‘On my own, maman. I don’t get lost anymore.’
I let Tommy speak to them. It was he who told Jean-Guy to be careful and not to wander far from the house. He was to keep an eye on his little sister and to tell Arthur if anything was not as it should be. ‘Your mother will be home tomorrow.’
Two days-that’s all the time I was away.
Nicki’s friends and associates were mostly fellow cavalry officers. I remember that there was a major with a snow-white moustache, a ready laugh and an eye for the ladies. The hands, too.
I remember that the talk was of the war, of a savagery I couldn’t have imagined.
We went up to bed early. We excused ourselves-they’d talk and drink all night. They’d scheme and do so all over again, just itching to get back at the Nazis and the Russians.
Tommy built up the fire. There was no furniture in that timber-ceilinged room, other than a single chair and a heap of fox furs and wolf skins. Wrapped in my lover’s arms, glowing with the warmth of alcohol, animal skins, and that fire, we experienced sex at its most pleasurable, and in the morning my children were gone.
‘You’re going home just like you did back then,’ said Dr. Laurier. ‘Your children had been taken from you.’
‘Yes, but because of me, they’re now gone forever.’
‘Lily, let me come with you. I want to. I think I need to.’
It’s Oradour-sur-Glane all over again for her. ‘You wouldn’t last a minute.’
‘Must you be so harsh? It’s not in your heart to be unkind.’
‘Oh? Hey, écoute-moi, ma chère doctoresse, I’ve a Luger and some other things stashed in that house. Me, I’m heading for it and when I have that gun, I’m going to make them feel how it really was for us.’
‘I still think I should come with you.’
‘It’s impossible. I’m sorry. You haven’t an inkling of what’s involved.’
The land before us is grey with snow. Fir-clad hills flank the mountain to spill down into a valley through which a stream flows. On the other side, the valley wall rises through a turf-covered, rocky slope to a low stone wall. Marius Cadieux is the typical Jura peasant. Proud, lean, wiry, wizened, weather-beaten, and suspicious, but able to grin about it. A man of about sixty-five or seventy-it’s hard to tell-but just being with him makes the past seem all that much closer.
‘I can breathe the air of France,’ I tell him.
‘Ice fog more likely,’ he quips. ‘If we’re to go over, madame, we had better leave now.’
‘How far is it?’
‘Only a few kilometres. There’s a road on the other side at Derrière-le-Mont-Behind-the-Mountain. My son has the sawmill. He’ll help us. I’ll get him to take you to the train.’
‘So, it’s good-bye, Doctor.’
I reach out to shake her hand. The wind is from the north and it stings my eyes. ‘Please contact me,’ she says. ‘Telephone the clinic and let me know the moment you get there.’
She’s so innocent really, a lot like Michèle but much older, and again I have to tell her, ‘Don’t go back. Not for at least a fortnight. Ring up Zimmermann if you must, but don’t, for any reason, let him know where you’re staying.’
‘I have my other patients, Lily. If I’m not going with you, then I have to go back.’
How many times was I to hear people say to me that they had to go back, how many times was I never to see them again?
‘Please don’t. Please just listen carefully. Dupuis wouldn’t be so anxious were it not for the crimes he committed. He and the Obersturmführer Schiller always worked together, and what the one didn’t know, the other did. Both would kill you without hesitation.’
‘Then why go after them?’
‘Because Schiller can’t possibly be there and the others never worked that way with Dupuis, so I’ll have him all to myself.’
‘Telephone the clinic. Let us know how you get on. Promise me you’ll keep in touch. The war’s over, Lily. It’s time to let things lie. It’s time for the healing to take place.’
She’s so earnest, I know she’s grown very fond of me-a mistake one must never make if one is to survive.
‘Send that cable to Dr. André de Verville as I’ve asked you to.’
‘What about that firm in London? They were going to get back to us today.’
She can’t bring herself to let go. Another mistake one must never make. I look back at her. ‘Forget about them. Ah, mon Dieu, Doctor, don’t be such an idiot. Go into hiding for a little like I’ve asked you to. Give me a chance to settle everything.’
We reach the stone wall. I’m all out of breath from such a climb. Cadieux says, ‘Are you ill or something?’
I shake my head. ‘Just tired.’
She’s still standing there watching us. Not a wave, not a last gesture of farewell. Just a lonely woman on a hillside with the mountains all around her.
4
‘The Louvre, please. The office of Middle Eastern Art and Antiquities, Egyptian desk. A Madame Dominique Vuitton. Yes … Yes, of course I’ll wait.’
Those dusty back corridors will ring with her steps. The confusion at the Gare de Lyon is the usual-streams of hurrying, indifferent people, trains coming, others leaving. Paris again-I can’t believe I’m really here.
From Besançon I caught the train to Dijon, and from there to here. Ah, mon Dieu, the destruction along the way. Locomotives on their sides, tracks ripped up-delays and delays while the work crews repaired things. Whole villages in ruins, parts of towns but shattered shells. A country awakening from the ravages of war, but I must confess, the sight of locomotive boilers ripped apart still continues to excite me. A fistful of properly placed plastic can do a lot. You mould it against a bearing housing out of sight. It’s just like bread dough. You make a rope and tuck it up against a rail …
‘Madame … madame, this is Lily. I thought you’d like to hear from me personally.’
As with Dupuis and Jules, there is a momentary silence as she wonders if the sound of my voice is correct, but finally says, ‘You can’t be Lily de St-Germain. She died in a concentration camp.’
‘Oh? Which one, please?’
‘Bergen-Belsen.’
The acid’s there, and I let her hear the traffic in the station. ‘Madame, you and the others are to meet me at the house. That’s where things began, and that’s where they’ll end.’
‘Dupuis has gone to Zurich.’
‘Good!’
‘You’re crazy. We’ll never agree to meet you.’
‘Madame, the Résistance and its tribunals may have cleared you for lack of evidence, but I’ve come back to put the icing on the cake. You’ve a choice, n’est-ce pas? Either we meet at the house, or I go directly to them now.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Which station do you think?’
I leave the receiver dangling. I pick up my little cardboard suitcase and walk away from the counter of this bar, on which I found the telephone and purchased the still necessary jeton for the call. There are no SS hanging about, no plainclothes Gestapo, either, or gestapistes français, and this I can’t understand at first. Just Parisian flics with their hem-leaded capes and white, leather-covered, lead-weighted truncheons, and those boys, they’re the same as ever. Not dampened at all by what happened and what they did to help it happen. You’d think they’d all been in the Résistance, just like everyone else.
The taxi driver sucks on a dead fag and gives me a disdainful look as if I didn’t have a sou. This hasn’t changed much, either, but he’s had to put up with operating a vélo-taxi for four years, so there’s a hint of humbleness when he realizes I might have suffered and actually been in the Résistance.