A Packhorse Called Rachel

A Girl’s Bitter Struggle With The Enemy In Occupied France

by

Marcelle Kellermann

Fay Weldon comments:

‘A Fascinating Tale, And True, Beautifully Written’

This piece is based on personal experience, and the description of historical events is as true as memory will allow, although all names have been changed.

Contents

1. The Raid.

2. The Bothy.

3. The Long March.

4. The First Steps.

5. And More Steps.

6. Encounter with the Bear.

7. Morning Rituals.

8. Bacchus’ Temple.

9. Jean-de-la-Montagne.

10. Love and Chlorophyll.

11. The Ratcatcher from the Mont-Dore.

12. Before The Carnage.

13. Murol and Kafka.

14. The Syringe.

15. The Carnage.

16. After the Carnage.

17. Mister Well-dressed.

18. The Interrogation.

19. The Return.

20. A Journey to Hades.

21. The Fairground.

Epilogue - The Maurice de St Pré trial.

To Walter

1.

The Raid.

It has been more than fifty years now, but I can never forget the day:

February 2nd, l944. This is the University of Clermont-Ferrand. More precisely, its Faculty of Science.

I kick the laboratory door and enter. Some students turn around (sorry boys and girls but I overslept), others are absorbed in their analysis, or pretend to be. They are studying medicine. Most of the staff and students have fled here from the university of Strasbourg, now hopelessly Nazified. Clermont-Ferrand, the capital of the Auvergne, well anchored at the foot of its volcanic mountains, escaped the onslaught of the occupation by its geographic situation, south of the demarcation line. Only until November 1942, that is. By December, the demarcation line disappeared and France was totally invaded. In l940 my parents and I had taken refuge in Clermont thinking (hoping) the French government in Vichy would protect its Jewish citizens from the Hun. It did the reverse: I was given no choice but to take refuge again, this time in the laboratory of organic chemistry. The brave and handsome professor Clément Vallette appointed me as his assistant (that’s why I say he is brave) and pays me a nominal fee from his own pocket because he knew it was not safe for me, as a Jew, to appear on the university’s register. Vichy had to ignore I existed. I should be afraid but I am not. I am 19, and female, and blond, and still possessed with the arrogance of youth. But by the end of this day, February 2nd, I will be different forever.

The students are my friends. We fool around a bit and exchange confidences between experiments, to while away the time and give each other a little human warmth in the chilly, hungry world the grown-ups have created for us. Outside the window snow falls. An acrid smell drifts over from the far end of the room. Everyone in the lab begins to cough and sneeze. “I hope no one is boiling ether! I call out.”

Francine turns around and in a mewing tone says: “I am, Mademoiselle. Is it wrong?”

I cry, “everybody out! It’ll explode! Out!” I yell at the top of my voice “Out! Out!” herding them like a sheepdog. I shove those who have frozen in place. My colleague Hervé appears and seizes those who won’t budge. He yells: “Get the hell out of here! Go now! Think later!” I fetch the fire extinguisher which for some inane reason is kept down the corridor leading to the lecture theatre. Hervé grabs it, pulls off the cap and directs a stream of foam onto Francine’s steaming crucible. Soon the lab looks like the snowy landscape outside.

The danger has passed. The tension breaks. Foam is all over the place and suddenly it is funny. We double up with laughter. We cannot stop. I notice Hervé’s beautiful, even teeth. I have never seen him laugh before. At last we regain control of ourselves. We’ve saved the students, staff of the science faculty and perhaps even those of the Arts faculty next door. In fact the whole of the impressive modern building, Léon Blum’s Prize baby. Elected president in 1936, he was to give the provinces a chance to free themselves from the yoke of Parisian Academic supremacy. He financed generously the creation of new universities and the modernization of the old ones. A major problem remained: to fill these establishments with staff and students. The exodus of students and staff from Strasbourg filled the void; they had flocked together to reach Clermont-Ferrand, arriving at the university’s gates in l941, many of them without time to present their applications and credentials, all exhausted and starved. They were received with open arms, led straight to the canteen and given shelter, no questions asked.

We’ve saved all that. We feel good. No time to relax though. “Can we come in?” asks a girl, poking her nose around the door. Before I reply the others reappear and they all push into the room. They are a bit shamefaced because they ran, even though we forced them to. Visachel Rosenthal comes up to me. He is my favourite student, tall and lanky as a greyhound, working faster than the others, looking slightly bored. I join him sometimes to know what he’s thinking. He rarely opens up his inner thoughts but lately he told me that his father had fled from Strasbourg a little later then he did and that he was without news. Where could he have gone he wondered?

Though he is usually so very pale, at the moment his cheeks are flaming. He says, angrily: “You shouldn’t have chased us away like that!” I say, “But we needed room to control…” He interrupts, “That’s not my point.” He is annoying me. We have just saved the building and all the people in it. Can’t he see that? I say, more harshly than intended: “You’d have preferred us to die together?”

“Yes,” he says. “Yes”.

He turns away from me and goes to the window. The import of his remark strikes home: we had our opportunity to end it all. Now we’ll have to go on as before…we’ll have to return to Babylon, to captivity, and all because of…me. I suddenly see his future, mine and many others linked by a common fate, the one running in front of his eyes right now through the winterscape and which I sense as imminent, too.

After consulting with Hervé I tell the students they are free until the lecture at eleven o’clock. “Is Vallette giving it?” asks a student. “Yes, on cholesterols.” I say. One pretty, outspoken girl cries, “Oh, help!” and several others join in. I leave them to it. Hervé follows me into the assistants’ room which is also used by members of the academic staff because it is the only one with heat. Some squat on the floor for lack of chairs. They drink coffee made from lupin seeds (courtesy of the Prof. of Botany) and chew on biscuits of maize and saccharine which are not only as hard as wood but also taste like wood. We talk about sideways. Two high-ranking Gestapos make their appearance. They look like coal-black shining crows, their left wings marked with the blood-red insignia, the devil’s swastikas well in evidence. They stop short in the doorway as if afraid we might contaminate them if they enter any further. They click their heels and make their darting fascist salute. “Alle raus!” they croak, a guttural, twisted, strident sound which makes us jump in spite of ourselves. We wish to appear calm no hope! Some of us spring up like clockwork toys, others stay glued to their seats.

I stand and wait. From the back of the room a voice hollers ‘Warum?” and the sound reverberates like thunder, like “Wroom! It is professor Baumgartner. He was one of the first academics of Strasbourg to flee, soon to be followed by other members of staff. However, a minority of them did not dare leave hoping the war would soon be over. Others stayed collaborating with Hitler’s Alsace in view of a quick promotion from the new administration.

Baumgartner’s escape had been an ordeal; childhood polio had left him with a limp and a humped back and forces him to waddle when he walks with the aid of a stick. Helped by his son and a student, the journey through Switzerland and occupied France must have been an ordeal one can only surmise.

“Befehl! Alle raus! Schnell, schnell!”

The crow who just opened his beak blinks. He looks daggers at Baumgartner and shouts “Sie auch!”, then turns and exits, followed by his twin. They are immediately replaced by two Wehrmacht (in green) who point their rifles at us. We have no choice but to file out.

Baumgartner refuses. “Ich bleibe hier!” he intones and bangs his stick on the floor with such might that the two Wehrmacht turn their rifles at him. Are they going to shoot? We wait for gunfire, for the dwarf to fall in his own blood…but they don’t shoot. A stroke of pity? Baumgartner won’t move. He brandishes the stick like a maniac. Some of us return into the room to help him out of his chair but we get the butt of a rifle in the ribs. Pushed out by force none of us will ever know what happened next.

The incident in the lab; some people are amused, others angry that I allowed my students such liberties.

It’s clear not everyone shares the same sense of humour (or of the ridiculous). Comments start to fly about among the tobacco smoke making a few pipes tremble on the way. They glance at me sideways, someone launches the attack: “You ought not to let those idiots get on by themselves.” I continue to nibble my biscuit, disregarding the double assault on the students and myself. There is more to come: Clément Vallette adds “Our future medics don’t seem to have much scientific flair” which meets with general approval.

True. As it happens, a delegation of students recently approached me after hours to discuss their difficulties with certain subjects in chemistry. They were fed up with cholesterols, toad venom and other complicated molecules covering the Prof ’s blackboard. They thought that he had forgotten that they were not going to be chemists. “You tell him,” they said, “we can’t. He’s too high up, he gives us the shivers”. I agree to speak to him, but I said I would have to pick the right moment. God only knows why I think this is the right moment! With all the tact I can muster I tell the professor what my “future medics” have told me.

“Ha!” he says, “they are frightened to think. Tell them they’ve only to cut my lecture”.

“But your lectures are part of the course,” I say.

“They want me to make them optional, is that it?”

“They want them out of the course.” I feel as if I’m shrinking.

“My answer is NO! As I said, let them cut my lectures…if they dare!”

He leaves the room, plainly meaning “I have nothing to add.” A few seconds later he reappears, his face strained and white, his eyes unseeing. We hear strange noises from the corridor. Heavy authoritarian steps, doors being wrenched open –voices shouting in German. We look at one another, petrified. German voices have never been heard within the walls of our sanctuary. “It’s a raid” says a colleague.

“Perhaps not” say the professor, “but they’ll interrogate the lot of us”. He leans against the door to keep it firmly shut. Our ears are buzzing. The door opens woosh! Vallette gets the push and stumbles We don’t see the professor again until we are taken outside. He is crouching in the snow of the courtyard of the science block, hatless, coatless. Did he surrender? Doubtful. Perhaps they hit him across his hump with their rifles, perhaps something worse. Meanwhile, we are making our way to the cloak-room. “Verboten” says a voice from a distance. We are walking in a file to join the others already standing in the yard forming a circle round Baumgartner whose eyes are fixed on his stick marking a ring, a line not to be crossed again…not to hurt him again. We have joined him, miserable sheep, like him without our winter gear, standing in the melting snow.

What do they want from us, these jack-booted monsters?

Just look at them! They are on an improvised platform, sitting in arm-chairs taken from the staff room we’ve just left, warmly wrapped in fur-lined leather coats which gleam in the sun - the generous sun out of the clouds to warm us a little.

Bayonets oblige us to clasp our hands on top of our heads. An unbearable apprehension seizes us, we must look like quivering puppets held by invisible strings glued on to our heads and arms. We wait for something to happen. We don’t have to wait long; a series of events unfolds before us like a waking nightmare. We can’t believe what we’re seeing because we don’t want to. We have to. The evidence is too strong.

Among the flock of strutting, sinister birds appears a familiar figure. It’s one of us - Maurice de St Pré. Maurice is a law student, a former cadet at St Cyr. We are filled with hope, some of us even smile. All is well, we know that he is in the Resistance and of his contacts with London and Spain. He provides false passports and helps both students and staff to escape through Spain. He is very handsome, twenty three, with eyes even bluer than usual this morning because of the reflection from the shining snow. He’s going to spin them a yarn, he’s so clever…

Something is terribly wrong, though. He smiles, but not at us. He speaks and gesticulates with the monsters in charge with ominous familiarity. St Pré hands them one, two, three sheets of paper. Whatever for? One monster starts reading the names on the first page in guttural German accent. He pauses after each name. The walls echo them back. The names called come before an improvised tribunal. St Pré faces them, self-important, legs apart, so steady - whilst ours tremble like Hell. With a slight gesture of the hand he sends some to the right, others to the left. The ones on the right are sent back to their places. Those on the left are surrounded by Boche bayonets. Hands on head!

The left-right selection continues. It doesn’t relent.

Sheet two: The names fly into the air like frightened birds. BLANCHARD - BAUMGARTNER (the prof ’s son) - FRANKEN - LEVY ROSENTHAL …VISACHEL! I am so sorry. So sorry, but what could I do? STORA - WEISS - YACOB …to the left. All passport seekers, all trusting their treacherous saviour!

The students who’ve been let off murmur between clenched teeth “swine…double crosser…rat…we’ll get you!” The bayonets silence them. Panic is getting hold of us. Two girls pass out, white as snow, another girl vomits her breakfast, retching pitifully; blood flows red and warm down the legs of a girl. She stares straight in front of her, obviously in pain. She sways but tries to keep erect. I try to steady her but the bayonets separate me from her.

Vallette comes close to me and whispers: “He’s denounced them! How despicable!”

I grab his wrist: “Visachel! He must have contacted him!”

“Have you?” he asks in a broken voice.

“No. Have you?”

“No. But take heart, Rachel. It’s not the end…it may be a new beginning…there’s work ahead of us…right now”.

“Surely not here!”

“No. Much will depend on our determination to get out of here!” Vallette looks at me, clearly worried.

“Are you all right?”

I nod. No words come out.

Vallette holds my arm firmly I must be looking like death. He does too. All arms are lowered. They can shoot us if they want.

Sheet three. The names called now are those of the staff. Am I being spared? It seems so since I do not appear on the staff ’s register. Will St Pré notice that I am the forgotten one? He doesn’t, all his attention is given to the names called and on his fatal selection.

Baumgartner’s name is called. He doesn’t move. Is he dead? No, his chest is heaving. Two Boches get hold of him. St Pré sends him to the left, eyes lit up. Baumgartner stumbles and falls. His son rushes forward to help him get up but he’s stopped by the bayonets. They grab him by the shoulders and brutally throw him back to the group on the left.

They call Vallette’s name. He goes up. Although sent to the right he doesn’t move. He remains facing the tribunal and addresses the monster holding the third sheet. His voice reaches me in wafts. It is the voice of JEDERMANN, echoing from all corners of this open-air platform of Hell. I hear: “Innocent…children….no harm…no right…I guarantee…safe return …parents…go home…immediately…mediately…”

It’s the Teutonic grand finale. The humiliators are aroused - truly aroused- by the spectacle of the humiliated. St Pré, with his ice-blue eyes and his weak chin (yes, it strikes me now as such) can hardly contain himself: Vallette, the eminent professor, so severe, so distant, now begging. What a feast! His fascist acolytes are all having trouble restraining themselves, they’d better not spoil their spotless, beautifully pressed trousers! Heil Hitler! It’s too much to endure…Heil! We want to stay clean and pure as we promised our Führer. We must control ourselves! We will, it’s our duty as soldiers, Heil Hitler! But all the same, what bliss to have displayed at our feet this human excrement losing menstrual blood, vomiting, crying for mercy, shaking like leaves, fainting, yes, fainting on the pure snow, the snow as white and pure as our race, Heil Hitler! It’s a magnificent spectacle. Heil!

The chief Gestapo monster is the first to regain his composure. He makes a short well-reasoned speech: here are the words coming out of the beak of Maître Corbeau perched high on his tree. Sod off, bird of ill omen! Maître Renard, where are you? Why don’t you get him?

There’s nobody. Nobody at all. Turning his back on Vallette who hasn’t left the stage, he plants himself in front of the condemned and says:

“You have plotted against the armies of occupation and your own government. We have irrefutable evidence of acts carried out against the authorities. You will be deported to a military camp in Germany”.

He swings round to face the rest of us down below. With the pathos of Wotan he hollers: “Let these arrests be a warning to all of you. Heil Hitler!”

The stage empties. St Pré first, having done a good day’s work. He is followed by the condemned. Visachel, superb greyhound now wounded, my friend, my brother, please! Please, turn round, just once. Say you forgive me! He doesn’t turn round.

Vallette returns to the building to plan his next move, undefeated it seems. He invites me to go with him but I am drawn to follow the slushy path taken by this demented circus.

A strong grip gets hold of my arm and leads me back to the university compound. Only then does Vallette let go. He doesn’t speak until we arrive at the front entrance, then he says:

“Go home. To-morrow is another day”.

Making my way to the cours Sablon where I live I sing ever so softly but with a burning throat Schumann’s newly discovered Lied ‘Das alte Ross” (the old steed). I wish Vallette could hear me, share with me this pure and simple song just to lessen the hurt in my soul and possibly his. But he shut the main gate with a bang, turning his back on the world…and to me.

Mein Kamerad, wie schad, wie schad

Dass alles, dass alles ist aus

Und der Schnee hat verweht den Pfad

Und das Herz tut so weh, so weh!

My friend, how sad, how sad

That everything, everything’s gone

And the snow has covered the path

And my heart feels such pain, such pain!

2.

The Bothy.

Daylight creeping through the bars of the tiny east side window of my bothy amazes me. It is all so new and incredibly quiet!

My bothy! Of course it isn’t mine but it belongs to me for now as it belonged to generations of shepherds in the Auvergne. I am told they used to build these huts with their own hands with blocks of limestone and thatch made of reeds collected from the shores of the lakes lying down in the valley, their waters quite still, as beautiful as they are treacherous, swampy, unapproachable. They surround themselves with sludge and quicksand where snakes and mosquitoes hatch among the reeds.

The birds in the giant poplars which tower above my hut are beginning to sing. Theirs are the only perches to be found in the barren volcanic moonscape of this part of the Central plateau where fate has placed us, me and my dog. They ruffle their feathers among the pale young leaves as they gather to celebrate the dawn and share my crumbs. I thank them for making nature speak for me alone, for there is no one else in this desert of deserts.

Nourse gets up from the palliasse we share, shakes himself out of his sleep, stretches and yawns showing his fierce strong teeth and his pink shiny gums. Just look at my proud young sheepdog - he’ll swallow his tongue if he doesn’t close his mouth this instant! I kiss his moist muzzle -black as a truffle and smelling just as good- in return for this reassuring display and I stretch myself out on the straw full of minute transparent lice scarcely visible to the naked eye which dart all over my bare skin. Though they annoy me I’ve found a way to tolerate them but they add to the unease I feel, like that in my worse nightmares. My thoughts turn to you, my lanky, pensive Visachel Rosenthal and wonder what they did to you that evil day in February and in the days that followed. I need so much to know!

* * *

Every morning at dawn they wait for Nourse and me at the bothy of Savignole, our Maquis, every day God sends. It’s my job to bring the bread, the potatoes, the blue-veined cheese, and sometimes chunks of smoked jambon. I have another job. Colonel Gérard wants to know, if like sister Anne, I see ‘someone coming’. (“Ma soeur Anne, ma soeur Anne, ne vois-tu rien venir?”) I listen, then go out and watch with my binoculars the troop movement of the enemy shuttling between Murol, Mont Dore and Clermont-Ferrand. Their route lies well above my bothy to the east, on the hillside. Everything except the living lies, it seems, on a hill side in the bare landscape that encircles me. Even the deer dare not venture there. Exists are hidden from me. In the hollow of the swelling mountains I am at least safe from view. So I thought at the time…

With my binoculars I count the number of vehicles in each convoy, especially the tanks, and note the time of their passing. Scattered throughout the southern half of the country, these convoys coming from Italy are now funnelling to the north to reinforce the German contingents at present attacked day and night by the Allies or the now well-organized ambushes on the ground. Hence they are in a hurry. I can tell; their drivers have their foot down, their big vehicles not on parade this time! I rush out of my bothy for Savignole where Gérard and his men are billeted. The colonel takes action as soon as he has gathered a sufficient contingent to create an ambush. It is easily achieved because the boys are always fully prepared, mainly with hand grenades. It is a sight to see them running like rabbits ‘till they have reached the strategic point of attack. Recent orders from the Free French are that the German armies of the north and the south have to be prevented from joining up, no matter what it costs, and the costs are heavy in human lives since the enemy is now hunted down fearlessly, without respite.

Gérard’s boys come to us from all over the place; from England or the north of France, from Lyon or the Massif central, sometimes already armed (with Dad’s rifle), sometimes bare chested, young or not so young, Communists or non-Communists, someone’s son or no-one’s. They have no ration cards because they have to register to get them. They are all ravenous. This means that I am always received with open arms and plenty of kisses. We share everything; the provisions, the soup, the grief which assails us when one of our comrades does not return to the fold, his place still warm, the straw-bed still carrying the imprint of his last sleep. New recruits are parachuted in, irregularly and not often enough, in spite of our wireless operator’s SOS messages to London. There is a reason for this which I shall explain later. Like young crusaders they all have untroubled brows, fixed ideals and complete self-denial. If they have ever been selfish they certainly aren’t now. I love them, even though they come and go. The loss of one of them causes great pain and makes me cry with frustration and anger… and hatred, never leaving me.

During the winter my bothy, called Buron in the Auvergne, was only half an hour’s journey from the bothy of Savignole. I could travel quickly over the snow-clad mountains and hills on my un-waxed skis which I used to coat, for want of anything better, with layers of cooking fat which the snow soaked up much too quickly. I made stylish zigzag descents through the dense, silent forests, I practiced ski de fond along new path no-one else ever took, besides iced lakes, on top of frozen swamps. But since the snow has melted, though it still lingers on the higher summits, it takes me a good hour to reach Savignole, depending on how much weight I have to carry on my back. They say walking is good for your health. I don’t deny it, though I do not give a damn about my health anymore. If you must know, I am covered with boils as big as your fist, walking brings them on and my rucksack which weighs sometimes up to twenty kilos makes them erupt. To use an expression dear to my suffering Mamoshka: “I am going through Hell on earth!”

She certainly went through hell on earth when the Germans marched in in 1940. They had parked their tanks and heavy vehicles in front of our rented house in Clermont-Ferrand and hit our door with their boot. Mamoshka let them in.” Oh, mon Dieu!” were her last words.

I was behind her. She collapsed on the floor with a stroke. The two Wehrmacht who had already stepped in retreated after one of them said to the other: “Ich glaube die Frau ist tot”.

Mamoshka, or Moshka as I like to call her for short, died three days later without recovering consciousness.

‘La Défaite’, for me, was complete.

The memory of my mother’s unconscious fight for life during the sultry days of August 1940 is still burning me inside. The whole sequel of her sudden collapse in front of the Invaders and the three days that followed describe better than any historical account the utter cruelty of the times, the quasi-impossibility for us French to comprehend what was happening to us, the madness which befell all of us.

Looking at my father I can see he is in deep shock. He lay on the bed beside my mother, holding her hand. All he can say is ‘call the doctor’. Both looked like they had wanted to die together and were waiting patiently for it to happen. Panic-stricken I ‘phone the emergency service at the hospital. No-one lifts the receiver. Would it be possible that they had left in a hurry? After what seemed an eternity a doctor is on the line. I tell him about our predicament, he interrupts “how old is your mother”? I say fifty, he says “It’s a case of menopausal fit…give her an infusion of orange-blossom” and he hangs up after refusing to visit. I find it pathetically risible. This man’s shameful response to my cry for help forces me to be sane. I suddenly remember the existence of Dr. Julius May, an acquaintance of ours who had left Paris about the same time as we did after telling my father on the ‘phone that he had taken up a temporary post at the hospital of Royat, a spa famous for heart patients and a suburb of Clermont-Ferrand. I ask for Dr May, I insist it is extremely urgent. We are cut off. I try again. And again. Finally, he is at the end of the line. “My poor Rachel” he says with a broken voice, “I am in no position to help. I am leaving right now. So sorry. It sounds as if your mother has had a stroke. Call on the Little-sisters-of-the-Poor, they might give your mother some relief by applying cupping glasses”. I apologize for disturbing him in these grim times. He sobs. I am in tears myself. I think of my father; should he get away too, NOW? Back to the bed-room I see he hasn’t moved, lying still next to Mamoshka, holding her hand. I tell him I’m fetching help. He doesn’t react. The convent is not far, I reach it by bicycle in less than five minutes.

Mother Superior receives me, listens to me, then says: “my child I am very sorry but our order allows us only to help and serve the poor”. I say: “But Mother Superior, my father and I are poor, we are losing our most precious possession…a wife and a mother”.

She relents. Two sisters join us later in the evening carrying a box filled with leeches instead of cupping glasses. We turn my poor Mamoshka on her tummy and apply the leeches to her back. She frowns. I am seized by a crazy hope; would there be some cognition left in her? Some life?

After the worms have dropped one by one, replete with Mamoshka’s blood, the sisters place them back in the box and seem to be in a great hurry to leave us. Would it be that loitering for too long in the home-of-the-rich means for them committing a sin? I give them money. No, no, they mutter. I understand that for them it is evil money.

Meanwhile, father turns Mamoshka round on her back again. Her laboured breathing continues non-stop, it is loud, oh so loud! Her chest and belly are heaving up and down, like a machine. Her distorted face expresses anger. The frown hasn’t left her. Her struggle to breathe is hurting her so.

3.

The Long March

Now, how I got to be at my godforsaken bothy, with Gérard’s binoculars, squire Raboullet’s potato sacks full of provisions, and my suppurating boils (sorry if I disgust you) is a rather long story…an itinerary along tracks which didn’t exist until I took them and which I would never have thought I could negotiate. Many a time, I must confess, I have an irresistible urge to sit down, lean against a tree and suck pebbles. But wanting to make time stand still is the same as turning back, and that I must not do. So the second of February had its tomorrow, as might have been expected, and it gave rise to many more. From then to the fragrant and still misty dawn which greets me through the bars of the east window of my bothy, two long months have run their dizzy course.

After Moshka’s death I seem to have no resistance to emotion. Or this is what I felt very powerfully at the time until Flora, my friend, came into my life. We both had a heavy load to share, didn’t we, dearest Flora? You were looking for a haven yourself having come from Poland where your father, a famous heart surgeon had been interned by the Nazis in l941. Although not a Jew he had given shelter in his large house to several Jewish children who had fled from the Warsaw ghetto and were roaming the streets of Warsaw hungry and in a desperate search for shelter. After your father’s arrest you fled Poland, made for France, enrolled as a medical student at Clermont-Ferrand to continue your interrupted studies and were immediately taken care of by your benefactor, Maître Sarlange, a barrister. In a few months you will be a doctor. I am so proud of you! You and I are a bit like orphans, our lives fused by the music we make, whenever we can, often at unsociable hours, playing ever so softly– because of complaints from the concierge and the neighbours of my little apartment, Cours Sablon. We play the work of our favourite composers, you improvising on your guitar, I providing the accompaniment on the piano. I do so love it when you sing with your pure vibrant voice Lieder by Schumann, Schubert, Hugo Wolf… in moments of happiness and relief beyond compare!

