The Single Solider: a moving war-time drama Read online

  “Good,” he nodded, dim.

  “Petain is France...”

  “...France is Petain.” Janon grunted, took the empty bottle and shambled back inside.

  “Catechisme,” Jerome sneered. “Must be all that Catholic practice, eh, Arbel?”

  “It’s their hope.”

  “It’s their disgrace.”

  “And what’s yours?” Sara nudged at him.

  “That I don’t know what to do. For the Jews, for the Russians – for my baby. For all the babies. French, Russian. German, even. Eh?” Janon re-appeared with a bottle, went back.

  Arbel stared at Sara. Filled their glasses. “You’re pregnant?”

  “Yes.”

  “Name of the Father the Son and the Holy Ghost.”

  “Thank you, Arbel.”

  “Oh my God.” He poured his glass down his throat. Sara laughed.

  “You’re pregnant?” Jacques looked at Sara.

  “Shh!” Jerome mocked. “Yes. What is my response, Vermande?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Get married.” Arbel grinned. Jerome’s smile was beautiful. “No-o.”

  “Get very drunk, then.”

  Jerome turned back to Jacques. “You’re jealous?”

  “Yes.”

  The silence grew quiet and thoughtful. Like St.Cirgues.

  Jacques walked past the cemetery. Michel Pinot and Silvane Galtier asleep now after their brief war. The woods began, the road rose and a brilliant-blue dung-beetle waddled across in search of the morning’s droppings.

  Yes, he was jealous.

  A jay swooped across the lane. Another followed, chasing. Someone had left one red sock on a branch of a tree. He hadn’t noticed it this morning. Had it been there this morning? It was good. One red sock. Why? A sign for the Resistance? Here? In Duthileul’s woods? Surely it wasn’t him – that greedy unsmiling prune. Were there really Maquisards? Jerome talked, but it was talk, wasn’t it?

  The Germans were two hundred kilometres North, and the war was in Russia, even in Africa, some said. There were no Germans here. Why would they be? What is here? Us and our farms.

  Duthileul’s herd stared as he strode by.

  Where was this war? Not with the birds, or his cows, or in the dancing leaves. It was in his mother. As if she were pregnant with it. A cancer of grief. Started when his father was gassed in the last push of 1918. The father he’d never seen. And she’d lived and raised Jacques to be the father everywhere but in her bed. But when this new war had started it had laid her down like a floorboard. And he knew she was dying of it and would die unless it were stopped. His stride shortened as the lane rose sharp to meet the house.

  Another truth was, Mamman had made herself weak in order to protect him, to prevent him from being called up, two years before. But that was over. They were safe now. They had less, but they had enough to live. And she wasn’t living.

  He knew, suddenly, like a farmer, as he came into her room. Like looking at a sick cow; she had six, perhaps nine months left.

  He was five, in primaire class, when he’d first realised he had no father. He asked her and she told him. The War. In an onion field.

  17. She had a photograph, in the pocket of a dress. Him, in his uniform. Just a big grinning lad.

  Jacques was nine when he first noticed the village women muttering. In church or on market day, he saw the way his mother withdrew from them. Away from their belief that she should snap out of it, as they had had to do, and had done.

  He learned the land, the moons, the seasons and their tasks in a way that made school books remote. Like all the first-born boys, he knew his future and Allibert lacked the humility to teach through the land; he retained a snobbery, a rigidity in his methods that failed his warm nature.

  By thirteen he was the farmer. His mother had worked their three fields, fed them from the vegetable plot, and once a year had even dragged a beast to cut the hay on Janatou. Their fourth field.

  The folly her father had won that night he lost everything to Duthileul Pére. He was a famous fool. Never play with land. And he’d played cards and made Duthileul’s great-grandchildren secure by losing eight hectares. Everything you could see from the front door, except the three fields and the copse. And he’d won Janatou, a sharp sloping hillside field, four kilometres the other side of the village, facing the Cantal Mountains. He never went there and the field was hardly worth the effort she expended to reap it. But she had walked with a cow and cart, every year, and done it. Baled it and brought it back. The winter feed. He was thirteen when she asked him to do it.

  It was the furthest he’d been in his life.

