Amandine (29 page)

“Oh, I, ah, we don’t really need those because we’re going home, a village near Reims, and once there, we won’t need anything like that, of course, my mother, my grandmother … the farm …”

“All of France eats what the
boche
deign them to eat, and that which has been deigned can only be procured with these little pieces of paper. Even in Reims, mademoiselle. Where have you been for the past year?”

“But I have francs, you see, and I, well, we only need something—”

“Ah, of course, francs. Then perhaps you should eat them, mademoiselle.”

Next morning we queued at the
mairie
. It was the first time I’d had to show Amandine’s papers, and I feared that the official would find some pulsing flaw in them, that someone would try to take her from me. I should have know that Fabrice would do his work well. With no break in the rhythm of his pounding timbre, the official slid two thin sheaves of paper across the wide wooden expanse of his desk.
“Prochain.” All of France eats what the Boche deign them to eat.…

But even the ration coupons are often of little use. The
boche
take almost everything. According to our ages, Amandine is rated J2 and I, I am rated A. This means that she can have milk and even chocolate, should there be such. Sometimes we can get only a single egg or a dried sausage, but there are many times, too, when full rations are set before us. Margarine, bread, cheese, potatoes, biscuits, a piece of
ventrèche
with skin rough as hide. Even honey. And, once in a while, vegetables that are hardly rotting at all. There have been times when we’ve supplemented our supper with black market food. It’s not as though one has to look very far or hard to find a supplier. A fistful of francs laid on a table in a bar and someone wanders over.
Mademoiselle desires?
From some trunk or chest or drawer or cellar, voilà. Into the string bag, back on the road. I bless Fabrice for the still fat wad of francs in my bag. No matter what, we have never been without.

And what village was it where we first saw the
boche
up close? I
can’t recall its name. Two weeks it was, maybe three into our wandering. We took a room at the top of a high stone building with dark green shutters and a black iron sign swinging on a rod, its cutout words showing yellow from the flame of the lantern fixed behind it. L’Auberge Fleurie. Through the open windows, the smells were good and we were hungry.

Madame didn’t look up from her wiping down the zinc bar. She had hair so red it was purple in the dim light.

“Fourth floor, number six. The key is in the door.”

I started to walk back to where Amandine was waiting for me when she said, “Pay now, if you don’t mind.”

On the wet bar I put down the small patrimony of francs she required, and we went up to wash. Later we sat side by side on a small wooden bench set against a wall in front of the table that Madame had arranged for us, set with clean white napkins, a fat, oily candle stub in an iron holder, and a blue glass bottle of sweet peas. We had a fine view of the hot, dark room ripe with old sweat and the sharp smells of aubergines and garlic rising up through a Gauloise mist. I’d learned quite a lot about the war, about my France, during that early period of our flight. Learned by listening and watching. Therefore I knew that the
boche
who sat there in front of us in Wehrmacht gray-green with their collar studs undone—raucous and unself-conscious, clinking down their belts and helmets and pistols and making a victor’s noise—were likely an advance guard searching out partisan movement. Surely those
boche
suspected, knew, that the men they hunted sat at the next table, eating the same supper. Spilling down the same cool, light red wine from small stone bowls rather than glasses. The
boche
had seemed to like the wine bowls, held them to the candlelight, all the better to see them. Yes, at the next table, and at the one behind them, and at those all around them sat partisans, faces hard as those stone bowls and so unlike the fresh, rosy-cheeked ones of the big blond boys. In black basques and poor men’s clothes, the partisans were quieter than the
boche
, theirs being a subtle language of codes: wine bowls raised to a certain height, a glance pitched left or right, the removing of a cap, the fumbling with a button
on a shirt, a kiss on the cheek to signify “stop,” a hand on a shoulder, “proceed.”

