Amandine (37 page)

“Avise. Near Reims. Their name is Jouffroi.”

“Yes, well I did, I do know that, but you see, listen, why don’t you
and Madame Isolde go about the morning together while I get to my work? And after lunch, we shall speak about this.”

“About my going home?”

“About why it’s best for you to stay here with us. For now.”

Madame Isolde heats water in a cauldron over a woodstove in a shed behind the house where a great deep zinc tub sits. Towels, a brush like the ones the convent sisters used to scrub the stairs, Amandine tells her, a cake of blackish soap. Isolde goes to work on Amandine’s slender limbs. Washes her hair, rinses it with water gone cold.
Almond oil, purple capsules that make lilac foam. Solange is still dead
.

“Pardon, madame?”

“I was saying, ‘There we are, all finished.’ Until we fix up some other things for you, I found these in your valise. I’ve ironed them. They’ll do for now.”

Amandine buttons up her old tartan shirtwaist and pulls her black market sundress, dark blue and white stripes, over it. Both are too small and short for her lengthening body. Their effect raises a gasp from Madame. “I’ll get things ready for Monsieur’s lunch, put that hare to soak, sweep up a bit, and do the beds. Then we’ll be on our way. The queue will be shorter nearer to ten, so there’s no rush. Sit in the sun to dry your hair, won’t you? Such lovely hair, Amandine.”

Catulle has invited Amandine to sit with him in the garden. He has set out two heavy iron chairs under the apple trees. Though it’s still light, he has lit a small lantern, hung it from a tree branch.

“Amandine, I understand your wanting to get to Madame Jouffroi. Though I don’t know all of your story, I know that, well, I know enough to understand why you would like to see her.”

“Do you know about Solange?”

“Yes. I know that she was your guardian, that you and she were traveling north to her home. I know that she was killed.”

Catulle waits. Amandine, satisfied that he knows this much, at least this much, waits for him to proceed.

“But it isn’t possible. Not now. It’s not the imprudence of trying that I’m against but the futility of it. There is no way to get through. There would have been no way for you and Solange to get through. Their village lies in what the
boche
have designated ‘the forbidden zone.’ It’s an area that has been, well, it’s been cut off from the rest of France. No one can get out, no one can get in. Not without authorization. Not without permission.”

“How do I get permission?”

“You don’t. You can’t. I meant military permission, authorization. And those do not apply to you. Please listen. Just as I believe Dominique and her friends did, my friends and I have done our best to contact Madame Jouffroi. We’ve even tried to contact people who might know her, people who live nearby. The search has been an empty one, Amandine.”

“Do you mean that she’s dead?”

“No. Not at all. It’s likely that Madame Jouffroi and her mother, her daughters, it’s likely that they were displaced by the
boche
. That means that the
boche
could have taken over their house, their farm. That’s probably what happened. Until the war is over, until people begin to return to their homes, to their villages, there’s not much to be done. Can you try to begin thinking of this as your home? Not for a week or a month. Perhaps for a very long time.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know. As you’ve come to realize already in this brief, inconceivable life of yours, no one of us knows very much at all.”

“It seems to me that everyone is either dead or hiding. Or lost or waiting.”

Catulle is quiet. He looks at Amandine, looks away. “You’ve just about covered all the possibilities. But I am not dead. And Madame Isolde is not, and all the—”

“I know, but you could be by tomorrow, and Madame Isolde could go for a walk and not ever come back because the
boche
decided to shoot her, let her fall into a ditch, and then cover her up with dirt. And where is Dominique, and where are your sons? Where is Solange’s mother? Where is mine?”

This is the most that Amandine has spoken since Solange’s death.
Perhaps it is more than she has ever spoken. The most she has given voice to the words that stay inside. Philippe and Baptiste, Paul and the convent girls. Josette. They march past her now. Solange is there. Hedy Lamarr, who impersonates her mother, she is there. She looks at this man sitting near her. Wonders why he is crying.

“That’s the part of your story that I know less of, Amandine. I know that you’re an orphan. That—”

“I don’t know much more than that, myself, monsieur. Just as it says on my papers: mother, unknown; father, unknown. I worry so much about her. Not so much about my father. I don’t know why I’ve never wondered about him, but I think it might be because of Philippe. Père Philippe. He was a priest at the convent. I used to think that he was my father. That was when I was very little. And so he sort of became him. You know, became my father. But even though I used to think that the abbess in the convent was my mother, when I learned that she wasn’t, well, eventually I was glad. Glad that she wasn’t my mother. Do you understand?”

“I think so. Because she wasn’t, she wasn’t …?”

“Like a mother. Solange was. I guess I’ve had two mothers. One is dead, and one is lost. I miss the one who’s dead and I worry about the one who’s lost.”

“You worry about her?”

“Of course. Wouldn’t you worry about your mother if she was lost? I don’t even know her name. How shall I find her, how shall I begin?”

“Maybe it’s she who must find you.”

Built of round gray stones, it is long and low, Catulle’s house. Endlessly turning corners and forming small river-shale-paved courtyards from which curved wooden doors—each painted with an appropriate fruit or vegetable—open onto root cellars and pantries and a wine cave, it would be the typical mid-eighteenth-century village house of, perhaps, a prosperous merchant or, in his case, a prosperous farmer who prefers the convenience of village life to the isolation of living on
his land. When his sons and his daughter were at home, when they were growing up—albeit without their mother but in the care of a revolving procession of devoted aunts and cousins and always Madame Isolde—the house was ripe with cheer. Under the low-beamed ceilings against the annually whitewashed walls, hearths smoldered in every room, the curtains were starched, the heirloom mahogany glossed, the tile floors waxed to peril. Masses of flowers and blossoming branches and fruits spilled from vases and jugs and bowls, and there were cupboardsful of green-and-yellow faience plates and silver and crystal and some tiny jot of old lace was everywhere there was a space for it, that’s how it was, Catulle’s house. And the smells of supper and wood smoke, of some voluptuous potion—a brace of fine putrid birds, the haunch of a boar—shuddering away in a bath of noble wine perfumed with a faggot of wild herbs in Isolde’s great black iron casserole at the back of the stove. For the epoch of those twenty-odd years between the wars, that’s how it was. The village, too.

