Charlotte Gray

  André climbed the steps on the outside of one of the neglected outbuildings. A door was open to a gloomy room with a stone sink in one corner. A purple-faced woman in a headscarf, known to André only as Marion’s mamie, was pouring fat from a pan over the top of a duck’s leg in a glass jar. She looked up as André stood hesitantly in the doorway and let out a greeting in the cracked accent of the region, which André was too shy to return. The old woman continued with her greasy work, sealing the bottle with a rubber washer and a glass top. André looked nervously round the room, in which three ducks in different stages of dismemberment lay on a long dirty table and a row of blackened pans hung from a beam. Marion’s mamie wiped her hands down the front of her apron, exchanging the fresh fat for accumulated layers of older lard transferred from the cloth to her sliding palms.

  ‘Have you come for some eggs?’ She rolled across the room like an old sailor, the heel of her hand stuck into the flesh above her hip.

  ‘Yes.’ André’s voice had the clarity of a treble bell, especially when he was unsure of himself. ‘Please,’ he remembered.

  ‘I can only let you have four. Have you got the money?’

  André took a twist of paper from the pocket of his shorts and handed it to her. The old woman opened it and counted the coins inside. She nodded. ‘I’ll put them in a paper bag for you. Don’t drop them, will you?’

  André shook his head vigorously, opening his eyes and pulling his lower lip down in a self-mocking grimace. Eggs were vital.

  He went gently down the steps, the memory of first negotiating stairs on all fours still fresh in his mind – often, when no one was looking, he still went up the stairs at home like a dog – and moved off across the farmyard, holding the paper bag tight. ‘Thank you,’ his father’s absent tones prompted him to call in his clear voice, setting off a renewed spasm of barking.

  The church spire of Lavaurette came into view as André rejoined the road. His mother had told him the whole excursion would take about an hour, and had smiled impatiently when he asked her, ‘Is that a long time?’ André clutched the eggs by the top of the twisted paper bag: both his parents had brought him to the edge of tears in their eagerness to impress on him how important it was that the goods came home intact.

  Lavaurette was a place that would not die. In the waiting room at the hôtel de ville were photographs from the nineteenth century, and there was one that showed the main street in 1910, before the cataclysm. Small enterprises spilled in black and white from the front rooms of almost every house: tobacconist, carpenter, draper, coiffeur, greengrocer. Young and middle-aged men leaned against doorways, smoking; out of the camera’s narrow angle they were working – in the fields, in the giant stone quarry a bicycle ride to the south and in the factory just outside the village. And then there were no men any more, there was only a crudely carved Marianne whose chiselled face, designed to show triumph, looked as though it were blinded by the list of names of the dead that rambled on, up and down the stone pedestal at her feet, through families, through streets, through the ribs and lungs of Lavaurette.

  In the years since the Great War it had declined from the character and status of a small town to that of an overgrown village. The main structures were still there: the hôtel de ville was an ambitious Second Empire building with fine tiled eaves; there was a cobbled square in front of it with a neoclassical post office and stern municipal buildings. A plane-flanked avenue led to the railway station, a place of captured somnolence with faded lettering on cream plaster walls; there was a goods siding with rusted buffers and two platforms for the passenger trains that eventually connected their handful of travellers to the main lines for Bordeaux and Clermont-Ferrand. The journey to Clermont was the same as it had been since the line opened in 1882, but the trip to Bordeaux now involved crossing the demarcation line into the Occupied Zone. On the train there were inspections of documents, and beneath the great tubular vaults of Bordeaux St Jean there were German troops. How well behaved they were, it was agreed by all the travellers: how disciplined, polite and neatly dressed.

  Although there now existed a new generation of twenty-year-old men, Lavaurette had for many years depended on the vigour of its women: Mlle Cariteau, who ran the post office, a tall, strong-jawed woman of forty whose efficiency was marked by a virile manner and a big, white-toothed smile, a natural wife they said, with no men available in her generation to marry; or Madame Galliot, widowed in the war and left with a baby daughter, whose ironmongery served as a meeting place for the other women of Lavaurette who were unwelcome in the male atmosphere of the Café du Centre.

