Chapter Seven #2
Outside, the fields lay beneath a purple and pink evening sky.
Her yard was a series of familiar shapes—well-tended apple trees stood protectively between the front door and the rose-and-vine-covered stone wall, beyond which lay the road to town and acres and acres of fields, studded here and there with thickets of narrow-trunked trees.
Off to the right was the deeper woods where she and Antoine had often sneaked off to be alone when they were younger.
Antoine.
Isabelle.
Where were they? Was he at the front? Was she walking from Paris?
Don’t think about it.
She needed to do something. Gardening. Keep her mind on something else.
After retrieving her worn gardening gloves and stepping into the boots by the door, she made her way to the garden positioned on a flat patch of land between the shed and the barn.
Potatoes, onions, carrots, broccoli, peas, beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, and radishes grew in its carefully tended beds.
On the hillside between the garden and the barn were the berries—raspberries and blackberries in carefully contained rows.
She knelt down in the rich, black dirt and began pulling weeds.
Early summer was usually a time of promise.
Certainly, things could go wrong in this most ardent season, but if one remained steady and calm and didn’t shirk the all-important duties of weeding and thinning, the plants could be guided and tamed.
Vianne always made sure that the beds were precisely organized and tended with a firm yet gentle hand.
Even more important than what she gave her garden was what it gave her. In it, she found a sense of calm.
She became aware of something wrong slowly, in pieces. First, there was a sound that didn’t belong, a vibration, a thudding, and then a murmur. The odors came next: something wholly at odds with her sweet garden smell, something acrid and sharp that made her think of decay.
Vianne wiped her forehead, aware that she was smearing black dirt across her skin, and stood up.
Tucking her dirty gloves in the gaping hip pockets of her pants, she rose to her feet and moved toward her gate.
Before she reached it, a trio of women appeared, as if sculpted out of the shadows.
They stood clumped together in the road just behind her gate.
An old woman, dressed in rags, held the others close to her—a young woman with a babe-in-arms and a teenaged girl who held an empty birdcage in one hand and a shovel in the other.
Each looked glassy-eyed and feverish; the young mother was clearly trembling.
Their faces were dripping with sweat, their eyes were filled with defeat.
The old woman held out dirty, empty hands.
“Can you spare some water?” she asked, but even as she asked her the question, she looked unconvinced. Beaten.
Vianne opened the gate. “Of course. Would you like to come in? Sit down, perhaps?”
The old woman shook her head. “We are ahead of them. There’s nothing for those in the back.”
Vianne didn’t know what the woman meant, but it didn’t matter.
She could see that the women were suffering from exhaustion and hunger.
“Just a moment.” She went into the house and packed them some bread and raw carrots and a small bit of cheese.
All that she had to spare. She filled a wine bottle with water and returned, offering them the provisions. “It’s not much,” she said.
“It is more than we’ve had since Tours,” the young woman said in a toneless voice.
“You were in Tours?” Vianne asked.
“Drink, Sabine,” the old woman said, holding the water to the girl’s lips.
Vianne was about to ask about Isabelle when the old woman said sharply, “They’re here.”
The young mother made a moaning sound and tightened her hold on the baby, who was so quiet—and his tiny fist so blue—that Vianne gasped.
The baby was dead.
Vianne knew about the kind of talon grief that wouldn’t let go; she had fallen into the fathomless gray that warped a mind and made a mother keep holding on long after hope was gone.
“Go inside,” the old woman said to Vianne. “Lock your doors.”
“But…”
The ragged trio backed away—lurched, really—as if Vianne’s breath had become noxious.
And then she saw the mass of black shapes moving across the field and coming up the road.
The smell preceded them. Human sweat and filth and body odor.
As they neared, the miasma of black separated, peeled into forms. She saw people on the road and in the fields; walking, limping, coming toward her.
Some were pushing bicycles or prams or dragging wagons.
Dogs barked, babies cried. There was coughing, throat clearing, whining.
They came forward, through the field and up the road, relentlessly moving closer, pushing one another aside, their voices rising.
