The House with Blue Shutters (29 page)

‘Good morning. Or is it just afternoon? What can I do for you, gentlemen?’

Georges felt Thierry and Eric behind him, and the consciousness of their morning’s failure fought with his natural respect
for the collar and the cassock. ‘We’re very busy, Father,’ he began gravely, ‘so we won’t take up your time. I’ll come straight
to the point.’

‘Please do.’

Georges felt his throat contracting dustily as it always had when it was his turn to recite the catechism. Thierry interrupted,
‘We need Boissière. François Boissière, the schoolteacher. And don’t mess us about, with respect, padre.’

If the priest was affronted, he didn’t show it. ‘Monsieur Boissière? I see. I had better fetch his wife, if you can wait a
few moments.’ He passed down the room to a yellow painted door at the right of the stove that presumably connected the schoolroom
with the teachers’ living quarters. Georges cleared his throat and strolled over to the bookcase to look over a
copy of Molière, turning the pages with slow attention and not glancing at the others, nor did he stir at the sound of the
door.

‘Dear old Harpagon?’ asked the priest. ‘One of his finest comedies, I think.’

‘I prefer the tragedies, myself,’ said Georges.

‘Of course, of course. You are the er, the superior officer, sir?’

‘Indeed.’

‘Well perhaps you would like to come and sit down in private. This is rather a delicate matter, you understand.’

Boissière’s wife was in the small sitting room of the schoolhouse, like a man in the armchair, with her big feet planted flat
on the floor and her hands clasped beneath her knees. Later, to make a joke, Georges said he could see why Boissière would
have preferred to get into bed with Uncle Joe. Now, he removed his cap and gratefully took the weight off his feet at her
invitation. There was an arrangement of dried twigs in the empty grate. Artistic, he supposed, though the room was freezing.

‘You are looking for my husband, I imagine?’ Her educated voice showed that she was not local.

‘Yes, Madame. He is in our files, you see.’ Georges liked the sound of that.

The woman attempted to speak and then began to weep, scrambling a grubby handkerchief from the nubbly brown sleeve of her
buttoned sweater and pressing it to her eyes. The priest took over.

‘I’m sorry, Monsieur, but we have all had a terrible shock. We learned recently that Madame Boissière’s husband was, is,’
he lowered his voice and cast a pained glance at the snuffling woman.

‘Yes?’ said Georges.

‘Not to put too fine a point on it, you understand—’

‘Yes?’

‘—a Communist.’

Père Guillaume had said it was impossible for them to light a brazier in the crypt. François Boissière had felt awkward at
first to be confined so closely with his three former pupils, but the cold and the injunction against speech and cigarettes
united them swiftly. Marcel had thoughtfully brought a pack of cards, and they played hand after hand of
vingt-et-un
, laying the cards down separately so they would not slap even slightly on the floor. None of them concentrated on the game,
but it gave their eyes something to focus on besides one another’s faces, and the movement of their hands marked the time.
François wanted to talk to the lads, to ask them how they thought it was that they found themselves here, but he knew better
than to expect an explanation, even if they were not hiding underneath Castroux church whilst they were variously denounced
and impersonated to the
Milice
.

He could not ascertain satisfactorily even to himself why his convictions had failed to make even a token show of themselves
when René Larivière called on him to explain the warning. Nor did he understand why, when they had all met in the presbytery,
Bibles clutched absurdly in their hands, he had taken a certain pleasure in selecting the Communist cover story for himself.
He, who had tried to explain to the Castroux farmers that the world had changed definitively, for better or
worse, that France was beaten and this must be accepted, that at least they were on the winning side in the coming battle
against Communism, had suddenly found himself amused by the idea that he had run off to join the Party. He was rationalizing
his own cowardice, he knew that. What he thought he believed to be correct was a puff of air, and François Boissière was revealed
to himself as a man of no principle who was terrified of what he had taken pride in ignoring until it came too close.

If he could have asked the others why exactly they were here now, he knew they could not answer him. He remembered too clearly
their blushes when he asked them to respond to a question, the way they had sprawled their already-powerful bodies over the
forms, shoulders and biceps arguing more impressively against their imprisonment in this little room than their tongues could
ever have done. At fourteen, Jean Charrot had had an almost full moustache. None of them had taken their Certificate, and
in the case of Nic Dubois, François had felt guilty when he filled in the customary ‘knows how to read and write’ on the leaving
paper, though the lad did have a good head for figures, which would be useful to him in the café. None of them was lazy or
would ever consider himself a coward, that much François thought. If they refused their obligations now, he doubted whether
they did so after any considered analysis of what was their duty. Partly it was the mulishness with which their type, the
peasant type, greeted an injunction of authority, and partly the foxy delight that class took in getting the better of the
same.