The day after the raid on the university you came to see me. It was 1O o’clock in the evening. The night was cold and calm. Instead of knocking lightly on my ground floor window, as you usually did, you chose to sing Chopin’s Tristesse to your guitar. Nourse barks and wags his tail for joy, knowing your voice. I open the window and the shutters, you pass me your guitar and you hitch yourself over the balustrade with a ‘whoops’ so familiar and heart-warming, your heavy body, your rounded thighs and matronly bosom not quite suited for this kind of nocturnal sport. I close my shutters and windows as quickly as I can to keep out the cold. Then you throw your guitar on my bed and hold me tightly in your arms. In your musical Polish accent you say:

“Maître Sarlange told me… it’s awful!” Tears stream down our cheeks. I say: “Visachel has gone…with the others…with Baumgartner and his son”.

“I know,” you say. “The names of the deported are already known”. We sit down, you on my bed, I on my piano stool. Worried about you I say: “‘Tomorrow it might be the turn of the medics…”

“No, no fear of that! We look after their own wounded” you say with a bitter laugh. “That’s ironic!” I say. You reply:

“Oh, you know, wounded men are all the same, lying there, under their white sheets, weak, asking for help, for love. The former hate in their hearts dissolves in their wounds. They are like children. As for us doctors, all we see are bodies to be treated…bodies which have lost their nationality…their history and their aggression” and then you ask me point-blank: “What are you going to do now?” “Join the maquis…what else can I do?” The thing I had been wanting for too long to happen becomes a reality in a flash. I see myself already living in the midst of nameless men and women called terrorists, becoming a terrorist myself, sharing the lives of those men and women who had made their choice at the beginning of the hostilities.

The long, often agonizing wait had its reasons, purely filial ones and which I do not regret to this day.

When my father fled from Clermont-Ferrand shortly after my Mamoshka’s death he had made me promise to avoid all kinds of ‘heroics’ (his own words) which might lead to my arrest and subsequently his. He had compelling reasons for the request: He had been on Hitler’s black list since Hitler came to power. Besides being a Jew, his notorious anti-German activities whilst director of the Sunlight soap factories in Mannheim had become known on both sides of the German-French divide. Having obtained German nationality after escaping from the pogroms in his native Romania at the age of nineteen my father, who spoke also fluent French, was put in charge of the French prisoners arriving in droves at the factory from 1916 onwards. He saw to their welfare personally and accorded them many privileges which alarmed the German military. Why should Herr Direktor Henner spoil the French prisoners while German prisoners in France were known to be miserably treated? Father’s pro-French deeds did not stop there. He impeded, in fact sabotaged, the manufacture of the explosive tri nitro-glycerine (one of the by-products in the manufacture of soap) which had been imposed as a matter of great urgency by the German Ministry of War during the winter of 1917/18. The quantity of explosives expected to be delivered on time failed to materialize. An order for Dr Henner’s arrest was issued, but by that time he had fled to Switzerland. Two months later the Armistice was signed and Father made for Paris to join my Parisian mother whom he had secretly married when on a vacation in the capital in l913. He was given French nationality on account of his courageous acts of defiance during the war and the Légion d’Honneur shortly after. How very nice it would have been if Father’s epic history had terminated at this point. But it was not to be. In l940, a German acquaintance stationed at the German embassy in Paris warned him of a damning report which had reached his desk. It described in detail his ‘treasonable acts’ twenty two years before in Mannheim, declaring him an enemy of the Reich. So here I was, his daughter, a prisoner of chemistry lab., a place of isolation from normal living, stashed away, forced to be the impotent witness of other people’s totally committed lives. Yet feeling strong. Always hopeful. Was this due to my friend and surrogate mother Flora? To the BBC broadcasts listened to every night with unabated excitement? To the support of my supervisor and to the students so keen on getting their analysis right to please me? Or to my concierge’s sustaining gifts of her home-made pâté de campagne given to me when not drunk or just foul tempered as she was most days? Or to my faithful dog Nourse who loves me? Yes, I am sure it was, it was due to each of these who in their own ways conspired (inspired me) to keep me going…

* * *

Flora asks: “‘What about your father?” This is a brutal question. (Not welcomed after what I experienced yesterday). But it’s the way you never beat about the bush. The thought of my father confounds me and you know that I’ve decided not to look back. I say: “You’ve left your father too, haven’t you?” “Not the same. I left Poland a few days after my father’s arrest. Anyway, he wanted me to finish my studies in France and had said so long before they arrested him. “Ah yes,” I say, “I remember… ”

So here I am, unable to justify my decision. My selfishness is intolerable. In the rare letters to reach me my father writes “You have taken your mother’s place in my broken heart.” He says this each time. I dread receiving his letters…

“But Flora”, I say, “had you forgotten that he is safe in the Corrèze? Why are you inflicting such a painful reminder on me? Anyway, I have signed a pact with myself. Words are no longer necessary. “Look, I’ll play your favourite Chopin Etude. The first one. Just listen…”

I turn my piano stool round to play as Flora prepares herself to listen, clasping her hands and closing her eyes as she often does when I’m playing.

Flora, my dear dear friend, that’s all I can give you right now. I finish playing, swivel round to read your eyes they reflect your usual percipience, your smile illuminates your face. You take both my hands in yours and say “I know you, Rachel. I knew that’s what you would finally choose to do. It was written, somewhere…” I kiss your hands, full of gratitude. You approve and it is enough for me. And you make the announcement which changed my life:

“Until today I promised to say nothing. Maître Sarlange is one of the founders of the National Council for the Resistance. He’s in daily contact with Georges Bidault, recruiting for different networks of the Maquis. I spoke to him about you. He wants to see you tomorrow at 11.00. That’s why I came tonight.” I shout and weep for joy. A desire to live a full and useful life overcomes me. It is almost midnight. We are drinking hot tea from my samovar - an authentic, imposing one - tea which has been boiling for hours, nay, days! It’s indestructible, this tea! In our imagination we rekindle the aroma of China tea, even though it lost its aroma ages ago. It’s thanks to you, Flora, that I know the secret of preserving the clear colour of tea; add a piece of charcoal …a recipe from your native Poland where tea is as scarce as it is now in France. Faces buried in our bowls we both think about the hazy and mysterious future. I see my samovar grown cold and tarnished; my piano out of tune, its felt moth-eaten, worm-eaten; my hay box rotting away…In spite of the lateness of the hour and in spite of my neighbours and the concierge sleeping below (she’s going to kill me tomorrow morning, that’s for sure) I launch into Chopin’s Revolutionary Etude. It may be for the last time, who knows and who cares. I play as my master Alfred Cortot wanted it played, “with passion and dedication to Chopin’s ever suffering Poland”.

- At the Conservatoire, his students were used to hearing him speak like this; he would go to the piano to let his fingers give resonance to his words. We listened, transfixed, asking ourselves how does he do it? (He continued to perform in concert halls during the Occupation, to the chagrin of many of his students and to mine in particular.)

I play. You’ve buried your head in your hands, dearest Flora, crying for a lost father… and a Poland that is no more -.

4.

The First Steps.

Flora and I are waiting in the anteroom to Maître Sarlange’s office. I feel like a little girl (numb at the prospect of appearing before the school’s disciplinary committee), helpless before the man who is going to determine my fate. It’s different for Flora. She loves and respects her adopted father, her protector. She told me that he calls her “ma chérie” to remind her that she is now his daughter and as such owes him nothing but to take his help for granted.

On the way there, Flora had said abruptly: “I must tell you…Maître Sarlange is very ill. He’s going to die.” Shocked by the news I asked foolishly: “Are you sure?”

“Alas, yes. He has terminal cancer. Inoperable. His wife and children know.”

“Why are you telling me this now?”

“Because you’re going to see him and sometimes he’s a bit distant. He withdraws, you see.”

Why did Flora keep this terrible secret to herself ? I began to tremble uncontrollably, I felt cold and desolate. Flora squeezed my arm tightly and we walked on through the muddy snow without a word. There was nothing to say. Recent memories came galloping, the characters in my own personal tragedy competing with each other for dramatic resonance - Maître Sarlange, unknown and present, heroic and dying; Flora, already practicing as a doctor at the hospital, resigned to being orphaned for the second time; Visachel suffering from thirst, wanting to end it all but not free to do so; Maurice de St Pré at the Kommandantur, arrogantly drinking champagne, celebrating his masterly ‘coup’; Clément Vallette preparing himself for “the work ahead”; Baumgartner hoisted into an overcrowded wagon like a trunk, separated from his son by his fellow sufferers.

My dog! Where is my dog? He’ll be waiting for me at the door. I’ve given him my bread ration this morning, with a little milk. He is alive…I know he is! But the students? I left them this morning at the chemistry block. Are they dying of hunger and thirst in their wagon of death? No-one gives them bread and milk. Oh Lord! Why are you punishing them so?

February the 3rd, 11 am.

The door opens. Maître Sarlange’s secretary invites us into the office. He is sitting at his enormous desk which takes up the whole width of the room, rises. Flora introduces me. He shakes hands with me and kisses Flora. He is lanky, very tall, very handsome, his fevered brow awe-inspiring. The almond eyes (they are almond coloured too) the long arms… no, it isn’t the arms, it’s the hands which are long, they’re limp and tapering. I am seized by an urge to put my lips to their soft, damp palms. Not done, as I am silently reminded by one of the teachers of the disciplinary committee.

“Please sit down” he says, indicating two green leather armchairs. I sit down, Flora remains standing.

“I’m off. You don’t need me” she says with a grin directed at Sarlange. He replies: “Oh but we do…don’t we?” he asks, turning to me also with a grin. “Sure we do!” I say. Our affectionate irony provokes Flora to make for the door saying: “I can see you’re going to get on well…without me…”.

Maître Sarlange turns to see her out but she has already gone. He returns to his position in front of the desk, I can see he frowns, then clasps his hands and gazes calmly into my eyes, (periwinkle blue ones, if you want to know).

“So…You’ve decided to join our sector of the maquis.”

“Yes, Maître”. “Flora often talks about you. I feel I know you a little, Rachel. You are aware of the risks involved, I hope?”

“I think so, Maître.”

“Are you free”?

“In what sense, Maître”?

“In every sense, Rachel”.

“My father is in the Corrèze, working on a farm under an assumed name. I’ve never been to see him. He told me not to. My mother died in ‘40. The sight of jackboots in front of our door brought on a cerebral haemorrhage.”

“Where was that?” he asked.

“Here in Clermont. We had joined the last exodus from Paris. We thought, like many of the refugees, that the Auvergne would be far enough from the capital and that the Huns would be stopped long before reaching the Central Plateau. We were mistaken of course. They invaded Clermont shortly afterwards. Dropped a strong contingent of the Abwehr in Clermont on their way to the Mediterranean coast for a swim “. I can detect a smile on Maître’s tired face.

“You put it rather well” and he sighs. Silence. Then he says: “You must miss your mother”.

“Yes I do. Horribly.”

“Have you a fiance”?

“Not that I know of ”. He smiles again, faintly.

“Do you need money”?”

“No, Maître. I’m all right”.

“Good. Don’t change too much your routine. Never forget you are being watched, as we all are. At first you’ll probably have to work between Clermont and the place I am sending you to, near the Puy de Sancy. Afterwards, it will depend very much on the circumstances, you understand?”

“I understand”.

“Flora tells me you play the piano”.

“Yes, Maître”.

“And that you are a professional pianist”.

“No, not professional…just a good amateur” I say, actually with a bitterness he immediately senses, because there is a reflective pause before he says:

“But you are a pupil of Alfred Cortot”?

“I was. I was…but he stayed in Paris. Most of my fellow students at the Conservatoire didn’t.”

Maître Sarlange seizes a pencil and turns it round and round in his fingers (those fingers!). I have the impression that he is retreating from me, but it only lasts a few seconds.

“How many hours a day do you practice?”

“Irregularly, but as often as I can.”

“I can see some difficulty here. Your neighbours…”

“I’ve thought of that” I say, lying.

“Unfortunately it’s not enough. Neighbours are potential denunciators. A daily occurrence. Your future absences from Clermont may pose a problem. You’ll have to travel between Clermont and Sancy quite frequently, otherwise the Gestapo will look for you and find you. You’ll have to explain your present situation to your future leader, Colonel Gérard. He’ll advise you. Mind, I can predict what he’ll say. You must be prepared to a total reversal in your lifestyle, Rachel.”

“I understand”. That’s all I find to say. My throat feels dry, my eyes are not. Maître Sarlange turns his pencil round, faster and faster. I present a problem for him. Will he turn me down because of my piano? If this is the case, I can assure him that…that I’ll drop the lid on the keyboard, put the seal on it, virtually. I dare not say it. My suspense grows by the second. Maître Sarlange pours some water into a glass, takes two pills from a sachet which he keeps in his waistcoat pocket, swallows them and is about to resume the interview when the telephone rings.

He says: “Excuse me”, lifts the receiver and speaks: “Yes, that’s me…ah good…thank you…goodbye…yes…goodbye.”

That’s all he says. It’s enough to lighten the atmosphere which was beginning to become quite heavy. Smiling, he addresses me with a twinkle in his eyes:

“It’s good news…Professor Vallette is safe and sound…at his Maquis…with his radio equipment. Colonel Gérard has just told me of his arrival at Savignole, your future destination. A mountain refuge I believe. They call it a bothy, but it is larger than that. You’ll see.” He mops his forehead as a mountaineer would do after a difficult climb. I spring up. He asks: “Surprised”?

Surprised? I am stunned. Speechless I pace up and down the room. I am carried away. I fly…Quick, there’s no time to lose, I must go immediately, they’re waiting for me at the Maquis of Savignole.

Maître Sarlange watches me with indulgence and calmly invites me to sit down again. He hasn’t finished yet. He proceeds to tell me more about my future mission. It seems nothing much at first He assures me that I won’t have to carry a gun, thank God! My weapons, he says, will be “eyes open and sang-froid.” I haven’t enough sang-froid to tell him about my dog since no-one, but no-one, can separate me from him. I have given up my piano, isn’t that enough?

We say goodbye. He kisses my forehead and then, grasping me by the shoulders he says: “We shan’t meet again, Rachel. Colonel Gérard will be your contact from now on, and your chief. Take care. And thank you.”

“Maître, may I?” I take his slender right hand, unresisting. I brush my lips across the warm, damp palm. Blushing furiously.

5.

And More Steps.

I feel as if I have left Clermont for ever. When I go back there it will be as a ghost, a ghost who plays the piano to allay the curiosity of the neighbours. The very first command I received from Colonel Gérard: No change to your routine. You’ll have to go to Clermont at least once a week so that your neighbours can see you and hear you. What about your concierge? “I trust her,” I said, “and pay her well”. The colonel did not seem to be reassured. (What I did not know yet was that I would arouse the curiosity of the Kommandantur.)

Flora comes with me and Nourse to the station, as my mother would have done, making sure that I haven’t forgotten my toothbrush and making me promise to be sensible “Now remember…You’ll have to be your own guardian angel” she says with emotion. At these words I have a mental picture of a chubby Renaissance angel…I don’t want to look like that, heaven help me! And anyway, how could I with all that rationing? I kiss Flora with all my heart, I say thank you, thank you for coming, thank you for loving me…as I would have done with my tearful Mamoshka, had she been on this platform. But Flora doesn’t cry. It’s not that she doesn’t want to, I can see that her nose is red, but she keeps her tears for Poland, her lost Poland that ceased to hear her sing…

The station master blows his whistle, the train gives an ear-splitting screech in reply and begins to move away, puffing slowly and rhythmically; shafts of light dazzle me at intervals, I can see Flora only at intervals, too. Then, nothing. The shafts of light have disappeared with her. All I can see is the town of Clermont-Ferrand beneath the moon and the scudding clouds moving with the train, the snow covering the Michelin estate - a working class ghetto built for the Michelin workers so that they would be content with their lot. I have to admit it is a model estate. Each family has its own house and garden. Here and there yellow and blue tinged lights appear in spite of the curfew. Night is working a transformation on this social desert studding it with diamonds.

I am sitting on a hard wooden seat pierced by cold for the train is unheated. Nourse huddles under the seat, my skis and my rucksack are on the luggage rack. I glance at my travelling companions. There are two of them. Let’s guess what they do, it will help to pass the time. It’s not difficult. The one opposite, next to the window, must be a chemist, a sort of sulky Monsieur Homais. He smells like a chemist’s shop. The other one opposite, next to the corridor, is a peasant from the Auvergne in all his splendour. He is stocky and thick-set and he smells agreeably of wine, cheese and tobacco. He is wearing a large Basque beret, or rather an Auvergnat one, a coat down to his feet and Michelin rubber boots. His face is red, his eyes are dim, his hair and moustache are black. I like him. I wouldn’t have liked to travel alone with Monsieur Homais…he looks like a collaborator. Huddled in their corners, these two men have nothing to say to each other. When we get to Mont Dore station, I say to myself, I bet they’ll shoot out of the train without having spared a word for each other.

I close my eyes in order to think about my future as an object in the hands of Colonel Gérard…Will he be greying at the temples, tall, bony, rather tubercular? Oh no! It’s Visachel I am seeing! Visachel grown grey, bony, tubercular…I open my eyes to wipe out the image. My peasant has lit a big clay pipe. He’s smoking and dribbling a little, I can see bits of charred tuft of whatever he’s smoking, no doubt grown on his dung heap! “It doesn’t bother you, Mamzelle?” he asks, taking his pipe from his mouth.

“No, not at all,” I say; “He thought I was asleep and didn’t want to wake me to ask if he could smoke. We smile at each other. He looks at my dog and we start to talk dogs. Alsatians are “very good for herding,” he says, patting Nourse who welcomes a bit of friendship, “not so good for sheep, they tend to upset them and nip their heels to make them do.” He tells me that he had a dog like that, “but I couldn’t make him do…he used to bite the strays”.

“What did you do with him?” I ask, fearing the worst. “Chained him up as a guard dog.”

Not the worst, perhaps, but close to it. I say: “He must have missed his freedom, poor thing. “Oh, you know, dogs get used to it” he says to reassure me.

Do people? I don’t ask him that, of course. I know the answer. Homais looks out of the window and keeps his thoughts to himself. Good. I don’t particularly wish to know them.

My train slows down, enters the station at Mont Dore and screeches to a halt. My peasant opens the door, jumps down the steps on to the platform. He takes my skis, seizes Nourse’s lead and hoists him down the steps, puts him down very gently and pats him. All this is done with a marvellous economy of effort of which the secret is known only to people working on the land.

“Well, good-night Mamzelle, Bonne chance” he says, touching his beret. I thank him and say that perhaps he and I shall meet again, one never knows these days.

“Oh yes…Come and see us…I don’t live far away. My farm’s over there, see?” and he points north. I can’t see, but say I do. He goes off to join the little crowd making its way towards the exit. The chemist has disappeared.

A few militia men drift towards the station buffet, arrogant and laughing loudly. They have good reason to feel proud and cheerful. They are very handsome (because hand-picked) in their black uniforms. They have chosen to join the militia because of the uniform, the pay, and more importantly because of the right (which no civilian dares dispute) to arrest, denounce and even shoot their brother-Frenchmen who happen to have chosen the wrong get-up whereas they are Le Maréchal’s golden boys.

They are crossing in front of me, marching as if on parade, clean shaven, shining shoes, expression of utter happiness on their baby faces.

I make for the bench furthest away from the buffet in the welcoming shadows of platform one where Colonel Gérard is to make contact with me.

* * *

The shrill, nocturnal station clock strikes eight. I fix my gaze on the electric light bulb on the opposite platform, one of the few sources of artificial light in this snow-covered railway terminus. The moon is full. I wait, pulling my sheepskin coat tightly round me.

Maître Sarlange had said: “Wait for the colonel on the platform on which you arrive. I’ll advise him of your arrival”. The station buffet is full of Wehrmacht soldiers, the militiamen are fraternizing by trying to speak the other’s language and laughing at their lack of success. Still, they have something very important in common. A few German soldiers seem to be in a hurry, but they still find time to whistle as they go past me. They’re going to piss their beer and their idleness on to the snow covered shrubs, the station master’s rose shrubs along the wall. The light bulb opposite shakes its head. It disapproves of the action. Nourse sits beside my bulging rucksack, guarding it. That’s his job, more so now that he can smell all those uniforms marching past us in heavy leather boots and emitting foreign ugly sounds.

More comings and goings of soldiers on the same errand. Travellers on platform two stare in disgust. A grandmother, holding her granddaughter by the hand says, loud enough for everybody to hear: “It’s scandalous! As if there weren’t any toilets in this place!” whilst another woman shouts: “Don’t take on so!” and a man hollers: “I’m going to fetch the station master, no two ways ‘bout it!” He moves a few paces, then stops. A typical aborted reaction one witnesses these days, a typical reluctance to stick one’s neck out. Beware! “They don’t give a damn! True to form!” says the grand-mother. It doesn’t go further!

During these unproductive and short lived protests a man approaches me, walks past, comes back, sits down beside me. He’s dressed like a peasant, he’s tall, square-shouldered, I can’t see his head band covers his eyebrows making him look obstinate and sullen. Beneath it, two eyes shine behind spectacles. I cannot guess their colour. Below them, a moustache and a beard, brown or possibly very well because it’s covered by a beret pulled down over his eyes, so low in fact that the leather showed. The shadows make it difficult for me to decide.

“Rachel? Bonsoir.”

I stretch out my hand to meet his. “Colonel Gérard”? “They call me Gérard. Have you been waiting long”? “No, I’ve just arrived.”

“Good. We needn’t hang about…we’ve three quarters of an hour’s walk ahead of us. It’s snowed a good deal today” and he adds: “We’ll talk as we go along.”

I seize my rucksack. Gérard takes it from me saying: “Let me …” What I feared happens: Nourse growls. I fondle his ear, my way of reassuring him. It’s only then that the colonel takes note of his existence.

“Yours?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll have to get rid of him”. I protest vehemently: “He’s my dog, he stays with me.” He says:

“It won’t do. You’ll have to find a solution.” Mercy me! I feel myself stiffen. This man’s harshness is unbearable. I try to mollify him. “We’ve never been separated, you know.” I have a burning sensation in my throat.

“May be so” he replies, “but things are different now”. “I really don’t see…” He interrupts:

“You will, you will! There’s a war on, have you heard? With this dog you cannot pass unnoticed. You’re putting our comrades in danger”. I’m not a sniveller, I have my pride you know, but my eyes are beginning to smart.

There. Now the tears run down my frozen cheeks! Gérard takes up my rucksack once more, puts it squarely on his shoulders this time and without a word goes towards the exit. I am rooted to the spot. Nourse wants to charge the bad man who is stealing my belongings. I hold him by the collar. I order: “Stay”. Gérard turns round. “Well, have you decided?”

Have I decided what? (I can see now that his moustache and beard are red). I choke back my tears and we go out of the station in total silence he with my rucksack, I with my skis criss-crossed on my back, with my dog on the leash and a heavy, heavy heart.

The station withdraws into itself and we walk away from it unhurriedly. I would like to be able to say to Gérard: I am ready for anything, really, except being separated from my dog… but I can’t. Perhaps I owe you an explanation: at this time of strict rationing, dogs whose owners did not find the courage to put them down but have nevertheless to part with them, are put in kennels where they eat disgusting food. They are given a concoction of grass and straw cooked with a sort of ersatz beef cubes. They die like flies, inevitably. I could have my dog put down.

We could both be put down. An attractive idea right now.

The full moon, hanging in the sky like a colourless Chinese lantern, plays tricks with the shadows; hummocks are holes, holes become hummocks, distances stretch out to infinity and it is difficult to walk in the soft, deep snow. You have to concentrate and this makes it hard to hold a conversation. Nourse leaps about like a rabbit in an effort not to sink into the snow, but he does not succeed. He is exhausted. Gérard turns round: “Tired?” he asks.

“No, it’s my dog. We’re walking too fast for him.”

Gérard gives his permission: “‘All right, we’ll have a short rest.” He points to a clearing. I thank him and we sit down in the middle of a sea of snow. Nature, so beautiful, enfolds us but for all that does not protect us. They say that in this forest of Les Dores as in more distant times, there were wolves threatening the scattered holdings. In the winter, when the wolves were hungry, they made their way to the farms and ate anything that was not safely shut up. They were hunted with fierce dogs. Amongst the legends of the Auvergne there is a poem about a mortal combat between two dogs and a wolf, a combat which, I tell myself, might have taken place in this very clearing. The image of the torn and wounded animal gives me pain, whether of a dog or a wolf but I can accept the violence of this confrontation; it is without mercy, without sequel, committed in freedom. I cannot accept the inequality of the fighting between men in this war in which the assailant, running no risks himself, captures, subdues and tortures his prey, enjoys the power he has over it and finally finishes it off if it has not succumbed already… all in the name of an inhuman ideology.

At length Gérard decides to speak: “Maître Sarlange must have told you about the situation at Savignole?”

“Yes, a little.”

“Good. There are fifteen of us at the bothy, including a Jewish family, father, mother and two kids. They left Clermont just in time, they’d been denounced to the Gestapo, presumably by the people living in the same building and with whose children their own children used to play. It is hard to believe in such inhumanity. But as long as they’re with us they have to be fed. They came to us, starving. No ration cards…too risky using them… “. Gérard draws semi-circles in the snow with one of my ski sticks. His mood is sombre. He explains that the Maquis’ hold-ups he could still organise a while ago have now to be stopped. He says:

“The Gestapo is everywhere, fanatically rounding up the remaining Jews, those who managed to live in hiding…it’s horrible…worse: they are largely helped by the militia and the gendarmerie, supposedly briefed to arrest black marketeers but in practice to arrest the food shop raiders as well as the Jewish families and deliver them to the Gestapo. If one of our younger lads is taken, it’s very serious. Very serious indeed.

‘Has it happened?”

“Yes.”

“Did they talk?”

“I wouldn’t know. I haven’t heard of them since. But you see” Gérard goes on: “In a group which is changing all the time, like ours, you are bound to get some young people who are more vulnerable…new recruits ill-prepared to undergo frightening interrogations, not to mention torture…They soon lose their heads…Mind, some of them, don’t. They know how to outwit their interrogators.”

Gérard has succeeded in prising up lumps of earth with my stick, so much force has he used. Finally he turns his reddened face towards mine, puts the stick down and touches my arm with his gloved hand:

“Do you think you could fetch and carry food for us? It won’t be much fun, I warn you. Think well before you answer now you know what is at stake.” (I can just hear le prof. (that is, Gérard) putting a question to his pupils at the Lycée Henry IV where he is a history master: ‘Why did Rome overthrow the monarchy in 509 ? (Think well before you answer.)’

