Amandine (31 page)

The men speak neither between themselves nor to us three who are settled in a wide, deep well behind the front cab, a makeshift sort of space with a folded-back canvas roof. A hiding place? What had I agreed to this time? I feel nothing of fear though and, from the beatific gaze she throws at me, less does Amandine. Wedged between us, she looks from Lily to me with a closed-mouth smile, trying to contain glee. Lily hugs her repeatedly and, now and then and without looking at me, stretches her arm behind Amandine’s shoulders to touch mine. I close my eyes, nod to the Fates, invite them to have their way with us for the next few hours. By afternoon we’ll have arrived in this place, this village near Vichy, and I shall resume my sway. We shall thank them for the passage, offer to pay them, be on our way. That is exactly what we’ll do.

“If we’re stopped at any point, please don’t offer information. Answer questions if they are asked. But nothing more. Do you remember the name of the village where we’re going?” Lily’s soft, urgent voice wakes me.

“I don’t know that you’ve told me its name.”

“Lagny. Not on the
boche
map. A group of houses, a church, a few shops. If you are asked, we are going to Lagny. You are cousins. Displaced, in need. That’s all.”

“Yes, Lagny.”

It’s nearly nine when the driver turns onto a broken, rutted road and soon after turns again, onto a dirt path that leads into a vineyard. He stops, and the two men descend, walk a bit down among the vines, their somber voices resounding in a monotone chant to where we sit under a stand of chestnuts. From the canvas bag she wears like a bandolier over her sweater and trousers, Lily takes a small cheese wrapped in what looks like a roughly torn length of old sheet.

“Our
bleu
. Bleu d’Auvergne. Cow’s milk. We have no sheep.”

From the pocket of her trousers, she takes a knife, unfolds it, carves thin, crumbling slices from the wheel, lays the cheese on chestnut
leaves, and passes it to us. Two long thin brown pears she peels with finesse, holds out a slice to each of us from the point of her knife, licks the juices from the blade before slicing again. Repeats the rite until the pears are finished. Another round of cheese. Stowing the remains of the cheese, the knife, she rises, gathering the fruit peelings and stamping them into the earth around the trees. She walks between two rows of vines, parts the wide, succulent green leaves at a certain point to find the right bunch of grapes. An expert snap, and she returns, a fat mass of dark blue Gamay dangling in her hand. From her open palm, we pluck them from the stems, crush the grapes between our teeth, the sweet, potent juice filling our mouths. One grape at a time under the chestnut trees, sitting on the stubble and the stones of the Auvergne.

“This next part of the ride will be a bit different. Off the roads. A little rough. Are we ready?” she wants to know.

As she slips the canvas bag into place over her chest, I see the outline of the Valkryie’s pistol under her sweater.

Raised up in a small forest of pines and chestnuts, it is tall and wide and made of stone. Eight chimneys bolt like pillars above the thin slate tiles and give the roof the air of a ruined temple. Faded wine red wooden shutters ornament the three rows of windows, and over the great black door, with its iron handles and knockers, “La Châtaigneraie 1628” is engraved, barely readable, upon what remains of a marble cornice. The Chestnut Grove. Our things deposited on the flags of the terrace, the men having driven off, we stand behind Lily as she enters her family home.

On either side of a long, dark hallway, sweaters, coats, hats of all sizes and conditions are hung on iron hooks while sabots, soft boots, shoes are lined up on shelves below them. I am preparing my exit lines while Amandine is running ahead, her hand in Lily’s.

“Everyone will be working. Harvesting, picking. I’ll show you where you can …”

To her back I say, “Lily, listen, I appreciate your kindness in having given us passage, but I’ve decided that …”

She opens the hall door onto a wood-smoke-scented salon with a hearth great enough to roast an elk.

“Is this a house?” Amandine asks.

“A rather ancient one. Do you like it?”

The high walls of the salon are papered in purple and mustard stripes, and edged in a wide border of red roses and dark green leaves. The colors startle before they please. Like a long, narrow spit of land in a wavy red sea of waxed tiles, a table is flanked by twenty mismatched chairs. Sofas are arranged about the hearth. Yellow-flowered porcelain tureens and pewter pitchers sit on starched lace doilies along the lengths of two wooden dressers and, in the depths of armoires with no doors, there are stone crocks covered in brown paper and tied with string and bottles and jars of fruits and vegetables, preserved. In a corner, baskets of walnuts and chestnuts spill out over a large round table, and dried mushrooms and berries and small, silver-skinned onions are festooned everywhere. As though twilight was shaken down upon it all, there is something both of gloom and of radiance. Lyrical, haunting.

