Page 23 of The Girl You Left Behind
“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 on my occasional visits to the Académie he would show me his work, glancing over to check that I had grasped each point before he showed the next piece—“joyous. I think he gets great joy from what he does.”
TheKommandantthought 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 theKommandant, 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 theirKommandantis 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 neighbors. 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 neighbor.”
“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 theKommandantwas 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.
Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht.
Alles schläft; einsam wacht.
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 theKommandant’s face. His request seemed genuine.We shall just... be two people....
And then I thought of my husband.Would Iwish 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?
