Children of War (28 page)

Bruno left the two of them alone and went back down the stairs, checking the message that he’d heard coming into his phone. It was a voicemail from the Brigadier, asking him to call back.

‘There’s trouble in Toulouse,’ the Brigadier said when he answered. ‘Some right-wing militants marched on the mosque and began throwing paint and chanting slogans. People came out of the mosque and there were some rough scenes for an hour or so, some tear gas and water cannon. The police seem to have got control but there’s another demonstration called for tomorrow afternoon. And they’re torching cars again in Paris.’

‘Is all quiet at the château?’ Bruno asked.

‘Yes, but half the TV crews in France seem to be camped on the road outside, except for those who raced down to Toulouse. I may go down there. Nancy was asking for you. She seems pleased with her TV interviews and says she thinks the mood might be shifting in Washington. Apparently they had a woman in the TV show, a mother whose son was killed by one of Sami’s bombs. She said Sami sounded like he was just as much a victim as her own boy.’

‘She’s right,’ said Bruno, thinking that the wisdom of ordinary people never ceased to surprise him.

‘I’m pretty sure Sami won’t be heading to Guantanamo after all this. And what are you up to?’

‘I’m with the old Jewish lady I told you about, the one who was sheltered in St Denis as a child. We’re about to have dinner.’

‘
Bon app
é
tit
. I’ll call you if I need you. If I go to Toulouse tomorrow, I’ll want you back here at the château. Deutz has been making a nuisance of himself, furious that your doctor was allowed in to see Sami. I thought I’d let you know.’

‘It looks like there may have been a bit of personal history between the two of them,’ Bruno said. ‘I’m still trying to get to the bottom of it.’

‘Understood, keep me informed.’ He rang off.

Bruno hesitated before asking Maya the questions that intrigued him. What had become of the two children and their guardians, one of them a
gueule cassée
, at the end of their time at the farm, and how had they resumed their lives? And why had they never returned to St Denis, never returned to the brief sanctuary that had saved them, until after David’s death?

He had wanted to ask her when Maya came out of the attic on Yacov’s arm, but her face was pale and strained. She shook her head as if to forestall any conversation and then wiped away the tears on her cheeks. In the car, she took a small tube of some cream from her bag and wiped away the smudged eye make-up. She looked much older, and when they returned to Pamela’s house she asked for another scotch and this time downed it in a single gulp and then took a refill. Pamela led her to the bathroom and the two women had remained there for some minutes while Yacov and Bruno talked and opened the wine.

The questions continued to nag at him over dinner, at the back of his mind even as he told Maya and Yacov what he knew about Sami as a boy, about Momu and Dillah, and of his sadness at Sami’s likely fate. Maya looked herself again, her make-up refreshed, making polite compliments to Pamela
about the food. She took a sliver of cheese and just enough of the
tarte au citron
to be polite. When the plates had been cleared away, she said, ‘Let’s stay on around the table. I always prefer talking that way and you ought to know what happened to us. But bear in mind, these are the memories of a little girl of eight, backed up by what David remembered, but he was just eleven when we left the farm.’

The attic had been the worst time, she said. She and her brother had been whisked away from Paris in the summer of 1942, just after the massive round-up of 13,000 Jews and their detention in the Vélodrome d’Hiver, the indoor cycling stadium just down the Left Bank from the Eiffel Tower. Neither she nor David knew why her parents were not arrested at the time, perhaps because her father was a doctor. Through the Jewish Boy Scouts, they had been assigned to a group of eight children who were taken first to a campsite near Blois in the Loire valley. Once there, they had photos taken and after a few days were issued with new papers that identified them as Protestant Scouts and Girl Guides to get them through the controls at Vierzon, the border crossing between Nazi-occupied France and that part still nominally ruled by the Vichy government.

They had then gone by train to Brive, and then a bus took them to a Protestant campsite. They stayed there in tents for the summer while Robert Gamzon tried to find somewhere more permanent, but the first of the round-ups of Jews in the so-called free zone of Vichy began that August. They were still at the campsite in November when German troops invaded the Vichy zone to occupy France’s Mediterranean coast after the Allies had landed in Morocco and Algeria. Somehow Gamzon
persuaded several Protestant pastors to find various places of refuge for the children.

