This branch line is a crazy one. After meeting the line to Pithiviers, it swings abruptly to the southeast and then south. Throughout virtually all its length, it passes through fields and farms. It’s what Tommy once called a ‘milk run’ and therefore was ideally suited to our purposes.
I start out. I know that for me this is going to be particularly hard. The trees are bare as they were back then.
The land sloped steeply up into the forest. Icy water covered the ditches on either side of tracks, down which a German patrol had stopped.
I pushed the bicycle towards them. In my coat pocket, I clutched one of the leftover grenades from Dunkerque that Paul Tessier had given me to deliver to the others. Once the pin was out, I would need count to three but me, I wouldn’t throw it. I’d not let them take me.
‘Ihre Papiere. Papiere, bitte, Fräulein.’
They’d come down out of the forest to cross the railway line. There were eight of them: two with Schmeissers, the rest with Mauser rifles, their sergeant in the lead.
I leaned the bike against me and handed my papers over. In broken French with bits of Deutsch, I told them I was on my way to the village of Ury.
‘But you live near Fontainebleau?’ he managed. He was really suspicious, this Feldwebel.
I was still clutching the grenade, but found the will to say, ‘Ja, Herr Oberst, ja, but this route it is shorter, and I must visit some old people to see how they’re getting along.’
Curtly, he nodded at the bike. ‘What’s in the carrier basket?’
‘Food for them and for meine Kinder, ja?’
Five other grenades, three pistols, and a small quantity of ammunition, again from Dunkerque in 1940 and via the marché noir since. Also one stripped-down, stolen Schmeisser and the regulation two magazines that were with it.
‘Und Apfelmost,’ he said.
The cider I’d left out, plain as day, nestled in cloth, a favourite of les Allemands. ‘It’s so hard to get these days.’
He held up one of the bottles, put it to the sun. I waited. I heard myself saying, ‘Bitte, Herr Oberst, please put that back. It’s my daughter’s birthday, and I want it to be a surprise.’
He did. He betrayed that he knew a little more French than I’d given him credit for and slid that bottle into its nest and wished me a good day. Until I was almost out of sight, I knew they were watching me, but I didn’t turn to look back at them and wave.
Then I reached the clearing and pushed the bike up into the forest to meet the road that came by there. It was the first of many patrols, and I knew they must be on the lookout for someone.
The millpond is dark, the geese timid. One slips and goes down on its bum. The others raise a racket and stretch their necks.
At last, a few succeed in reaching open water and the gander ushers the rest of them in. Henri Poulin is talking to Schiller and Dupuis, only Schiller’s not in uniform-he was that day I came up here from Ury in the late autumn of 1941. A staff car was parked on the road, it’s driver polishing the chrome.
But Schiller acts as though he’s still in uniform and, of course, Dupuis is still subservient, deferring always to the other, some habits being simply too hard to break.
Tommy … I knew they were after Tommy, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it except to go home.
They’ve used André de Verville’s car, have taken it from in front of the house, but as if in the present, though well in the past, I hear, ‘Lily, wait! Don’t turn around. We’re right behind you.’
Nicki said that I must lead a charmed life and that I had the most interesting friends. ‘Those two in particular,’ he said. ‘Schiller and Dupuis.’
I turn. I have to, and, of course, Tommy and Nicki aren’t here. How could they be? It’s not the autumn of 1941; it’s four years later, but I must remember the robbery because for us, everything changed after that.
** Curfew times were often changed at will, though generally settled down to the above.
9
Below me, down a tumbled slope through trees whose autumn leaves have fallen, Schiller and Dupuis are picking their way among some boulders. Schiller’s older. Mon Dieu, he’s iron grey and looks unhealthy, but is he also afraid because I’m the only thing that stands between him and the hangman? Is he remembering how it was?
Dupuis, though just as shabby as before, has obviously been eating as he did during the Occupation, ration tickets or no tickets, simply shopkeepers and maître d’s who wanted to please, cash, too, of course, and the never spoken, always present threat of Sûreté muscle.
Both have drawn their guns and I could perhaps kill them, but that would be too easy. They chased me on the road in that car of theirs back in the autumn of 1941, and I took a little detour. The Fontainebleau Forest is full of such things-side roads, woodcutter’s trails, hiking paths, those of the kings themselves. Les Monts des Chèvres, the Mountains of the Goats, that’s what this place is called.
They’ve remembered what I’ve remembered. Schiller found it then, and as I look down on them, it’s the lieutenant who looks questioningly up towards where I’m still hidden. Perhaps two hundred metres separate us, not just the years, the camps, and everything else. He’s thin, stooped and pale, so gaunt lines crease that narrow face, the scar glistening even more, but the right eye is also all but closed. Shrapnel, I wonder? The Russian front, but well after the robbery, after the interrogations, the beatings, and the torture, right at the end in 1945 and in or near a Berlin that was being mercilessly destroyed.
‘She’s not here,’ says Dupuis. How I remember that voice.
‘I’m sure I saw something. What about that woodcutter’s hut? It was up there, back of that ridge.’
That’s also a voice that brings instant apprehension, but it’s Dupuis who says, ‘She’s got a bicycle just like in the late autumn of 1941. Is it that you’re forgetting this?’
‘You sound as if you don’t want us to go up there after her.’
Dupuis shakes his head and stuffs his pistol away. ‘I’m merely stating the obvious. That one knows the woods, and we’re still together. If she can draw us out and separate us, she will because she wants to have a word alone with each of us first.’
‘We’ve nothing to say to her; she nothing to us.’
‘You’re forgetting her French side. De Verville got his little lecture. For myself, I think she might not even have wanted to kill him. Far better a very public humiliation and Résistance trial.’
He’s only partially right about André, but it’s Schiller who snorts and says, ‘You French were always so weak. Follow if you like. I’m going up to the hut.’
‘Perhaps that’s what she really wants.’
They begin to climb. It’s not difficult, a few boulders and gullies, and certainly I could let them have the grenade, but a stone will do just as well since they must be made to feel it as we did: hunted and in absolute terror for their lives.
That bouncing stone whistles past Dupuis who cries out and buries his head in his arms as Schiller laughs and says, ‘Dummkopf, a loose rock! Where would she have got a grenade? Plucked it from the trees?’
‘Sacré nom de nom, she may still have friends and could have made contact!’
In spite of this, they continue, but take the main gully that leads away from me. Just as they have thought, I do have my bicycle, but it’s hidden in a hollow beneath a covering leaves. It’s beside the trail that leads to the hut and when they reach the top, they walk right past it, just as they did back then.