"Yes, Madame, hope…" said Madeleine and the tears she could no longer hold back flowed slowly down her cheeks.
Lucile put her arms round Madeleine and hugged her. "Go and get him. Go through the Maie woods. It's still raining. No one will be out. Listen to me, trust no one, German or French. I'll wait for you at the little garden door. I'll go and warn Marthe."
"Thank you, Madame," Madeleine stammered.
"Go quickly. Hurry."
Madeleine opened the door without making a sound and slipped out into the deserted wet garden where tears seemed to drip from the trees. An hour later Lucile let Benoît in through the little green door that opened on to the Maie woods. The storm was over but an angry wind continued to rage.
19
From her room, Madame Angellier could hear the local policeman shouting in front of the town halclass="underline" "Public Announcement by Order of German Headquarters…" Worried faces appeared at all the windows. "What is it now?" everyone thought with fear and hatred. Their fear of the Germans was so great that even when German Headquarters ordered the local police to instruct the villagers to destroy rats or have their children vaccinated, they wouldn't relax until long after the final drum roll had ceased and they had asked the educated people in the village-the pharmacist, the notary or the police chief-to repeat what had just been announced.
"Is that all? Are you sure that's all? They're not taking anything else away from us?"
They gradually calmed down.
"Oh, good," they said, "good, that's fine then! But I wonder why it's their business…"
This would have made everything all right if they hadn't added, "They're our rats and our children. What right have they got to destroy our rats and vaccinate our children? What's it to them?"
The Germans present in the square took it upon themselves to explain the orders.
"We must have everyone in good health now, French and German."
The villagers quickly conceded, with an air of feigned submission ("Oh, they smile like slaves," thought the elder Madame Angellier): "Of course… Good idea… It's in everybody's best interest… We understand."
And each one of them then went home, threw the rat poison in the fire and hurried to the doctor to ask him not to vaccinate their child because he was "just getting over the mumps," or he wasn't strong enough because they didn't have enough food. Others said straight out, "We'd rather there were one or two sick kids: maybe it'll get rid of the Fritz." Alone in the square, the Germans looked around them benevolently and thought that, little by little, the ice was breaking between conquered and conqueror.
On this particular day, however, none of the Germans was smiling or talking to the local people. They stood very straight, a hard stare on their pale faces. The policeman had just played a final drum roll. He was a rather handsome man from the Midi, always happy to be surrounded by women; he was obviously enjoying the importance of what he was about to say. He put his drumsticks under his arm and, with the grace and skill of a magician, he began to read. His attractive, rich, masculine voice echoed in the silence:
A member of the German army has been murdered: an officer of the Wehrmacht was killed in a cowardly way by one Benoît Sabarie, residing at… in the district of Bussy.
The criminal succeeded in escaping. Any person guilty of providing him with shelter, aid or protection, or who knows his whereabouts, is required to report this information to German Headquarters within forty-eight hours, or will otherwise incur the same punishment as the murderer, that is:
IMMEDIATE EXECUTION BY FIRING SQUAD
Madame Angellier had opened the window slightly. When the policeman had gone, she leaned out and looked into the village square. People were whispering, in shock. Only the day before they had been discussing the requisitioning of the horses; this new disaster added to the previous one led to a sort of disbelief in the slow minds of the country folk: "Benoît? Benoît did that? It isn't possible!" The secret had been well kept: the villagers were largely ignorant of what happened in the countryside, on the large, jealously guarded farms.
As for the Germans, well, they were better informed. They now understood what the commotion was about, why there had been whistles in the night, and why, the evening before, they had been forbidden to go out after eight o'clock: "They must have been moving the body and they didn't want us to see." In the cafés, the Germans talked quietly among themselves. They too had the impression it was all horrible, unreal. For three months they had lived alongside these Frenchmen; they had mixed with them; they had done them no harm; they had even managed, thanks to their consideration and good behaviour, to establish a humane relationship with them. Now, the act of one madman made them doubt everything. Yet it wasn't so much the crime that affected them as the solidarity, the complicity they could sense all around them (in the end, for a man to elude an entire regiment hot on his heels meant that everyone must be helping him, hiding him, feeding him; unless, of course, he was hiding in the woods-but the soldiers had spent the entire night searching them). "So, if a Frenchman kills me tomorrow," each soldier was thinking, "me they welcome in their house, me they smile at, who has a place at their dinner table and is allowed to sit their children on my knee… there won't be a single person who'll feel sorry and speak up for me, and everyone will do their best to hide the murderer!" These peaceful country folk with their impassive faces, these women who smiled at them, who had chatted to them yesterday but today walked by embarrassed, avoiding their eye, they were nothing but a group of enemies. They could hardly believe it; they were such nice people… Lacombe, the shoemaker, who had offered a bottle of white wine to the Germans the week before because his daughter had just received her high school diploma and he didn't know how else to express his joy; Georges, the miller, a veteran of the last war, who had said, "Peace as soon as possible and everyone in his own country. That's all we Frenchmen want"; the young women, always eager to laugh, to sing, to share a secret kiss, were they now and for ever to be enemies?
