Suite Francaise (26 page)

It had been stiflingly hot for several days; you could hardly breathe until the sun began to set. But this was the time when the garden was at its most beautiful. The heat had withered the daisies and the white carnations bordering the kitchen garden, but around the well the rose bushes were in full bloom; a scent of sugar, musk and honey wafted up from the clusters of small red roses next to the beehives. The full moon was the colour of amber, shining so brightly that the sky was bathed in a soft green light, as far as the eye could see.

“What a beautiful summer we’ve had,” said Madeleine. She’d taken her basket and was walking towards the stakes of green peas. “Only a week of bad weather at the beginning of the month and since then, not a drop of rain, not even a cloud, though if it carries on like this we won’t have any more vegetables . . . and it’s hard to work in this heat; but I don’t care, it’s still nice—as if the heavens have taken pity on us poor people. You can help if you want to, but you don’t have to,” she added.

“What’s Cécile doing?”

“Cécile, she’s sewing. She’s making herself a pretty dress to wear to Mass on Sunday.”

Her skilful, strong fingers reached between the cool green leaves of the peas, broke the stems in half, threw the peas into her basket; she looked down as she worked. “So you’re going to leave us, then?”

“I have to. I’ll be glad to see my parents again and I’ve got to find some work, but . . .”

They both went quiet.

“Of course, you couldn’t stay here your whole life,” she said, looking down even more. “Everybody knows that’s how it is, you meet people, you say goodbye . . .”

“You say goodbye,” he repeated quietly.

“Well, you’re much better now. You’ve got a bit of colour . . .”

“Thanks to how well you took care of me.”

Her hand stopped still under a leaf. “Have you been happy with us?”

“You know I have.”

“Well, then you better make sure you keep in touch. You should write . . .” she said, and he saw her eyes full of tears, close to him. She quickly turned away.

“Of course, I’ll write to you, I promise,” said Jean-Marie and gently touched the young girl’s hand.

“Everybody says that . . . After you’ve gone, we’ll have time to think about you here, my God . . . Now it’s still the busy season, we’re working all day long . . . but when autumn comes, and winter, we’ll have nothing to do but look after the animals, and the rest of the time we’ll just stay indoors and watch the rain fall, then the snow. Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn’t look for work in town . . .”

“No, Madeleine, don’t do that, promise me. You’ll be much happier here.”

“You think so?” she murmured, her voice low and strange.

And suddenly picking up the basket, she moved slightly away from him so he couldn’t see her through the leaves. He picked some peas, lost in thought.

“Do you really think I could ever forget you?” he said finally. “Do you think I have so many happy memories that I could forget this? Just imagine! The war, the horror, the war.”

“But what about before that? You weren’t in the war for ever, were you? So before, were there . . .”

“What?”

She didn’t reply.

“You mean were there women, girls?”

“Of course that’s what I mean!”

“Nothing very interesting, my dear Madeleine.”

“But you’re going away,” she said and finally, without the strength to hold back her tears, she let them fall down her full cheeks and said in a voice choking with emotion, “I can’t stand the thought of you leaving, I can’t. I know I shouldn’t say it, you’ll make fun of me and Cécile will even more . . . but I don’t care . . . I can’t bear it . . .”

“Madeleine . . .”

She stood up straight, their eyes met. He walked towards her and, gently putting his arm round her waist, drew her close; when he started to kiss her, she sighed and pushed him away. “No, that’s not what I want . . . that would be too easy . . .”

“What do you want, then, Madeleine?” he said. “That I promise never to forget you? Whether you believe me or not, that’s the truth. I will never forget you,” and he took her hand and kissed it; she blushed with happiness.

“Madeleine, is it true you want to become a nun?”

“It’s true. Well, I wanted to before, but now . . . it’s not that I don’t love our Good Lord any more, I just think it’s not for me.”

“Of course it’s not! You’re meant to love and be happy.”

“Happy? I don’t know, but I think I’m meant to have a husband and children, and if Benoît hasn’t been killed, then . . .”

“Benoît? I didn’t know . . .”

“Yes, we talked about it . . . I didn’t want to. I had this idea of becoming a nun. But if he comes back . . . he’s a good man . . .”

