J. Janes - Hunting Ground

‘You … yes, you,’ said another guard.

Michèle stepped forward and he said, ‘Behind the bales.’ That was all, but in Deutsch .

The knife lays in the mud- and rag-strewn black earth that is constant to us. There’s blood on its blade. The SS possessed such beautiful knives but it’s cold and suddenly I’m freezing for I know I can’t escape.

I’ve done such a terrible thing. Me, I’ve killed the guard who attempted to rape Michèle in the shed they call Canada. The bastard lies beside his knife, only he’s not here, not now, and I’m in the woods, have come for my bicycle, yet can still hear Michèle sobbing her heart out.

With difficulty, I stoop to pick up my knife and wipe its blade on the leaves before closing it up and slipping it into a pocket. I wish I could have killed Schiller like I did that guard. They shot one hundred women and beat countless others senseless because of it, but they never thought to ask us. For a long time afterward, Simone and I kept a close watch on Michèle.

My bicycle is where I had left it. Schiller hasn’t touched the carrier basket. The Schmeisser is safe.

‘Some soup, a little bread, and ham, please, and half a glass of wine to which water will be added. Just a taste, you understand. The red, I think. Yes, yes, that will do and then a coffee with lots of milk, but later you understand.’

The proprietor of Barbizon’s Coq Royal looks at me as if I’ve just demanded the world, but I couldn’t care less. This place still reeks, and he doesn’t know me, not really. There were always too many Germans here. In the autumn of 1942, the Résistance from Melun asked me to deliver to the proprietor one of their little black pasteboard coffins: Its lid had a cross at the top, then the name, and finally the cross of Lorraine with a V for Victory on either side, and all in white chalk. The man had ignored repeated warnings. An example had needed to be made.

His wife’s brother came from Chailly-en-Bière to take over the business, but if you ask me, he was no better, yet I must have something to eat and a place to rest, and daren’t go back to Matthieu’s for fear Schiller and Dupuis will find out about him. So I sit here by the window where I can watch my bicycle and the street, and I have a cigarette and try to think.

That whole business at the caves was far too close for me. I can’t be dropping from the present into the past and back again like that. They’re bound to catch me out. And I’ve hurt my left hand. The middle finger is stiff, the others only a little less. Have I sprained it?

Schiller was only partly right about the cave. Tommy did seal it up, but there was far too much to hide. Some was simply left with the German lorries we had borrowed. Some went to the loft above Clateau’s slaughterhouse and then, piece by piece, to other places.

Luck … we had such luck. The Germans did find the warehouse where Matthieu Fayelle and others had emptied a lorry, but they never once connected it to Matthieu. This I still can’t understand.

The soup comes. This pig of a proprietor has spilled it and his thumb is wet, but such things shouldn’t bother me, not after what I’ve been through. I set the cigarette aside, but its smoke trails up, and suddenly I’m reminded of things and can’t stand the sight of it. Too many memories. Every one of those SS and Gestapo or gestapistes français knew how terrifying the upward curling of cigarette smoke could be. Never mind touching the burning end of it to my breast or using the leather belt or holding me underwater for what seemed like hours. Just sit me naked and helpless before them and let that smoke curl upwards in silence. Me, a mother whose two children they had killed!

Through the window, the main street of Barbizon seems strange-hauntingly so. It’s odd to see it like this after knowing for so long that I’d never see it again. The pâtisserie is over there under its flaking gold letters and doing a reasonable business. Two middle-aged women have just come out: brown coats, hats pulled down, no stockings yet, and nothing new. Their woollen socks have lost their elastic. It was always so hard to replace. The wind even tugs at their hats and tries to open their coats, as laughing, they turn away, and I watch them pass the milliner’s without a look, and finally the burned-out, boarded-up skeleton of Clateau’s butcher shop.

That fire must have come late in 1943 after he’d been killed. The family would have been sent to the camps, not even into forced labour, and my guess is that none of them survived, for by then the Germans were being very thorough.

Reminded of my hunger, I eat my soup. I’m really very good at this, but the ham I must cut into tiny pieces. And the bread … what can I say, but that it’s like my own. So good, I must extract every morsel of flavour and keep a crust for my pocket.

Tommy came back in the spring of 1942. I remember it was Jean-Guy who first discovered we weren’t alone. We’d gone into the forest and were heading for the stone tower, but Marie wanted to check the bathing pool, so we went first to the stream that was a little to the west of our usual route, perhaps a kilometre. The leaves were very green, and I remember thinking there would be a good crop of wild raspberries along the roadsides that year, but we’d have to be careful that others didn’t get them first. I was settling back into the routine of being my old self and trying hard to forget the war and its Occupation that might never end.

I had the gardens to think about, the fields, rabbits, chickens-the geese at mother’s farm. So many things. The hope, I confess, that the Germans would leave me alone and that the Résistance wouldn’t call on me.

‘ Maman , there are ships,’ said my son. I know Marie was intrigued. Both timidly advanced to the edge of the pool we had made with stones and mud.

The sails were of one-hundred-franc notes skewered on masts of sharpened sticks, the hulls patiently whittled out of bits of driftwood. ‘ Bonjour , Lily. Bonjour , Jean-Guy and Marie.’

Automatically, I turned away in a flood of tears to search the woods for the enemy while he tousled Jean-Guy’s hair, only to have my son yank his head away as Tommy reached for Marie’s, his grin the same.

He was armed, of course. There was a rucksack and a Schmeisser. ‘How have you been?’ he asked. ‘Missing me a little?’

Setting the knife and fork down, I swallow hard and have to shut my eyes, but the memory keeps coming back, and I can’t stop it though I try, for in the camps they forbade us to even remember and tried their best to wipe it all out, but Tommy’s so close, I can feel his kisses still, the very breath and warmth of him, and I don’t ever want to let those go.

It was Marie who tugged at his sweater and said, ‘We have two SS guards, monsieur, and the colonel. The Lieutenant Schiller has been sent to Russia.’

‘And the inspector?’ he asked of my daughter.

She was very firm with him. ‘Still asking his questions. Only yesterday I have seen him go into the Tabac Ribault. Me, I waited fifteen minutes, you understand, but he didn’t come out, so we know he’s working with Monsieur Ribault who is a dirty collabo .’

Only then, did I notice how Jean-Guy was looking at Tommy, and when the sails were taken off the little ships and bankrolled to me because children didn’t have money like that, and he knows his friends and the shopkeepers would only notice and start talking, the thanks he gave were empty.

‘I don’t know what’s come over him,’ I said later that night when I went to Tommy by myself. ‘Ever since the robbery, he’s become increasingly distant. Jules and the Vuittons were here when I was in Paris and maybe they put pressure on him.’