Suite Française

  “Do you really think I could ever forget you?” he said finally. “Do you think I have so many happy memories that I could forget this? Just imagine! The war, the horror, the war.”

  “But what about before that? You weren’t in the war for ever, were you? So before, were there . . .”

  “What?”

  She didn’t reply.

  “You mean were there women, girls?”

  “Of course that’s what I mean!”

  “Nothing very interesting, my dear Madeleine.”

  “But you’re going away,” she said and finally, without the strength to hold back her tears, she let them fall down her full cheeks and said in a voice choking with emotion, “I can’t stand the thought of you leaving, I can’t. I know I shouldn’t say it, you’ll make fun of me and Cécile will even more . . . but I don’t care . . . I can’t bear it . . .”

  “Madeleine . . .”

  She stood up straight, their eyes met. He walked towards her and, gently putting his arm round her waist, drew her close; when he started to kiss her, she sighed and pushed him away. “No, that’s not what I want . . . that would be too easy . . .”

  “What do you want, then, Madeleine?” he said. “That I promise never to forget you? Whether you believe me or not, that’s the truth. I will never forget you,” and he took her hand and kissed it; she blushed with happiness.

  “Madeleine, is it true you want to become a nun?”

  “It’s true. Well, I wanted to before, but now . . . it’s not that I don’t love our Good Lord any more, I just think it’s not for me.”

  “Of course it’s not! You’re meant to love and be happy.”

  “Happy? I don’t know, but I think I’m meant to have a husband and children, and if Benoît hasn’t been killed, then . . .”

  “Benoît? I didn’t know . . .”

  “Yes, we talked about it . . . I didn’t want to. I had this idea of becoming a nun. But if he comes back . . . he’s a good man . . .”

  “I didn’t know . . .” he said again.

  How secretive these country people were! Discreet, wary, everything securely locked up . . . like their big wardrobes. He’d lived with them for two months and had never even suspected there was anything between Madeleine and the son of the house, and now that he thought about it, he realised they hardly ever talked about this Benoît . . . They never talked about anything. But that didn’t mean they weren’t thinking about it.

  The farmer’s wife called Madeleine. They went back.

  Several days passed; there was no news of Benoît but Jean-Marie soon got a letter and some money from his parents. He was never alone with Madeleine again. He realised they were being watched. He said goodbye to the whole family at the door. It was raining that morning, the first rain in many long weeks; a chilly wind blew in from the hills. When he was out of sight, the farmer’s wife went back inside. The two young girls lingered at the door, listening to the sound of the cart on the road.

  “Well, it’s not such a bad thing,” exclaimed Cécile, as if she had made an effort not to say anything for a long time and now let a rush of words tumble out. “Maybe we’ll get a little work out of you now . . . You’ve had your head in the clouds recently; I’ve had to do everything . . .”

  “You’ve got no right to criticise me,” Madeleine replied angrily. “All you did was sew and look at yourself in the mirror . . . I’m the one who got the cows in yesterday and it wasn’t even my turn.”

  “Well, I don’t know anything about that. It was Mother who told you to do it.”

  “Even if Mother told me to do it, I know who gave her the idea.”

  “Think what you like!”

  “Hypocrite.”

  “Hussy! And you want to be a nun . . .”

  “As if you didn’t run around after him. But he couldn’t have cared less!”

  “So, and what about you? He’s gone and you’ll never see him again.”

  Their eyes burning with rage, they looked at each other for a moment, then suddenly a surprised, soft expression came over Madeleine’s face.

  “Oh, Cécile! We used to be like sisters . . . We never fought like this before . . . It isn’t worth it, come on. We can’t have him, either of us!” She put her arm round Cécile, who started crying. “It’ll pass, come on, it’ll pass . . . Dry your eyes. Mother will see you’ve been crying.”

  “Oh, Mother . . . she knows everything but says nothing.”

