An Owl's Whisper (8 page)

“Certainly, uncle.” Eva lowered her eyes. “But consider this. What I’m doing for the cause is important. And so near to Lefebvre and her bridge, St. Sébastien is the perfect place for me. You’ve said that from the start. Things are getting bad so fast—without your help how long can the school survive? For the sake of our work, I’m asking you to do what you can to save it.”

Henri sat back in the seat and groomed his moustache with his thumb. After a moment he said, “I’ll see what I can do. Now let’s see your notebook.” He took the volume from her. “Night before last, someone dynamited the main rail line this side of Liege.” He opened the notebook and scanned Eva’s recent entries. “Any of the girls ever mention our friends in the Resistance?”

“No, uncle.”

Henri scowled. “Then loosen their tongues. Catch them off guard. Tell them, I don’t know…your cousin in France firebombed a panzer or publishes an underground newspaper or something. I’m counting on you to be smarter than they are.”

Eva looked down. “I’ll try, uncle”

“With all that’s at stake, you say you’ll try?” He slammed the notebook closed. “Dammit, don’t just try. Do! Get out at night—that’s when you’ll see something.”

“It’s risky, uncle. It would be hard to explain if I got caught.”

“Christ, tell them you couldn’t sleep. I can’t do everything myself, you know.”

“I’ll try to do more. To be smarter, as you said.” She glanced at Henri.

“See that you do.” Henri tapped Pruvot’s shoulder with his crop. “Back to the school.”

It was two days before Christmas when Sister Martine scurried from the kitchen to answer the doorbell. She pulled open the door and there was Henri Messiaen with his chauffeur Pruvot standing behind him.

She bowed. “Ah,
Monsieur
Messiaen, good day. Shall I fetch Mother Catherine?”

“No, no, good sister, don’t bother her, for it is you I call upon today.” He winked.

Sister Martine covered her lips with her hand as if Henri had asked for a kiss.

“I’ve brought a few little things for your pantry,” Henri said, pointing backward with his thumb, “in the rear of the truck I hired. May we drive around to the kitchen entrance?”

“Yes, of course. It’s just there.” She motioned to the north side of the convent building. “But sir—”

Henri’s hand shot up. “We’ll meet you in a moment at the kitchen door.”

Sister Martine closed the door and skittered off. Henri said a word to Pruvot who dashed down the steps, jumped on the driver’s side running board, bracing an arm inside the open window. He told the driver, “Micheaux, pull around to the rear entrance.”

Henri was waiting when Sister opened the door. Micheaux, handsome with his long eyelashes, dimples, and a moustache like Clark Gable’s and wearing blue worker’s coveralls, was at the rear of the truck, tugging at a gray canvas tarpaulin. When the cover slipped off, racks of milk bottles, wet with dew, sparkled in the sunshine. Under Pruvot’s watchful eye, Micheaux carried in the clinking racks, six bottles each, two at a time. It took four trips.

“But no one can get milk!” Sister gasped.

Henri stood at the threshold with his arms crossed Mussolini-style and shrugged.

Next Micheaux brought in bread—four dozen baguettes, bundled like sheaves of wheat, and a huge burlap sack stuffed with round loaves of country bread. He piled it on the large kitchen worktable. He brought in three blocks of ice for the icebox.

Mother Catherine came to the kitchen to investigate the commotion. She blinked at the bread-covered table and the racks of milk bottles. She looked at Henri and shook her head in disbelief. “Oh,
Monsieur!”

“We do have a bit more,” Henri said, as Micheaux struggled in with five dachshund-sized sausages.

By the time Micheaux lugged in a wheel of Norwegian cheese huge as an automobile tire, the windows of the dormitory were filled with the excited faces of students. On the walk back for another load, he blew a kiss and bowed like a matinee idol to his audience. It brought squeals and waves from the girls.

Micheaux carried in a wooden tub of butter. Then a box with ten kilograms of nuts and ten kilograms of chocolate. Then one with twenty kilos of flour. Then one with twenty of coffee.

Next to the icebox, Sister Martine sat speechless, tears rolling down her tiny cheeks.