Close enough but not too close to Paris, the place thrived from the overnight carting to the city of bounty from its rich earth—vegetables and fruits, which were sold each dawn at Les Halles. At least as much did the village thrive by its own essential frugality. There were cafés and
pâtisseries
, wine shops,
épiceries
, bakers, butchers, little restaurants with wide
guinguettes
cantilevered out over the river where, on a summer’s evening in the light of pink and yellow lanterns, people would dance. If one was careful, one could partake of all of this and still put something aside in the wooden cigar box in the bottom drawer of the kitchen armoire. But now, life with the
boche
, under the
boche
, the villagers have adjusted.
Jours maigres
to be sure, yet often there are good days. Another kind of
good days
. The houses, the park, the school, the
mairie
show only a mild embattering from early
boche
strafing. Unlike in the Great War, this time France saved herself. In some ways, she saved herself.

Up and down the main street of the village, much seems as it was. The pastry shops are closed, of course, and the butcher hands out what the
boche
give him. Likewise the
épiceries
. Though in the bars the
café
machines are quiet and the only offerings are thick glass tumblers
of watered wine or some unrefined homemade poteen that the
boche
didn’t want, the old men still play cards at the oilclothed tables, still cheat and challenge, if with less voice and less heart.

The restaurants survive in an interesting way. Villagers bring some part of their rations to barter with the cooks for a plate of soup, some sort of braise or stew. A sweet concocted from salvaged fruit, a piece of honeycomb, yesterday’s bread, an egg, some cream. And then, next morning, the foods that the villagers had brought the evening before to barter are put to use for that day’s menu, a self-sustaining concept that flourishes upon French culinary ingenuity and the truth that says: A good cook can make a good supper from nothing. And though one of the old men might strap on his accordion and play for a bit, no one dances on the
guinguettes
stretched out over the river. No one save the girl whose fiancé was shot on the first day of the Occupation because he moved too slowly into roll call to suit the
boche
. She dances sometimes on the terrace of one little place, her arms an arc about his ghost.

The effect of the Occupation on the village is like that of a Vermeer left to the ravages of sun and rain and the slashing of a small, sharp knife. Still recognizable, even still good, certainly still precious. Perhaps more precious to one who has known it as it once was.

Catulle and a troupe of older village men work his land. The vast portion of his crops is requisitioned, as are those of his neighbors. And those of most of France. What he manages to set aside or glean helps. There are rations. There are the forests, the river. Among his treasures he counts three goats, a bevy of hens, a gallant rooster, a rabbit hutch. Madame Isolde. He waits for his children to return, opens the doors to their rooms each day, more than once a day, walks to their windows, touches their beds. Beds where
boche
slept and might sleep again while his sons and his daughter slept, sleep … where? He thinks of the girl. This Amandine. Her ancient little soul. Nothing more than a scuffed valise and someone else’s shoes to call her own, still she worries for her mother.

Though she’s been with Catulle and Isolde for two months, she still shakes hands with both of them as she enters the kitchen every morning. Still thanks them before she sits down at table and again when she rises. She has grown fond of them, of how they look and speak, what they do, the simple ceremonies of their life. She thinks what she feels is something like the happiness she felt with Solange. Something like it. She wonders if it’s terrible that hours pass without her thinking of Solange. Or is it that she never stops thinking about her? Is it that Solange is always nearby? No, not nearby but rather inside her. Yes. Inside her.

After Catulle has gone about his business of a morning, Amandine and Madame Isolde begin theirs. Isolde is surprised by the little girl’s will to work and the strength of her delicate body. She polishes and scrubs and lifts and carries, can soon anticipate what’s next to be done and, from time to time, will have an idea of her own. Especially about lunch.

The lettuces need to be thinned. May I make a custard with the broken leaves? I would need two eggs and some milk. I know we have cheese. Do we have nutmeg?

Together Amandine and Isolde queue for rations, wander about the shops to see what might be there, visit the place behind the church where a group of farm ladies set up tables to present whatever they’ve been able to keep from their gardens and orchards that day. As though she was her own dark-eyed, curly-haired triumph, Isolde is proud of Amandine, of her manners, her beautiful speech, her ease with adults, with strangers. Her composure.

She has remade two of her best dresses—ones she’d been saving for occasions that never quite arrived—to fit Amandine. A powder pink silky one she’s cut down into a pinafore with short ruffly sleeves, made a belt and a shawl from the scraps. The brown one with the white buttons from the collar to the hem, Amandine prefers. Isolde has found some used things in the market, a gray seersucker pinafore and two white cotton blouses with lace collars, a pair of wide canvas trousers like the farmers wear in the fields, wooden clogs, never worn and still bound together with a length of string, and black oxfords
and a pair of boots for working in the garden and walking in the woods. From a length of batiste meant for curtains she has made chemises and threaded pink ribbons through their buttonholes, culottes with elastic waists, and a nightdress. Isolde is already worried about finding a winter coat for Amandine and has put the word out to her neighbors.