Page 5 of The Girl You Left Behind
•••
St. Péronne, where the Bessette family had run Le Coq Rouge for generations, had been among the first towns to fall to the Germans in the autumn of 1914. Hélène and I, our parents long dead and our husbands at the Front, had determined to keep the hotel going. We were not alone in taking on men’s work: The shops, the local farms, the school were almost entirely run by women aided by old men and boys. By 1915 there were barely any men left in the town.
We did good business in the early months, with French soldiers passing through and the British not far behind. Food was still plentiful, music and cheering accompanied the marching troops, and most of us still believed the war would be over within months, at worst. There were a few hints of the horrors taking place a hundred miles away: We gave food to the Belgian refugees who traipsed past, their belongings teetering on wagons; some were still clad in slippers and the clothes they had worn when they had left their homes. Occasionally, if the wind blew from the east, we could just make out the distant boom of the guns. But although we knew that the war was close by, few believed that St. Péronne, our proud little town, could possibly join those that had fallen under German rule.
Proof of how wrong we had been had come accompanied by the sound of gunfire on a still, cold, autumn morning, when Madame Fougère and Madame Dérin had set out for their daily 6:45A.M.stroll to theboulangerieand were shot dead as they crossed the square.
I had pulled back the curtains at the noise, and it had taken me several moments to comprehend what I saw: the bodies of those two women, widows and friends for most of their seventy-odd years, sprawled on the pavement, head scarves askew, their empty baskets upended at their feet. A sticky red pool spread around them in an almost perfect circle, as if it had come from one entity.
The German officers claimed afterward that snipers had shot at them and that they had acted in retaliation. (Apparently they said the same of every village they took.) If they had wanted to prompt insurrection in the town, they could not have done better than their killing of those old women. But the outrage did not stop there. They set fire to barns and shot down the statue of Mayor Leclerc. Twenty-four hours later they marched in formation down our main street, theirPickelhaubehelmetsshining in the wintry sunlight, as we stood outside our homes and shops and watched in shocked silence. They ordered the few remaining men outside, so that they could count them.
The shopkeepers and stall holders simply shut their shops and stalls and refused to serve them. Most of us had stockpiled food; we knew we could survive. I think we believed they might give up, faced with such intransigence, and march on, to another village. But then Kommandant Becker had decreed that any shopkeeper who failed to open during normal working hours would be shot. One by one theboulangerie, theboucherie, the market stalls, and even Le Coq Rouge reopened. Reluctantly, our little town was prodded back into sullen, mutinous life.
Eighteen months on, there was little left to buy. St. Péronne was cut off from its neighbors, deprived of news and dependent on the irregular delivery of aid, which was supplemented by costly black-market provisions when they were available. Sometimes it was hard to believe that Free France knew what we were suffering. The Germans were the only ones who ate well; their horses (our horses) were sleek and fat, and they ate the crushed wheat that should have been used to make our bread. They raided our wine cellars and took the food produced by our farms.
And it wasn’t just food. Every week someone would get the dreaded knock on the door, and a new list of items would be requisitioned: teaspoons, curtains, dinner plates, saucepans, blankets. Occasionally an officer would inspect first, note what was desirable, and return with a list specifying exactly that. They would write promissory notes that could supposedly be exchanged for money. Not a single person in St. Péronne knew anyone who had actually been paid.
•••
“What are you doing?”
“I’m moving this.” I took the portrait and moved it to a quiet corner, less in public gaze.
“Who is it?” Aurélien asked as I rehung it, adjusting it on the wall until it was straight.
“It’s me!” I turned to him. “Can you not tell?”
“Oh.” He squinted. He wasn’t trying to insult me: The girl in the painting was very different from the thin, severe woman, gray of complexion and with wary, tired eyes, who stared back at me daily from the looking glass. I tried not to glimpse her too often.
“Did Édouard do it?”
“Yes. When we were married.”
“It’s lovely,” Hélène said, standing back to look at it. “But...”
“But what?”
“It is a risk to have it up at all. When the Germans went through Lille they burned art they considered subversive. Édouard’s painting is... very different. How do you know they won’t destroy it?”
She worried, Hélène. She worried about Édouard’s paintings and our brother’s temper; she worried about the letters and diary entries I wrote on scraps of paper and stuffed into holes in the beams. “I want it down here, where I can see it. Don’t worry—the rest are safe in Paris.”
She didn’t look convinced.
“I want color, Hélène. I wantlife.I don’t want to look at Napoléon or Papa’s stupid pictures of mournful dogs. And I won’t letthem”—I nodded outside to where off-duty German soldiers were smoking by the town fountain—“decide what I may look at in my own home.”
Hélène shook her head, as if I were a fool she might have to indulge. And then she went to serve Madame Louvier and Madame Durant, who, although they had often observed that my chicory coffee tasted as if it had come from the sewer, had arrived to hear the story of the pig-baby.
•••
Hélène and I shared a bed that night, flanking Mimi and Jean. Sometimes it was so cold, even in October, that we feared we would find them frozen solid in their nightclothes, so we all huddled up together. It was late, but I knew my sister was awake. The moonlight shone through the gap in the curtains, and I could see just her eyes, wide open, fixed on a distant point. I guessed that she was wondering where her husband was at that very moment, whether he was warm, billeted somewhere like our home, or freezing in a trench, gazing up at the same moon.
In the far distance a muffled boom told of some far-off battle.
“Sophie?”
“Yes?” We spoke in the quietest of whispers.
“Do you ever wonder what it will be like... if they do not come back?”