“I didn’t know . . .” he said again.

How secretive these country people were! Discreet, wary, everything securely locked up . . . like their big wardrobes. He’d lived with them for two months and had never even suspected there was anything between Madeleine and the son of the house, and now that he thought about it, he realised they hardly ever talked about this Benoît . . . They never talked about anything. But that didn’t mean they weren’t thinking about it.

The farmer’s wife called Madeleine. They went back.

Several days passed; there was no news of Benoît but Jean-Marie soon got a letter and some money from his parents. He was never alone with Madeleine again. He realised they were being watched. He said goodbye to the whole family at the door. It was raining that morning, the first rain in many long weeks; a chilly wind blew in from the hills. When he was out of sight, the farmer’s wife went back inside. The two young girls lingered at the door, listening to the sound of the cart on the road.

“Well, it’s not such a bad thing,” exclaimed Cécile, as if she had made an effort not to say anything for a long time and now let a rush of words tumble out. “Maybe we’ll get a little work out of you now . . . You’ve had your head in the clouds recently; I’ve had to do everything . . .”

“You’ve got no right to criticise me,” Madeleine replied angrily. “All you did was sew and look at yourself in the mirror . . . I’m the one who got the cows in yesterday and it wasn’t even my turn.”

“Well, I don’t know anything about that. It was Mother who told you to do it.”

“Even if Mother told me to do it, I know who gave her the idea.”

“Think what you like!”

“Hypocrite.”

“Hussy! And you want to be a nun . . .”

“As if
you
didn’t run around after him. But he couldn’t have cared less!”

“So, and what about you? He’s gone and you’ll never see him again.”

Their eyes burning with rage, they looked at each other for a moment, then suddenly a surprised, soft expression came over Madeleine’s face.

“Oh, Cécile! We used to be like sisters . . . We never fought like this before . . . It isn’t worth it, come on. We can’t have him, either of us!” She put her arm round Cécile, who started crying. “It’ll pass, come on, it’ll pass . . . Dry your eyes. Mother will see you’ve been crying.”

“Oh, Mother . . . she knows everything but says nothing.”

They let go of each other; one went over to the stables and the other went inside the house. It was Monday, washing day, and they hardly had the chance to say two words to each other, but from their expressions, their smiles, it was clear they had made up. The wind blew the smoke from the laundry boiler towards the barn. It was one of those dark, stormy days in the middle of August when you can smell the first breath of autumn in the air.

Madeleine didn’t have time to think as she washed, wrung out and rinsed the clothes, and so she managed to put aside her pain. When she looked up, she saw the grey sky, the trees battered by the storm. “You’d think summer was over . . .” she said.

“Not before time. Filthy summer,” her mother replied resentfully.

Madeleine looked at her, surprised, then remembered the war, the mass exodus, Benoît gone, the universal misery, the war still going on far away and so many people who had died. She went back to work in silence.

That evening, she had just shut the chickens away and was hurrying across the yard in the rain when she saw a man on the road walking quickly towards her. Her heart began pounding; she thought Jean-Marie had come back. A kind of wild joy shot through her. She rushed towards him, then let out a cry: “Benoît?”

“Yes, it’s me all right,” he said.

“But how . . . Oh, your mother will be so happy . . . Did you escape, Benoît? We were afraid you were taken prisoner.”

He laughed to himself. He was a large young man with a broad, brown face and daring eyes.

“I was, but not for long!”

“You escaped?”

“Yes.”

“But how?”

“Well, with my friends.”

And suddenly she became a shy country girl once more, with that ability—lost with Jean-Marie—to love and suffer in silence. She didn’t ask him anything, she just walked alongside him without saying a word.

“And how’s everything here?” he asked.

“Fine.”

“Nothing new?”

“No, nothing,” she said.

And leaping up the first three of the steps into the kitchen, she went inside the house and called out, “Mother, come quick, it’s Benoît! Benoît’s come home!”

