Ignorance (21 page)

I started working out how to draw the
patronne
, the muscles deep beneath the flesh. She said: he’s a good friend, that one. So don’t go being rude to him. Be pleasant.

She caught my eye in the mirror: I hope we shan’t lose him once he’s married. Much better he should come here than have affairs.

I peered at Madame’s grey roots. I lifted a fistful of hennaed curls, coaxed them to lie on top of each other and disguise the whitening hair underneath. I combed some tendrils into a fringe on her forehead. The
patronne
lifted her hand mirror and studied the effect. She bent forwards, groaning and puffing, to roll on her stockings. She said: help me on with my shoes. I didn’t like touching her deformed, bent-over toes, even under their veil of silk. Nonetheless I knelt in front of her and eased her misshapen feet into her high heels. She groaned theatrically: oh my poor corns! She heaved herself up: you should have another day off sometime soon.

I said: I’d like to go home and visit my mother.

She shrugged. All right. Behave yourself properly with my visitors, and you can stay the night at your mother’s.

She forgot about her offer, and I had to prompt her. A week later, she let me go. I walked home to Ste-Marie-du-Ciel under a blue sky. We were moving towards midsummer: the air smelled of ripe grass and warm earth. The fields on either side of the road showed the high green of wheat. Buzzards circled overhead. En route I got stopped twice by German soldiers at checkpoints. Once they recognised me they grinned, didn’t ask to see my papers, slapped my backside. Fräulein Johanna! I shut my eyes and counted one two three. I opened my eyes, smiled, walked on.

My mother in her black widow’s dress looked lean as a vanilla pod. Older. We hugged each other, sniffing. Look. There’s a cup of milk. I saved it for you specially. Her thin arms, reaching around me like string, looped me to her; a parcel of love. Madame Fauchon had given me a cup of milk. She’d been pregnant with her third. Four little parcels by now to care for.

I drank the milk. Maman sat opposite me at the kitchen table. She’d spread a clean tea towel over the oilcloth, to protect her work. She fiddled with her sewing scissors, a little heap of children’s grey woollen coats and jackets, and watched my every gesture. She said: how’s the job? Her hands teased a spiky shape of yellow material.

I said: what’s that you’re sewing? She answered: it’s for Madame Fauchon’s children, you know we’ve become better friends these past months, we try and help each other out. She began to fold up the coats: now, darling, tell me about how you’re getting on.

I said: may I have something to eat? I’m very hungry. She jumped up immediately: there isn’t much.

Where before she’d saved the outer leaves of lettuces and cabbages as greenstuff for her rabbits, where before she’d nourished her hens in the backyard with the tops and peelings of carrots, the skins of onions, now she simmered them all for soup. The hens had been boiled long ago. The starved rabbits, very lean, had been killed and eaten the winter before. Two rabbits, roasted, stewed, potted, had stretched to many meals, their picky sharp bones then seethed for bouillon. I shelled a fistful of haricot beans. I soaked the pods in hot water, added them to the vegetable stock. I’d stolen some peppercorns and some coarse salt from the
patronne
’s kitchen, hiding them in separate fingers of my glove. One fingertip could dip into salt and lick it; one into pepper. The soup could be seasoned.

My mother and I argued over what to do with the two small potatoes she possessed: whether to add them to the broth or save them for tomorrow. She pardoned the potatoes, put them back into the hanging wire cupboard outside the back door; they could live another day.

She cleared away her sewing things, laid the cloth. She winced, sank back into her chair at the table. My asthma’s worse.

Her shoulders drooped and her back humped. Suddenly I could see how she’d look as an old woman. Steam issued in clouds from the saucepan, beaded the wall. Living in this damp flat, she was prey to the moisture that seeped up from the lino covering the earth floor and through the flaking plaster. Sunshine leaked around the small window, reminding us it was summer outside. Nonetheless I kept my coat on: the kitchen felt chilly as well as damp; the cooking-stove gave out little heat. Maman grimaced: the landlord comes round for the rent all right, but he won’t do any repairs, the bastard.

I tied an apron over my coat, pushed up my sleeves, began scouring the sink. My mother’s voice jumped up behind me: I know what goes on in that house where you work. One of the neighbours told me. I want you to leave the job and come back home.