“Maître Sarlange spoke to me about the risks. My decision is made” I say, hearing my own words as if someone else had spoken them. I am trembling. It’s the cold…no, it isn’t, not really. Gérard seems not to have noticed. He squeezes my arm: “I am glad. Thank you” he says, releasing his grip. I suddenly feel all warm inside. Gérard gets up and I do the same (with difficulty). Snow is sticking to the seat of our trousers. Nourse shakes himself, as dogs do, with excellent results whilst Gérard and I dust each other down – a brotherly and reassuring gesture. Then we set off once more.

Gérard continues:

“About old Raboullet…Has Maître Sarlange described the man to you…and told you what he’s going to give us in the way of food?”

“Yes” I reply, “but not in great detail. I know I must acquire his bothy, the one nearest to his farmhouse”.

“Is that all?”

“No. He told me also that Monsieur Raboullet sells his produce at prices approaching those of the black market.”

“But still affordable. What else did he tell you?”

“How a young postman takes him the money, in cash.!”

The postman in question was a young peasant of twenty who had joined the Maquis and who served as both guide and courier. He took our messages from a box in a well hidden shed. He was shot by the militia on May 18, the day of his birthday said his mother.

“Maître Sarlange has assured me that we can count on a fairly regular provision of foodstuff from his farm.”

“Good”, he says, “I see he’s told you the main facts. As for the rest, I’ll come and visit you in your palace (with a short laugh) tomorrow….There is no time to lose. I’ll tell you your routes. You’ll have to vary them. Take this map and learn it by heart. It’s not safe to have it on you, just in case…” He hasn’t finished his sentence. Instead he looks at me, directly, for the first time: “You’re going to have to walk over hill and dale ma pauvre fille.”

How could I ever forget these spontaneous words of sympathy that night when I was hardly able to hold myself erect, my feet slowly sinking in the soft snow, my soul sinking too?

I remember exactly how I felt that night; like an employee who has just taken on a job that after the first few minutes promises to be more than he can tackle. The same feeling I had when Professor Vallette engaged me to do some research for him. How can I tell Gérard about my doubts when he needs to believe I shall be up to the task, because his confidence in me is like an imperative…it is granted to me a priori.

He holds out to me a tattered ordnance survey map mended with sticky paper. I put it in one of my rucksack’s outer pockets. Back at school, this is my homework, I’d better go straight home and learn my future itinerary by heart!

We set off again. The cold intensifies. A crust of ice has formed over the snow. Our footsteps resound. I count mine in order not to think. Don’t think, Rachel, it’s fatal if you do!

We go round privet bushes and tree trunks, Gérard walks in front, his back bent, perhaps with tiredness, his head now hidden almost completely by my rucksack. Nourse walks behind me in our tracks, stopping from time to time to lick up the snow; he is tormented by hunger and thirst. I rub his shoulders to let him know that I share his torment but cannot do anything about it.

Without turning round, Gérard goes on: “Another thing. Did Sarlange tell you what old Raboullet’s like, and so on?”

“Not really, no”.

I was remembering Maître’s words: “The colonel is in a better position than I am to tell you about the people with whom he works. I do not know his contacts. When we communicate, we do it cryptically either by telegraph, or by telephone when the lines are free…they rarely are.”

Gérard has hitched my rucksack higher up on his shoulders. His face darkens:

“For your information…The old man threw me out the other day! Unceremoniously. He accused me of being a fanatic - he may be right, mind! - but when he started hurling insults at me and telling me that I was getting young men killed to further my political beliefs I saw red, and no mistake!”

Gérard has a nervous laugh, painful to hear. He adds: “With the handle of his whip (he always carries a whip) he literally drove me outside… mind you, he was dead drunk!”

“Does that happen often?”

“What?”

“That he’s drunk?”

“Three hundred and sixty-five days of the year!”

“Oh merde!” came out before I could stop it. Gérard doesn’t seem to mind. He goes on: “He starts early in the morning, ten litres of wine a day, interspersed with glasses of marc. He works efficiently until midday. He’s everywhere, oversees everything. Incredible. He makes his men jump to it, it’s quite a sight! He only stops to have a drink and off he goes again. Back at the farmhouse for his midday meal the alcohol’s already gone to his head. I’ll give you a piece of advice: do your dealings with him early in the morning.”

Deal with him! A drunkard who threatens you with his whip? How am I going to do that? I say to myself: surely he wouldn’t dare to whip a woman, would he?

“Tell me about his good points. He must have some, surely!”

“Yes he has. Plenty. But I don’t feel like talking about them right now. Sorry.”

We go on walking in silence. The freezing night in white and marine blue, pale, bloodless, takes away a soul’s desire to communicate.

“Here we are,” says Gérard, pointing with his gloved finger at an expanse surrounded by curving hills, blue beneath a sky of opal. I rub my eyes, which are watering with the cold. I scan the pine forest but I cannot see any sign of life. We stumble down a slope at the foot of which is a flat piece of land where a large roof and chimney appear. The smell of woodsmoke enters our nostrils; they are probably burning wood and branches of dried broom which send up incandescent showers of spark, as transient as fireworks. The tops of hundred year old poplars map out the way to the farm. All around, great walnut trees have been set here and there, by men or by chance, carried by the wind, their gnarled skeletons relieving the bareness of the landscape, providing landmarks for the traveller and shelter for the hibernating animals of the Dores. A rectangular smudge of land shows where a vegetable garden is. A little further away, on slopes which at midday face the sun are rows of dwarf trees revealing the existence of the region’s treasures, now covered with snow. These are vines and dwarf peach trees. At the first sign of warm weather it is a delight to see these trees and bushes of the Lord lovingly intertwining; they share their perfume, mingle their roots, even borrow each other’s colour, golden green, to complete that loving union. To bite into a fresh, ripe peach from the Auvergne is to share this symbiosis. What a lot of peaches and grapes we ate last summer! During the months of August and September the population of central and southern France had become fruit eaters. They’d nothing else to eat. At the beginning of the war housewives could still preserve fruit by increasing the quantities of citric acid and saccharine instead of sugar, but the shortage of glass has put an end to all that and as a result last summer, on the market place at Clermont-Ferrand, mountains of pears, peaches, plums and grapes could be seen rotting in the oppressive heat. The flies and the starving had a field day.

After an hour’s walking, to discover this vast domain with its wealth hidden under snow makes my blood race again. Gérard stops, turns round, is astonished to see me unbuttoning my coat, throws back his shoulders and announces:

“This is as far as I go.” I want to know why:

“Might I know your reasons for sending me to see Monsieur Raboullet alone… at this hour?” I check; “it’s half past nine.” “At this time of night he’s gone to bed. His wife will put you up for the night, and so you’ll be around to see him tomorrow at dawn. There’s no time to lose, Rachel! I’m sorry.”

I am shaking now. Gérard notices it this time:

“Scared?”

“Well…yes. Shouldn’t I be?”

“Of course you should. We all are, all the time!”

I put on my skis, Gérard helps me to put on my rucksack. “That thing’s heavy!” he informs me.

“It’s good practice for my future calling as a packhorse!” Gérard brightens up for the first time. My reference to a packhorse seems to amuse him.

“I’ll come and see you at your new abode. We’ll go to Savignole together. I’ll introduce you to the others. The day after tomorrow atthe latest.”

(Another command from Gérard. I expect many more). “As soon as that?” I intone.

“Yes. As soon as that.” He adds: “Rachel, we’re depending on you.” “And on Monsieur Raboullet! “ I whisper to myself. He’s heard:

“And on him, too.”

Then, coming close to me, he says:

“You’ll see. The old boy’s no fool, you can get round him if you know how”.

After a moment’s hesitation he feels bound to inform me: “He likes pretty girls. He paws them whenever he can. Be careful, right?”

“Is that all?”

“You’ll find out the rest all in good time.”

“What do you mean, the rest?”

“The best and the worst. You’re a woman…your instinct will help you.”

With these words we shake hands and he is gone.

You’re on your own now, Rachel. But think of Visachel, how he would like to be alone, like you, in this winter landscape of the Auvergne. So, get on your way, old girl, be prepared to canter along with your load like Diderot’s “Jacques Le Fataliste” did when he was riding on his own donkey, loaded with his master’s luggage; turn into “Rachel la fataliste…with that weight which makes you sink into the snow but with the precious freedom you still have and Visachel and the others have lost!

Move, Rachel! Move, or you’ll freeze to death on the spot!

I fix my skis and slide in the direction of the smoking chimney. Nourse bounds towards the farm at full speed to join the human race he can now smell, humans who will give him something to eat, for hasn’t God put them there for that very purpose?

Yes, but where is God?

6.

Encounter with the Bear.

Like a hungry deer in winter, I hang around outside the house. It breathes out the life-giving odour that emanates from the hearths of country people. I recognize the smell of smoked lard soup which women from the Alsace also know how to make to perfection. Nourse is driven frantic by it. White foam flecks his open jaws, he scratches at the door with his front paws, tearing his claws in a frenzy of hunger. I come to a stop at the front door; it is massive, made of oak and quite plain. I take off my skis, put my rucksack and skis in the porch and allow myself a minute to get my breath back. I can hear voices, coughing, and the sound of laughter. Someone is singing. I know that song; it is La Délaissàdo, a song which tells about a shepherdess waiting up there above the woods for the one she loves, who does not come:

“When the star appears, the star that foretells the night,

The shepherdess is alone, alone and weeping with grief.”

Nourse loses patience and barks. Shh! Shh! I shut his muzzle. Everyone stops speaking. They’ve heard us! Should I knock now? There is a knocker, but I prefer to use my knuckles, it sounds less peremptory. Knock. Knock. Nothing. Knock. Knock. Still nothing. I raise the knocker and it falls with a thud. Nourse barks furiously, he’s had enough of this door which obstinately refuses to open. I seize the big handle and turn it to the right, someone on the other side turns it in the opposite direction. It’s just like a Fritz Lang horror film. I let go of the handle and the door creaks open. I say hello to a little girl hardly bigger than three pippins, aged about four, who says “Bollioure” (the little girl’s Bonjour) and laughs. I enter an enormous farm kitchen, everyone looks at me sideways, guardedly, expressionless. Another little girl, absolutely identical to the first, rushes up to me shrieking, giving me another welcoming “Bollioure”.

I lift up this little scrap, give her a big kiss on both cheeks, red and sticky with sugar, and say with forced bonhomie, feeling like death: “Hello everybody! I’m Rachel Henner. This is Nourse. I’m sorry to disturb you at this hour, but they said you were expecting me.” I hear a raucous “expecting nobody” which comes (you guessed it!) from the throat of the head of the household. Good God! Here is the redoubtable Raboullet! The bear! Why hasn’t he gone to bed, I ask myself ? The answer lies on the table - the depleted remains of a birthday cake and other goodies not yet cleared off. My mouth begins to water. Four candles, still burning adorn the snow-white sugar icing, the sight of which is staggering - where did they get all that food?

Nourse wags his tail like mad, he takes up his stance by the hearth where the thick soup is still simmering, its ladle standing upright in the middle, vibrating to and fro as the bubbles rise to the surface. I can’t resist any longer. I say, angrily this time, to force a reaction:

“Nourse and I are very hungry. We haven’t had anything to eat since this morning”. All spirit leaves me. To be hungry, yet to have displayed in front of me the inaccessible remains of a banquet…is pure Chinese torture. A stomach cramp seizes me. I stiffen. At Savignole, the children are crying; I can hear their moan. Can You? Time is standing horribly still. No one moves. They continue to stare at me. I can’t bear this dumb questioning. Madame Raboullet, for I guess it is she, shows the ghost of a smile which disappears immediately, as if she were afraid of showing kindness. I smile back at her and fix my eyes on her to keep my dignity well bruised by now. Madame is stout, dressed in black, with a linen apron covering her from the waist down and which she has tied over her stomach. It stands out as though she were pregnant. Might she be? Probably not, she just looks like so many women of the kind I have had time to observe since my arrival in the Auvergne. Twice a week they arrive at Clermont by horsecart to sell their ware on the market place. These days, because of the food restrictions, the edibles are only fruit; melons, plums, peaches, the early yield of summer grapes. Next to the fruit lay displayed rough looking spoons, knives, forks in steel made by their men folk in the garden shed; it is an ancient craft practiced in the mountainous part of the Auvergne. It allows the families to feed and clothe the children during the long winter months. Alas, it has never been a lucrative business because of the proximity of the famous steel works at St Etienne. It breaks my heart to see them packing up the unsold silverware at the end of the day. No one seems interested. I bought far too many of them.

I can read much kindness in Madame Raboullet’s eyes. Resigned as well as composed, she seems to have weathered many domestic storms. The deep wrinkles in her face tell a story of hard work, having accepted the alcoholism of her men as an inevitable curse she shares with her neighbouring womenfolk. Two of the older sons seem already to be going their father’s way… not difficult to guess, looking at them right now…I don’t give her more than forty-five. She might even be younger. For me she is beautiful.

After glancing furtively at Raboullet, she decides to offer me a chair, one that is a long way from the table. I sit down and thank her, explaining: “Colonel Gérard came with me as far as your house, he…”

“Don’t know him! “ shouts the brute.

“He knows you!” I retort.

“Colonel who, tha’ says?”

“GERARD!” I yell. I’m shaking with anger. Nourse gets on his feet, ready to attack on my command.

“Don’t know him. Get out, you and your tyke! Out I say!” Half slumped on the table, his elbows spread, roaring drunk, the bear makes a superhuman effort to raise his head. His face is puffy, fiery red, unshaven, his eyelids half closed over black eyes which strip me of my clothes. I see my naked body reflected in his eyes. (I had jumped up at once when he had ordered me out).Standing now in the middle of the room, terribly embarrassed, I appeal to the Raboullet family. The three sons and two daughters of squire Raboullet look at their father like travellers scrutinizing a stormy sky. Grandmother is asleep, or pretending to be, her mouth open, showing two front teeth, one pointing up, one down. Madame turns her back on me, and I think I know why. Raboullet coughs fit to rend his soul (if he has one) spits, coughs, spits again. The noises he makes are dreadful; they terrify Nourse who has left the hearth to lie at my feet, showing solidarity, having given up pleading with Madame.

The horrible man is thick-set, heavily built, I can only see the top half of his body, but I guess he is rather short, his arms are very muscular and he has the hands of a Goliath. Hairy into the bargain! I am beginning to suffocate in my winter sports gear but I daren’t take off my fur in case the gesture is misinterpreted. I am still on my feet, losing all sense of knowing what to do next…

“Perhaps we could get the lass summat to eat?” ventures poor Madame.

He doesn’t seem to have heard. He calls his twins who jump on to his knees. He becomes almost human, the atmosphere softens a little, the innocence of these two little girls wins over the company; after all, it’s their party, I’m a spoil-sport…But this is war, didn’t you know? War? No sign of it here. Don’t know what you’re talking about. A tragic mute dialogue I hear inside my head for the first time, and it hurts. I am thinking: if I were in this room, at this hour, with the little Jewish children now starving at Savignole, would Raboullet shout at them “Get out” and perhaps threaten them with the whip hanging in the wall just next to me? Would he? How deep should one dig to find some human vitals in this man?

After planting several sonorous kisses on the twins’ cheeks covered in icing sugar, he orders: “Right! Off to bed, my Pitchounettes” and accompanies the words with a friendly slap on their backsides. Although very excited, the twins know better than to argue with their father. They disappear immediately with their older sister.

“Gorgeous, eh?” he says. Is he talking to me? Just in case I reply: “Yes, adorable”. Raboullet smiles, or rather grimaces, seizes the long neck bottle of marc, drinks a glassful of this rot-gut and slumps back.

Perhaps he’s dead. Good. At least I’ll get something for my dog and myself. Wrong! He’s breathing!

“We’re off to bed” says one of the sons. His brothers follow him as if they’d been waiting a long time for this moment. They say “bonne nuit” almost imperceptibly without quite looking at me. I say: “Bonne nuit. Dormez bien! ”

Silence falls again. It lasts for ages. I have decided to sit down, I don’t quite know why. The ladle in the pot continues its belly dance to the bubbling of the soup which rises and falls like the sea in a heavy swell. This is too much for Nourse who looks at me with pitiful questioning eyes. He asks “why are these creatures doing this to me?”

Madame begins to clear the table, giving me a look of helplessness as she shrugs her shoulders. The eldest daughter, a handsome girl with red hair, comes back into the kitchen, gets grandmother out of her chair and helps her upstairs, then reappears a few minutes later to give her mother and her younger sister a hand with the washing up. These rituals remind me of the famous ballet Joos with their dancers moving staccato fashion, in their black tuxedos, round and on top of “The Green Table”, wearing death masks, declaring war in unison…gesticulating convincingly with their white gloved hands…with no words spoken.

In Raboullet’s kitchen the dancers are mimicking secular domestic life round an oak table wearing masks too; masks with drooping eyes, tight lips, rough looking red cheeks, oblivious of a war conducted on their behalf by soulless politicians prancing behind closed doors round a green table, shaking hands in white gloves, after signing …

The man who is dead drunk but alas not dead, tries to raise his head, heavy as lead, his puffed eyelids open enough to express surprise at seeing me still occupying the stage. Look out! He’s about to speak:

“That’s a German, right?”

I wasn’t expecting this. I reply, stupidly: “Who? Me?”

“Aye. Thee.”

“No. Why do you say that?”

“Alsatian then, like yon tyke.”

“I am a Parisian, Monsieur Raboullet, if you must know!” “Ha! Thy dog an’ all?”

“No. He’s an Alsatian.”

Raboullet starts to giggle like an idiot. I hate him.

“Ha! Ha! German, tha’s what I said!”

“No. Alsatian,” I insist.

“Makes no odds!”

“Alsatian is not German, Monsieur Raboullet!”

“Tis now” he throws at me, looking straight into my eyes for the first time. It is an analytical look. A shrewd one too.

I say: “Not for long, Monsieur Raboullet.”

“Not for long says you, says you!” and after another coughing fit barks out: “Papers!”

I take my identity card from the pocket of my trousers and throw it on the table; it ends up under his nose. He tries to read it without success because he’s too drunk. He makes a sign to his daughter who glances at it and says:

“It’s all right.”

“What’s all right, damn it?”

“It’s Mamzelle Henner, Paris, it’s stamped on the card”. As a reply he growls like an animal. I take back my card and say: “Now that you know, can you put me up for the night?” No reply. I am losing my temper:

“I can’t very well sleep outside in the snow, can I ? I’ll pay you for it.” This remark does not please him. He answers angrily: “Don’t need your brass. Bugger off, right? Go and sleep in t’mistle. Tomorrow, off !”

“Raboullet!” cries Madame.

“Shut thi gob, woman!”

He turns towards me with some difficulty, and in his croaking voice orders: “Out, or I’ll bray thee! “ He accompanies these words with a fly-swatting gesture. It’s all the old soak can manage.

I leave the room to go outside into the freezing darkness. I feel as deprived as the milkmaid in Lafontaine’s famous fable with her overturned milk can. I can’t help shouting, with tears now flowing: “Farewell soup! Bread, Cake! Cheese! Wine!” and then I start laughing like an idiot. Madame, who has followed me out after putting on an immense woolen shawl over her shoulders looks at me perplexed. I re-assure her: “Don’t worry, Madame Raboullet, it’s the reaction!”

“Oy, oy (an Auvergnat way of saying Oh!), don’t blame him too hard, it’s the war, you see. He’s not himself since the war…Oy, oy, what a wretched business!”

Like two little girls who have just been spanked, we walk, resigned, towards the cowshed. Fortunately for both of us it isn’t far and we arrive at an impressively huge double door. Madame pushes one side which hasn’t been oiled for hundred of years, or so it seems to me, and we are welcomed by the lowing of the cows, one or two even get up and greet us with a cataract of steaming urine. It is a warm reception all the same, ‘though Nourse doesn’t appreciate it; he growls and becomes agitated. Madame lights a candle which she puts upon a stool and replaces the box of matches in her pocket (matches being hard to come by).

“I put new straw this morning, there, look, it’s nice and warm here…there…you’ll sleep well, Mamzelle.’

She has taken down a rug hanging on a nail, which makes me think that other lost souls must have slept here before me.

Madame is weary, poor thing, she is dropping with fatigue. I feel guilty. I can’t find the words. Instead of leaving me to my fate she stands there; I can see she wants to talk. I take her hands in mine, her hands rough and warm. Mother’s hands.

“Raboullet wasn’t always like that,” she tells me.

“I know” I say with all my heart. I understand her, I understand this heavy sadness which does not leave her.

“Oy, oy,” (with a sigh), “ he has worries…The Boche, you see, they come and taunt him.”

“How do you mean?” I ask, suddenly worried about my future contacts with Raboullet.

“They want to commandeer his ham and cheese, think of it!”

“You mean the Boche come to your house?”

“Aye, sometimes of a sudden, no warning! They are everywhere. They want ham. He sells them only cheese, says he has no meat to sell. So they’ll look no further, but at every visit it’s the same; they say they’ll come back. Good job he’s summat hidden our reserves! I didn’t ought to tell you…He’s blocked up one of his cellars… I trust you, Mamzelle. Don’t tell him I told you! He’d kill me!”

I hug my new friend (mother) and ask her to tell me more about her man. She describes a well-educated Raboullet. “He used to read piles of books before, the bed-room’s full of them”. A Raboullet who freely gave advice and still does, when sober, to “the folks round about”; a Raboullet who knows a bit about medicine. - “He helps women to have babies when the doctor’s not there”; a Raboullet who knows the law; who reconciles peasants with lawsuits against each other; a Raboullet who writes letters for “folks ‘as don’t know how to read and write. He’s very clever, you see, Mamzelle, nobody like him for miles about.” She tells me all this nostalgically, with tears she has learnt long ago to swallow. She is proud, you see, like my Moska was.

I kiss her, warming to her by the minute, trying to think of a way to help her and can’t think of one right now. She is leaving, promising to bring us something to eat, Nourse and me, now that her old man has gone to bed. “Shan’t be long,” she says, as she closes the doors.

The flickering light of my candle hasn’t the strength to resist the draught the doors make as they close, and my joy at finding friendship is extinguished, too. I’m overcome once more by the thought of my unhappy situation and obsessed by the complex Raboullet conundrum. I try to banish his drunken image. Other images take its place. The cowshed, in its total darkness, becomes a concentration camp. Tomorrow I’ll be shot, together with Visachel, our comrades at the university and all those who were waiting to know their fate in the snow. The snow! It is outside, it belongs for ever to the vast landscape of my memories, it will stay unsullied, untrammelled by men and women whose ephemeral destiny has passed over it with a song. Sitting on the fresh straw I wait patiently for the return of my benefactress. Suddenly Nourse gets to his feet and barks. I presume he is angry with the cows for making the noises that cows do make and to which he is not accustomed. I grab him by the collar. At the same moment the feeble light of a torch approaches, trembling, hesitating, nearer and nearer. I see a human form, I say “Who’s there?” Nothing. I shout “Answer nom de Dieu!” Still nothing. I am seized by an uncontrollable fear, I scream loud enough to frighten myself: “Stay where you are or I’ll set my dog on you!” The man, for it is a man, stops, I make an immense effort to see through the darkness. A gorilla-like creature is staring at me intently, his eyes are like fire, his chest is covered with hair matted with something sticky and shiny, like tar (or is it blood, I can’t see anything very well except his eyes), I say something like “Bon sang, what do you want”. I don’t wait for the reply. I pull open one of the big doors with all my remaining strength and run out into the freezing darkness, seizing my dog by his collar and running to the farmhouse, hoping Raboullet is in bed as his wife said he would be. Hoping!

I give a big thump against the door. Madame opens it, surprised to see me shaking with anger whilst she is so calm holding the ladle in her hand in the act of preparing my meal as she had promised. No Raboullet in sight, thank God for that!

“What’s the matter?” she asks simply, ladle in one hand. Apologizing for my bull-like entry into her kitchen, I tell her as well as I can about the gorilla in the cowshed. She listens, impassive, faintly smiling. She dips the ladle into the steaming soup and fills a large bowl.

And she starts explaining to me the presence of the gorilla-man in the cowshed as she fills a bowl for my salivating dog. She interrupts her story to talk to my dog.

She says he has to wait a little longer for his soup to cool. Nourse is not in a talking mood; he jumps on her, rips her apron, “Ca va! Ca va!” she says to calm him down, lifting the bowl just high enough to avoid a catastrophe she decides to give in and puts the bowl down on the kitchen floor.

While Nourse devours his dinner, burning his mouth, spitting some blood, Madame Raboullet resumes her gorilla story: Raboullet employs Spanish farm labourers because they cost less than French ones. He pays them nothing, instead he gives them a roof over their head (a dilapidated bothy) and their food. “They are content with their lot, she says. Only… they fight each other with knives when they are drunk.”

Still not quite satisfied with the explanation, I feel obliged to ask: “But why do they sleep in the cowshed when they’ve got their own shelter?”

“They shouldn’t” she replies, “but in winter the mistle is warm, that’s where they drink and fight…they sleep it off, then at dawn they scamper so’s the boss won’t find out, or else…there’d be more bloodshed. Poor Mamzelle, I didn’t know them Spaniards were in the mistle.”

She rubs her hands on her torn apron, then invites me to sit down, saying: “Don’t worry yourself, I’ll put some heart in your belly, as we folks say.” It is my turn to get my bowl of soup, next to which she puts a large slice of cake with a candle she lights up, accompanying this friendly gesture with a grin that lightens instantly her broad tired face. I am moved to tears. I fall upon my bowl of soup as Nourse does with his; we both forget our manners!

I spend the rest of the night in grandmother’s rocking chair in the kitchen. Before going to sleep my good fairy reminds me that her husband is an early riser - six o’clock - and that he must not find me here. I ask her with a smile “Or else there’ll be trouble?” She smiles faintly: “Oh aye, it’s best not to cross him. Come in as if you’d been in the mistle.”

Poor woman! She has accepted fate as if it were her due. She is not fighting any more. I, at least, can console myself that fight I shall, I shall win the old man over. His wife has given up; she has arrived at the end of the long road. All that remains is her man who destroys himself and whose decay she cannot prevent. I compare myself to her and feel I am privileged; my future at least is not foretold.

