The House with Blue Shutters (32 page)

Each day two loaves and a pot of wine were left in the doorway of the little chapel. François guessed they were delivered
by the third brother, who was perhaps young enough to have remained legitimately in the world. Sometimes there were a few
greyish carrots or a bag of squelching, half-rotten potatoes. They ate one loaf in the morning, soaked in coffee with fresh
milk, and in the evening there was the inevitable vile soup, and scrapes of curdy, ammoniac cheese. At first
François was irritable from the combination of permanent hunger and lack of a book. After a few days he was grateful for the
meagre food, it made him duller and more anxious to sleep. One night he thought he heard Marcel crying, and another he heard
little mews and gasps, rustling fumbles from the brothers’ corner. Beastly, but then what did one expect, if this existence
had been their whole life?

François was overjoyed when he went down to the chapel one morning to collect the supplies and saw Laurent Nadl and another
man sitting on the lintel above the miniature door. They were breakfasting on one of the loaves. Laurent’s companion was about
the same age, neatly dressed in a jacket over a thick sweater, though when he sprang down François could see the weariness
around his eyes and the greyness of his skin.

‘Morning, Prof!’ he called cheerfully.

‘This is Jean-Claude, sorry, Mula,’ said Laurent, scrabbling down less gracefully.

‘Laurent. Is it over? Can we go home? Charlotte…’

‘Call him Moto,’ said the other man curtly. Laurent smiled as though he had said something funny.

‘Look, Laurent, can’t we just stop all this business with the names? We all know each other anyway, so what’s the point? Are
we leaving now?’

‘The point,’ said Mula slowly, ‘is that you forget everything. You’re Prof, see? So when they capture you, and you get tortured,
you can’t tell them anything. Get it?’

François was appalled. He looked to Laurent for help, but Mula started laughing and Laurent joined in.

‘We had you there, eh, Prof? You should see your face.’

So François began to laugh too and for the first time, in that cold morning, nowhere, it began to feel all right.

They moved that night. Mula remained with them, but Moto had stumped off down the path, back to the real world. Once again,
the two brothers led the way and they followed in a line, heads down, shoving their frozen hands into their pockets whenever
the track was clear enough to avoid the risk of falling. Mula walked in front of François, who was shocked to see he carried
a long hunting knife, the blade winking horribly whenever it caught the light of the now-thin moon.

‘Boar,’ Mula hissed at him, but François sensed he had the knife out more for pleasure than protection. They walked for hours,
and though François had no sense any more of their direction, it seemed they were going in a sort of circle, bearing left
above where he thought Saintonge had been and dropping down once more into the valley. He looked at his watch when Mula stopped
to light a cigarette. Four in the morning. ‘Nearly there, Prof.’

‘There’ was one of the shepherds’ hovels, hidden beneath an overhang of rock. François guessed they were now below the plain.
There was no door, but the roof was sound. Mula said they couldn’t light a fire, but Pastre produced a little brass pot of
coals from the blanket tied around his back, like the ones François had seen in the orchards, warming the pale petals of the
plum trees. They slumped around it, pulling their blankets tight.

‘Right then,’ said Mula. He was the leader, had been the leader from the moment he arrived. François felt curiously light,
obeying him. He realized it had weighed on him, that
sense of always having to maintain a position of authority, before.

‘I’ll be back here at midnight. There’s some grub in a basket there. Get some rest and don’t leave the hut.’

In a few seconds, the night had swallowed even the sound of his boots. For the first time since he had left the schoolhouse,
François slept well.

Hummel didn’t think he should say so, but in his view it was a poor show. This was serious enough for von Scheurenberg to
be taking an interest, surely? He should be with them. His presence would be a reassurance to the men at the camp, who were
apparently vengeful and restive. As it was, von Scheurenberg had merely told him to make a full report. The boss was behaving
strangely, that was for sure, and it would have been good to discuss it with a superior officer. Grenadier Koller was waiting
for him at attention in the mess tent, looking stiff and guilty. Hummel took out his notebook.

‘At ease, Grenadier. Now, tell me exactly what happened. Take your time.’

The private cleared his throat, still rod-straight despite the order, obviously scared.

