In This Hospitable Land (43 page)

“What happens next?” Denise asked in a subdued tone. “Do we stay here? Do we go?”

“You stay here for now,” Georgette said in a sympathetic hush, “till someone tells us otherwise or you can’t stand me and Simone one minute more.”

“I’m sure that won’t happen.” Still not eating, Denise walked to the fire to stop herself from shivering. “So my sister and I won’t be able to get back together?”

“Not immediately, no.”

Denise took her hands out of her coat pockets and extended her cold fingers toward the fire. “Will our husbands know we have left La Font for Villaret?”

“I’m sure they’ll be told something.” Georgette stepped over to Denise and put her arms around her. “It will all be all right. You’ll see.”

“I just keep thinking how fortunate Albertine is to have her husband with her.”

“And our other brother’s still around too,” Georgette said, lighting up. “Émile.”

“Brother? Isn’t your last name ‘Guibal’?”

“Married name, yes. But I was born a Brignand.”

Just then Ida inched down the steps trailed by Christel. Both rubbed their eyes.

“Maman,” Christel said proudly and sheepishly at once. “I have to go pee-pee.”

“Here,” Georgette said reaching into a small side room and bringing out a glazed clay object. “Use the chamber pot.”

Ida looked scandalized, Christel simply horrified.

“But Maman,” Christel complained, “can’t we go outside?”

“Not unless Georgette says so,” Denise replied. “You know we have to be much more careful now than ever before.”

Reluctantly but bravely, Ida and Christel trooped into the side room to take their turns using the new facilities. Meanwhile Denise went to get Cristian as Georgette started warming the bajana, adding a few new ingredients to the pot that was always available in the fireplace.

Ida returned from the side room first. “Can we go out to play?”

Denise looked to Georgette who shook her head no, reminding Denise of the warning she had issued the previous night.

“But Maman,” Christel whined as she also returned, “we went potty like good girls!”

Denise looked at her daughters helplessly. She had run out of ways to explain.

Georgette swung the great pot out on its crane and gave the soup a stir. With infinite patience and concern she explained again about going outside only at night and never being seen at the windows. Then she served out the soup.

That evening after the children were once more in bed, the sun quickly set across the range of mountaintops to the west and the deep gray shadows of night surrounded the ancient stone buildings of Villaret. Georgette led Denise out of the house at last, and in the pale light of stars shining through a haze of clouds Denise could just make out the little passageways between the several houses and the many small barns and outbuildings. The two women stood quietly, hidden in the lee formed between the corner of the house and the adjoining barn, listening to the Guibals’ livestock bedded down beneath their two-story stone house just as the Sauverins’ animals had been at the much-larger La Font. Creatures of the night crept out of their daylight hiding places, scurrying here and there in search of life—another’s for their own. This led Denise to dark thoughts of human hunters.

“It’s all right though,” Georgette said, as if she had read Denise’s mind. “They can’t see us from the mines when it’s dark like this. Besides,” she added with a confidence born of long years in the hamlet, “I can hear anyone coming from across the way. We’re safe here for the moment.”

Denise stood silently in the dark corner, sheltered from the wind but keeping her coat buttoned up against the cold.

“I’ll go back in now,” Georgette said thoughtfully, appreciating the delicacy of the moment. “You stay out as long as you like.”

Denise stared up into the dark, searching for the invisible moon. She tried to count her blessings. Though it was terribly sad she wouldn’t be able to be with Philippe when he turned four, she was glad at least some of the family had had a chance to celebrate his birthday together.

Le Tronc is hard,
Alex reflected, forking manure out of the lower level of the barn he and his brother lived in—less comfortable and more monotonous than La Font. But he preferred sleeping in a barn and working outdoors to confinement in a prison camp.

The stone barn would have been too cold if not for the built-in fireplace that due to the stone could be used without fear of conflagration if one made sure every last wisp of hay was far enough away to prevent stray sparks and cinders from igniting it. With the fire bright and the Guins’ limited livestock gathered in the nearest stall, the smallish barn was fairly warm.

There were a couple of chairs and a rough table but no beds. The brothers slept on piles of hay they regularly reformed into usable shapes which weren’t as comfortable as La Font’s uncomfortable beds but were better than the hard barn floor or the unheated ground outside.

The Guins were almost the only people Alex and André saw. Food was in very short supply and basic—simple and none too tasty despite Madame Guin’s best efforts.

As for the brothers’ work—gathering firewood, feeding sheep and goats, shoveling manure—Alex preferred it to doing nothing or moping about the Brignand house in Le Massufret. In the cold air of early spring, he, like André and Léon, wore heavy wool pants, a white cotton shirt grown faintly brown from dust and dirt that refused to come out despite repeated washings, and a wool suit coat, its three tightly sewn buttons buttoned in hopes of preserving as much body heat as possible. Not that forking mounds of manure over a stone wall didn’t make Alex sweat.

“Amazing,” Alex muttered to André laboring beside him, “how so few creatures can produce so much stuff. We’ve been pitching it for days.”

“I don’t think Léon has ever cleaned out this barn,” André said.

