*
Between the houses: the boiling square, women walking past with their aprons, stained from their daily activities, still on. Men point to something in the sky — the place where the impact blew away a chimney and smashed it on the cobbles below, as it turns out when my mother and I arrive breathless in the square, just in time to see the girls. The oldest are carrying the youngest, the youngest are crying, the oldest are putting a brave face on it and calling out: “Amélie. Amélie Bonnard fell and she’s lying there…There!” Arms are outstretched, fingers point in the direction of the church, a few side streets farther on, in the square with the lime trees. The women walk in that direction, my mother and I in the rear. The girls follow, calm the fear of the little ones, and dry their tears.
Above the back of the church there hangs a cloud of dust, ethereal dull red, yellow ochre, grey-white. “In the field there,” cry the girls. “She’s lying in the field.” Only when we walk past the church onto the lawn do we see the hole that has been knocked in the wall, and the lopsided crosses on the tombs, and the smoke rising from the nave of the church — one of the bombs must have fallen right next to the choir, on the narrow gravel path that divided the back of the chapel from the first row of graves. I heard later that Monsieur Bossuges, who had been buried about three weeks before, Monsieur Bossuges, a gentleman of private means, self-appointed dignitary, who had had a tomb built while he was alive in which the accumulation of cherubs and other feathered creatures supported the assumption that he expected a certain esteem in the hereafter also — Monsieur Bossuges, it was said, was hurled out of the hole that one of the bombs had made in his pathetic one-man mausoleum and was found in his best suit, without footwear, hanging right across the tomb of Mademoiselle Bernier, former schoolmistress, as if he had tried to clamber over a stone fence to lie beside her, which in my uncle’s opinion wasn’t even that improbable. Monsieur Bossuges and Mademoiselle Bernier lived very close together and when they were alive, all kinds of things were whispered about them which, my mother felt, would have been a lot less interesting if people had simply said them out loud. “In any case, dear sister,” my uncle commented, by way of conclusion, “who on earth has himself buried with his glasses in his inside pocket?” What truth there was to all this I never knew, my uncle was not averse to exaggeration, and when we bury Amélie Bonnard a few days later, the mairie has had all the rubble cleared and the craters have been filled with it. The glazed tips of the wings of Monsieur Bossuges’s angels gleam like children’s teeth in the sand.
Because of the rouge it looks as if Amélie Bonnard is not dead at all. Because of the rouge and the earrings, and thick winter coat over her summer dress, she looks like a child very accurately playing dead. It takes a while to find her, flat on her back, an unsightly bundle of blue-grey serge amid the copper-coloured grass of the falling evening. She must have turned round at the last, wanting to retrace her steps, because she is lying with her feet in the direction of the gate in the hedge and the dusty country road, arms next to her trunk, a last convulsion still in her fingers under the thick sleeves of her coat. The eyes, vacant, stare at the clear sky without seeing the clogs and socks, the grazed knees, the skirts of the women, or the face of my mother, who kneels down by her and superfluously, since everyone knows that Amélie is dead, puts the back of her hand against the child’s cheeks, the powdered cheeks, and then turns her hand over, and strokes Amélie’s forehead to close her eyes, and then with the chin in the hollow of her palm pushes it against Amélie’s upper jaw. “Someone should tell Marie,” she says without looking up, and when she gets up again I see she is close to tears — but it isn’t necessary to call Marie, more people are approaching down the country road. Above the voices and the footsteps Madame Bonnard calls, “Amélie, Amélie! Where are you?” as she walks towards us and wipes her hands on her apron, covered in smears of fat from her work at the butcher’s, and pushes her way through the people, the men who keep an embarrassed distance, the children whom she pulls brusquely aside until she is standing next to my mother and in turn sinks to her knees by her daughter, blushing from the rouge, the earrings glistening in the grass—“Silly child…” she hisses in a voice that is breaking.
She looks unharmed, Amélie Bonnard, an expensive powdered doll left behind by a spoilt rich person’s child, but when her mother lifts her head up she withdraws her hand in horror, red with blood, because the back of Amélie’s skull is left behind in the grass and her own fingers sink into the soft mass of the brain — and she does not so much utter a cry, Marie Bonnard, as a groan that seems to issue more from her tissue and bones than from her chest, as if all the tendons and joints were howling in their sockets. My mother puts a hand to her mouth and turns her head away. “Send them away,” she finally mumbles. “Les enfants. Send then away, Hélène. Take them with you to the market square.”
*
Only when we rinsed her clean in our cellar, where it was cool, as we waited for Monsieur Véclin, carpenter and undertaker for the occasion to make her coffin, was the colour of death exposed in Amélie’s body, and my mother and I, who washed the child while her own mother vacantly stroked the bloody locks, we gulped and both bit our bottom lips. My mother had lent her shawl, so that Monsieur Véclin could bind Amélie’s head before he took the body away, and then it emerged that the mortuary had also been destroyed, and Monsieur Véclin admitted that because of what he called “the situation” he did not have sufficient planks at home, so that it might be quite some time before there was a coffin—“And you understand, Madame Demont, with this heat…”—then she had summoned me again: “Run home quickly, Hélène, ask uncle to send the dog cart, and bring a blanket with you.”
And so little Amélie Bonnard arrived at our house towards evening, under a blanket on the dog cart, followed by a procession of women and children. My mother supported Madame Bonnard, I walked ahead, next to the elderly servant who handled the dog. No one spoke. Behind me was the sound of suppressed sobs. The wheels of the cart crunched on the gravel, the dog panted. In our yard Madame Bonnard took her daughter off the cart and carried her into the house in her arms. We showed her the way, down the steps, into the cellar area, the vaulted passage under the house, with countless side rooms, one of them the cool room, with the flowing water and the big cold stone in the middle, on which Amélie Bonnard was set down.
*
My mother sent all the others away, instructed the maid to bring jugs of water, towels and washbasins and soap. We undid the straps of Amélie’s shoes. Madame Bonnard took the earrings off her child and put them in the pocket of the apron she still had on. She could not take her eyes off her daughter’s face, which in her hands blushed so unnaturally in death. “We’ve informed Abbé Foulard,” said my mother. Marie Bonnard nodded, but did not look up. “He’s on his way.” We unbuttoned Amélie’s coat, and the stiff material did not easily give. My mother said: “Take her socks off” and then turned to the maid, Madeleine, who was waiting by the door and looking on. “Fetch bandages, from the boudoir upstairs.”