Tina's War

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PROLOGUE

She sits in the train compartment watching the drop of perspiration slowly taking shape on the forehead of the old man across the aisle. He must be close to eighty. A frail little face with skin so sheer the nexus of blood vessels asleep under it give it a cyanic translucence. Xavier’s skin is like that too, right above the temples where it stretches tautly over the baby’s bones. But on Xavier’s temples you can actually delineate each vein, three of them, as if someone had drawn them on purpose under the skin with a blue ballpoint pen. Clear. She often traces them with her finger when he sleeps against her breast. It doesn’t wake him. He keeps on napping, his pink lips gaping over the ripe, luscious fruit of his tongue. On the old man’s face it’s different. You can’t see the veins: the topography is blurred like on those photographs sent back by the American astronauts on which the earth looks like a ball of blue cotton candy.

The drop of perspiration, now a swollen tear, proceeds to dribble down his nose, slowly, a little off center. His lower jaw has dropped faster than his head: it’s hanging limp over the knot of his skinny tie. Then he startles, blinks his eyes: the drop poised on the very tip of his nose has tickled him to wakefulness. He crushes it with the gnarled knuckle. She shifts her eyes, encounters the window. She doesn’t want to embarrass him but she can feel him looking at her as she tallies the electric poles flying past the grimy panes.

It’s drizzling and everything is cat gray outside: one of those late May rains steaming all over the countryside. They will reach Château-Thierry soon now and then it’s only twenty more minutes to Dormans. She is a little sad but it’s a sadness like that of love, mellow. The morning’s thoughts are on the back-burner for a time ready to be tackled again when she snaps out of the mood.

Click-a-tee-clack, click-a-tee-clack: the wheels under the carpeted floor are devouring the kilometers of rail tracks. She doesn’t like trains, planes: travelling. Alain chides her about this idiosyncrasy every time they travel together. He is a born adventurer, Alain. The year before they were married right after he proposed upon completing his internship at the Paris Children’s Hospital, he bought a used land-rover, loaded it with camping gear, three pairs of jeans and ten T-shirts and took off: Will you marry me? Goodbye! She drove with him as far as Nice, then flew back to Paris and waited for him. It took him six months to see the world but when he returned he was eager for marriage, spoke a smattering of ten languages and had accumulated enough stories to last their conversational lifetime. She has tried to explain it to him, her dread of trains but he doesn’t understand.

It starts from the moment she dusts the suitcases out of their Parisian hibernation and keeps growing until by the time they reach the railway station, the airport or load the Peugeot, the anguish is so overwhelming that it borders on panic and she wants madly to run back to their apartment, lock the door behind her and sit in the cretonne armchair by their bedroom window. Irrational: he is right. Actually if she tries to analyze the anguish -- and she has – she comes up with a reason which is entirely plausible from her psychological standpoint. It’s the act of departure, of leaving, which is the root of the neurosis, of closing up the lovely apartment where they are so very happy, Alain, Xavier and she, and fearing something will happen along the journey to prevent either one or all of them from returning to it. Leaving is like shedding her past, discarding her identity and the history which is part of herself and for a while, until she gets to wherever she is going, being a non-person adrift on the raft of a present which has suddenly broken anchor.

Château-Thierry! Château-Thierry!

The voice blaring out of the loudspeaker jolts her back to reality. The old man gathers his brown overnight bag, his newspaper and the silver pommel of his cane. She tucks her feet under the seat sliding her knees sideways because he is standing in front of her, wobbling. But he makes it to the door, tips his hat to her and whispers a polite Good-day. She smiles back at him but wonders why she did not return his friendly good-bye when the train starts again. But it’s too late: his silhouette has already drifted past the rain-streaked window.

Dormans next. She opens the alligator handbag tossed next to her on the maroon plush of the seat and extracts from it the wire she has read many times. Like all wires it’s what it doesn’t say which weighs on her mind as she reads it again:

Madame Tatiana d’Evry

51 Rue du Bac

Paris 6eme

Regret inform you Marcel Germain passed away this morning STOP Funeral to be held May 28 STOP please attend if you can STOP Guy Marchand.