I open my eyes. The wood on the hearth crackles and gives off a wonderful smell of resin. On the ceiling shadows flicker to and fro. Tomorrow, which has turned into today, I’ll hold out my hand in friendship to Raboullet, yes, I’ll do it with a good grace. It must be possible to get round him, surely, if he reads books and counsels people? And I’ll get permission to use his bothy as my base.

It’s one o’clock. I have five innocuous hours before me. If I were sleeping in a real bed (or even on the floor) I would turn over and sink into dreams of innocence. But in a rocking chair…Have you ever tried it?

Nourse is barking loud enough to wake the dead. My watch says six o’clock. I jump out of the rocking chair only to end up, I’m sorry to say, on all fours on the matting, still heavy with sleep. I say “Oh shit!”, half raise my head and stare wide-eyed at two sturdy legs in corduroy trousers; the chair goes on rocking, it must have a life of its own jabbing me in the behind as it does so. I raise my head higher. Raboullet, newly shaven and spruced up, helps me get to my feet, and frowning like a master of an infants school says:

“Musn’t swear like that, Mamzelle Henner!”

“Ha!” I say, “You remember me!”

“Well of course I do! You’re the German lass with her Alsatian tyke who’s pretending to be a Parisian, correct?”

He hasn’t let go, the brute! I feel as if I could kill him, I don’t like the way he looks me up and down, crackling with sarcasm and openly suspicious. I pull myself together and say: “You’re unjust and unkind, Monsieur Raboullet!”

“You, you’re having me on, lass! Yon identity card, I don’t believe it. Identity cards are thirteen to the dozen… it means nowt!”

This pig-headed man persists in thinking that I am German or worse, a member of the militia or a Vichy spy come to poke my nose into his affairs, asking under threat: Your supplies, your money, your savings, where have you buried them? Your terrorists, I know where you’re hiding them. I’ll worm it out of you, you country bumpkin, thick and weather beaten as the stone from Volvic, that burnt stone spewed out of the volcanoes! And what about your sons, hey? Just the right age for the Waffen SS…or voluntary labour in Germany…or the Militia! We’ll crack your thick skull to make you talk. I’ve only to lift my little finger…I’ve got connections in high places, just try me!”

On the brink of turning away and slamming the door on my way out I have a last try: I ask him:

“But what else can I say to convince you? I…

He interrupts me by putting his paw over my mouth, an unexpected move which incenses me. He says in a whisper, his black eyes like gimlets:

“Why didn’t thy Gérard come with thee last night, eh? Tell me that!”

“You kicked him out, remember?” I reply, “You’d shamed him, you have!”

I am saved! Saved by these few words! Why didn’t I think of it before? His suspicions take wing like butterflies from their chrysalis, the atmosphere in the room lightens, the old bear gives ground. He deigns to answer: “He deserved it… he’s a fanatic, yon colonel, he gets lads killed the same age as mine…You don’t believe me? Well, go and ask him about his bolshie views!”.

His face darkens, he says: “He’s a red! Don’t think like him! Don’t become a bolshie too, nom de Dieu!”.

“So why are you harbouring him and his people at Savignole?”

I sense my questioning irritates him. He owes me no explanation, that’s for sure. But he relents, suddenly talking like a headmaster, dropping his patois forcé on me when it suits him. He declares:

“He and I share opposite political views but when he came to my house, in poor shape and hungry I gave him shelter. Then we talked. I let him have Savignole, temporarily, mind! Costs me nothing and if it means helping towards the end of this guerre de merde, so much the better, see? It’s all in my own interest. Ideals, like yours and his, pardon, I have none.”

I can’t argue with him. Anyway, I too have come to Raboullet ‘in poor shape and damn hungry’. Like the colonel, I want Raboullet’s other bothy. Like the colonel I’ll make him relent. Yes, I will.

I react in becoming pompous: “There are more important matters to settle than political ones; they are hungry at Savignole, colonel Gérard and his people are depending on me to bring them food. I’ve given my word that help will come, and as long at it will be necessary. I’ll bring them food- if it’s the last thing I’ll ever do”. (To be frank, I don’t think I was quite so direct…but near enough). Raboullet looks at me, sideways, intrigued. He raises his eyebrows, heavy ones, he doesn’t quite know what to do next. I seize this moment of hesitation to make contact. Reaching for his hand I ask: “Will you help me and sell me some food? Besides; a packhorse needs a stable, since that’s what I’ll be from now! Please, Monsieur Raboullet, please, let me have your bothy! Let me have it!

Raboullet was going to let me have it, but HIS way…Raboullet had become single-minded. I am pleading…I am weak. What next? His body language is explicit enough: Raboullet the lecher is going to have a go at me. It’s like the savage games, sometimes fatal, animals play when they confront each other for the first time, not knowing the opponent’s strength. Contact is made to find out, they get excited by that contact, they want to win, then it’s no holds barred. Will the fight (the game) ever end? It always does. They turn away injured, exhausted. The confrontation has been necessary; it has put an end to desire and fear. The two adversaries have sounded each other out, they know each other’s strength, smell, feel. They’ve grazed each other’s skin, bitten into fur and flesh, blood spurting out. After the fight they become friends, or foes, or they make love. Desire has been assuaged, pride resolved, fear gone.

Our game, Raboullet’s and mine, begins in earnest.

I get up, run my fingers through my hair for something to do. If I smoked, I would light a cigarette. This gesture of mine brings out the animal in Raboullet. He approaches as if invited. I step back. He comes forward. I retreat no further. Come on, Rachel, don’t be a prude, Raboullet wants to touch you, well let him, it’s part of his game and part of your mission. What mission? You’re a member of the Resistance now, I tell myself. Not as resistant as all that, not at this time of day, early in the morning. Just got up. Well, sort of…I’m not too proud, either. I’m Judith in Holophernes’ tent, though not quite. To believe Jean Giraudoux’s Judith, she had her night of love! She went through the tumult of the senses, of ecstasy, and then she killed her lover to save her people from bondage. Yet…yet fulfilled as a woman, she left the tent liberated and triumphant. Me? I’m letting myself be pawed by a lustful, drunken peasant who’s exploring the top half of my body with his big, hairy hands. He gropes at one of my breasts, then the other; the nipples become erect, it’s inevitable. He is very pleased with the effect he is producing. My heart is beating wildly. It has never happened to me before, I mean being pawed not wanting it. I grit my teeth, I feel no ecstasy in this situation! I tell myself that at least I’m liberating my people from Nazi bondage, that perhaps in some way I’m coming to the aid of Visachel and those who disappeared with him to the concentration camps. Visachel! Listen! I’m doing this for you! It isn’t too much, really…

Holophernes from the Auvergne murmurs “Tha’s a grand lass” and “Tha’s a virgin, right?”

Help! He has fallen back into the rough language of the mountains and of the hills. His paw searches for the answer lower down. Oh God Almighty! What shall I do? He starts to unbutton the flies of his corduroy trousers - I bet he put his Sunday best ones for the occasion!

- I escape from his grasp, manage a laugh (rather forced). To loosen the tension I hear myself say:

“You’re not going to have me on the kitchen floor, are you?” At this he does his flies again. I allow a necessary interlude for the rutting animal to collect itself. He does. Slowly. Mumbling to himself. It’s a groan more like. Defeat accepted. Momentarily. Enactment postponed.

I, on my part, have gone as far as my “sacred mission” will permit and no further. (Sorry, but grandiloquence is perfectly appropriate here I think. No irony intended). He says:

“Tha’s a virgin, lass. I know.”

I look him in the eye: “Monsieur Raboullet, I haven’t come here to play games with you, but to help our comrades at Savignole. I need your cooperation, your good will …whether I am a virgin or not!”

He snorts and turns his back on me. He makes his way to the dresser loaded with an impressive number of bottles of wine. He grabs a large glass, goes over to the table, sits down and without saying a word fills his glass, empties it and wipes his mouth with a check handkerchief taken from his trouser pocket. From the other pocket he takes an ancient leather tobacco pouch and his pipe, fills and lights it, letting out slurping noises. He seems to be thinking. I sit down beside him. He looks at me, then looks straight ahead. In no time the bottle is emptied. Another one is opened. He drinks. I can’t accept the reasons his wife gave me for his drinking. The Occupation has little to do with this dreary ritual, it reaches him only peripherally. Think if you can of the eroded mountains of the Auvergne scorching ceaselessly the inner soul of the men and women who toil in their midst. Think of Raboullet’s daily responsibility as the boss of a large estate subjected to regular inspections by Vichy’s “Intendants” and the obligatory deliveries of food on the spot.

Think! Think of the obese and weary wife who must have been so desirable in her youth and has ceased to be so…of the local girls Raboullet lusts after but who turn and run, mocking him in defiance…of the farm hands who fear and hate him… of the children who are fed up with the old man’s bouts of temper and drunkenness and keep away from him as much as they can…

And there’s more: think of the helplessness of country folk in the face of the heavens which can ruin all their efforts in a trice? It can take one night to freeze the potatoes if a plague of Colorado beetles hasn’t stripped off all the leaves first It takes only a week of incessant rain to rot the mown hay; a single flurry of late snow or a gale or one late frost to make the buds of the fruit trees come to nothing, or a drought such as last year’s when the fallen russets were riddled with maggots.

So you drink…to forget the war. Oh aye, the war! Well, tha knows, us folk don’t like it. No. But these days our lads are like pigs in clover, the Jerries leave ‘em be as they are farm workers, working for the Jerries mostly. So, while there isn't much coffee nor sugar about, all t’same we don’t do too badly. We can make a bob or two…black market, tha sees. It’s no so bad…

I wondered, and still do, who provoked more contempt in the eyes of country folks: the occupant’s compulsory requisitions or the townies begging on their knees for ham, cheese or even butter, their pride left at the door, their wallets wide open lures, stuffed with banknotes… the ultimate temptation.

7.

Morning Rituals.

Before launching into the episode of the Savignole bothy, this misty, shimmering April morning, as the day slowly sheds its kapok cover, and after I have bathed in my stream which I was to call Clairefontaine after the French ‘comptine’ of the same name, I must finish the story of my first days with Raboullet.

Like the 2nd of February, the 22nd was decisive. But whilst the former was dragged down into the mud of treachery, the latter ended in the clear waters of hope. This day marked the beginning of my life as a member of the Maquis.

Raboullet’s generosity through the weeks and months of toil and pain before the partial Liberation of France (in the summer of l944) was a gift to me, and to me alone. So he persisted in saying. Each potato, chunk of cheese, smoked ham, home made pâté, …was an offering from Raboullet to ‘his’ Rachel. Yet, his acts of kindness towards me didn’t stop there, –I’ll come to those a little later. Was I gratified, I asked myself ? Yes. And no. I lived in the fear of asking too much of this man who transformed himself before my eyes to please me - the reasonable prices he charged us, the amount of food he tucked into my rucksack unflinchingly, the use he allowed me to make of Jean, his shepherd, the personal contact he made, in the end, with the Maquisards of Savignole in spite of his reluctance to have anything to do with those “terrorists”- yes, all this and much more to tell when I come to it.

“Just now”. he had said one fine afternoon in April while my rucksack was being filled again to the brim: “I’ve got other fish to fry than to worry about what motivates them comrades of yours to risk their lives as they do.” He was obviously in a specially good mood (having had less to drink than usual) but taking the opportunity of letting me know in no uncertain terms that his liberalities were only a reprieve. One day all these fanatics would have to be put in their place if they persisted in spreading their “egalitarian rubbish and shoving us all into co-ops!” I confess his old- fashioned reactionary opinions irritated me, they did not quite fit with the new idea I had formulated about the man. Generous and tolerant towards me –and eventually towards our maquis– he could also be bloody intolerant and hidebound when he chose to be so. But as I said before the more I got to know that country - so rich in the valleys, so barren up on the hillsides where you had to work with your feet planted on different levels- and the packhorse Rachel had learnt a thing or two about those treacherous landscapes, beautiful to the eye, pitiless on the feet - the better I came to understand the historical reasons for the rough, instinctive tightfistedness of the Auvergnat, his pathological obsession with losing his money well hidden in woolen stockings - his freedom and his fierce independence.

* * *

After finishing the second bottle of the day and broaching the third, Raboullet remembers that it is nearly seven o’clock and his wife hadn’t yet got up to put the coffee on the hearth and the white cheese on the table. He springs up and roars through the door leading to the bedrooms, “Shake yourselves, women! I want my coffee?” And he sits down again with an air of who-is-the-master-in-this-house? Then he questions me about the incident in the cowshed. So, his wife had already told him! I had better defend the Spanish labourer. After all, he hadn’t touched me I said. Raboullet cuts me short; “My business!” he says. I held my tongue.

“You’ve got something up your sleeve, I can see that,” he says, patting my hand in a fatherly way, changing the subject.

The animal! As if he didn’t know …

“Let me rent your bothy, Monsieur Raboullet, the one that’s empty…”

This was to be my second plea within a short time. Was he driving my patience to the limit of endurance and enjoying it?

“I never rent my bothys.” he says.

He shook his head, had a drink and his eyes met with mine. Just look at you! You are not made for it, lass”. I protest:

“You shouldn’t go by appearances, Monsieur Raboullet… a packhorse is tough and that’s what I’m meant to be from now on, remember!”

I don’t think he heard me. He takes his glass, drinks, stands up and shouts even louder than before: “Are you all dead up there?”

Two women’s voices called out simultaneously: “Coming …coming!”

He comes and sits down again, has another drink and says: “He’s mad, yon colonel. You’ll die of cold and hunger like as not!” I agree:

“I suppose I shall!”

He scratches his head: “‘What do you want to do there?”

“Watch the Boche convoys…store food for the comrades. They say your bothy is in an ideal spot for doing both things. That’s all, really.”

He says; “But why don’t you stay at the Savignole bothy? It’s a proper dwelling I had built years ago. There’s a proper stove… and more…”

“I know. Colonel Gérard decided otherwise. He must have his reasons.”

“His reasons! His reasons! They are selfish reasons, they are! You know what I think? The Boche will have a field day if they find you in that bothy all alone! Thought of that?” (As if I hadn’t! But what is the good of telling him?) He goes on:

“What will you tell them, the Krauts? That you’re on holiday? That you’re living in that hovel to commune with nature?” And the raspy laughter follows.

I make no answer because I don’t like his sarcasm…I’m not in the mood.

He doesn’t like my silence and breaks it:

“Don’t expect me to get you out of the mess, my girl! If they come asking me questions I’ll tell them that I don’t know you…that you’re a squatter…”

Raboullet looks at me narrowly to see what effect his discouraging words have on me.

“You can tell them what you like” I throw at him in contempt.”

He is about to answer me back but is interrupted by the appearance of Madame and his eldest daughter, the rather pretty, plump red-head. They seem only half awake, poor things; the night had been all too short for them. We greet each other in a friendly fashion and Madame begins to grind the coffee, or rather the toasted lupin grains which look like coffee beans but aren’t, of course. She has to force the grinder round - there must have been chick peas in there! - and then puts the whole lot into a pan where some milk was just coming to the boil. The daughter, Adèle, puts a great round loaf of bread on the table, some onions, soft goat cheese and quince jelly which she places in front of me with a smile. At the same moment the farm labourers come in one by one, mumbling ‘Patron’, and the sons after them, muttering ‘Papa’. Ten labourers, three sons. The other daughters, including the twins, must still be in bed, knocked out by last evening’s birthday party.

The loaf passes from hand to hand, carved up by pocket knives, leaving behind a dusting of fine white flour on the chests of the carvers. Raboullet cuts a bigger piece than the others and puts it in front of me: “Better put some flesh back on you, lass!” I find the protective tone touching, and not in the least irritating as it could have been. The men pour the milky coffee into the bowls, adding molasses to it instead of sugar.

When the goat cream cheese comes round to me I discover with horror that it is crawling with tiny maggots. Raboullet bursts out laughing at the sight of my grimace.

“Don’t turn thy nose up like that! It’s the maggots that make it tasty, isn’t that so, lads?”

The ‘Aye’ that they feel obliged to say in response makes my blood run cold. I glance at the “lads” and see maggots crawling along moustaches, down beards, across unshaven cheeks; I feel sick. Was this a conspiracy? I refuse point blank to put that crawling cheese into my mouth. Raboullet’s coarse snigger finds no echo. The family does not laugh, nor even smile. No one finds it funny. The lads make a sort of grimace as they watch their boss, as if they agree with him for once. That couldn’t happen often.

My agony doesn’t end there; Nourse was busily wolfing down that awful cheese. How was I going to get rid of his maggots? Where could I get worm tablets for him? And when? And was it proper for me to worry, when more important matters…

At that very moment nothing, absolutely nothing seemed more urgent to me than finding a way of getting some worm tablets for my dog. The war, the bothy, the Maquis at Savignole, my mission (sorry if this word creeps up again), Visachel, Baumgartner and the others…each and every one had vanished at a stroke. A relief you might say, but no, not a bit, I felt instead shame. The protagonists of the Last Judgment on the 2nd of February were marching in front of me in single file, expressionless, already dead.

Suddenly old Raboullet bangs on the table:

“What about the fandangos?” (This was a word he used to taunt the

Spaniards.)’ “Where are they hiding?” A young labourer says

“Dunno”, another “Think they’re chopping wood.” At which Raboullet declares: “I’ll warm ‘em, and they won’t need no wood!” He gets

up, takes down his whip from the nail on the wall, puts it on the table,

sits down again and says “Get on lads, get going! It’s late!”

The men get up, slowly, chewing their last mouthful.

It was now half past seven. It was still dark, and I still didn’t know whether Raboullet was going to let me have his bothy. I gave myself a time limit: in half an hour, no longer, I must know. At eight o’clock. At day break. Yes.

How naive can you get!…

A peasant from the Auvergne won’t be hurried, that’s a fact, folks! If you try, he shies, you can’t get anything out of him; the tempo of his life, so different from ours, conforms only to the movement of the sun and never runs ahead of it. When the sun sets beyond the great ridge of the mountains, although it still colours the sky and the summits with it’s aureate glow, men and beasts go back to the fold. It’s time to rest. Only the woman folk go on with their labour commensurable with that of the oxen.

When the “lads” had gone Raboullet got up, took his whip and put it under his arm, indicating that I should follow him but without uttering a word. When we got to the door he said “Your tyke stops here. Don’t want dogs in my bothys, they sniff at owt … it’s not clean. Got it?”

His bothys? Was he going to lead me to his hidden treasures? Or had he something else in mind? I wanted so desperately to trust him while I was certain he didn’t trust me yet. A fox doesn’t trust anyone, an Auvergnat fox even less. I hesitated to follow him, unable to invent a pretext to stay, remembering what the colonel had said about his good side, yet how imperative it was for me to “negotiate” with him in the morning. The morning it was now, cold and sunny, the sunrays filtering through the large kitchen window.

Madame Raboullet got hold of Nourse’s collar, he was pulling so hard to follow me that he dragged her forward some inches. I decided to follow my “master” outside. Indeed I had no choice in the matter.

We walked along in silence. Raboullet had only one idea in his head, to find the “fandangos” and give them a good hiding. He found them. There they were, chopping wood, apparently unaware of the presence of their boss… two handsome fellows, sunburnt and with rich hair the colour of jet. What happened next horrified me. Raboullet rushed at them and hit them both impartially, without bothering to enquire which was the guilty one if guilt is the right word. I turned my back on this mediaeval scene, sickened to the depths of my soul.

When Raboullet re-joined me I couldn’t help expressing my indignation. I holler: “They are not beasts you know!” came out before I could get control of myself. “They are human beings, like you and me…”.

I turned away with rage in my heart. He ran after me, seized my arm whilst I was running, forced me to stop and said: “Now you listen to me, and listen well. A townie like you hath no idea of what its like up here…These fandangos are like beasts. When they’re drunk they’re dangerous…wild…got my women to think of…they’d rape them if they could. One of them tried to. Adèle had the presence of mind to kick him where it hurts”. Raboullet shows me the place where-it-hurts in case a “virgin” like me wouldn’t know where it is!

Heated by the wine he had already downed before breakfast and which is working its way up, he says much more. I try not to listen. All I remember at this hour is his concluding line which is still resonating in my head after so many years: “Don’t you ever compare my people with that lot. Sub-human, they are, and Spaniards in the bargain, see?”

Heard that one before? I mean, the Nazi (Untermenschen) concept? Raboullet’s tirade was too much to bear, but I kept stumm. The half hour I had given myself in which to mention the bothy had passed. I gave myself a reprieve. But I refused to walk with him any further.

I made my way back to the farmhouse to fetch my dog. Madame did not ask any question. She looked at me and knew.

I head for Murol to find some sort of accommodation for the night. Time and space are needed now to forget about political philosophy, to reconcile myself with the idea that after all, Raboullet is a human being, that he’s got a brain and a heart. A matter of negotiating in the morning… again…to-morrow…another day…

8.

Bacchus’ Temple.

I stayed at an inn near Murol, situated further down in the valley. Early in the morning I left with my dog, my skis and my miserable empty rucksack in the direction of Raboullet’s farmhouse, asking the landlady to look after my belongings until my return. I had paid her the night before; she was still asleep when I left. It was freezing outside. And dark. Not quite, though; a wan light shed by the moon cast sprawling shadows on the snowy surfaces. Every which way I looked there was a kind of desolation which gripped the soul and made me wonder whether I ought to go home…Home? Where was it? Did I have one? As usual, Nature was silent, silent and stealthy as a thief.

I skied with ungreased skis all the way to Raboullet’s farmhouse, an exercise I wished then I’d never have to repeat and which I repeated many times after that. Nourse had been my guide all along, running ahead of me towards the farm. No hesitation! True to his kin-of-the snows he reached the house long before me, returning to me, saying in doggy body-language: “It’s over there…follow me…hurry up, I’m hungry!” Daylight was just piercing through the moving clouds.

On entering the kitchen I was told by Madame Raboullet that her husband (‘le patron’ as she often referred to him) had gone to the Mont-Dore spa for the day to sell at auctions part of his fallow fields. When would he be back? was my question. “Dunno, Mamzelle” was the answer.

I decided to spend some time with Adèle, the Raboullets’ eldest daughter, intending to give her a hand milking the cows. After what seemed to me to be a very long time I succeeded in extracting a few drops of milk. “Drink it” said Adèle with a smile. I really liked her.

On re-entering the farmhouse I saw my empty rucksack on a hook in the kitchen. No-one had touched it, it was hanging flat as an old woman’s breasts, wrinkled, telling a rich story of past fullness during its younger days.

Everywhere I looked there was denial that I’d ever make it. I looked at my watch (4 pm), saw myself as the victim of the worst kind of non-physical torture, the one which erodes hope by playing the waiting game with me… not for the first time since my steps led me to this accursed place.!

I made for the door with the intention of returning to my little inn in Murol when Raboullet made his entrance, greeted me with a mocking “Tiens! toujours là? “ which I felt didn’t deserve an answer. He was totally sober, spruced up and clean shaven. “Would you care for a cognac” he asked. “Yes, thank you” I replied.

The atmosphere was unusually relaxed. The business deal in Mont Dore must have been successful. I was invited to dine with the family but declined saying I needed to change clothes and to wash. I made my long way back to Murol, reluctantly, but I had to. Why? The wait had been too agonizing, I was letting down the starving people at Savignole. Not even the sight of Madame’s clafoutis (made with plenty of eggs) would make me change my mind. Yet, I was so hungry…But at least Nourse got his portion of soup before we set off.

The following morning I called at Raboullet’s farmhouse, this time lubricating my skis with lard my landlady sold to me for a few francs. Raboullet was waiting for me. I hadn’t told him I’d be back that early, but he knew I would, and what for. Pigheaded as he was and I had become, it was now clear to both of us that the Bothy was going to be mine, and the food would fill my rucksack as well. “You come with me, lass,” he said, “I’ll show you something you’ve certainly never seen before.” He took my arm and literally pushed me out of the house into the fresh winterscape. Why fresh you might ask? Well, because the wind was light - a breeze more like - and the sun was out and I felt good.

Raboullet made me walk the bounds of his estate, inviting me to visit his sacred bothys where the big blue veined cheeses weighing several kilos each were made, also the famous St Nectaires “The best ones round here…before the war I used to sell them to the Paris lot…Androuët, heard of it?” he asked. Had I! My Mamoshka regularly used to visit this legendary cheese merchant rue Amsterdam, a steep busy street branching off the Gare St Lazare. Next I witnessed the centrifugal process of butter making. Impressive! Strictly for the family, mind - a butter which in Auvergne will not turn yellow no matter how much you try. Unctuous and light it is a treat to eat spread on Madame’s freshly made rye pain de campagne. The cheese and other dairy products were all made in dairy bothys where centrifuges stood. Pushing one of them aside with his powerful arms, Raboullet invited me to his secret cellar by stepping in first -the one he had blocked up at one end so that the Boche wouldn’t find it. By means of a ladder he lifted me down into Orpheus’ hell holding me round the waist as if we were going to dance among the devils. He held me tightly against himself before putting me down in this place without sun, without light, without life, dank, smelling of earth which had long ago ceased to breathe, and of wood soaked in alcohol; a cold, dead place. Then he invited me to join him in his daily prayer to the god Bacchus to put the seal on our friendship. But before the solemn ceremony he lit a candle to illuminate Bacchus’temple. I followed him respectfully all along a central alley, brushing against enormous casks which, in the shadows where they stood lined up, resembled huge bears, stuffed and mythical. The scent emanating from them was that of St Pourçain, a wine which, when young, as in these casks (vintage ‘42 and ‘43) can rot your guts unless you’ve been weaned on it. (In this part of the world you probably have).

At the end of the alley I saw Raboullet’s shadow sweep along deformed till it touched the vaulted ceiling, then overtake him to disappear behind us. We sat down on three-legged stools. Raboullet filled two glasses with his elixir, ‘cuvée 37’ engraved on one of the casks. He offered me a glass as if giving me a jewel and said: “Just taste this”. I tasted it. It tasted fruity and strong. Putting his glass on the ground after we had toasted one another, he came closer to me, touched my knees with his own, pressed them hard, then seizing my head in his hands, searched for my mouth and found it. This was neither the place nor the time to be prudish, was it? But this was certainly the ultimate moment to plead for the last time:

“Let me have your bothy, please, Monsieur Raboullet”. “It’s madness. Your colonel wants your death, ma parole!” He shook his head with a reprobate expression, thereby throwing

me into a flutter of doubt. Should I go on stooping so low until I dropped? Or should I just leave hostile Auvergne to the Auvergnats, regain Clermont and my anonymity? Should I boldly declare to those who put me here in the first place (Maître Sarlange in particular) that this clandestine rural life was not for me? Should I tell them that I was being abused by creatures of the mountains, sucking the very marrow of my bones?

