Lisette's List (26 page)

The domestic alternated with the tragic. Kooritzah stopped laying altogether. Knowing I could not bring myself to eat her, Louise told me that I should give her away for food. That hit me hard. Kooritzah had become a friend. Sadly, I did as Louise directed, and pictured Maurice enjoying Louise’s
fricassée Arlésienne
with onions, garlic, eggplant, and white wine.

The
Roussillonnais
remained nervous. Although Maurice had the gasogene conversion now, he drove only to Apt, which was overrun with German soldiers garrisoned there. With Louise’s help, I chose a new hen and named her Kooritzah Deux, not knowing the Russian word for two.

In disbelief, we stumbled upon a market table piled high with yarn that had somehow been shipped to Apt in a relief package from Switzerland. We bought all of it, and quickly handed it out to the women of Roussillon who Louise knew could knit. By working feverishly night and day, we were able to send two cartons of socks to the Croix Rouge in Paris to be delivered to prisoner of war camps in France.

O
N 19
A
UGUST
, the BBC reported that the French
Résistance
had attacked the German garrison in Paris. Maurice reached for his wine tumbler to raise a toast and knocked it over. Louise called him clumsy, and Mélanie shushed her, straining to hear.

On 25 August, just ten days after the landings in Provence, the BBC triumphantly announced the Liberation of Paris. We were delirious with joy. Our City of Light would sparkle again. I hoped with all the hope in my heart that Maxime knew. Back home, on
her knees, Geneviève prayed with me for the release of prisoners, as Sainte Geneviève had done fourteen centuries earlier.

But that was not the end of the war. Fighting continued in the south and in the German-held Atlantic seaports. All the terrain east of Paris—Alsace, Lorraine, and the Rhine—had to be recaptured, and the German offensive in Belgium had to be put down. The BBC called that the Battle of the Bulge, and the miserable fighting in the snow lasted for more than a month. Every week, the Allies pushed on toward Germany, and on 29 April 1945, the United States Army liberated a prison camp called Dachau. The next day, we heard later, Adolf Hitler committed suicide. The day after that, Aimé discovered that Mayor and Madame Pinatel had fled in the night.

For a week, the disbelief, the tension, the excitement, the relief crackled the air. By universal agreement of a crowd in place de la Mairie, Aimé Bonhomme was declared the new mayor. He and Maurice and Monsieur Beckett had a sense that a big announcement would come soon. Louise, Mélanie, and I did not stray far from the café those days, but Odette was running back and forth between the café and her daughter’s house, checking to see if Sandrine was in labor yet.

Louise and I were sitting in place de la Mairie when Monsieur Voisin cranked up the volume on the radio at the same moment that Aimé leapt down the steps of the
mairie
and shouted through a homemade megaphone, “The war is over! France has been liberated!
Europe
has been liberated! Today, the eighth of May 1945, is and ever shall be Victory in Europe Day! Victory in Europe Day! Victory in Europe Day!”

People burst out of their houses with their arms raised, beating on pots and pans, crying out,
“Grâce à Dieu! Grâce à Dieu!”
through streams of tears. Samuel Beckett ran into the square shouting, “Right has prevailed!” Surrounded by a delirious, cheering crowd, he grabbed my hand and we followed Aimé through the village just to hear him shout again and again, “The war has ended! The war has ended!” and watch him tear down the swastika flags
on the Gothic arch. A young boy who would remember his act for the rest of his life touched a lit match to them. Known enemies hugged and kissed and danced in the streets. Women tossed packets of sugar they had been hoarding, and men poured the last of their marc for refugees.

Maurice drove through the village sounding the horn on his bus and shouting, “It’s over! It’s over!” He scrambled out and hugged Louise, kissed her loudly and swung her around, and then me, bending me backward and kissing me on both cheeks, right and left and right and left, laughing and whirling me around so that my feet lifted off the ground, until I squealed and laughed and squealed again.

Odette came running into the street shouting, “It’s a boy! They’ve named him Théo Charles Franklin Silvestre. De Gaulle and Roosevelt will live in Roussillon! Théo’s life will begin in peace!”

The first sounds the babe must have heard were shouts of joy and the church bell ringing with all its wild might, as if to welcome him. The bells from Gordes and Apt and Saint-Saturnin-lès-Apt and Bonnieux answered ours in wild jubilation.

The constable was nowhere to be seen.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

THE UNSPEAKABLE

1945

I
RECEIVED A LETTER, BUT IT WAS MERE TRICKERY SINCE IT WAS
my own to Maxime, now bearing the stamp
RETURNED UNDELIVERABLE
. It sent me into a panic. What was the meaning behind
UNDELIVERABLE
? I couldn’t help but think the unthinkable. An accident in the mine. Or some revengeful atrocity in the last days of the war. I wrote a hasty letter of inquiry to Monsieur le Chef d’État-Major de l’Armée begging him for information. Sandrine searched through a postal directory for an address.

Contrary to my own anxiety, the general mood in Roussillon was buoyant, as people stood on cliff edges watching long lines of defeated German troops trudging east in the valley below. Some gun-happy
Résistance maquisards
took potshots at them from the woods below the cliffs, injuring a few, which I thought was unconscionable when I heard about it in the café. Apparently a single unarmed Frenchman thought so too. He was reported to have stepped forward between the line of unarmed retreating soldiers and the armed
maquisards
and ordered them to desist. At least that was what they said in the café. Most people speculated that it had been Aimé Bonhomme, but he denied it. I thought it must have been Samuel Beckett.

