“Retaliation? My God, are you sure? A hundred men? There are not a hundred maquis in Tulle—there are not a hundred maquis in the Limousin!”
Bernard gives a worldly shrug. “I don’t think the Germans care. They are simply angry.”
Philippe shakes his head. “We cannot go into the village; it would give the Germans an excuse.”
Rainy sags. She’s been hoping for sleep and a meal. She’s been hoping to join up with more maquisards, to get back to her uncompleted mission. Her legs are a network of fine scratches. Her shoes are bundles of rags. Every muscle aches. And there is a deeper weariness of the spirit.
Bernard snaps his fingers. “You know old Brun’s cabin?”
“Is it still standing?”
“Of course! They took Brun for the forced labor, so he is gone, but the cabin is still there as he left it.” The boy grins. “You know old Brun. No one wants to anger him! He has a shotgun!”
“You must tell no one, Bernard,” Philippe says. “No one at all. Not your parents, not your friends. No one. Not a word!”
Bernard makes a cross over his mouth.
And Rainy realizes that her life is now in the hands of a mischievous boy. But at least he isn’t sleeping with a German officer.
“Show us,” she says.
The cabin is nicer than Rainy expects. To start with, it has furniture, an actual table and chairs, a mildewed sofa, and one low bed, also mildewed. There is a small kitchen area that seemingly relies on a wood-burning fireplace. And there is an outhouse. No hot shower, but joy of joys, there is a day’s worth of canned food. The cabin is dry enough, as long as you don’t count the corner where a leaky roof has caused the floor to discolor and buckle. And it is just up a wooded slope from the River Glane, so there is plenty of drinking water.
“Maybe we should just sit out the war here,” Rainy says.
Bernard flops contentedly on the sofa, reveling in his role as fixer for Philippe and Rainy. Philippe goes out to gather firewood.
“You’re a clever boy,” Rainy says. “So you know that if you say anything to anyone, there is a very good chance your friend Philippe would be arrested, perhaps shot?”
Bernard nods solemnly. “Why are you here? Are you a spy? I didn’t know women could be spies.”
Rainy hesitates. Her life is already in Bernard’s hands. He surely knows she is not French, and he seems bright enough to guess that she is either British or American.
“I’m here looking for German tanks.”
“I don’t know where they are,” Bernard says. “I only know where they were.”
Rainy blinks. “I’m sorry, did you just . . .”
“I have seen many tank tread marks. Not far from here.”
“Can you show us?”
“Tomorrow, in the morning before school?”
“Okay,” Rainy says, thinking, it can’t be this easy. Then again, this mission could hardly be described as easy so far. “Tomorrow, before school.”
After Bernard leaves, Rainy warms canned soup for herself and Philippe. It is a glum meal, interrupted twice, once when they hear a dog barking, and a second time when they hear loud engines, which turn out to be Luftwaffe planes overhead.
Rainy takes the sofa—she’s smaller than Philippe—but has a hard time sleeping.
It is the endless replays that keep her awake. Again and again she runs through the events at the café. What could she have done differently? What mistakes were made? Why had she not suspected earlier that Marie was a problem? Had she missed clues? Had it all been inevitable? Had there not been a way to avoid that small round hole?
Philippe’s voice comes from the dark. “You should sleep.”
“I know.”
After a pause, he adds, “It was necessary. You did what was necessary.”
“I know.”
Another long pause, then, “You are a soldier, as I am.”
“Soldiers do not kill unarmed girls in cold blood. I was an executioner.”
He sighs. “Tomorrow you will be a soldier again. And someday when this is all over you will be a woman. You will be married and have children.”
“And you’ll be a man with a wife and children,” Rainy says. “And neither of us will ever speak to them about this day.”
“No,” Philippe admits. “We will not.”
Bernard was true to his word . . . mostly. He reappeared early, but very definitely during what should have been the school day, unless French children went to school in midmorning. Philippe chided him, but it is clear from the way he goes about it that a young Philippe Gilles had once ditched the exact same school to run in these same woods.