It couldn’t have come at a worst time Alain had complained when the boy had delivered it two days earlier. There was the dinner party planned for the same day, the decorators scheduled to begin work on his study that very morning and above all, the fact that she had promised him – promised him! – she would attend the Sixteenth International Pediatrics Congress on the twenty-ninth because he was one of the featured speakers. They argued over breakfast, not much, just enough for her to convince him that her decision when she had finally reached it was one she had arrived at after taking into account his disappointment. Silenced by kindness he had said he understood and kissed her before leaving for the hospital. She had called off the dinner guests and the decorators and written a sweet note to tell him how good his speech read and how proud she was of him. Later her mother had come: she had told her the guest room was ready and where Xavier’s things were and what he should be fed tonight and tomorrow. Her mother had said everything would be fine because she wasn’t new to motherhood, Remember? They had kissed good-bye and she had taken a taxi to the Gare de L’Est to catch the two-thirty train to Dormans.

Now the train is slowing down: she can see clearly the beach across the Marne river and the fields stretching beyond it to her left and on her right the still familiar main street halving the town and its double row of modest houses sandwiched at almost equal intervals by an array of shops, most of them new. Also the bridge rebuilt over the Marne river. She was right to come: she owes it to Tina.

Then she sees them standing in the drizzle, cloaked in the persistent sadness of the May rain and their own grief. They spot her behind the grimy window before the train comes to a halt and an ever so pale ray of sunshine seems to show over their gray faces. God how old they look! Antoinette is biting her lower lip as though on the verge of tears and Gilbert tries to hide his emotion behind a stiff smile.

Indeed she is right to have come to Dormans for Marcel Germain’s funeral. Already she can feel it surging inside of her, this slow eruption of dormant emotions that have lurked for those many years simmering and rumbling they are, ready to surface into the present, to glitter and glimmer again as they did once for her and for Tina. As Antoinette embraces her, weeping now, she wonders why she has never told Alain about them. A slip of too-long buried memory. But now she will tell him as soon as she gets back to Paris after the funeral. Then perhaps he won’t mind so much her having broken her promise and it might help him understand this thing she has about trains.

CHAPTER I

W hat happened to the Boche, Nanette?

What Boche, child?

The one last week.

I told you a hundred times, Tina: he left. Ain’t no use your asking me over and over ‘cause I’ll just have to answer the same thing over and over. You are like a bee about my ears: buzz, buzz, buzz! Eat your bread instead and mind your home work!

Nanette was laboring over the porcelain sink at the far end of the kitchen, peeling wrinkled rutabagas and anemic turnips for tonight’s soup while I sat perched on a wooden stool and two green encyclopedias faced with a week-long problem, a slice of stale bread and a square of ersatz chocolate I didn’t feel like eating.

The month was April, the year was nineteen-forty-four. I was nine years eight months and twelve days old hurrying toward my tenth birthday with great anticipation for reasons as varied as they were my own. I had recently read in one of the omnipresent encyclopedias that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, as the tender age of nine, had performed before the Imperial Court of Vienna, and nurtured dreams of performing a similar feat upon reaching this seemingly prophetical age. Besides, Nanette, Bébert and Guigui kept drumming into my head that when I reached my tenth birthday I would be made privy to some of the secrets which, due to this maddening contretemps of a few months, they so far persisted in keeping from me. And if the Americans managed to make it to France round about that time, I would even be allowed my first glass of Champagne to celebrate both their long-anticipated landing upon French shores and my birthday. In short that spring, I was in the untenable position of desperately hankering for my birthday while paradoxically faced with the prospect of having to defer its celebration to accommodate the Americans if they didn’t make it to Dormans by August 4. Fortunately, I never considered that they might make it earlier thereby avoiding another dilemma whose burden might have been too much considering the other inextricable problems confronting me that particular April, of which the question of what had happened to the Boche was the most pressing.

Well girl, what are you gawking at now? You still ain’t touched your bread and it’s almost time for supper. And your homework?

It’s Thursday tomorrow, no school!

