Authors: Ian McEwan
‘And then,’ the Maire said, raising his voice, ‘something went wrong. Somebody talked. Two were arrested in Arboras. That was when the Milice came.’
The waiter turned his head politely and spat at the base of a lime tree.
‘They went right along the line, set themselves up
indoors here at the hotel and interrogated the whole village one by one. It makes me proud to say they found nothing, absolutely nothing and they went away. But that was the end of Antoinette, and from then on St Maurice was under suspicion. Suddenly, it was understood that we controlled a route north across the Gorge. We were no longer obscure. They were through here night and day. They recruited informers. Antoinette was dead and it was difficult to start again. The Maquis de Cévennes sent a man down here and there was an argument. We were isolated, that was true, but we were also easy to watch and the Maquis didn’t understand. We have the Causse at our back with no cover. In front, there’s the Gorge, with only a few routes down.
‘But in the end we started up again, and almost immediately, our Docteur Boubal was arrested here. They took him all the way to Lyon. He was tortured, and we think he died before he talked. The day he went, the Gestapo arrived. They came with dogs, huge ugly animals they’d been using in the mountains to track down the Maquis hideaways. That was the story, but I never believed they were tracker dogs. They were guard dogs, not bloodhounds. The Gestapo came with these dogs, requisitioned a house in the centre of the village and stayed for three days. It wasn’t clear what they wanted. They went away, and ten days later they were back. And two weeks after that. They moved around the area, and we never knew when or where they’d turn up next. They made themselves very public with these dogs, poking into everyone’s business. The idea was intimidation, and it worked. Everyone was terrified of these dogs and their handlers. From our point of view, it was difficult to move about at night, with the dogs patrolling around the village. And by this time the Milice informers were firmly in place.’
The Maire emptied his wine in two long pulls and refilled his glass.
‘Then we discovered the real purpose of these dogs, or at least, of one of them.’
‘Hector ...’ Mme Auriac warned. ‘Not this ...’
‘First,’ the Maire said, ‘I must tell you something about Danielle Bertrand ...’
‘Hector,’ Mme Auriac said, ‘The young lady does not wish to hear this story.’
But whatever power she had over the Maire had been lost to the drink.
‘It is not possible to say,’ he announced, ‘that Mme Bertrand was ever popular here.’
‘Thanks to you and your friends,’ Mme Auriac said quietly.
‘She came after the war started and took over a small place she had inherited from her aunt on the edge of the village. She said her husband had been killed near Lille in 1940 and that might or might not have been true.’
Mme Auriac was shaking her head. She was sitting back in her chair with her arms folded.
‘We were suspicious. Perhaps we were wrong ...’
The Maire offered this to Mme Auriac, but she would not look at him. Her disapproval was taking the form of furious silence. ‘But that’s how it is in war,’ he went on, with an open flourish of the hand to suggest that this really would be Mme Auriac’s line, if only she were to speak.
‘A stranger coming to live with us, a woman, and no one knew how she got her money, and no one remembering old Madame Bertrand ever mentioning a niece, and she so aloof, sitting all day in her kitchen with piles of books. Of course we were suspicious. We didn’t like her and that was that. And I say all this because I want you to understand
Madame,’ – this to June – ‘that despite everything I’ve said, I was horrified by the events of April 1944. It was a matter for deep regret ...’
Mme Auriac made a snorting sound. ‘Regret!’
At that moment Monique arrived with a large earthenware
cassole
and for a quarter of an hour attention passed properly to the cassoulet, with statements of appreciation from everyone present, and Mme Auriac, gratified, responding with the story of how she came by an essential ingredient, the preserved goose.
When the meal was finished the Maire resumed. ‘There were three or four of us sitting at this very table one evening after work when we saw Mme Bertrand running up the road towards us. She was in a bad way. Her clothes were torn, her nose was bleeding and she had a cut above her eyebrow. She was shouting, no, she was gibbering, and she ran up here, up those steps, and inside to look for Madame ...’
Mme Auriac said quickly, ‘She had been raped by the Gestapo. Excuse me, Madame,’ and she placed her hand on June’s.
‘That was what we all thought,’ the Maire said.
Mme Auriac raised her voice. ‘And that was correct.’
‘It’s not what we discovered later. Pierre and Henri Sauvy ...’