31

The preceding winter—the first of the war—had been long and hard. But what of the winter of 1940–1? The end of November saw the beginning of the cold and snow. It fell on the houses destroyed by the bombs, on the bridges they were trying to rebuild, on the Paris streets where there were no cars or buses, where women in fur coats and wool hoods hurried by, where other women shivered and huddled in doorways. It fell on the railway tracks and on the telegraph wires, which were sometimes dragged to the ground by the weight and snapped; on the green uniforms of the German soldiers standing at the entrance to their barracks and on the red flags with their swastikas draped over the monuments. In freezing apartments, it cast a mournful, deathly pallor that made everything feel even colder and more inhospitable. In the poorer families, the old people and children stayed in bed for weeks: it was the only place they could be warm.

That winter, Gabriel Corte’s terrace was covered in a thick layer of snow; he and Florence put the champagne out there to chill. Corte would write sitting next to the fire, which still didn’t quite manage to replace the lost heat of the radiators. His nose was blue; he could have cried from the cold. With one hand he held a piping hot-water bottle against his chest; with the other he wrote.

At Christmas the cold became even fiercer; only in the Métro could you warm up a little. And still the relentless snow fell—softly, cruelly—on the trees along the Boulevard Delessert where the Péricands had come back to live (for they belonged to the French upper middle class who would prefer to see their children with no bread, no meat, no air rather than no education, and under no circumstances would they interrupt Hubert’s studies, already so damaged by the terrible events of the past summer, nor Bernard’s, who was nearly nine and had forgotten everything he’d learned before the exodus and was forced by his mother to recite “The earth is a sphere which sits on absolutely nothing” as if he were seven instead of eight—what a disaster!)

Snowflakes gathered on Madame Péricand’s black mourning veil as she marched proudly past the long queues of customers in front of the shop, stopping at the entrance to wave like a flag the priority ration card given to large families.

In the snow, Jeanne and Maurice Michaud waited their turn, leaning against each other like weary horses during a short pause in their journey.

The snow covered Charlie Langelet’s grave at the Père-Lachaise cemetery, the piles of wrecked cars near the Gien bridge—and all the shelled, burned-out, abandoned vehicles left along the roads in June, tilted over on one wheel or on their side, or ripped open, or nothing more than a twisted mass of steel. The countryside was white, endless, silent. Only after several days did the snow melt; the country folk were delighted. “It’s good to see the earth again,” they said. But the next day it snowed again and the crows screeched in the skies. “There’s a lot of snow this year,” the young people murmured, thinking of the battlefields, the towns that had been bombed. But the older people replied, “No more than usual!” In the countryside nothing changed, everyone just waited. They waited for the war to end, for the blockade to be lifted, for the prisoners to come home, for the end of winter.

“There won’t be any spring this year,” the women sighed as February passed, then the beginning of March and still it got no warmer. The snow had disappeared, but the earth was grey and as hard as iron. The potatoes froze. The animals had nothing to eat. They should have been put out to pasture by now, but there wasn’t a single blade of grass in sight. In the Sabaries’ hamlet, the old people shut themselves away behind their great wooden doors, which they nailed shut at night. The family huddled round the stove, knitting for the prisoners, without saying a word. Madeleine and Cécile were making little nightshirts and nappies out of old sheets: Madeleine had married Benoît in September and was expecting a baby. When a harsh gust of wind shook the door, the old women would say, “Ah, dear God, it’s just too much!”

At the neighbouring farm a baby was crying. He’d been born just before Christmas and his father was a prisoner of war. His mother already had three other children. She was a tall, thin countrywoman, modest, reserved, who never complained. When people asked her, “How are you going to manage, Louise, with no man at home, with all the work, no one to help you and four children?” her eyes would be sad and cold, but she would smile faintly and reply, “I have no choice . . .” In the evening, when the children were asleep, she would go round to the Sabaries and sit down with her knitting, next to the door so she could hear if her children called her through the silent darkness. When no one was looking she would secretly watch Madeleine with her young husband, without envy, without malice, but in silent sorrow; then she would quickly look back down at her work. After a quarter of an hour she would get up, put on her shoes and say quietly, “Well, I’d better get going. Goodnight, goodbye everyone,” and go home. It was a March evening. She couldn’t sleep. It was the same almost every night when she tried to fall asleep in the cold, empty bed. She had thought about having her eldest child sleep with her, but a kind of superstitious fear prevented her: that place had to be saved for her absent husband.