Marlene (2 page)

But when classes resumed in the autumn of 1914, all the pupils and teachers were ordered to gather in the auditorium.

Thunderous speeches were delivered, of which we didn't understand a word. I tried to find Mlle. Breguand's face. I didn't see it. The English and French teachers were seated next to the Latin and Greek teachers. She wasn't there. I then combed the rows of the science and mathematics teachers. Neither was she there. She surely must have heard the big school bell that summoned us. Where was she? Then slowly the terrible truth dawned on me with a chill. Marguerite Breguand! France! French! You are a Frenchwoman! You, Marguerite Breguand, you are a French-woman! Germany is at war with France! That's why you're not here. We are enemies. These thoughts actually made me faint.

I was made to drink some water, and they said the air in the auditorium was too stuffy. The speeches came to an end, and we returned to our classrooms chattering like magpies. Now we had to knit for the soldiers during school hours. The youngest of us made mittens, the older ones sweaters. Scarves, too, a simple task. Wool was stored in the gym. The dead languages were still being taught, but what was going to happen with English and French? New teachers would replace the old ones now fighting at the front. If we were lucky, they'd be old and drowsy. And we were lucky. The school rules were made less rigid. Every morning in all classrooms, from eight to nine o'clock, from the fourth grade through the fifth form and from the seventh through the eleventh, academic instruction was replaced by knitting lessons.

The soldiers marched through the streets with flowers clasped to their rifles, they laughed, they sang, kissed the women.
Flags hung from windows as people celebrated the war against France.
The festival of the war.
The barbarians were celebrating the declaration of war with a flower clasped to a rifle.

Nobody could have forced me to participate in the war against France. I loved Marguerite Breguand, and I loved France. I loved the soft and familiar French language. I was the first to wear mourning. I had lost Mlle. Breguand, I had lost the French language, I had lost a promise that was not kept, an honorable, pure promise that my teachers had made to me—they who had been telling us: “A promise is a promise.”

We had been promised a peaceful childhood: school, holidays and picnics, summer vacations with hammocks, beach, pail, shovel, and a starfish that we could take home with us. We had been promised plans, plans to be forged, carried out, actualized, dreams to be dreamed and made to come true. A secure future—and it was up to us to take advantage of it. And now? No more plans, no secure future, and no knowledge that could be of any use to the war. Since we couldn't form a military unit, we knitted. We sat in the classroom barely lit by the daylight and knitted to warm the soldiers digging trenches far from home. They made us knit to make us feel useful, to fill the gaping void caused by the war. The wool was “field gray,” rough and constantly tangled. Field gray. For me the fields were not gray, but wherever the fighting was going on, they probably were.

Life in school sank back into a gray monotony, becoming again what it had been before Mlle. Breguand's guest performance: a prison. But I didn't forget her. Each time I was punished for speaking French (the language of our enemy) and had to drop ten
pfennigs
into the glass till, this donation was made in her name.

My passionate love for France overcame the first shock: It went underground and survived all the prohibitions. I didn't tell a soul about it. With head held high, I bore my secret in the depths of my heart.

The first members of my family who fell in combat were distant cousins and an uncle. Their deaths left no void in our small family circle. My mother showed no grief. Her great concern was, and had always been, her childrens' health. My father was on
maneuvers when the war broke out. He went to the front without returning home to bid us good-bye. It seemed to me as if he spent all his time writing to us, his letters seemed to have kept him out of the fighting. He never related anything about the war, but instead described the various countrysides, the villages, and the woods through which he trudged, and the seasons that he saw come and go.

Summer vacation was drawing closer, and with it the mountains and the scent of the pines at sunset. Some teachers had stayed put and had organized summer courses to which I was sent. I loved the lessons outdoors, the feeling of freedom, the cheerful and sunburnt teachers. Nobody talked about the war. Yet not too far away was a POW camp, off limits to us.

One day I was sitting on the veranda busy with my homework. The last sunbeams cast a yellowish light on my paper. Suddenly I noticed that I had written the date of July 14 in my notebook. The Bastille! France's famous day! The holiday of holidays! “
Allons enfants de la patrie
.” By the time it was twilight, I had gathered as many white roses in the garden as I could carry. I ran to the edge of the woods. The thorns pierced my summer dress. I cried in pain and fear. But I was firmly determined to go through with my adventure, come what may.

