Suite Francaise (27 page)

On this particular night, a violent wind was blowing as a storm from the Morvan mountains swept over the village. “There’ll be more snow tomorrow!” everyone said. In her large, silent house that creaked like a ship adrift at sea, the woman couldn’t bear it any more and, for the very first time, burst into tears. She hadn’t cried when her husband had left in ’39, nor when he’d said goodbye after his few days home on leave, nor when she’d found out he’d been taken prisoner, nor when she’d given birth all alone. But she just couldn’t bear it any more: so much work to do . . . the baby was so big and wore her out with his feeding and crying . . . the cow hardly gave any milk because it was so cold . . . the chickens had nothing to eat and weren’t laying any eggs . . . in the wash-house she had to break the ice . . . It was all too much. She just couldn’t do it any more—it was making her ill. She had lost the will to live . . . What was the point of living? She would never see her husband again. They missed each other so much; at that moment he was probably dying in Germany. It was so cold in that big bed.

She reached for the warming stone, which a few hours ago had been burning hot but was now icy cold, took it out from under the sheets and set it gently down on the floor. As her hand touched the freezing tiles, she felt an even icier chill run straight through her heart. She was sobbing violently. What could anyone say to ease her pain? “You’re not the only one . . .” She knew that only too well but other people seemed to be lucky . . . Madeleine Sabarie, for example . . . She didn’t wish her harm . . . It was just too much! Life was too painful. Her thin body was frozen. It did her no good to huddle under the eiderdown, she felt the cold seeping right down to her bones. “It will pass, he’ll come home and the war will be over!” people would say. No. She didn’t believe it any more. No. It would go on and on and on . . . Even spring didn’t seem to want to come . . . Had there ever been such terrible weather in March? March was nearly over and the ground was still frozen, frozen to the core, like her. Such harsh winds! Just listen to them! They would surely blow the tiles off the roof.

She sat up in bed and listened for a moment. A look of mild surprise suddenly passed across her sad, tear-stained face. The wind had stopped. Just as it had come out of nowhere, so it had now disappeared without a trace. It had broken branches off the trees, whipped the rooftops in its blind rage, carried away the last of the snow on the hill, and now, out of the dark sky devastated by the storm, the first rain of spring began to fall, still cold, but torrential and urgent, carving its way down to the smallest roots of the trees, down to the very heart of the deep, black earth.

TWO

Dolce

1

Occupation

In the Angellier household they were locking away all the important papers along with the family silver and the books: the Germans were coming to Bussy. For the third time since the defeat of France, the village was to be occupied. It was Easter Sunday, High Mass. A cold rain was falling. At the entrance to the church, the branches of a small peach tree, pink with blossom, swayed mournfully. The Germans marched in rows of eight; they wore their field dress and metal helmets. Their faces maintained the impenetrable and impersonal expression of professional soldiers, but their eyes glanced furtively, inquisitively, at the grey façades of the town that was to be their home. There was no one at the windows. As they passed the church, they could hear the sound of the harmonium and the murmur of prayers; but a frightened member of the congregation shut the door. The stomping of German boots reigned supreme. The first detachment swung past and was followed by an officer on horseback; his beautiful dappled mare seemed furious at being forced to go so slowly; as she placed each hoof on the ground with reluctant care, she trembled, neighed and shook her proud head. Great grey armoured tanks pounded the cobblestone streets. Then came the cannons on their rolling platforms, a soldier positioned high above each one to keep watch. The column of soldiers was so long that throughout the priest’s sermon a kind of constant thunder resounded through the church’s vaults. The women sighed in the shadows.

After the metallic rumbling subsided, the motorcycles arrived, flanking the Commandant’s car. Behind him, at a respectful distance, came trucks packed to the brim with large round loaves of black bread. They made the church windows rattle. The regiment’s mascot—a thin, silent Alsatian dog, trained for combat—ran beside the cavalrymen who brought up the rear. Perhaps because they were so far away from the Commandant that he couldn’t see them, or for some other reason incomprehensible to the locals, these soldiers were more informal, friendlier than the others. They talked and laughed among themselves. The Lieutenant in charge smiled when he saw the lone pink peach tree lashed by the bitter wind; he snapped off a branch. Since he saw nothing but closed windows all around him, he assumed he was alone. Far from it. Behind each shutter was an old woman, eyes as piercing as a knife, watching the conquering soldier’s every move. Deep within hidden rooms, voices groaned.

“Could you ever have imagined such a thing . . .”

“He’s destroying our fruit trees, for heaven’s sake!”

“Seems this lot’s the worst,” a toothless mouth whispered. “I heard they did a lot of damage before coming here. Just our luck.”

“I bet they’ll take our sheets,” said one housewife. “Just imagine, sheets I got from my mother! Only the best for them . . .”

The Lieutenant shouted an order. The men seemed very young. They had rosy complexions and golden hair. They rode magnificent, well-fed horses with wide, shiny rumps, which they tied up in the square, around the War Memorial. The soldiers broke ranks and started to make themselves at home. The village was filled with the sound of boots, foreign voices, the rattling of spurs and weapons. In the better houses, they hid away the good linen.

