50.

THROUGHOUT THE DAY SHE CONTINUED THE TELLING. HER French was too fast for him, so she indulged him by speaking English. In the kitchen, in the chicken house, in the field with the horses, she spoke—insistently, passionately. Walking down the lane to the river, they guided each other, arms around each other’s waists. He was holding her in a half embrace even as she was launching a carrot at a horse or drying a bowl in the kitchen. He felt rooted in Annette’s courtyard. He was at home with her chickens, her horses, the exuberant yet patient dog.

He followed her around, trailing in the wake of her story. She made elaborate dishes that required both precision and intuition. She seemed to do this automatically, as if cooking were only a background accompaniment to her voice. She whipped eggs for a quiche Lorraine. She pitted cherries for clafoutis. She minced parsley.

They were in her garden, in bright sunlight. She was showing him how to deadhead a flower bed. Holding a handful of dead flowers, Annette stood beside a bank of zinnias, the palette of colors virtually jumping against the dull landscape of the work camp she was describing.

“At Ravensbrück, we were digging potatoes. It seemed to me that the jardiniers were experimenting with some esoteric principles of ‘biodynamic’ gardening. I learned more about this later. At the time it was of little interest.”

She laughed and flipped a dead flower into a bucket. She snipped some more flower heads and continued. “The Nazis wanted purity in their lives. They wanted pure food, pure art, pure blood. Hitler would not eat animals. That was the only good idea he had! Oh! Also he liked dogs. The Nazis used animal manure only in a certain way that they thought natural and compatible. In the garden, they set us to labor—to grow food for them, nothing for us. We did not know where we were or how much of eternity we would be there.”

Letting the dead flowers fall, she grasped his arm and lowered her head.

“What I hated most about the German soldiers and officers was the way they could be perfectly polite in one moment and coldly brutal in the next, as if that were the rule. They followed rules. Now you will be correct. Now you will be violent. The French love rules, but of course we mean the rule of civilization, not of barbarity. The Nazis behaved as if barbarity could follow rules, and that therefore it could be normal. That’s the difference. Or, that’s what I used to think, but …”

She let go of his arm.

“Marshall, I know I shouldn’t hate the Germans. But even now when I’m in the presence of someone German I feel a little cold shiver. I’m ashamed to say that.”

“How can you feel ashamed after what you’ve been through?”

“Think, Marshall. Their barbarity called forth our own savagery. There is atrocity everywhere. The blame is not just on Germany. It’s on all of us.”

“I see.”

“But I’m going on with opinions. It exhausts me—the weight of my opinions. My mother is telling me, urgently—she told me when I was in Saint Lô last week—that I must conquer my refusal; that I must assemble some scrapbooks and begin to visit the schools. People are beginning to do that—as Odile is doing. Maman says if I don’t go out to be a witness, the young people are never going to know how it was.”

LATE IN THE AFTERNOON they rested indoors, in the bedroom. She closed the shutters, muffling the outdoor sounds. The workmen had returned to the courtyard to lay a stone walk between the house and the former carriage house, where she stowed her car. Their voices were unintelligible, punctuated by occasional curses or loud bursts of laughter. The room had large, ornate furnishings and portraits of ancestors, and fresh flowers.

“I haven’t been in a French home since the war,” Marshall said, then remembered Iffy and Jim. He had forgotten all about them.

“That armoire was in the Paris apartment when you were there,” she said, pointing to a somber, heavy piece of furniture opposite the bed.

“It’s big enough to hide a couple of flyboys,” he said.

“Indeed. That’s why it’s called an ‘homme debout.’ A man standing!”

“I just realized why French doors are double doors,” he said, thumping his forehead. “To move the giant furniture.”

She laughed. “I tell you horror stories, and I expect you to make me laugh.”

“I do my best.”

STILL ENCLOSED IN EACH OTHER, they lay on her soft, lavender-scented sheets. It was too warm, but he didn’t want to let her go, and she did not move to release him. Quietly, she resumed the telling, parceling out more from her store of turbulent memories.