‘It was o-four-hundred hours, sir and I was patrolling the perimeter with Grenadier Bloch.’ He paused, as if uncertain how
to go on.

‘Forget the official speak, Koller. Just say what happened.’

‘We had the third patrol, sir. We’d just made a round and I was standing outside the cabin. I was having a smoke.’

‘What was Grenadier Bloch doing?’

‘He was taking a piss, sir.’

‘So he was a way off?’

‘Yes, sir, by the fence.’

‘Go on.’

‘I heard something and I turned around. I couldn’t see Rudi – Grenadier Bloch – so I shone my torch, but then something hit
me on the head and I fell down. I don’t know what happened for a bit, I felt myself being dragged across the ground. They
stuffed something in my mouth, it might’ve been a scarf, and there was something tied around my eyes. I struggled to reach
my gun, but it was hard to breathe, it happened so quick. Then I heard them moving about in the cabin. I don’t know how they
broke the lock. We don’t have the keys, the
Oberscharführer
keeps them. There were a few of them, I think, because I could hear different footsteps moving about. Then they hit me again,
see?’

He bent his head and Hummel saw a huge greenish bruise at the base of the harshly shaved skull.

‘They’d taken off the blindfold, but I still couldn’t see, it was pitch dark. They’d tied my arms and legs. I tried to stand
up, then I rolled to the wall and started kicking as hard as I could. After a bit, the others came and we found Grenadier
Bloch, sir.’

Hummel knew already what they had found. Bloch had been garrotted with a thin wire and there was a single deep wound beneath
his left ear. Someone had known what he was doing. The man was propped up inside the cabin under a V-sign, daubed on the wood
in his own blood. He dismissed Koller under guard. He would be disciplined, Hummel thought, though he didn’t think the man
could be blamed for having a cigarette.

They had not taken much, just what could be carried. Six rifles, four service pistols, and the mortars. They must have had
a vehicle, or they couldn’t have got away quickly enough. No one had heard anything, the men maintained. There was something
else that Hummel found no one to tell, which was that he was impressed.

When Oriane awakened to the sound of the latch downstairs, she hoped for a few short, stupid seconds, that it would be Karl.
She did not call out his name. Rubbing her hands across her face dispelled any guilty signal of disappointment. When Laurent
told her that he needed her to take her big laundry basket down to Murblanc that day she was grateful that he seemed to need
her help. He said she was to put a few things in the basket, sheets or something, and he made her wait outside the humped
shape of the old bread oven and took the basket inside. When he emerged he was listing, struggling to maintain his balance
against his crutch. She could see the tendons standing out in his wrists.

‘I’ll help you carry it up the hill, it’s heavy. Put it in the kitchen and don’t look inside. Do you understand, Oriane? Don’t
look inside. I’ll be back for it sometime.’ They said nothing as they walked up the hill, and Oriane tried not to show her
fatigue, holding her arm stiffly away from her body, as though her belly wasn’t there.

‘Do you want to eat?’ she asked when they reached the thin warmth of the fire.

‘I could do with something.’

She heated up the soup, the cabbage leaves roiling under the spoon, broke the bread into it so it would soften. He was
sitting at the table, she was conscious of his silence at her back, and that the last time they had been alone together like
this she had made him coffee and he believed himself her lover. There had been nothing since but silence between them, never
anything but silence. As she set the dish on the table the baby kicked under her ribs and she giggled without meaning to.

‘What’s up?’

‘Here.’ Slow, she drew his hand towards her belly, somehow feeling he would pull back angrily, but he allowed his big warm
palm to come to rest on her blouse and the baby spun and tumbled beneath their skins.

‘He’s playing! I can feel it.’

The baby somersaulted, as though he was rolling down a bank, a meadow in summer full of flowers. They would watch that together,
one day. Laurent removed his hand softly and took her own, and they looked at one another for the first time in months, too
full of words to speak.

‘You’re a good girl, Oriane. You’ll see, it’ll all be different soon.’ He watched her shyly. ‘I’ve been making him a cradle,
well, a little basket, in good oak. He won’t be able to fall out if he tries.’

