The Girl You Left Behind

  He snatched at it. 'What is this?'

  'Nothing of importance, Officer. Just ... just a gift from my husband. Please let me have it.'

  I heard the panic in my voice, and even as I said the words, I knew it had been a mistake. He opened Edouard's little sketch of us; he the bear in his uniform, me serious in my starched blue dress. 'This is confiscated,' he said.

  'What?'

  'You are not entitled to carry likenesses of French Army uniform. I will dispose of it.'

  'But ...' I was incredulous. 'It's just a silly sketch of a bear.'

  'A bear in French uniform. It could be a code.'

  'But - but it's just a joke ... a trifle between me and my husband. Please do not destroy it.' I reached out my hand but he batted it away. 'Please - I have so little to remind me ...' As I stood, shivering, he looked me in the eye and tore it in two. Then he tore the two pieces into shreds, watching my face as they fell like confetti on to the wet ground.

  'Next time remember your papers, whore,' he said, and walked off to join his comrades.

  Helene met me as I walked through the door, clutching my freezing, sodden shawls to me. I felt the eyes of the customers as I pushed my way inside, but I had nothing to say to them. I walked through the bar and back into the little hallway, struggling with frozen hands to hang my shawls on the wooden pegs.

  'What happened?' My sister was behind me.

  I was so upset I could barely speak. 'The officer who grabbed you that time. He destroyed Edouard's sketch. He ripped it into pieces, to get revenge on us after the Kommandant hit him. And there is no bread because Monsieur Armand apparently also thinks I am a whore.' My face was numb and I could barely make myself understood, but I was livid and my voice carried.

  'Ssh!'

  'Why? Why should I be quiet? What have I done wrong? This place is alive with people hissing and whispering and nobody tells the truth.' I shook with rage and despair.

  Helene closed the bar door and hauled me up the stairs to the empty bedrooms, one of the few places we might not be heard.

  'Calm down and talk to me. What happened?'

  I told her then. I told her what Aurelien had said, and how the ladies in the boulangerie had spoken to me and about Monsieur Armand and his bread, which we could not now risk eating. Helene listened to all of it, placing her arms around me, resting her head against mine, and making sounds of sympathy as I talked. Until: 'You danced with him?'

  I wiped my eyes.

  'Well, yes.'

  'You danced with Herr Kommandant?'

  'Don't you look at me like that. You know what I was doing that night. You know I would have done anything to keep the Germans away from le reveillon. Keeping him here meant that you all enjoyed a proper feast. You told me it was the best day you'd had since Jean-Michel left.'

  She looked at me.

  'Well, didn't you say that? Didn't you use those exact words?'

  Still she said nothing.

  'What? Are you going to call me a whore too?'

  Helene looked at her feet. Finally she said, 'I would not have danced with a German, Sophie.'

  I let the significance of her words sink in. Then I stood and, without a word, I went back down the stairs. I heard her calling my name, and noted, somewhere deep in a dark place within me, that it came just a little too late.

  Helene and I worked around each other in silence that evening. We communicated as little as possible, speaking only to confirm that, yes, the pie would be ready for seven thirty and, yes, the wine was uncorked, and that indeed there were four fewer bottles than the previous week. Aurelien stayed upstairs with the babies. Only Mimi came down and hugged me. I hugged her back fiercely, breathing in her sweet, childlike smell, feeling her soft skin against my own. 'I love you, little Mi,' I whispered.

  She smiled at me from under her long blonde hair. 'I love you too, Auntie Sophie,' she said.

  I put my hand into my apron and quickly popped into her mouth a little strip of cooked pastry I had saved for her earlier. Then, as she grinned at me, Helene shepherded her up the stairs to bed.

  In contrast to my sister's and my mood, the German soldiers seemed curiously cheerful that evening. Nobody complained about the reduced rations; they seemed not to mind about the reduction in wine. The Kommandant alone seemed preoccupied and sombre. He sat alone as the other officers toasted something and all cheered. I wondered whether Aurelien was upstairs listening and whether he understood what they were saying.

  'Let's not argue,' Helene said, when we crawled into bed later. 'I do find it exhausting.' She reached out a hand for mine, and in the near dark I took it. But we both knew something had changed.

  It was Helene who went to the market the following morning. Only a few stalls were out, these days, some preserved meats, some fearsomely expensive eggs and a few vegetables, and an elderly man from La Vendee who made new undergarments from old fabric. I stayed in the hotel bar, serving the few customers we had left and trying not to mind that I was evidently still the subject of some unfriendly discussion.

  At about half past ten we became aware of a commotion outside. I wondered briefly whether it was more prisoners, but Helene came rushing in, her hair loose and her eyes wide.

  'You'll never guess,' she said. 'It's Liliane.'

  My heart began to thump. I dropped the ashtrays I was cleaning and ran for the door, flanked by the other customers who had risen as one from their seats. Up the road came Liliane Bethune. She was wearing her astrakhan coat, but she no longer looked like a Parisian model. She had on nothing else. Her legs were mottled blue with a mixture of cold and bruising. Her feet were bare and bloodied, her left eye half closed with swelling. Her hair lay unpinned around her face and she limped, as if every step were a Sisyphean effort. On each side of her stood two goading German officers, a group of soldiers following close behind. For once, they seemed not to mind when we came out to stare.