It wouldn’t hurt to start on it now!

But I don’t have to –

You don’t want to girl, I wasn’t born yesterday you know!

Nanette always had the last word with me, but then she had the last word with everyone her husband, Bébert, her mother-in-law Mémé who lived with us, with Bébert’s uncle, Uncle Marcel and his wife Louise who lived across the avenue from us, with Guigui her son and, of course, with me, her charge. Even with the omniscient Doctor Martin who owned the big house next to the Town Hall on the Place de la Marne and whose waiting room was full of diplomas, all written in Latin, attesting, I was convinced, to his supernatural intelligence. Yet even with Dr. Martin she managed to have the last word although she went about upstaging him in a subtler manner using a litany of less blunt but just as effective but-don’t-you-think-Doctor-Martin that invariably brought the good doctor to an exhausted surrender. Bébert sometimes in a sudden itch of rebellion would try to put her down but although his sporadic last-stands filled me with admiration I also knew that they were doomed to failure. Nanette could outlast any of us: she won her arguments by attrition because none of us were obstinate enough to out talk her. But being argumentative was Nanettes’s only flaw and the sum of her qualities was such that we all put up with her contentiousness more willy than nilly. Bébert when he was in the mood to laugh about it even went so far as to remark that it was a pity she couldn’t unleash it on the Boches because she was a Maginot line all by herself and much more defensible than the real one had proven back in thirty-nine.

What’s the matter with you today child? Cat’s got your tongue? Wonder what happened to Mémé.

"Where’d she go?

Up the fields to cut grass for the rabbits. We were all out.

Where?

You know where, Tina! Behind the saw-mill on the road to Chavenay.

Think I’ll go after her. I said an idea suddenly popping into my mind. I was determined to find out what had happened to the Boche and if anybody was likely to enlighten me, Mémé was it.

I jumped down from my perch atop the encyclopedias, snatched the ersatz chocolate from the plate, ran out of the kitchen into the hallway and grabbed my red coat and yellow muffler from their assigned place on the mirrored coat-hanger behind the front door. I was already in the street when Nanette called out to me:

Tina! Tina! She had run after me, caught the hem of my fleeing coat.

What?

Come back here, child. Inside, quick. Put your satchel away, and the plate: in the sink. And put on your shoes: You can’t run half-way through Dormans in your slippers. Tsk! Tsk! Did you hear the quarter off siren of the saw-mill yet? And give me that chocolate, too late for it now, almost time for soup.

No

What do you mean, no?

I didn’t hear the siren, I yelled back. I would probably bump into Mémé at the corner of the street and that sure wouldn’t give me enough time to find out about the Boche. You had to work on Mémé before she came through, lull her into thinking your questions weren’t all that important.

Tina! Tina!

What did she want now? I swooped around. Nanette was leaning out of the kitchen window, waving her left arm frantically.

Stop by the Co-op and see whether Guigui is finished for the day. It’s dinner time, tell Pottin I want him home now she bellowed half-way down the block.

Then she spotted Soldat Mueller coming out of the café across the street with three German privates and her head disappeared back inside the kitchen, I heard her close the window behind her as I stood petrified, smiling back at Soldat Mueller who was waving Hello to me the way he always did every time I passed the Town Hall which he pretended to guard. He had even tried to talk to me once, Soldat Mueller, a couple of months back as I had passed him on my way to school. But I knew better. Bébert had warned me that all sorts of things happened to Frenchmen who fraternized with the enemy they disappeared one day and no one ever knew what had happened to them. Besides, the Germans, they did things to little girls that the devil himself wouldn’t think of. I found his warning hard to believe as far as Soldat Mueller was concerned because he really seemed harmless, but still, I preferred to play it safe and the extent of my fraternization with him was limited to a stiff grimace which was meant to a s a smile but seldom came out as one.

The muscles of my cheeks ached when I turned my back on Soldat Mueller and his companions. I walked gingerly to the corner of the street, sensing their eyes on my back, gathering echoes of their guttural laughter. As I turned into the alley leading to the Faubourg de Chavenay, the siren releasing the workers of the saw-mill for the day shot above my fear and the Germans’ laughter and I ran toward Mémé whose black and grey paisley smock had suddenly appeared at the sunny end of the high-walled and weed-grown alley.

