A Prince Without a Kingdom (44 page)

“My animals can’t live on thin air. I’m short of hay.”

“Lieutenant Engel is informing you that everybody for fifty kilometers around heard at least one engine on Christmas Eve,” explained the interpreter, “because three planes were giving chase to a fourth for an hour. And he would also like you to know that he does not sell hay.”

“The lieutenant is quite right about the noise on Christmas Eve,” agreed Labache, sounding too friendly. “I have twelve horses and none of them got a wink of sleep that night. As for the hay, we’ll talk about it later. He’s not wrong when he says it’s been a problem for me this winter. I see that Monsieur knows all about horses. . . .”

She gave a sly smile while twiddling with her red hair.

“I am providing you with this information with no thought of personal gain. Far be it from me to waste anyone’s time by telling you about my problems with my neighbor who has a ton of hay but refuses to sell me any of it, because such stories won’t interest you. And I wouldn’t dream of mentioning what kind of people he hosts in secret, at what time, what sort of company he keeps, and all the rest of it. . . . No. I don’t get involved in politics, me.”

The soldier was of two minds about translating these overtures. His superior slowly smoothed his jacket collar in order to remain calm.

“I wouldn’t have come all the way here today to talk to you about that, or about the airplanes at Christmas,” Madame Labache went on. “I’m busy enough as it is. And it’s a good forty-five minutes’ walk from my house, if you take the shortcut. Or an hour, if you walk around the woods and the marsh over by La Crapaudière.”

“Madame,” said the translator, “I would advise you to cut —”

“I am cutting, young man, and straight to the point. But you keep interrupting me. I’m an honest woman, trying to help out as best she can!”

The wooden floor creaked beneath the weight of the soldiers. They had occupied this forest hut since the day after Christmas in order to direct the hunt for the pilot and the plane that had disappeared. The searches hadn’t yielded anything. A large part of this vast forest was flooded, which complicated their task. There was no trace of either the aviator or the plane.

They’d had high hopes for this woman horse-rearer. But not anymore. Then, just as they were about to send her packing, she paused for dramatic effect before announcing:

“Gentlemen, I am here to tell you about the airplane engine I heard last night.”

“What?”

“Translate!” she ordered.

The interpreter was pressed back into action. And the lieutenant finally stopped rocking on the table.

“Last night?” queried the interpreter.

“Yes, monsieur,” confirmed Madame Labache, stroking her handbag as if it were a little rabbit.

“A big plane?”

“No.”

“Madame,” said the young soldier, leaning over her, “during the past three days, there have been cars patrolling the paths by the felling area at night.”

“I am perfectly well aware of that.”

“You have been confused by those engines,” he whispered. “The plane fell on Christmas Eve. . . .”

The lieutenant uttered one word in German:
“
Beweis.”

“Evidence,” translated his interpreter.

She shrugged.

“In that case, you’d better come back with me, and I’ll show you.”

“So you’ve got an airplane in your bedroom, Madame Labache?” said Lieutenant Engel slowly, with a smile on his lips.

“Not exactly, Lieutenant. In my barn.”

The silence thickened as she scratched her spurs on the floor. The lieutenant sighed. He had no confidence in this woman, but that was probably a good sign. Ever since he had been in the role of Occupier, he knew that he should only count on the most underhanded of individuals. Everything that he hated in life — bitterness, jealousy, cowardice — he now had to seek out and cultivate on a daily basis, among those who might further his cause.

“The airplane landed opposite my house,” Madame Labache told the soldiers in the hut. “I had switched off all the lights, so they probably thought the farm was abandoned. The horses were tethered under the trees. And in the morning, I found the airplane hidden in the barn.”

“What about the pilot?”

“No pilot.”

The lieutenant issued a few orders. Someone should be sent. A soldier was duly assigned. Madame Labache wanted to talk about her neighbor’s hay again but realized this wasn’t the moment. The lieutenant was already hunched over his maps.

And so she left with her soldier, her boots, and her handbag.

The lieutenant remained with his men. He pointed to the eastern part of the zone on the map, and the thirty hectares of enclosed marsh area in the middle of the woods. The answer surely lay there.