In answer, the colonel’s ghost appeared, in flashes, within the four walls of this airless hell where I was sitting rather uncomfortably, trying not to lose my balance from a three-legged stool resting on an uneven ground…

Can you see, as I do right now, Gérard, tall, bi-spectacled, beret firmly pushed over his forehead, speaking to me in a hollow voice, reminding me of my commitments?

I took Raboullet’s hands in mine, on impulse, yes, letting the language of touch flow between us, language which is not expressed in words but in waves for which the whole body reaches out. The seal of mutual trust was laid. The Colonel’s ghost suddenly approved and disappeared.

9.

Jean-de-la-Montagne.

On the evening of the 22nd, (another date I shall never forget) I was installed in my bothy with food a-plenty -enough to feed a regiment in the company of Jean, a young shepherd of twenty whom Raboullet had lent me as porter for the long march to the bothy.

“Do what you will with him…I shan’t need him right now. Not ‘till we bring the sheep up for summer.”

Was this true? Not quite, surely, but he wanted Jean to assist me during our frequent journeys between the farm and the bothy, especially when the load exceeded 30 kilos (which it did more often than not). It still remained for me to march across from the bothy to Savignole, but with half the load, making another journey there, at night, when there was less risk of meeting the Vichy militia.

But first let me tell you something about Jean. He is one of those chosen creatures who in brutal times restores our faith; noble beings unsullied by the depravity of war. He has remained a primitive, having slipped through the net of state education. There is a village school at Murol, but he served his life’s apprenticeship with the sheep he had been told to watch as soon as he could walk. He can neither read nor write, his mind is untouched by formal education. He is as gentle as a lamb, as sturdy as an ox, as free as Romany, caring little if at all for men and their affairs. But he can foretell the weather unerringly, sniffing the air. He can tell the time of day without a watch. He knows what date it is without a calendar. He likes to talk, and he talks well. Words keep him company. He told me one day that he talked to himself, held conversations with his dog Fiston, his sheep, and sometimes with the trees whose varieties he knows as well as any botanist. “I tell them things”, he said. I would give a lot to know what he tells them and what they say to him in return, but my bookish education prevents me from understanding the unspoken language of the hills I climb every day, the streams I trace and cross, the Neolithic rocks of shale and chalk which strew my path, the wild flowers and fruit which used to fill my herbarium when I was a student… the fragrant trees… the lizards, snakes, toads, frogs, the field mice… the eagles and kites suddenly darkening the skies with their fully stretched wings. My formal learning of nature’s wonders will never compare with Jean’s Savoir.

Jean has also the gift of listening, without seeming to concentrate when you speak to him, and of remembering what you said. There is never any hurry, he can and will take his time. No one is there to exercise pressure on him, his memory is perfect, it has its own perfect rhythm of recall. During the fortnight when I used him as a porter to carry food to Savignole because of the boils erupting wherever my sack would rub and in spite of Gérard’s strict order: “You must work alone. Trust no-one”. I trusted Jean; he would never neglect an errand or forget a message. He knew he was running risks should he be stopped by the militia or a German patrol; he thought nothing of it, shrugged his broad shoulders when warned by us. “I know them militia boys, they are neighbours he replied, cockily.

Fortunately, Gérard ended up admitting that I wasn’t using Jean’s help because I was a weakling but because of my abscesses and the risk of general septicaemia. After all, a dead packhorse is no use to anyone! (As you may have guessed, my relationship with Gérard was not easy; he became more and more intolerant of measures taken by others without his say-so).

After a regal dinner with the Raboullet family where I avoided as much as possible letting my glance fall on my inebriated friend- not through disgust, but because he was breaking my heart by going to pieces once more- I set off with Jean for the bothy which was his during the summer. On that memorable day of February 22nd Raboullet had supervised the filling of my rucksack with ham, cheese, bacon, lard, cabbages, carrots, and swedes instead of potatoes, for the potato yield had been very poor that year because of an invasion of Colorado beetles.

I left the farmhouse thanking everybody for the lovely dinner, put on my skis (coated with hot resin this time, courtesy of one of the sons!) to make better progress in the fresh snow and made for my new abode with Jean carrying my rucksack full to bursting, weighed down further by a steaming loaf which Madame had just taken out of the oven. It continued to steam, that golden round loaf, as we waded through the snow towards my destiny. Jean didn’t like skis, he preferred his own seven league boots in which he could bound along and slide in spite of the load pressing on his shoulder blades. Nourse quickly got the hang of walking in fresh snow; he loped over it quite happily, now that he had a full stomach.

The night was hard like metal, of a pale blue which darkened the shadows. The snow crunched with every step Jean took and the moon was full as on the previous night. We climbed and descended again and again, Jean ahead of me on the climbs, I leading him on the descents. We waited for each other sometimes in the hollows, sometimes on the hill tops. Too heavily burdened to talk as we went along, Jean said only a few words scarcely voiced which gave to the night a soothing lilt.

The bothy came into sight, like a mirage in the desert. The snow…the sand, nature’s trompe-l’oeil playing with our senses. As centuries seem to recede at night, its walls seemed gallo-roman. It is perfectly rectangular, built in stone with a thatched roof, huddled in a valley, the fifth we had come to since we left the farm. Behind it I could see six poplars, rising up, waving their silver filigree arms against the night sky. There is no earthly reason for their threatening presence. Whoever planted them in military formation must have had the crazy idea that their formidable height would protect the bothy. As it was, they were more likely to attract lightning and threaten to burn the bothy and themselves in the process. Surely, there must be a guardian angel of bothys since they are still standing there, majestically erect and defiant. “When the sky is angry,” Jean says, “you ‘ave to get out, no two ways ‘bout it!” !

Many years later I revisited the place with my family; we could see from the high road running between Murol and the Mont Dore that the Bothy was no more. The remains of burnt out poplars lay criss-cross upon blackened stones. The children tumbled all the way down the hill to see. I stayed on the road, watching them dancing round the remains of my former life, waving back to me.

As I approached the bothy I saw that Gérard had not yet tried to get in touch with me. The surface of snow was unbroken and it had not snowed that day. Jean opened the heavy door of the bothy with an enormous rusty key which reminded me of the one used by Madame for the cowshed. He put his foot against the door, which creaked abominably - the noise echoed round the mountains in the deadly silence - and went first into the den to light two candles poised in an ancient candlestick which would have delighted the heart of any antique dealer.

It was rusty and black but beautifully sculpted in what I thought was old silver.

The scene which met my eyes almost suffocated me. Table, chairs three of them, straw bed, blanket - only one…And what a state it was in! Washbowl - broken; jug - broken; fireplace and cauldron, logs and sticks; tied up with a horse’s leather strap. Everything was covered with an indescribable dust which must have come in under the door. And the smell, friends! Enough to turn your stomach. I recognized the unmistakable stench of rodents. (I must tell you that one of my first tasks was to stop all holes, and there were many, with broken glass, and to fill the gap under the door with the old khaki blanket which couldn’t be made any worse than it was). Then I saw that the straw on which I was supposed to sleep was moving, and the stealthy departure of some creatures I hadn’t time to identify. I grabbed Jean’s arm; mice? Rats? “Both, Mamzelle’ he said calmly, “but don’t let this worry you, you know…they’re afraid of men.” What about women? Would they like them? I was soon to find out.

Jean lit the fire in the fireplace after moving the cauldron which was full of maggots. I went outside. I had to! The moon made faces, it always does when you look at it with the sad soul of Pierrot Lunaire. It actually grinned! It always does if you look at it long enough!

I began to search for the stream Raboullet had mentioned. It is, in fact, a spring coming out of the ground, warm and sulphurous, an underground spring for most of its meandering course. They say it cures ‘albuminous’ patients who seek a cure in the spa of Saint Nectaire.

I saw it, my spring! Flowing freely, bordered with reddish tufts of grass and smelling sulphur. I plunged my hands into its warm waters and ran my fingers along the keys of an imaginary piano engulfed beneath it. Jealous of the poet never without his instrument, I promised myself to become a composer. Debussy’s La Cathédrale Engloutie played in my ears. I would compose a song entitled Le Piano Englouti for Flora to sing one day to her guitar, a song flowing warm and freely, like my stream…

I returned to the bothy, revived. In the hearth, pine logs were blazing. I began to hum the first bars of my ode to Flora.

The only view of the outside world from the bothy was through two tiny windows to which iron bars were fastened. Whatever for, I wondered? One at the front, the other on the east side from where I recognized the road which runs between Murol and Mont-Dore. It takes well over an hour to reach it up a steep slope. It is bordered by scattered trees, and on a clear night their long shadows move like the hands on a dial according to the movement of the moon. I can’t be seen from the road, I thought. I was wrong. With field glasses it is possible. What’s more, I hadn’t thought of the smoke from the chimney. (When Gérard came the next morning he exclaimed: “Really, Rachel, what are you thinking of ? Might as well tell the whole world that there’s somebody living here…more like in hiding! What’s more, that that somebody isn’t a shepherd …at this time of year!”) I spent the rest of the winter with no other protection from the cold than my fur and a woolen blanket, a gift from Raboullet without which, for sure, I’d have perished.

My visits to Savignole became more frequent as days went by. Besides needing the company of humans and the warmth (I was glued to the stove whenever possible) I never failed to deliver enough food to feed hungry men (on average ten of them, often many more) and cook the vegetables as dutiful housewife…

If this sounds easy to you think again! The countryside was patrolled by the gendarmes and the militia as I mentioned before; the storms could be as cruel as on Anapurna on a bad day; the short cuts from my bothy to Savignole had to be varied, thus ceasing to be short cuts (remember Gérard’s recommendations when he asked me to consult his ordnance survey map?), and my threatening boils which grew worse by the hour, and…and…and…

But my visits meant also watching Clément-at-the-controls between his earphones, I waiting for a pause in the transmissions for him to stretch his whole body, arms reaching out, and if we were alone, seizing me by the waist for a passionate embrace.

But I digress.

Jean and I crouched in front of the hearth. He was sweating. His sweat had the musky smell of a young wild-cat over and above the fetid odour of vermin. Nourse was stretched out at full length in front of the crackling fire, pricking up his ears each time a log stirred with a shower of sparks. Jean felt that the moment had come to tell me a story, a story close to his heart which, he said, he had never told anyone. I have great difficulty, even today, in getting it out of my mind when I find myself in Raboullet’s presence. The sense of wonder which the fire had kindled in me froze as Jean’s story unfolded:

Raboullet had been employing an old shepherd of seventy or more. His name was Arthur. As was the custom with the local shepherds, le Patron had given him a dog and a gun. “If you see anybody after the sheep, man or beast, shoot! You’ve the right, got it?” Since meat rationing had become more and more severe, thefts of farm animals were frequent, especially of sheep. It is enough simply to shoo them, and they run panic-stricken into the arms of their executioners. Then, badly killed on the spot, they are hurriedly thrown into trucks or carts. So the sheep had to be watched even at night, rounded up and counted. The shepherds guarding them would sleep under the stars, with one eye open. Until the sheep were brought down to the valley for the winter, Jean and old Arthur lived together. They made their own shelter, their sheep grazed together up on the high bare mountains of the Dores. They took turns to guard them at night, gun at the ready.

In the autumn, at the transhumance, they separated, Jean living at the Clairefontaine bothy, old Arthur retreating further down into the valley near Chambon. He had taught Jean the art of looking after sheep, of treating the injured ones, and how to train sheep dogs. Jean interrupted his narration to demonstrate for my sake the unhurried, yet strident dialogue between a shepherd and his dog. Nourse woke up and jumped to his feet at the sound of this audible telepathy which had revived in him an ancestral calling. It took a while before he settled down again. Then Jean spoke of his friendship with Arthur. He loved him more than the father who drank, more than his mother who killed herself with jobs her old man no longer did.

It was the year before. At the beginning of autumn, Arthur noticed one day that four ewes were missing. He walked miles with his dog, Vautour, but found nothing. Arthur knew what had happened; they had been stolen! He asked an old shepherd from the neighbourhood to look after his flock and made for Raboullet’s farmhouse, calling first at Clairefontaine to ask Jean to accompany him, the reason being he was terribly scared of the boss. The two friends arrived at the farm at nightfall.

Alas! Raboullet was blind drunk. Arthur began to shake in every limb. He stammered: “‘Boss…they’ve stolen me four ewes…I looked everywhere…I swear…with Vautour…I lost them, I did!”

Raboullet seized his whip and shouted threateningly: “‘Tha’s stolen them! As if I didn’t pay thee enough, bandit!” He shook Arthur, yelling: “Confess! Confess tha’s stole ‘em!”

Arthur was overcome by a sudden spasm - Jean said to me: “T’was like a hiccup” - and began to weep like a child. Jean was afraid for his old friend who by now was choking and tried to intervene, saying that he’d seen men prowling about, that it could easily have happened to him too. Raboullet shouted even more: “Shut thy gob! Nowt to do with thee!”, then he drove Arthur away, hitting him with the whip: “‘Tha’ll pay for yon sheep, d’ye hear? Tomorrow, no later, or I’ll have thee in jail…in jail, that’s for sure!” Next morning, at dawn, Arthur was found hanging from a tree. Jean said to me, huskily; “Prison, for Arthur, was worser than death”.

He went back to the farm to give Raboullet the bad news. The whole family was there, sitting at the dinner table. Raboullet said: “That proves he did it! I was right…he was a thief !”

“No one said nowt” said Jean.

No one ever spoke about the affair again…no one, except Jean, that night, in the bothy.

Jean and I each ate a beautiful russet apple, all golden and juicy. Raboullet had chosen the best apples from his winter fruit reserves and had said: “Tell me what you think of these!” They were very, very good. As I ate, I felt I was becoming purified, a strange sensation which I can’t easily describe, I sometimes get it when I play the piano, or when I hear Flora singing her Polish songs to the guitar. Jean was obviously happy, his face was serene; it bore the first downy traces of a beard. When he had eaten his apple he got up and said: “Well, I’m going” and shook hands with me with his left hand. I hugged him and thanked him. He said: “You won’t be frightened all alone, Mamzelle?” I said: “Of course not, Jean…I’m used to being alone. But where will you sleep?”

“There’s a shelter not far away… “ he said.

I couldn’t let him go. I said: “Won’t you stay here? Its warm and we can put some straw on the floor?”

Jean blushed! I had embarrassed him with my invitation …

He made for the heavy door and said: “I’ll be all right Mamzelle. Good night” and off he went into the darkness. I saw him go past the little window and disappear behind the bothy. Then I lost sight of my wonderful companion. Not for long; about fifty yards away I saw his broad athletic shoulders dig a large hole in the snow, making it into solid ice. After that he settled himself into the hole with his head between his knees. Then he was still.

Jean, the Eskimo, was cosy and warm in his igloo. He was guarding me. I was receiving, through him, Nature’s purest message of love.

It was complete.

Nourse sniffed frantically under the door, enough to flay the skin off his nose. I reassured him, telling him that I knew there was a man outside and it was all right. He lay down again in front of the fire, a dog on guard, his eyes fixed on the door. To reassure him I lay down beside him on my fur. The straw mattress in the far corner of the Bothy would become my bed in the days ahead. Not to-night, though… Not to-night…

Next morning when I opened the door I saw that Jean had gone. His igloo shone in the still pale rays of the rising sun. The unbroken, solitary landscape which stretched before me made me forget why I was here. I made for the stream and washed as best I could, making sure no-one was watching. I had no soap but realized that the sulphur replaced it beautifully. The sweat of yesterday’s long journey was swept away, unbelievably so, cleansing the boils under my arms and breasts which had grown bigger since I had left Clermont.

Climbing the slope to regain the bothy, breathless from the contrasting cold air, stark naked …I saw Gérard. He had been waiting for me to finish with my ablutions and had tactfully turned his back to me by sitting on a little mound not far from the bothy. After a hearty “Bonjour mon colonel!” I walked straight into the bothy to cover myself with my (only) thick pull-over reaching down to the knees. I’ve already mentioned his quick reaction at the sight of the fire in the chimney… Not of my own reactions. Hear this: I hit the still burning logs with a large poker till the fire went out showering me with white ash. I can still hear myself flying into a foul temper and swearing at my irresponsibility…at my thoughtlessness…at Gérard’s inhumanity …at the cold February wind.

Gérard had stayed outside to give me time to cool off. A couple of minutes, not more. Then he burst in, seized my arm and said: “Listen!” I listened. I heard the rumbling of engines which heralded the appearance of the early enemy convoys, the continuous noise reverberating over Clairefontaine. “We’ll get them, Rachel! It won’t be long now!” At these words I began to shake off the ashes and my vexation. My body felt warm. Gérard turned his green eyes towards the sack which was beginning to fill the room with the intoxicating scent of a larder from distant years. Seized with wonder, almost delirious with joy, he took me in his arms, swung me round crying “You made it Rachel! You made it!”

10.

Love and Chlorophyll.

Clément Vallette, our radio operator whom everybody except me calls ‘Prof.’ has shed the trappings of university life and of life in Strasbourg before ‘42. He wears a thick, bottle-green pullover frayed at the elbows, washes and darns his own socks with enormous concentration (“Don’t talk to the great man while he’s thinking”, says Gérard to the boys jokingly). He shaves only when his nascent beard makes him feel uncomfortable, addresses everybody by his first name or nom-de guerre, takes orders from the colonel unflinchingly, eats out of his mess-tin with his personal wooden spoon (some of us use forks and knives as well), and leaves the bothy almost every day at dawn carrying his radio equipment, playing a cat and mouse game with the enemy patrols and detectors, mooring his apparatus in half a dozen hideouts, choosing suitable inclines to get better reception.

With the first buds of Spring, Clément and I have become lovers. The seeds of our love were sown before we left the university. I remember him bending over my notes in the lab, taking a long time to go over them, leaning over me, oh so slightly, but I felt the warmth of his body invading mine, my body drifting off like a raft while I analysed a solution or made measurements. He would then hold my hands to steady them and pronounce words of encouragement.

But I was not doing very well and I knew it. He had put me onto the synthesis of chlorophyll, a hopeless task which made me wonder whether he had done it on purpose, just to keep me there for the eternity it would take to get some results. Presently, I dared to complain. The task was daunting, I said. (The synthesis of a substance as complex as chlorophyll was in my humble view experimentally unattainable ‘avec les moyens dont nous disposons AUJOURD’hui’, I quoting dear Lavoisier’s famous statement on the impossibility of splitting the atom). Not so, replied Clément; he had worked it out in his head. It was possible to assemble the near-infinity of combinations of atoms and get, “in the end, the miraculous deep green liquid, God’s greatest creation”. For an agnostic like him I found this formulation rather strange, but then agnostics do perhaps carry God secretly in their pockets, invoke Him, work in harness with Him. At least, this seemed to apply to Clément for he refused vehemently either to negate or to accept a priori the existence of what could not be seen, proven and measured. A scientist’s task, he said repeatedly to his students, was to look for proofs, to use the tools available to him and to invent new ones.

I insisted: “Was it then the scientist’s prerogative to search for proofs of the existence of God?”.

“No. Never!”

“So, should he search for the existence of God and not find it, is it his right to deny His existence because he can’t prove it”?

“It is the scientist’s right to doubt it” he answered with authority. “Scientists demand proof. Most of us prefer knowledge to blind belief, that’s all…not being Pascal” he added with a slight tone of regret…or was it irony?

It is the beginning of April. In spite of what it costs me, and it costs me a lot, I have decided to stay away from Savignole, just for a few days. Rachel is ill, but shush! no-one must know. More important matters to worry about in that highly-charged atmosphere than health ones. Here, at Savignole, win or lose is paid for equally in human lives! Clément was gradually driven to criticize Gérard’s high risk military actions taken on impulse, coloured by his obsession to get results, Now is the time, or NEVER he’d retort.

Here I must tell you of a short scene which took place recently between Clément and Gérard, alas in my presence! But it also marked the beginning of my passionate relationship with Clément. The date: the third of April. A date I have never forgotten.

After Clément had insisted I give up running a shuttle service, at least for a time, “loaded comme un âne”, and that I should take a “well earned” rest. (I felt as if I could have crept into a mouse hole). Gérard answered sharply: “This is no time for giving anyone a holiday, and that includes Rachel! Too much is at stake right now, and you know it as well as I do”.

“I’m not talking about a holiday!” replied Clément, stung. “What I am asking for is a little humanity. After all…”

Gérard interrupted him, annoyed. You could see his ill-humour rising like an angry tide. He said: “Why? Because Rachel is a woman? I’m sorry…”

Clément turned pale. In a trembling voice which had roughened, he protested: “Good heavens, man, you’ve lost all sense of proportion!” Upon which Gérard said curtly: “Quite possibly”, then turned on his heel and walked away.

I was mortified. I who had struggled all along to remain in the background and only to be there when needed, I’d messed everything up! I had become a burden! An unwelcome centre of attention!

Finding ourselves alone - yes alone!- Clément was the first to speak:

“I should have kept my mouth shut! You can’t argue with a fanatic.”

As soon as he had said these words, Clément retracted. He took my hand and lifted it to his trembling lips. “Forgive me”, he said, “I went too far…but I can see that you are in pain. Just now, Gérard does not see it…or rather he doesn’t wish to see it. It is as if he were charging at a goal with his eyes wide shut!”

Leaning against a tree, lost in thought, Clément seemed to be talking to himself: “I wonder… I wonder if this is at all possible…I mean, to see only what the eyes WANT to see…”

To be sure, Clément had charged with his eyes wide open when he abruptly left the university, telling no-one, not even his landlady, knowing that the enemy would be at his heels? I put it to him. Yes, he replied, his departure was a long premeditated act and he added, drawing me close in his arms: “One must always have one’s eyes wide open, at least before the act, don’t you agree?” The act? I was suddenly aware that he was talking of something other than political commitment. He was talking about the intimate act. Did they exist side by side, completing and justifying each other? Does each generate pleasure as well as its own desecration?

That morning, still misty under the sublime hovering pine trees, found us entwined, Clément and me, prisoners of our embrace as of our dilemma. He and I, Gérard and his men, we made up an equation of equal passions, our eyes wide open before the ultimate commitment. Making love. Making war. It was an all-embracing affirmation which we both made that misty morning on that day when there followed the slow descent of our bodies on to the dead pine needles and the frost-covered moss beneath, Clément touching me ever so cautiously because of my boils, the lightness of his touch awakening in me vehement sexual desires never experienced before, never thought possible. Was it me? No! Yes it was, it was an occurrence in the whole of my being so powerful that I became totally overcome by it, bereft of my own identity, of my life before. Wandering into Eros’ territory, drowning weightless in an ocean, then out, then in again, breathless, I yelled and dissolved in a state of pure ecstasy.

Clément seized my head, his myopic eyes scrutinizing me intently, Have I hurt you, my love? I do not remember what I said but I remember putting my arms around his neck to let him know what I felt so mightily at that instant, a fused sensation of hurt and pleasure. He lifted me off the wet ground on which we had made love and put me gently on my feet again, still holding me tight. He tasted my tears as the final rite of our union. He spoke. His precious words resounded in me, yet so vaporous in the air, so fleeting. Would they ever be retrievable as are words in a song?

The acid smell of earth not yet awake filled our lungs. He brushed the pine needles from my wet clothes as Gérard wiped the snow off me. Remember? That was in winter when the earth was dormant. Now it is awake. The birds are singing, the young ones are flying low, close to us, in all directions, not yet practiced enough to take flight in the wide-open space above us. From then on Clément and I met as often as our nomadic lives would permit, but on a constant look-out, never certain of being alone, never sure of what could happen when we turned round, always stealing the precious seconds of privacy by getting close, oh! So close to one another because privacy and peace, space and time were not granted us.

11.

The Ratcatcher from the Mont-Dore.

As Raboullet had predicted, I still do not feel at home in my bothy in spite of the life carried by its mysterious subterranean spring. Each time I enter I am assailed by a stale smell of urine; it gets into my nostrils and makes me retch. I shake myself like a dog, try to regain self-control.

My friend Jean was wrong when he said that rats are afraid of men, meaning humans. Mine, I mean the rats which look like voles, have a special liking for me! Still, they do run away when I walk in. All efforts to render my life sufferable are in vain, they slip between the bits of glass I had hoped would deter them from entering, they cut themselves as they do so - here and there you can see spots of dried blood. I complained bitterly to Jean. He promised he’d do something about it. He did. He built a well-designed garde-manger with his own hands. It is wire-netted, a large drawer completes its rather quaint appearance. I offered to pay. He refused.

“Oh no, Mademoiselle, I made it for you.”

Was he offended by my offer? Jean never ceased to surprise me…One afternoon I was coming back from Savignole more exhausted than usual, not only because I had dragged about twenty kilos of food along from the farm and my boils were erupting like hell, but because I’d seen militiamen on the way. There were four of them, I think, and they were in high spirits as they made their way towards the lake Chambon. They hadn’t seen me and my dog, (my dog! Gérard had finally agreed I could keep him with me because, as he was somewhat reluctant to admit, I had trained him well), but it was imperative that we kept totally motionless, both lying flat on the ground.

Nourse gives a growl but doesn’t bark; one single bark and we are lost. I have only to say “Shshshsh” and his body stiffens like a bow, he becomes threatening and superb. I hold him close to me; we both quiver like the twin prongs of a tuning fork. After some minutes of paralysed waiting, the militiamen disappear.

As I already mentioned, they collaborated with the Gestapo but through Vichy’s orders. They were allowed to kill. They bore their weapons across their chest, hand on the trigger. They were very young and feeling powerful, always smartly dressed in order to give themselves status and confidence. Led by equally young chiefs, with stripes not gained in battle but in crime, they roamed the countryside like hunters after big game, enjoying the healthy life to the full. They were a far more serious threat to the Resistance than the Gendarmerie with its formidable armoury but, fortunately for us, the sound of their engines reached us before they could see us, giving us time to run for cover.