The Angellier women—the mother and wife of Gaston Angellier, prisoner of war in Germany—were finishing their packing. The elder Madame Angellier, a thin, pale person, frail and austere, quietly read out loud the title of each book in the library and religiously stroked its cover, before putting it away. “My son’s books,” she murmured, “to see them in the hands of a German! . . . I’d rather burn them.”

“But what if they ask for the key to the library,” groaned the fat cook.

“They’ll have to ask
me
for it,” said Madame Angellier and, standing very tall, she lightly tapped the pocket sewn inside her black wool dress; the bunch of keys she always kept with her jingled. “They won’t be asking twice,” she concluded darkly.

She instructed her daughter-in-law, Lucile Angellier, to remove the decorative ornaments from the mantelpiece. Lucile wanted to leave an ashtray out. At first the elder Madame Angellier objected.

“But they’ll drop ash all over the carpets,” Lucile pointed out. Pursing her lips, Madame Angellier gave in.

This older woman had such a transparent, pale face that she seemed to have not a drop of blood beneath her skin; her hair was pure white, her mouth like the blade of a knife, her lips almost purple. An old-fashioned high collar made of mauve cotton, held rigid by stays, covered but didn’t hide her sharp, bony neck which pulsated with emotion like a lizard. When she heard a German soldier’s footsteps or voice near the window, she would tremble from the tips of her small pointy little boots to the top of her impressively coiffed head. “Hurry up, hurry up, they’re coming,” she’d say.

They left only the bare essentials in the room: not one flower, not one cushion, not one painting. In the large linen cupboard, beneath a pile of sheets, they buried the family picture album, to prevent the sacrilegious enemy from seeing Great-Aunt Adelaide at her First Communion and Uncle Jules, aged six months, naked on a cushion. They packed away everything—right down to the mantelpiece ornaments: two porcelain Louis-Philippe vases decorated with parrots holding a garland of roses in their beaks (a wedding gift from a relative who came to visit less and less frequently but whom they didn’t dare offend by getting rid of the present) and the two vases about which Gaston had said, “If the maid breaks them while sweeping, I’ll give her a raise.” Yes, even them. They had been given by French hands, looked at by French eyes, touched by the feather dusters of France—they would not be defiled by contact with Germans. And the crucifix! In the corner of the room, above the sofa . . . Madame Angellier took it down herself, slipped it beneath her lace shawl and held it to her breast. “I think that’s everything,” she said at last.

She took a mental inventory: the furniture from the main reception room had been removed, the curtains taken down, the provisions crammed into the shed where the gardener kept his tools (oh, the large hams smoked in ash, the jars of clarified butter, the salted butter, the fine, pure pork fat, the thick streaky sausages!). All her possessions, all her treasures . . . The wine had been lying buried in the cellar since the day the English army had left Dunkerque. The piano was locked; Gaston’s hunting rifle was in an impregnable hiding place. Everything was in order. There was nothing to do but wait for the conquerors. Pale and silent, with a delicate, trembling hand, she half closed the shutters, as you would in a room where someone had died, and went out, followed by Lucile.

Lucile was a young woman—beautiful, blonde, with dark eyes, but a quiet, modest demeanour and “a faraway expression,” for which Madame Angellier reproached her. She’d been acceptable because of her family connections and dowry (she was the daughter of an important landowner in the area). However, Lucile’s father had gone on to make some bad investments, lost his fortune and mortgaged his land; the marriage was, therefore, not the most successful; she hadn’t had any children, after all.

The two women went into the dining room where the table was set. It was just after twelve o’clock, but only according to the clocks on the church and town hall, which they were obliged to set to German time; every French home set their clocks back by sixty minutes as a point of honour; every Frenchwoman would scornfully say, “At our house, we don’t live by German time.” This practice left great voids at various points of the day when there was nothing to do. Now, for example, a deadly gap loomed between the end of Mass and the beginning of Sunday lunch. They didn’t read. If Madame Angellier saw Lucile with a book in her hands, she would look at her, surprised, and say reproachfully, “What’s this? Are you reading?” She had a soft, refined voice, as faint as the echo of a harp: “Don’t you have anything else to do?” No one was working: it was Easter Sunday.

