Page 29 of The Girl You Left Behind
“What?” I protested. “Does the truth make you too uncomfortable? Am I forbidden to speak?”
“Sit down, Sophie. For God’s sake, just sit down and hush.”
“I am very sorry for Madame Béthune,” the mayor said quietly. “But I am not here to discuss her. I came to talk to you.”
“I have nothing to say to you,” I said, wiping at my face with my palms.
The mayor took a deep breath. “Sophie, I have news of your husband.”
It took me a moment to register what he had said. He sat down heavily on the stairs beside me. Hélène still held my hand.
“It’s not good news, I’m afraid. When the last prisoners came through this morning, one dropped a message as he passed the post office. A scrap of paper. My clerk picked it up. It says that Édouard Lefèvre was among five men sent to the reprisal camp at Ardennes last month. I’m so sorry, Sophie.”
8
Édouard Lefèvre, imprisoned, had been charged with handing a fist-sized piece of bread to a prisoner. He had fought back fiercely when beaten for it: how typical of Édouard. The reprisal camp where he was held was said to be one of the worst: The men slept two hundred to a shed on bare boards; they lived on watery soup with a few husks of barley and the occasional dead mouse. They were sent to work stone breaking or building railways, forced to carry heavy iron girders on their shoulders for miles. Those who dropped from exhaustion were punished, beaten, or denied rations. Disease was rife, and men were shot for the pettiest misdemeanors.
I took it all in, and each of these images haunted my dreams. “He will be all right, won’t he?” I said to the mayor.
He patted my hand. “We will all pray for him,” he said. He sighed deeply as he stood to leave, and his sigh was like a death sentence.
The mayor visited most days after the parading of Liliane Béthune. As the truth about her filtered around the town, she became slowly redrawn in the collective imagination. Lips no longer pursed automatically at the mention of her name. Someone scrawled the word “héroïne” on the market square in chalk under cover of darkness, and although it was swiftly removed, we all knew to whom it referred. A few precious things that had been looted from her house when she was first arrested mysteriously found their way back.
Of course, there were those who, like Mesdames Louvier and Durant, would not have believed well of her if she had been seen throttling Germans with her bare hands. But there were some vague admissions of regret in our little bar, small kindnesses shown to Édith, in the arrival at Le Coq Rouge of outgrown clothes or odd pieces of food. Liliane had apparently been sent to a holding camp at some distance south of our town. She was lucky, the mayor confided, not to have been shot immediately. He suspected it was only special pleading by one of the officers that had saved her from a swift execution. “But there’s no point in trying to intervene, Sophie,” he said. “She was caught spying for the French, and I don’t suppose she’ll be saved for long.”
As for me, I was no longer persona non grata. Not that I particularly cared. I found it hard to feel the same about my neighbors. Édith stayed glued to my side, like a pale shadow. She ate little and asked after her mother constantly. I told her truthfully that I didn’t know what would happen to Liliane, but that she, Édith, would be safe with us. I had taken to sleeping with her in my old room to stop her shrieking nightmares waking the two younger ones. In the evenings she would creep down to the fourth stair, the nearest point from which she could see into the kitchen, and we would find her there late at night when we had finished clearing the kitchen, fast asleep with her thin arms holding her knees.
My fears for her mother mixed with my fears for my husband. I spent my days in a silent vortex of worry and exhaustion. Little news came into the town, and none went out. Somewhere out there he might be starving, lying sick with fever, or being beaten. The mayor received official news of three deaths, two at the Front, one at a camp near Mons, and heard there was an outbreak of typhoid near Lille. I took each of these snippets personally.
Perversely, Hélène seemed to thrive in this atmosphere of grim foreboding. I think that watching me crumble had made her believe that the worst must have happened. If Édouard, with all his strength and vitality, faced death, there could be no hope for Jean-Michel, a gentle, bookish man. He could not have survived, her reasoning went, so she might as well get on with it. She seemed to grow in strength, urging me to get up when she found me in secret tears in the beer cellar, forcing me to eat, or singing lullabies to Édith, Mimi, and Jean in a strange, jaunty tone. I was grateful for her strength. I lay at night with my arms around another woman’s child and wished I never had to think again.
•••
Late in January, Louisa died. That we had all known it was coming did not make it any easier. Overnight the mayor and his wife seemed to age ten years. “I tell myself it is a blessing that she will not have to see the world as it is,” he said to me, and I nodded. Neither of us believed it.
The funeral was to take place five days later. I decided it was not fair to take the children, so I told Hélène she should go for me; I would take the little ones to the woods behind the old fire station. Given the severity of the cold, the Germans had granted the villagers two hours a day in which to forage in local woods for kindling. I wasn’t convinced that we would find much: Under cover of darkness the trees had long been stripped of any useful branches. But I needed to be away from the town, away from grief and fear and the constant scrutiny of either the Germans or my neighbors.
It was a crisp, silent afternoon, and the sun shone weakly through the skeletal silhouettes of those trees that remained, seemingly too exhausted to rise more than a few feet from the horizon. It was easy to look at our landscape, as I did that afternoon, and wonder if the very world was coming to an end. I walked, conducting a silent conversation with my husband, as I often did these days.Be strong, Édouard. Hold on. Just stay alive, and I know we will be together again.Édith and Mimi walked in silence at first, flanking me, their feet crunching on the icy leaves, but then, as we reached the woods, some childish impulse overtook them, and I stopped briefly to watch as they ran toward a rotting tree trunk, jumping on and off it, holding hands and giggling. Their shoes would be scuffed and their skirts muddied, but I would not deny them that simple consolation.
I stooped and put a few handfuls of twigs into my basket, hoping their voices might drown the constant hum of dread in my mind. And then, as I straightened, I saw him: in the clearing, a gun on his shoulder, talking to one of his men. He heard the girls’ voices and swung round. Édith shrieked, looked about wildly for me, and bolted for my arms, her eyes wide with terror. Mimi, confused, stumbled along behind, trying to work out why her friend should be so shaken by the man who came each night to the restaurant.
“Don’t cry, Édith, he’s not going to hurt us. Please don’t cry.” I saw him watching us, and prized the child from my legs. I crouched down to talk to her. “That’s Herr Kommandant. I’m going to talk to him now about his supper. You stay here and play with Mimi. I’m fine. See?”
She trembled as I handed her to Mimi. “Go and play over there for a moment. I’m just going to talk to Herr Kommandant. Here, take my basket and see if you can find me some twigs. I promise you nothing bad will happen.”
When I could finally peel her from my skirts, I walked over to him. The officer who was with him said something in a low voice, and I pulled my shawls around me, crossing my arms in front of my chest, waiting as theKommandantdismissed him.
“We thought we might go shooting,” he said, peering up at the empty skies. “Birds,” he added.
“There are no birds left here,” I said. “They are all long gone.”
“Probably quite wise.” In the distance we could hear the faint boom of the big guns. It seemed to make the air contract briefly around us.
“Is that the whore’s child?” He cocked his gun over his arm and lit a cigarette. I glanced behind me to where the girls were standing by the rotten trunk.
“Liliane’s child? Yes. She will stay with us.”
He watched her closely, and I could not work out what he was thinking. “She is a little girl,” I said. “She understood nothing of what was going on.”
