Luck … we had such luck. The Germans did find the warehouse where Matthieu Fayelle and others had emptied a lorry, but they never once connected it to Matthieu. This I still can’t understand.
The soup comes. This pig of a proprietor has spilled it and his thumb is wet, but such things shouldn’t bother me, not after what I’ve been through. I set the cigarette aside, but its smoke trails up, and suddenly I’m reminded of things and can’t stand the sight of it. Too many memories. Every one of those SS and Gestapo or gestapistes français knew how terrifying the upward curling of cigarette smoke could be. Never mind touching the burning end of it to my breast or using the leather belt or holding me underwater for what seemed like hours. Just sit me naked and helpless before them and let that smoke curl upwards in silence. Me, a mother whose two children they had killed!
Through the window, the main street of Barbizon seems strange-hauntingly so. It’s odd to see it like this after knowing for so long that I’d never see it again. The pâtisserie is over there under its flaking gold letters and doing a reasonable business. Two middle-aged women have just come out: brown coats, hats pulled down, no stockings yet, and nothing new. Their woollen socks have lost their elastic. It was always so hard to replace. The wind even tugs at their hats and tries to open their coats, as laughing, they turn away, and I watch them pass the milliner’s without a look, and finally the burned-out, boarded-up skeleton of Clateau’s butcher shop.
That fire must have come late in 1943 after he’d been killed. The family would have been sent to the camps, not even into forced labour, and my guess is that none of them survived, for by then the Germans were being very thorough.
Reminded of my hunger, I eat my soup. I’m really very good at this, but the ham I must cut into tiny pieces. And the bread … what can I say, but that it’s like my own. So good, I must extract every morsel of flavour and keep a crust for my pocket.
Tommy came back in the spring of 1942. I remember it was Jean-Guy who first discovered we weren’t alone. We’d gone into the forest and were heading for the stone tower, but Marie wanted to check the bathing pool, so we went first to the stream that was a little to the west of our usual route, perhaps a kilometre. The leaves were very green, and I remember thinking there would be a good crop of wild raspberries along the roadsides that year, but we’d have to be careful that others didn’t get them first. I was settling back into the routine of being my old self and trying hard to forget the war and its Occupation that might never end.
I had the gardens to think about, the fields, rabbits, chickens-the geese at mother’s farm. So many things. The hope, I confess, that the Germans would leave me alone and that the Résistance wouldn’t call on me.
‘Maman, there are ships,’ said my son. I know Marie was intrigued. Both timidly advanced to the edge of the pool we had made with stones and mud.
The sails were of one-hundred-franc notes skewered on masts of sharpened sticks, the hulls patiently whittled out of bits of driftwood. ‘Bonjour, Lily. Bonjour, Jean-Guy and Marie.’
Automatically, I turned away in a flood of tears to search the woods for the enemy while he tousled Jean-Guy’s hair, only to have my son yank his head away as Tommy reached for Marie’s, his grin the same.
He was armed, of course. There was a rucksack and a Schmeisser. ‘How have you been?’ he asked. ‘Missing me a little?’
Setting the knife and fork down, I swallow hard and have to shut my eyes, but the memory keeps coming back, and I can’t stop it though I try, for in the camps they forbade us to even remember and tried their best to wipe it all out, but Tommy’s so close, I can feel his kisses still, the very breath and warmth of him, and I don’t ever want to let those go.
It was Marie who tugged at his sweater and said, ‘We have two SS guards, monsieur, and the colonel. The Lieutenant Schiller has been sent to Russia.’
‘And the inspector?’ he asked of my daughter.
She was very firm with him. ‘Still asking his questions. Only yesterday I have seen him go into the Tabac Ribault. Me, I waited fifteen minutes, you understand, but he didn’t come out, so we know he’s working with Monsieur Ribault who is a dirty collabo.’
Only then, did I notice how Jean-Guy was looking at Tommy, and when the sails were taken off the little ships and bankrolled to me because children didn’t have money like that, and he knows his friends and the shopkeepers would only notice and start talking, the thanks he gave were empty.
‘I don’t know what’s come over him,’ I said later that night when I went to Tommy by myself. ‘Ever since the robbery, he’s become increasingly distant. Jules and the Vuittons were here when I was in Paris and maybe they put pressure on him.’
‘The son of an important family. You have to remember the boy’s growing up. Jules can’t have been all that bad or you would never have married him.’
‘Women make all kinds of mistakes this Occupation only reinforces.’
He added another dry stick to the tiny fire he’d built among some screening boulders. There was no possible warmth except for the mind and soul. ‘What will you do?’ he asked.
‘Lie low for a while. My SS guards watch me all the time. Neumann has been repeatedly eyeing the contents of the house and has made another list of his own: the small things that can be easily taken. He’s edgy, Tommy. It can’t have been easy for him having that train robbed. He’ll be worrying about the Russian front just like the rest of them.’
‘Was Schiller really sent there?’
There were so many things we didn’t know. One guessed simply because that was all one could do. ‘Maybe yes, maybe no, but deep inside me, I have to feel he’s near.’
‘And Dupuis?’
‘Just like Schiller, he believes I was involved in the robberies, but more than this perhaps, that I’m the key to the rest of you, so they both tolerate a modicum of freedom for me as they wait to see what I’ll do. I can’t become involved again, Tommy. I mustn’t. I don’t want to be the one who leads them to you and Nicki and the others.’
‘Marie seems very reliable.’
‘She and Jean-Guy argue vehemently. For days on end, she won’t speak to him, but when I ask, it’s always some stupid thing, never the real reason.’
‘Could she take a message into Fontainebleau?’
‘No! I absolutely forbid such a thing.’
‘I have to contact Matthieu and through him, Paul Tessier. We’re moving over to the offensive. Now that America’s in the war, it’s only a matter of time until the Allies invade the Continent.’
Pearl Harbour-yes, I’ve forgotten to mention it-7 December 1941. But you do see how small our war here really was? We learned of this tragic event both from the BBC French broadcast and the German-controlled Radio-Paris. We also knew that as Tommy had said, it would only be a matter of time.
‘We’ve a parachute drop in ten days, Lily, near that abandoned airfield.’
The caves and my mother’s farm.
‘Just hang on for a little longer. As soon as the drop’s done, we’ll clear off and leave you out of it. Some of the arms are to be smuggled into Paris. Marcel is working for us.’
‘You’ll all be arrested!’
‘Somehow I’ve got to contact Tessier. He’s the only one who can teach the others how to handle the explosives that will be dropped.’
‘I’m not hearing this. I’m really not! And where, please, do you intend to hide stuff like that?’
‘As far from the caves as possible. The loft of Clateau’s slaughterhouse probably.’
‘Ah, nom de Dieu, why? Barbizon is a little place that’s crowded with Germans and collaborators!’
Not only had he a place in mind, he let me say it: ‘My coach house, among the crates.’ Aghast that he should even think of such a thing, I offered an alternative: ‘The Poulins, Tommy. Yes, we must take it to their farm. Henri and Viviane will help us. It’s far enough from the drop zone and won’t arouse suspicion.’