And among the black basques there was sure to be a collaborator, maybe two, tipping down their wine. Collaborators who work for the masquerade at Vichy? A cell of partisans with different priorities? One with another mode of operation? Communists? Those French who would stand up to the
boche
and those who would lie down with them, sometimes the lines between the factions are smudged. The partisans are hardly of a single mind. Less the collaborators. Nor is it so that one chooses sides. One can move in and out and back in again. If he’s lucky, back out once more. Often it’s the way of things what with sentiments and ideology shifting according to hunger. One hunger or another. Yes, it was the night at les Fleurie when I first began to understand how the war raged within the war, the war that France was fighting with herself. The only constant among the French is that none are passive. Against the French grain to be gray. And so there they were, the
boche
and the partisans and the collaborators, eating aubergine stew at les Fleurie. And all of them looked up when the town girls stepped in, laughing. Not to eat but to show off their pumps and ankle socks, they walked in and, there being no chairs, they stood in counterfeit ease at the bar. Their kerchiefs tied in loose knots above their foreheads, their lips slicked in dark red from what must have been a single rouge pot, they were like town girls everywhere, timid, yearning, waiting to be cherished. There were no town boys, of course, for, upon capitulation, two million French soldiers—not unlike herds of cattle, fleets of trucks—had been requisitioned, taken into
boche
slavery in the fatherland. There were few young Frenchmen left in France, yet young girls must preen for someone.

I’d heard a word in les Fleurie that night. A word I’d heard often enough over those weeks.
Résistance
. Mostly I’d heard it whispered, but once I heard it shouted from the swollen, bleeding mouth of an old man who’d sat down the aisle from us on a train. A
boche
had walked past him, stopped, turned back, and said something that I
didn’t understand. And then the
boche
smashed the old man with his pistol butt. The old man rose from his seat, stood to his full height, which barely reached the
boche’s
shoulder, and screamed,
Je me défends. Je suis la Résistance
. The
boche
laughed, lit a cigarette, went back to his seat. Sometime later I saw the
boche
approach the man again, this time to offer him a cigarette. An olive branch. The old man hesitated, and one could see that he wanted it, perhaps craved it. He made a cutting sign with his hand, turned to look out the window.
Résistance
.

There is another word one hears now and then.
Maquis
. It’s what the moorland of Corsica is called. The secret and desolate terrain of the island’s interior.
Maquisards
. Those who hunt there. The
boche
would not walk so easily over France.

Nor did we. We bought a bicycle in a hamlet near Aubenas and, like most all business, the deal was clinched in a bar. The woman there had asked where we were headed and by what mode. When I told her that we were walking to the Champagne, she lifted her apron to her eyes and laughed behind it until she cried. She wheeled a bicycle out from a shed behind the bar, and Amandine began to dance around it. The woman—was her name Yvonne?—said that her father would rig up a seat for Amandine behind mine. It wasn’t a beautiful thing, the bicycle. Still…

“Where can I find a small wagon to tow our things?”

She fed us, invited us to rest in the little room behind her kitchen from whence we heard banging and pounding in the garden and an irritated voice asking,
How large is the child? Tell me how large is she?
When we walked out, there it was. The metal scrubbed, shined, the wooden seat from what must have been a donkey cart strapped with leather thongs tight over the back wheel, a kind of stirrup was attached somehow to either side and just below it. Amandine climbed in. An adjustment or two. A small three-wheeled wagon was rigged up to trail a meter or so behind us. The whole affair was shaky. But everything else was, too.

“The price, madame?”

And that’s how we became
pédaleuses
.

When we find decent roads, we go like the wind. Not so much like the wind, really. While pushing the cycle uphill or over stones or through the woods, often I think to leave it by the wayside but then tell myself,
Perhaps I shall keep it just awhile longer
.

We rarely advance far in a day, five or six kilometers, often less. I am hard put to explain the sense of liberty I feel. Midst the
tristesse
. The more we learn about, see, hear, feel the war, the more we consent to it. To its shoals, its traps, its shelterlessness. We revise expectations to suit the burdens and are astonished by the smallest goodness. We are grateful for supper. Unaware and without intention, Amandine has instructed me. Surely I will be content to reach home. But meanwhile …

We arrive rather conspicuously in each of our destinations, dismounting our homemade contraption, untying our kerchiefs. We wander about the village, find the place where we shall queue next morning for food. In whatever shops are open and in some of the more prosperous-looking houses, I always ask to trade work for a place to sleep. For a little something more to eat. When someone says yes, we stay for a few days until that yearning to keep going sets in. Or until the grocer or the lady of the house or whomever we’ve taken up with needs our bed, our place at table. Our plate of soup. Until someone doesn’t like my prowess with the laundry or the way Grand-père’s eyes sparkle when he sees me.