Micheaux’s last load was the size of a valise and wrapped in waxed paper. Mother pulled back the wrapping to reveal bacon—slabs, thick and hard, with fat the color of cream and meat the color of blood. She could only marvel, “But these things, they’ve all disappeared from the shops. It is truly a miracle.”

“Miracles are a specialty of mine.” Henri laughed, tipping his bowler hat. “And now I must depart for my dining engagement in the city. Pruvot, pay Micheaux and dismiss him.” He turned back to the nuns. “Mother Catherine, Sister,
au revoir
and
bon appétit
!”

The miracles continued for almost a year. At least once a month Henri Messiaen would bring or have delivered similar stocks of food—somehow. For, though no one had fuel, his car was running. Though no one could get meat, he found a way. In wintertime, when everyone shivered,
Monsieur
Micheaux showed up every so often at St Sébastien with lovely coal. And when no one could get cigarettes, even on the black market, he brought them, sometimes English ones no less, for Sister Arnaude. The nuns speculated that he must be a bootleg kingpin, but they never asked questions. One didn’t ask questions in those days.

Red and White

With the arrival of improving weather in April 1941, a number of members of
Le Cercle de la Chouette Chuchoteuse
at St. Sébastien contracted spring fever. At night, those Whispering Owls regularly snuck out of the dormitory and occasionally even off the convent grounds. And those who went began to sniff the subtle odor of change in the war’s course. Sitting with nineteen other nightgowned girls in a circle around a single candle in the dormitory, Camille reported one night, “It’s strange. Last night I saw a train of flat cars loaded with tarpaulin-covered tanks and cannons. And it was heading
east
.”

Camille’s cousin Chloe, who spent weekends at a nearby farm helping tend the orchard, whispered, “You know the highway running by the farmhouse? It was clogged Saturday night with convoys of troop trucks hauling
Boche
soldiers back toward Germany.”

Isabelle from Paris said, “Perhaps they’re leaving France, too. Surely they are.
Mamam
will be so happy to have their filthy boots off the
Champs-Élysées
.” She looked around the circle like she’d said too much. “It’s not just Germans. She’d say that about any foreigners, mind you. It’s just a fact that the
Île de la Cité
should be for Parisians. Just for us.”

Eva smiled sweetly. “My uncle says Paris would be the best city on earth were it not for Parisians.”

“Then your uncle can sit on a tack.” Isabelle crossed her arms. “We won’t ever leave.”

That night, lying in their beds, the girls heard waves of warbirds droning overhead. Like what they’d heard nine months earlier. Only now they were heading east, back from the Channel.

In the Owl’s circle a week later, with the nightly movement of men and machines increasing, Simone, the girl nicknamed Trout, steered the talk to reasons for the change. “So, sitting here in our little circle around our little candle we know that the
Boche
are turning their noses east; we just don’t know why.”

“Maybe they need to go home,” Bébé snickered, “to wash out their stinky old underwear.”

“Bébé, shush!” Chloe swished a quick sign of the cross. “There’s to be an armistice.”

“An armistice?” Nathalie’s eyes got wide. “Father’s saved a magnum of champagne to celebrate the peace. When it comes, I get to go home for the week and get tipsy drunk with him.”

“Nathalie, please!” Chloe scolded, “I’ve been praying for peace, and I think God’s listened. He’s granting us an armistice.”

Bébé threw her chubby arms into the air and looked up toward heaven. “Praise the Lord!”

Clarisse poked Bébé in the ribs. “Hate to burst your balloon,
Mademoiselle
Avoirdupois, but God and Herr Hitler don’t talk much. Want to know what I think? There’s no way the
Boche
are giving up. Look, they gassed my uncle in the Great War. He said they fled from the front just before they sent the mustard gas. I think that damn Hitler is planning to do it again, drenching England in the stuff, and he wants his precious SS safely away when he does.”

Laetitia grimaced. “I like Chloe’s idea better.”

“Believe as you wish.” Clarisse resumed brushing her hair. “But remember, when it comes to misbehavior, the
Boche
wrote the book.”

“You must have studied with them, LaCroix,” Isabelle stuck out her tongue at Clarisse.

