In This Hospitable Land (27 page)

Night after night, Geneviève read while the others scraped, amused by Stevenson’s misadventures with his willful pack-donkey Modestine. They also took pleasure in the familiar settings Stevenson described—walks through locales the Sauverins had experienced recently.

“‘A little after,’” Geneviève read, “‘the stream that I was following fell into the Tarn at Pont de Montvert of bloody memory.’”

“That’s where we entered the Cévennes,” Denise recalled.

Geneviève continued, “‘One of the first things I encountered in Pont de Montvert was, if I remember rightly, the Protestant temple.’” She interrupted herself. “It’s uncanny.”

Stevenson’s book didn’t serve as mere travelogue and reminder. It proved practical when Geneviève read about chestnut trees: “‘The slope was strewn with lopped branches, and here and there a great package of leaves was propped against a trunk; for even the leaves are serviceable, and the peasants use them in winter by way of fodder for their animals.’”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” André allowed.

“Helpful as the old farmers have been,” Alex remarked, “no one mentioned it either.”

Later Geneviève read that “‘chestnut gardens are infested with rats.’ Ugh!” she grunted. “You won’t catch me going back into those anytime soon!”

“We’ll set traps,” Alex said dismissively. “We’ll take care of it.”

“But let’s have the children play elsewhere till we do,” Denise suggested.

That Stevenson confirmed some of their impressions of the vicinity and its inhabitants suggested neither had changed in the previous sixty years and so might be assumed unlikely to change anytime soon: “‘I had not only come among new natural features, but moved into the territory of a different race. These people…questioned and answered me with a degree of intelligence which excelled all that I had met…’”

Much of the rest was congenial to André especially because it dealt with the spiritual dimensions of the Cévennes. André felt encouraged by a number of passages, one of which spoke to him as no other. He even took the book to bed one night and sat up late to memorize Stevenson’s words in order to have them with him as he went about his labors:

No one could have been more surprised or less delighted than Alexandre Sauverin to find himself in the Protestant temple in Vialas Christmas morning. But he could not have avoided it: his children and nieces were appearing in the pageant. The little ones’ excitement might have been contagious even to him if the whole business hadn’t seemed such a foolish waste of time.

Rose had begged off because of the cold, blustery weather. The rest had bundled up for the tramp to the French Reformed Church, which wasn’t as bad as it could have been for the day was crisp, the sun was out, and even Alex had to admit it was dramatically beautiful on the road with snowcapped mountains majestically surrounding them, crystalline in sparkling sunlight.

The church was packed with worshipers excited for the lengthy celebration of Christ’s birth to begin. They greeted the Sauverins warmly. André plainly fit in.

Alex defiantly didn’t. Sitting with his wife beside their brother and sister he felt uncomfortable physically because of the hard bench and mentally because he didn’t share the faith by which in Alex’s not-humble opinion everyone else had been brainwashed.

The children disappeared into the back to prepare for the “show.” After a long time Pastor Burnard began preaching a long sermon. Others seemed enraptured by it but Alex was mind-numbingly bored and not a little angered. Worse still, when the sermon was finally finished the parson invited others up for an extended series of readings from the Bible, mostly from the New Testament which Alex had managed previously to avoid.

His back stiff and his legs asleep by the time the children finally filed out to perform, Alex still felt a thrill of excitement since the Sauverin progeny looked incontrovertibly adorable even to his curmudgeonly self. But he quickly concluded he had only perked up because the intolerably dull and utterly preposterous readings had ended.

Preposterous was also his word for the traditional Christmas pageant unfolding before his disbelieving unbeliever’s eyes. But Katie and Ida acquitted themselves admirably as members of the chorus and little Philippe appeared every now and again too. Christel had a memorable nonspeaking role as one of three girls at play in a field—presumably one of the fields of the Lord. An evil person came along and for no apparent reason killed them by beheading them, of all hideous things, represented by each girl pulling a blanket over her head. Then St. Nicholas happened along and miraculously brought them back to life—that is, the little girls threw off the blankets again.

The only real miracle to Alex was that he kept from laughing out loud. He actually enjoyed the extravaganza’s climax: a choral rendition of a Protestant hymn taken from Handel’s oratorio “Judas Maccabeus:” “Thine is the Glory,” the children sang, and though the sentiment rang hollow, Alex could appreciate the music.

Then midday dinner was served. The parson had somehow found enough rolls baked from scarce white flour to give one to each child to take home as a Christmas gift.