It was all very well for the likes of de Chazoumes to sentimentalize the rural poor, but there was no denying that
they were often a bad lot. François had re-read
La Terre
before coming to Castroux, and had often discussed with Charlotte his surprise at the continuing accuracy of Zola’s depiction.
They liked to get one over whenever they could, these people, and they didn’t consider it dishonest, just looking out for
their own. That was their only principle, though it seemed that in the end he himself was no better. François did not consider
then or afterwards for how many it had begun like that, doing what you could to get by until you found yourself suddenly on
the wrong side of the law, with the game changed beyond recognition.

Georges was at a loss. The chair into which he had squeezed himself was very low, and the narrow wings confined him so that
he was unsure that he would be able to get up with any dignity. Moreover, his paper-stuffed holster had been pushed up by
the flesh of his thigh and had risen obscenely against his belly, right in the schoolmistress’s line of vision. The poor woman
was obviously desperately ashamed, she repeated again and again that she was trying to compensate now by being ever stricter
with the pupils, for who knew how he might have indoctrinated the big boys whilst she took the little ones for their nature
walks? She had jumped up and pulled papers from her desk; extracts from the Maréchal’s speeches made by the children, her
own notes on the education laws of 1940. The priest had taken over some of her husband’s lessons, and with God’s grace they
were getting by, but it was a struggle to recover from such a terrible betrayal. There was more of this, a good deal more.
Georges attempted to look knowledgeably at the extracts whilst thinking of a way to tell
the woman that if her husband were to return it would be her duty to report him, and that he would surely go to prison.

He had impressed that on the mayor, he thought later, made that fact thoroughly clear. This observation was repeated in various
formulations throughout the drive home in the humiliatingly empty truck. If any of them, Dubois, Charrot, the Vionnes, Contier,
Boissière, so much as showed their faces there or anywhere else then they were under arrest. The mayor would be under arrest
if he failed to report any information pertaining to their capture.

‘Is it clear, Monsieur,’ Georges had asked grandly, ‘that these men of the Saintonge commune are considered outside the law
by the state. Outside the law!’ Thierry and Eric had thankfully not witnessed the priest’s effort to extract him from the
armchair. Georges was unaware that they were presently puffing out their cheeks in the doorway and muttering ‘Outside the
law!’

Eric was a serious young man, Georges thought, but he had his doubts about Thierry. Too keen, yet in the wrong way.

Dispatches came by motorbicycle and sidecar twice a day, from Cahors and Monguèriac. In theory, they were to arrive by eight
o’clock in the morning and three in the afternoon in winter, but the weather and the condition of the roads had made this
improbable since December. Had
Obersturmbannführer
von Scheurenberg not been waiting irritably in his first-floor office at Esceyrac for the post to appear, smoking his fifth
cigarette of the morning and watching a dimly visible work party ploddingly clear leaves from the avenue, he would have thrown
the letter away after a first reading. Von Scheurenberg liked his room, with its long windows and thick pale walls and the
two elongated Mannerist nymphs, delicate of wrist and ankle and robust about the hips, let into the relief around the fireplace.
He guessed, from their appearance and counting the distance from Esceyrac to Fontainebleau, that they were likely late-sixteenth
century. It was the sort of thing he would have liked to look up, if he had the time. But the room was overheated and stuffy,
and when he opened the casement in
the broader panel of glass to get some air, the January mist snaked in from the dark, straight behind his eyes so that his
incipient headache became urgent. He felt dehydrated, as though his breath was foul, and pressed the bell for his orderly
to fetch a carafe of water.

When it came, he asked the man if the post had arrived, although he knew that it hadn’t. There had been a letter, addressed
to him personally, found in the hallway that morning. Von Scheurenberg felt able to work up quite a good rage about that,
shouting that he didn’t expect to find correspondence dropped off at random like invitations to a birthday party, and where
had the watch been so as not to notice people sneaking around in the grounds delivering letters in the middle of the night,
and what did the man think they were here for, a rest cure? He took some time over the explosion, then sent for Wurster to
have him look into it, lit another cigarette when he was alone again and thought he might as well open the white envelope,
though he knew what he would find.