When I got to my bothy I collapsed on my straw bed and covered myself with my fur, shaken and very tired (of living).I closed my eyes. Not for long. I felt something gently massaging my belly. I opened my eyes, saw the sleeve of my coat undulate then stop, then start again. I turned my head, feeling sick, calling Nourse to my rescue. Now, would you believe it? He opened his eyes then shut them again! The traffic of rats had become so familiar to him that the sight of a single rat which has chosen to share the straw with me wasn’t going to deprive him of his sleep. His indifference to my cry for help distressed me. My companion! My faithful friend! He didn’t give a damn!

I decided to move. The rat, as big and as furry as a kitten, slid between my legs as it came out of the padded sleeve, slipped calmly past Nourse: “Sorry to disturb you, but I’ve been disturbed myself ”, at which Nourse merely opened an eye: “Don’t mention it.”

Isolation seized me by the throat and stifled me. I fled from the bothy with my dog, now roused, pursued by imaginary rats. I was Der Widerwilliger Rattenfänger von Hamelin, without his bagpipes, naturally. I arrived at the farmhouse, trying to look composed.

Adèle was alone in the kitchen, getting the evening meal ready while the rest of the family was still in the fields. or in the barn smoking hams. I asked her where Jean was.

“With his flock”, she said, “I think he’s going to stay with them all night. Do you want to speak to him?”

“Yes, Adèle, it’s rather important.”

“Right. You see that hill?” (She pointed it out through the window). “ You go up. You’ll see him from the top. That’s where he sleeps. “I went. The sun, like Jean, would soon go to sleep, too, behind the hill. But now it was high up, blinding me.

I found Jean sitting on the stump of a tree. He had his dog Fiston with him. I begged him to come and see the boss with me without giving him my reasons. He trusted me, got up and asked me to wait a minute. The sun had become a darker ball of fire, turning the whole sky to flame, darkening the wooded slopes which faced away from it shading the fields. with mauve. Mauve! The colour of peace, they say. I found this peace oppressive; I saw it as the prelude to the Apocalypse.

Jean put his sheep in a fold with the help of Fiston. During this operation I had to put Nourse on his lead or there would have been a fight Fiston was used to working alone. Nourse wanted to play at chasing sheep, to frighten them, make them run and then chase eagerly after them without ever hurting them. But he was nevertheless a threat to the baby lambs not yet steady on their legs which could break.

When we reached the farm I fell into an armchair before the fire, too ill to hold a conversation. Jean looked at Adèle. I could see he wanted her desperately to look at him. Instead she ignored him completely. A great pity, I thought.

Raboullet and the others came in shortly afterwards. He was sober, and pleased to see me. Jean’s presence seemed however to surprise him.

He planted himself in front of me and said, tranquilly: “You want something…otherwise the lad wouldn’t be here.” It wasn’t a question. I nodded. “Right. Follow me.”

I got up with difficulty, Raboullet took my arm and dragged me into a room adjoining the kitchen which I’d never seen anyone enter before. There were four genuine Louis XV bergères in pale blue, and a rectangular rosewood table which smelled of wax. I sat down in one of the armchairs, Raboullet sat in another which he drew nearer to me, and nearer still until he could grip my knees in his own.

“You’re ill,” he said, touching my forehead. “Your colonel! I’d willingly kill him with my own hands! All his doing!”

Then he said: “You want Jean again, is that it?”

I nodded, I couldn’t speak because a terrible desire to cry was making a lump in my throat.

Right,” he went on, “I’ll send my boy Antoine to replace him, don’t worry. Only, understand this, lass; it’s only for you that I’m doing it. You can tell them that, your pals and your colonel. Personal message from me!” And he laughed, with a laugh I had heard before and which reminded me of the bad days.

To re-establish contact with him I seized his rough face in my trembling hands. The daylight which had filtered in through the narrow panes of the window was softly edging its way out of the room. All I could see were two shining eyes which lusted after me. Estranged from myself, deprived of all willpower, on the edge of consciousness and of nature, plunged into the darkness and the mystery of my condition, I leaned over his head with its wiry grey hair, its deep wrinkles, I put my lips on his, my tongue in the burning mouth which opened.

12.

Before The Carnage.

End of April.

I have returned to Savignole after a week when Jean took my place with love and devotion. In the whole of this part of my story, what hurts me most is Gérard’s lack of confidence. in this twenty year old shepherd. He thinks he is too simple, too vulnerable were he to be questioned by the militia boys of the neighbourhood, fellows who would be too sure of themselves because they are in uniform and who most certainly knew him. “They would have great sport with him,” says Gérard. I’ve tried in vain to insist that Jean is intelligent and loyal, and that his air of being a simpleton is deceptive, something which in my opinion could even be an advantage under interrogation…It’s no use.

“If the lad is arrested, he’ll talk. It’s written all over his face. He couldn’t stand up to them, that boy.”

So Gérard, that incomparable leader of men, was terribly wrong in his judgment of Jean. I wondered; might it be because he could only trust those he could control, who acted under his authority, who had been trained by him and belonged to him in some way? Jean was outside his control. Jean was his own man. Jean was a peaceful shepherd, on no one’s side, with no ambition, with no desire to be a hero. He had only one aim in life: he did not want to lose his freedom, as Arthur had.

I was maladroit enough to say so to Gérard. “Ha!” he said, “that’s just what I tried to tell you. He’ll do or say anything to keep his freedom. He’s too obsessed by it! It doesn’t go with the spirit of our movement, you must see that.”

I didn’t.

Savignole is without its men and their chief.

Three German convoys came belting along the strategic road. I warned Gérard. He waited for them at the entry to Clermont-Ferrand with his new recruits, volunteers who arrived in plenty, full of self denial, apprentices, former soldiers or students. The former soldiers, all veterans from the Spanish Civil war, had grown impatient at having to wait for victory like employees watching the clock. They had suffered a cruel defeat in Spain, now they wanted to bring things to a head and celebrate victory. As to the younger recruits, you should have seen them before an ambush, stuffing the pockets of their coat or trousers with grenades (recently parachuted in by the Allies), like kids at a party filling their pockets with free sweets.

Early in the morning I kissed them, each in turn, ordering them to come back. It is every time an order from the heart, urgent, useless, desperate. In my haversack I’ve brought the ingredients for a terrific soup, they have to come back to eat that soup. They promise they would. How could it be otherwise? That’s what I tell myself as I peel the potatoes and the vegetables and chop the bacon up in little pieces.

Their mess-tins are hanging on a wall. Clément and I are like those mess-tins as we wait, empty, suspended. My fear for the absent comrades is clinging to my skin like leeches. In the end, I know, it will fall off as leeches do, as my poor Moshka’s leeches did, but now full of my own bad blood. I mock my fear as well as I can, sometimes I sing. At other times I recite English poetry especially by Keats which I haven’t recited since I was at school. At such times Clément takes off his headphones, his face lights up as he watches me declaiming while going about my business; the incongruousness of the tasks amuses him.

* * *

In my high school in Paris we had a fabulous English master - his name was Monsieur Bénassy - who made us read Marlowe, old English which was funny, Shakespeare - which was difficult, Keats and Blake which was divine. We did this every Wednesday morning for a double period before break. Bénassy succeeded in getting us to love the English language, drawing our attention to the rhythm of the blank verse, to its music, conducting us like a choirmaster, with rehearsals when necessary (by that time we knew our lines by heart), while respecting our flights of lyricism without interrupting us until we reached the end of the poem. He used to read himself, in his warm, deep, trained voice. I can still hear him declaiming the “poem of poems” of Keats: On first looking into Chapman’s Homer.

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star’d at the Pacific - and all his men

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Back to reality (that is, to the school bench) we had to translate. “Demolish it for me!” he used to say. We did! With our awful translations. Here is a model, as I remember it vividly to this day:

Alors je me sentais devenir un guetteur du ciel

Qui voit tout à coup se glisser une planète nouvelle

Ou Cortez le magnifque…

“No! No!” Bénassy would shout. “Not ‘magnifque’ - wrong word.

Find another for stout”.

“Le gros Cortez…” a girl suggested, timidly, her dictionary remaining open on her lap, hidden under her desk.

Laughter. Bénassy, raising his arms to Heaven, would say: “Forget the dictionary! Use your imagination! How do you see him,

Cortez? Cortez upon a peak in Darien?”

“Ardent?”

“Yes, that’s better. Not quite right, though. Too emotional. “Statuesque?”

“Nearer. Too ponderous”.

“Gargantuesque?”Uproar. Bénassy looked very angry. “Gargantua’s got nothing to do with Cortez, for heaven’s sake!” “Imposant?”

“Not bad…not bad…any other suggestions?”

“Impérieux?”

“Good,” said Bénassy, relieved, adding “don’t forget…he was a conquistador. ‘impérieux’ fits…for the time being…”

Leaving our Lycée for home, we carried “Stout Cortez” in our satchels. Cortez the imperious, the silent, his eyes fixed on the infinites of the Pacific Ocean. Can’t you see Clément looking out over a silent and terrifying landscape beyond the walls of Savignole. Gérard the feverish, Cortez the imperious…their men looking at each other ‘with a wild surmise’. Clément gets a grip on himself again. London is sending us its personal messages. Across the crackling and the fading we hear:

“The Roman has platonic ideas - we repeat - the Roman has platonic ideas.”

Not for us!

“The waves will immortalize the butterfly - we repeat - four times.”

The Butterfly. Not for us.

The messages continue to be broadcast. Clément adjusts the set with infinite patience and concentration, constantly listening.

“I like omelette flambée - we repeat - twice.”

Omelette flambée, that’s us! Clément gives a start. He translates: munitions to be dropped by parachute on field B (a field of sugar beet which belongs to Raboullet). When?

“That’s the third time we’ve received the same message…still no day or time given. It’s enough to try the patience of Job!”

Clément takes off his spectacles, wipes his eyes, holds out his hand to me and draws me towards him before putting on his spectacles once more, misted over. I can hardly see myself in them. My image is reflected in the two little round circles of glass. It is indistinct as well, Clément’s short-sighted eyes come into focus, shining and wide open, very dark brown, almost black, they come nearer and nearer; my own eyes need see no longer. With my eyes closed I have made my night an accomplice, as I did in my ground floor flat in Clermont-Ferrand when I drew the blinds. Only in Clermont it was oblivion and longing. I called absent hands to my aid. I gave myself up to phantom caresses which were real enough…until I had quietened the anguish of their absence. Panting, empty, absent from my own self, I remained for a long time looking at my false night, spent for nothing.

* * *

The orange glow of the setting sun is slipping behind the mountain, the birds are starting to sing their twilight love songs, night will soon grow heavy upon us. Gérard and his men have not returned - a bad omen.

My soup is getting thicker, it becomes more and more like Madame Raboullet’s soup; she inspired it, after all. A wooden spoon stands up in it. The water slowly evaporates with lumps of overcooked vegetables while the radio transmits Mozart’s symphony 40 in G minor, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham. Its tragic notes of despair, but also of heroic refusal move us to the depths of our being. Clément turns down the volume to lessen its effect, but in vain!

“I must get back to Clairefontaine” I say. Clément says:

“Wait until it’s dark. They might come. They’ll be so pleased to see you”.

Now it’s the Andante. I am overcome by the divine tranquillity of its discordant Minuetto Clément takes my head in his hands, leans his damp forehead against mine, our lips meet, our embrace is full of passion and despair. He goes back to his table, Mozart soon gives way to personal messages, curiously in tune with the tragic and heroic message of the symphony they interrupt.

“A friend is coming tonight” is the second message we are waiting for after the “omelette flambée”. The ‘friend’ should have come by now. He hasn’t. The speaker announces “end of personal messages”. Clément turns off the radio. He says:

“I’m beginning to think that Gérard was right…Our elusive “friend” is obviously too busy…or just bloody-minded.”

“But this is terrible!” I say, feeling utterly outraged by this let-down. I ask: “Does London know about this?”

“They do…I spend my time telling them that if they want us to stop the enemy’s armoured cars fleeing northward they’ve to send us proper ammunition for the operation. Twice they cut us off… probably fed up with my repetitive messages.”

I asked myself then as I ask myself in retrospect: was it because we were accepting young communists who felt ill at ease in a Maquis mainly orientated towards the Catholic Right? Surely, London and Le Général must have known about them and might have felt reluctant to arm young “fanatics”, disciples of Jean-Paul Sartre’s new perception of La Liberté, who might cause trouble after the war if not during. I remember how Clément and Gérard feared for the future of their recruits and how they were proven right. Indeed, many of those named fanatics would die in the last hours of the war either in combat or in concentration camps for a freedom they didn’t live long enough to experience or enjoy.

* * *

Clément and I step outside the bothy, downhearted, asking ourselves the mute burning question: what are we doing here, this starlit April night? Are our itineraries, our apprenticeships all for nothing? Are we to throw out the past, our past bound for ever to our dead lying in their graves under fresh soil?

“I don’t think our comrades will be coming back tonight”, he says. And so it was.

I spent the night (the only one) in Savignole. This is the first time Gérard and his men have been away from base for more than twenty four hours. The Bothy seems emptier than usual. Seated on the bare floor, Clément and I feel indescribably melancholic. Morbid images pass before us, a chill seizes us both. Clément draws nearer to me, caresses my cheek, then takes my hand and says “ Rachel my love I think it is time you knew something about my past, I mean the recent past, just in case…” and he suddenly changes his posture, perhaps to distance himself from the present, in order to turn back a page or two of his life for I could tell it was not going to be easy for him to do so. I am ready to receive a secret weighing heavily on him, yet apprehensive of what he will say, wishing the boys would enter the bothy this instant, that they would sit around the pot of soup I had prepared for them, tired but voluble as they all are after meeting with danger and challenging it once more.

I listen to the rustling of the wind over the twigs and sprigs of our fragile thatched roof. Soothed by it I pledge myself to be worthy of Clément’s surrender to his past.

“You know I am married…well, I am not sure I still am. Jacqueline my wife chose a week prior to our departure from Strasbourg to tell me point- blank that she won’t follow me to Clermont-Ferrand. She talked with her parents, she said, who dissuaded her from leaving with me on the grounds that Alsace is her ancestral home and country (they are the famous wine-growers Berkmann). She ought to show solidarity with her fellow-Alsatians in times such as these…and anyway it would be wrong, they said, for Valéry, our seven year old daughter to be deprived of her grand-parents and teachers…one has no right to traumatise a young child for purely political motives. They said more. Jacqueline said more too. It was awful and it hurt. She ended by making the appalling statement, crimson red in her face and passionate as I had never seen her before: “And don’t forget ME: I am Alsatian… heart and soul … my ancestors were German… my parents speak and think German. I am not going to let them down at this point in their lives…”

I shall never forget her long cold gaze before she left the room. I must tell you, Rachel… the whole edifice of our conjugal life crumbled before my eyes. Her claim to be still German was the last straw. I saw my little daughter Valérie standing there, alive and beautiful amidst the ruins of our marriage. You know, days before we were due to leave she had been packing all her precious possessions neatly in her little rucksack, excited by the prospect of change. I had prepared her for what I called our adventure, but she knew it wasn’t quite like the adventures she had been reading about in fairy stories. She is intelligent. She knew from experience that Strasbourg was being invaded by hostile forces that they seemed to be feeling at home but had no right to, that some people welcomed them with open arms, that others hated the sight of their black boots and their arrogance. I must say that the sight of heavily armed soldiers taking possession of familiar public places had made little Valérie very frightened, particularly when walking back from school. So I told her we would go to a place in the mountains too far for the Invaders to reach. She knew I was lying, of course, but to start with that’s the best I found to say to her.”

A cramp forces me to get up. Clément does the same. He comes close to me again, encircling me with his powerful arms. Neither of us moves for a while, both in desperate need to prolong the comfort of our closeness. Yet between us I could feel that Valérie, all vibrant and loving, had joined us in spirit, that her father’s arms closing on me were closing on her too.

When I open the heavy door of our bothy the brightness of the early morning light tears me apart. I was not ready for it. The effects of a sleepless night spent in waiting and listening to my lover’s sad story blurs my vision. I rub my eyes and want to cry, but material living takes hold of us both. I see Clément preparing to shave and return to the present, and to what he had said to me hardly three months ago: “There’s work to be done”.

I look up. The pine trees so huge above us are as many dead souls. Clément smiles at me. I carry his message of love, if not of hope, as I make my way to Murol.

13.

Murol and Kafka.

At the beginning of spring Gérard wanted me to get myself known in the region as the young lady from Clermont-Ferrand who had come for a holiday in the mountains to see if the purity of the air would cure her boils. The Murol chemist gives me injections prescribed by my doctor in Clermont. I am supposed to be renting Raboullet’s bothy strictly for health reasons. It seems to work. For now. In fact it works so well that Jean has a ready-made reply to the Militia when asked where he is going carrying a whole larder on his back: “I’m taking supplies for the demoiselle who’s ill”. Mind you, he knows how to walk quickly without being seen and avoid an encounter with the Militia. He dodges about like a rabbit. So do I, actually. Early in the morning, or when it is already dark, I set off for Savignole never following a straight line with my load, accompanied by Nourse who lets me know with a growl when he smells the presence of a stranger; I call him to heel and we wait. Problems start when there are no trees to protect us from view. Unfortunately there are many such open spaces in volcanic Auvergne. I weave from copse to copse. Sometimes I sit down at the foot of an oak tree, resting my body against its large trunk, but I feel most at ease when I march through a forest of fir trees; they create a welcoming darkness and you can see through the lattice of their boughs.

April! It is the month when the sap rises everywhere, when rain makes the earth exude strong, intoxicating smells, when Nature speaks of youth and hope. Today I linger under my favourite oak tree (it knows me well by now) to breathe that scent of rebirth, to watch those tiny insects frolicking among the new grass. At my feet the elder bears its tiny white flowers which taste bitter. Further the narcissi - coucou they call them here. Further still scabious dance round the trunks of the hazels. Do you know what they call them in the Auvergne? “drunkard’s nose”. Needless to say they are red. I imagine that a shepherd, English this time but as close to Nature as Jean, would have given the scabious her name: “You’ve got a nose like Dad’s”, amused by his own irreverent comparison. The scabious, taking its nickname very seriously would murmur, like King Midas’ reeds, ‘drunkard’s nose, drunkard’s nose’. A hundred years on, who knows, it will be known as ‘drunk rose’ or something similar without anyone knowing whence it came. Words suffer their tortuous metamorphosis as men’s thoughts and tribulations do, reinventing themselves ad infinitum by children singing nursery rhymes, by lone shepherds like Jean speaking with nature by scribes writing it all down, upstroke downstroke, in books of legends and prayers.

I tear myself from this moment of supreme peace. Lately, meditation has not been granted me. Every morning and evening striding from my bothy to Savignole has been an experience in overcoming both worsening physical pain and fear. I truly envy the comrades who are always together; they can at least pass their fear from one to the other and replay acts of bravura by contagion. I can only pass on my misery to my dog. He responds to it by coming a little closer to me, wagging his tail. I press his body against mine in gratitude and off we go again. Today we set out towards Murol. A weekly chore.

My first port of call is the grocer’s for my monthly sugar ration. The atmosphere is unusually tense. The customers are talking heatedly about the ambush which has taken place in the rue Montlosier in Clermont-Ferrand. They say people have been killed, mostly civilians, how scandalous! It’s all the fault of those terrorist brutes, they don’t care about women and children, do they? It’s not their women, their children! You aren’t safe any more in your own home these days, “pas vrai?”

My hand trembles uncontrollably as I pay. Would they be talking about Gérard and his men? I rush out of the grocer’s, hesitate over going to the chemist. He’s a double-dealer; each time he invites me to step into the backroom for my injection, I expect the Gestapo to arrest me. But the colonel’s orders are to act “normally”, to complain about my aches and pains quite openly, to go and have a drink at the café, to act as if…So I decide to go to the café first, to sit and pull myself together before making my appearance at the chemist’s.

“Mademoiselle Henner! You here?”

I turn round. Maurice de St Pré stops his Mercedes, beside him is a young, elegant blond woman. I keep walking as if I were deaf. He gets out of the car, slams the door, catches up with me and puts his hand on my shoulder. I give a start, turn round and say:

“You! What brings you here?”

“A change of air. You?”

“Same thing.”

“Is that so? I didn’t see you at the hotel. Are you staying there?” “No.”

His stare becomes icy, empty as it was on the 2nd of February. I start walking again in the direction of the café to show that the conversation is at an end. St Pré catches me up:

“Where are you staying then?”

“What’s it to you?”

My question offends him but he forces himself to smile condescendingly.

“Everything interests me and that includes you. Actually, I am here on a mission…mixing business with pleasure!”

“Good luck with your mission!” and I walk away.

“Yea! You must have heard…there was a terrible fracas at Clermont last night! Terrorists attacked a convoy of armoured cars. A fine mess, I can tell you…your friends! It was them!”

I turn round. I say: “What are you getting at?”

“I am the one to ask questions, not you, dear Mademoiselle!” he says savagely. I walk away, he seizes my arm and propels me across the street and up against a lamp post. I tear my arm away from his grip with such force that he stumbles, turns pale, his mouth and cheeks twitching as though he’s about to throw a fit.

“Don’t touch me!” I scream. (Actually I said: “Abat les pattes”).

“Mademoiselle Holier-than-thou!” he yells, “We’ll find them, your terrorist pals…we have information about them…about you…not very clever, are you? Not very clever at all!” He comes closer to me reaching for my arm again. I step back, full of venom.

“Get your dirty paws off me!” I yell loud enough to be heard by the populace now assembled, silent and hostile. I sense this hostility like an incoming foehn blowing over the place.

“How now…how dare you!” He chokes, he’s ready to strike me but he changes his mind: “You’ll pay for this!” he says, “You’ll pay dearly …just you wait! Vengeance is a plate one eats cold!”

His stupid remark makes me burst into hysterics. I spit at him, shout “how original”, turn my back on him by crossing the street. I am shaking irrepressibly. The bitter taste of hate is rising to my mouth. Onlookers stare at me, standing there as judges, merciless and sullen. Meanwhile, St Pré has got back into his car, shouting at the gawpers:

“Watch out you people! She’s a terrorist!”

In this pretty little town in the heart of the Auvergne, it has taken a few minutes for me to become the enemy. Inside the café the customers have drawn back the curtains, driven by an insane curiosity to witness what will happen next. Are they hoping to watch my execution on the grande palace? Probably. Their faces are masks without a soul behind them, staring at me. I go to the café to confront them. The curtains fall back in my face. They speak rejection. They cut me out. The only solution is to retrace my steps and go back up the main street which will take me out of this town possessed…this town gone back to savage and yonder times.

When after the war, I read Kafka’s ‘The Trial’, the Murol scene-on-the Grande-Place became The Trial’s re-enactment. The locality was unchanged, so were the accusers on the Grande Place, so was the persecution sprawling over the bleak décor and far beyond it.

From Murol to Raboullet’s farmhouse takes a good half hour if you have got legs. Mine fail me right now. I call for my dog who had disappeared during the fatal encounter. He had been chasing a bitch on heat otherwise he’d have attacked my attacker. With a sigh of relief I greet his return. I can see he’s had a good time and shows signs of it by making an unusual fuss of me. I regain my composure and leave the accursed place at a normal pace. Out of view I run. I long to see old Raboullet. He’ll be supportive, no doubt. He can be so reassuring and wise when he is sober, which he is most of the time these days, his way of manifesting his love for me. “She’ll end up by realising it” he must be thinking. Yes indeed, I do, my dear friend! You’ve given me proof enough…

Madame Raboullet opens the door, her hands covered in flour; she is in the process of making bread. She quickly goes back to kneading the dough. She makes a sign that Raboullet is not to be spoken to. I catch sight of him sitting in the furthest corner of the kitchen, looking fiendish and spoiling for a fight. I make for the door to exit, but change my mind, turn round and ask: “What’s wrong?”

“Tha’s the bloody cheek to ask!”

“Do you mean the ambush in the rue Montlosier?”

“Aye! yon maquis…made a right mess…killed civilians, kids, women!”

“Surely its not them! They are not irresponsible!” “They were this time!”, he says, “they killed civilians with grenades…your pals, their grenades. They make me sick, d’ye hear? Savignole, out! Finished! I don’t want to have anything to do with that kind of slaughter!” He shouts, he shakes, he’s mad with rage. I don’t know which Saint to ask for protection. Madame kneads her bread mechanically, she pushes the dough, hits it with all the strength she’s got. I wish I could do the same, borrow her single-mindedness, her sham deafness, hit the dough. Instead I am the dough, being jostled and pummelled. Oh why, God of wretchedness, why punish me? I’ve had enough for one day! I refuse to believe that it is Gérard’s doing. This insane ambush is not his style; he is scrupulous, humane, cool. It must have been the others, those from Chambon. Not much of a consolation! The crimes of others become our own in these circumstances, we dig our communal graves, we bury ourselves deeper and deeper in the dung heap of our need for revenge.

I shut the door I had opened to leave and go straight to the old man. I want to make peace with him. He pushes me away saying: “Get off !” I am shattered. I say: “It’s not our men who did it, they never…”

“How d’you know?” he cuts me short.

“I know them! I know the colonel…”

“You make me laugh..(he doesn’t). You’d sell yourself for them!

Your loyalties are all twisted! What about your conscience? What happened to it? You tell me! Killing civilians, is that all right by you, then? All for the cause of what you people call Li-ber-té!

The sacred word sounds dirty in his mouth. I shut my ears with my hands. He notices the gesture and stops the assault.

I sit down. I cut myself from the living. Madame Raboullet comes to sit beside me, patting my hand left inert on the table in hers covered with flour. She says, ever so gently: “There, there, don’t take on”

Raboullet comes out of his corner. I can see, through my tears, that it hurts him to have caused me pain. Why do we torture ourselves like this? He answers my unspoken question by saying, in a gentler tone: “Tha’ll never make me change my mind. If they did it, I’ll chase them away and so quickly that they won’t know what hit them. My word I shall!”

“I’ll leave with them! Right now!”

I said it, meant it.

Raboullet says nothing. This cunning Auvergnat who can see ahead, who thinks of all possibilities, hadn’t thought it would be easier for me to leave him on the spot without the slightest hesitation than abandon my comrades. A shadow passes across his face and he says, with a smile typical of him: “Just ye try!”