‘We can put him outside, under the trees. He’ll like that.’

She watched him eat his soup. After he had gone she waited ten minutes or so until she looked beneath the soiled clothes where
the snout of the gun peering out at her was no surprise. So now she knew something about Laurent, something she was sure was
connected with Papie’s death and the disappearance of the lads from the village, and Monsieur Boissière’s confused face in
the hay. She pushed the basket into the corner under the stairs and laid a brush across it, to
look as if she had been interrupted at her work. Of course they would not think to look here, she imagined Laurent was counting
on that, that it would be too obvious. He had told her not to look because he wanted to protect her, because he was afraid.

Jacky came at the beginning of spring, a few months after Papie Nadl’s death. Oriane was surprised at how kind everyone was.

Betty and Andrée and Amélie came up nearly every day, one of them, and sat with her by the fire in the last weeks, knitting little things and telling her the latest gossip from the village. Amélie even kept her dirty remarks to herself, because the war was on and everyone understood that she and Laurent would have to wait to be married. Betty and Andrée were more sober now, with their brothers gone, though it didn’t stop them chattering about the dances. Madame Boissière was very busy with the school, but she came up with a bag of soap and rubbing alcohol from the chemists in Landi, and told Betty and Andrée to scrub Oriane’s bedroom within an inch of their lives.

When the pains began, Laurent went to fetch Magalie Contier on the motorbike, then sat in the kitchen at Aucordier’s with William. They drank red wine because that was the thing to do. Cathérine and his mother went up and down the stairs

with horrible red bundles of rags. Oriane screamed above them and Cathérine said, ‘I bet you’re sorry now, aren’t you, you dirty bugger?’ William was so upset by the noise that in the end Madame Nadl fetched him back to Murblanc. Oriane squatted, clutching the bedpost, with the knotted bolster cover between her teeth. Magalie told her about her own first time, there had been a doctor in the village then, and Yves had insisted on having him out, he was so proud to be getting a baby. Yves and the doctor sat drinking in the kitchen while Magalie howled on the bedroom floor, and when she asked if she could have a bit of something for the pain the doctor said it wasn’t suitable for women, so when the child came they were both dead drunk, he and Yves, rolling under the
buffet
. Magalie had to pull her son out herself. Oriane tried to smile.

Afterwards, Laurent was allowed to see Oriane for a few minutes. The tiny baby snuffled at her breast, but her face was old and far away, bruised as though she had been beaten. Laurent reached out to touch his son, but Magalie swiped his hand away and said to get downstairs and make himself useful, the poor girl had had a shocking time. Jacky was no more than a bag of skin in her deft hands, his dark hair plastered over his scrunched up face. Laurent took the soup pot from Cathérine’s hands and, for the first time in his life, stirred food at the fire. There were potatoes in goose fat. He squashed them into lumps.

He managed to get upstairs with a steaming plate and sat as gently as he could on the edge of the clean sheet holding out the dripping spoon.

The war had been good news for the pigeons, Père Guillaume thought as he struggled up to the belltower. The
Milice
had impounded every hunting rifle in the south, or so they claimed. René Larivière had been obliged to announce the abandonment
of the annual Castroux Pigeon Feast last August. This was usually a delirious occasion, when the
chasseurs
warmed up their trigger fingers by blasting every bird in sight, and on more than one occasion in Père Guillaume’s memory,
one another. The women spent a frenzied day of plucking and roasting and there was a five franc prize for the biggest bag.
Unculled, the pigeons were fatter and saucier than ever, as witness the pulpy-bodied yellow chick squatting contentedly in
the nest its parents had seen fit to build on top of the wireless set. Other than squirming its greasy stumps of feather,
it seemed undisturbed when the priest tuned in. Père Guillaume was panting as he arrived in the loft space beneath the bell.
He had hoped to hide the set in the crypt, but there was no reception, so it was as well he had slimmed down a
little in the past few years. The chick squeaked and opened its beak expectantly. Père Guillaume considered pigeons to be
a disreputable sort of bird, and he enjoyed the Feast as much as anyone, but he took a heel of bread from his cassock and
crumbled it in the smelly nest, glad that no one could see his foolishness.