Page 17 of The Girl You Left Behind
It had been a month since the Germans had started to eat at Le Coq Rouge, and an uneasy truce had settled over its shared territory. From ten in the morning until half past five, the bar was French, filled with its usual mixture of the elderly and lonely. Hélène and I would clear up, then cook for the Germans, who arrived shortly before seven, expecting their food to be on the tables almost as they walked through the door. There were benefits: When there were leftovers, several times a week, we shared them (although now there tended to be the odd scraps of meat or vegetables rather than a feast of chicken). As the weather turned colder, the Germans got hungrier, and Hélène and I were not brave enough to keep some back for ourselves. Still, even those odd mouthfuls of extra food made a difference. Jean was ill less often, our skin began to clear, and a couple of times we managed to sneak a small jar of stock, brewed from the bones, to the mayor’s house for the ailing Louisa.
There were other advantages. The moment the Germans left in the evenings Hélène and I would race to the fire, extinguishing the logs, then leaving them in the cellar to dry out. A few days’ collections of the half-burned oddments could mean a small fire in the daytime when it was particularly cold. On the days we did that, the bar was often full to bursting, even if few of our customers bought anything to drink.
But there was, predictably, a negative side. Mesdames Durant and Louvier had decided that, even if I did not talk to the officers, or behave as if they were anything but a gross imposition in my house, I must be receiving German largesse. I could feel their eyes on me as I took in the regular supplies of food, wine, and fuel. I knew we were the subject of heated discussion around the square. My one consolation was that the nightly curfew meant they could not see the glorious food we cooked for the men, or how the hotel became a place of lively chatter and debate during those dark evening hours.
Hélène and I had learned to live with the sound of foreign accents in our home. We recognized a few of the men—there was the tall thin one with the huge ears, who always attempted to thank us in our own language. There was the grumpy one with the salt-and-pepper mustache, who usually managed to find fault with something, demanding salt, pepper, or extra meat. There was little Holger, who drank too much and stared out of the window as if his mind was only half on whatever was going on around him. Hélène and I would nod civilly at their comments, taking care to be polite but not friendly. Some nights, if I’m honest, there was almost a pleasure in having them there. Not Germans, but human beings. Men, company, the smell of cooking. We had been starved of male contact, of life, for so long. But there were other nights when evidently something had gone wrong, when they did not talk, when faces were tight and severe, and the conversation was conducted in rapid-fire bursts of whispering. They glanced sideways at us then, as if remembering that we were the enemy. As if we could understand almost anything they said.
Aurélien was learning. He had taken to lying on the floor of Room Three, his face pressed to the gap in the floorboards, hoping that one day he might catch sight of a map or some instruction that would grant us military advantage. He had become astonishingly proficient at German: When they were gone he would mimic their accent or say things that made us laugh. Occasionally he even understood snatches of conversation; which officer was in theKrankenhaus(hospital), how many men weretot(dead). I worried for him, but I was proud, too. It made me feel that our feeding the Germans might have some hidden purpose yet.
TheKommandant, meanwhile, was unfailingly polite. He greeted me, if not with warmth, then with a kind of increasingly familiar civility. He praised the food, without attempting to flatter, and kept a tight hand on his men, who were not allowed to drink to excess or address us in an ungentlemanly manner. Several times he sought me out to discuss art. I was not quite comfortable with one-to-one conversation, but there was a small pleasure in being reminded of my husband. TheKommandanttalked of his admiration for Purrmann, of the artist’s German roots, of paintings he had seen by Matisse that had made him long to travel to Moscow and Morocco.
At first I was reluctant to talk, and then I found I could not stop. It was like being reminded of another life, another world. He was fascinated by the dynamics of the Académie Matisse, whether there was rivalry between the artists or genuine love. He had a lawyer’s way of speaking: quick, intelligent, impatient toward those who could not immediately grasp his point. I think he liked to talk to me because I was not discomfited by him.
His own parents, he confided, were “not cultured” but had inspired in him a passion for learning. He hoped, he said, to further his intellectual studies after the war, to travel, to read, to learn. His wife was called Liesl. He had a child, too, he revealed one evening. A boy of two that he had not yet seen. (When I told Hélène this I had expected her face to cloud with sympathy, but she had said briskly that he should spend less time invading other people’s countries.)
He told me all this as if in passing, without attempting to solicit any personal information in return. This did not stem from egoism. It was more an understanding that in inhabiting my home, he had already invaded my life, and to seek anything further would be too much of an imposition. He was, I realized, something of a gentleman.
That first month I found it increasingly difficult to dismiss Herr Kommandant as a beast, a Boche, as I could with the others. I suppose I had come to believe all Germans were barbaric, so it was hard to picture them with wives, mothers, babies. There he was, eating in front of me, night after night, talking, discussing color and form and the skills of other artists, as my husband might. Occasionally he smiled, his bright blue eyes suddenly framed by deep crow’s-feet, as if happiness had been a far more familiar emotion to him than his features let on.
I neither defended nor talked about theKommandantin front of the other townspeople. If someone tried to engage me in conversation about the travails of having Germans at Le Coq Rouge, I would reply simply that, God willing, the day would come soon when our husbands returned and all this could be a distant memory.
And I would pray that nobody had noticed that there had not been a single requisition order on our home since the Germans had moved in.
•••
Shortly before midday I left the fuggy interior of the bar and stepped outside, on the pretext of beating a rug. A light frost still lay upon the ground where it stood in shadow, its surface crystalline and glittering. I shivered as I carried it the few yards down the side street to René’s garden, and there I heard it: a muffled chime, signaling a quarter to twelve.
When I returned, a raggle-taggle gathering of elders were making their way out of the bar. “We will sing,” Madame Poilâne announced.
“What?”
“We will sing. It will drown out the chimes until this evening. We will tell them it is a French custom. Songs from the Auvergne. Anything we can remember. What do they know?”
“You are going to sing all day?”
“No, no. On the hour. Just if there are Germans around.”
I looked at her in disbelief.
“If they dig up René’s clock, Sophie, they will dig up this whole town. I will not lose my mother’s pearls to some German hausfrau.” Her mouth pursed in a moueof disgust.
“Well, you’d better get going. When the clock strikes midday, half of St. Péronne will hear it.”
It was almost funny. I hovered on the front step as the group of elders gathered at the mouth of the alleyway, facing the Germans, who were still standing in the square, and began to sing. They sang the nursery rhymes of my youth, as well assongs from other parts of France—“La Pastourelle,” “Bailero,” “Lorsque J’étais petit,” all in their tuneless, rasping voices. They sang with their heads high, shoulder to shoulder, occasionally glancing sideways at each other. René looked alternately grumpy and anxious. Madame Poilâne held her hands in front of her, as pious as a Sunday school teacher.
As I stood, dishcloth in hand, trying not to smile, theKommandantcrossed the street. “What are these people doing?”
“Good morning, Herr Kommandant.”
“You know there are to be no gatherings on the street.”
“They are hardly a gathering. It’s a festival, Herr Kommandant. A French tradition. On the hour, in November, the elderly of St. Péronne sing folk songs to ward off the approach of winter.” I said this with utter conviction. TheKommandantfrowned, then peered round me at the old people. Their voices lifted in unison, and I guessed that, behind them, the chiming had begun.
“But they are terrible,” he said, lowering his voice. “It is the worst singing I have ever heard.”
“Please... don’t stop them. They are innocent peasant songs, as you can hear. It gives the old people a little pleasure to sing the songs of their homeland, just for one day. Surely you would understand that.”
“They are going to sing like this all day?”