They didn’t speak. Between these two women, every topic of conversation was a thorn bush they only approached with caution: if they reached out a hand, they risked getting hurt. Every word Madame Angellier heard brought back the memory of some loss, some family story, some former pain Lucile knew nothing about. She would reply with reluctance, then stop to look at her daughter-in-law in sad surprise, as if she were thinking, “How strange that her husband is a German prisoner of war and yet she can still breathe, move, speak, laugh . . .” She could barely admit that the problem between them was Gaston. Lucile’s tone was never what it should be. Sometimes she seemed too sad: was she talking about someone who was dead? Surely her duty as a Frenchwoman, as a wife, was to bear separation courageously, as she, Madame Angellier, had done between 1914 and 1918, just after—or not so long after—her own marriage. But whenever Lucile murmured words of consolation, of hope, her thoughts were similarly bitter: “Ah, you can tell she never really loved him; I’ve always suspected it. Now I can tell, I’m sure of it . . . That tone is unmistakable. She’s cold and indifferent.
She
wants for nothing, while my son, my poor child . . .” She imagined the prisoner-of-war camp, the barbed wire, the guards, the sentries. Tears would well up in her eyes and she would say in a broken voice, “We mustn’t speak of him . . .” Then she would take a clean handkerchief from her bag, always there in case anyone made her think of Gaston or the misfortunes of France, and delicately dab at her eyes with the same gesture she would use to remove a drop of ink with some blotting paper.

And so, silent and still, next to the cold fireplace, the two women stood and waited.

2

The Germans had moved into their lodgings and were getting to know the village. The officers walked about alone or in pairs, heads held high, boots striking the paving stones. The ordinary soldiers stayed in groups; they had nothing to do, so they paced up and down the only street or gathered in the square near the old crucifix. When one of them stopped, all the others did too, forming a long line of green uniforms that made it impossible for the villagers to get by. Faced with this obstacle, they simply pulled their caps even further down over their eyes, turned away and used the small winding lanes to return to the fields.

The local policeman, under the surveillance of two non-commissioned officers, was putting up posters on the walls and main buildings. These posters were of various types. Some depicted a smiling German soldier with fair hair and perfect teeth giving out jam sandwiches to a group of French children gathered around him under the caption, “Abandoned citizens, trust in the soldiers of the Third Reich!” Other posters used drawings or caricatures to illustrate world domination by the English and the detestable tyranny of the Jews. But most of them began with the word
Verboten
—Forbidden. It was forbidden to walk down the street between nine o’clock in the evening and five o’clock in the morning; forbidden to keep any firearms; forbidden to “aid, abet or shelter” escaped prisoners, English soldiers, or citizens of countries which were enemies of Germany; forbidden to listen to foreign radio stations; forbidden to refuse German currency. And beneath each poster was the same warning in black lettering, underlined twice:
ON PAIN OF DEATH
.

Meanwhile, Mass was over and the shops were opening for business. In the spring of 1941, there was still no shortage of goods in the provinces: people had secreted away such hoards of fabric, shoes and provisions that they were now rather inclined to sell them. The Germans were not difficult and were prepared to be palmed off with junk: women’s corsets from the last war, ankle boots from 1900, linen decorated with little flags and embroidered Eiffel Towers (originally intended for the English)—they’d buy anything. They inspired in the inhabitants of the occupied countries fear, respect, aversion and the amusing desire to fleece them, to take advantage of them, to get hold of their money.

“It’s our money anyway . . . they stole it from us,” thought the grocer as he gave a soldier from the invading army his most charming smile and a pound of wormy prunes at double the price they were worth.

The soldier examined the goods sceptically. It was obvious he suspected fraud but, intimidated by the grocer’s impenetrable expression, he said nothing. The regiment had previously been stationed in a small town in the north that had been destroyed and pillaged; there had been no supplies for a long time. But in this rich province of central France, the soldier once more found things to covet. His eyes lit up with desire in front of displays full of reminders of comfortable civilian life: pine furniture, ready-to-wear suits, children’s toys, little pink dresses. Their expressions serious and dreamy, the troops marched from one shop to the other, jingling the money in their pockets. Behind the soldiers’ backs, or above their heads, the French sent little signals to one another from their open windows—they raised their eyes to heaven, shook their heads, smiled, made faint grimaces of scorn or defiance, an entire language of gestures to show that they needed God’s help during such terrible times (but that even God . . . !), that they intended to remain free, free in spirit in any case (if not in actions then at least in words), that these Germans weren’t really very clever since they believed favours were done for them willingly, whereas the French knew they were obliged to because, after all, the Germans were the masters. “Our masters,” said the women who looked at the enemy with a mixture of desire and hatred. (The enemy? Of course. But they were also men, and young . . .) The French took special pleasure in cheating them. “They think we like them, but
we
know we just want to get passes, petrol, permits,” thought those women who had already met the occupying forces in Paris or the larger provincial cities, while the naïve country girls shyly lowered their eyes when the Germans looked at them.

On entering the cafés, the soldiers took off their belts and threw them on the marble tables before sitting down. At the Hôtel des Voyageurs, the non-commissioned officers reserved the main room for their mess. It was the kind of long, dark room you find in country hotels. Above the mirror at the back, two red flags with swastikas were draped over the cupids and burning torches that adorned the old gilt frame. In spite of the season, the stove was still lit; some of the men had dragged their chairs up to it and basked in its warmth, looking blissfully happy and drowsy. The large purple and black stove sometimes belched out acrid smoke, but the Germans didn’t care. They moved even closer; they dried their clothes and boots; they looked pensively around, a look that was simultaneously bored and vaguely anxious, and seemed to say, “We’ve seen so many things . . . Let’s see what happens here . . .”