‘So it was November, cold and dark, on the morning when David and I left the campsite,’ Maya recalled. ‘A big blonde woman, very pretty, told us to call her Tante Simone. David later found out that it was Simone Mairesse, one of the people who organized homes for hundreds of Jewish children around the village of Chambon-sur-Lignon. But apparently there had been a panic after some raids and we had to be taken elsewhere.’

Maya said she remembered a train journey, and watching through the window as their train stopped and another train full of German troops went by. David later tried to track down their route but he was never sure. Then they walked along country lanes for a long time and then waited in some woods outside a small town until it was dark. Tante Simone had some stale bread for them to eat. Then she took them over a bridge into a town with very few lights. It was St Denis. She led the children to a house and up some stairs to an attic, where an old woman was waiting.

‘She spoke hardly any French and I thought she was a witch. I was very scared,’ Maya said. ‘She was bent over as if she had a hunchback and she smelled, but she gave us some soup and tried to be kind to us. Tante Simone said we were not allowed to go out of the attic until market day, when there would be a cart to take us to a farm. It was a donkey cart, the first I ever saw. And then Tante Simone left, telling us we had to leave before dark on market day and go back to the place in the woods where we had waited together. A man with a white mask on his face who would come about midday.’

‘He was a
gueule cassée
, from the First War,’ Bruno prompted. ‘That was how I tracked down the farm of Michel and Sylvie Desbordes. The old woman in the attic was her mother, all of them Protestants.’

‘Michel and Sylvie, that sounds right. She told us to call her Tante Sylvie and we were to say we were her cousin’s children if anybody ever came. But I don’t remember anyone ever visiting except for the old woman from the attic once or twice. Monsieur hardly ever spoke, and when he did his voice was just grunts. His wife was very kind. I think she’d always wanted children.’

The children stayed there through the winter and all through the year of 1943 and the first half of 1944, knowing nothing of the world outside the farm. Sylvie taught them their sums, read to them from the Bible and sometimes brought back battered copies of Dumas, Victor Hugo and Jules Verne. But they only had candles to read by because they couldn’t always afford the oil for the lamp, even when there was lamp oil to be had. There was no gas, no electricity and all their water came from the well. At least the wood stove kept the kitchen warm. On Sundays, the children were left alone as the Desbordes took the donkey cart to the Protestant chapel in St Denis.

They lived on the eggs and milk the farm produced, made bread from chestnuts and in the vegetable garden they grew verveine and camomile to make tea. Occasionally there would be a
poule au pot
when one of the chickens grew too old to lay. The Desbordes sold eggs and chickens in the market, vegetables in summer, and in the winter Michel knew a place where he could find truffles and would sell them, when he could find a buyer. Few people had the money except for occasional visitors
looking to supply the black market, but dealing with them was a risk the Desbordes thought it wiser not to take. Ironically, as a result foie gras from the ducks was a regular part of the diet on the farm. With so few buyers the Desbordes made it for themselves.

‘Apart from the foie gras, it sounds like living in the Middle Ages,’ said Yacov, shaking his head.

‘I suppose it was. In winter, we all slept in the same big bed for warmth, me and Madame Desbordes at one end, David and Monsieur at the other. We had to work, too,’ Maya said.

Every day the children were in the woods, getting kindling for the stove, or looking for mushrooms for Tante Sylvie to sell. In the summer they took their turns with the scythe, getting the hay for the donkey. Maya had to watch the chickens when they were out in the yard and she and David both helped Sylvie in the garden. Maya was taught to sew and knit, because their clothes were falling apart. And although there was no sugar, she recalled a kind of jam from berries.

‘Looking back, it was probably a very healthy way to grow up, and we loved Dou-Dou, the little dog. It was he who taught us how to swim, a sort of dog paddle that we copied from him. It was a lovely place to be, in spring and summer …’ Her voice trailed away.

