The Alice Network

  “We took a wrong turn somewhere,” Finn said some minutes later. “This is south, not west. All these unsigned roads . . . Here, wait a moment.”

  He pulled up outside a roadside shop with a display of postcards and a cat dozing on its step. The cat yawned as Finn stepped over it to address the proprietor in his rough Scots-accented French. Rose and I could get a cat, I mused as the tabby washed its tail. My dearly departed Donald (God rest his soul) would never let me get a cat, because they made him sneeze. “I’ve decided I hate Donald,” Rose said in my imagination. “Couldn’t you at least invent a nice dead husband?”

  “You’re smiling,” Finn said, dropping back into the still-running Lagonda.

  “Just wondering what you’ll think of my cousin when you meet her. Well, not really wondering. Everyone likes Rose.”

  “Is she much like you?”

  “Not at all. Funnier, braver. Pretty.”

  Finn had been about to turn the car back onto the street, but he paused, giving me a long look out of those dark eyes. Finally he turned off the engine, reached out, and pulled me across the seat up against him. Winding his hand through my hair, he put his lips to my ear. “Charlie lass.” His breath was warm, sending a spark of current through the entire surface of my skin as he kissed the beating pulse below my ear. “You.” Kissing the point of my jaw. “Are.” Kissing the corner of my mouth. “Brave.” Kissing my lips, very lightly. “Not to mention pretty. Bonnie as a spring day.”

  “You know what they say about Scotsmen,” I managed to say. “They’re all liars.”

  “That’s Irishmen. No blarney about a Scot.”

  His mouth found mine again, and he kissed me for quite a while. Dimly I heard a passing bicycle ring a bell at us, but I had my arms tight around Finn’s neck, and my heart was thudding against his hard chest.

  Eventually he pulled back, though he still held me tight against his side. “I could stay here all afternoon,” he said. “But why don’t we go find your cousin?”

  “Okay,” I said simply, and I had not been this happy in a long time.

  “You want to take the wheel?”

  I stared at him, and then I grinned. “You’d trust me with the old girl?”

  “Slide over.”

  We traded places. I stretched my feet for the pedals, still smiling. Finn took me through the start-up—“If she was starting cold, you’d set your fuel-air mixture to slightly rich, but you can move it closer to center”—and eventually I turned the Lagonda back toward the west. She purred in my hands.

  “Funny,” Finn said. “The old man at the shop who gave me directions—he gave me an odd look when I said I was looking for Oradour-sur-Glane.”

  “What kind of look?”

  “Just odd.”

  “Mmm.” I ran my hand along the Lagonda’s wheel, feeling the soft cloth of Finn’s sleeve pressed against my arm. The sun was warm on my head, and as I steered the convertible along the rutted road, I started humming “La Vie en Rose.” I never wanted to leave this car.

  Look.” Finn pointed, but I’d already seen it. The looming shape of a church tower. “That should be it.”

  My blood fizzed as though it had turned to champagne. We’d traded places again as we got closer to Oradour-sur-Glane, since I was too keyed up to focus on driving. The road ahead wound toward the south end of the village, over the river Glane—I could see a church tower, low squat shapes of stone buildings around it, telephone poles. I wondered why the roofs canted at odd angles.

  “It’s quiet,” Finn commented. No barking dogs, no rumble of tram cars, no bicycle horns sounding as we motored into the town’s outskirts. Finn slowed the Lagonda, but there were no children playing in the streets. I was more puzzled than anything else, but then I noticed the nearest house had black smoke marks streaking the stone walls. And the roof had fallen in. “There must have been a fire,” I said, but the marks looked old, washed by rain.

  Finn eased off the gas even more, moving the car at a near idle. The Lagonda’s engine whined as though she were uneasy. I looked from side to side across the street. Still no people. More marks of smoke, of fire. I saw a clock lying on a sidewalk as though it had been dropped and abandoned. The face was half melted, but I could see the hands had stopped at four.