  Wednesday, first light, he yoked the strongest cow to the cart, took the scythe, the strong string, his knife, cheese and bread, and left. September. Always cut between the September moons. Down through Duthileul’s woods, up past the cemetery and its high walls, past the village wash-pond and into the town square. Janon the hunchback nodding from wiping his tables outside the Café Tabac as Jacques Vermande took the Maurs road alone for the first time.

  In twenty strides he passed Sara’s house and was walking alongside her land. She looked up from the vegetables, straightened, grinned. “Leaving us?”

  “Janatou,” he said, self-importantly.

  “Pff,” she rubbed at her back and bent again.

  As the road turned back to face the morning sun, suddenly there was St.Cirgues, all toy-town simplicity as though God had copied the classroom bricks from Primaire. All he’d ever known right there. He laughed and the cow flicked back its ears, and they walked.

  There was a spring, a source, there for him and the animal, she’d said. He passed the rusted iron crucifix and the three houses of Poutiac. An old one came to a balcony and watched the boy and cart all the way past, then went back inside.

  He thought of the girls in his class and their chests. Sara and her chest. Sara, who laughed. Who seemed to know what he thought. About her chest. And Jerome, who made her laugh in a different way. A way that somehow made him hard when he thought of it, like now.

  The cow walked, its huge shoulders a tireless see-saw. He almost missed the postboxes and the turning.

  Overgrown with a year’s nettle and hawthorn the path led him down to his work, his land. The track was lined with blackberries, red berries and raspberries, all bursting with juice, all his. He stopped by the shell of an ancient oak. Hollowed dark by time, dead longer than his mother’s life. An eerie standing corpse. Saplings sprouted in a circle around it, acorns that had fallen and taken.

  Now the trees seemed to gather, waving castanets of dry leaves as the beast brushed past and finally Jacques pushed a last low branch aside and saw the diving, impossible field.

  And then his eyes lifted and took in the hundred kilometres of valleys in layers and ridges all the endless pastel colours of an Auvergne Autumn, leading his heart and soul to rest on the peaks of the Cantal mountains.

  The next time he would experience a similar emotion was when Simone came round the corner of his barn with Chibret the Mayor. And he would be twenty-four.

  He made a leek soup and brought it in to her, the dog following. “A little pepper?”

  In the kitchen he took down the mortar and the grains and ground enough to cover the bottom of an egg-cup. The dog followed and slumped down to wait.

  “The village?”

  “Normal. Less of everything.”

  “War.”

  “I suppose. The Requisition.”

  “The black market, more like.”

  Her face registered nothing more than experience. Two bluebottles battered against her windows.

  “Sara’s pregnant.”

  The woman looked up. “Who?”

  “Jerome.”

  “Lacaze?”

  “Yes.”

  “His mother will freeze over.” Like you, he thought.

  “The fool.”

  “Sara?”

  “Him! Head full of spiders. And his poli
tics.”

  “That’s all talk.”

  “Is it? Is it? When the Bosche come – what will that fool do? I’ll tell you! He’ll leave her and he’ll fight for his talk and he’ll die with his talk and she’ll be left.”

  She seemed to physically shrink, yet at the same time her eyes widened and filled, and when her legs kicked out at her helplessness the soup spilled, the bowl rolled from the bed and broke neatly and she slapped at her tears, furious.

  The dog looked hard at her and then to the fallen crusts. She fell back, blasted, into her pillows.

  He took the corners of the eiderdown and swung the mess to the floor. He pulled her blanket up and looked into her prematurely old face.

  “Men have no imagination,” she panted, “The future is nothing, because men die in the present for Glory. And death is not Glory, it’s final.”

  Her son didn’t know what to say.

  “He wanted to fight. ‘For France’, he said. And he did and he died and don’t go, son. Don’t ever go.”

  Her fingers clawed round his wrist.

  “Don’t die for France, or for today. Don’t fight. Don’t kill, my son. Don’t kill.”

  The lines on her neck, the crow’s feet, the sweet faint motherly smell. And his face touched hers, their cheekbones nestling, warmth yet in her tired skin. Nothing feels like blood on blood.

