The Girl You Left Behind (12 page)

‘One. It’s Christmas.’

I knew an order when I heard it. I thought
of the others, eating the roast pork a few doors away from where we sat. I thought of
Mimi, with pork fat dribbling down her chin, of Aurélien, smiling and joking as he
boasted of their great deception. He needed some happiness: twice that week he had been
sent home from school for fighting, but had
refused to tell me what
it had been about. I needed them all to have one good meal. ‘Then … very
well.’ I accepted a glass, and sipped. The cognac was like fire trickling down my
throat. It felt restorative, a sharp kick.

He downed his own glass, watched me drink
mine, then pushed the bottle towards me, signalling that I should refill it.

We sat in silence. I wondered how many
people had come to eat the pig. Hélène had thought it would be fourteen. Two
of the older people had been afraid to break their curfew. The priest had promised to
take leftovers to those stuck in their homes after Christmas mass.

As we drank, I watched him. His jaw was set,
suggesting someone unbending, but without his military cap, his almost shaven hair gave
his head an air of vulnerability. I tried to picture him out of uniform, a normal human
being, going about his daily business, buying a newspaper, taking a holiday. But I
couldn’t. I couldn’t see past his uniform.

‘It’s a lonely business, war,
isn’t it?’

I took a sip of my drink. ‘You have
your men. I have my family. We are neither of us exactly alone.’

‘It’s not the same, though, is
it?’

‘We all get by as best as we
can.’

‘Do we? I’m not sure whether
anyone can describe this as “best”.’

The cognac made me blunt. ‘You are the
one sitting in my kitchen, Herr Kommandant. I suggest, with respect, that only one of us
has a choice in the matter.’

A cloud passed across his face. He was
unused to being challenged. Faint colour rose to his cheeks, and I saw him with his arm
raised, his gun aimed at a running prisoner.

‘You really think any of us has a
choice?’ he said quietly. ‘You really think this is how any of us would
choose to live? Surrounded by devastation? The perpetrators of it? Were you to witness
what we see at the Front, you would think yourself …’ He tailed off, shook
his head. ‘I’m sorry, Madame. It’s this time of year. It’s
enough to make a man maudlin. And we all know that there is nothing worse than a maudlin
soldier.’

He smiled then, an apology, and I relaxed a
little. We sat there on either side of the kitchen table, sipping from our glasses,
surrounded by the detritus of the meal. In the other room the officers had begun to
sing. I heard their voices lifting, the tune familiar, the words incomprehensible. The
Kommandant
tilted his head to listen. Then he put down his glass.
‘You hate us being here, don’t you?’

I blinked. ‘I have always tried
–’

‘You think your face betrays nothing.
But I’ve watched you. Years in this job have taught me a lot about people and
their secrets. Well. Can we call a truce, Madame? Just for these few hours?’

‘A truce?’

‘You shall forget that I am part of an
enemy army, I shall forget that you are a woman who spends much of her time working out
how to subvert that army, and we shall just … be two people?’

His face, just briefly, had softened. He
held his glass towards mine. Almost reluctantly, I lifted my own.

‘Let us avoid the subject of
Christmas, lonely or otherwise. I would like you to tell me about the other artists at
the Académie. Tell me how you came to meet them.’

I am not sure how long we sat there. If I am
honest, the hours evaporated in conversation and the warm glow of alcohol. The
Kommandant
wanted to know everything about an artist’s life in Paris.
What kind of man was Matisse? Was his life as scandalous as his art?

‘Oh, no. He was the most
intellectually rigorous of men. Quite stern. And very conservative, in both his work and
his domestic habits. But somehow …’ I thought for a moment of the
bespectacled professor, how he would glance over to check that you had grasped each
point before he showed you the next piece ‘… joyous. I think he gets great
joy from what he does.’

The
Kommandant
thought about this,
as if my answer had satisfied him. ‘I once wanted to be a painter. I was no good,
of course. I had to confront the truth of the matter very early on.’ He fingered
the stem of his glass. ‘I often think that the ability to earn a living by doing
the thing one loves must be one of life’s greatest gifts.’