  “Not a single one of these houses has a roof.” Finn pointed and I saw more blackened timbers, more destroyed shingles. No wonder the silhouettes had looked strange from a distance. It had to have been a fire, but these were stone buildings, sturdy and well spaced. How could fire jump between buildings like this?

  My fizzing blood had gone very, very heavy in my veins.

  The church loomed on our left, massive, built also from the heavy local stone. It too had no roof. “Why hasn’t anyone rebuilt?” I whispered. “Even if there was a fire, why hasn’t anyone come back?”

  The thought came at me like a shrieking train: maybe there isn’t anyone left.

  “No,” I said aloud as though arguing with myself. “A whole town doesn’t die in a fire.” People would have fled. And work had obviously been done in Oradour-sur-Glane after the fire, whenever it happened—there was no rubble, no debris. People had come to clear the buildings and the streets.

  So why didn’t they stay? Why didn’t they rebuild?

  The Lagonda crept through the center of town, past an abandoned post office, a tram station. The tracks looked as good as new, as if a tram would be rumbling around the bend at any moment. But it was so silent, not a footstep or the meow of a cat to be heard anywhere. Why were there no birds singing? “Stop,” I said unsteadily. “I need to get out—I need to—”

  Finn halted the Lagonda in the middle of the cobbled street. Who would honk a horn at him here to make him move? There was no traffic. I scrambled out, nearly falling, and Finn steadied me with a hand on my arm. “No wonder the man at the shop gave me an odd look.”

  “What happened here?” This was like a ghost ship abandoned at sea with a meal still on the table. It was like a toy village with no dolls. Rose, where are you?

  We wandered back the way we’d come. I peered through the window of a burned-out hotel, and saw furniture inside—small tables thick with dust, chaises for waiting guests, abandoned countertops where desk clerks must have presided. If I went in, I’d probably find the half-melted bell on the counter, waiting to summon bellboys long gone.

  “Do you want to go in?” Finn asked. I gave a violent shake of my head.

  An empty market square or fairground loomed to our left. A car sat abandoned, rust showing around the doors. Finn ran a hand over the peeling fender. “A Peugeot,” he said. “Model 202. Someone’s pride and joy.”

  “So why would he leave it here?”

  Neither of us had any answers. But the fear inside me rose higher with every echoing footstep we took.

  The church again, rising up behind the stone wall at the road and a farther steep grass slope. A trio of arched windows loomed, looking like eyeless sockets gaping at us. Finn ran a hand over the lower wall, freezing in place. “Charlie,” he said. “Bullet holes.”

  “Bullet holes?”

  He passed a hand over the set of pocked marks. “Not rounds from country hunting rifles either. Look how evenly they’re spaced. Soldiers fired these rounds.”

  “But this is a village in the middle of nowhere. Who would—”

  “Let’s get out of here.” He swung around with a white face. “We’ll ask at the next village, someone can tell us what happened—”

  “No.” I pulled away. “Rose was here.”

  “She’s not here now, Charlie lass.” His eyes flicked up and down the empty street. “No one is. Let’s get out of here.”

  “No . . .” But my skin was prickling all over and the silence was driving me mad, and I was already taking a step in the direction of the Lagonda. I didn’t want to stay any more than he did.

  That was when I saw a flicker of movement at the corner of my eye.

  “Rose!” It burst out of m
e in a scream. I couldn’t see her face, but it was unmistakably a female figure, hunched and wrapped in an old coat despite the warmth, huddled on the grassy slope below the wall of the church. I tore away from Finn, sprinting around the lower wall, up the slope and around another wall, never taking my eyes off the figure. “Rose!” I shouted again, hearing Finn scrambling after me, but the figure at the church wall didn’t turn. “Rose,” I cried a third time like an incantation, like a prayer, and my desperate pleading hand fell on her shoulder.

  She turned.

  She was not Rose.

  Eve? I almost asked, though the woman looked nothing like Eve. She was plump, grandmotherly, with gray hair brushed into a bun—why did she make me think of tall, gaunt Eve? Then her dark eyes found me blankly and I saw the resemblance. She had the same ravaged gaze of a woman who had been harrowed and clawed to the soul. Like Eve, she could have been any age from fifty to seventy. It was all the same to her: like the melted clock, she had stopped permanently at four in the afternoon. When this town had died . . . however it died.