  He gathered the broken bowl onto the tray, the eiderdown in the other hand, said, “Washing,” and went out. The dog hesitated, followed.

  She thought of a picture in a school history book. There had been some war between Catholic and Protestant. She couldn’t remember when, or which, but the picture had shown an army of men attacking a church. A monastery, something. A soldier had scaled a statue of the Virgin and was decapitating her with a mallet. At his feet a comrade had been shot, through the neck, by someone with a gun inside the church. This meant it must be at least the sixteenth century, since she remembered Allibert insisting they understand the importance of the moment hand-rifles had appeared and how history altered for ever. She had remembered it then and she knew it now. Had lived this little life ruined by guns. But it was men’s history that changed with the gun. The history of women stayed the same. Raise men, lose them, grieve. And what was the point of women’s grief in the weight of history and all the world? All through that book, every other page had a picture of men dying. To rid France of the English, the Germans, the Austrians, the Spanish, The Moors, The Cathars, the Protestants, the Kings, the Bourgeoisie and men still dying till today when that Lacaze fool would make another baby fatherless, another peasant woman grieve, when he died ‘for France’.

  And she? Another widowed peasant woman. What place had her grief in this world? With him. Jean-Luc. With her precious sexy lad. His son, Jacques, older now than the boy-father who had shaken every drop of him into her and then gone and died for an onion-field.

  Her head drooped sideways and she prayed again for death. Still she prayed, though now she knew, because she lived, God was deaf.

  At the lavoir Jacques squatted on the sloping stone ledge traversing the two pools, slid the eiderdown into the water, took the soap from his pocket and washed.

  Both his shirts, his Sunday trousers, socks and underwear. Rinsed them in the smaller pool. Squeezing, wringing, his hands stinging red with the cold. Then back on the barrow, the soap re-wrapped in his pocket and home to milking, the fire and food.

  LaCroix was felling wood for Duthileul in the valley field. LaCroix. The family of incest. Him, her, a mother, no one sure whose, and two sons, no one sure whose, simpletons. Jerome had joked once about Jacques and his mother. He had thought of it too, once. Jerome changed the joke to calves’ mouths. Then loaves of damp warm bread. Then he must have fucked with Sara because he had dropped the joke abruptly, and took to urging Jacques to the dances and village fetes. He had gone, felt gauche – and now...

  He stopped at the iron bench, rolled a cigarette and let the smoke at his thoughts.

  “Don’t kill.”

  But if a Bosche came, and would kill her, then he would kill the Bosche, wouldn’t he? Yes. He would defend her time.

  And if the Germans threatened any of his friends and he could save them, he would. Jerome, Arbel, Ardelle. Sara.

  Duthileul, then? Yes...

  Does that mean everyone French? Collaborators?

  But, aren’t we all collaborators? Our food is feeding them. We’re not fighting them.

  So was it wrong to obey the Government? They’d met Hitler and they’d stopped him invading the south, and they said Resistance was wrong. Why say that?

  Because, Jerome said, the Government was collaborating. But what was their choice? Invasion.

  Rather than that, wasn’t it better to collaborate? So, what about the Russians?

  Were they wrong? The Bolsheviks. Fighting Hitler for him? Well, they weren’t fighting for him or for us French, they were fighting for their mothers and friends and homes. So, who was wrong? Us, for not fighting, or them for resisting? Because shouldn’t they fight to defend their land, their homes? The French had. And lost. Had it been wrong to fight in the first place then?

  No. Because he would defend his land, his mother, and his friends. So, he should help them, the Russians.

  But, this was mad – hadn’t the Russians helped Hitler at the start? Hadn’t they invaded Poland? Wasn’t that why everyone except Jerome hated the Communists? They hadn’t helped when France was invaded. They had helped themselves.

  Who should he help?

  And how? He had nine animals, three fields, Janatou, his beech copse and his mother.

  And in the end, because of the Requisition, the only people he was helping were the Germans. Who, twenty-odd years ago, had killed his father.

  He hauled hard at the tobacco, sucked it down, let the smoke and his confusion drift up and out.

  What was his mother saying? Turn the other cheek.