During the dinner interlude, Alex and Geneviève slipped away. A few grocers were keeping hours that day so last-minute items could be picked up for a Christmas “feast.” As they passed one open store, the shopkeeper waved them in.

“I’m glad to see you,” she exclaimed, picking up and proudly displaying a box of figs. “I’ve been saving these for you. The local folks won’t eat them—they’d rather keep their money. But I know you Sauverins have more cultivated tastes and will appreciate these.”

The shopkeeper placed the box atop the counter expectantly. Geneviève gave her husband a look of request and demand. Alex smiled indulgently.

“This will be our Christmas treat,” he agreed, placing his payment into the little dish on the counter. “Sweeter even than a roll.”

Back at church the Sauverins said good-bye and swathed themselves. Snow fell and the wind, into which the road home faced, picked up, whipping freezing white powder into their lowered faces and making remaining upright steadily more difficult.

“It’s good Mother decided to remain Jewish today,” André shouted to Alex inches away.

“I wish I hadn’t pretended to be a Christian,” Geneviève shouted back, voice muffled by the scarf in which she had buried her mouth.

“It was a nice service though,” André insisted.

“Lovely,” Denise called out, supporting him.

To Alex, it was the box of figs that made all the effort and suffering worthwhile.

Despite the pleasing spiritual interlude, André was distressed by the way 1940 ended and 1941 began. There was simply too much work to do for him to find the time he wished to devote to his interior life. And listening to the radio gave little cause for optimism, let alone joy.

Though encouraging noises kept coming out of Washington, D.C.—President Roosevelt declared that the United States “must be the great arsenal of the democracies”—words were not yet matched by meaningful deeds. And there were other words that had to be considered, such as Hitler’s New Year’s message to the German armed forces in which he promised “the greatest victory in our history” on the Western Front.

News from the Eastern Front was disturbing too, and puzzling. Despite the 1939 signing of both a nonaggression pact and an economic agreement between the Soviet Union and Germany, André had understood as far back as the Spanish Civil War that there was no love lost between the Nazis and the Communists. He had hoped the Russians would enter the war on the Allied side, possibly sooner than the Americans, but now the Soviets and Germans had signed a new series of pacts recognizing their respective “spheres of influence” and affirming previous trade agreements. Was it conceivable the Russians would sit out the war for a modest economic advantage? Surely it was as obvious in the Kremlin as in Soleyrols that Germany unchecked was a mortal threat to all sovereign nations.

Nothing in Indochina made sense either. How could France protect its territories in Laos and Cambodia from incursions by Thailand when the Japanese supported Thai rights to the disputed lands? Surely Vichy France would not be allowed to stand up to Germany’s ally!

Now that the RAF was bombing occupying forces from Brittany to Bordeaux to Cologne, André was grateful yet again that the Sauverins had sequestered themselves in a remote and strategically insignificant locale. But what was he doing with a chestnut in his hand? He didn’t think himself superior to the mundane demands of existence but couldn’t help wondering if there wasn’t something more important for him to do than peel husks from dried nuts.

After Stevenson’s
Travels
—a quick and pleasing read as promised—Geneviève read
Chronique des Pasquier,
a beguiling book she had already begun but was happy to begin again. The story of a poor family’s struggles in Paris could hardly have been more different from the Sauverins’—especially that of the Freedman sisters, who had grown up economically privileged. But that was a large part of the book’s appeal: Duhamel’s ravishingly detailed contemplative narrative drew these Belgian refugees into worlds and lives so unlike theirs it helped them forget present troubles—even the damage to their fingers—for hours at a time. And that this volume consisted of five complete novels was a blessing since so many chestnuts remained to be shelled.

Recalcitrant nuts didn’t go to waste since the goats and rabbits were willing to eat them even with their peels on. The rabbits fattened with noteworthy speed on this unusual diet.

Alex closely tracked and recorded the details of the care, feeding and growth of all the animals and chickens because charting the barnyard creatures’ behavior and life cycles impeccably could profit the family. For example, the chickens also turned out to be quite willing to eat cast-off chestnuts, but Alex was able to prove such ingestion reduced egg production and in some cases stopped it altogether. Then again, when Alex’s records indicated a particular chicken was no longer laying eggs anyway, the Sauverins could begin a regimen of deliberate chestnut-feeding to fatten that chicken for the table quickly.