  Whatever the dramatic nature of its changes and whatever the violent reasons for them, Lavaurette retained in the eyes of casual visitors a sense of continuity with more innocent days – a time before the holocaust, when such a village might have seemed as close to paradise as anything that humans had contrived. It certainly, at least, looked old-fashioned, with its three squares, its narrow shuttered streets and its hard-retained dignity. Far enough south to have hot summers, it was sufficiently northern to be wholly French, with no trace of Spain, Liguria or the Languedoc. With a shrinking population, there had been no need to build new houses; and while the soil of the surrounding farmland varied in quality, it had, until the Occupier’s ravening expropriations, been good enough to supply an ample market on Saturday mornings; the priest was still respected and his church was full. It was impossible to tell if everything was really lost, because so much seemed to carry on unharmed.

  André came to the bottom of the Avenue Gambetta, where he received a wave of greeting from the butcher, Monsieur Gastinel, Lavaurette’s only self-proclaimed Gaullist, a man whose low-grade sausages, inventive cuts of would-be steak and dishes of prepared offal were available more readily to those who, like him, had been inspired by General de Gaulle’s passionate broadcast from London, in which he had claimed that the fight for France went on and that only a battle, not a war, was lost. A scrap of lamb breast or a spoonful of veal muzzle in brine would sometimes find its way into the rationed bags of those who denied the legitimacy of Vichy and believed that the true spirit of the Republic was now in exile overseas.

  Whatever the business of the other shops, there were hardly any goods on display; the only thing of which there seemed an abundance was portraits of Marshal Pétain. His wise and kindly face stared out on to the street, mounted, framed, sometimes surrounded by swathes of crimson velvet or perched victorious on a marble plinth. The snowy moustache and the saviour’s tolerant eyes said: we went wrong and we are being taught a lesson; we cannot say how long this improving penance must last; we brought this upon ourselves and now we must see the error of our ways. The older villagers remembered that Pétain had once been the hero of France, when he had seen off the Germans at the Battle of Verdun in 1916 and been the first leader to show a concern for his men’s lives. His ramshackle government of 1940, which had voted to dissolve the republic and grant itself full powers, was now the only haven in the storm. The Marshal was a good man, they said; and in any case the people of Lavaurette had nowhere else to turn.

  André kicked a flinty stone along the edge of the road. When he got home he would go out into the garden with his younger brother Jacob and continue to excavate the small trench beneath the chestnut tree which served as a moat to the castle they were building with old boxes. André was almost seven, Jacob only four, but their mother treated them alike. Having borne them, fed them, cleaned them, she could not break the bond of touch. Though André could easily dress himself she liked to help him, so that she could feel the packed little muscles beneath his skin. She ran her hands through his black hair and felt the soft spokes of it trickle out over the webs between her fingers. Before going to bed herself, she still crept into André’s room and kissed every part of him when he slept naked in the summer, his left arm flung back behind his head, his right arm hanging limp, his golden skin tingling soft beneath her lips, his low breathing undisturbed by her self-indulgenc
e.

  André pushed open the door to Madame Galliot’s ironmongery and went shyly across the scrubbed boards up to the counter. He felt in his pocket for the second twist of paper his mother had given him, with which he was supposed to buy candles. Half a dozen people were standing round the counter, talking loudly, preventing him from catching Madame Galliot’s eye.

  ‘I think it’s long overdue,’ Madame Galliot was saying. ‘The Marshal’s the first person who’s had the courage to grasp the nettle, that’s all. For years they’ve been undermining us, keeping all the best jobs to themselves, swindling proper French people. The day when they said no Jew should be a school teacher any more, that was the best day we’ve seen round here for a long, long time.’