‘Drunks!’
‘They saw it happen. Excuse me Madame,’ – to June – ‘but they tied Danielle Bertrand over a chair.’
Mme Auriac slapped the table hard. ‘Hector, I’m saying this to you now. I will not have this story told here ...’
But Hector addressed himself to Bernard. ‘It wasn’t the Gestapo who raped her. They used ...’
Mme Auriac was on her feet. ‘You will leave my table now, and never eat or drink here again!’
Hector hesitated, then he shrugged, and he was halfway out of his chair when June asked, ‘They used what? What are you talking about, Monsieur?’
The Maire, who had been so anxious to deliver his story, dithered over this direct question. ‘It’s necessary to understand, Madame ... The Sauvy brothers saw this with their own eyes, through the window ... and we heard later that this also used to happen at the interrogation centres in Lyon and Paris. The simple truth is, an animal can be trained ...’
At last, Mme Auriac exploded. ‘The simple truth? Since I’m the only one here, the only one in this village who knew Danielle, I’ll tell you the simple truth!’
She stood erect, quivering with indignant fury. It was impossible, Bernard remembered thinking, not to believe her. The Maire was still in a half standing position, which gave him a cringing appearance.
‘The simple truth is that the Sauvy brothers are a couple of drunks, and that you and your cronies despised Danielle Bertrand because she was pretty and she lived alone and she didn’t think she owed you or anyone else an explanation. And when this terrible thing happened to her, did you help her against the Gestapo? No, you took their side. You added to her shame with this story, this evil story. All of you, so willing to believe a couple of drunks. It gave you so much pleasure. More humiliation for Danielle. You couldn’t stop talking about it. You drove that poor woman out of the village. But she was worth more than the lot of you, and the shame is on you, all of you, but especially you, Hector, with your position. And this is why I am telling you now. I never want to hear this disgusting story spoken of again. Do you understand? Never again!’
Mme Auriac sat down. By not contesting her account,
the Maire seemed to feel that he had earned the right to do the same. There was a silence while Monique cleared away the dishes.
Then June cleared her throat. ‘And the dogs I saw this morning?’
The Maire spoke quietly. ‘The same, Madame. The Gestapo dogs. You see, it wasn’t long afterwards that everything changed. The allies were landing in Normandy. When they started to break through, the Germans began pulling units up north to fight. This group here was doing nothing useful beyond intimidating the locals, so they were among the first to go. The dogs were left behind and they ran wild. We didn’t think they’d last, but they’ve lived off the sheep. For two years now they’ve been a menace. But don’t you worry, Madame. This afternoon, those two will be shot.’
And with his self-respect restored by his chivalrous promise, the Maire drained his glass again, filled it and raised it. ‘To the peace!’
But quick glances in Mme Auriac’s direction showed her sitting with folded arms, and the response to the Make’s toast was only half-hearted.
After the cognac, the wine and the protracted lunch, the Maire did not manage to despatch a posse of villagers into the gorge that afternoon. Nor had anything happened by the following morning. Bernard was fretful. He was still set on the walk that had been spread before them at the Dolmen de la Prunarède. He wanted to go round to the Maire’s house immediately after breakfast. June however was relieved. She had matters to consider, and a strenuous walk no longer suited her. The homeward tug she had felt before was stronger than ever. Now she had a perfect
rationalisation for it. She made it clear to Bernard that even if she saw the dogs dead at her feet she had no intention of walking down to Navacelle. He blustered, but she knew he understood. And Mme Auriac, who served them herself at breakfast, understood too. She told them of a path ‘doux et beau’ which ran in a southerly direction towards La Vacquerie, then ascended a hill before dropping down off the Causse into the village of Les Salces. Hardly a kilometre further on was St Privat where she had cousins who would make them comfortable that night for the smallest consideration. Then they would have a pleasant day’s walk into Lodève. Simple! She drew a map, wrote out the names and address of her cousins, filled the water bottles, gave them a peach each and came a little way along the road before the exchange of little kisses to the cheek – then an exotic ritual for the English – and a special embrace for June.
