Honeymoon in Paris: A Novella

Herr Kommandant, comes
    here at least twice a month attempting to persuade us that in the absence of our
    husbands we are in need of his particular brand of comfort. Because we have chosen not
    to avail ourselves of his supposed kindness, he repays us with rumours and a threat to
    our lives.’
    ‘The authorities would not act unless
    the source were credible.’
    ‘I would argue, Herr Kommandant, that
    this visit suggests otherwise.’
    The look he gave me was impenetrable. He
    turned on his heel and walked towards the house door. I followed him, half tripping over
    my skirts in my attempt to keep up. I knew the mere act of speaking so boldly to him
    might be considered a crime. And yet, at that moment, I was no longer afraid.
    ‘Look at us, Kommandant. Do we look as
    though we are feasting on beef, on roast lamb, on fillet of pork?’ He turned, his
    eyes flicking towards my bony wrists, just visible at the sleeves of my gown. I had lost
    two inches from my waist in the last year alone. ‘Are we grotesquely plump with
    the bounty of our hotel? We have three hens left of two dozen. Three hens that we have
    the pleasure of keeping and feeding so that your men might take the eggs. We, meanwhile,
    live on what the German authorities deem to be a diet – decreasing rations of meat and
    flour, and bread made from grit and bran so poor we would not use it to feed
    livestock.’
    He was in the back hallway, his heels
    echoing on the flagstones. He hesitated, then walked through to the bar and barked an
    order. A soldier appeared from nowhere and handed him a lamp.
    ‘We have no milk to feed our babies,
    our children weep with hunger, we become ill from lack of nutrition. And still you come
    here in the middle of the night to terrify two women and brutalize an innocent boy, to
    beat us and threaten us, because you heard a rumour from an immoral man that we were
feasting
?’
    My hands were shaking. He saw the baby
    squirm, and Irealized I was so tense that I was holding it too
    tightly. I stepped back, adjusted the shawl, crooned to it. Then I lifted my head. I
    could not hide the bitterness and anger in my voice.
    ‘Search our home, then, Kommandant.
    Turn it upside down and destroy what little has not already been destroyed. Search all
    the outbuildings too, those that your men have not already stripped for their own wants.
    When you find this mythical pig, I hope your men dine well on it.’
    I held his gaze for just a moment longer
    than he might have expected. Through the window I could make out my sister wiping
    Aurélien’s wounds with her skirts, trying to stem the blood. Three German
    soldiers stood over them.
    My eyes were used to the dark now, and I saw
    that the
Kommandant
was wrong-footed. His men, their eyes uncertain, were
    waiting for him to give the orders. He could instruct them to strip our house to the
    beams and arrest us all to pay for my extraordinary outburst. But I knew he was thinking
    of Suel, whether he might have been misled. He did not look the kind of man to relish
    the possibility of being seen to be wrong.
    When Édouard and I used to play poker,
    he had laughed and said I was an impossible opponent as my face never revealed my true
    feelings. I told myself to remember those words now: this was the most important game I
    would ever play. We stared at each other, the
Kommandant
and I. I felt,
    briefly, the whole world still around us: I could hear the distant rumble of the guns at
    the Front, my sister’s coughing, the scrabbling of our poor, scrawny hens
    disturbed in their coop. It faded until just he and I facedone
    another, each gambling on the truth. I swear I could hear my very heart beating.
    ‘What is this?’
    ‘What?’
    He held up the lamp, and it was dimly
    illuminated in pale gold light: the portrait Édouard had painted of me when we were
    first married. There I was, in that first year, my hair thick and lustrous around my
    shoulders, my skin clear and blooming, gazing out with the self-possession of the
    adored. I had brought it down from its hiding place several weeks before, telling my
    sister I was damned if the Germans would decide what I should look at in my own
    home.
    He lifted the lamp a little higher so that
    he could see it more clearly.
Do not put it there, Sophie,
Hélène had
    warned.
It will invite trouble.
    When he finally turned to me, it was as if
    he had had to tear his eyes from it. He looked at my face, then back at the painting.
    ‘My husband