This challenge, so touching, prevents me from answering I will! No need for wounding each other any further. He takes a large handkerchief from his pocket and orders, as he would his twins: “Blow your nose!”

Then he goes to get a bottle of good wine and three crystal glasses and we drink to one another, all three of us in total silence, still bruised by the battle of words which has taken place in this large sunlit room where the dough, starting to swell under a spotless white cloth tells there’s something good to come, already brewing in the air.

It is midday. Madame Raboullet charges one of her younger sons to set off with a large basket filled with fresh ham and bread for the labourers working in the fields. She follows him to leave Raboullet and me alone. I go the window. The sowing season has begun. I watch the silhouettes of the workers moving very slowly under the blue April sky, a sky washed by the rains and the ferocious storms of the preceding days. From time to time they are buzzed by aircraft which dive quite low over their heads, but they continue to sow, deaf and indifferent to war’s games. Only the crows are alarmed and fly away, but return just as quickly. I turn from this disturbing scene of war and peace, the heart-rending contrast it offers which reminds me of our long wait in Savignole, of Gérard and his men… of Clément, the passion which tied our lives into a knot…and yet…and yet, the future does not exist. It is ashes.

14.

The Syringe.

I return to Raboullet sitting at the table, staring at me… me all mixed up. He takes my hand in his and says simply, “Tell me about it.” About what? Ah, yes, my fatal encounter… It may not be the incident in Murol that he wants to hear about, but about Savignole…my relations with the boys and their chiefs…he is dying to know. Instead I describe St Pré’s aggression, the sudden hostility shown me by the inhabitants, the pharmacist who was supposed to give me an injection but didn’t since I was prevented from honouring my appointment with him…

“I can’t believe it!” he says. “Didn’t you know that Messire-Jean (an ancient Auvergnat surname) is pally with the Boche? Everybody knows that! Except you!”

“I had no choice!”

“Yes, tha had. Tha should’ve mentioned the injections to me. I’ve done ‘em afore…many of them…to beasts, folk, lasses! So?”

“So…I didn’t know.”

“By going to see that Tartuffe you’ve made yourself a suspect, can’t you see that?”

“Yes, I am sorry.”

“What about t’dog? Did they see you with him?”

“Yes.”

“Bon Dieu! Tha’s in a right mess. From now on, no more Messire-Jean, right?”

“Yes, papa!” I can’t help laughing and so does he.

“Right. Yon injections, papa’s going to do them. Got the phials?”

“Yes.”

“Hand ‘em over.”

“I can inject myself, you know.”

“Oh, aye, what with? A screwdriver?”

Very droll. I tell him that one of our comrades, young Francis, is a diabetic and his syringe is always tucked in his rucksack…Oh God! Is he back? With the others? What am I doing here worrying about my own problems?

The only reply I get to my wretchedness is the sight of self possessed Raboullet opening a drawer in the big dresser and taking out a tin box containing a whole arsenal of medicaments, including syringes and needles beautifully laid out on cotton wool. He puts the box on the table and glances at me sideways to see how I’m taking it. This is my first encounter with Raboullet the medic. He is amazing. I am particularly surprised to see how steady his hand is (though I’ve seen it tremble, that hand!) He holds the syringe and the needle and then, as he is drawing up the liquid from the phial into the syringe, he orders:

“Right! Thi bum!”

The old goat! I hesitate (wouldn’t you?). I say: “Why not my arm?” “It’ll hurt thee…In thi bum it’ll go in like butter. Come on. Trust me.”

I don’t tell him that Messire Jean pricked my arm. And it hurt! I trust my friend. Anyway, you don’t argue with your medicine man. There’s just one thing; as I’m wearing trousers, it’s a bit difficult to show only part of my bum. I watch Raboullet out of the corner of my eye. He is waiting patiently, the syringe pointing in the air, while I get ready to half undress. His calmness is disconcerting, I can feel myself going quite red. It’s silly, I know. What if someone comes in? One of the cowmen, for instance, the one with the black beard who looks at me like a rutting bull looks at a cow…or…or Raboullet’s eldest son, Fernand, whom I’ve seen a little too often prowling round Clairefontaine when I washed myself in my stream?

“Bend over!”

I bend over and whoops! In goes the needle, just like butter, as he said. I haven’t felt a thing. Raboullet goes to disinfect the syringe whilst I dress hurriedly. When he has put everything away, very professionally, I give him a kiss. On the cheek. He prefers my mouth.

I walk back to Savignole by way of Clairefontaine to supply the boys with the last of my winter reserve of apples keeping (so far) very well at the bothy which is dry and dark. I took the precaution to protect them from the rodents by means of a piece of gauze stretched on nails, unaware that rats are extremely resourceful; they made little holes in the gauze to get at my apples and made them rot almost immediately.

15.

The Carnage.

My door is ajar. I go to the little window, guessing immediately who is inside. Gérard comes out (He has a key to the bothy). I exclaim: “Thank God” and throw myself into his arms, so great is my joy at seeing him safe and sound. He replies: “There’s nothing to thank God for!”

So the news is bad. I open the door wide to let in some fresh air. Gérard says: “For heaven’s sake, shut that door!”

Silence. It lasts. I can’t wait any longer:

“Would you like an apple?” I ask stupidly.

“No thank you.” He begins to shake his head from side to side, and seems to be focusing on an invisible person across the room. The air is heavy in here, heavy with words not yet spoken. I’ll have to break the silence once more or I’ll go mad. I say: “What about the comrades?”

“Jean-Claude…Gui…Sébastien…dead… all three of them. They disobeyed my orders.” He rises, walks up and down in the small space of the bothy like a trapped animal all alone with its misery. He goes on: “It had to happen, sooner or later…They weren’t soldiers…just kids with a heart! But they hadn’t learnt to obey…”

Gérard sits down again, wipes his forehead with his handkerchief, takes off his glasses, does not put them on again, retreating into his own shell, a man deeply wounded. I go and fetch two apples from the shelf Jean had made specially for me. I give one to him and bite into my own to encourage him to do the same. He bites into it absentmindedly and says: “At the beginning all went well, the boys were full of spirit.”

“Perhaps too much so?”

“No,” replies Gérard, “at that moment it was fine”

A shadow passes over his green eyes. He takes off his glasses, his gaze resting on the wall opposite. I take his hands in mine; he does not resist. They are long, strong hands. He withdraws his hands to put on his glasses and resumes: “We succeeded in cutting the telegraph wires in the avenue Blatin. You should have seen us! We climbed up like squirrels, right under the noses of the passers-by who thought we were repair men! Some of us were singing, like workers do. Priceless!”

We laugh, a short laugh.

“When we’re finished, we scatter as planned, to meet up again rue d’Anthème where Pierre is waiting for us in his van.” (Pierre is the Maquis van-driver. He is a grocer in Mont-Dore).

“We set off. Half an hour later we assemble, having gone our separate ways as usual. The timing was perfect. Just then a devil of a row breaks out in the rue Montlosier. It is the convoy you’d signalled us! A whole company, parading like after a victory although they were fleeing to the north… in a hurry, I can tell you!. Our only way out was blocked. We entered the van. I order Pierre to stop the motor. Tanks go past. It never seemed to stop; they must have received reinforcements on the way. Well, as you can imagine, with a few grenades in our pockets and in the middle of town there was no question of having a go at them. We had to let them pass.”

Gérard mops his brow which is beaded with sweat. I’ve never seen him in this state before. The bothy is suddenly plunged into darkness, for the sun which till now was slanting in through the barred window, has gone behind the rhomboidal hill facing the bothy. Gérard turns instinctively to see who has thrown the switch, the natural reaction of a town dweller!

“It’s the sun,” I say. “It will return soon.”

I light the candles. Gérard has stopped talking as if he had received a signal for doing so. Gradually our eyes become accustomed to the new source of light which invites us to look at each other more intensely. Yes, it’s me, Rachel, looking at Gérard, a Gérard beaten, weary, looking at Rachel, fearful of the words which are yet to come. He goes on: “We get out of the van. I give the order: “Down!” There we are, flat on the ground, as one man, all six of us! Pierre stays at the wheel, impassive, smoking a cigarette, looking as though he were waiting for his girl friend. Unbelievable, that lad!”

The ghost of a smile as Gérard says that.

“We wait. The din is terrible. Gui starts to move. First he crawls, as if he just wanted to see, then he gets up and runs like a maniac in the direction of the avenue!”

“Oh no!” I am shattered by this suicidal act committed by a boy of eighteen. Gérard continues:

“The others start to move too. I yell “Get down, it’s an order, damn it!” Sébastien suddenly says “Let’s go!” Jean-Claude gets up with him and they run after Gui as if possessed. I grab the leg of one of them, I don’t even know whose it was, he kicks out so violently (I think it was Jean-Claude) that I fall backwards and bang my head against the van. I must have passed out for a split second. Francis helps me to get up, Paul runs after the three to get them back. I join him hoping that they’d stopped at the corner of the street. Nobody there! They’d disappeared!”

“It was folly!” I cry.

“Yes…they were high…I can’t explain it any other way!”

Oh, how badly I miss my piano right now, how I wish I could play one of Chopin’s Preludes to soothe us both!

The table between Gérard and me is my illusionary piano. I play Chopin’s first Prelude on it, humming. Gérard puts his fingers on mine and says: “To think I’ve never heard you play! Maybe…one day…who knows…in Paris…after this wretched war…”

I burst into sobs. Perhaps Gérard feels like crying too, but his are men’s tears reduced in the throat. When he speaks again his voice is rasping and grave:

“Do you want to hear the rest?”

I nod. At that moment the sun reappears, now a bright red ball of fire. I blow out the candles. We can hardly see each other’s downcast faces. He says:

“We stayed there, Francis, Paul and myself, totally numb. It was then that we heard grenades going off, lobbed from a block of flats quite near.”

“Was it our three?”

“It was.”

The lines of Gérard’s face deepen.

“The convoy stops dead. A swarm of Wehrmacht gets out of the vehicles, enters the houses, breaks down doors of the flats. Meanwhile a tank is hit, then another. Two motorbikes explode with their riders blown to pieces. Women and children, panic-stricken run wild, screaming, mothers calling for their kids. Machine-gun fire drowns their cries and groans. We hear “Raus! Raus!” One or two grenades are thrown for good measure… by the boys…falling on the women, young and old, pushed out of the houses by a demented Wehrmacht…”Gérard stops to draw breath:

“The block of flats the grenades came from is emptied. We see the three lifeless bodies being dragged by the feet…abandoned on the pavement…covered in blood…then more dead bodies from the same building are dragged out…women and children screaming…it was an awful carnage, Rachel! Awful!”

Gérard gets up saying to himself: “It was too much …too much…” He opens the door of the bothy which had remained shut, is astonished to see that it is still daylight and shades his eyes with his hands; half of the disappearing red ball of the sun is dazzling him. Not for long. Dusk sets in when we make our way to Savignole.

Gérard and I are drunk with grief, stumbling on rocky obstacles we cannot see. The ground under our feet is moving, vipers run away from us. I feel the imminence of an earthquake. I can feel its rumble. I ask Gérard whether he can sense it coming. With a cynical laugh he answers “We’d be so lucky”.

At Savignole the comrades are asleep on their mattresses, dead beat. Gérard chooses to repair the shirt he tore when he fell. The boys had eaten my soup, except Francis. Since it is dangerous for a diabetic to go without food, Clément and I are shaking him, trying to get him swallow a spoonful of soup. No Hope! He doesn’t react. Gérard gets out of his corner, raises Francis’ head, slaps his cheeks. I try to get some liquid into his mouth which finally opens. His eyes remain tightly shut. Would it be that he won’t or can’t see any more? The horror film which this adolescent of scarcely seventeen has been forced to watch must have shaken down the walls of innocence which still protected him and has, perhaps, driven him to despair. Gérard touches his pulse and says:

“Let him sleep. He’s exhausted.”

16.

After the Carnage.

The incident at Murol triggered a series of events of which the slaughter in the rue Montlosier was only the prelude. It is the fifth of May. We are waiting for the Allies to invade. Clément tells us “It’s any day now.” We are already talking about how we shall organise ourselves to join up with them.

Gérard is reticent on this point; he reminds us that there is work to be done here, that there are railways to sabotage, that there will be prisoners and we ought to be ready to receive them. We still have no ammunition, the “friend” who was supposed to be coming tonight is otherwise engaged, obviously. So, Gérard has decided to go and see colonel Bollard-Dufresne who is in command of the Maquis at Chambon which seems to be getting more than enough supplies to attack military trains. Our two groups will join up. Gérard is going to discuss it tomorrow, with the Chambon group, loath to join with them for reasons he keeps to himself at the moment. Gérard’s trust in the neighbouring Maquis is limited to what he knows about their past actions. So far, the Chambon group has shown more military successes than we have been able to show on our side.

Raboullet did not turn us out of Savignole, although he knew who was responsible for the massacre at Clermont-Ferrand. A few days after these events I saw him making his way towards Savignole, his pipe clenched between his teeth. He wanted to see for himself and make his mind up afterwards. His conscience was still bothering him, but his determination not to lose me worried him just as much. The aim of his visit to our Maquis was to reconcile these contradictory feelings.

There was also another aim: he had to meet Clément. I was at the farmhouse when he set off. He said: “I’m going to see what’s going on in your asylum.” This was his way of showing me that he was in a good mood. I could see, too, that he was sober; I mean, it was obvious that he hadn’t touched a glass of wine since the morning, perhaps even the night before. He set such store by my realising the sacrifice he was making to please me! Sometimes he did get drunk, and always for the same reason: I hadn’t been to see him for several days. What would happen to him when I went for good? I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind. It must be the same for him too.

His first visit to Savignole was followed by a second and a third. He wanted to see the boys again, to drink to the Führer’s downfall. He especially wanted to see Clément and exchange views with him. They got on together without difficulty. I might have known they would, but all the same, when Raboullet told me “Your professor, he’s a fine man”, my heart leapt with joy. He added with a half smile that he and Clément had something in common, and “I don’t mean diplomas, either!”

It meant more: Clément told him his fields had been signalled to the Allies as a dropping ground for ammunitions. Raboullet apparently winced:

“You’ll have to pay me for damage” he said.

“After the Liberation we will” was Clément’s reply with a handshake.

No such luck, however, as fate would have it.

17.

Mister Well-dressed.

I went back to Clermont, as Gérard had insisted I should. Our region of the Dores was getting seriously invaded by the enemy coming from the South, joining up with their Italian contingent, whilst the Gestapo still in situ at various Kommendanturen became more paranoiac and lethal by the hour with their sophisticated radio detectors and the full cooperation they received from the Vichy police force. Gérard feared that my absences from Clermont would make me a suspect in the eyes of the Gestapo at the Kommandantur there.

The same day as Gérard had told me ‘GO’, Flora had telephoned Raboullet; would he mind telling me that a “very well dressed man”, as described by my concierge, had been to my door several times, that he had finally gone to ask the concierge where I was, that she had replied: “Mamzelle Henner is staying at Mont-Dore for her health, her doctor told her that she should go straight away…she’s quite ill, you know, that poor Mamzelle!”

My concierge has her heart in the right place. She knows perfectly well why I went, she never asks questions but when I occasionally return to my flat, she always greets me with “I’m mighty pleased to see you!” which says it all.

I went straight away to see Raboullet. He made a great fuss at the news of my departure: “You’re going into the lion’s den, ma parole!” The poor man, tortured by the idea that I might be arrested in Clermont, suggested that I stay at the farm, sleep in a well-hidden hut he had built himself. Not in the cowshed? He doesn’t think that’s funny. What’s done’s done. No. His place is very snug. I say I’ll think about it.

Meanwhile, our Maquis in Chambon joined up with us. I consult with Gérard before leaving; he says reassuringly “They won’t bother you so long as you’re out in the open”. In other words, if I don’t go back to Clermont they’ll come and get me here, and if they spy on me (and my inseparable dog) I’ll lead them straight to Savignole without being aware of it.

“I doubt that” I say.

“You are being naive and irresponsible” he retorts. In other words, THEY DON’T NEED ME ANY MORE. It is obvious, is it not, that if I stay I’m putting our Maquis in danger? “ What about the food?” I ask meekly.

“We’ll manage. The Chambon group has plenty of it, apparently.”

So there it is. Back to the stable, Rachel - the- packhorse! Back to the stable where you belong.

Jean was at Clairefontaine. He’d stayed outside the bothy although he had a key. He was waiting for me, his sixth sense must have told him he was needed. I was so pleased to see him that I kissed him and thanked him for being there. I shall never know whether he came of his own free will or whether Raboullet sent him. I should like to think that it was his instinct which prompted him. He asked me if he could do anything for me.

“Yes” I said, “Help me to pack up, I’m leaving Clairefontaine for good… All traces of my existence here must be destroyed… See to it, Jean, please.” He helped me to put my things in my rucksack, looked all around and said: “I’ll live here until your return.” Until my return! This uncomplicated visionary believes I shall come back. Perhaps he can see it written somewhere, in the sky, in the history of living things, in the voice of his ancestors he hears on stormy nights, in the sighing of the wind and in echoes. I take leave of my young protector holding him tightly, his arms hanging loosely by his sides like those of a little boy on the verge of crying. This young man does not show how he feels. But I know now. I have come gradually to understand him ever since I lived in the Auvergne among -les ‘Jean-de-la-Montagne’-. Flora came to meet me at the station of Clermont. She has lost weight. That makes two of us! We cling to each other, embracing in the middle of the platform, among soldiers, militiamen and civilians streaming towards the exit and bumping into us. She has decided to sleep at my place, “whether you like it or not!” She leaves me to go and get her nightdress and toothbrush. And her guitar! She tells me that she has submitted her thesis, that she’ll probably pass with honours, and she’s off (she is like that) before I can congratulate her.

I enter my damp, unaired apartment, open the shutters, and look at the empty Cours Sablon as if for the first time. Something has changed around here. What is it? Only Nourse seems at home, he goes straight to my hay box, showing me he is hungry I open the lid; it smells musty. My samovar has lost its lustre. My piano is covered with a pale film of dust.

I blow on it, don’t open it. I return to the window. Reality hits me; the daily reprisals have left their mark on the town. People’s backs are curved, yes, like the trees, like the walls. There are no strollers any more. Mothers hold their children prisoner in a feverish grip as they rush home, not daring to turn their heads. The kids snivel; they don’t understand why maman won’t let them run, pick up pebbles, play with marbles as they used to on the pavement of this beautiful avenue lined with awesome trees. No. Back inside. Quick! No arguing!

Two days have gone. The well-dressed man hasn’t yet made his appearance. He must know I am here; what is he waiting for? Is he letting me stew in my own juice? Is he trying to get supplementary information on me? My meagre stocks of food are used up.

Nourse becomes more excitable. I can see he is beginning to get thinner. I had bought strawberries. I gave him a few. They give him diarrhoea. I decide to go and see the concierge and buy from her a pound of black market pâté de campagne. It is full of lard and smells to high heaven of garlic. Nourse gobbles it up. I am pleased to see him eat thinking I am doing the right thing. I am not! He vomits it all up, goes under the table, heaving with stomach pains. Flora walks in, sees my ailing dog, opens her medicine box and takes his temperature; it is very high. I shall have to take him to the vet. Flora knows of one and gives me his number. I call that number and a young and timid voice answers. He’s not in. I ask “When will he be back?” “Don’t know,” says the voice, “he’s been deported!” What? Sobs at the other end of the line. This is his daughter speaking. Knowing I am a friend of Flora’s she tells me that her mother and father have been arrested -a week ago- and she hasn’t had any news of them. They must have been Jewish. Simonnet. Take away the ‘net’, it leaves Simon. Yes. The Nazi cancer is spreading.

In the mountains none of the country folk suffered from it. Clément, Gérard and Raboullet were the only ones who knew I was Jewish. Some of our comrades guessed it, I think. Furthermore, apart from the Vichy bureaucrats, the population on the whole knew nothing about the existence of the extermination camps; the Resistance press revealing their existence fought to undermine their readers’ passive incredulity, that is until the 11th hour…until the Allies from west and east crossed the Rhine in March l945.

I try to concentrate on my dog’s plight. Through tears of rage I consult the directory again, looking for an Aryan name. I see the name Dubois. Aryan enough, that name! He answers. Appointment this afternoon at three o’clock. Someone rings the bell. Flora says “I’ll go”. It’s the ‘well-dressed’ man. He’s small, wiry, looking like an undertaker. He’s wearing a hat which he keeps on his head, a very small head indeed. I find him comic. He introduces himself; he is French, he is working at the Kommandantur. Not so comic. He removes his hat hastily, as if he had forgotten to take it off in the first place and tells me that ‘they’ are expecting me …at three o’clock. Impossible, I say. Mr Welldressed frowns. I’m making life complicated for him. Now he’s holding his hat in front of his crotch as if I might kick it. I can’t take my eyes off that quivering hat. This petty official from the militia makes me sick to the stomach.

Flora intervenes:”Mademoiselle Henner is not well. She has an appointment with her doctor at three o’clock. I am a doctor, I am here to assist her”. The wretched hat wavers. Mr Welldressed twists it to overcome his trembling. “It would be better not to argue, Mademoiselle Henner. Herr Major von Weidenfeld is expecting you”. I reply: “Pity”. “Please, if you refuse to keep the appointment they’ll come and fetch you. It’s better not, if you want my opinion”. I don’t.” Whereupon I rush to the door, open it wide, push Mr Welldressed outside and say: “Tell your Herr Major Whatshisname that I’ll be there. I’ve no choice, have I?” I slam the door on him with such fury that it bounces open again, and the concierge, who misses nothing starts to shout “Is that you, Mamzelle? and I reply: “Merde!” It was meant for Mr Welldressed but it’s the concierge who gets it.

Furious, she slams her door making such a racket that the obstetrician on the first floor opens his door and shouts: “Can we have some peace in this house?”Flora takes me in her strong arms and says: “I’ll come with you.” I say: “No, you’ll be more use to me elsewhere. “She knows where. She says: “To the vet, is that it?”. “Yes, Flora…if you don’t mind.” Of course she minds. She’s got an hour’s walk there and back with a dog that drags along.

Off she goes with my dog to the vet’s, whilst I…

18.

The Interrogation.

Sitting in the endless corridor at the Kommandantur, I wait to be interrogated. Several chairs have been put in a row. An ageless and tired looking woman waits next to me. She is fidgety. Wehrmacht officers mingle with French civilians, businesslike, without paying the slightest attention to us. More civilians (French lackeys) open doors, close them and open them again, like actors in a bedroom farce. It would be funny, don’t you think, if the Allies had just landed - say this morning - and the personnel at the Kommandantur was too busy getting ready to decamp to find time to indulge in interrogations? I ask myself which road they could possibly take; they all lead to nowhere! Nowhere safe for them, for ever and ever!

Shall I share this thought with my neighbour to cheer her up? Better not. Perhaps she’s the new cook the Gestapo is just going to engage, to replace the one… you know… the one who put arsenic in the flour, ha! ha! A Maquisard, perhaps?

My wishful thoughts are interrupted. Two legs in well-pressed trousers stop in front of me. I don’t look up. No need. I hear “Follow me!” I avoid looking at the sod who’s just spoken. I follow him, my mind a blank. We go along the corridor, up some stairs. St Pré opens a door without knocking (he’s at home here, don’t forget), takes me through offices, pushes me into a waiting room and bolts the door behind me so that I can’t escape, turns his back and knocks on an adjoining door.

Someone says “Entrez”. I am face to face with von Weidenfeld sitting behind a gleaming oak desk on which there are several piles of documents. The Major half rises, bows slightly, holds out his hand (I say!) and with an unforced smile says “Enchanté” (I hadn’t expected so much courtesy) and invites me to sit down in an armchair opposite him. The room is large and furnished with good taste. To my right is a grand piano. The sight of this instrument gives me a swift moment of incredible happiness. I hesitate for a moment before taking the chair offered me, so fascinated am I by the piano’s gracious, gleaming ebony body in repose. I move slightly in order to touch it, telling myself that at least I’ll be able to play Chopin’s funeral march before my execution.

I sit down. Von Weidenfeld utters a few platitudes in impeccable French while St Pré prowls about like a bird of prey, ready to move in for the kill should I show any sign of weakness. I tell myself I’m not going to give him the pleasure. I won’t!

“Mademoiselle Henner,” says von Weidenfeld, “please excuse this appointment at such short notice,” (he doesn’t say “but we are rather in a hurry) “You have been away from Clermont and it was important that I should speak to you.” Pause. I say nothing. He goes on: “The authorities are concerned about your frequent visits to Murol (his information is very good). “You have been there six times…” and he turns towards St Pré who puts his oar in. “Six times since the arrest of the university dissidents in February. Can you explain why?”

“My doctor prescribed fresh air for me. I have a serious attack of boils. If I don’t have mountain air I risk gangrene”.

“Who is your doctor”?

“Dr Berger.”

“A Jew!” says St Pré. Von Weidenfeld frowns. At this stage of the interrogation I cannot make out why he frowns. Is it that he finds the interjection premature? He continues to take notes.

“Where do you stay in Murol?”

“With a farmer I know. I needed also wholesome food…”

“I see.” Pause. Then he asks: “Do you know anything about the guerrillas who infest that region?”

“Yes” I say. “This…this individual…felt obliged to mention their existence to me…something I knew about already…he need not have taken the trouble, really…”

Von Weidenfeld turns to St Pré for an answer.

“I met Mademoiselle Henner by chance at Murol.”

“I see. So this news came as no surprise to you?”

“Not a bit.”

“Can you tell me why that is?”

“Everybody knew it. I didn’t need him to inform me. After all, Monsieur von Weidenfeld, we are living in an occupied country, and you seem to know the French… especially as you speak their language so well!” St Pré is shocked by my familiarity of tone.

“Herr Major, I think this woman here doesn’t realise to whom…” He is cut short by von Weidenfeld’s raised hand and expression of annoyance. (Would it be the Major doesn’t like the turn the interrogation is taking?)

“Mademoiselle Henner, you must have some knowledge, surely, of the crimes committed by the terrorist cells at Murol and of the reprisals that are necessary to protect our troops. These attacks must cease, if only for the safety of your compatriots, you understand?”

“I do.”

