She thought to argue — didn’t Germans too have immortal souls? — but the urge passed after a moment. His rebuttal would be swift — the Germans had forfeited their souls the day they decided to invade Poland — and would leave no room for objections.
So she instead left, for the church, for the rope, for the clarion bell that would unite them all. If they no longer had peace during war, they at least had each other.
While Nomad, it occurred to her, had no one.
*
It came, soon enough: the war.
More planes overhead. On tranquil mornings and still evenings and moments during the day when cows fell silent and conversations ended, from the roads just beyond the valley came the sound of mechanized caravans. The low mingled rumble of engines and rolling tires and the crushing tank-treads of the Panzer divisions … these would drift down the gentle slopes on crisp November air, like the first drafts of a wind that would soon turn bitter and furious. It was, Giselle thought — and Sister Anna-Marie agreed — almost worse this way than if the Germans had arrived in the village immediately. They had no faces this way, no eyes to beseech in hopes of finding pity. They could only be imagined, and invariably imagination conjured ogres in uniform.
This climate of fear … in it, did Nomad feel more at home?
Giselle had been forced to lie to him to spare his feelings, telling him that Father Guillaume soon would meet with him, but that he was ailing, and for now it took all his strength to give heart to his parishioners. Nomad did not question, and from her lips, at least, the lie was believed.
She tried to get him to move into the priory, where he could at least enjoy the warmth of a fire. They would fix up a corner for him, or perhaps a nook in the cellar. But no, he steadfastly refused, preferring to remain in the stable and the daily company of the horses who, he said, never judged or turned their eyes away or cried out at the sight of him. When parishioners came up the hill, from the sprinkling of cottages and farms below, to seek spiritual guidance from the Father or the sisters, he was careful to wear an empty grain sack, cut with eye holes, to protect them from a possible fright.
His was the life least changed by this shift in the tides of war, and Giselle tried to spare him an hour or two each day, simply to talk. He listened wonderfully, and spoke with a hesitant and self-conscious eloquence on more books than she could ever hope to read … Milton and Plutarch, Dante and Dickens, Descartes and Steinbeck and Twain. Of countries he knew, but little of borders. He crossed at timberlines and often didn’t realize he was in a new land until he overheard a new language spoken.
War? Nomad had lived through them before, and for him they were no different than peace. He was an aberration to invader and defender alike, and in that spirit, Giselle supposed, he lived under a constant declaration of war from all nations. Their talks opened more than her eyes, it felt as if they shed light into her soul as well…
Until at last the occupation came to Château-sur-Lac.
It was preceded by the sounds of battle, the fabric of the day rent by machine gun fire and the crack of rifles, the dull thud of grenades and explosions greater still. Two columns of ominous black smoke rose in the distance. A partisan ambush, no doubt. Prayers for its victory rippled through the village.
And went unheard.
The battered victors came over the hills and streamed into Château-sur-Lac, sons of the Hun from a generation before. Teutonic faces grimed with soot and sweat and blood; gray tunics and coal-scuttle helmets and high black boots; carbine rifles and Schmeisser machine pistols and potato masher grenades. And every man who had just lost a good friend to partisan fire had replaced him with a lethal anger burning in his eye. Peasant blood would run just as red.
Barely over twenty of them, all told: half a dozen surviving wounded, the rest able-bodied. Teenage boys fought alongside hard, seasoned veterans.
The villagers were rousted from their homes, forced to gather in the central village green, before the tiny cafe and bakery. A battered but still operable motorcycle came roaring up the hill to the church. Out of the sidecar leapt a private who rounded up priest and nuns at rifle-point, and began to march them back down to join the rest while the cyclist buzzed a circuit around rectory and priory and barn to make sure they hadn’t missed anyone.
The thought of Nomad, gargantuan child that he was in some respects, back there alone, elicited surprisingly little worry in Giselle. In his vast span of days on this earth, he had learned nothing quite so well as how to hide.
Pity the rest of them had not learned so valuable a skill.
They were gathered within a perimeter of uniforms. Some in tears, others in sullen quietude, most of the older ones calm and resigned, as ones who were watching history repeat itself. Father Guillaume moved among them, as did Giselle and Anna-Marie, but how much comfort could cold hands provide under the watch of muzzles colder still?
The officer who came striding forth from a tight knot of his men silenced them with a pair of shots into the air from his Luger sidearm. His face was tightly seamed. Prematurely graying blond hair strayed from beneath his helmet to cling wetly to his upper forehead. When he spoke, he had no need of an interpreter. His French was deliberate but no less understood.
“I am Untersturmführer Streckenbach,” he called out, “and you will give me all the cooperation due the Third Reich. Who refuses, will be shot. In a few moments you will be questioned and asked to surrender whatever weapons you may have in your possession. Who refuses, will be shot. Your homes will then be searched. Who is found to be lying … will be shot. Understood?”
Giselle stood with clasped hands and listened to the scarcely audible murmuring around her. How little malice the man actually spoke with. He might have been placing an order in the bakery.
“For tonight,” Streckenbach went on, “your home will be ours. We have just suffered the loss of our radio at the hands of some countrymen of yours. For their actions, I do not hold you responsible, unless you are found to have aided them. For your own actions, you will bear every responsibility. Until a messenger can be dispatched to send back new orders and evacuation for our dead and our wounded, you will accord us your hospitality.”
He suddenly craned his neck, scanning faces in the crowd. “Where is the priest … ah, there you are.” Beside her, Giselle felt Father Guillaume go suddenly rigid. “I wish to see you in a few minutes.” The lieutenant flicked one finger toward the door of the cafe, and in a moment a young private was at his shoulder to ensure he found the way.
Giselle met his eyes only once as he was led away from the crowd. The Father’s eyes, resigned and bitter, retained something crushed as well. Something broken that could never be restored. Did they kill priests to demoralize an occupied village? She prayed not. There was no need. Château-sur-Lac was full of compliant people.
She continued to pray until her concentration was shattered, as two soldiers departed on motorcycle and in sidecar, down the road and away to the west, buzzing like a horsefly until they were gone, simply gone.
*
Servant of God or not, Father Guillaume looked for things to hate about this man. This Hun. There was plenty to find. He hated the small scar that curled out from the corner of the left eye, hated the cleft in the chin. He hated the straight posture and the blue of his eyes and the gray of his uniform and the sharp tangy sweat-smoke smell of him, and most of all he hated the very fact of this man’s existence, and how they were now forced to breathe the same air in this rustic cafe. I can never eat here again, thought Guillaume. I’ll see him and smell him even then.