Vianne couldn’t help so many. She rushed into her house and locked the door behind her. Inside, she went from room to room, locking doors and closing shutters. When she was finished, she stood in the living room, uncertain, her heart pounding.
The house began to shake, just a little. The windows rattled, the shutters thumped against the stone exterior. Dust rained down from the exposed timbers of the ceiling.
Someone pounded on the front door. It went on and on and on, fists landing on the front door in hammer blows that made Vianne flinch.
Sophie came running down the stairs, clutching Bébé to her chest. “Maman!”
Vianne opened her arms and Sophie ran into her embrace.
Vianne held her daughter close as the onslaught increased.
Someone pounded on the side door. The copper pots and pans hanging in the kitchen clanged together, made a sound like church bells.
She heard the high squealing of the outdoor pump. They were getting water.
Vianne said to Sophie, “Wait here one moment. Sit on the divan.”
“Don’t leave me!”
Vianne peeled her daughter away and forced her to sit down. Taking an iron poker from the side of the fireplace, she crept cautiously up the stairs. From the safety of her bedroom, she peered out the window, careful to remain hidden.
There were dozens of people in her yard; mostly women and children, moving like a pack of hungry wolves. Their voices melded into a single desperate growl.
Vianne backed away. What if the doors didn’t hold? So many people could break down doors and windows, even walls.
Terrified, she went back downstairs, not breathing until she saw Sophie still safe on the divan.
Vianne sat down beside her daughter and took her in her arms, letting Sophie curl up as if she were a much littler girl.
She stroked her daughter’s curly hair. A better mother, a stronger mother, would have had a story to tell right now, but Vianne was so afraid that her voice had gone completely.
All she could think was an endless, beginningless prayer. Please.
She pulled Sophie closer and said, “Go to sleep, Sophie. I’m here.”
“Maman,” Sophie said, her voice almost lost in the pounding on the door. “What if Tante Isabelle is out there?”
Vianne stared down at Sophie’s small, earnest face, covered now in a sheen of sweat and dust. “God help her” was all she could think of to say.
* * *
At the sight of the gray stone house, Isabelle felt awash in exhaustion. Her shoulders sagged. The blisters on her feet became unbearable. In front of her, Gaetan opened the gate. She heard it clatter brokenly and tilt sideways.
Leaning into him, she stumbled up to the front door. She knocked twice, wincing each time her bloodied knuckles hit the wood.
No one answered.
She pounded with both of her fists, trying to call out her sister’s name, but her voice was too hoarse to find any volume.
She staggered back, almost sinking to her knees in defeat.
“Where can you sleep?” Gaetan said, holding her upright with his hand on her waist.
“In the back. The pergola.”
He led her around the house to the backyard.
In the lush, jasmine-perfumed shadows of the arbor, she collapsed to her knees.
She hardly noticed that he was gone, and then he was back with some tepid water, which she gulped from his cupped hands.
It wasn’t enough. Her stomach gnarled with hunger, sent an ache deep, deep inside of her.
Still, when he started to leave again, she reached out for him, mumbled something, a plea not to be left alone, and he sank down beside her, putting out his arm for her to rest her head upon.
They lay side by side in the warm dirt, staring up through the black thicket of vines that looped around the timbers and cascaded to the ground.
The heady aromas of jasmine and blooming roses and rich earth created a beautiful bower.
And yet, even here, in this quiet, it was impossible to forget what they’d just been through …
and the changes that were close on their heels.
She had seen a change in Gaetan, watched anger and impotent rage erase the compassion in his eyes and the smile from his lips. He had hardly spoken since the bombing, and when he did his voice was clipped and curt. They both knew more about war now, about what was coming.
“You could be safe here, with your sister,” he said.
“I don’t want to be safe. And my sister will not want me.”
She twisted around to look at him. Moonlight came through in lacy patterns, illuminating his eyes, his mouth, leaving his nose and chin in darkness.
He looked different again, older already, in just these few days; careworn, angry.
He smelled of sweat and blood and mud and death, but she knew she smelled the same.
“Have you heard of Edith Cavell?” she asked.
“Do I strike you as an educated man?”
She thought about that for a moment and then said, “Yes.”