Authors: Susan Vreeland
T
HREE DAYS LATER
, B
ERNARD
B
LANC
was at my door, instantly thrusting his foot forward onto the doorsill. His ostentatious boots were an offense to me, and probably to the farmers of Roussillon as well. He brandished a handful of envelopes and read the penciled words on each one in a voice that scraped like sandpaper. “Onions, carrots, beets, cauliflower, green beans, tomatoes, lettuce, celery.” Shaking each envelope to taunt me with the rattle of seeds, he kept checking my expression for a covetous reaction. I refused to respond.
“You see now what I can do for you?”
“I can manage on my own.”
“How long would it have taken you to walk the countryside asking at each farm? I know the farms, the crops, the farmers’ wives, and I have a lorry.”
A pause while he looked me over head to foot.
“You would be back in Paris now if it weren’t for the paintings, wouldn’t you?” His tone had softened.
I was annoyed that Roussillon was so small that everyone knew everyone else’s business.
“You must be lonely living here, a pretty woman like you alone, especially in the long evenings.” Now his arrogance slid into a leer. “What do you think about?”
“I am not lonely.”
“I venture to say you would like some company.”
“No. I prefer solitude.”
He guffawed at my lie. “Maybe someday you will change your mind. Maybe you will come around to wanting a new life, a better life than a widow’s stale grief.”
He grabbed me around the waist and pulled me to him so that our bodies pressed against each other, shoulders to knees. I pushed back with all my strength, and he let go, except for my hand, which he held so tightly I couldn’t pull it away. He turned it palm up, placed the envelopes in it, and firmly closed my fingers over them.
“I’m glad to see that you wisely wish to follow Pétain’s doctrine
that tilling the land is patriotic. The only thing more patriotic is that he urges us to use our bodies more than our minds. Children, Lisette. Sons to join the Legion. It would be a new life for you. I am a patient man. Up to a point.”
Hubris oozed from him like seeping oil.
“Did you like the chicken?”
Despite the unsavory origin of that savory chicken, his civility in the face of his inconsistent kindness, this time in providing seeds, forced me against my conscience to say yes.
He straightened his shoulders, removed his foot from the sill, nodded, and left, smug in his perception of victory.
He was a fool to think he could win me by force, by intimidation, or by gifts. I turned from the door, my thoughts swinging from anger to mild annoyance to grudging gratitude for the seeds.
I went down into the root cellar to look for garden tools. They lay on top of a spread of burlap sacks. From the edge I had seen only lengths of wood, so I hadn’t taken apart the pile. Now I did. I shrieked. Pascal’s frames! I dropped to my knees. No paintings, just empty frames, one inside the other, and disassembled stretchers.
“Oh, André, why didn’t you keep the paintings in the frames? It would have been so much easier. Why did you make me go through this agony?”
My vow to forgive him shriveled. No. My grief was not stale. It erupted fresh and toothed every night. I stayed on my knees, unable to move from this spot, staring at the frames and burlap that he had handled. I rubbed the scratchy, rank-smelling cloth against my cheek.
Maybe there was a reason for this framing of frames, the smaller ones placed inside the largest one. Maybe telling me that the paintings were under the woodpile was a ruse, not to trick me but to mislead anyone I told. Maybe beneath the frames …
I found a shovel and dug in the hard earth without making much progress. Surely he would not have buried them too deeply. I unearthed the whole area. Nothing. If the paintings had been wrapped
against dampness or placed between boards, this would have been a good hiding place, far safer than the large communal woodpile at place de l’Abbé Avon. In truth, they could be under either one. I lifted off all the frames and stretchers, not in order to bring the paintings into the house, just to be assured that they were there.
Nothing. Not a single canvas.
Light waned in the courtyard. All I had to show for myself was a filthy dress, mud-caked shoes, broken fingernails, and utter disappointment. Tomorrow, I promised myself, I would dig a garden, which would at least be digging with a purpose.
I
FOUND THAT TURNING
earth for a garden wasn’t any easier than digging in the cellar. The ground hadn’t been broken up since Pascal’s parents had cultivated it. After a week of hard labor and a good long rain, I planted the seeds in rows and commanded, “Grow your roots!