I turned round. Crossly smoothing the oilcloth, filling the pepper pot, the salt shaker, she looked small as a child. A child I could punish. When you’ve got a child you’ve got power over her. You can hurt her. You can ignore her, try to have all the fun. You can push her away, flirt with her man, dance with him, leave the girl out.

I said: I’ll make my own decisions, thanks. You don’t know what you’re talking about! And we need the money, you know we do.

My mother said: I’m ashamed of you. Letting yourself be degraded like that. Where’s your self-respect? Her face quivered. I could not let myself feel tender towards her. Instead I felt tender towards the sink, which was something I knew how to deal with. I wiped the white enamel as though it were a child’s face. I wriggled a cloth into the ends of the taps and cleaned the green slime from them as though they were a child’s nostrils crusted with snot. My mother set out plates and spoons, a jug of water. Glancing at each other, tacitly we agreed a truce. She opened the cutlery drawer, rattled her hand inside it. She produced a new subject of conversation. Marie-Angèle had a boyfriend. She’d heard all about it from Marie-Angèle’s mother, when she went up to the rue de la Croix to do the washing. She said: a good job, wonderful prospects, apparently. If she gets married she’ll probably need some sewing done. So that could mean a little extra money coming in.

Maman began inspecting the cutlery. She looked up from polishing a spoon. She said: I’ll manage, you know.

Steam from the cooking pot cocooned her. I couldn’t reach her. I wanted to jump up and down like the lid on a boiling saucepan. She lined up the spoons with her fingertips, patting them into place. She said: why should I leave? I’m not a refugee Jew. I’m a French citizen, I’ve lived here all my life and my parents before me. Across the kitchen the yellow scraps bundled on top of the sewing-box rose up: tiny gendarmes thumbing their noses. I said: you know as well as I do, if the Germans decide to de-naturalise you, that’s that. Maman said: where would I go? And what about you?

I chopped up the moment into a collage. Two white soup plates, fluted rims stencilled with worn green chevrons, on the red and white checked oilcloth. A pair of brown hands. Stars of yellow material. Her gold wedding ring. I studied the bits of images as I ladled out our watery mush. Later on I’d draw them. I said: other people you know must be leaving. She agreed: the Fauchons are going down to Spain, but they’ve had to get new papers first, it’s cost them their life savings. I haven’t got money like that.

Other people. Fauchons, Jacquotet, Nérins. Names on papers, on cards. A long silver nib reaching down, marking them with indelible ink, then long silver tweezers plucking them up, lifting them out, dropping them into a hat. Pick a card. Any card. This one will live this one will die.

I said: how are they getting hold of the papers?

Maman said: someone who works in the town hall, apparently. She stood the salt pot and pepper pot side by side, like a bride and groom. She glanced at me: obviously, they don’t know his name. Sleek as a seal, Monsieur Fauchon described him, very well-dressed. Black hat, black overcoat. Sounds a pretty sharp customer to me.

The long summer evening would confine me to the same room as my mother. Night would pack me into my narrow bed in its corner. My mother seemed to think I was still a child she scolded, forgave, tucked up. She was clutching at me. I wanted to clutch her back and also I wanted to break out, break the curfew, run up and down the street, shouting, just to prove that I could. My mother sewed. I watched. She bit off the end of her thread, wrapped up the children’s clothes in a piece of brown paper tied with a length of old string: you can take these across in the morning. Make sure you ask for the paper back.

When darkness fell we moved niftily around each other, checking the blackout was properly in place, undressing, extinguishing the lamp. I was imprisoned by anxious dreams in which I lost my way home. I kept kicking the coverlet off and waking up sweating. Over and over I dreamed that Monsieur Jacquotet was calling for me from where he balanced, trapped, on the roof of his house. If I reached him in time I’d be able to put out the flames. He gazed at me sorrowfully. Where are you? Why have you abandoned me? I burst into tears. But you told me not to come back!

I woke late next morning. Maman had gone off to work in a hurry, leaving an unmade bed, a toss of clothes. When I took down the blackout yellow light spilled across the room. Too bright. Noisy, like the blare of a military trumpet. I couldn’t control the light, the noise. Instead I tidied the room, did up my hair, smoothed the creases from my clothes.

