Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

‘The curtain twitched again!’ Picallon said.

Someone was watching them from a window. The village was not entirely dead. A hand and a cat still lived here, and things began to look more lively as a breeze rustled the leaves of the ash trees shading the avenue with its inevitable war memorial, which for once was reasonably discreet, an obelisk decorated with bronze laurels beneath which was inscribed the fateful date ‘1914–1918’, followed by a list of names. At a second gust of wind a door creaked, and the three startled men whipped round: one of the doors of the church had swung open onto a dark space streaked through with reddish flashes of sunlight from the stained-glass windows.

‘Blimey!’ Picallon said, crossing himself.

The seminarian went in, crossing himself again after dipping his fingers in the font. Jean did the same, and both felt the incense-scented coolness of the holy place buffet their hot, dry faces. Picallon knelt to pray while Jean, moved by the silence and innocent simplicity of the church, which reminded him of the abbé Le Couec’s at Grangeville, stayed standing in the nave. A splintering sound distracted him. Palfy was trying to force the poor box underneath the Sulpician statue of St Anthony. Their gazes met. Palfy shrugged and went out.

‘Why do you keep doing that?’ Jean asked, following him outside to the porch. ‘It’s like an illness with you. I thought you’d got over it.’

‘I’m not harming anyone. I believe I explained it to you years ago, when we first met. What’s in the poor box is for the poor. And we’re poor: twenty-five centimes a day is nowhere near enough to live on. Particularly as our government no longer knows where we are.’

‘You’re forgetting the postal orders Madeleine sends you. And that I always share the ones Antoinette sends me.’

‘Money from women doesn’t count. It’s dishonourable. Can only be spent on things you shouldn’t spend it on. The only money I respect is the money I earn.’

‘By stealing?’

‘There are risks.’

‘Not in churches.’

‘Jean, you’re being tiresome.’

Picallon was still praying. They walked back to the square. Again the curtain fell back. Someone was spying on them. Approaching the front door, they read the enamelled nameplate ‘Jacques Graindorge, surveyor’. Palfy rang the bell. They heard chimes: three notes repeated three times. The house remained silent.

‘Perhaps it was the wind twitching the curtain,’ Palfy said. ‘Or just a mirage. I don’t know how many days it’s been since we saw a civilian, apart from that handicapped chap in his wheelchair, whom the pigs must have eaten by now.’

‘I saw a hand the first time.’

The cat, licking its paw on the top step of the mairie , stretched, arched its back, and padded towards them. An ordinary cat, black spotted with white or white spotted with black, in no hurry, pausing to bat playfully at a piece of paper before proceeding with remarkable casualness across the deserted square. Jean watched it closely: it was clearly well fed, so there was no question of it making do with rummaging in dustbins or hunting mice. No, this was definitely a proper, bourgeois moggy, returning from a short stroll after its lunch. Nothing surprised it, not even the two men in khaki shirtsleeves who had arrived from another planet in their big noisy toys that were resting further down the avenue. It walked between Jean and Palfy, lifted a paw to push a flap that swung back in the bottom of the door, and hopped through it. The flap closed automatically.

‘There’s someone inside,’ Jean said.

Palfy rang the bell repeatedly. The only reply was the sound of meowing. The cat did not like the noise of the chimes.

‘I know what to do,’ Palfy said, walking back to the tankette and pulling out a machine pistol. Of course, the classic tactic: a quick burst to shoot the lock and you push the door open.

But there was no need: above them the window opened and an anguished voice called out, ‘ Kamerad! Kamerad! Don’t shoot! Me friend Germans. You speak French?’

‘Like your mother and father,’ Palfy said calmly. ‘My friend too. Open this door or I’ll shoot it open.’

‘I’m coming! I’m coming! Don’t shoot!’

The house suddenly came to life. A door slammed, hurried steps made their way downstairs. A chain was slipped and a key turned in a lock. In the doorway stood a man in his forties, his red hair tousled, his lips pale and quivering in an almost purple face.

‘Gentlemen, forgive me, I thought you were French soldiers. I swear’ — he put out his right arm — ‘I swear I’m a friend of the Germans, a friend of Grossdeutschland and its leader, the Führer Adolf Hitler.’

Palfy put on an interested expression.

‘So you’re definitely not hiding any Frenchmen?’

‘I’m the only Frenchman in the village.’

‘You don’t listen to the lies on the English wireless?’

‘Never. Anyway I don’t understand a word of English.’

Palfy turned to Jean and said to him in English as guttural as he could make it, as though it was spoken with a German accent, ‘This bugger deserves to be taught a lesson. Go and get Picallon, and tell him not to utter a word of French.’

In French he said to the surveyor, ‘That’s all very well, but we’re an advance force. The regiment is following behind and we’re here to start the requisitioning. What do you have for lunch?’

Monsieur Graindorge raised his arms heavenwards.

‘Requisitioning! What an awful word, Messieurs. You won’t be requisitioning anything here. You are my guests. My maid — a very stupid woman — has gone off pushing a pram filled with everything she holds most dear. But I can do without her. Give me an hour and I’ll have the pleasure of offering your German palates — a little basic, I’m sure you won’t mind me saying — a lunch worthy of French discernment and quality. I trust you accept?’

‘Of course, Monsieur Graindeblé,’ Palfy answered with blithe artlessness.

‘Graindorge!’ the surveyor corrected him. ‘Strangers do sometimes muddle up my name.’

Blushing and still trembling, the man was sweating with unctuousness. Jean went to warn Picallon, who was where he had left him, on his knees, communing with himself before the altar, thanking God for having saved his life and entrusted it to such resourceful friends, even if they did not seem very promising at first sight. Jean’s hand on his shoulder roused him from his reverie.

‘Are you hungry?’

‘Very,’ the seminarian said.

‘Come on then.’

As they crossed the square he explained the situation.

‘I’m not setting foot in there!’ Picallon said indignantly. ‘He’s a traitor.’

‘I thought you said you were hungry?’

‘Yes, but such a man’s bread shan’t pass my lips!’

‘You only have to open your mouth and eat.’

‘You’re both mad.’

Palfy was in the sitting room, stretched out in an armchair, his feet on a velvet stool, holding a glass in his hand.

‘What are you drinking?’ Picallon asked, thirst getting the better of him.

‘Monsieur Graindemoncul’s pastis. Help yourself. The bottle’s over there and the water’s cold.’

‘Where is he?’

‘In the kitchen, knocking us up a chicken fricassee.’

Picallon helped himself to a glass of pastis and stared around the sitting room, finally exclaiming, ‘It’s really nice in here!’

‘Personally, I think it’s revolting,’ Palfy said. ‘I wouldn’t live in a room like this if you paid me. The worst of French bad taste …’

Picallon was quiet, suddenly anxious. The black furniture polished to a dusky red, the dresser and its shelves of travel trinkets, the reproduction Corot that was so dull it made you want to throw up, the bone china on the mantelpiece had astounded him, but Palfy’s confident and violent antipathy cast doubt on all of it. He turned to Jean, who saw his discomfiture.