Tentatively, Vango entered the house. The smell was disgusting, but the farm seemed to be inhabited. A yellow straw mattress had been left on the floor in front of the fireplace. Clothes were drying on a line and there was a bowl, some hard bread, a hammer, and a leather whip on a stone table.

Vango touched the whip. He also found two new horseshoes and some nails. A horse. That’s what could save him.

He went outside again and noticed a barn a bit farther off. Many of the roof tiles had fallen into the grass. Perhaps he would find a horse there. The place where Paul’s plane must have crashed was still several kilometers away. There could be no better means of exploring the forest and the marsh than on horseback.

As Vango was approaching the barn, the sound of whinnying diverted his attention toward the woods that started a hundred meters behind him. He turned back and ran toward the forest edge, where he saw some horses tethered to a tree. Perhaps twelve of them, bunched up like grapes. How long had they been there? They looked famished. Vango went over to one of them and stared at it.

He wanted to untether the horse, but the rope had been obsessively tied to the trunk. Without any kind of pocketknife, it took him several minutes to undo the cluster of knots. A dangerous maniac must have spent hours tying up the horses. The final knot gave way.

All the other horses turned toward the happy chosen one. Vango led it over to the grass, where he let it graze. The horse’s companions were becoming restless. Vango spoke softly into its ears and climbed onto its back. Sated by the rich grass, the animal didn’t put up a fight. Vango had managed to assemble a makeshift bridle from the rope. The horse responded perfectly, as if rediscovering old reflexes. They were ready to go.

But on seeing the doleful looks from the other horses, Vango made first for the barn. Surely he would find an ax or a sickle in there to give the herd its freedom. His horse was enjoying galloping again. The barn door looked closed, but some of the boarding had fallen down on one side, and Vango made for the opening. Horse and rider crouched at the same moment to squeeze through. When they stood up again, there in the half-light of the barn, Vango saw an airplane.

It was a small white biplane with its two sets of wings, one on top of the other. It didn’t look like a fighter plane, or the Whitley two-engine planes out of which soldiers could jump at an altitude of two hundred meters, but Vango couldn’t help thinking of Paul’s plane. How, given that it had been struck down in midflight, could it be here, intact, with its angel’s wings? And what about Paul? Where had he gone? Slowly, Vango circled the vehicle. The other horses were whinnying in the distance.

Vango was on the verge of conceding that this plane wasn’t the one he was looking for when, painted against a white background near the propeller, he noticed the following small red letters:

EVERLAND B. H.

A door creaked behind him. The horse turned around.

“Halt!”

A short red-haired woman was staring at him with a glint in her eye. Next to her, a German soldier aimed his submachine gun at Vango.

Three kilometers away, Paul’s body was floating in the marsh water of what appeared to be a flooded forest. A single piece of metal was visible on the surface, a little farther off. It was all that remained of the plane.

From time to time, a few bubbles rose up out of the silt.

Paul’s fingers moved on the surface of the water. He was wiggling them ever so slightly to feel what strength was left in his hands.

He had ejected himself from his seat, on Christmas Eve, a split second before the wings caught fire. But the blast from the explosion had prevented his parachute from opening properly. It was a horrific fall. Crashing into a tree, he had broken both legs as he rebounded from branch to branch. The marsh water had saved his life.

The first night, he managed to tie himself to a trunk, using his parachute cords to keep his head above the water. In the morning, he had to make a choice. It was raining, and his legs hurt with every movement, but thanks to the shallowness of the marsh, he could crawl about. So Paul set off, not knowing where he was going, with only his arms to propel him, covering a few dozen meters each hour. He was eking out the three portions of survival rations he had in his parachute. At night, he still slept a little, tied to a branch. He suffered from the cold as soon as he stopped moving. So as not to poison himself with the marsh water, he stretched his waxed cape across some branches. He waited and collected the rain for his drinking water.