  But when Christ turned the other cheek it was to a slap. Christ’s action required eyes to meet and shame be turned to love. This war was fought at the range of a rifle or a tank or a Stuka. Not a slap. Rifles had sights, but they were instruments of the blind. It’s easy to kill if you can’t see the eyes. He killed flies easily, and weren’t we all just so many flies to a bomber-pilot? Bullets couldn’t be shamed. Bombs were indifferent to Christianity.

  So how would Jesus deal with Hitler and his armies? He wouldn’t. He would be killed. His own people had killed Him easily enough... Jacques’ chest heaved hard and he didn’t understand.

  If Our Lord couldn’t have saved even Himself...

  No. That’s not right. He accepted His death. He accepted God’s will. Then what is God’s will?

  Thou Shalt Not Kill.

  A last drag. His head lolled back. How can a painter paint those trees so they move? How could they paint the wind? How would he ever be loved? When? Two more jays swept across.

  The cows, heavy with milk, late by their day, gave gladly. The swallows cleaned their metal-blue wings. He closed the barn doors and pulled a salad supper from the garden. His house-swallows dashed out to the trees and back. They were smaller than the pair in the barn. Cramped by the eaves of the house?

  He cut some ham, washed the garden insects from the lettuce, sliced a little cheese. Gave the cat cheese rinds and milk. Gave the dog ham rinds and water. Wondered how the cat purred and drank at the same time. The dog gathered itself by the fire, rested his head on his legs, looked at him once, closed his eyes and went to sleep. Fast, easy. The cat washed and groomed.

  The dart of an evening wind drying his washing. He took his mother’s meal to her. The dog woke and followed.

  “I made you break routine.”

  He shrugged. Gave her the tray. Paused at the door. “Mass on Sunday?”

  “No.”

  Their ritual wash-day conversation. Three days early.

  He ate at the table. Another ritual, he ate his evening meal alone at the table. From thirteen, whe
n he had first come back from Janatou, from his being the farmer, she would place it before him and then leave him, the man, at the table.

  He threw crusts to the dog. Finished. Another day. Lit a candle and took it to her. Closed the volets. Took the tray and her bed-pot. Looked at the first stars. Clear sky, the chaleur had begun. Felt her eiderdown, nearly dry. A cow vaired in the barn as he passed. The dog waited at the top of the stairs. Trudged up, kicked off his clogs, took her pot back.

  “Nothing you want?”

  “No.”

  “Call...”

  “I would.”

  “Night mamman.”

  “Night son.”

  That last ritual over he fed the vegetable cuttings to the fire, sat on Arbel’s bench, undid his trousers, stretched his toes to the edge of the ash and reached for his tobacco and papers. Best part of the day. The last fag.

  One of the cows was mounting today. She’ll need the bull. Have to talk to Duthileul. The bastard had the best one, no question. His hand gently rolled at his balls and his gaze rested on his mother’s door.

  His Mother. Old, and like the century, killing itself at forty-two.

  2

  Two years before, Simone, her mother and father, and the civilians of Peronne, where the Somme meets the Oise North-East of Paris, waited, listening to the shared radios and prayed. That the French Army would hold. That the English would come, that the Germans would not. As in all wars God is deaf to the defeated and on and on through the brief glorious summer, like a plague, came the Bosche. Why, argued the people, would they want their town? They could pass it by, it had nothing. A ruined sandstone castle where Charles the Bold had once held Louis XI. Good fishing; but nothing else of virtue, except it was their home.

  Should they leave, should they stay? They stayed. And like dawn the Germans came, winning.

  First a trickle of refugees; Belgian, Dutch, Flanders French begged food and a bed and told of bare chested young soldiers running triumphant through the fields, rifles over their heads, singing; then in the morning wrang their hands and left. The Bosche were two days away. And still people stayed. The trickle burst to a flood and lastly came the bewildered young hopeless of the French Army; riding, striding, limping through and ordering them to evacuate and still father stayed. So mother stayed. So Simone stayed. Father called the soldiers and the south-bound neighbours cowards and the neighbours called him a fool and left, on bikes and carts and cows, with sacks and suitcases and mattresses, and Peronne’s four thousand became a few dozen.