I stood still right in front of the barbed wire.

Some figures were discernible behind the fence. Too late to make a retreat. They had seen me. I was small, but I was wearing a white dress and carrying a bouquet of roses of the same color. The men had black beards, black eyes, they didn't stir. Bells were pealing in the village. Peace, suppertime—and again the fear of being discovered, of not being able to transmit my message to them. For a long time I just stood there, motionless. The bells ceased to peal.

“Let's go,” I thought, “let's go! After all you're a soldier's daughter.”

I drew a rose from my bouquet and held it up to them. I couldn't notice any movement on the other side. They just stood there, rigid and stiff like tin soldiers. Then I drew a little closer to them, and in my childish voice and in my best French, I said:
“Today is the Fourteenth of July. I thought the roses would make you happy.” I pushed a rose through a hole in the barbed wire fence, a hand suddenly moved, grabbed, then other hands also dared to reach out. Breathlessly, I quickly handed over all my roses, as though accomplishing a glorious and forbidden feat. No other word was spoken.

I ran, and my heart pounded as though it were about to burst when I secretly slipped into the house through the cellar door. The anniversary of the storming of the Bastille came to a quiet close. Nobody had noticed my absence.

On the following day a teacher came by to see my mother. I had been seen. The teacher was ready to forgive me, to forget this “childish” prank, but the mothers of my schoolmates had demanded my expulsion from the summer school.

My mother remained quite calm. No anger, no nervousness. I was ashamed of myself for her sake and broke into tears. I didn't get to hear the familiar phrase: “A soldiers daughter doesn't cry.” When I raised my eyes she was standing there, motionless, looking at me and weeping.

Now that I was left to my own devices for the rest of the summer, I gave a lot of thought to the notion of justice, confused thoughts, questions without answers, buzzed through my head. The war was unjust. Good and evil, these poorly defined concepts, have a clearly etched meaning in the world of children. They are like a primal law: unchangeable, always explainable, inexorable and mighty. Outside the world of children, on the other hand, good and evil seem to be changeable, deceptive, and invented arbitrarily.

I lay on the grass and thought about God and about Mlle. Breguand.

Both were somewhere, very far from me. God would come back after the war, I was as much convinced of this as I was of His absence. Yet I wasn't so sure in the case of Mlle. Breguand: First of all because she was a young woman, and then because I knew her less well than I knew God. I could rather easily foresee what God would do. Mlle. Breguand's image, however, was blurred and yet fascinating, full of surprises, it would suddenly turn up, flooded
with light and vanish again as suddenly as it had appeared. Why should she have to come back after the war? The peace, perhaps, would not reconcile the French and the Germans, and besides, I might be too old to still be at school. God, on the other hand, had to come back, as He is responsible for us and, unlike us, does not reckon in years. He would come back to us again and reward those who suffered in the war permitted by Him. Yet none of these reasons spoke for the return of Mlle. Breguand.

Deep down I thought it was proper that God and Mlle. Breguand should keep their distance for a while, because men were slaughtering each other and making a mockery of human and divine laws. Summer came to a close, and sadly, I boarded the train that brought me back to the city.

I sang “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles” in the spacious school courtyard amid my girlfriends. But I kept my mouth hermetically closed when the imprecation “May God punish England” reverberated from the walls. And again more victory celebrations, again holidays in exchange for gold pieces we were told to elicit from our mothers and grandmothers. Holidays in the event of death in the family. Once more, girls absent from school, more girls in black, food ration cards, lists of the wounded, lists of the missing, lists of the dead. Family gatherings with coded words, phrases overheard through closed doors: “The children mustn't notice anything. Careful, speak softly, there are children in the house.”

Grief of the grown-ups. In the church, religious services for the missing. Tears hang like silver pearls from veils that flutter in the cold gusts and summer winds. The hope that you will never have to experience war when you are grown up.