I thought of Édouard then, his face
lost in concentration, peering at me from behind an easel. If I closed my eyes, I could
still feel the warmth of the log fire on my right leg, the faint chill on the left where
my skin was bare. I could see him lift an eyebrow, and the exact point at which his
thoughts left his painting. ‘I think that too.’

‘The first time I saw you,’ he
had told me on our first Christmas Eve together, ‘I watched you standing in the
middle of that bustling store and I thought you were the most self-contained woman I had
ever seen. You looked as if the world could explode into fragments around you and there
you would be, your chin lifted, gazing out at it
imperiously from
under that magnificent hair.’ He lifted my hand to his mouth, and kissed it
tenderly.

‘I thought you were a Russian
bear,’ I told him.

He had raised an eyebrow. We were in a
packed brasserie off rue de Turbigo. ‘GRRRRRRRR,’ he growled, until I was
helpless with laughter. He had crushed me to him, right there, in the middle of the
banquette, covering my neck with kisses, oblivious to the people eating around us.
‘GRRRRR.’

They had stopped singing in the other room.
I felt suddenly self-conscious and stood, as if to clear the table.

‘Please,’ said the
Kommandant
, motioning me to sit down. ‘Just sit a while longer.
It’s Christmas Eve, after all.’

‘Your men will be expecting you to
join them.’

‘On the contrary, they enjoy
themselves far more if their
Kommandant
is absent. It is not fair to impose
myself on them all evening.’

But quite fair to impose yourself on me, I
thought. It was then that he asked, ‘Where is your sister?’

‘I told her to go to bed,’ I
said. ‘She is a little under the weather, and she was very tired after cooking
tonight. I wanted her to be quite well for tomorrow.’

‘And what will you do? To
celebrate?’

‘Is there much for us to
celebrate?’

‘Truce, Madame?’

I shrugged. ‘We will go to church.
Perhaps visit some of our older neighbours. It is a hard day for them to be
alone.’

‘You look after everyone, don’t
you?’

‘It is no crime to be a good
neighbour.’

‘The basket of logs I had delivered
for your own use. I know you took them to the mayor’s house.’

‘His daughter is sick. She needs the
extra warmth more than we do.’

‘You should know, Madame, that nothing
escapes me in this little town. Nothing.’

I couldn’t meet his eyes. I was afraid
that this time my face, the rapid beating of my heart, would betray me. I wished I could
wipe from my mind all knowledge of the feast that was taking place a few hundred yards
from here. I wished I could escape the feeling that the
Kommandant
was playing
a game of cat and mouse with me.

I took another sip of my cognac. The men
were singing again. I knew this carol. I could almost make out the words.

Why did he keep looking at me? I was afraid
to speak, afraid to get up again in case he asked awkward questions. Yet just to sit and
let him stare at me seemed to make me complicit in something. Finally I took a small
breath and looked up. He was still watching me. ‘Madame, will you dance with me?
Just one dance? For Christmas’s sake?’

‘Dance?’

‘Just one dance. I would
like … I would like to be reminded of humanity’s better side, just once
this year.’

‘I don’t … I
don’t think …’ I thought of Hélène and the others, down the
road, free, for one evening. I thought of Liliane Béthune. I studied the
Kommandant
’s face. His request seemed genuine.
We shall
just … be two people …

And then I thought of my husband. Would I
wish him
to have a sympathetic pair of arms to dance in? Just for one
evening? Did I not hope that somewhere, many miles away, some good-hearted woman might
remind him in a quiet bar that the world could be a place of beauty?

‘I will dance with you, Herr
Kommandant,’ I said. ‘But only in the kitchen.’

He stood, held out his hand and, after a
slight hesitation, I took it. His palm was surprisingly rough. I moved a few steps
closer, not looking at his face and then he rested his other hand on my waist. As the
men in the next room sang, we began to move slowly around the table, me acutely aware of
his body only inches from my own, the pressure of his hand on my corset. I felt the
rough serge of his uniform against my bare arm, and the soft vibration of his humming
through his chest. I felt as if I were almost alight with tension, every sense
monitoring my fingers, my arms, trying to ensure that I did not get too close, fearful
that at any point he might pull me to him.