Poussez! Poussez!
Push through the earth and stand up for yourselves!”
Louise told me that Geneviève’s dung would make good fertilizer. Now when I milked her, I chanted, “Poop, Geneviève, poop!”
Cherry picking was hard work too, but the occasional plundered cherry revived me—satin-smooth on my tongue, the dark purple meat sun-warmed, sweet, and juicy. I liked thinking of the people of Roussillon having this rare pleasure, until Émile said that all cherries grown in Provence had been requisitioned by the Vichy government to grace German officers’ tables. After hearing that, I ate my fill of them when Émile wasn’t looking.
By August, I had gathered my first harvest from the ladies of my garden: Thomassine and her sisters, the tomato plants, whose small green marbles had swollen into plump red hearts; Claudine and her row of amply endowed sisters, the cauliflowers, billowing like white thunderclouds; Céleste and her siblings, tall and stately, trying to befriend the sky by stretching their pale green stalks and leafy crowns; Lutèce and her court, standing erect like queens unfurling
their ruffled green robes; Beatrice and her friends, who kept their secrets below the surface in purple balls with root tails; Caroline and her maidens, so shy they grew their orange roots downward while shaking their green frizz in the joy of clean air; Bérénice and her cousins, who hung their pendulous green tubes until they were ready for a
salade niçoise;
Ondine and her next of kin, who could spice up my
daube
with pungency, even shedding their brown paperlike dresses, and then, peeled and peeled and peeled, they would give themselves completely to me until there would be nothing left of them. Oh, the glory of growth! All day I thought my thanks for the plenitude of my garden. Begrudgingly, I recognized Bernard as having been the source of it.
In November, I flung a rope around the lower branches of the almond tree and yanked on it sharply to shake loose the nuts, then hauled a burlap sack of them to Jérôme Cachin to sell in his
épicerie
. A week later I dragged them home. No one had bought any. Nuts were a luxury. I might as well give them away.
I had thought it would be easier to be bereaved in Paris, where there were diversions, where I could order soup in a café and not be stared at. Now, without André, would the city be enough? Might I long for my patch of garden and the daily rhythm of milking Geneviève? Would I miss Kooritzah’s proud clucking when she laid an egg? Would I miss Odette and Louise and Maurice?
The approach of winter of 1941 came upon us with a vengeance, one mistral after another. Although I dragged my mattress downstairs to sleep by the stove, I still could not keep the house warm. André’s woodpile was shrinking, so I limited myself to three sticks a night, then two, then one, just enough to steam vegetables. When my own woodpile was gone, there would be the frames.
No. I refused.
But there was something I could sacrifice. It might bring in a little money. The thought grieved me. It was so final, a severing. They had been Pascal’s before André had used them. I tried to ignore it, but the thought beat at my temples. All right then, I would
do it, but André’s hammer I would save to rehang the paintings, and the mallet to split the almonds.
This was the second time I had visited the cemetery since Pascal had died. The first wrenching time was when I had come to tell Pascal that his grandson had been killed. This time would not be as hard. I knelt and placed my palms on the Roux tomb.
“Hello, Papa. I am still here. I miss you dreadfully, and André too. The two most important people to me, and you’re both beyond my reach. I would gladly give up all the paintings to have one of you back for a day.
“I met a painter in Gordes. I did something nice for him and his wife—brought them chèvre and eggs.” In a whisper, I said, “He
gave
me a painting. I thought you would like to know.
“I’ve come to ask your forgiveness. This winter promises to be exceptionally cold. I’ve tried to provide everything for myself, but I have to buy wood or I’ll freeze. Do you remember the furniture repair shop in Avignon where André worked? When Maurice finally gets the parts he needs to allow his bus to run on gasogene, he could take me there. Maybe the man …” I didn’t even want to voice the words. “I know they were yours. André sharpened them before he left, out of respect for you, I think. You’ll forgive me, won’t you? I love you, Papa. Never forget that.