  “Who are you?” I whispered. “What happened here?”

  “I am Madame Rouffanche.” Her voice was clear, no old-lady mumbling. “And they are all dead but me.”

  Sunlight warming my head. The rustle of grass. Small everyday things made a backdrop for the quiet horror of Madame Rouffanche’s voice.

  She wasn’t even faintly curious as to who Finn and I were, nor did she seem surprised to see us. She was like the chorus in a Shakespeare play: the curtain went up on a set so strange and horrific the audience could not comprehend it, at least not until she walked out and in a calm, dead voice explained the scene. What had happened. When it happened. How it happened.

  Not why.

  She did not know why. I suppose no one could.

  “It was ’44,” she said as we stood beneath the eyeless socket windows of the half-burned church. “June tenth. That was the day they came.”

  “Who?” I whispered.

  “Germans. Since February, an SS Panzer division had been stationed north of Toulouse. After the Allies landed in June, the division headed north. On June tenth they came here.” Pause. “Later we learned that someone had reported Oradour-sur-Glane as sheltering resistance fighters . . . Or that Oradour-sur-Vayres was. I don’t know. It wasn’t ever clear.”

  Finn took my hand, his fingers ice cold. “Go on,” I managed to say through stiff lips.

  Madame Rouffanche did not need to be told. The story was begun; she would tell it until the end and then walk off the stage again. Her eyes saw past me and through me to the tenth of June 1944.

  “It was about two in the afternoon. German soldiers burst into my home and ordered us—my husband, my son, my two girls, my granddaughter—to the fairground.” She pointed toward the square where we had seen the abandoned Peugeot. “A number from the village were already assembled. Men and women flocking in from all directions. All the women and children were herded inside the church.” She stroked the pocked smoke-streaked stone as though it were a corpse’s brow. “The mothers carrying their babies in their arms, or pushing them in prams. Several hundred of us.”

  Not Rose, I thought sickly. Rose could not have been among them. She wasn’t a village woman; she was living and working in Limoges. I’d been so certain I’d find her here, but not like this. She couldn’t have been here on June the tenth.

  “We waited for hours,” Madame Rouffanche continued calmly. “Speculating, whispering, growing more afraid. Around four o’clock—”

  Four. I thought of the melted clock.

  “—a few soldiers entered. Just boys, really. They carried a box between them, with strings hanging out of it that trailed on the ground. They set the box in the nave, close to the choir, and they lit the strings. They retreated, and the box exploded—the church was full of black smoke. Women and children were running everywhere, shoving, screaming, choking.”

  She sounded flat as a printed page. I wanted to put my hands over my ears to shut out the words, but I stood frozen in horror. Finn, at my side, was not even breathing.

  “We broke down the door to the sacristy and flooded in. I sat down on a step—I was trying to get low, to the good air. My daughter ran toward me, and that was when the Germans opened fire from the doors and windows. Andrée was killed where she stood.” Pause. Blink. “She was eighteen.” Pause. Blink. “She fell over me, and I closed my eyes and feigned death.”

  “Jesus,” Finn said quietly.

  “There were more shots, and then the Germans threw armloads of straw and firewood and broken chairs in a heap onto the bodies lying on the flagstones. There was still smoke billowing—I crawled from under my daughter and hid behind the altar. There were three windows high in the wall behind it—I went to the middle one, the biggest, and pulled up the stool the priest used to light the candles. I heaved myself up to it as best I could.”

  This hunched grandmotherly woman had clawed her way up a sheer stone wall, over a floor thick with bodies and a miasma of smoke and bullets. I didn’t know what look Madame Rouffanche saw on my face, but she shrugged.

  “I don’t know how. My strength was multiplied.”

  “That happens.” Finn was almost inaudible.

