The Girl You Left Behind

obviously German propaganda
     that few of us did more with it than use it for kindling. But this one gave military
     information, naming the towns and villages under occupation. It commented on official
     communiqués, and contained humorous articles about the occupation, limericks about
     the black bread and cartoonish sketches of theofficers in charge. It
     begged its readers not to enquire where it had come from, and to destroy it when it had
     been read.
    It also contained a list it called Von
     Heinrich’s Ten Commandments that ridiculed the many petty rules imposed upon
     us.
    I cannot tell you the boost that four-page
     scrap gave to our little town. In the few days up to the
réveillon
, a
     steady stream of townspeople came into the bar and either thumbed through its pages in
     the lavatory (during the day we kept it at the bottom of a basket of old paper) or
     passed on its news and better jokes face to face. We spent so long in the lavatory that
     the Germans asked if some sickness were going round.
    From the newspaper we discovered that other
     nearby towns had suffered our fate. We heard of the dreaded reprisal camps, where men
     were starved and worked half to death. We discovered that Paris knew little of our
     plight, and that four hundred women and children had been evacuated from Roubaix, where
     food supplies were even lower than they were in St Péronne. It was not that these
     pieces of information in themselves constituted anything useful. But it reminded us that
     we were still part of France, that our little town was not alone in its travails. More
     importantly, the newspaper itself was a matter of some pride: the French were still
     capable of subverting the will of the Germans.
    There were feverish discussions as to how
     this might have reached us. That it had been delivered to Le Coq Rouge went some way to
     alleviating the growing discontent caused by our cooking for the Germans. I watchedLiliane Béthune hurry past to fetch her bread in her astrakhan
     coat and had my own ideas.
    The
Kommandant
had insisted that
     we eat. It was the cooks’ privilege, he said, on Christmas Eve. We had believed
     ourselves preparing for eighteen, only to discover that the final two were
     Hélène and me. We spent hours running around the kitchen, our exhaustion
     outweighed by our silent, unspoken pleasure in what we knew to be going on two streets
     from ours: the prospect of a clandestine celebration and proper meat for our children.
     To be given two whole meals as well seemed almost too much.
    And yet not too much. I could never have
     turned down a meal again. The food was delicious: duck roasted with orange slices and
     preserved ginger, potatoes
dauphinoise
with green beans, all followed by a
     plate of cheeses. Hélène ate hers, marvelling that she would be eating two
     suppers. ‘I can give someone else my portion of pork,’ she said, sucking a
     bone. ‘I might keep a little bit of the crackling. What do you think?’
    It was so good to see her cheerful. Our
     kitchen, that night, seemed a happy place. There were extra candles, giving us a little
     more precious light. There were the familiar smells of Christmas – Hélène had
     studded one of the oranges with cloves and hung it over the stove so that the scent
     infused the whole room. If you didn’t think too hard, you could listen to the
     glasses clinking, the laughter and conversation, and forget that the next room was
     occupied by Germans.
    At around half past nine, I wrapped my
     sister up and helped her downstairs so that she could climb through toour neighbours’ cellar and then out through their coal hatch. She would run down
     the unlit back alleys to Madame Poilâne’s house where she would join Aurélien
     and the children, whom we had taken there earlier in the afternoon. We had moved the pig
     the day before. It was quite large by then, and Aurélien had had to hold it still
     while I fed it an apple to stop it squealing and, with a clean swipe of his knife,
     Monsieur Baudin, the butcher, slaughtered it.
    I replaced the bricks in the gap behind her,
     all the while listening to the men in the bar above me. I realized, with some
     satisfaction, that for the first time in months I wasn’t cold. To be hungry is to
     be almost permanently cold too; it was a lesson I was sure I would never forget.
    ‘Édouard, I hope you’re
     warm,’ I whispered, into the empty cellar, as my sister’s footsteps faded on
     the other