  André waited his turn. The shop smelled of coir matting, camphor and galvanised buckets. Behind Madame Galliot’s indignantly nodding head was a pointed step-ladder she used for fetching down the graded boxes of washers and nails from the top shelf. The shaved floorboards led down the interior of the shop into a secondary room, less pungent, stacked with pans, casseroles, stiff yard brooms and long shelves full of crockery with sets of china laid out round cavernous lidded soup tureens.

  ‘I didn’t know Duguay was one of them,’ said an old man called Roudil. ‘He seemed like a nice enough type. He was no trouble to anyone and I don’t think his business was dishonest.’

  ‘Oh, but the mother, though. A typical Israelite,’ said Madame Galliot. ‘They changed their name to Duguay to take us all in.’

  Hearing his family name, André found the courage to speak. The group of people at the counter split apart to let him in and he walked forward, holding up his money. ‘Have you any candles, please?’

  Madame Galliot’s rolling eloquence came to a halt. Her hands flew up to the side of her head, where they pushed nervously at the orange hair that was escaping from its net. She settled her spectacles and gave a turkey-like cluck as she bent down to open a cupboard behind her.

  There was silence among the other five adults, who anxiously avoided looking at one another, or at the boy. Roudil coughed and ran his hand over André’s hair. ‘All right, young man? Off to play now, are you?’

  ‘Yes. I’m going home.’ Seeing the old man’s worried but kind expression, André was bold enough to add: ‘I’m building this castle with my brother. From old boxes. My father’s helping.’

  ‘That’s nice, then,’ said Roudil. ‘A castle.’

  Silence returned, apart from the sound of feet shuffling on the splintery floor. Madame Galliot handed André the packet of candles and took his coins. She raised them close to her face to count them out.

  ‘You owe me . . .’ She hesitated. ‘Tell your parents . . .’ She paused and looked at her feet; then, with a great effort, as though moving into unknown commercial territory, she said, ‘You can owe me the rest.’

  ‘Thank you. Goodbye, Madame.’

  The adults watched in silence as the boy swung the door closed, causing the bell to jangle briefly, then started to skip up the street.

  André had a natural, loose-limbed action. His feel slithered over the ground with a rhythmic rustle, like wire brushes going over a snare drum. Skipping tired him no more than walking; it was his natural means of going up the hill towards his parents’ house in the street behind the square. It was time for him to eat and drink, and he knew his mother would have something ready for him. She had tried to explain to him that it was difficult, these days, to give the children enough food, let alone the things they used to like. André didn’t understand the reasons for this shortage, and in any case his mother always used to come up with something.

  The front door of the house was closed, which was unusual. André stood on tiptoe and reached up for the knocker. As he did so he saw that a star had been painted on the door. Some dribbles of yellow paint ran from the swiftly daubed diagonals.

  He banged on the door again, but there was no answer from inside. His mother had often told him that if he should ever return and find no one there he was to go next door to Madame Redon and ask if he could wait in her house.

  With the eggs and the candles still clutched in his hand, André went through to the old widow’s house and again raised his small fist. He saw a movement through the half-open window on the first floor, but no one came. It was very odd. If Madame Redon was in the house, why would she not answer the door?

  André found his happy poise begin to crack. Just as his mother still liked to treat him as a baby, still wanted him physically attached to her, so in a way he felt that the things he could do – the errands, the hesitant reading – were only fragile accomplishments, and that the real bases of his world were still panic and helplessness. He sat on the step of his own family’s house and felt tears coming to his eyes.

  ‘You’d better come with me.’ The voice seemed to be in his head almost at once; in his loss of control, André had no sense of the passage of time.

  He looked up through red eyes and saw a youngish man hold out his hand. He did not know the man, though he had seen him in the village. ‘My name is Julien. I’ll look after you.’

  André reached out his hand and felt the man take it; some order returned to his existence. ‘What’s happened? Where’s my mother?’

