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The Girl You Left Behind

The Girl You Left Behind

Titel: The Girl You Left Behind Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Jojo Moyes
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Germans left in the evenings, Hélène and I would race to the fire,
     extinguishing the logs then leaving them in the cellar to dry out. A few days’
     collections of the half-burned oddments could mean a small fire in the daytime when it
     was particularly cold. On the days we did that, the bar was often full to bursting, even
     if few of our customers bought anything to drink.
    But there was, predictably, a negative side.
     Mesdames Durant and Louvier had decided that, even if I did nottalk
     to the officers, or smile at them, or behave as if they were anything but a gross
     imposition in my house, I must be receiving German largesse. I could feel their eyes on
     me as I took in the regular supplies of food, wine and fuel. I knew we were the subject
     of heated discussion around the square. My one consolation was that the nightly curfew
     meant they could not see the glorious food we cooked for the men, or how the hotel
     became a place of lively sound and debate during those dark evening hours.
    Hélène and I had learned to live
     with the sound of foreign accents in our home. We recognized a few of the men – there
     was the tall thin one with the huge ears, who always attempted to thank us in our own
     language. There was the grumpy one with the salt-and-pepper moustache, who usually
     managed to find fault with something, demanding salt, pepper or extra meat. There was
     little Holger, who drank too much and stared out of the window as if his mind was only
     half on whatever was going on around him. Hélène and I would nod civilly at
     their comments, taking care to be polite but not friendly. Some nights, if I’m
     honest, there was almost a pleasure in having them there. Not Germans, but human beings.
     Men, company, the smell of cooking. We had been starved of male contact, of life, for so
     long. But there were other nights when evidently something had gone wrong, when they did
     not talk, when faces were tight and severe, and the conversation was conducted in
     rapid-fire bursts of whispering. They glanced sideways at us then, as if remembering
     that we were the enemy. As if we could understand almost anything they said.
    Aurélien was learning. He had taken to
     lying on the floor of Room Three, his face pressed to the gap in the floorboards, hoping
     that one day he might catch sight of a map or some instruction that would grant us
     military advantage. He had become astonishingly proficient at German: when they were
     gone he would mimic their accent or say things that made us laugh. Occasionally he even
     understood snatches of conversation; which officer was in
der Krankenhaus
(hospital), how many men were
tot
. I worried for him, but I was proud too. It
     made me feel that our feeding the Germans might have some hidden purpose yet.
    The
Kommandant
, meanwhile, was
     unfailingly polite. He greeted me, if not with warmth, then a kind of increasingly
     familiar civility. He praised the food, without attempting to flatter, and kept a tight
     hand on his men, who were not allowed to drink to excess or to behave in a forward
     manner.
    Several times he sought me out to discuss
     art. I was not quite comfortable with one-to-one conversation, but there was a small
     pleasure in being reminded of my husband. The
Kommandant
talked of his
     admiration for Purrmann, of the artist’s German roots, of paintings he had seen by
     Matisse that had made him long to travel to Moscow and Morocco.
    At first I was reluctant to talk, and then I
     found I could not stop. It was like being reminded of another life, another world. He
     was fascinated by the dynamics of the Académie Matisse, whether there was rivalry
     between the artists or genuine love. He had a lawyer’s way of speaking: quick,
     intelligent, impatient towards those who could notimmediately grasp
     his point. I think he liked to talk to me because I was not discomfited by him. It was
     something in my character, I think, that I refused to appear cowed, even if I secretly
     felt it. It had stood me in good stead in the haughty environs of the Parisian
     department store, and it worked equally well for me now.
    He had a particular liking for the portrait
     of me in the bar, and would look at it for so long and discuss the technical merits of
     Édouard’s use of colour, his brushstroke, that I was briefly able to forget
     my awkwardness that I was its subject.
    His own parents, he confided, were
     ‘not cultured’, but had inspired in him a

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