  They let go of each other; one went over to the stables and the other went inside the house. It was Monday, washing day, and they hardly had the chance to say two words to each other, but from their expressions, their smiles, it was clear they had made up. The wind blew the smoke from the laundry boiler towards the barn. It was one of those dark, stormy days in the middle of August when you can smell the first breath of autumn in the air.

  Madeleine didn’t have time to think as she washed, wrung out and rinsed the clothes, and so she managed to put aside her pain. When she looked up, she saw the grey sky, the trees battered by the storm. “You’d think summer was over . . .” she said.

  “Not before time. Filthy summer,” her mother replied resentfully.

  Madeleine looked at her, surprised, then remembered the war, the mass exodus, Benoît gone, the universal misery, the war still going on far away and so many people who had died. She went back to work in silence.

  That evening, she had just shut the chickens away and was hurrying across the yard in the rain when she saw a man on the road walking quickly towards her. Her heart began pounding; she thought Jean-Marie had come back. A kind of wild joy shot through her. She rushed towards him, then let out a cry: “Benoît?”

  “Yes, it’s me all right,” he said.

  “But how . . . Oh, your mother will be so happy . . . Did you escape, Benoît? We were afraid you were taken prisoner.”

  He laughed to himself. He was a large young man with a broad, brown face and daring eyes.

  “I was, but not for long!”

  “You escaped?”

  “Yes.”

  “But how?”

  “Well, with my friends.”

  And suddenly she became a shy country girl once more, with that ability—lost with Jean-Marie—to love and suffer in silence. She didn’t ask him anything, she just walked alongside him without saying a word.

  “And how’s everything here?” he asked.

  “Fine.”

  “Nothing new?”

  “No, nothing,” she said.

  And leaping up the first three of the steps into the kitchen, she went inside the house and called out, “Mother, come quick, it’s Benoît! Benoît’s come home!”

  31

  The preceding winter—the first of the war—had been long and hard. But what of the winter of 1940–1? The end of November saw the beginning of the cold and snow. It fell on the houses destroyed by the bombs, on the bridges they were trying to rebuild, on the Paris streets where there were no cars or buses, where women in fur coats and wool hoods hurried by, where other women shivered and huddled in doorways. It fell on the railway tracks and on the telegraph wires, which were sometimes dragged to the ground by the weight and snapped; on the green uniforms of the German soldiers standing at the entrance to their barracks and on the red flags with their swastikas draped over the monuments. In freezing apartments, it cast a mournful, deathly pallor that made everything feel even colder and more inhospitable. In the poorer families, the old people and children stayed in bed for weeks: it was the only place they could be warm.

  That winter, Gabriel Corte’s terrace was covered in a thick layer of snow; he and Florence put the champagne out there to chill. Corte would write sitting next to the fire, which still didn’t quite manage to replace the lost heat of the radiators. His nose was blue; he could have cried from the cold. With one hand he held a piping hot-water bottle against his chest; with the other he wrote.

  At Christmas the cold became even fiercer; only in the Métro could you war
m up a little. And still the relentless snow fell—softly, cruelly—on the trees along the Boulevard Delessert where the Péricands had come back to live (for they belonged to the French upper middle class who would prefer to see their children with no bread, no meat, no air rather than no education, and under no circumstances would they interrupt Hubert’s studies, already so damaged by the terrible events of the past summer, nor Bernard’s, who was nearly nine and had forgotten everything he’d learned before the exodus and was forced by his mother to recite “The earth is a sphere which sits on absolutely nothing” as if he were seven instead of eight—what a disaster!)

  Snowflakes gathered on Madame Péricand’s black mourning veil as she marched proudly past the long queues of customers in front of the shop, stopping at the entrance to wave like a flag the priority ration card given to large families.

  In the snow, Jeanne and Maurice Michaud waited their turn, leaning against each other like weary horses during a short pause in their journey.