Surveying the dark mass of animal defecation, Alex shook his head. “Now I know why he wanted helping hands.”

“I don’t have much,” was Léon’s favorite phrase. “Just my animals and my land. At least the authorities are far away—though they’re never far enough away.” Whenever he spoke of “the authorities,” Léon coughed and spat derisively. But he always followed this display of disgust by growling pleasurably, with a twinkle in his eye, “Of course I have Yvonne.”

Very much her husband’s opposite, Madame Guin was always smiling, helpful, and supportive. She could ameliorate Léon’s nastiest moods, and she sent him out to the brothers every few hours with warming mugs of some mixture of beans, tea, and goat’s milk she contrived in her kitchen.

“Here,” Léon said each time, thrusting steaming mugs into the brothers’ hands. “This will help. Though it’s not like Brussels, eh?”

Alex had been drinking ersatz concoctions so long he had almost forgotten the taste of real dark-roast coffee. Every now and again he could trick himself into believing charred beans of undistinguished mixed pedigree supplied a hint of civilized satisfaction.

In late March—three weeks after Émile Brignand had dropped off the Sauverin brothers at Le Tronc—Alex took a brief break from his dung-removal efforts. Wiping away the sweat beneath his beret, he looked out over the valley stretching far away below to the slope of the mountains rising up on all sides. From here he could see a great distance, making it difficult for anyone to approach unnoticed during the day. So when he saw Pastor Donadille bicycling down the path to the Guins’ isolated farm, he and André raced to the Guins’ door to greet him.

“Marc Donadille, what brings you here?” Léon demanded, stepping out of his house.

Panting, the pastor said, “I want to let the brothers know about their families.”

“Are they okay?” André asked anxiously over the pastor’s gasping.

“Yes yes,” Pastor Donadille answered weakly, “but they had to leave La Font.”

“When?” Alex felt his heart thump against his rib cage and pound in his ears.

“Last week. The police were coming for them as they had come for you.”

“Where are they now?” André asked.

“Madame Denise and your three aren’t far. They’re staying with the Guibals—a good woman and her daughter—in Villaret, a hamlet rather like this. Off the main road.”

“The Milice don’t like to get off the main roads,” Léon spat, “and the Gestapo like it even less. We make it dangerous for those cowards.”

“Where is my family?” Alex demanded. “Why aren’t they all together?”

The pastor put his hand over his heart as if to apologize.

“No room at the inn,” Léon chortled.

“Or in Villaret,” the pastor explained. “Seven Sauverins in one tiny hamlet would have made for too much activity and visibility.”

“So where are they?” Alex insisted.

“Two places,” Donadille revealed regretfully. “Madame Geneviève and your daughter are in the next valley over, in L’Herm, also with a nice family, that of Pierre Guin.”

“Your brother?” André asked Léon.

“Cousin,” the old farmer answered.

“And my son?” Alex asked, almost apoplectic.

“Philippe is just a little farther away with the family of Edouard Ours in Le Lauzas, part of Le Collet-de-Dèze, south of Saint-Frézal-de-Ventalon. They have a lot of children. I’m sure he’s safe and happy there.”

“Away from his mother?”

“Just one of the precautions the Resistance judged it wise to take,” the pastor said levelly.

Alex continued to stare at Pastor Donadille. Slowly his look softened. “Forgive me,” he apologized. “I’m worried, concerned, upset. But it has nothing to do with you or any of the good people doing all they can to help us.”

“We all understand,” Donadille said, putting out a hand, which Alex took in his.

Talk turned to the question of security throughout the Cévennes.

“The Maquisards are strong around here,” Léon said. Then he smiled broadly. “Of course the strength of the Resistance is mostly due to the Communists.”

Alex was surprised by this. He had had the impression that factions within the Resistance locally were much less significant than before André had staged his intervention at La Font.

“Léon only says such things because he himself is a Communist,” Pastor Donadille told the brothers good-naturedly.

“Naturally I’m a Communist,” Léon declared. “Only the Communists have a real feel for the people. The government never cared about us even before that idiot Pétain took over. And neither do the socialists or the conservatives.”

“Léon’s a good man,” the pastor said grinning, “but he holds to his own opinions.”

“Still a Communist!”

Donadille winked at the Sauverins conspiratorially. “And like all Communists he doesn’t hold much truck with religious people like myself. You don’t think much of us Protestants, do you, Léon? Neither your forebears nor your contemporaries.”

Léon stamped the ground and gave a firm negative shake of his head. “Ah, you’re all right, Donadille,” he conceded. “You’re a good man too—not so much for the religious part but because of your Resistance work.”

“You wouldn’t have the one without the other,” the pastor insisted.

“If you say so. But I still don’t believe all that religious gobbledy-gook—not to be insulting to you two,” Léon said to André and Alex. “You can be Jews or not. I don’t care one way or the other.”

“I feel about religion as you do,” Alex quickly told Léon, “but I’m no Communist.”

“My religious views are ever-changing,” André explained, “but they’re much closer to those of Pastor Donadille than to those of my ancestors.”