She sat up in bed and listened for a moment. A look of mild surprise suddenly passed across her sad, tear-stained face. The wind had stopped. Just as it had come out of nowhere, so it had now disappeared without a trace. It had broken branches off the trees, whipped the rooftops in its blind rage, carried away the last of the snow on the hill, and now, out of the dark sky devastated by the storm, the first rain of spring began to fall, still cold, but torrential and urgent, carving its way down to the smallest roots of the trees, down to the very heart of the deep, black earth.
TWO Dolce
1 Occupation
In the Angellier household they were locking away all the important papers along with the family silver and the books: the Germans were coming to Bussy. For the third time since the defeat of France, the village was to be occupied. It was Easter Sunday, High Mass. A cold rain was falling. At the entrance to the church, the branches of a small peach tree, pink with blossom, swayed mournfully. The Germans marched in rows of eight; they wore their field dress and metal helmets. Their faces maintained the impenetrable and impersonal expression of professional soldiers, but their eyes glanced furtively, inquisitively, at the grey façades of the town that was to be their home. There was no one at the windows. As they passed the church, they could hear the sound of the harmonium and the murmur of prayers; but a frightened member of the congregation shut the door. The stomping of German boots reigned supreme. The first detachment swung past and was followed by an officer on horseback; his beautiful dappled mare seemed furious at being forced to go so slowly; as she placed each hoof on the ground with reluctant care, she trembled, neighed and shook her proud head. Great grey armoured tanks pounded the cobblestone streets. Then came the cannons on their rolling platforms, a soldier positioned high above each one to keep watch. The column of soldiers was so long that throughout the priest's sermon a kind of constant thunder resounded through the church's vaults. The women sighed in the shadows.
After the metallic rumbling subsided, the motorcycles arrived, flanking the Commandant's car. Behind him, at a respectful distance, came trucks packed to the brim with large round loaves of black bread. They made the church windows rattle. The regiment's mascot-a thin, silent Alsatian dog, trained for combat-ran beside the cavalrymen who brought up the rear. Perhaps because they were so far away from the Commandant that he couldn't see them, or for some other reason incomprehensible to the locals, these soldiers were more informal, friendlier than the others. They talked and laughed among themselves. The Lieutenant in charge smiled when he saw the lone pink peach tree lashed by the bitter wind; he snapped off a branch. Since he saw nothing but closed windows all around him, he assumed he was alone. Far from it. Behind each shutter was an old woman, eyes as piercing as a knife, watching the conquering soldier's every move. Deep within hidden rooms, voices groaned.
"Could you ever have imagined such a thing…"
"He's destroying our fruit trees, for heaven's sake!"
"Seems this lot's the worst," a toothless mouth whispered. "I heard they did a lot of damage before coming here. Just our luck."
"I bet they'll take our sheets," said one housewife. "Just imagine, sheets I got from my mother! Only the best for them…"
The Lieutenant shouted an order. The men seemed very young. They had rosy complexions and golden hair. They rode magnificent, well-fed horses with wide, shiny rumps, which they tied up in the square, around the War Memorial. The soldiers broke ranks and started to make themselves at home. The village was filled with the sound of boots, foreign voices, the rattling of spurs and weapons. In the better houses, they hid away the good linen.
The Angellier women-the mother and wife of Gaston Angellier, prisoner of war in Germany -were finishing their packing. The elder Madame Angellier, a thin, pale person, frail and austere, quietly read out loud the title of each book in the library and religiously stroked its cover, before putting it away. "My son's books," she murmured, "to see them in the hands of a German!… I'd rather burn them."
"But what if they ask for the key to the library," groaned the fat cook.
"They'll have to ask me for it," said Madame Angellier and, standing very tall, she lightly tapped the pocket sewn inside her black wool dress; the bunch of keys she always kept with her jingled. "They won't be asking twice," she concluded darkly.
She instructed her daughter-in-law, Lucile Angellier, to remove the decorative ornaments from the mantelpiece. Lucile wanted to leave an ashtray out. At first the elder Madame Angellier objected.
"But they'll drop ash all over the carpets," Lucile pointed out. Pursing her lips, Madame Angellier gave in.