The Causse de Larzac between St Maurice and La Vacquerie is indeed gentler than the scrub wilderness further west. I have walked it many times myself. Perhaps it is because the farmsteads, the
mas
, are closer together and their benign influence on the landscape extends the whole way. Perhaps it is the ancient influence of the
polje
, a prehistoric riverbed that runs at right angles to the Gorge. A half-mile stretch of lane, almost a tunnel, of wild rose bushes passes a dew pond in a field which in those days was set aside by an eccentric old lady for donkeys too old to work. It was near here that the young couple lay down in a shady corner and quietly – for who knows who might have come along the lane – re-established the sweet and easy union of two nights before.
They ambled into the village in the late morning. La Vacquerie used to lie on the main coach route from the
Causse to Montpellier before the road was built from Lodève in 1865. Like St Maurice it still has its hotel restaurant, and here Bernard and June sat on chairs on the narrow pavement with their backs to the wall sipping beers and ordering lunch. June was silent again. She wanted to talk about the coloured light she had seen or sensed, but she was certain that Bernard would be dismissive. She also wanted to discuss the Maire’s story, but Bernard had already made clear he did not believe a word of it. A verbal contest was not what she wanted, but silence was inducing a resentment that would grow in the succeeding weeks.
Nearby, where the main road forked, stood an iron cross on a stone base. As the English couple watched, a mason was cutting in half a dozen fresh names. On the far side of the street, in the deep shadow of a doorway, a youngish woman in black was also watching. She was so pale they assumed at first she had some sort of wasting disease. She remained perfectly still, with one hand holding an edge of her headscarf so that it obscured her mouth. The mason seemed embarrassed and kept his back to her while he worked. After a quarter of an hour an old man in blue workman’s clothes came shuffling along in carpet slippers and took her hand without a word and led her away. When the propriéetaire came out he nodded at the other side of the street, at the empty space and murmured, ‘Trois. Mari et deux frères,’ as he set down their salads.
This sombre incident remained with them as they struggled up the hill in the heat, heavy with lunch, towards the Bergerie de Tédenat. They stopped half way up in the shade of a stand of pines before a long stretch of open ground. Bernard was to remember this moment for the rest of his life. As they drank from their water bottles he was struck by the recently concluded war not as a historical,
geopolitical fact but as a multiplicity, a near-infinity of private sorrows, as a boundless grief minutely subdivided without diminishment among individuals who covered the continent like dust, like spores whose separate identities would remain unknown, and whose totality showed more sadness than anyone could ever begin to comprehend; a weight borne in silence by hundreds of thousands, millions, like the woman in black for a husband and two brothers, each grief a particular, intricate, keening love story that might have been otherwise. It seemed as though he had never thought about the war before, not about its cost. He had been so busy with the details of his work, of doing it well, and his widest view had been of war aims, of winning, of statistical deaths, statistical destruction, and of post-war reconstruction. For the first time he sensed the scale of the catastrophe in terms of feeling; all those unique and solitary deaths, all that consequent sorrow, unique and solitary too, which had no place in conferences, headlines, history, and which had quietly retired to houses, kitchens, unshared beds, and anguished memories. This came upon Bernard by a pine tree in the Languedoc in 1946 not as an observation he could share with June but as a deep apprehension, a recognition of a truth that dismayed him into silence and, later, a question: what possible good could come of a Europe covered in this dust, these spores, when forgetting would be inhuman and dangerous, and remembering a constant torture?
June knew Bernard’s description of this moment, but claimed to have no memory of the woman in black that was actually her own. When I walked through La Vacquerie in 1989 on my way to the dolmen I found that the base of the monument was inscribed with Latin quotations. There were no names of the war dead.
By the time they reached the top the mood had lightened
again. They had a fine view back towards the gorge eight miles away and they could trace their morning’s walk as though on a map. It was here that they began to get lost. Mme Auriac’s sketch did not make it clear how soon they had to leave the track that runs past the Bergerie de Tédenat. They turned off too soon, drawn down one of the enticing paths made by hunters that interlace across a heath of thyme and lavender. June and Bernard were not troubled. Scattered over the landscape were outcrops of dolomitic rock carved by the weather into towers and broken arches, and the impression was of walking through the ruins of an ancient village overrun by a delightful garden. They wandered happily in what they thought was the right direction for more than an hour. They were supposed to be looking for a wide sandy track off which they would find the path that made the steep, descent under the Pas de l’Azé and down into Les Salces. Even with the best of maps it would have been hard to find.