“There are some things that will keep repeating somewhere in my consciousness always, till my last breath. The throes of childbirth are like birds singing at dawn compared to the harshness of wearing broken shoes in winter as I lifted my ax again and again to work the ground. And now you arrive to me, like a ghost, stirring me until I could think I was eighteen years old again. Since that time I have never known misery. I have never felt discomfort on a train, or waiting a long time for a seat, or in a line. I am never bored. I never feel that a minor discomfort is insupportable. I know what I can bear.”

“I’m amazed at what you had to bear.”

“Maman had to protect me from the depravity. Oh, it was so horrible. What they did to her—No, I can’t visit that. It’s gone.”

Annette threw her hands up to cover her face for a few moments. He thought she might be crying, and he pulled her to him, but then she resumed in a soft, low tone.

“I cannot tell of the worst things. You will think it was all like that. The friendships with so many wonderful women—I don’t want to say that was the happiest time of my life, certainly not. But in a way it was the best time, the most important.”

“Tell me what you mean—the best time.”

“You had to have a best friend in order to survive. For me, it was my mother. But there were so many women willing to help. We helped each other to live. At some point a person stops helping and thinks only of herself. But I knew women who never gave up their willingness to help. When I arrived at Koenigsberg, I had an ear infection. A girl who was a nurse stole some medicine from the infirmary and gave it to me. ‘Don’t say a word,’ she told me. She could have been shot for that simple kindness.” Annette paused. “And in fact she was shot, later, on the Death March.”

“So with the friendships came loss.”

“Yes. There were some very brave English girls at Koenigsberg with us. They were British agents who had parachuted into France to work with the Résistance. They were sent back to Ravensbrück early. We hoped they would be liberated, but we learned much later that soon after they arrived at Ravensbrück they were shot. I had been deported with those girls, and I had worked beside them at Koenigsberg, and the news of them made my heart so heavy.”

She paused. “I apologize,” she said, squeezing his hand.

“The idea of shooting a woman …” Marshall couldn’t finish the thought.

“Of the two hundred and fifty Frenchwomen I was with, fifty-six of us returned to France.” Pausing, she took a deep breath.

Her eyes focused on the homme debout.

“There were moments of pleasure. In the evenings we talked, we shared our lives. We made poésie, songs. On Sundays we had prières. On Christmas a very nice Polish girl who was artiste made a pretty Christmas tree, using every little scrap to decorate it. The German directress, who was so cold and brutal, liked our tree. It brought a little smile to her face, but she wouldn’t admit it. Her eyes were blue and hard like metal. She was terrible, but she was a simple woman.

“We had the poux—I don’t … what is the word? In our hair—oh, you know what I mean. I won’t go into that.”

“It’s all right,” he said.

“But it was one of the good times!” she said. “On Sundays we helped each other pick out the poux from our hair. We found the greatest pleasure in this!” She smiled.

“I’m running on, in all directions,” she said.

They were now sitting side by side on a divan by the window. She was quiet, and he reached for her, holding her shoulders and resting his cheek against hers. She resumed.

“Earlier at Ravensbrück the pregnant women weren’t allowed to keep their babies. The SS women, the baby-catchers, they were called, seized the newborns and drowned them by holding them upside down, their heads in a bucket—in front of the mothers. I didn’t see this. When I was there, they were allowed to keep the babies, but how could these babies survive? Some women saved their meager rations for them, or sometimes they got packages and shared the cans of milk. I knew of three babies kept hidden under the clothing of the mothers. They had no milk. One day I saw the book where the block leader listed the births in our block. And beside each name was the word Mort. But there were three names unmarked. I saw one of these babies, glimpsed it beneath a Polish woman’s rags. She was a slip of a girl, with no possible milk. Yet her baby survived as I survived with my mother, hunched under her wing.

“That was the worst thing in the war—what the Nazis did to children.” She turned her gaze out the window. She whispered, “It takes a newborn baby a long time to drown.”

She separated herself from him to study his stricken face. She offered an encouraging smile.

“The day I lost my husband, almost five years ago, I was possessed with uncontrollable grief for perhaps one hour, until I recalled how wise and hard I had become. I could endure. I was afflicted with an odd sting of happiness then. I was so thankful that I had lived to have a husband and children.