Despite the end of the war, I could not shake the gloom generated by the return of my letter. I made a batch of chèvre and took it to Madame Bonnelly, whom I found carrying a wooden crate of filled wine bottles on her ample hip as if it were a feather pillow. I showed her the envelope.

“Puh! Don’t let that scare you,
minette
.” She pulled out from a stack of papers an envelope of her own, with the same stamp, and slapped it against her palm. That ruled out an accident in the mine.

“I imagine the camps are in chaos,” she said. “They probably closed some of them and moved their prisoners just ahead of the Allied advance. Don’t worry your pretty head under that Parisian haircut. It will all get resolved.”

Her explanation washed me clean of fear.

She crooked her index finger around the neck of a bottle to lift it out of the crate. “Take this with you. To celebrate the peace. And if my husband does not come home before the
vendange
, come pick for me again.”

S
O
I
WAITED, AND
went to the post office every day and held baby Théo in my arms while Sandrine sorted letters. I often saw stout, stouthearted Madame Bonnelly there, who came for the same reason. “Any news?” she always asked, and when I shook my head, she would say with amazing cheer, as though someone had poured steel down her backbone, “Any day now.”

Finally that day came, and I read,

4 JUNE 1945

Chère Lisette
,

Please forgive me for letting such a long time pass without writing to you. Stalag VI-J was closed at the end of 1944, and we were held at another camp for weeks or months
.

Obeying your wishes, I did not count them. There was no arrangement for writing letters there
.

Now I am in Paris, our beloved Paris
. Elle existe encore!
Can you imagine my flood of emotions when I stepped out of the train and saw her with my own eyes? I was processed for readmission at Gare d’Orsay, where a portrait of Charles de Gaulle welcomed us, along with young women handing out French bread rolls. Just think—I was housed for repatriation and recuperation at Hôtel Lutetia. Those elegant salons defaced with swastikas and Nazi slogans on the walls soured my happiness but did not destroy it. I was free!

I was only one among thousands of prisoners housed there, some of them dazed, pitiful shells of men who had survived camps worse than mine. The repatriation bureau did what they could for us, but since my condition was not considered critical, I was released quickly. Now I am staying at my mother’s house, where she is filling me with more food than my shrunken stomach can accommodate, doting on me, and fluttering around like a nervous sparrow. She cannot grasp that I am stupefied by the vast difference between her beautiful apartment and the barracks. I miss my prison mates terrifically and wonder where they are living
.

I will come to see you when I am able. Please don’t worry if it isn’t soon
.

Très bien affectueusement
,

Max
                                    

I showed the letter to Louise and Maurice, and when Madame Bonnelly told me her husband was home, I showed her too. She gave me a rib-cracking hug. “See? I told you so.”

During the next months, fourteen other prisoners of war came back to Roussillon. Mayor Bonhomme posted a notice on the
mairie
when each one arrived, so I was very busy milking Geneviève twice a day, making chèvre as well as ricotta from the whey, using lemon to curdle it, and delivering it to Madame Bonnelly and fourteen other homes as “welcome home” gifts. What a joy that was!

I
N
N
OVEMBER, A SOFT
knock at the door sounded like a child’s knock. I felt no fear. Maybe it was Mimi. I opened the door to a skeletal stranger, still as a statue.

Maxime.

Sudden weakness made me sway. I took in his presence in electric silence. Neither of us was able to utter a word. For the moment, just his breathing sufficed. Our mutual restraint rendered us motionless, tumbling me with relief and joy.

“Come inside.”

“I wasn’t sure that you would want to associate with a prisoner of war. France needs heroes, not specters of defeat.” The voice I recognized, but his tone was apologetic.

“Every man who fought is a hero, Maxime.”

He stepped across the threshold. “Even those who fought for only a day?”

“You fought for five years.”

He pursed his lips at that. I must have touched a nerve.

Behind the closed door we fell into each other’s arms, and held on and on, our beating hearts pressing hard against each other’s, breathy sounds escaping from our lips, wetting each other’s faces with our tears.

“Let me look at you,” he murmured, and we drew back.

Then, in a soft voice, “You are beautiful, Lisette.”

The former full contours of his face had shrunken to reveal jutting bones thinly covered by yellowish skin, the tendons in his neck protruding as though an inner layer of flesh had dissolved. His eyes, now deeply set, as if trying to retreat from what he had witnessed, carried the prison camp in them.

“So are you. Beautiful.”

“Short hair. Chic. Like Kiki. I like it.”

With Max standing in the center of the room, the house, which had been so empty for five years, sprang to life. How ill-prepared I was to offer him comfort with only a wooden settee and ladderback chairs. Quickly I brought downstairs all the quilts and bed pillows and spread them out for him to sit wherever he wanted. Jittery with joy, I prepared a
café crème
, such as it was, an omelette with chèvre, boiled carrots, and bread. He watched my every move.

“The cream and cheese are from my goat, Geneviève. Patron saint and protectress of Paris.”

He smiled at this, and I saw that one of his front teeth was chipped to a point and two others next to it were missing. Despite that, his smile gave me hope for his well-being.

We stumbled over our commonplace words—
I’m happy to see you; I’m happy you’re home
—silly, safe understatements. While he ate, so slowly, it was enough just to absorb each other’s being.

With equal slowness, our fingers stole across the space between us on the table, a hairsbreadth apart for an age before we felt the tender tickle of each other’s skin. The knobs of his knuckles rose like mountain peaks. A nasty mauve scar on the back of his hand had been stitched together inexpertly. I let my index finger graze over it. Without flinching, he offered it to me as evidence of something.