No one.
“Probably out in town. Celebrating the peace,” said my husband. I asked him to wait outside, went down the steps behind the hydrangea to the basement kitchen, Emilie’s vault. The door was not locked.
There was a penetrating smell of drink gone flat in her kitchen, around the oven above which not a single pan was still on the hooks. In the fading light a mountain of empty glasses shone, in the washing-up bowls, in the corners, on the chopping block. On the table, next to a candle-holder with a stump of candle in it, next to a plate and fork, a cooking pot containing a vague mush still felt lukewarm. There must definitely be someone around.
I went upstairs. In the hall the lamp fittings had been torn out of the wall, the palms had been stripped of their brass pot-holders, the chandelier had been replaced by a miserable bulb. In the anteroom the chairs were piled on top of each other in a corner and in the middle of the room was my brother’s bed in all its glory without a mattress.
I opened the front door. “No one home,” I said. “But someone has been eating.”
“Mind if I put me things inside, love?” He returned to the car.
I went back inside. There was no metal to be found anywhere in the house, apart from that one cooking pot and a couple of saucepans. All the expensive cutlery had disappeared. All the tin. Every cook’s knife, every ladle. Most of the earthenware, almost all the carpets. The house seemed to have been cleaned out. In the back garden someone, Emilie perhaps, had dug over the small lawn. In the increasing darkness I saw strictly demarcated vegetable beds, pale, faded potato tops above heaped earth, compact, globular cabbages. In the house I could hear my husband lugging his things about.
“Might go and join the party as well,” he said when everything was in the antechamber, his cases, his cameras, the bread and the eggs, and the various jars of preserves Madeleine had given us to bring. “What d’you think?”
“We’ll wait,” I said, in the darkness of the drawing room. “I know some tricks to entertain us, Monsieur Heirbeir.”
I pushed him onto the sofa, fell and met his lips and forced him back in the cushions.
We had dozed off when someone was fiddling at the front door lock, whereupon he leapt up, pushed his shirt into his trousers, buttoned his fly while I buttoned my blouse; in the hall there was the echo of coughing, and his familiar tread across the floor. I got up and left the living room in my stocking feet.
I saw him, by the weak light of the window above the front door, putting his bowler hat on the rack, taking his scarf off his shoulders. And when I said softly: “Papa… it’s me, Helena…” his hand hung in mid-air above the hook of the hallstand.
We ate an improvised meal of eggs and bottled vegetables, after my husband had got the oven going with the last firewood and I had beaten the eggs. Somewhere in a side cellar my father had unearthed a full bottle of wine.
We clinked glasses.
“La Paix!” he cried. He was still moved.
“Here, here,” echoed my husband.
“Good heavens, dear child, I’ve never enjoyed a simple omelette so much.”
He looked as if he’d lost weight. Bags under his eyes, a dull gleam in his wrinkles. He coughed a lot. He’d also caught flu.
“I had to go to the hospital. There was nothing else for it. They’ve been hard years, child, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt lonelier than when I stood there on the threshold of that hospital, shaking with fever, with my pathetic little case, my pyjamas and my shaving kit in front of a nun who wanted to blast me off the paving stones with one look. The wards were full to bursting…”
“And Emilie?” I asked.
He sighed, looked furtively at the mountain of empty bottles behind us. “Let’s say that she got on quite well with the Germanic element in the house…”
I looked at him uncomprehendingly.
“The German who was billeted here… He slept in the anteroom. The first one was all right. Wernher. Good family man. Three children. He was also looking forward to when the misery would be over, and to his wife’s liver noodles. But the second one… I think it’s best if I say nothing. There are respectable ladies in the company.”
“Oh, the young lady has been through the war,” I said. “She knows what the world’s like.”
I saw his eyes dart from me to my husband. Surprised. Not unfriendly.
“I had to let her go, Hélène. The whole street was talking about it…”
We never saw her again. Once, in the following weeks, when my father had gone to see my mother, I thought I recognized her smile in a group of women that shot timidly past my husband and me, a glance that noticed me behind the tall, raised collar of a heavy winter coat, under a big hat or cap under which a head looked strangely bald. One of the passers-by broke into curses, hard as nails in our town dialect. The women buried themselves even farther in their coats. A little farther on they just managed to avoid a rain of well-aimed gobs of phlegm.
“The fate of the harlot,” said my husband.
I don’t know what became of her. We scarcely knew where she came from. The woman who for as long as I could remember had starched our linen, cooked our food, heated our milk, was largely a stranger to me, an insignificant source of muscle power, an anonymous workhorse. There were more bodies than usual fished out of the rivers and waterways of our town in those months, and quite a few of women in heavy coats. I still hope that she wasn’t one of them.
My father sipped his glass and wiped his mouth. “So Mum is on the mend? And Edgard?”
“He’ll pull through. The doctor said so too. He’ll make it…”
“And his leg?”
“It will be some time before he can walk normally…”
“He’s alive. That’s the main thing. We’re poor, we’re hungry. But we’re alive. I want to see them as soon as possible…”
“The railways are a mess, Dad. It’ll be complicated.”
On the way home we had passed the station, the embankment had been blown up and some rails were sticking in the air like stiffly curled ribbons. There was a rumour that the enemy had disabled as many locomotives as possible.
“If necessary, I’ll go on foot…”
My husband stretched out in his chair — he had been fighting off sleep for some time. “Perhaps something can be arranged,” he yawned.
“He’s big pals with his major,” I said. “The major fancies him…”
My father brought his glass to his mouth. Before he drank I saw for the first time since we’d been reunited the familiar chuckle playing round his lips. “If you ask me, the poor chap will have to go on fancying for a long time. Don’t you think, child?”
He left two weeks later and stayed well into January. It was freezing when he left. The night before it had snowed lightly. A biting wind shook tufts of caster sugar from the bare branches of the chestnut trees. He had had a haircut and had his moustache trimmed. We were standing in the dormer window when the driver of the car which was to take him to my mother drew up at the front garden, sounded his horn and waited next to the door of the vehicle.
“Well, well, I’m gradually feeling more important than our prime minister.” He took off his glove. Tapped on the window to let the chauffeur know he was coming. Then he looked up at the grey, overcast heavens.
“What do you think, child? Porcelain? Murano glass? Quicklime?”
I stood close to him, raised my head and surveyed the sky for a while. “Water vapour,” I said.
Laughing, he pressed the tip of my nose with his index finger. “My daughter has grown up.”
He picked up the small suitcase standing next to him on the floor. “Off to the Great Mother. To tell her that the world has changed for good. I hope she’ll accept it. You know what she’s like. The world will have to be very sure of itself. Are you certain you want to stay here? Will it work, child? Restrain yourself a bit with the visits of your English boyfriend. You know the neighbours…”