Bernard brings a whole baguette broken in two for easier carrying, and a wedge of cow’s-milk cheese with a wrinkly, chalky rind. They wolf this meal down and then set out with Bernard. The boy moves through the woods like an animal born and bred in the forest, dodging brambles, leaping fallen logs and tiny streams. Even city-bred Rainy has to smile at the leggy kid in the gray smock and short shorts, who snatches berries and pops them in his mouth, chatting all the while about his friends, about a hunting trip with his uncle, about how much he despises girls—though not mademoiselle (meaning Rainy) because she is not a girl, she is a spy.
Philippe’s talk of marriage and children has Rainy watching the boy through different eyes. Her big brother, Aryeh, a Marine, has a child, not that Rainy (or Aryeh) has seen much of her. But Rainy can imagine, just barely, a world with a Manhattan version of Bernard, a smart kid who knows his way around the subway and alleyways, and looks a little like Rainy.
It’s easier than trying to picture a husband for herself. She’s only ever been on one real date, and that was with a boy named Halev, who she barely knew. And she has to laugh at the notion that the son of an Orthodox tailor would be interested in settling down with the sort of woman who kills people.
In her imagination now she is being questioned by her future, imaginary Bernard, her son or daughter.
Couldn’t you have just tied her up, Mom?
Couldn’t you have convinced her . . .
In her imagination this unformed, faceless child, her child, looks at her with a solemn expression. Rainy imagines a sense of betrayal. She imagines the pitiless eyes of a child judging her, trying to absorb the fact that Mommy shot a girl.
My life will be either lonely or a series of lies.
Someday if she finds her way back to safety she will be debriefed by Colonel Herkemeier. He will understand. He may even approve. But even he will never see Rainy the same way again.
The scarlet letter, like the book she’d read in high school. A scarlet letter A, but not for adulterer.
A for assassin.
They reach a clearing, which upon closer inspection is a firebreak, an unpaved path cut through the woods. There Bernard points triumphantly at the ground.
There is only one thing that leaves tracks like this: a tank. Many tanks, in fact, because the ground is chewed up all the way along the firebreak.
“Go home now,” Philippe tells Bernard. But Bernard is not so easily gotten rid of. So they decide to pass as a family out hunting for berries and mushrooms, father, mother, and son. Of course Rainy would have had to be a very, very young mother, but the ruse is the best they can do. And at a distance they might look innocent enough.
They follow the tracks for a mile, and it is early afternoon when they begin to see signs of more activity, stacks of jerry cans, discarded empty crates, cigarette butts. They stop and duck into the woods upon spotting a German half-track, obviously broken down, with two shirtless German soldiers working on the engine.
They take a long detour around the half-track and come to a road. They rest by the side of the road, well back in the trees, and try to ignore rumbling stomachs and the fact that they have picked up fleas along the way. Rainy scratches her legs, leaving tiny blood trails from fleabites.
Philippe says, “They must have a company based nearby. I can guess where. There’s a?
??”
He falls silent at the sound of engines. Engines and clanking treads.
The first vehicles to appear are two motorcycles with sidecars, followed by a line of half-tracks and trucks. Rainy watches from her concealment, dutifully noting details: the stenciled numbers on the sides of half-tracks, the condition of the vehicles, the mood—insofar as it is possible to guess based on smiling versus worried faces.
Definitely Waffen SS, she notes with satisfaction. She has found part of the Das Reich division. Just a column, but it may yield greater finds.
Coming up last, trailing the column, is an open staff car. An SS sturmbannführer, the equivalent of a major (Marie’s alleged castle-owning Nazi?), is the main occupant. He’s a whippet-thin, good-looking, youngish man with a wide grin who wears his cap at a rakish angle.
Philippe breathes, “That is Adolf Diekmann, ambitious and vicious.”
Rainy stares intently at the SS officer. The enemy. What goes on inside a mind like that? What turns a handsome man, a man who by the look of him had every privilege, into a Nazi? The question seems to have new urgency now.