  The snow covered Charlie Langelet’s grave at the Père-Lachaise cemetery, the piles of wrecked cars near the Gien bridge—and all the shelled, burned-out, abandoned vehicles left along the roads in June, tilted over on one wheel or on their side, or ripped open, or nothing more than a twisted mass of steel. The countryside was white, endless, silent. Only after several days did the snow melt; the country folk were delighted. “It’s good to see the earth again,” they said. But the next day it snowed again and the crows screeched in the skies. “There’s a lot of snow this year,” the young people murmured, thinking of the battlefields, the towns that had been bombed. But the older people replied, “No more than usual!” In the countryside nothing changed, everyone just waited. They waited for the war to end, for the blockade to be lifted, for the prisoners to come home, for the end of winter.

  “There won’t be any spring this year,” the women sighed as February passed, then the beginning of March and still it got no warmer. The snow had disappeared, but the earth was grey and as hard as iron. The potatoes froze. The animals had nothing to eat. They should have been put out to pasture by now, but there wasn’t a single blade of grass in sight. In the Sabaries’ hamlet, the old people shut themselves away behind their great wooden doors, which they nailed shut at night. The family huddled round the stove, knitting for the prisoners, without saying a word. Madeleine and Cécile were making little nightshirts and nappies out of old sheets: Madeleine had married Benoît in September and was expecting a baby. When a harsh gust of wind shook the door, the old women would say, “Ah, dear God, it’s just too much!”

  At the neighbouring farm a baby was crying. He’d been born just before Christmas and his father was a prisoner of war. His mother already had three other children. She was a tall, thin countrywoman, modest, reserved, who never complained. When people asked her, “How are you going to manage, Louise, with no man at home, with all the work, no one to help you and four children?” her eyes would be sad and cold, but she would smile faintly and reply, “I have no choice . . .” In the evening, when the children were asleep, she would go round to the Sabaries and sit down with her knitting, next to the door so she could hear if her children called her through the silent darkness. When no one was looking she would secretly watch Madeleine with her young husband, without envy, without malice, but in silent sorrow; then she would quickly look back down at her work. After a quarter of an hour she would get up, put on her shoes and say quietly, “Well, I’d better get going. Goodnight, goodbye everyone,” and go home. It was a March evening. She couldn’t sleep. It was the same almost every night when she tried to fall asleep in the cold, empty bed. She had thought about having her eldest child sleep with her, but a kind of superstitious fear prevented her: that place had to be saved for her absent husband.

  On this particular night, a violent wind was blowing as a storm from the Morvan mountains swept over the village. “There’ll be more snow tomorrow!” everyone said. In her large, silent house that creaked like a ship adrift at sea, the woman couldn’t bear it any more and, for the very first time, burst into tears. She hadn’t cried when her husband had left in ’39, nor when he’d said goodbye after his few days home on leave, nor when she’d found out he’d been taken prisoner, nor when she’d given birth all alone. But she just couldn’t bear it any more: so much work to do . . . the baby was so big and wore her out with his feeding and crying . . . the cow hardly gave any milk because it was so cold . . . the chickens had nothing to eat and weren’t laying any eggs . . . in the wash-house she had to break the ice . . . It was all too much. She just couldn’t do it any more—it was making her ill. She had lost the will to live . . . What was the point of living? She would never see her husband again. They missed each other so much; at that moment he was probably dying in Germany. It was so cold in that big bed.

  She reached for the warming stone, which a few hours ago had been burning hot but was now icy cold, took it out from under the sheets and set it gently down on the floor. As her hand touched the freezing tiles, she felt an even icier chill run straight through her heart. She was sobbing violently. What could anyone say to ease her pain? “You’re not the only one . . .” She knew that only too well but other people seemed to be lucky . . . Madeleine Sabarie, for example . . . She didn’t wish her harm . . . It was just too much! Life was too painful. Her thin body was frozen. It did her no good to huddle under the eiderdown, she felt the cold seeping right down to her bones. “It will pass, he’ll come home and the war will be over!” people would say. No. She didn’t believe it any more. No. It would go on and on and on . . . Even spring didn’t seem to want to come . . . Had there ever been such terrible weather in March? March was nearly over and the ground was still frozen, frozen to the core, like her. Such harsh winds! Just listen to them! They would surely blow the tiles off the roof.