“You told me to let the paintings care for me. I have a fine vegetable garden now just like Louise has, and a goat, like the girl had in the Pissarro painting, so I am doing what you said. I’m living in at least this painting. It’s a new life for me. In spite of my Paris dream, I seem to be growing roots here.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
SHAME
1941–43
L
OUISE AND
O
DETTE AND
I
SAT IN OUR COATS, ENJOYING A
new kind of coffee made from sweetbriar while we waited in place de la Mairie for the five o’clock news, both from Radio Vichy, which came through too loud, and the BBC, which was scratchy with interference. We had been occupying the same table in the café most nights to hear the events of the world.
That night, December 8, both reports announced a surprise attack by Japanese bombers on a harbor in Hawaii the day before, damaging eight United States Navy battleships. We were stupefied. On the other side of the globe, Hawaii seemed exotic to us.
“Is this the same war?” Odette remarked.
“This will surely bring the Americans into it,” Louise said.
And in a few days, it did. Our hopes lifted.
J
UST BEFORE
C
HRISTMAS
, Constable Blanc knocked on my door and announced that he had a truckload of wood for me and a wheelbarrow.
“I know you’ve been cold. You can’t tell me otherwise. These are
the last of the split logs and bundles of kindling from the community woodpile.”
He was already unloading them into the wheelbarrow.
“How do you know I don’t have a big stack of firewood in the courtyard?”
“I can see it from the promontory across the ravine.”
“You make it too much your business to know my business.”
“Do you want me to drive off without leaving you a stick? I will. Just say the word, Lisette.”
“Madame Roux.”
“Lisette.”
Without my telling him, he wheeled the load around the corner to my side gate. How did he know there was a gate there? It was overgrown with passionflower and honeysuckle vines. He stacked the wood where André had stacked it, loaded the wheelbarrow four more times, brushed off his pant legs, and wiped off his boots with a folded white handkerchief.
I admitted my gratitude only to myself, feeling it shameful for me to accept such a generous gift.
“Christmas is only a week away. You wouldn’t like to spend it alone, now, would you? I can bring a nice roast capon. More than enough for just the two of us.”
“No, thank you, Constable. I already have plans.”
“I have a little gift for you that you will love. Something you can’t get here.”
“That’s kind of you, but please keep it. I have no gift to give in return.”
“Oh yes you do, if only you knew.”
He grasped my shoulders and forced his kiss upon my clenched lips, which I’m sure injured his pride more than gave him pleasure because he let me push him away, and then he left.
Late on Christmas Eve, when I came home from Louise and Maurice’s house, I found his gift wrapped in newspaper in my lavender
pot. Leaving it there was crafty of him. It prevented me from refusing it. Silk stockings! Unbelievable. He certainly had connections.
In the wrapping there was a note.
Chère Lisette
,
The time will come when you will see what I can do for you
.
My patience is wearing as thin as these stockings
.
Joyeux Noël
,
Bernard
I lit the stove with a precious piece of kindling and watched the precious silk shrink from the precious flame and burn itself out.
A
YEAR CREPT BY
on bare hands and knees. Geneviève was giving less milk, so Louise bred her with her buck. Months later, Geneviève’s belly and teats grew large and her udder firm. One morning I came out to see two baby goats suckling hungrily. When they were large enough, after three months, I gave them to Louise and Maurice. One by one Louise roasted them,
chevreau provençal
style, with garlic and herbs. Toughening myself, I ate two hearty meals at their house. I was becoming reconciled to the ways of the country.
Bernard brought me more seeds. I called him by his first name in my mind now, but I would never be so informal as to say that to his face. He was polite, so I gave him carrots from my root cellar. The vegetable garden and Bernard’s delivery of wood saved me from dire want, and my friends saved me from unbearable loneliness.
The Allies invaded North Africa in November 1942. That seemed close enough to mean something good to us. Unfortunately, it also meant that now the south of France was an occupied territory. German soldiers were garrisoned in Apt and elsewhere, and long lines of German tanks on transport trucks and armaments
lorries rumbled through the countryside, heading south. A couple of times, they exploded, thanks to the
Résistance
.