What’s with you child! Mémé asked as my face rammed into her skirts.

Soldat Mueller! I panted out my words muffled in the folds of her ankle-long skirt and the layers of the petticoat under it. Mémé’s skirts were thick and soft like and eiderdown: a refuge where I cried, laughed and loved.

Come now, baby, he won’t hurt you. It’s that son of mine putting all these tales into your head, frightening you like, child. They won’t be here for long, the Boches, you mark Mémé’s word. She continued petting my cheek.

They won’t?

No, dear. We got them out in eighteen and we’ll get them out this time, and sooner than they think. You be a good girl and stop fretting your little head about Soldat Mueller ‘cause I got my sickle and it’s much more dangerous than him.

She pushed me away from her, laid the sickle safely atop the pungent wild grass and clover stacked in the basket swaying from her left arm and took my small hand in hers. My head almost reached her shoulders. I was as small for my age as she was for hers, her frailty being hereditary and mine circumstantial. According to the town folk of Mémé’s generation and those beyond who were still alive to tell you about the Germains of Dormans, all the Germain women had been short like a winter day and lean like Good Friday. But notwithstanding their physical frailty, the local gossip also had it that every one of them from Mémé on to her mother and grandmother and down to her aunt and sister, God rest their souls, had ruled their households like little corporals and managed their husbands and sons like drill sergeants. Even now, long after Pépé had been killed at Verdun, after all her widowed years which one might assume would have eroded the potency of the Germain genes in her, she still enjoyed a definite ascendency over her son and Bébert, at forty-four would not have dreamed of contradicting his mother although he might make a fair try at contradicting his wife. So, even though Mémé’s frailty was deceiving and I knew better than to take her size at face value, the realization that I would soon overtop her endeared her to me more than the rest of the family.

Between Soldat Mueller, Mémé’s skirts and my height almost equal to hers and the ever present question of what had happened to the Boche, Nanette’s summons for me to fetch Guigui had slipped my mind. As I filed into the kitchen behind Mémé, Nanette scolded me.

Where’s Guigui? she bellowed no sooner had she spotted me, holding her knife threateningly over the strips of rancid lard she had been dicing.

I am going now, I said trying to sound casual.

Oh you are, are you? You know Pottin closes at six. It’s six twenty now, how are you going to get in?

By the backyard, through Rigaux’s warehouse!

And how do you know about Rigaux’s warehouse?

Bébert showed it to me.

Bébert is a fool. Rigaux is a collaborator, everyone in Dormans knows that. What would happen if he found you loitering about his place, Rigaux?

He wouldn’t ‘cause I’d hide!

All the same, I don’t want you hanging round there especially now that the Boches are almost done for. A lot of accounts are going to be settled and Rigaux is sure to be one of them. Well, what are you standing here for, go fetch Guigui but not through Rigaux’s place: knock on Pottin’s front door, he’s bound to be there still.

I watched her as she went back to dicing her lard. I thought about what she had just told me about Rigaux and some of my courage was sorely tested. What if Pottin was in his back-room and didn’t hear me? I would have to go through Rigaux’s warehouse anyway, sneak my way through his place to the Co-op’s backyard, and old Pottin’s dog would bark the alarm long before I made it. Rigaux would catch me and the whole German army would follow in his trail to do things to me that the devil himself wouldn’t dream of. I made a tacit appeal to Mémé, but she pretended not to notice me and busied herself with her upper false teeth which had dropped out of their sockets once more.