On the morning of the twenty-eighth of December, Paul reached a spot where the forest gave way to dry land, and he thought that he was saved. But when he tried to stand on the ground, he realized the game was up. With his broken legs, it was impossible to move about on dry land. He was turning into a fish. He fell back into the water and felt his last ration in his pocket. He knew that the hunger and the cold would kill him soon.

He thought of the provisions still inside his plane. And so he set off again, backward this time, crawling once more through the black water. He no longer recognized the shredded skin hanging off his hands. It took him a day and a night to find the wreck. Most of it had been engulfed in the mud as a result of the impact. The airplane was no longer visible from the sky. Paul managed to open the boxes. He wept as he ate and drank, lying on the vehicle’s flank.

He had fallen asleep there and now, floating on the water, he didn’t know what to do next. The Germans would explore the marsh. In the end, they would find this wreck. But he would no longer be alive. He stared up at the trees above him.

Paul remembered a trip he had made to France as a child, with his mother, who was pregnant at the time. In the middle of winter, they had eaten lunch together by the banks of a river. There was a war going on back then as well, but they were far away from the front. They tried in vain to catch fish with their hands between the rocks, then ran to warm their fingers over the car engine. He still dreamed about that warmth and his mother’s hands next to his. When they reached the villages in the evening, the hoteliers — on seeing a woman who was eight months pregnant braking abruptly in front of the door and holding out the keys to an imaginary valet — would run to wake up the midwives. Paul took his place behind the steering wheel and moved the car. He was eight years old.

His father met them in Paris on Christmas morning. But Ethel waited a while longer inside her mother. She wanted to be born in Scotland.

These were Paul’s first memories of France. And he now knew what his last memories would look like: a canopy of branches in a white sky.

He heard a noise in the water a few meters away from him. They were coming. This time, he didn’t have the strength to escape. He stayed where he was, and felt he was slowly disintegrating like a water lily into the water.

The noise was getting closer. Small waves rippled up to his cheeks. Someone was running through the water now toward him. He felt himself being lifted up, and he let out a cry.

It was Ethel.

He hadn’t seen that smile for a long time. It belonged to an Ethel from another era. It didn’t even occur to him to wonder where she had come from, or which marsh creature had made her rise up out of the silt. She was there, a will-o’-the-wisp emerging from the water.

As for Ethel, she could see only one thing: her brother’s face telling her he was alive. She could feel the pressure of his hand on her arm. From far away, she had caught sight of him motionless. She had assumed that she had arrived too late. Throughout this adventure, she knew that she had defied common sense: entering France at impossible altitudes, lack of oxygen, navigating at random in a plane that looked more like a paper toy. Ethel was equipped with nothing more than the two sets of numbers telegraphed by Charlot from the base in Cambridge, which she had traveled to collect before returning to Everland. Two sets of numbers: the coordinates of Paul’s wreck. She had told the colonel that she wanted to have them engraved on her parents’ headstone. Touched by this romantic gesture, he had even given her a map of the operation rolled up in a tube.

“This will be for your children, one day.”

But she hadn’t waited to have children before looking at the map. From the outset, she was haunted by a single image, which was of a butterfly crossing a battlefield, twirling between the bombs and the barbed wire. To succeed, you had to be a butterfly rather than a tank or a foot soldier.

“I can’t walk,” said Paul, shivering.

“I’ll help you.”

She tried to get him to stand up, but he stopped.

“No. Forgive me.”

He looked at her sorrowfully, ashamed of his lack of strength. She didn’t force him. She was smiling because he was still alive. They stayed like that for several minutes, without moving.

And then Ethel said, “A horse.”

Vango was sitting against the wooden slats of the barn wall, still under threat from the soldier with his weapon. The horse’s rope was tied to the propeller. The madwoman with red hair and silver spurs had disappeared almost an hour ago, in order to fetch German backup from the forest hut. The reinforcements wouldn’t be long now.

The soldier stared at Vango, convinced that this was the pilot they were looking for. Vango had addressed him in German, denying everything and claiming that he was a Parisian student who pilfered from the countryside over the holidays. But the soldier reckoned that Vango would only speak such good German if he were English. He arrived at this conclusion while dangerously teasing the trigger on his gun.