  “The window had already shattered. I pulled myself up, and flung myself out. I fell about ten feet.” She looked up, directly over our heads to the dark and gaping middle window in the church wall. “Here.”

  My throat choked with an unborn scream. Here, the word echoed, here. This woman, three years ago, had flung herself out of this window, down onto this patch of grass where we now stood in the fragrant sunshine. Here.

  “A woman tried to follow me. The Germans opened fire as soon as they saw us.” Madame Rouffanche began to walk, her steps slow and difficult. “I was hit, five times. I crawled this way.” We followed her mutely, around the church wall. “I made it to the sacristy garden. The plants weren’t dead then; they were growing thick.” We stood among the flattened weeds, looking at the barren garden. “I hid among some rows of pea plants. I heard more shots, more screams, more shouting . . . That’s when the men and the boys died, most of them. Gunned down. And then there was the rush of fire, as all the roofs were kindled. Night fell, and then came the sound of champagne corks popping . . . The Germans stayed the night, and they drank champagne.”

  My lips parted but no words escaped. I didn’t think there were any words. Finn turned his back abruptly, but he didn’t release my hand. He gripped so hard my fingers felt like they were breaking, and I gripped him back. Madame Rouffanche looked past us serenely, her fingers working as though she were fingering nonexistent rosary beads.

  “The Germans stayed a few days . . . They made some attempt to dig pits, hide the bodies. I never knew why. No one could hide it, what they’d done. Such a stench of burned flesh. Panicked dogs running everywhere, looking for their masters . . . The Germans killed most of us, but they had a soft spot for the dogs; they didn’t shoot any. They dug a pit here for the dead in the presbytery garden, and it was so shallow a man’s hand was still sticking up from the earth after they’d filled it in.”

  I looked at Finn. He was still turned away, shoulders heaving. I didn’t know why I couldn’t move, couldn’t make a sound. I was frozen.

  “By the time the Germans gave up cleaning and made their retreat, I’d been rescued. Two men who sneaked back into the village, looking to see if their sons had lived . . . I begged them to take me to the river and drown me, but they took me to a doctor. I was in hospital a year. When I came out the war was done, and the Germans were gone. But the village was still—”

  Pause. Blink.

  “—like this.”

  Pause. Blink.

  “I lived,” she continued matter-of-factly. “Others too. Men who’d crawled out of the burning barns after being shot; men who were in the fields or gone to neighboring towns that day; a few children who hid in the ruins or escaped the gunfire.” There was something struggling to
surface in her eyes—she looked as though she were rising slowly back to the present from the island of time that was June tenth, 1944. She looked at me for the first time as if she actually saw me. Saw Charlie St. Clair in her red skirt and cork sandals, standing in the wreckage of all the ghosts.

  Finn turned back. “Why do you come here?” He gestured at the empty smoke-stained buildings around us. “Why do you stay?”

  “It is my home,” Madame Rouffanche said. “It is still my home, and I am its living witness. You are not the first people to come here, looking . . . It is easier to find me than nothing at all. So tell me who you are seeking. I will tell you if they lived.” Her eyes were pitying, bottomless. “And I will tell you if they died.”

  For a long moment no one spoke. We stood like a trinity in that terrible place, a soft breeze ruffling Finn’s hair and rippling the hem of Madame Rouffanche’s coat. Then I reached into my pocketbook and took out the worn photograph of Rose. I put it into Madame Rouffanche’s lined hands.

  I prayed then. I prayed so hard.

  She peered at the photograph, holding it closer to her old eyes. “Ahhhh . . . ,” she said quietly, recognition flowering in her eyes. “Hélène.”

  “Hélène?” Finn said it sharply, before I could.

  “Hélène Joubert, she said her name was when she came here to have her baby. A widow, very young. I think we all guessed, but . . .” A shrug. “A lovely girl. No one cared. She left her baby with the Hyvernaud family while she went to work in Limoges. She was back every weekend on the tram, Madame Hyvernaud said.” A smile. “Hélène. A pretty name, but we never called her that. She said she’d been Rose as a child, for her pink cheeks, so we called her that. La belle Rose.”