Like a condemned man marching to the scaffold, I turned my head back on their complicit indifference and stared at the handle of the kitchen door suddenly in line with my mouth as if it were Damocles sword ready to drop and halve my brain. That’s when I heard the muffled giggles and snickers: the giggles were Guigui’s the snickers Bébert’s. Both originated I soon detected from the lumber-room under the staircase at the end of the hallway, where we kept pinafores and blue overalls, brooms and mops, firewood, snow boots, umbrellas, Marseilles’ soap and bleach, Mémé’s old ankle-boots studded with black buttons, Bébert’s discarded pajamas turned dust mops, and where a few spiders and an occasional cockroach cohabitated in a stack of old, long-yellowed newspapers preserved by Nanette for plugging drafts in winter, lighting the stove, stuffing the tips of Bébert’s old shoes so Guigui might finish them, or for lining the rabbit’s cage when straw became scarce.

The giggles grew louder as I opened wide the kitchen door. When Guigui catapulted himself out of the lumber-room into the darkened hallway, taunting me with a string of Got you, got you, chicken! I punched him in the ribs once and hard. By now Mémé and Nanette were at the kitchen door joining in the chorus of laughter. Mortified, I silently hoped Mémé’s dentures would burst out of their socket once and for all. But they didn’t. They shook and quivered, and played a bar of castanets but hung on.

Hey! Hey! Fooled you this time, Tina, didn’t we? Bébert said catching his wheezing breath.

I didn’t dignify his taunt with an answer, but I was grateful when he told Guigui to stop roughing me up, and I sneaked behind him down the hallway back into the kitchen, holding on the his shapeless bottle-green sweater as if it were my salvation.

Let go of my apron strings girl, Bébert said as we reached the stove because not only was I holding on to Nanette’s masterpiece of knitting, I had started tugging at it quite frantically. Bébert swooped around. As he did so he sighted Guigui who had been pulling my pony tail throughout our procession.

What do they teach you at catechism, son? he berated his son upon whom my eyes settled smugly. About to make his first communion next month, spending his time with the curates and all those sacristans, washing their faces in the church’s stoop several times a day, he ranted taking the panoply of pots and pans as witnesses. "What does he teach you Father Rocas? To torment girls half your age? A bunch of hypocrites, that’s what they are, and so are you, boy. But I’ll have none of that mendacity in my house, no Monsieur Guigui, not in my house! Keep that for catechism, Father Rocas and his harem of bigoted womenfolk!’

That’s blasphemy, Bébert! Mémé objected crossing herself, you’ll sure go to hell! her dentures were shivering with anger.

"Alright Mother. I’ve spoken my piece. Say a couple of Ave Marias for my soul tonight to straighten me out with your boss!’

Bébert!

Alright, alright, Goddam it! Where’s my dinner Nanette?

Gilbert! Mémé called out resorting to her son’s Christian name in her indignation.

Sorry, Mother, I won’t swear again.

I should hope not, I want to see you up there.

Where?

In God’s heaven where your father is, God bless him.

Bébert didn’t answer. He believed neither in heaven nor in hell, although he was convinced there was a purgatory: his life had been nothing but one since the Boches had occupied Dormans. He didn’t believe in priests, bishops, saints or the Pope and especially not in the virginity of Mary because he had been a gay blade in his prime and knew that babies weren’t conceived in heaven. There was nothing holy about that notorious conception, he would tell everyone when the occasion arose and Mémé was not around, except Joseph’s gullibility. Bébert was neither an iconoclast nor an atheist, he was a registered communist, or had been before the Germans had decreed that communism was anathema to the new order of National Socialism. He was a rabid patriot through an accident of history and a communist through a need for idealism: one had to find utopia where one could in these days. Bébert was too old for heroism and too practical for fanaticism. But because of the German occupation he was unable to determine which was more important: patriotism, communism, anti-clericalism or pro-Americanism for he was indeed fiercely pro-American. Just as politics makes for strange bedfellows, so does history, and in Bébert’s philosophical bed their cohabited many ideologies not altogether reconcilable but which had landed there to see him through the long ordeal of France’s occupation and helped him to survive the seemingly endless night of the war. I was proud of him for being what he was as I sat nights next to him at the dinner table. I respected him for standing up to Nanette once in a great while, for working as a carpenter in the German barracks of the Château every time they summoned him because I knew how much he hated those assignments. I loved him for knowing tenderness instinctively, for being able to be angry for the right reasons and wise for what everyone in those days considered the wrong ones; for being not merely a survivor but a selfless provider to us all; for sensing precisely when I was on the verge of tears and drying them up with a story often told but which he – no one but he – could make sound so new every time.

