‘No, I’m fine. Thanks for listening.’ She’s so polite, so calm, has such a soft voice, but are we to avoid Dupuis like the plague?
‘We’re they all killed?’ she asks.
‘Not all of them, no.’
‘Jules-your husband?’
‘Jules wasn’t killed.’
‘Marcel?’
‘That I can’t tell you. I simply don’t know.’
‘But not your husband and not the Vuittons? Lily, exactly what have you in mind?’
‘Nothing. I simply want to go home so that I can remember how it was.’
‘But you’re burdened with guilt?’
‘Because I survived when others who were far more worthy didn’t. Because there are things I did for which I’m ashamed.’
‘You desperately need help. You know this, don’t you?’
‘What I need most is to remember. You see, they robbed us of everything else in the camps. They even tried to steal our memories, to ridicule them, to debase them, to grind us into the ground. I can’t lose my memories, not until …’
‘Until what?’
‘Never mind. Look, the least you can do is leave me alone. I don’t want to talk to you. I never did! It’s far too hard for me. So hard, I feel like I’m breaking to pieces!’
It’s an outburst I regret, but she reaches for my hand anyway and says she’s sorry. ‘Now that we know your name, there’s no need for us to slip you across the frontier. The French Embassy will provide you with a temporary identity card and passport.’
‘I never had a French passport. I wasn’t considered a citizen. Besides, I’d sooner slip across. No one else is to know exactly where I am. Not for a bit.’
‘This Dupuis?’ she asks.
Sacré nom de nom, she’s so innocent! ‘Yes, him, especially.’
‘And the Vuittons?’
‘Them also, and my husband.’
‘And Tommy? What about him? How certain are you that he was killed?’
‘Very. There’s no question of it, nor that it was my fault. Me, I’m the only one who’s left.’
‘And Marcel-he’s a possibility, isn’t he?’
She wants so much to offer hope, but hope is delusional. ‘Marcel might be alive. I really don’t know. We never could tell with him. There was always doubt in my mind. I’ll have to settle things about him later. As yet I’ve been unable to trace him.’
I know she’s thinking I’ve made other phone calls and sent other little packages in the post-that black pasteboard I insisted on having, that piece of white chalk, but she doesn’t say this. ‘Is there more to that weekend you were telling me about?’ she asks.
‘A little.’
She fidgets. She craves a cigarette almost as much as I do. ‘Dupuis will be here in the morning,’ she says. ‘He can catch a flight from Paris. Even with all the difficulties of travel, Zurich’s easy for such a one. He’ll have the authority.’
‘My things are packed. I need only to get dressed.’
‘You could tell me about it in the car. There’s a place I know of, a hut in the mountains. I could take you there until …’
‘They’d only kill you, Doctor. Just get me across the frontier. Please don’t try to alert the Swiss police. Dupuis will be watching for just such a thing and will only think you know more than you’re saying. Just let me deal with it myself.’
‘Strasbourg … We’d better cross over into Germany and head for there. At least, that way your transit papers will be of some use. I can simply say I’m returning you to the hospital in Bremen.’
She’s so green it hurts. ‘Katyana crossed the frontier at a little place called Au-Dessus-de-la-Fin-Above the End. There are some fields and woods, rough farms, pastures. Tommy said she used a farmer named Marius Cadieux and his son. They’re good, reliable people. They never charged a sou for the service, and we used it several times. Not myself, you understand. Only some of the others and those they were taking with them. Packages, we used to call them. Downed British aircrew, escaped prisoners of war. Spain, too, of course.’
It doesn’t take us long. The car is warm, the night still dark, and I know she’s debating whether to come with me and still thinks I’m suicidal.
‘Katyana … that’s Polish or Russian. Look, I really wish you’d confide in me, Lily. I’m certain we could help each other.’
I stare emptily out the window towards the lake. There are houses in the darkness, moonlight shimmering on the water, trees, and more trees-sometimes I used to count them as the railway cattle trucks rumbled eastward with their cargoes of humanity. ‘Katyana was Nicki’s wife, but they came into things a little later on.’
‘And the rest of that weekend?’
‘Please slow down. Let’s open the windows and have a cigarette. Me, I’ll inhale the secondhand.’
Rebuked, she begins to relax, and as I light a cigarette for her, she says, ‘Thanks. I needed this. So, okay, that weekend.’
I begin it again. I remember it as it all was, my sister, the memory of her and of Pincevent. Barges plied the river. The Bugatti touring coupé Jules loved to drive was parked beside the economical two-door Renault I had forced him to buy in 1937. The night before, he hadn’t even come to bed.
Janine was sitting on the sand, holding Marie between her knees. In the palm of her hand, there was a scraper, a small flint tool that had once been used to clean and prepare reindeer hide.
‘Where’s Jules?’ I demanded.
‘With Marcel.’
‘But I thought …’
‘Lily, what you thought wasn’t correct. Marie-Christine and I’ve been breaking open the clay balls, haven’t we, darling?’
‘Stone tools, Mommy. Hunters.’ She scrunched up her nose so seriously, we both had to laugh.
We began to hunt in earnest, two sisters, two childhood friends, and the children. In spite of everything, I had come prepared. When nothing further was found, I let Nini see me take a Roman coin from my pocket and secret it in the sand. ‘Jean-Guy, try here. Here’s a good place, isn’t it?’
With him digging between us, and Marie crawling into my lap, I looked steadily into my sister’s eyes but couldn’t say what I’d wanted so much to say.
Later, with the children happily playing at our feet, I told Janine that I would try to go to England to see our father and perhaps stay for the duration of the war. Jules wasn’t to know. This she understood. ‘You ought to come with us,’ I said, only to see her shake her head and hear her say: ‘Ah, no, not me. I belong here. I’m far more French than you.’
There wasn’t any sense in arguing. There never had been. ‘I’ll tell Papa we’ve been here. He’ll like that, and he’ll understand why I wanted us to be together. May I take the scraper to show him that we can still find things here?’
‘Yes, certainly. Please do.’ I knew she was thinking we might never see each other again. I felt the same myself, and couldn’t be angry with her.
The knife was razor sharp. From the windows came the sound of driving rain, from the skies above, that of thunder. Lightning filled the kitchen, momentarily startling me so that the yelp I gave caught in my throat as the sound of thunder rolled away.
Blood ran over Marcel’s fingers and thumb. He gripped the throat more tightly to still the jerking body. Then he laughed as the eyes glazed over, and he slit the skin, first around the neck, then down the stomach and around each of the legs.
Yanking off the pelt, he gutted the thing into a basin. ‘A rabbit slips its skin like a whore sheds her clothes, Lily.’
I had never seen Marcel kill anything before. ‘You took pleasure in that. Why couldn’t you have hit it on the head first?’
The dirty stub of a dead Gauloise bleue clung to his lower lip. He gave a ragged cough, brought up quantities of phlegm, and spat into the sink. Swiftly lopping off the head and feet, he said, ‘Would it have mattered?’
‘If you had been the rabbit, yes.’
‘And the whore?’
‘I … I don’t know what you mean?’
Jules, the Vuittons, and the others were upstairs in the library listening to the wireless. ‘That your sister’s being one and that because of what she’s done with Jules, you’ve accused me of stealing from him.’