Liz Nugent - Unraveling Oliver

In May 1944, just a few months before the Liberation, a midnight raid by the Gestapo found fourteen Jewish families in our cellars, including my best friends Sara and Marianne. I never saw them again, but was later to discover that they and all their families were dead, some shot while trying to escape the camp at Drancy, others gassed in Auschwitz.

The Gestapo seized our home, had my father arrested by the local police, and I was sent to Tante Cecile in the city. I did not see my father again for six months, but prayed every night for his safe return. I do not remember most of these events and it shames me a little that I do not, but I can visualize the story as it was retold to me by those who were old enough to understand what was happening.

We were reunited for Christmas after the Liberation back at Château d’Aigse, but it was barely recognizable as the grand home it had once been. The house had been stripped to its bones: no rugs, paintings, furniture, or bedding. Floorboards had been used as firewood. It was the first time I saw my father cry. Whatever they had done to him in prison had broken him. He was just forty-eight years old.

Many years later, I wanted him to get a typewriter and modernize our archaic filing system, as it would be easier than filling out the old ledgers we used for the administration of the farm. Papa’s refusal was instant and ferocious, and it was only then he told me that while in prison he had been forced to type up deportation orders. He had told nobody, and despite his heroics, he felt nothing but shame. I think it an honorable thing not to visit your horror upon those that you love, but I suspect that the pain of keeping it inside must also cause a lesion to the soul. It was known that when the Gestapo realized they were on the verge of defeat, they became particularly vicious.

I recall the particular warmth of my father holding me tightly in the skeleton of our library, picking over the remnants of our raped bookshelves, where he had kept many precious volumes. Papa was a book collector, and I remember that he swore to restore this room first.

Because our winery had ceased production when we were hiding the families (there was no way of operating without the use of the cellars), and my father’s nerves were too shattered to return to the business of wine, we had no income apart from what was left of his inheritance. We closed off one wing of the house and confined ourselves to just a few rooms. My privileged childhood was over, but I had no concept of it and so I did not miss it. I was too young to be aware of wealth or the lack of it. I was delighted to attend the local lycée as my father tried desperately to nurse his neglected vines back to life. My father begged Tante Cecile to move in with us. He was determined that I should have a mother figure. Tante Cecile was my mother’s older spinster sister. The few photographs that remain of my mother show some resemblance, though my mother was beautiful and Cecile was not. She did not know what to do with a child, and we had many battles of will over the most ridiculous things. My father grew weary of being the referee between us, and it took me some time to realize that if Papa trusted her, then I should also trust her. It occurs to me now that they may have been lovers. I have snapshots of catching them awkwardly together in my mind, but no matter. She was a good woman in a difficult situation, and I should have been more aware of the sacrifice she had made to become my guardian.

It was Tante Cecile who spoke to me about how to be a woman and who gave me napkins when menstrual blood first appeared. I thank God for that, because my father was old-fashioned in a lot of ways and could not have countenanced such a conversation, although he proved to be quite the feminist in other ways later on.

I was decidedly average at school but got respectable grades upon graduation. Papa thought it was time for me to go to university in Bordeaux or Paris, but I was not a city girl and could not imagine myself adjusting to life beyond my friends, my father, and Cecile. The village girls were not going to university and I thought of myself as one of them. They would mostly end up working on our land in some capacity, so I did not want to mark myself out as different from them. They were good, honest people. Besides, we could not afford three years in the Sorbonne, and I thought that anything I needed to learn, I could learn in Clochamps. I had no ambition to be a doctor or a lawyer, as my father had suggested, and I dreaded telling him this. When I eventually did, his relief was palpable. My father and I had become very close, and he depended upon me more as he aged and his health gradually began to fail.

It was arranged that I would work as secretary to the maire , a token job, really, that took up five half days a week, although it was rather more demanding to dodge his roaming hands successfully for the ten years I worked there, usually by reminding him loudly of his obligations to his wife and children and by pointing out how very old he was.

I never breathed a word of this to my father. He would have been horrified, and I was strong enough and confident enough to deal with the old buffoon.

In the afternoons, I returned to my father and Cecile and helped with the work of maintaining the land and the house as we began a painstaking restoration project.

I had a social life with the other young people in the village, and I attended all the local carnivals and dances, but I did not want a boyfriend. I was sought after by the local boys, and I certainly flirted and exchanged kisses and probably was quite a tease, but I did not fall in love. I cannot understand why, as most of my friends fell in love many times before they married and several times afterward, but at the back of my mind, I always wondered, Would Papa like this boy in his house? Would Papa like to see me marry this boy? Could Papa live with this boy? The answer in my head was always negative. My female friends pitied me, I think, as I attended one wedding after another, assuring me that I would be next, suggesting their cousins and friends as potential partners, but I was happy alone.

The next decade saw the recovery of the vineyard. My father was something of a legendary figure in the entire region. Mostly the villagers felt tremendous guilt that they had done nothing during those terrible years, although we understood their fear. Even known collaborators bent over backward to help us, and Papa accepted their help graciously, knowing that he was doing them the favor. We drew up plans to restore the house to its former glory, although it was a tediously slow process and, as it later turned out, a futile one.

By the time I was thirty-two, my beloved Tante Cecile died peacefully in her sleep and my father was bereft again. I, too, felt grief, but whether my father and Cecile were lovers or not, they were certainly confidants and, I suspect, I was often the sole topic of conversation. Cecile thought my father was wrong not to insist that I go to university. She thought I would never meet a suitable husband in our provincial little corner. After she died, Papa began to worry that she was right. It worried him enormously that I was childless. By then, I had had a healthy number of assignations, and had long since lost my virginity to our butcher’s nephew Pierre, who came to spend a winter in Clochamps and begged me to marry him at the end of it. It was an intense affair, but I saw no future in it, and poor Pierre left the village with a broken heart. Papa had begged me to marry him, or indeed anyone, but I resisted, insisting that I did not want a husband and would never marry. Papa surprised me then by lowering his expectations, suggesting that I take a lover instead. I was shocked, not by the idea of having a lover, which was an entirely acceptable concept, but that my father had suggested it.