I shall not say how lovely the room is or sit or even stop to talk
, I tell myself.
We must go now, or perhaps we never will
.

“As I was saying—”

“Why don’t you stay the night and get a fresh start in the morning? Some of the people you’ll meet might be able to help you with your route. They’ll know more than we do about the state of things farther north. And someone will offer passage if they can. Or you could remain.”

Standing behind Lily, Amandine looks at me, says nothing aloud.

“Thank you. We’ll stay. For a night. Thank you very much.”

Lily shows Amandine and me to a cold room on the third floor. Feather beds upon pale blue wooden frames. A hearth with a fire laid, a wood basket, an armoire painted with a country wedding scene. The small rippling panes of a curtainless window give an undersea luster to the treetops and a steeple and the heaped-up roofs of the village,
and we sit on the ledge, pressing our foreheads to the glass. We rest.

We are eleven at table that first evening. Nine women, two girls: Amandine and a five-year-old named Claude with small gray eyes and skin the color of caramel just before it burns. And Magdalen, of course. Taller and with a sculpted face perhaps more beautiful than her daughter’s, she is pale and blond as Lily is dark. From one of the tureens with the yellow flowers, she ladles soup into shallow bowls already laid with roasted bread.

“Pumpkin and onion and wild sage,” Magdalen says and breaks into a round, heavy loaf of dark bread, giving the piece to the woman beside her, then passing the loaf itself to her. The woman then breaks off a piece of the bread and passes it and the loaf to the woman beside her. Around the table. Pewter pitchers of water and wine.

When the soup is finished, Magdalen carries in a tray on which there is what looks like a length of broom handle, a great mound of white cheese, a large pat of butter, a few cloves of garlic still in their purple skins, a small pewter pitcher, and a stone basin filled with boiled potatoes, steaming. With Claude’s gentle humming as accompaniment, Magdalen begins pounding at the potatoes, heaving in cheese and pounding again, some butter, then milk from the pitcher, a good whack with the wooden thing upon the garlic, and she slips the cloves from their skins, flings them into the basin. More pounding, more cheese, more butter, three fat pinches of sea salt from the
salière
on the table, more pounding still until she begins to raise the mass from the basin with the wooden thing, pulling it up higher and higher into thick white strings, beating it back down, pulling it up again, and then finally walking about the table to serve it in our bread-wiped bowls.

“Aligoté,”
she tells me before I can ask her.

She stays seated at the table while the others begin to clear, gestures for me to put down the plates I’ve taken up, to sit next to her. “Bring your glass, Solange.”

She pours wine into it and into hers. Looks at me and smiles. “Lily will take Amandine and Claude up to your room, light the fire. Whenever Lily is home, Claude begs to sleep in her room. I imagine there will be all sorts of strategies about who will sleep where tonight. Are you well?”

“Oh, yes. We’re well. And thank you for—”

Shaking her head, fluttering the back of her hand in dismissal, she says, “We grow food for the Résistance. Wheat for bread. Our herds are a good size. We have a small dairy. Bread and cheese. It’s what they need most. We grow vegetables and corn. Sugar beet. We keep something for us. My husband, like many of the men who fought in the Great War, never stopped. And since this all began, this latest … it’s a question of conscience. He must fight. He cannot accept defeat. He’s that kind of French. We had this house, the land, he found a way for us to fight with these. Empty bellies can’t think, can’t rest, can’t believe. Instead they begin to believe what the fuller-bellied enemy tells them. Hunger versus satiety, that’s really what it comes down to. War. Empty bellies make traitors. We feed people. There is a prison in Clermont-Ferrand. When we’re not working in the fields or the dairy, we work in a kitchen near the prison. The Vichy fiends have granted us permission to bring one hot meal a day to the prisoners. Their duty to feed them they’d somehow overlooked. Death by starvation is far uglier than a bullet in the skull. So we cook soup, make parcels, buy soap and wool on the black market, knit socks and scarves. We bury the dead. We do what Vichy doesn’t do.”