  That beautiful astrakhan coat was grey with dirt. On the back of it were not just sticky patches of blood but the unmistakable smears of phlegm.

  As I stared at it, I heard a sob. 'Maman! Maman!' Behind her, held back by other soldiers, I now saw Edith, Liliane's seven-year-old daughter. She sobbed and writhed, trying to reach past them to her mother, her face contorted. One gripped her arm, not letting her anywhere close. Another smirked, as if it were amusing. Liliane walked on as if oblivious, in a private world of pain, her head lowered. As she came past the hotel a low jeering broke out.

  'See the proud whore now!'

  'Do you think the Germans will still want you, Liliane?'

  'They've tired of her. And good riddance.'

  I could not believe these were my own countrymen. I gazed around me at the hate-filled faces, the scornful smiles, and when I could bear it no longer, I pushed through them and ran towards Edith. 'Give me the child,' I demanded. I saw now that the whole town seemed to have come to watch this spectacle. They were catcalling at Liliane from upstairs windows, from across the marketplace.

  Edith sobbed, her voice pleading. 'Maman!'

  'Give me the child!' I cried. 'Or are Germans persecuting little children now too?'

  The officer holding her looked behind him and I saw Herr Kommandant standing by the post office. He said something to the officer beside him, and after a moment the child was released to me. I swept her into my arms. 'It's all right, Edith. You come with me.' She buried her face in my shoulder, crying inconsolably, one arm still reaching vainly in the direction of her mother. I thought I saw Liliane's face turn slightly towards me, but at this distance it was impossible to say.

  I carried Edith quickly into the bar, away from the eyes of the town, away from the sound of the jeering as it picked up again, away into the back of the hotel where she would hear nothing. The child was hysterical, and who could blame her? I took her to our bedroom, gave her some water, then held her in my arms and rocked her. I told her again and again that it would be all right, we would make it all right, even though I knew
we could do nothing of the sort. She cried until she was exhausted. From her swollen face I guessed she had been crying much of the night. God only knew what she had seen. Finally she became limp in my arms and I laid her carefully in my bed, covering her with blankets. Then I made my way downstairs.

  As I walked into the bar, there was silence. Le Coq Rouge was busier than it had been in weeks, Helene rushing between the tables with a loaded tray. I saw the mayor in the doorway, then stared at the faces before me and realized I no longer knew any of them.

  'Are you satisfied?' I said, my voice breaking as I spoke. 'A child lies upstairs having watched you spit and jeer at her brutalized mother. People she thought were her friends. Are you proud?'

  My sister's hand landed on my shoulder. 'Sophie -'

  I shrugged her off. 'Don't Sophie me. You have no idea what you have all done. You think you know everything about Liliane Bethune. Well, you know nothing. NOTHING!' I was crying now, tears of rage. 'You are all so quick to judge, but just as quick to take what she offers when it suits you.'

  The mayor walked towards me. 'Sophie, we should talk.'

  'Oh. You will talk to me now! For weeks you have looked at me as if I were a bad smell because Monsieur Suel supposedly believes me to be a traitor and a whore. Me! Who risked everything to bring your daughter food. You would all believe him rather than me! Well, perhaps I do not want to talk to you, Monsieur. Knowing what I know, perhaps I would rather talk to Liliane Bethune!'

  I was raging now. I felt unhinged, a madwoman, as if I gave off sparks. I looked at their stupid faces, their open mouths, and I shook the restraining hand from my shoulder.

  'Where do you think the Journal des Occupes came from? Do you think the birds dropped it? Do you think it came by magic carpet?'

  Helene began to bundle me out now. 'I don't care! Who do they think was helping them? Liliane helped you! All of you! Even when you were shitting in her bread, she was helping you!'

  I was in the hallway. Helene's face was white, the mayor behind her, pushing me forwards, away from them.

  '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 shut up.'

  'I don't know this town any more. How can you all stand there and yell at her? Even if she had slept with the Germans, how can you treat another human being so? They spat on her, Helene, didn't you see? They spat all over her. As if she were not human.'

  'I am very sorry for Madame Bethune,' 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. Helene 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 Edouard Lefevre was among five men sent to the reprisal camp at Ardennes last month. I'm so sorry, Sophie.'

  8

  Edouard Lefevre, imprisoned, had been charged with handing a fist-sized piece of bread to a prisoner. He had fought back fiercely when beaten for it. I almost laughed when I heard: how typical of Edouard.

  But my laughter was short-lived. Every piece of information that came my way served to increase my fears. 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 misdemeanours.

  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 Bethune. 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 'heroine' 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 Edith, 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 neighbours. Edith 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, Edith, 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, Helene 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 Edouard, 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 Edith, 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 Helene 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 neighbours.

  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, Edouard. Hold on. Just stay alive and I know we will be together again. Edith 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 towards 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 to his shoulder, talking to one of his men. He heard the girls' voices and swung round. Edith 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, Edith, he's not going to hurt us. Please don't cry.' I saw him watching us, and prised 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. Look, 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 prise 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 the Kommandant dismissed 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 sensible.' In the distance we could hear the faint boom of the big guns. It seemed to make the air contract briefly around us.