“At first, when the news came about Maurice’s accident, it was as though I were once again scrambling in the mud and the wet snow, clutching at roots, craving that awful soup. Oh, that dreadful soup girl! We called her la Vachère. The cow keeper. We were cows! She would spill soup in the snow and laugh while we scrambled to lap up the snow. And then, oh, the happiness when the Red Army arrived and found just a few of us, delirious, starving! Because the buildings had burned, we could not explain to them clearly that there had been five hundred of us, that many had died and the rest had been marched away to Ravensbrück. They had no idea what we meant by Ravensbrück.

“There were nine of us at Koenigsberg with the Russians for about three weeks. Then they sent us on a two-day trip to a hospital in Poland. Two of the soldiers accompanied us in an uncovered camion to the train station. The landscape was ravaged, but we were happy to see that the Red Army had already routed the Germans along the way. We were arranged on some good bedding salvaged from the ruins of the German quarters, and we kept each other warm. My soul and spirit had been badly bruised. I had seen so many women die. I had seen some of my friends marched away, and I was certain they would not live. I did not see how any of them could survive the walk to Ravensbrück—eighty kilometers. Even as they left, the last straggling rows were holding each other up. I saw a Polish woman being dragged by her companions, who did not have the strength to lift her. I learned much later that a train had taken them part of the way.

“If I had not connived to stay with my mother, I should have been on that march, since I could walk. But I could not leave her. Never.

“At the end of the train journey, they put us in a charrette, a little wagon, and we arrived at a hospital in Poland. That was the most welcoming place I had ever seen. A group of women in nun’s dress appeared before us, and one of them, Sister Roza—she was so lovely! Our savior! The nurses there wept when they saw us. We held their hands in joy—even my mother, who managed smiles of gratitude to them. She could hardly raise her hand; she could not rise. I had fear that she would die during the journey. She was so weak, and she hardly had the strength to eat, even though we now had food. The dysentery had subsided, but with the typhus she had lost so much blood. Sister Roza bent over her with the most angelic smile. She stroked Maman’s brow and whispered gently to her, and I made her understand that this was my mother, all I had in the world. I held back my tears as this magnificent woman held her and, with the help of another nurse, gently lifted her onto a little rolling bed.

“Maman and I had our own room. The most luxurious chalet at Grenoble would not have surpassed this little room. It was bright and warm and clean. There was warm water. There were towels. We could wash ourselves! There was a little desk with writing materials. Of all the things in the room, that little desk seemed the most civilizing! Possibly we could write letters, I thought wildly. Oh, would the war ever be over?

“The Germans had been living in one wing of this hospital, and when one of them was sick, they called upon the nurses to help them. I thought Sister Roza must have witnessed so many incidents of cruelty that I wondered how close she came to surrendering her faith. The Polish people had seen so much suffering. When the Germans retreated, and our little band of skeletons arrived, she learned that the Nazi barbarity was even more widespread than she had thought. She threw herself into helping us.

“She had fear that my mother would not survive, but she nursed her devotedly. She slept in the basement in a little cell. To have nothing during the war must have seemed natural to convent sisters. I did not see the sisters take much nourishment, but they always brought it to us. There were three sisters, a doctor, and two younger nurses, novices. Me, I had lost my faith, but with the example of Sister Roza I was tempted to try to retrieve it. Then I realized I had faith only in the individual, people like Sister Roza and so many courageous women at Koenigsberg—pulling the plow in the mud, sharing their food, sheltering each other. Some people could do this. Others, as you might expect, reduced themselves—I was going to say they became animals, but that is unfair to animals. Animals don’t share, unless it’s a mother animal with her young, but animals have a great dignity—a sense of self, I want to say. They do not betray their nature. They do not practice self-deceptions. Humans have a great capacity for the diabolical. Oh, Marshall, the Nazis invented so many unimaginable crimes. You see I have had time to think all this through!

“We had to speak German there, but Sister Roza had some notions of French from her school days, and she had a worn Polish-French dictionary—a treasure!