Moving through the woods they keep pace with the column, which is moving in fits and starts, thanks to an overturned hay wagon blocking a small bridge. Just beyond the bridge is an intersection. And that is when Philippe urgently grabs Rainy’s arm.
“What is it?”
“The road they’re taking . . .”
“Yes?”
“It goes to my village. It goes to Oradour.”
16
RAINY SCHULTERMAN—ORADOUR-SUR-GLANE, FRANCE
They run through the woods, tripping, faces whipped by low branches, gasping for air, Bernard leading the way. The path through the woods is shorter than the road, but they are not half-tracks, they cannot run at thirty or forty miles an hour. By the time they arrive, panting like racehorses, the Germans are drawn up at the edge of town.
Bernard, without a word of explanation, ducks through a bush and disappears out the other side.
“He’s going to see the excitement,” Philippe says. “Most likely the Germans are conducting a search. Perhaps for maquis, but there are no maquis in Oradour, there never have been!”
Philippe leads them to a spot in the woods just beside the river, which in this area is thickly overgrown on both banks. “Are you afraid of heights?”
Rainy shakes her head no, and Philippe begins climbing a tree with the ease of familiarity. Rainy joins him thirty feet up, resting in a crotch between branches, with Philippe standing on the branch and shading his eyes. The sun is high and very hot.
Oradour looks like any number of villages Rainy saw in Italy, a village of stone houses beside matching stone shops, all intermingled so the school for girls is beside a garage, and a café might be cheek by jowl with a barrel-maker. Most of the town extends just a few blocks along a single street. Newish tram tracks glow in the sun. An ancient church anchors the end of town nearest the river, farthest from where the Germans are forming up.
There are people in the street, children playing, mothers carrying babies, an old woman scolding a little girl, a young couple walking arm in arm, an old man pushing a wheelbarrow, a line of mostly men at the tobacconist.
“It’s tobacco ration day,” Philippe observes. “This may be an advantage. After the Boche search and go away, we will be safe going into town to buy food. And I can visit my parents.”
“Shouldn’t a search be done by milice? Or at least garrison troops? Those are Waffen SS panzergrenadiers.”
Philippe has no answer. Then, voice dropping in worry, he says, “They’re sending out flankers. I think . . . they’re encircling the village.”
Rainy’s heart sinks. If the SS throw up a cordon around the town, they may well come right through this spot. They stay silent, hugging the tree trunk, grateful for the spring foliage that is their camouflage. Soon they hear spoken German, laughing and loud tramping. The SS cordon is forming behind them, at least five hundred feet back. They relax their postures slightly but keep to the lowest of whispers.
“Do you see them?” Rainy says. She rises cautiously, turns carefully, holding on to branches lest her rag-shoes slip. She catches a glimpse of a uniform. Maybe it’s more like three hundred feet.
“Look!” Philippe hisses, pointing.
Rainy sees a file of German troops now advancing at a quick walk into town, jaunty on the downhill slope. The residents stop and stare but don’t seem overly afraid. One of the soldiers ducks into a pastry shop and emerges with a fistful of brioches. A playful tussle breaks out as fellow soldiers try to grab one.
Now come the sounds of Germans shouting orders, some in the German tongue, some in hard-edged French. They are ordering the residents to gather on the fairground so they can search the village. The term fairground is perhaps a bit grand for the space involved, which Rainy can see only as a bright, narrow wedge between rooftops.
“Normal when a village is searched,” Philippe says, but he sounds as if he’s trying to make himself believe it.
Time passes. The heat is stifling now in midafternoon, though it is surely more bearable up amid the leaves of the tree than down on the fairground. Rainy’s legs begin to cramp. A bicycle comes rolling down the main street of Oradour, passing into and out of shadows, the cyclist seemingly unaware.
“My God, it’s my father!” Philippe says a bit too loudly for Rainy’s taste. She glances in the direction of the German encirclement and sees nothing but a wisp of cigarette smoke.
In the town a German soldier grabs the arm of Philippe’s father and hauls him off his bike. He appears to be protesting, but the German gives him a shove toward the assembly and he is lost to view. His bike is left in the road, and it is that fact that causes Rainy’s heart to pound faster. Germans are orderly people, not the sort to leave a bicycle in the middle of the street.