Von Weidenfeld clears his throat and says: “My task here is to interrogate all persons listed as suspects. Your name is on the list.” “Ah”. It’s not a question.

At which St Pré sniggers and says:

“You don’t seem surprised!”

I ignore this abject creature and continue to address von Weidenfeld:

“May I know of what I am suspected?”

He consults his dossier and replies: “Your comings and goings, in a region which conceals terrorists are suspect. Your departure from the university at the same time as Professor Vallette who, according to our information, has also become a terrorist…it was unfortunate and not coincidental in our view.”

He looks at me intensely. I don’t flinch. I say: “I do know that Professor Vallette has left the university. As I was writing my thesis under his direction…” St Pré interrupts:

“How very interesting!”

I go on as if I hadn’t heard: “…his departure from the university made mine possible. I didn’t see any point in continuing, in bad health, to work in the laboratory without my supervisor.”

“I see,” says von Weidenfeld, thoughtfully.

“That’s why you went to join him?” says St Pré.

I hold von Weidenfeld’s regard as if deaf in my left ear.

He says: “Answer Monsieur St Pré, if you will.”

“His is a gratuitous comment.. it doesn’t deserve an answer.”

St Pré cracks his fingers. I still don’t look at him. He says: “You are very haughty, Mademoiselle Henner! We have ways of toppling you off your high horse, you know!”

I look him straight in the eyes for the first time and say: “You were quite a bit up on yours a few months ago, remember? At least mine doesn’t harm anyone! Yours hurt many!”

My allusion to the 2nd of February goes home. He turns purple and addresses himself venomously to von Weidenfeld:

“This terrorist is trying to pull the wool over our eyes. She’s done nothing but lie from the start with her fictitious abscesses…She wants to make us sorry for her…that’s an old trick!”

He pronounces these words with almost pathological hatred.

It is then that the height of my wrath is reached: Outwardly icy, inwardly seething, I rise, tear my blouse open and reveal my boils and the deep holes they have left in my skin. It’s not a pretty sight, but the effect on von Weidenfeld is undeniable. On St Pré it has no effect whatsoever. He is the reincarnation of ‘Der Mann ohne Herz’ (one in the Brothers Grimm story).

St Pré applauds: “Well acted, Sarah Bernardt!”

This remark frankly irritates von Weidenfeld who addresses St Pré: “Monsieur de St Pré, would you kindly leave me alone with Mademoiselle Henner?”

St Pré hesitates, but as von Weidenfeld is his superior he gets up to go. He walks slowly towards the door and as he passes me, hisses that villainous cliché “we shall meet again!” to which I reply:

“Allez au diable” He goes out, slamming the door. I burst into tears. It had to happen. My boiling anger had touched the outer layers of my icy calm.

Von Weidenfeld gets up. He is tall, elegant, probably in his late fifties. He picks up a crutch which had fallen to the floor. He limps, for his left leg does the work of two, which explains why he has been put behind this pillar of files. He comes up to me, pats me on the arm, gently covers up my bare shoulder and suggests a glass of cognac. He goes to open a small cupboard, holds out a glass to me after pouring one for himself, and raising his own says ‘A votre santé’ to which I say ‘A la vôtre’. I have climbed off my high horse, there’s no longer any point in staying perched up there. Von Weidenfeld returns painfully to his chair, puts the crutch on his desk and says: “These boils must be very painful!”

“Not so much as this war, Monsieur von Weidenfeld!” “I feel as you do, Mademoiselle Henner. I’ve lost both my sons, you see. Killed in Russia. I was there myself. I lost my leg on the battlefield…and my health, as you can see…”

“I’m very sorry” I whisper, having suddenly no voice left.

“I also lost my wife, just before the outbreak of war. It was better so - at least she died before witnessing the madness of it.”

He goes back to the little cupboard, he must do it often. He fills both our glasses. I don’t touch mine, he drinks his off at one go. I put my glass on his desk, go to the piano and open it. I sit down preparing myself to give this man so deeply scarred by ‘the madness of this war’ the most precious gift I can think of offering him at this moment. I play a Chopin Prelude… for him alone.

He puts his head in his hands and lets the tears flow down his hollow cheeks.

We talked till dusk surprised us both. He told me about his life as a soldier, his setbacks, his lost illusions, his present work - which he hates. Before the war he taught French literature at the University of Tübingen. He had published a book on Mallarmé. With the assistance of cognac, he told me much more. I was amazed to learn that like Gérard, he had met Jean-Paul Sartre before the war. But then, so did many intellectuals at the time. Because of his definitive book on Mallarmé, Sartre wanted to talk with him about the great poet they both loved. Their meeting took place at Sartre’s apartment, rue Bonaparte in the 6th arrondissement. A friendship developed. Weidenfeld used to join Sartre at Le Caveau des Oubliettes, a Jazz club owned by one of Sartre’s many existentialist friends. The musicians, six of them, were natives from the Martinique. Weidenfeld told me of those nights of heavy drinking, of excited, erotic Jazz sessions until the early hours of the morning, of philosophical discourse with Sartre presiding as usual over his admiring women and fervent disciples…the company oblivious to the daylight in the outside world because in the Caveau, daylight never entered.

I listened, won over by the forceful personality of this German scholar. Existentialism, obviously linked to Weidenfeld’s recollections of an exciting intellectual life in Paris on the left bank, took on an existential dimension for me, perhaps, or rather because, he was German and I could sense the deep conflict his military life must have created in his being since the outbreak of the war.

I got up. He couldn’t, although trying to. We shook hands. He said: “Leave Clermont at once…St Pré is out to get you…he can do what he likes in here. When he does so I have no power to intervene!”

When I arrive home I go no further than the entrance hall, a spacious square room where I am waiting for Flora and Nourse. She must have been waiting too at the surgery before the vet could see my dog, and I am beginning to worry. Would Flora risk arrest because of him? A German shepherd?

Can you see the black eagle, its eyrie now threatened, flying over our heads ready to pounce on us, tearing us to pieces with its murderous claws?

The wallpaper which supposedly decorates the wall of the entrance hall is covered with blue and pink flowers, with a border round the ceiling of dancing girls with garlands, holding hands. I notice them for the first time and find them utterly ridiculous. I stare at one of them to indulge in one of my favourite childhood games which consisted of staring, before I went to sleep, at a certain point in the tapestry and repeating my name: Rachel, Rachel, Rachel. I wanted to detach myself from everything I possessed, to forget family, school friends, people who came to the house, the whole of humanity. I wanted to enter an invented existence. As soon as I had achieved this state of isolation, as soon as my name had become “me”, with no ties, no memories, I felt a great dizziness. It was like falling into a deep gulf, dragging my name along with me in the fall. The sexual effect of this descent aroused the whole of my body. It lasted only a fraction of a second and was glorious.

I am no longer eight but twenty. I stare at the dancers on the wall, in vain. The faint light coming from the yard behind my apartment vanishes, in come the characters who have peopled my fervent daily life as a Maquisards. They interact as in a chemical solution to disappear without trace. So, was the whole experiment a failure? A loss without any possible gain?

I am reminded of Professor Baumgartner’s remark in one of his first lecture to first year students; ‘La Chimie est la science du ôte-toi de là que j’ m’y mette’, translated: “Chemistry is the science of: Get out of your patch. Let me in!” and I wonder: have Baumgartner’s torturers precipitated him out of his patch to be then filtered out and thrown away as happens sometimes with unwanted precipitates? Are our Maquisards going to suffer the same fate? Am I? Though, come to think of it, my patch is so small and insignificant that I may be spared. Forgotten in the rush.

19.

The Return.

Flora has come back with Nourse who goes to lie under the table, tail down, tongue hanging out.

“It was your strawberries!” she tells me laconically. It seems to amuse her. She adds: “Do you want to know what the vet said about his mistress?”

“No!” In that case, only a note of warning: if you want to get rid of your dog give him plenty of strawberries!”

Flora my friend, you know I’m not quite myself these days…why torture me? But Flora looks amused, which reassures me somewhat.

“Has the vet given you some medicine?”

Flora puts on an air of mystery and says: “Ah, you just wait…” and she opens a parcel, slowly, and what do I see? Fresh, bright red horsemeat! She must have paid black market prices! I bend down to offer some to Nourse; too ill to get up, he lifts his head, then puts it down on the floor again. His taste for life has gone out of him.

Flora and I go into my room to have some charcoal tea, remember? It has been brewing in my samovar since our arrival. Flora wants to know how I got on at the Kommandantur. I tell her everything. I warn her she is in danger of being arrested as long as she stays with me. I cannot convince her. She leaves, singing rather than saying “I’ll come back in an hour”. I watch till she’s disappeared from sight, then I pack in a hurry and steal out of the apartment like a thief, through the back door which leads to the lock-up-garages. I make my way towards the station with Nourse trailing behind me, panting, looking at me with incomprehension.

When I get to the station I telephone Raboullet:

“I’m coming,” I say.

“Where are you going to sleep?” He sounds nervous. “At Clairefontaine”.

“You can’t.”

“Why?”

“We’re getting visitors. Plenty of them” he says.

“Too bad,” I say, “but please, tell Jean to stay at the bothy. He won’t disturb me. Be sure to tell him!”

“I’ve got a better idea…leave it to me.” And then he says: “I’m pleased, lass. When will you arrive?”

“Ten to eight.”

“Right. I’ll be there.”

I say: “No, please no!” But he has hung up.

At the station I mingle with the crowd until the train is due in case I’ve been followed. I’m holding Nourse on a tight leash, pulling him forward. He is trying to resist.

* * *

20.

A Journey to Hades.

I’m shivering. Hell! I’m running a high temperature. That’s it. I’m ill, my teeth are chattering…if only I can hold out till I get to the Mont Dore! I must sit down or I’ll faint. I make my way to the buffet to get a hot drink. I put my dog on a tight leash, not as much for his sake as for mine.

The train arrives at the platform. I stop in front of the first compartment trying to push Nourse in front of me. He is scared of those high steps which have him falling backwards. Someone behind me pushes us both into the compartment with brute force, swearing. I collapse in an empty seat, have to get up again. It’s taken. The train is overcrowded. Back to standing in the corridor. Nourse lets out a yell; someone stepped on his paw.

It’s a journey to the underworld. I want to die.

Someone helps me to open the large window. I lean out. I want to jump. Nourse holds me back by shifting closer to me.

Help! I walk along a few compartments, begging for a seat. Faces turn the other way. The war has changed humans into animals I tell myself. I try to half sit in the corridor. I am pushed out of the way by ill tempered passengers.

Raboullet is at the station. He helps me down from the train, gets hold of my rucksack. Without him I would have collapsed on the platform. I say: “My dog!”

He says: “He’s here, dont worry. Can you walk? Lean on me… cart’s not far away, I’ll take you home.” I think I said something like “No,don’t…they are after me”.

I am hallucinating. I don’t remember what followed. I had fainted.

I am sleeping in the attic of a building that Raboullet intended to pull down before the war. This attic must have served as a love nest for him. The bed is large and comfortable, there’s a jug and basin, next to the bed a chamber pot of respectable proportion.

I have been delirious for three days. Raboullet has never left me all that time. My temperature has dropped thanks to the large doses of quinine he has administered. He forces me to drink enormous quantities of water. He empties my chamber pot, he applies compresses to me with water he fetches from a well nearby.

He sleeps fully dressed on the large bed beside me, wiping my forehead from time to time. He gets up several times in the night to change my nightshirt. I wear his coarse linen ones which smell of lavender.

On the fourth day,(I think it was), my temperature is down but I am very weak indeed. I ask: “Have you news of Savignole?” He replies: “That can wait.”

I say: “You’re keeping something from me, I know! I can see it on your face.” He says: “Not at all! I haven’t been up to Savignole, so how could I know?”

The liar! Is he trying to spare me? Is the news that bad? I start shouting, I’ve got to know…it’s my right… it’s my people, my comrades, my…

Raboullet calms me down with cold compresses and gentle kisses. I am touched by this man’s happiness. My world has been reduced to the limits of the attic and I’m still too weak to insist with authority on hearing the news from outside it. I can only guess. Raboullet tries to cheer me up; he tells me that his wife is looking after my dog who has recovered and eats like a horse. “Is he missing me?” I ask. “No” is his answer. I don’t believe him.

Is Clément missing me? I dare not ask such a naive question…

Next day Raboullet is away during the daytime. He comes back at dusk, looking serious. He helps me out of bed “to exercise your little paws,” he says. He holds me by the shoulders, then draws me to him. He says softly in my ear: “Gérard is dead. Suicide. The Boche arrested him near Chambon. It seems he slipped something into his mouth and fell dead at their feet. Monsieur Vallette is alone at Savignole with young Francis. The others fled to the south on Monsieur Clément’s orders. He got the personal message he was waiting for. Things work now” he says. “Be strong, lass, it had to end like that!”

Raboullet makes me lie down again, and lies down beside me drying my tears. He waits for me to calm down, holding me tight against him. He wants more. He’s getting it.

I feel a little stronger to-day. I want to join Clément and Francis. Raboullet has gone. When he returns I see he has been drinking. He says: “Monsieur Vallette’s personal message …it says A friend is coming to-night, ten o’clock. Do you know what that means? It means that that friend of his is going to land on my poor sugar beets, just sowed… that ‘s what it means!” He is obviously creating a distraction. I guess something far worse is bothering him. He sits on the edge of the bed, puts his head in his hands, bent double. And here it comes at last: “The militia… they’re everywhere…they’re looking for you…you and your dog… they’ve been to the farmhouse asking questions…with two of the Gestapo…I saw them coming…in the distance…and so…and so…I took my gun…your dog…It’s all over! “ He stumbles against the door and staggers out.

I wish I were dead. But I’ve no cyanide pills.

Raboullet returns in the afternoon. He brings me a vest and a béret which used to belong to Louisette, a poor girl from a hamlet nearby. He explains that she died of tuberculosis about a week ago, that her death has not yet been registered, that she was simple… she used to watch the sheep… she looked something like me. He’s rubbed some oil over the photograph on her identity card. He makes an effort to sound reasonable: “It’s in case tha’s arrested. They are everywhere, like hunters on the watch. Act stupid if they ask questions. Say tha’s lost a sheep, and tha’s looking for it…whimp, don’t talk…she only talked our dialect…”

Raboullet ties a big shawl round my head “to hide thy sweet adorable face”. He is so moving, and I love the softness in him. He takes a flask out of his pocket, looks at me and says “Do you want some to give you heart?”

I shake my head. He drinks, and drinks, solitary as the spectre in Verlaine’s Park, Solitaire et glacé…

It’s nine o’clock.Time for us to part. Raboullet hands me my bundle (I have had to discard my rucksack)…my bundle which carries my story. I look for my dog. He’s gone. Raboullet killed him. Raboullet…he tries to keep pace with me, he cannot quite manage it.”Go!” he says. I make my way to the sugar beet field. I turn round several times…it’s horrible…he staggers…drunk…desperate. He gives up, raises his hand and falls at the foot of a tree. I can’t see him any more. I must go on.

Clément, I am coming to you! I love you!

At the edge of the wood which surrounds the beet field. I wait for Clément and Francis and for the plane which will take us to England. The night is dark, a drizzle falls on Louisette’s rain jacket.

I hear gunshots… coming nearer and nearer …

21.

The Fairground.

The vigour of youth! It is granted… granted by the Almighty, promised… wished for by the mother-to-be in intimate dialogue with her infant not yet born, her infant without as yet a place of his own but with the gifts he already possesses, unknown to her as yet. She will give her infant the strength to bring them forth.

In these dark despairing hours my Mamoshka is beside me, I talk to her. I am sliding back into childishness. I want to live. Yes, I can feel the to-ings and fro-ings of my breath under my ribs, the pulsations of my arteries throbbing under the skin of my wrist, a proof beyond philosophical doubt that I am young and alive. Alive and fighting for my freedom, an abominable freedom willed by me and me alone.

I start to move, expecting to be followed by Clément and Francis. I run, stumble, get up again, turn round, lose sight of Clément - my love - and of Francis. I retrace my steps as best I can in the blackness of the night, rain getting heavy, bullets fired at us incessantly by the militia under their Vichy commander, I can hear him giving orders like a maniac to his men, the lot of them well hidden behind an incline, safe as they’d be at the funfair’s shooting gallery aiming at passing ducks, here shooting at the human ducks made visible by the lugubrious blue light of the flares sent up by young Francis …one …two …three, in succession, changing night into day for a few seconds to indicate our position to a Lysander circling the field. …a fatal mistake!

Clément and Francis fall on the water-logged earth, riddled with bullets. The kids at the funfair miss me - that last damned duck to disappear behind the screen. Meanwhile they reload their rifles. Better luck next time. Ready? Ready! The shooting starts again, ferocious, unremitting. I am condemned to death. I throw myself to the ground, bury my head in the dank earth, breathe into it, swallow some of it. I am desperate to protect my head. I cover it with my hands. The shooting goes on and on till no more ammunition is left. The party’s over. I can hear a voice, joined by others. Orders are given to return to base. I hear the hubbub of excited children slowly receding into the distance, their cries of triumph striking me like poisoned arrows. I lay flat and motionless on the bed of earth.

For how long I was buried I’ll never know. All I know, however, and remember because of recurring nightmares …is me, crawling back to Clément and Francis, hardly lifting my head to find the direction where they fell, bumping against Francis, his head first then his chest with its holes, blood trickling out of flesh so young as I called “Francis, c’est moi! “… abandoning him now in search of Clément. No point in crawling anymore. I get up, I call “Clément!” Like the blind I rely on sensations, pause a while for signs of life. None. I stumble over rising ground. I stretch my arms in desperation for some kind of recognition. I bend. My hands touch Clément’s boots.

I cover his dead body with mine. A groan coming out of me brings the life of our love to a close.

* * *

Something is moving overhead, I can hear the vrooming noise of an engine. It’s the Lysander! Back again, trying once more to land (now that all is quiet on the sugar-beet front) its beacon darting over the patch on which it has chosen to land. It is picking us up as the omelette flambée personal message promised it would.

Us! Oh, good grief ! Should I apologize on behalf of Clément and Francis who couldn’t quite make it to the rendez-vous?

The plane bounces like a ball over the rough uneven ground, tearing the young shoots of beet and sending them into the air with clumps of the good fertile earth which was to nourish them. Then it skids and stops, engine still running, ready for take- off. The door opens, I see the pilot’s earphones and those of the navigator before I can see their faces.

Only a hundred yards separate me from my rescuers. I fall twice on the way, a third time just in front of that open door. The pilot (Flight Lieutenant Brian Marsh, as he introduced himself later) helps me inside. His navigator shakes hands with me and shows me the bench. I throw myself on it, murmur “Thank you …thank you …sorry about this” (I gesture at the mud on my face and Louisette’s soiled jacket, acting as if it were not me, my vanity still alive. Incredible!). Before shutting the door, Brian Marsh asks:

“No-one else …?”

I say: “They’re dead”. My words frighten me. I pray for some continuity, look intently at the two men to blot out the image of death. Brian Marsh turns to the controls showing no emotion. The Lysander takes off after a short, bumpy run on the ground, just missing the line of trees at the edge of the field.

Raboullet, my friend, can you see us taking off ? Can you see me? Are you still sitting at the foot of that tree? Will you take care of Clément and Francis until my return? Please, do not abandon them to an anonymous collector of bodies. Stay sober! Hang on! Do the right thing for them, I beg you! The navigator, David Smythe - my own age we were soon to find out - gives me a cloth to clean up my face and wipe the mud off my garments.

He laughs. He opens a flask of hot tea. We drink out of the flask’s cup, David gets off his seat to put a blanket over my shaking knees. I’m so moved by this that my bag of tears bursts open. David puts an arm round me and whispers words I cannot understand because of the engine noise. Our plane cleaves the low cloud. It lifts slowly, very slowly …

I am clamouring for a miracle. I speculate: what happened was not real, I applaud with the spectators, the dead bodies left lying behind the curtains are now getting up to take their bows before going off to the wings.

The higher the plane is taking us (never high enough for me but, as Brian explains, a Lysander is a small reconnaissance plane meant to fly only at night because it cannot fly at great height) the more painful my shame at having been spared.

David returns to his seat. He’s reading his map to help Brian steer westward towards Brittany and the Channel. Both men are concentrating on the hazards of flying low over hostile territory. I envy such single-mindedness. Me, I experience failure. I am hurt by the discovery of that unutterable failure. I close my eyes, plan ways of redeeming myself, tell myself that the only solution left me is to return. Yes. Tomorrow. Or the next day. I fall asleep.

Nearer the coast the German Ack-ack is trying to shoot us down. David’s light aircraft moves up and down and sideways, I wake in terror. David shouts “ Don’t worry, it’s OK!” We are dancing on the stage in the air, a ballet of terror for me, taking me with it, me unrehearsed…

The ordeal lasts only a few minutes. David turns and grins, gives the V sign. Brian, meanwhile, is talking (in brusque, military fashion) to his plane which responds by giving all it can give, and more. A smell of burnt rubber tells of the strain on the Lysander.

Out of the danger zone it now glides ( as if the engine had been cut but of course hadn’t) Brian invites me to look through the muddy window. “The Channel” he says. Below us the sea gradually takes on its familiar light grey, light green, dark shadows running over its surface with the clouds, small waves bursting to silvery froth. And in the distance, north-east, the white transparent glow of the sun evaporating the early mists while we watch.

“Beautiful, what?” Brian says, “And clear of the Jerries…Bloody luck!”..

The proximity of the English coast, not yet in view, excites all three of us. David sings. Half an hour later, a yell of triumph comes from Brian’s throat, followed by David’s. The rugged coastline of England! Our hands join. We congratulate each other and thank our “ship” by gently knocking our fists against its carcass.

It responds by descending nose first and on full throttle onto an airfield in Bedfordshire.

Epilogue.

The Maurice de St Pré trial.

The excitement in the town was indescribable; at the door of the Palais de Justice people were fighting to gain access to the court. They were demanding that the accused be put to death without trial.

The trial lasted three days. In the dock the torturer St Pré was a shadow of his former self. His hands were covered with crêpe bandages stained with pus and blood. Soldiers of the Libération had made him dig his own grave with his bare hands. During the first two days the victims of the accused gave evidence, called by the prosecution. We saw a procession of young women whose nipples had been burnt with cigarettes, then four men and two women just out of Auschwitz who looked even thinner and emaciated than the accused. They described in a whisper but with unconcealed emotion the physical and moral tortures inflicted on them in the camps - to which many of their comrades and colleagues had succumbed - and the fate of those who perished in the gas chambers. With the exception of Blanchard and Weiss, none of the students arrested during the 2nd of February raid had been spared.

On the third day of the trial the lawyer for the defence could not make himself heard. The noise was such that Monsieur le Juge ordered the court to be cleared. However, the speech revealed three main facts: first, that although he had performed brilliantly in the entrance exam to the military academy of St Cyr, he broke out into cold sweat when ever he had to ride a horse - a reason he had to leave the academy. Second, he enrolled in the Faculty of Law at Clermont. A brilliant student, ‘though depraved, he had gained his degree in Law with honours and begun to study for his doctorate. Third, he had organised a resistance group which was reported in all newspapers.

The defence lawyer recalled the circumstances which led Maurice de St Pré, a member of the Resistance from the beginning of the war, to betray his comrades and the staff. He had been arrested, he said, by the Gestapo in l943 having been denounced by persons unknown. The Gestapo had in its possession a dossier on St Pré that was damning. It stated that as a young member of the Resistance his job was to prepare false papers for staff and students at the University who for sectarian or political reasons had to escape to England or America. Quite a few had managed to leave the country in this way.’ Would Monsieur le Juge consider this fact as a circonstance atténuante asked the defence?

Following which, it was reported, Monsieur le Juge turned into a figure of stone, his lips tightly closed.

The Lawyer for the defence, rose to his feet again and by now shaking like a leaf (he was a very old man and probably retired). The Gestapo decided that Maurice de St Pré would be more useful alive than dead - in view of the physical weakness revealed in his dossier- and began to torture him to make him talk. Unable to endure pain of any sort, he agreed to all their demands. To ensure he would not be tempted to become a double agent (something he intended at first to do said the lawyer) he was given morphine. In a few days he became an addict and the Gestapo were able to count on his total collaboration.

The accused wept.

Maurice de St Pré was shot at dawn by the soldiers of the Libération in front of the grave they had made him dig.

About Marcelle

Marcelle Kellermann, a Parisian, interrupted her studies at the university in Clermont-Ferrand in France's Auvergne in her early twenties and joined the Resistance in 1942.

After the war she married the physicist Walter Kellermann in Manchester with whom she had three children. She completed her studies in England and eventually became a Senior Education Adviser in Yorkshire. She developed new ways of teaching foreign languages and published two books on the subject.

She now lives in Hampstead, London.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank first and foremost my husband Walter for his indefatigable support throughout the writing of this book. Also I would like to express my profound gratitude to my friend Aileen Ireland for her brilliant editing, to my friend Fay Weldon for her invaluable support and advice, to Barbara, Judith and Clive, my children for their blind faith in my endeavours, finally to Matt Campbell and all the wonderful people who contributed so unflinchingly to the birth of my 'Packhorse'.

Images of the Resistance by kind permission of the Imperial War Museum/Google Image Bank.

An M-Y Books eBook

All rights reserved

Copyright © Marcelle Kellermann, 2007

Marcelle Kellermann is hereby identified as author of this work in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This eBook is published by

M-Y Books Ltd

187 Ware Road, Hertford. m-ybooks.co.uk

This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the author's or publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-906658-02-1

Table of Contents

Title Page

Contents

Dedication

1. The Raid.

2. The Bothy.

3. The Long March

4. The First Steps.

5. And More Steps.

6. Encounter with the Bear.

7. Morning Rituals.

8. Bacchus’ Temple.

9. Jean-de-la-Montagne.

10. Love and Chlorophyll.

11. The Ratcatcher from the Mont-Dore.

12. Before The Carnage.

13. Murol and Kafka.

14. The Syringe.

15. The Carnage.

16. After the Carnage.

17. Mister Well-dressed.

18. The Interrogation.

19. The Return.

20. A Journey to Hades.

21. The Fairground.

Epilogue. The Maurice de St Pré trial.

About Marcelle

Acknowledgments

An M-Y Books eBook