The ingestion of the soup every evening had a ritualistic quality that had struck me as almost religious when I had first entered the Marchand family three years earlier. Its pattern was immutable.

The altar upon which we officiated silently was the long scarred kitchen table. It stood permanently pushed against the seldom used dining room wall, thus leaving only three sides for five of us. Mémé headed one side of the table while Bébert was her vis-à-vis on the other; in between them sat Guigui on Mémé’s right, Nanette next to her son and then I between Nanette and Bébert. I always suspected Nanette had selected this vantage point between Guigui and myself to act as a buffer between us. At any rate, each evening at precisely seven o’clock we would sit at our assigned places and unfold our napkins. Mémé’s was folded in a triangle, Nanette’s in a square; Bébert’s had for years been girdled by the silver ring that had been given him by his godfather upon his baptism, Guigui was never folded at all, and mine was usually covered with tell-tale signs of previous meals. Because of a perennial shortage of soap, we kept them for a week and they consequently served us for twenty-one meals so that it was essential that they be readily identifiable as to which belonged to whom.

Thus we all sat at the table in a row like garlic strung up for winter, all of us that is except Bébert who ladled the soup. I never understood why he undertook this chore since Nanette did everything else around the house and therefore might have considered this an encroachment upon her prerogatives. He always served his mother first. As soon as the steaming plate of soup was placed in front of her and Bébert’s back was turned, she would mumble grace with a verbal dexterity that was as impressive as it was unintelligible. Thank me, not God! He isn’t down at the Château working for those bloody Boches! he had exploded at her once a couple of months back when she hadn’t been fast or surreptitious enough about her graces. Although she was a devout Catholic the war had put her devoutness to a strain: she knew in her heart that God didn’t have anything to do with providing the food she ate and that only Bébert was responsible for that miracle. But cornered as she was between faith in God and gratitude toward her son, she did her best to preserve her future place in heaven while safeguarding her interests here on earth.

Once we had all been served and Bébert had settled himself behind his own plate, we ate the soup. But even then, it was not until he himself had attacked his steaming plate: none of us would have dared upstage him. Then there reigned a slurping symphony over the dinner table: no one said a word although sometimes livening up the ritual there was a tacit race between Guigui and me as to which one of us would finish first. Otherwise the only sounds one could hear were the rhythmical clang of spoons against china, Mémé trying not to swallow her dentures with her soup, Nanette’s occasional sniffles – she had a chronic sniffle although nothing was wrong with her respiratory system - or Bébert blowing like Vulcan on each spoonful because the soup was too hot. In retrospect it might have been that this silence of ours was more pragmatic than pious since it is easier to speak with a mouthful of solid than a mouthful of liquid. But for whatever reasons, the Marchands ate their soup in utter silence and so did I.

I beat Guigui to the finish that night, wiped my mouth dry, heaved my anticipated sigh of contentment thereby summoning all eyes in my direction. The pace of the spoons against china grew more rapid and Bébert finished second. To my chagrin Guigui had not noticed my feat: I found him staring blankly at Mémé’s right ear when I bent around Nanette to give him the winner’s leer. After a shrug I started playing with my knife and grinned innocently at Bébert when I caught him frowning at me. In no time Nanette was up.

Well, did you talk to Chalembert, Bébert? she opened up as if the question had been debated long enough and was now despairing of an answer.

Guigui and I immediately perked up our ears. The question of Bébert talking to Chalembert had been on the family’s agenda for the best part of a month. But so far Bébert had done nothing about it despite Nanette’s initial pleas and then her vociferous ultimatums.

Chalembert was a farmer who lived in Coudouart on the road to Epernay. He was as ugly as a rhinoceros and as ill-disposed. He was also a misanthrope and a reputed miser who scared me far more than Soldat Mueller when I happened to catch sight of him in Dormans. Before the war his domain had extended over some ninety hectares of choice land where he cultivated grapes for sale to the Mercier Champagne factory