Monsieur Obersturmbannführer Führer
,

I have the honour to draw to your attention the activities of some people who are encouraging drunkenness and idleness in
this village. If you look in the barn at Nadl’s farm you will see for yourself. There are certainly some lazy people who try
to escape the law.

Respectfully
,

An Honest Frenchwoman

Von Scheurenberg had seen hundreds of these things, in Paris and then at Bordeaux, but this was the first he had received
here and his disgust was freshened. Who were these mealy-mouthed types who had no loyalty to their own? The Nadl property
was the big farm visible in the valley to the left of the chateau, he thought. Hummel had reported that some
Milice
men from Cahors had been there yesterday, checking up on the STO. There were two pointless organizations, both of them a
wearisome waste of energy and resources. There was still no sign of the blasted post. He left the office and crossed the stone-flagged
passage to the staircase, admiring as always the smoothness of the bevelled poplar wood under his hand as he descended. Hummel
was at his desk in what had been the
salon
, and as he scraped his chair back to come to attention, von Scheurenberg was glad once more that he had decided not to replace
the valuable old carpets on the parquet.

‘Is that Nadl’s farm, down there?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You’d better take a couple of men and go along to see what’s going on. Contraband alcohol.’

‘That will be the old man’s still, sir.’

‘What?’

‘If you look through the window, sir, you can see the smoke. Look. He makes schnapps, sir.’

The lower reaches of the valley were still stuffed with mist, but it was lighter now, with no wind, and sure enough there
were two plumes of smoke rising from the farm, one from the main building and the other, finer, from a distance away. Von
Scheurenberg recalled the melon drink he had tasted in the summer, sweetish and rather charming, and the stiffer plum brandy,
like a slivovitz, of which he had drunk several glasses whenever he went to the café this winter. He considered
surprise followed by a lenient warning. Still, it wouldn’t do to seem sloppy.

‘Well if he hasn’t got a permit, you’d better arrest him. You can use the cellar room. Then ring up Cahors and have the
Milice
deal with him. And ask them what the hell is going on with their dispatches.’

‘Yes sir.’

There was refuge in irritation, von Scheurenberg was aware of that. He feared the contents of the post, feared his own truly
righteous anger, because they revealed to him that hope had abruptly departed. He could muster no sincerity for the bumblings
of the
Milice
or anonymous letters, felt himself lean and urgent with the tension of what was to come sprung constantly inside him. The
men, he thought, were beginning to be afraid, and he wanted that fear from them, though he had to control it, to direct it
through discipline so that it would never be dissipated by despair. Von Scheurenberg had been in Russia, but he thought that
this would be worse in the end, though he could not admit of the conclusion of such thinking, as he lit his seventh cigarette
and sat in his chair to wait for news.

Most of Papie’s still was older than he was, and there were parts of it, he said, which were made before the Revolution, though
it had been patched and cobbled so many times that it was impossible to discern what its original form may have been. In summer,
for the melons, he brewed outside because of the heat and the terrible flies. Papie preferred the winter brewing, when the
still was wheeled on the huge solid rubber tyres, which had carried Papie’s son’s perambulator in the last
century into the big barn and a fire was lit in the blackened grate. There were two roof tiles kept loose so the tin beak
of the still could poke out to the sky, though it had been twenty years since Papie had climbed up himself to remove them.
It was cosy then, waiting through the short day in the warm, the metallic pungency of the alcohol filling the air, so that
when he stepped outside to empty the pulp bucket the cold would strike him with the same surprising, invigorating force as
if he had drunk his potion, not merely breathed it. Not that Papie was stingy in giving away a nip or two. There were usually
three or four old-timers sitting around the fire in the afternoons, though nowadays it seemed to be mostly just Camille Lesprats.
Lately there had been William too, and the music, which was a compensation for Camille. There was a blackened copper ladle,
dipped straight into the bucket, and a collection of filthy little glasses that no one had ever thought to wash. Outside,
the juicy skins mounted into a pile, amber or purple, depending on whether he was brewing from the prunes or the Chasselas,
though his visitors would know from the scent long before they even crossed the Landine. As it grew dark Papie shovelled the
skins into a barrow and wheeled it around to the compost heap by the orchard wall. He had tried the skins on the cows one
year, but they got the squits something terrible and fell down drunk in their own liquid dirt. A good story to tell, but not
to repeat.