And all the while a voice repeated in my
head,
I am dancing with a German.

But he didn’t do anything. He hummed,
and he held me lightly, and he moved steadily in circles around the kitchen table. And
just for a few minutes I closed my eyes and was a girl, alive, free from hunger and
cold, dancing on the night before Christmas, my head a little giddy from good cognac,
breathing in the scent of spices and delicious food. I lived as Édouard lived,
relishing each small pleasure,
allowing myself to see beauty in all
of it. It was two years since a man had held me. I closed my eyes, relaxed and let
myself feel all of it, allowing my partner to swing me round, his voice still humming
into my ear.

The singing stopped and after a moment,
almost reluctantly, he stepped back, releasing me. ‘Thank you, Madame. Thank you
very much.’

When I finally dared to look up there were
tears in his eyes.

The next morning a small crate arrived on
our doorstep. It contained three eggs, a small
poussin
, an onion and a carrot.
On the side, in careful script, was marked:
Fröhliche Weihnachten.
‘It
means “Merry Christmas”,’ Aurélien said. For some reason he
refused to look at me.

As the temperatures dropped, the Germans
tightened their control over St Péronne. The town became uneasy, greater numbers of
troops coming through daily; the officers’ conversations in the bar took on a new
urgency, so that Hélène and I spent most of our time in the kitchen. The
Kommandant
barely spoke to me; he spent much of his time huddled with a few
trusted men. He looked exhausted, and when I heard his voice in the dining room it was
often raised in anger.

Several times that January French prisoners
of war were marched up the main street and past the hotel, but we were no longer allowed
to stand on the pavement to watch them. Food became ever scarcer, our official rations
dropped, and I was expected to conjure feasts out of ever shrinking amounts of meat and
vegetables. Trouble was edging closer.

The
Journal des Occupés,
when
it came, spoke of villages we knew. At night it was not unusual for the distant boom of
the guns to cause faint ripples in the glasses on our tables. It was some days before I
realized that the missing sound was that of birdsong. We had received word that all
girls from the age of sixteen and all boys from fifteen would now be required to work
for the Germans, pulling sugar beet or tending potatoes, or sent further afield to work
in factories. With Aurélien only months from his fifteenth
birthday, Hélène and I became increasingly tense. Rumours were rife as to
what happened to the young, with stories of girls billeted with gangs of criminal men
or, worse, instructed to ‘entertain’ German soldiers. Boys were starved or
beaten, moved around constantly so that they remained disoriented and obedient. Despite
our ages Hélène and I were exempt, we were informed, because we were
considered ‘essential to German welfare’ at the hotel. That alone would be
enough to stir resentment among the rest of our village when it became known.

There was something else. It was a subtle
change, but I was conscious of it. Fewer people were coming to Le Coq Rouge in the
daytime. From our usual twenty-odd faces, we were down to around eight. At first I
thought the cold was keeping people indoors. Then I became worried, and called on old
René to see if he was ill. But he met me at the door and said gruffly that he
preferred to stay at home. He did not look at me as he spoke. The same happened when I
went to call on Madame Foubert and the wife of the mayor. I was left feeling strangely
unbalanced. I told myself that it was all in my imagination, but one lunchtime I
happened to walk past Le Bar Blanc on my way to the pharmacy, and saw René and
Madame Foubert sitting inside at a table, playing draughts. I was convinced my eyes had
deceived me. When it became clear that they hadn’t, I put my head down and hurried
past.

Only Liliane Béthune spared me a
friendly smile. I caught her, shortly before dawn one morning, as she slid an envelope
under my door. She jumped as I undid the bolts. ‘Oh,
mon Dieu
– thank
heaven it’s you,’ she said, her hand at her mouth.

‘Is this what I think it is?’ I
said, glancing down at the oversized envelope, addressed to nobody.