The Frenchmen, meanwhile, were wondering, "That Willy who asked permission to kiss my kid, saying he had one the same age in Bavaria, that Fritz who helped me take care of my sick husband, that Erwald who thinks France is such a beautiful country, and that other one I saw standing in front of the portrait of my father who was killed in 1915… if tomorrow he was given the order, he'd arrest me, he'd kill me with his own hands without thinking twice? War… yes, everyone knows what war is like. But occupation is more terrible in a way, because people get used to one another. We tell ourselves, 'They're just like us, after all,' but they're not at all the same. We're two different species, irreconcilable, enemies forever."
Madame Angellier knew them so well, these country people, that she felt she could look at their faces and read their minds. She sniggered. She hadn't been taken in, not her! She hadn't let herself be bought. For everyone in the village of Bussy had a price, just like in the rest of France. The Germans gave money to some of them (the wine merchants who charged soldiers of the Wehrmacht a hundred francs for a bottle of Chablis, the farmers who got five francs each for their eggs), to others (the young people, the women) they gave pleasure. The villagers were no longer bored since the Germans arrived. Finally they had someone to talk to. God, even her own daughter-in-law… She half closed her eyes and raised her white, translucent hand to cover her lowered eyelids, as if she were trying not to look at a naked body. Yes, the Germans thought they could buy tolerance and forgetfulness that way. And they had.
Bitterly, Madame Angellier made a mental inventory of all the important people in the town. All of them had yielded, all of them had let themselves be seduced: the Montmorts… they entertained the Germans in their own home; she'd heard that the Germans were organising a celebration in the Viscount's grounds, by the lake. Madame de Montmort told everyone who would listen that she was outraged, that she would close all the windows so she couldn't hear the music or see the sparklers beneath the trees. But when Lieutenant von Falk and Bonnet, the interpreter, had gone to see her about borrowing chairs, bowls and tablecloths, she'd spent nearly two hours with them. Madame Angellier had heard this from the cook who'd heard it from the groundsman. These aristocrats were part foreigner themselves, after all, if you looked closely enough. Wasn't it true that through their veins ran the foreign blood of Bavaria, Prussia (abomination!) and the Rhineland? Aristocrats intermarried without a thought for national boundaries. But, come to think of it, the upper middle classes weren't much better. People whispered the names of collaborators (and their names were broadcast loudly on English radio every night): the Maltêtes of Lyon, the Péricands of Paris, the Corbin Bank… and others as well…
Madame Angellier came to feel that she was a race apart-staunch, as implacable as a fortress. Alas, it was the only fortress that remained standing in France, but nothing could bring it down, for its bastions were made, not of stone, not of flesh, not of blood, but of those most intangible and invincible things in the world: love and hate.
She walked quickly and silently up and down the room. "There's no point in closing my eyes," she murmured. "Lucile is ready to fall into the arms of that German." There was nothing she could do about it. Men had weapons; they knew how to fight. All she could do was spy on them, watch them, listen to them… keep her ears open for the sound of footsteps, a sigh in the silence of the night. So that these things, at least, would be neither forgiven nor forgotten, so that when Gaston got back… She quivered with intense joy. God, how she despised Lucile! When everyone was finally asleep in the house, the old woman did what she called "her rounds." Nothing escaped her. She counted the cigarette stubs in the ashtrays that had traces of lipstick on them; she silently picked up a crumpled, perfumed handkerchief, a flower, an open book. She often heard the piano or the German's low, soft voice as he hummed, stressing some musical phrase.