Not normally.
German soldiers can be seen pushing in doors and often emerging with booty—women’s dresses, bottles of wine, a small, intricately carved wooden end table. These they stack in the street or carry away to the trucks.
A group of people comes into view, a hundred, maybe two hundred, all men, all being driven away from the fairground. They are hurried along by soldiers who still laugh and saunter as if this is nothing but a rather dull way to spend a brilliant Saturday afternoon.
A second group emerges, heading in the other direction. These are all women and children. They are shepherded toward the church.
A half-dozen soldiers come from the direction of the trucks, carrying two machine guns, chatting as they go.
On the main street the group of men is divided into smaller groups of twenty or thirty each, and marched away by soldiers. It is then that Rainy spots Bernard, being furtively pushed away by an older man who keeps pointing toward the church. A German intervenes, pulls Bernard by the collar and kicks him in the backside. Bernard slinks toward the church.
“Thank God,” Rainy whispers.
The older man—perhaps Bernard’s father—watches the boy leave and makes the sign of the cross over his chest. Rainy sees others doing the same. She quickly loses sight of most of the groups of men, but she sees the group with Bernard’s father and yes, Philippe’s father as well, as they are directed into a barn.
“No,” Philippe whispers.
Three German soldiers begin to set up a machine gun.
“But why?” Philippe cries.
The machine gun opens up. Cries of pain and outrage float on the air between bursts. The firing goes on and on, and now from other parts of the village come answering machine guns, firing and firing.
B-r-r-r-r-r-t! B-r-r-r-r-r-t! B-r-r-r-r-r-t!
The men of Oradour are being murdered.
Philippe is listening to the sounds of his own father being killed. He is as still as if he were a painting, a handsome young Frenchman standing in a tree while his father is gunned down within hearing.
And he can do nothing.
B-r-r-r-
r-r-t! B-r-r-r-r-r-t! B-r-r-r-r-r-t!
At least, Rainy thinks, Bernard is safe with the women and children in the great stone church. Even the SS wouldn’t murder women and children. Certainly not in a church.
On and on the machine guns fire, and Philippe weeps openly, sagging to his knees on the hard branch. Rainy grabs his shoulder, afraid he will fall.
The church is much nearer, right in plain sight, though they have a side-on view of the front door. From within the church Rainy hears cries of anguish, questions, Why, why? Wailing voices, crying babies, women crying, My Pierre. My Joseph. My Thomas. My Charles.
They know, the women, they know even if the children do not yet understand, the women know their husbands and fathers and brothers, their uncles and cousins, their friends, their neighbors are being massacred.
B-r-r-r-r-r-t! B-r-r-r-r-r-t! B-r-r-r-r-r-t!
The Germans have set up a machine gun outside the church door, in the middle of the small plaza where no doubt the congregation gathers to exchange news on Sunday mornings after Mass.
Then Rainy sees two Germans carry a box with cords dangling from it into the church, and now the cries of fear come louder, more frantic, Pourquoi, pourquoi?
Why? Why?
The Germans come rushing back out of the church and just behind them comes the first black smoke.
“They’re burning them,” Philippe says. “My God, they’re going to burn them!”
Cries become screams, louder when those inside the smoke-choked church push open the door.
And when the church door opens, and the first women, many with children in their arms, or held by the hand, come rushing out of the smoke, the Germans open fire.
B-r-r-r-r-r-t! B-r-r-r-r-r-t! B-r-r-r-r-r-t!
Smoke rolls out of the church door, skimming above a rapidly growing pile of dead. Dead women. Dead children. Babies crying, screeching, suddenly silenced as a machine gun bullet finds them and ends their lives.
Dead in a pile of dead at the door of God’s house.
The windows of the church blow out, glass tinkling on stones, as the fire grows and the women and children climb over the bodies of their neighbors only to be ripped apart and join the pile themselves. Flames lick upward through the door, through windows.