  She sat up in bed and listened for a moment. A look of mild surprise suddenly passed across her sad, tear-stained face. The wind had stopped. Just as it had come out of nowhere, so it had now disappeared without a trace. It had broken branches off the trees, whipped the rooftops in its blind rage, carried away the last of the snow on the hill, and now, out of the dark sky devastated by the storm, the first rain of spring began to fall, still cold, but torrential and urgent, carving its way down to the smallest roots of the trees, down to the very heart of the deep, black earth.

  TWO

  Dolce

  1

  Occupation

  In the Angellier household they were locking away all the important papers along with the family silver and the books: the Germans were coming to Bussy. For the third time since the defeat of France, the village was to be occupied. It was Easter Sunday, High Mass. A cold rain was falling. At the entrance to the church, the branches of a small peach tree, pink with blossom, swayed mournfully. The Germans marched in rows of eight; they wore their field dress and metal helmets. Their faces maintained the impenetrable and impersonal expression of professional soldiers, but their eyes glanced furtively, inquisitively, at the grey façades of the town that was to be their home. There was no one at the windows. As they passed the church, they could hear the sound of the harmonium and the murmur of prayers; but a frightened member of the congregation shut the door. The stomping of German boots reigned supreme. The first detachment swung past and was followed by an officer on horseback; his beautiful dappled mare seemed furious at being forced to go so slowly; as she placed each hoof on the ground with reluctant care, she trembled, neighed and shook her proud head. Great grey armoured tanks pounded the cobblestone streets. Then came the cannons on their rolling platforms, a soldier positioned high above each one to keep watch. The column of soldiers was so long that throughout the priest’s sermon a kind of constant thunder resounded through the church’s vaults. The women sighed in the shadows.

  After the metallic rumbling subsided, the motorcycles arrived, flanking the Commandant’s car. Behind him, at a respectful distance, came trucks packed to the brim with large round loaves
of black bread. They made the church windows rattle. The regiment’s mascot—a thin, silent Alsatian dog, trained for combat—ran beside the cavalrymen who brought up the rear. Perhaps because they were so far away from the Commandant that he couldn’t see them, or for some other reason incomprehensible to the locals, these soldiers were more informal, friendlier than the others. They talked and laughed among themselves. The Lieutenant in charge smiled when he saw the lone pink peach tree lashed by the bitter wind; he snapped off a branch. Since he saw nothing but closed windows all around him, he assumed he was alone. Far from it. Behind each shutter was an old woman, eyes as piercing as a knife, watching the conquering soldier’s every move. Deep within hidden rooms, voices groaned.

  “Could you ever have imagined such a thing . . .”

  “He’s destroying our fruit trees, for heaven’s sake!”

  “Seems this lot’s the worst,” a toothless mouth whispered. “I heard they did a lot of damage before coming here. Just our luck.”

  “I bet they’ll take our sheets,” said one housewife. “Just imagine, sheets I got from my mother! Only the best for them . . .”

  The Lieutenant shouted an order. The men seemed very young. They had rosy complexions and golden hair. They rode magnificent, well-fed horses with wide, shiny rumps, which they tied up in the square, around the War Memorial. The soldiers broke ranks and started to make themselves at home. The village was filled with the sound of boots, foreign voices, the rattling of spurs and weapons. In the better houses, they hid away the good linen.

  The Angellier women—the mother and wife of Gaston Angellier, prisoner of war in Germany—were finishing their packing. The elder Madame Angellier, a thin, pale person, frail and austere, quietly read out loud the title of each book in the library and religiously stroked its cover, before putting it away. “My son’s books,” she murmured, “to see them in the hands of a German! . . . I’d rather burn them.”