We have moved into the kitchen, where three of the women work without a single wasted motion, sweeping, scrubbing pots, placing dishes and cups and cutlery in their proper places. Magdalen has seated me at the table, where she sets about whacking apart four or five small yellow pumpkins, places the pieces on a metal tray.

“They’ll cook overnight in the embers. Soup again tomorrow. We eat what’s ripe, and right now that means cabbage and pumpkin. We save the preserved things to bring to the prison. Or to take with us should we have to flee …”

She shakes her head, laughs, wipes her hands—small, long-fingered—down
the length of her apron, removes a guttering candle from a pewter holder, lights a fresh one with its flame. Sits down again.

“Lily and Jacques are almost never here. They have other work.”

“Lily has told me. They take people out of the country.”

“If you decide—”

“I won’t.”

“Stay as long as you’d like. There’s work here and on the farm. Choose which would suit you. Amandine can have her lessons with Claude. A classroom in the church. We have a teacher. Three hours in the morning. Sometimes the children sleep in the
colombier
, though I think it’s already too cold for that. Three more children are arriving tomorrow. No adults. They’re Jews. Claude’s mother was Dutch, her father Algerian. Both naturalized French citizens. Jews. All the laws broke down early for the Jews. No rights. They gave Claude over to … They put her in the line when she was three. A few months past three. Before the occupation. They knew what was coming. When they left her, they also left her history. Photos and letters, keepsakes. Most parents who leave their children want to believe it will be only for a while, that they shall somehow be spared, reunited. Two wooden boxes locked in a valise, they were sent on to an orphanage in Switzerland, the place where she is expected. Her history will be waiting for her.”

“No word from Claude’s parents?”

“There is word. Both missing. We’ll get her to Switzerland. It wants time. Is that what happened to Amandine?”

I look at her, shake my head.

“It’s only that you look nothing alike and she calls you Solange and …”

“You’re right, she’s not my daughter. But her parents, they, their absence from her life has been—”

“I need no explanation. I’d only wondered about—”

“I’ve told Lily and your husband, Amandine is not Jewish.”

“I’ll not ask you again.”

“But you must allow me to thank you, you and Lily, your husband, for helping us to get so much closer to home.”

“Will you stay for a while?”

“You can imagine how tempted I am. A paradise here. On the road we never know, from day to day—”

“Nor do I know. Once inside the Résistance, the only way out is death. It’s a mantra we all share. Life expectancy, six weeks. Not so true for people who do what we do up here, but quite true for the others. Those ‘in the field.’ When I see my husband or Lily, I never know if it will be the last time. Will he or she or one of the others, will they be stopped on the road with one of our ‘guests’? Interrogation, torture, execution. Not such a paradise. Oh, inside these walls, the fire and the soup … But beyond them …”

She fills the silence by rinsing the pumpkin seeds under the tap in the sink, pulling them from the mass of strings and pulp. She dries them in a kitchen cloth, spreads them out in a large skillet, sets it aside. She dries her hands on her apron again, leans against the sink, folds her arms across her chest.

I want to talk longer with this Magdalen but fear she is ready to send me off upstairs.

“Lily. She’s so young.”

“Nineteen. Most of the women in this business are young. Their men gone, husbands, lovers, fathers, brothers, they either take up with the
boche
or fight. Whatever way they can. I think solitude has much to do with it. We, we elders, it’s we who have brought down the evils. Made victims of the young. They’re lost trying to wander the paths we’ve laid. To feel less lost, they submit to the romance of danger. The thrill. They deliver packages, they hide arms. They set up transmitters, shelter Jews, arrange for false documents. Lily has a white velvet hat with a white, blowsy rose in the front and the good black suit I was married in twenty years ago and suede sandals with heels thin as blades and, when she dresses in this costume, sits across from some schnapps-bloated
boche
in Vichy, she begets wonders. The prison program in Clermont-Ferrand is hers. Then, in boots and hunting jacket and with a Luger in her belt, she walks children from safe house to safe house across the mountains. There are legions like her. I and the mothers of all of them, we should have given our daughters the same name.
We should have called them France. The youngest ones are the students from the universities in the bigger cities, the ones who, tottering about on their high heels, rendezvous with the
boche
, glean names and dates, times and places. Those who are a bit older usually operate more rurally. Crack shots, warrior saints. France’s secret weapons. Those are the ones you’ll meet up with as you proceed.”