‘You had no news of your family, nothing from the woman who brought you to St Denis, Tante Simone?’ Pamela asked.

‘Not a word. We had no radio, never saw a newspaper nor even a postman.’

The
facteur
would leave any letters at the
Mairie
and Monsieur would look in on his way to market. He had a small pension for his wounds and once a month something would
come in the post and he could go to the post office and get the money. And he got ration books, Maya said, because she remembered him applying for two tobacco rations for him and Tante Sylvie so he could sell them in the market to buy needles and thread. There was no wool, except from unravelling old sweaters.

‘Then came the Sunday, June the eleventh, I’ll never forget it because they came back from chapel and said the war was going to be over because the British and Americans had landed in Normandy and we could go home to Paris. They would take us to the big Protestant church in Bergerac where someone could get in contact with Tante Simone. There was such excitement!’

She laughed at the memory and helped herself to more wine. ‘We were sure we’d soon be in Paris, back with Maman and Papa. But of course we had to wait until after market day because there were eggs and chickens to sell. Then we had to wait another day because his ration books hadn’t arrived at the
Mairie
and he thought he might need something for a bribe if we ran into the
Milice
.’

Bruno winced a little at what the black-clad Vichy police had done to sully the name of his profession. The term was still used. Anytime there was a claim of police brutality in the papers somebody would be sure to say, ‘They were as bad as the
Milice
.’

So they had set off in the donkey cart in the moonlight, David and Maya in the back with Dou-Dou, the Desbordes up front with two fat chickens, their beaks and legs tied together, under Tante Sylvie’s ample skirts in case an extra bribe was needed. Just before dawn they crossed the river Vézère at
Limeuil and took the old road to Trémolat, planning to cross the Dordogne at Lalinde.

But there were armed men, Frenchmen, in the streets of Lalinde and the bridge was blocked by a barrier of heavy stones, as tall as a man. The bell was tolling and a priest told the Desbordes they were expecting German troops to come by the main road from Bergerac and they should turn back. But with his
gueule cassée
the
Résistants
let their cart through the chicane in the barrier on the bridge. Once over the river, Desbordes took the dirt track up the hill that went through the woods to Couze and Mouleydier and got to Bergerac that way.

Bruno now knew what was coming. The SS Panzer Division Das Reich, which had been based further south near Toulouse, was battling its way north through Resistance ambushes to join the German defences against the Allied landings in Normandy. An SS Panzer division was twice the size of the usual Wehrmacht armoured divisions. It had been equipped with new Panther tanks and 20-millimetre flak cannon designed for use against aircraft but which could chew up a house in a few rounds. The orders from London had been blunt: slow the Panzers at all costs. The longer the Das Reich division took to reach Normandy the greater the chance that the invasion could succeed. Bridges had been blown, towns destroyed, Resistance prisoners gunned down in ditches as the ill-armed civilians tried to slow the armoured columns. And two children and two simple peasants who knew little of the war save that Allied troops had landed were heading innocently into a battle zone.

‘I see you have some idea what happened to us at Mouleydier,
Bruno,’ Maya broke off. He tried to recall the details he’d read in the history books.

‘You got there in time for the first battle, when the Resistance held the bridge for a whole day,’ Bruno said. ‘I know the Soleil group was there and some of the Cérisier company. There’s an old man still alive in St Denis who took part.’

‘I suppose you could say we took part in it, too. At least, we were casualties. I had no idea what was happening, but we were coming along the road from Varennes and I remember watching the little planes in the sky. I didn’t know they were spotting for artillery. Just as we got to the crossroads where you’d turn right to cross the Mouleydier bridge, mortar bombs erupted all around us. David pulled me off the back of the cart and into the ditch. I was furious with him because it got me all dirty and I wanted to look nice for Maman.’

The donkey had been killed, and both of the Desbordes were wounded, him seriously in the leg and the stomach, Tante Sylvie in the arm but still able to walk. Some
Résistants
took them to a makeshift dressing station in a house on what was supposed to be the safe side of the river. Dou-Dou the dog had disappeared. Maya remembered being put into the cellar with David and some other children, where they would be sheltered from the mortars.