Our mothers. How do they bear this ordeal of fate? How do they still muster the courage to cook, sew, help their children with their homework, attend to them, listen to the melodies they play over and over again on the piano, go for walks with them on Sundays? All these women bereft of their husbands! They press us to their hearts, we embrace them in our turn, and the men for whom they yearn will soon be corpses. How sad … If at least we could cry. But we can't. We have our children's sorrows, our daily
disappointments, our world in which things are going wrong, going to pieces without any reason, resisting our efforts, desperate efforts, to cover up our stupidities, to hush up our memory gaps, to hide our ignorance, forgetfulness and inattentiveness, to atone for our sins—on paper and in our heads—to veil a lie with more and always new lies! And this terrible and insufferable anxiety against which only illness can be of some help, fever, doctors and bed, always the same routine—the bed, a haven, a bulwark, a fortress. It resists the assaults of teachers and principals who draw the parents to their side—and silken soft angel arms that cradle us like babies, protected in warmth, in security.

Children are condemned to silence and solitude in advance. They may not let on that their own fears bring them close to those who are suffering at the front every day and who live in fear of ambush and mutilation. If grown-ups were to listen to us, would they stop slaughtering each other? But we are only the passive witnesses of history's upheavals. We attend, as usual, to our affairs morning, noon and night, as though God were with us and blossoming apple trees bedecked the entire earth. Why send us to school if we are going to lose the war anyway? But no! We shall not lose the war, and we must go to school. God is with us, don't you know that? God, do You know that You are with us? Us the Germans? How do You choose what side You are on? Do You support the best ones? The best pupils? Are You only on one side? Then You cannot be God, or can You? You let the just and the unjust come to You. Are we the just? We are victors. Doesn't that mean that we are the just? Don't ask questions. Do your homework. Attend to your daily chores. And, finally don't forget music.

My mother taught me a waltz by Chopin that I was allowed to play as a reward, if I had diligently practiced Bach and Handel. Sometimes we changed places, and then she played, her fingernails touching on the keys with a delicate click. I knew this sound from earliest childhood. It belonged to a house full of flowers, to my mother's perfume, to her evening gown, her beautiful hairdo, to the smell of my father's cigarette coming through the open door of the library where he strode back and forth on a thick rug and
listened to my mother playing the piano. Everything was ready for the guests.

The fingernails had stopped striking the keys. I took my place again at the piano and noticed how precipitously my mother had left the room. The doorbell had rung. I heard my mother race to the door. It could not be the mailman, but she ran. She ran because she was waiting; all day long she waited for letters from the front, for something else. In the way she raised her head, you could feel that one-half of her being was steeped in anxiety and sorrow, and the other was restricted to performing the duties of day-to-day living. “My fate is that of millions of women,” she would say. For her that was neither good nor bad. With deeply bowed head, she read a letter from the family, and then she told me about the death of a relative, as if she had been expecting it for a long time.

She was always dressed in black. A black band was put over my left sleeve as a sign of permanent mourning for all the family dead. Mostly, I wore dark blue dresses and coats. Gray was also a mourning color, but one could go over to gray only after several years. Little white cuffs and collars constituted the only modification of this outfit's severity. I wore braided black ribbons on the pigtails that hung below my shoulders. Before the war I was allowed to wear my hair loose, held only by a headband—something now allowed only on Sundays or holidays. During the war there were no holidays. I dreamed of an armistice and peace; I dreamed also of the warm, wild, and fragrant sweep of hair that once fell on my face and on my neck.

Toward the end of the war I was vaccinated against smallpox, and a red band adorned my arm: black and red, the German flag. I painted for myself my own black and red homeland. Harmony, harmonicas, accordions, violins. No teachers, no soldiers. Twilight instead of dark nights. Plains and rivers, houses with straw roofs, children in big feather beds, a cow for each one, golden wheatfields in the sun, sweet-smelling lupines, moist and dark earth, green clover and sour sorrel, lavender honey-scented pillows, hammocks for summer afternoons, carefree, fleeting time. The hammock sways, the back of the hand grazes the grass, now this
way, now that. Back and forth without stopping. Nobody calls you. You eat whatever you like. No thunderous voices, no battle, no war. Silently, I swore allegiance to my flag when the moment came to remove the red band. But the black band remained on my sleeve.