This older woman had such a transparent, pale face that she seemed to have not a drop of blood beneath her skin; her hair was pure white, her mouth like the blade of a knife, her lips almost purple. An old-fashioned high collar made of mauve cotton, held rigid by stays, covered but didn't hide her sharp, bony neck which pulsated with emotion like a lizard. When she heard a German soldier's footsteps or voice near the window, she would tremble from the tips of her small pointy little boots to the top of her impressively coiffed head. "Hurry up, hurry up, they're coming," she'd say.
They left only the bare essentials in the room: not one flower, not one cushion, not one painting. In the large linen cupboard, beneath a pile of sheets, they buried the family picture album, to prevent the sacrilegious enemy from seeing Great-Aunt Adelaide at her First Communion and Uncle Jules, aged six months, naked on a cushion. They packed away everything-right down to the mantelpiece ornaments: two porcelain Louis-Philippe vases decorated with parrots holding a garland of roses in their beaks (a wedding gift from a relative who came to visit less and less frequently but whom they didn't dare offend by getting rid of the present) and the two vases about which Gaston had said, "If the maid breaks them while sweeping, I'll give her a raise." Yes, even them. They had been given by French hands, looked at by French eyes, touched by the feather dusters of France-they would not be defiled by contact with Germans. And the crucifix! In the corner of the room, above the sofa… Madame Angellier took it down herself, slipped it beneath her lace shawl and held it to her breast. "I think that's everything," she said at last.
She took a mental inventory: the furniture from the main reception room had been removed, the curtains taken down, the provisions crammed into the shed where the gardener kept his tools (oh, the large hams smoked in ash, the jars of clarified butter, the salted butter, the fine, pure pork fat, the thick streaky sausages!). All her possessions, all her treasures… The wine had been lying buried in the cellar since the day the English army had left Dunkerque. The piano was locked; Gaston's hunting rifle was in an impregnable hiding place. Everything was in order. There was nothing to do but wait for the conquerors. Pale and silent, with a delicate, trembling hand, she half closed the shutters, as you would in a room where someone had died, and went out, followed by Lucile.
Lucile was a young woman-beautiful, blonde, with dark eyes, but a quiet, modest demeanour and "a faraway expression," for which Madame Angellier reproached her. She'd been acceptable because of her family connections and dowry (she was the daughter of an important landowner in the area). However, Lucile's father had gone on to make some bad investments, lost his fortune and mortgaged his land; the marriage was, therefore, not the most successful; she hadn't had any children, after all.
The two women went into the dining room where the table was set. It was just after twelve o'clock, but only according to the clocks on the church and town hall, which they were obliged to set to German time; every French home set their clocks back by sixty minutes as a point of honour; every Frenchwoman would scornfully say, "At our house, we don't live by German time." This practice left great voids at various points of the day when there was nothing to do. Now, for example, a deadly gap loomed between the end of Mass and the beginning of Sunday lunch. They didn't read. If Madame Angellier saw Lucile with a book in her hands, she would look at her, surprised, and say reproachfully, "What's this? Are you reading?" She had a soft, refined voice, as faint as the echo of a harp: "Don't you have anything else to do?" No one was working: it was Easter Sunday.
They didn't speak. Between these two women, every topic of conversation was a thorn bush they only approached with caution: if they reached out a hand, they risked getting hurt. Every word Madame Angellier heard brought back the memory of some loss, some family story, some former pain Lucile knew nothing about. She would reply with reluctance, then stop to look at her daughter-in-law in sad surprise, as if she were thinking, "How strange that her husband is a German prisoner of war and yet she can still breathe, move, speak, laugh…" She could barely admit that the problem between them was Gaston. Lucile's tone was never what it should be. Sometimes she seemed too sad: was she talking about someone who was dead? Surely her duty as a Frenchwoman, as a wife, was to bear separation courageously, as she, Madame Angellier, had done between 1914 and 1918, just after-or not so long after-her own marriage. But whenever Lucile murmured words of consolation, of hope, her thoughts were similarly bitter: "Ah, you can tell she never really loved him; I've always suspected it. Now I can tell, I'm sure of it… That tone is unmistakable. She's cold and indifferent. She wants for nothing, while my son, my poor child…" She imagined the prisoner-of-war camp, the barbed wire, the guards, the sentries. Tears would well up in her eyes and she would say in a broken voice, "We mustn't speak of him…" Then she would take a clean handkerchief from her bag, always there in case anyone made her think of Gaston or the misfortunes of France, and delicately dab at her eyes with the same gesture she would use to remove a drop of ink with some blotting paper.