’m feeling fine. Excellent.”

“Good.”

I want to end the call.

“Give Marius and the girls my love.”

“We are going skiing this Christmas. Switzerland. Saint Moritz. Very chic. Never been there. So we won’t be coming up north.”

So this is why she is phoning me.

“I think that I will go away for Christmas myself this year, Marion,” I lie.

“Where to?”

“I rather fancy - Italy. Rome. Venice.”

“Rome’s awful at Christmas. Too many pilgrims and all crying buckets over the Pope’s Urbi and Orbi. Not for me! As for Venice, it’s damp in winter. Didn’t you know? Your hair will go all frizzy. You will hate it.”

“Thanks for being so encouraging, Marion.”

We say goodbye.

I put the phone down.

Sitting still, thinking of the call, the large - over one thousand five hundred pages - German-English dictionary on the shelf in front of me draws my attention. I fetch it. It is heavy and slips from my hands and falls onto my desk. I flip it open. My eye catches the word
Schicksal.
Its gender is neutral -
das Schicksal
; the noun capitalised as they are in the German language and which looks so odd to me.

With my German, elementary as it is, taught to me, not at school, but by my father, I know that
Schicksal
means fate. Fate. Destiny. Karma.
Karma
: what we put into the universe, the universe will hand back to us. The good as well as the bad.
For you reap whatever you sow:
Book of Galatians, as Father Pierre so often reminds Sainte-Marie-sur-Brecque’s faithless when they pass him on the street and he blocks their path to reprimand them for not attending mass. Terrible thought, when you come to think of it: reaping whatever we are sowing. Even more terrible is what always goes with it - according to Father Pierre that is: not only would
we
have to pay for
our
sins but so would our children, grandchildren, great grandchildren - those who come after us.
Who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?
asked John the Apostle on seeing a blind man. Vindictive, if you ask me. Like shaving a woman’s head because she fell in love with a German. Punishment, the French called it. And always did my uncles speak of the punishment that awaited my father for him having been a
Wehrmacht
soldier, for having worn the field-grey uniform. Therefore, from the time I read those books about the Second World War, I feared my father would reap what he had sown. So, understanding death as being a punishment, I used to seek out my father every morning on waking to make sure he had not died during the night. “You silly little person,” he always said when I threw my arms around him, happy I had found him alive, yet troubled because I would, in that case, have to be the one who would have to do the reaping. I, not Marius. Why I never thought that my brother, as much my father’s child as I, would have to do the reaping, I did not know.

I read what the large dictionary further writes about
das Schicksal
. It can be merciful.
Gnädiges Schicksal
. It is good to know this. It can be hard, bitter, adverse, unkind, tragic, inexorable, sinister, sad. Cruel:
Grausames Schicksal
. It is good to know this too because it eliminates nasty surprises.

I close the dictionary with a laugh. So much for
das Schicksal
: my father died in his sleep, never having had a day’s illness in his life. “His heart just stopped Dr Alphonse told me,” said my mother. She had telephoned me to Chartreux Hospital.

Truth, be told, at the Brissard twin’s death, I did for a moment wonder whether it was not
grausames Schicksal
having come to collect its dues.

“Tell me, did the baby die because I was negligent?” I asked Nurse Bonnec.

“Of course not, Doc,” she replied. “It was the hand of God.”

The hand of God. Karma. Fate. Destiny. There you have it!

I put the dictionary back on the shelf and I walk from the library room, closing the door behind me. I will have to remember I am not alone here anymore and I will have to keep the door closed as I do when I have a house full of guests.

-0-

The Legros chicken which I bought two Thursdays ago has defrosted and it is lying on the work table in a pool of murky water. It will be our supper.

I try hard to remember how Gertrude once told me to go about cooking
poulet bonne femme.
This is what we will have tonight.

Wash and dry the chicken. Quarter it. Dice some carrot and a celery branch. Prepare some peas and do open a can of peas if you do not have fresh one.
Tinned peas it will have to be. Peel and slice some onions. Peeling the onions, I hold a matchstick between my lips so my eyes will not water. They water all the same.
Wash and dry some fresh parsley.
I must not chop it up because it is for decorating the final dish.
Wash and dry some white button mushrooms and chop them up too.
Not too finely, mind.
Get some salt and pepper from the cupboard in the larder. Get some rashers of lard from the fridge.
Before closing the fridge, I take out the dish with the butter, and I fetch the olive oil can from the larder.
Heat the butter and the olive oil.
I do so in Gertrude’s favourite flameproof pot, the one with the pictures of some very yellow celery and very orange carrots around the side. I make sure the gas flame is not too high.
Wait till the butter has melted and add the chicken. Brown the chicken on all sides. When it is brown, add the vegetables and the lard and fry all for about five minutes before adding the mushrooms.
 