I’d run out of books to read. The kitchen shelf was bare except for the cookery book: pamphlets and magazines all gone. I searched for Maman’s store of novels, at length discovered them hidden under the bed, wrapped in a dustsheet. I picked out a couple and shoved them into my coat pocket.

Maman had put out a piece of bread for me on a plate. A jug with the last of the milk. I covered them with cloths, against the flies. Childish slop. Let her have it for supper. I wanted a slice of
saucisson
, a tot of eau-de-vie.

More than that I wanted to see Monsieur Jacquotet. My soft parcel under my arm, I took the back ways to the top of town, hurrying up the stone staircases fitted between buildings, scurrying up the steep alleys. The town was quiet, the shops all closed. I met nobody. My path was deserted, as though everybody had left in the night.

Emerging into the Place Ste Anne, I began to cross it in the direction of the school. Monsieur Jacquotet’s front door stood open. Wood panels fragile as a biscuit. Ste Anne and the Virgin stared down from their niche next door. Just outside the high gate of the convent, a group of townspeople had collected; a small crowd standing to one side, watching. A band of children loitered on the pavement, shifting and shoving. Why had they come out of school? Some of them clutched what looked like pieces of paper. I went closer. The gutter was scattered with torn-up photographs, little white bones, dead mice, dead voles. The lid of a cake-tin. A string of dried apple slices. The children poked each other, giggling. They darted forwards and picked up more scraps of paper, waved these talismans in the air. One boy said to another: they found lots of bones buried in the garden. The corpses of children! The second boy said: they need little Christian babies. They need their blood! They hissed dramatically, stamped their feet and waved their arms, mock-roaring. A third boy said: once he kidnapped two little girls who were never seen again!

Voices called in German inside the house. Two German soldiers emerged from the dark opening of the front door. They shouted at the children, who ran away, letting fall their spoils. Drifts of torn-up black and white photographs. A breast. A triangle of fur. A hand. The Germans bawled at the silent group of men and women. They averted their heads, dispersed. I turned away, pressed myself into the school doorway, tried to vanish.

The Germans came back out, carrying paintings. They threw the canvases into a pile on the ground beyond the gutter. Some framed, some just on stretchers. A big, jagged heap. A higgledy-piggledy tower, like a sculpture of a star. The soldiers poured liquid from a can on to the stack of wood, set a match. Flames roared up, wavery scarlet, transparent in the still air. Painted canvas flared and crackled as the fire bit into it, and smoke billowed out in thick grey clouds.

Maurice came out of a side street, his black coat folded over his arm. He stood still for a moment, swivelling his gaze about, taking in the scene. He skirted the bonfire blaze, walked up to the open front door of Monsieur Jacquotet’s house, watched by the children from their safe distance. He spoke to the two soldiers: a few French words, a few in German. They nodded, stood aside. He went in. The soldiers followed him, banged shut the door.

I waited a few minutes, then strolled off as casually as I could. Once I was out of the square I ran down to the rue de la Croix, to the cobbler’s shop. A large sign hung over the window: Jewish establishment. The drawn shutters sealed the shop away from my gaze: look all you like; we’re not here; we’ve gone for ever.

I rapped on the Fauchons’ door, pushed at the handle. The locked door pushed back. Go away. Leave us alone. Madame Fauchon’s voice whispered: who is it? I tried to magic my voice into a key: it’s Jeanne. Her indrawn breath. Silence. A scrape of iron. She let me in.

She’d turned into a blonde with bright yellow hair. She wore smart clothes: pleated wool blouse, woollen skirt, highly polished shoes. She stood back, gesturing. Come in, quick, quick. She bolted the door behind me. We shook hands. She looked pale, and almost as thin as my mother. The shop was bare: someone had cleared out all the shoes. Run off with them. The shoes had run away. No rows of brown paper bags on the shelves, no scuffed boots toppled in heaps on the counter awaiting mending. Three brown leather suitcases, one big and two smaller ones, secured by straps, stood to one side. Madame Fauchon’s glance followed mine. Her hand went up to her earlobe, touched the red spot where her earring had been, then flung away.