  The young man did not answer; he looked afraid. André, seeing that something had happened which was beyond the power even of a friendly adult to explain, and seeing that it had happened to his parents, began to sob. ‘What is it? Where is she? Where is she?’

  The waiting room of the hôtel de ville was filled with bewildered people, some sitting on the benches along the wall, some crowding up to the desk behind which a short-tempered clerk was trying to answer their questions. Their enquiries were to do with obtaining permits or papers within the mayor’s gift – permission to leave building waste in a disused quarry, access to food coupons, the right to travel. The room had the smell of bodies confined for too long.

  Julien Levade held André’s hand tightly as he forced his way to the front of the crowd. Resistance to him initially came in the form of looks and closed ranks; then, when it was clear he was paying no attention, three women began to remonstrate with him.

  Julien, who was a reasonable man, explained to them that a boy had lost his parents, that his errand was more urgent than theirs. ‘I apologise, Madame, please excuse me. It’s not for me, you understand, it’s for the child. See how upset he is.’

  They looked. André had never been in the hôtel de ville before; its vaulted hall, its marble stairs and now its room of bewildering officialdom had frightened him. He held more tightly to the hand of the strange man, hoping he would find a thread of order that would restore things to their proper place. The man seemed to think that the clerk would know where his mother was and André had no reason to think otherwise. Perhaps she was somewhere behind the counter, in a room at the back of the building. Since she was so powerful and had alone explained the world to him, he could not imagine how she might allow anything bad to happen to herself.

  ‘I don’t care what the matter is, you can’t just push your way to the front.’

  ‘That’s right. We’ve all got problems. You wait your turn like everyone else.’

  Julien elbowed the woman to one side and leaned across the counter. He took the clerk by the arm and pulled him forwards. ‘This child was sitting in the street outside his house. On the front door they’ve painted a Star of David and his parents have disappeared. What’s going on?’

  The clerk tried to pull himself out of Julien’s grip. The forms he had been handling fluttered to the floor. ‘Let go of me! What do you think you’re doing? Let go!’

  ‘You heard what I said.’ Julien released André’s hand so he could hold on more tightly to the clerk. ‘Tell me what’s going on. I heard rumours this morning. Extra trains at the station and things like that.’

  The clerk was visibly indignant at having both wrists in a stranger’s angry grip and anxious to resettle his half-dislodged glasses
. ‘Let go of me. I don’t know anything about it. It’s nothing to do with the hôtel de ville. You’d better go and speak to the police.’

  Julien pulled the clerk a little closer. Very quietly, he said, ‘You do know something, don’t you?’ Then he pushed him away, as though the feel of the other man’s flesh had become repugnant, reached down again for André’s hand and pushed his way back through the reproachful crowd.

  Julien and André walked through the streets of Lavaurette. It was now late afternoon and the tables outside the Café du Commerce were starting to fill up. Despite the hot weather, the customers were properly dressed, the men in collar and tie, the women in dresses with handbags and polished shoes. Older men and women were making their way back from the baker’s shop with their evening bread beneath their arm or poking out from shopping bags. From some of the houses that Julien and André passed the smell of dinner was starting to drift through open windows: not the rich meat-heavy smell of two years ago, but still passably aromatic with combinations of food saved, or extemporised from hidden stores. The church bell in the Place de l’Eglise was striking six emphatically, a few seconds late, as it had done for a hundred and sixty years.

  André’s panic now precluded thought as he ran and stumbled alongside the striding Julien. The gendarmerie was on the other side of Lavaurette, across a gravelled forecourt, near to a shaded area where the men played boules. Julien pushed open the double doors and pulled André across the hall into an anteroom where a heavy ceiling fan was stirring the clotted air. He rang a bell on the desk and they heard the sound, further back in the building, of a door grinding open.

  A gendarme appeared, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his uniform, as though interrupted in an early evening snack. He shook hands with Julien, who knew him from his frequent rounds in Lavaurette: Bernard, an amiable enough man, who gave the appearance of being bored by his work.