For a while, I stand at the bay window behind which dusk is falling and I listen to the sound of sizzling coming from the stove. I tell myself I am cooking
poulet bonne femme
for the first time in my life.

Back at the stove, I stir the ingredients with Gertrude’s big wooden spoon which she is inclined to lick when she should not do so. Always, I reprimand her.

“The chef must taste, Miss.”

The ingredients, nicely brown, I pour a glass of dry white wine, and half a glass of chicken broth, and a few tablespoons of white port wine over it, and I cover the flameproof pot with its lid which also has very yellow celery and very orange carrots all along the rim. Gertrude usually allows the chicken to cook like this for about forty minutes and every now and then she pours a small glass of water into the pot.

“Mustn’t dry out, must it, Miss.”

The chicken cooking, I peel some potatoes and start boiling them in another of Gertrude’s pretty pots.

Hoping that neither the chicken nor the potatoes would cook dry, and therefore burn, I go upstairs to my bedroom to make myself look presentable.

I powder my nose, shiny from the heat of the stove, and I want to comb my hair. My hair looks awful. A mess. “My little Blondie,” my father sometimes called me, brushing my rebel curls with my mother’s large brush, strands of her dark hair caught between the steel teeth. Blondie: the cartoon character, wife of Dagwood. It was my father’s favourite cartoon strip. Whenever we went to Avranches he went to the newsagents to buy the London papers especially so he could read the
Blondie and Dagwood
cartoon strip.

Ought I to go to Salon Larissa, Sainte-Marie-sur-Brecque’s hair salon next week, get Larissa to cut the mess? I have always hated my curls. I wanted straight hair like my mother. I never minded having blond hair though. Why, I do not know, especially as I should have hated being a blonde, because the German women on the photos in those books about the Second World War all had blonde hair.

Having slipped into a clean blouse and pair of jeans, I sit down at the window, the bay and the mount in front of me in the distance, now dark.

I wonder what time Colin will be back.

Of course, I only want to know because I do not want the food to be overcooked.

-0-

Chapter Twenty

I am in the courtyard. Because of the threshing of the rain, the trees and plants have shed some of their leaves, and I have come to clean up. Night having fallen and, as I have not switched the lights on here, I am working in semi-darkness, the only light coming from the kitchen.

Colin returned a few minutes ago. It was a noisy return. Coming up the driveway he revved the motorcycle’s engine as if he were a stuntman and preparing to become airborne and fly over the house’s roof for a scene in an action film. I have decided not to ask him what that was about, just as I will not ask him where he has spent the day, whether he has had a pleasant day.
Not my business
. This is what I am telling myself.

He appears in the doorway.

“I’m just going to brush up and then I will be down for supper.”

Fine. Sure. I have cooked. Cooked for you, my winter guest.
 

Back inside and carrying the food to the dining room, I see Colin has switched all the lights in the room off, but not the chandelier, which hangs right above the table where we have been sitting these past nights, and where I have again tonight set two places.

He sees me.

“I did not ask - I hope you do not mind, but I have switched off some of your beautiful chandeliers.”

“No problem.”

I do not look at him because I am not all that pleased he is making himself so at home at Le Presbytère.

We sit down.

“Shall we just help ourselves?” I ask.

“Thank you, yes, and this looks delicious.”

“I hope it will taste delicious too.”

“Sure it will.”

“Why? Why are you sure it will?”

I can see he is unable to interpret the mood behind the question.

“You’re French,” he says, hesitatingly.

“And so?”

“French cuisine … In England we believe all French can cook.”

“Which is of course a myth.”

I nearly accused him of sexism again. And racism.

“I suppose so,” he says.

“It is so.”

“What did you do today?” he changes the subject.

“My library needs a thorough clean up. I started on that.”

“May I have a look at your books one day, please? I could not help noticing you have a few thousand. Must have a few thousand.”

“I’ve a few.”