“ ‘Where is Ravensbrück?’ she wanted to know. ‘You had friends there? Are they there still?’

“We could hardly explain. After Sister Roza said, ‘I have a brother in a labor camp and I have not heard from him in several months,’ we refrained from revealing the horrors of our camp. We wanted to erase it from our minds for her sake.

“In April, Sister Maria rushed in with news that the Russians had the Germans in retreat from the Oder River.

“ ‘It may be possible soon to write a letter,’ Sister Roza said.

“Maman was rallying. Her cheeks had regained some color and were filling out. She weighed nothing. Sister Roza brought us clean rags to use for our menstruation.

“ ‘We haven’t done this,’ I said. I stopped. We did not have our règles. None of us did. I did not want to tell Sister Roza a hundredth part of what had happened.

“Sister Roza smiled as she tucked the rags into a cabinet. ‘For when you need them,’ she said.

“And then one day I found a blotch of blood issue from me. It was only a small bit. I told Maman, and she rejoiced. I think she ate with better appetite then, and she was sitting up more easily. She still wasn’t walking.

“I was increvable! If I had not been in fine health at the start and so young, perhaps I could not have lasted. I was so fortunate. I do not know why I was so lucky and others were not. I was quite ill, but the doctor there gave me a drug that helped. I think it must have been penicillin, which was new then. The injections were very painful, but pain was nothing to me anymore. It was a miracle. In two weeks I was recovered from the typhus. I was gaining weight, and I was feeling almost rested. I would not have come through so quickly if I had not been determined to live for my mother. I could not bear the possibility that she would lose me. Of course I could not bear the possibility that I would lose her, and I think her principal feeling was that she wanted to live so that I would not be abandoned.

“For a long while after we were back in Paris, we still shared the same bed. We always awoke in the night and clutched each other, and we would moan reassurances. Eventually it was my mother who pushed me to be independent again. At first I was uncertain, but she said, ‘Annette, we have been through this and it will always be there. I will always be there, in your heart, even after I’m gone. Just keep me there. You don’t have to remain a child. Go, go.’

“That was the wisest thing she did for me. It is the truest mother love to trust her child to be free. I think the independence she forced on me restored me—more than anything else after our return. I felt that whatever happened I could manage. Anything.

“Sister Roza was older than my mother. Maybe she has gone to her rest by now. She was a large woman, rather gaunt. I could tell that she might have filled out her frame during better times. But she was strong, and she could lift my mother. She had a kind face. The headdress she wore was flattering. She was pretty, I thought. Her skin was so white and soft. With her powerful hands, she massaged us, for the circulation. One of our companions, called Jacqueline, from Fresnes, had racking pains in her bones, like growing pains, and Sister Roza massaged her thin legs, sometimes in the middle of the night.

“Then on a beautiful spring day the news came that the Russians had reached the heart of Berlin. Hitler had been defeated. Perhaps he was dead. We hoped he was dead. Even the nuns prayed that he was dead.

“ ‘France! We will have France!’ we cried.

“I held Maman and said, ‘Hitler is no more, Hitler is no more.’

“She smiled and fell back peacefully on her bed. ‘A darkness has lifted from the world,’ Maman said.

“ ‘Vive la France!’ I cried, the exuberant schoolgirl again. We cried and held each other, and then Sister Roza brought out a cake she had been saving. The occupants of the hospital gathered in a large room that had a piano—brought by the Germans, requisitioned from someone’s home. By then we had been joined by several refugees of varying states of debility. We were all improving, and most of us were able to circulate. They had rolling chairs for Maman and for two of the other women.

“Vive la France! We made some decorations. We made a flag for Poland and one for France. The nuns sang hymns, their heads lifted to the heavens. One of us French could play the piano, and so the Frenchwomen burst into ‘La Marseillaise,’ with joie de vivre. We made the nuns weep with the sentiment of it. It was a joyous time! We even tried to dance. But of course you know it was terrible for the Polish people after the Russians came. But the nuns celebrated with us.

“But since then, I have wondered many times about the old camp at Koenigsberg, which is now in East Germany. I ask myself, would anyone ever know what had happened there?”