While the weather is still fine, we often prefer to camp near a river or a creek, set up our traveling household. What with the luxury of the wagon, we’ve accumulated quite a battery of things, found, gifted, pilfered—a mirror to hang on a low-slung branch so we can fix our hair,
marché noir
underwear and socks, wool and knitting needles for me, books for Amandine, a can of sea salt, a torch, matches, soap for us, soap for our clothes, a thin-bottomed pot with no handle, wooden bowls, spoons, forks, a black-enameled Laguiole, a good woolen
blanket, two glasses engraved with a François Guy absinthe bottle, a wooden fishing pole, a one-person
boche
tent, found wet and muddied in a stretch of beech woods that we scrubbed, dried in the sun. We have a small tin of walnut oil, which must have fallen from someone’s bundles where we found it along a stony back road on the northern edges of the Gard.

We wash our clothes and ourselves in cold, sweet river water, sit on its bank to let a soft wind blow us dry while we fish for our supper. We pile up stones and make a fire. If the fishing is good, we cook the catch—mostly carp but sometimes trout—usually wrapped in leaves and buried in embers. To the tender music of an old oak’s creaking limbs, we sleep under our blanket on a pallet of leaves in the
boche
tent. We wake with the birds and, if a village is close enough, sometimes the bells. By now I am less shamed by my heedless flight from the convent. I and myself, we are reconciled. I know that what was still safe back there, back then, is, by now, no longer safe. Less safe. While we’ve been wending north, sometimes east, even turning back south for a way until we can return to a passable northern route, they’ve seeped south, the
boche
.

It seems that all of France is moving.
Le grand exode
. Though the flight from north to south to outrun the
boche
is greater, we are not alone as we plod against the headwind. Northern French who’d been living in the south have family and farms and property to protect or, having fled early on from the north, are already turning back, ravaged, saying that the perils of facing the
boche
could not be worse than those wrought by six million French on the open road. Running away, running toward, all of them dispossessed of their plenty, they are frenzied, savage. The rich travel in fancy cars until the petrol is gone or the tires split, and the poor push carts and pull wagons. Of both classes, the minds and souls of those we meet are bolted fast as the doors of those still at home. For all that blood spilled in the name of
fraternité
, the French are not tribal. Not even here in the woods. Hiding a box of biscuits. Stealing a box of biscuits while one goes to
bathe. And then hiding it. Shoes. A sliver of soap. An egoism fierce enough to seem like cowardice. Amandine is another kind of French.

Look at her now, splendid in her black market sundress and Philippe’s broken straw fedora, wandering about the woods as if they are hers, as if all the others setting up for the night are her guests. She picks the new shoots of wild grasses, sucks their bitter green juices, chews them like salad. She gathers sorrel and
pis-en-lit
on the riverbanks, ties them in neat bundles with the stem of a weed, scent for the soup we’ll stir up from river water and a potato. Soup from stones, just like in the fable. Gorging upon the freedom of this primitive vagabond life, Amandine is peaceful.

We have no plan except to pedal and walk until we reach home. I send Maman postal cards, the official
boche-approved
ones, which have some chance to pass the censors. I can’t say much but only tell her that we’re well, that we’re on our way. I send the same to Fabrice. Of course I can give no return address, so even if they do receive our messages, they cannot reply.

I choose our route mostly by instinct. Sometimes from the counsel of a man—
résistant? maquisard? collabò?—
who gives us passage in a truck fed on
boche
petrol. How much alike are these ruffian saboteurs. Cigarettes clenched between their front teeth, they heave our rig onto the truck bed and themselves back onto their thrones, slam their doors while we’re still climbing in. Always some quaking, rattling thing, they pelt the truck over stones, take the crests of hills without touching ground, all the while cursing or singing, the cigarette, even when it’s gone to ash, still clamped in place.