Clarisse jumped to her feet and struck a belligerent pose, but the girls’ attention was drawn elsewhere. Eva stepped into the center of the circle and switched on a flashlight pointing up from the tip of her chin. The shadows it cast on her face and her bushy moustache, made by holding a black comb under her nose, were eerie. “Good evening, comrades. I am Josef Stalin,” Eva said with a Russian accent. “Allow me to offer a hypothesis for your observations. Observations my spies would have made if they weren’t all IDIOTS.” Eva looked away from the circle and called, “Beria, have all my spies shot. While you’re at it, shoot yourself, too!”

The girls were laughing as Eva turned her shadowy face back to them, her eyes wide and darting from girl to girl and her Russian accent even heavier than before. “It’s oh so clear. Unbowed Britain still rules waves and clouds in the west.” Eva made her eyebrows jump. “The German beast’s appetite is insatiable. So Hitler turns his hungry eyes elsewhere. Eeek! From Berlin, my socialist union must look tempting as a big bowl of borscht with sour cream.”

Camille raised her hand. “Sorry to interrupt, comrade.”

“Nobody interrupts me,” Eva said. She pointed to Cami. “Have her shot!”

“Just one question before I die, comrade,” Cami giggled. “I thought Hitler was your dear friend. Is there no honor among you despots these days?”

“Us, friends? Just because we dined together on Polish sausage? I never trust a man who won’t drink vodka with me.”

Cami said, “Is there anyone you do trust, comrade?”

“Didn’t I have you shot?” Eva laughed. “Anyway, the trains, the trucks, the troops, moved in secret under the cover of darkness—it proves my case. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a sleeping bear to rouse.” She switched off her light.

When the laughter had died down, Isabelle from Paris said, “But really, it’s all so silly. Germany and the Soviets are allies, and Hitler can’t fight England and Russia at once.”

Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s siccing of an army of 3.6 million on the unprepared USSR in June 1941, marked an explosive upturn in the war in the east. Changes that summer in the war’s impact on western Europe were more evolutionary. By September, not only was the evening’s light fading earlier at St. Sébastien, so too was food becoming increasingly scarce.

The district’s farmers had always been generous, but now their livestock and crops were inventoried and distribution of their produce was restricted. They still did what they could for Mother Catherine, but it wasn’t much. And with the town of Lefebvre starving, it had nothing to share with St. Sébastien.

Toward the end of summer 1941, Eva’s trips to visit her uncle became less frequent, for he was away from Liege much of the time. When Henri was home and wanted to see her, Pruvot was sent to the convent to fetch her. After those visits, Eva returned with provisions for the kitchen of St. Sébastien, but there seemed to be less each time.

Less from the local sources. Less from Uncle Henri. Finally, in late September came the third blow. Early one afternoon, a detail of three German soldiers arrived at the convent unannounced. A sourfaced corporal rang the bell. When Sister Martine answered, he held out a document, official-looking and written in German, and demanded in a distant cousin of French, “I am Corporal Schweinslauter. Make present the lands-master.”

Sister could not read the document and she interpreted
landsmaster
to mean the mayor of Lefebvre. With pointing and pantomime, she indicated the way to the village.

The soldier was first confused, then exasperated. He lapsed into German. “
Nein, nein. Wo ist irher Bauer?
” Then in French. “Your farmer. Where?”

Mother Catherine came to the door. The soldier repeated his clumsy demand.

Mother had heard rumors of food confiscation. She saw the shovels and baskets in the soldiers’ truck and immediately knew the importance of putting them off. She sized-up the corporal: The sloppy shave. Missing button. Twitching eye.
This one shouldn’t be so difficult to cow. If I can buy just a few hours, we can harvest and hide much of the garden.
She snatched the document and looked it over for less than five seconds. “Ha! Absurd.” Wagging her finger, she scolded the corporal. “No, no, no,
Monsieur
. Where is your officer?” She had the corporal backpedaling. “Your officer. Here. Bring him!” Mother flicked her hand, as if shooing a fly. She stomped her foot and pointed to the gate. “You. Out of my sight!”