The Girl You Left Behind

passion for learning. He hoped, he
     said, to further his intellectual studies after the war, to travel, to read, to learn.
     His wife was called Liesl. He had a child, too, he revealed, one evening. A boy of two
     that he had not yet seen. (When I told Hélène this I had expected her face to
     cloud with sympathy, but she had said briskly that he should spend less time invading
     other people’s countries.)
    He told me all this as if in passing,
     without attempting to solicit any personal information in return. This did not stem from
     egoism; it was more an understanding that in inhabiting my home he had already invaded
     my life; to seek anything further would be too much of an imposition. He was, I
     realized, something of a gentleman.
    That first month I found it increasingly
     difficult to dismiss Herr Kommandant as a beast, a Boche, as I could with the others. I
     suppose I had come to believe all Germans were barbaric so it was hard to picture them
     with wives, mothers, babies. There he was, eating in front ofme,
     night after night, talking, discussing colour and form and the skills of other artists
     as my husband might. Occasionally he smiled, his bright blue eyes suddenly framed by
     deep crows’ feet, as if happiness had been a far more familiar emotion to him than
     his features let on.
    I neither defended nor talked about the
Kommandant
in front of the other townspeople. If someone tried to engage me
     in conversation about the travails of having Germans at Le Coq Rouge, I would reply
     simply that, God willing, the day would come soon when our husbands returned and all
     this could be a distant memory.
    And I would pray that nobody had noticed
     there had been not a single requisition order on our home since the Germans had moved
     in.
    Shortly before midday I left the fuggy
     interior of the bar and stepped outside on the pretext of beating a rug. A light frost
     still lay upon the ground where it stood in shadow, its surface crystalline and
     glittering. I shivered as I carried it the few yards down the side street to
     René’s garden, and there I heard it: a muffled chime, signalling a quarter to
     twelve.
    When I returned, a raggle-taggle gathering
     of elders were making their way out of the bar. ‘We will sing,’ Madame
     Poilâne announced.
    ‘What?’
    ‘We will sing. It will drown the
     chimes until this evening. We will tell them it is a French custom. Songs from the
     Auvergne. Anything we can remember. What do they know?’
    ‘You are going to sing all
     day?’
    ‘No, no. On the hour. Just if there are
     Germans around.’
    I looked at her in disbelief.
    ‘If they dig up René’s
     clock, Sophie, they will dig up this whole town. I will not lose my mother’s
     pearls to some German
Hausfrau
.’ Her mouth pursed in a
moue
of
     disgust.
    ‘Well, you’d better get going.
     When the clock strikes midday half of St Péronne will hear it.’
    It was almost funny. I hovered on the front
     step as the group of elders gathered at the mouth of the alleyway, facing the Germans,
     who were still standing in the square, and began to sing. They sang the nursery rhymes
     of my youth, as well as ‘La Pastourelle’, ‘Bailero’,
     ‘Lorsque J’étais petit’, all in their tuneless rasping voices.
     They sang with their heads high, shoulder to shoulder, occasionally glancing sideways at
     each other. René looked alternately grumpy and anxious. Madame Poilâne held her
     hands in front of her, as pious as a Sunday-school teacher.
    As I stood, dishcloth in hand, trying not to
     smile, the
Kommandant
crossed the street. ‘What are these people
     doing?’
    ‘Good morning, Herr
     Kommandant.’
    ‘You know there are to be no
     gatherings on the street.’
    ‘They are hardly a gathering.
     It’s a festival, Herr Kommandant. A French tradition. On the hour, in November,
     the elderly of St Péronne sing folk songs to ward off the approach of
     winter.’ I said this with utter conviction. The
Kommandant
frowned, then
     peered round me at the old people. Their voices lifted in unison and I guessed that,
     behind them, the chiming had begun.
    ‘But they are terrible,’ he said,
     lowering his voice. ‘It is the worst singing I have ever heard.’
    ‘Please … don’t stop
     them. They are innocent peasant songs, as you can hear. It gives the old people a little
     pleasure to sing the songs of their homeland, just for one day. Surely you would
     understand that.’
    ‘They