The Girl You Left Behind

from our glasses,
     surrounded by the detritus of the meal. In the other room the officers had begun to
     sing. I heard their voices lifting, the tune familiar, the words incomprehensible. The
Kommandant
tilted his head to listen. Then he put down his glass.
     ‘You hate us being here, don’t you?’
    I blinked. ‘I have always tried
     –’
    ‘You think your face betrays nothing.
     But I’ve watched you. Years in this job have taught me a lot about people and
     their secrets. Well. Can we call a truce, Madame? Just for these few hours?’
    ‘A truce?’
    ‘You shall forget that I am part of an
     enemy army, I shall forget that you are a woman who spends much of her time working out
     how to subvert that army, and we shall just … be two people?’
    His face, just briefly, had softened. He
     held his glass towards mine. Almost reluctantly, I lifted my own.
    ‘Let us avoid the subject of
     Christmas, lonely or otherwise. I would like you to tell me about the other artists at
     the Académie. Tell me how you came to meet them.’
    I am not sure how long we sat there. If I am
     honest, the hours evaporated in conversation and the warm glow of alcohol. The
Kommandant
wanted to know everything about an artist’s life in Paris.
     What kind of man was Matisse? Was his life as scandalous as his art?
    ‘Oh, no. He was the most
     intellectually rigorous of men. Quite stern. And very conservative, in both his work and
     his domestic habits. But somehow …’ I thought for a moment of the
     bespectacled professor, how he would glance over to check that you had grasped each
     point before he showed you the next piece ‘… joyous. I think he gets great
     joy from what he does.’
    The
Kommandant
thought about this,
     as if my answer had satisfied him. ‘I once wanted to be a painter. I was no good,
     of course. I had to confront the truth of the matter very early on.’ He fingered
     the stem of his glass. ‘I often think that the ability to earn a living by doing
     the thing one loves must be one of life’s greatest gifts.’
    I thought of Édouard then, his face
     lost in concentration, peering at me from behind an easel. If I closed my eyes, I could
     still feel the warmth of the log fire on my right leg, the faint chill on the left where
     my skin was bare. I could see him lift an eyebrow, and the exact point at which his
     thoughts left his painting. ‘I think that too.’
    ‘The first time I saw you,’ he
     had told me on our first Christmas Eve together, ‘I watched you standing in the
     middle of that bustling store and I thought you were the most self-contained woman I had
     ever seen. You looked as if the world could explode into fragments around you and there
     you would be, your chin lifted, gazing out at itimperiously from
     under that magnificent hair.’ He lifted my hand to his mouth, and kissed it
     tenderly.
    ‘I thought you were a Russian
     bear,’ I told him.
    He had raised an eyebrow. We were in a
     packed brasserie off rue de Turbigo. ‘GRRRRRRRR,’ he growled, until I was
     helpless with laughter. He had crushed me to him, right there, in the middle of the
     banquette, covering my neck with kisses, oblivious to the people eating around us.
     ‘GRRRRR.’
    They had stopped singing in the other room.
     I felt suddenly self-conscious and stood, as if to clear the table.
    ‘Please,’ said the
Kommandant
, motioning me to sit down. ‘Just sit a while longer.
     It’s Christmas Eve, after all.’
    ‘Your men will be expecting you to
     join them.’
    ‘On the contrary, they enjoy
     themselves far more if their
Kommandant
is absent. It is not fair to impose
     myself on them all evening.’
    But quite fair to impose yourself on me, I
     thought. It was then that he asked, ‘Where is your sister?’
    ‘I told her to go to bed,’ I
     said. ‘She is a little under the weather, and she was very tired after cooking
     tonight. I wanted her to be quite well for tomorrow.’
    ‘And what will you do? To
     celebrate?’
    ‘Is there much for us to
     celebrate?’
    ‘Truce, Madame?’
    I shrugged. ‘We will go to church.
     Perhaps visit some of our older neighbours. It is a hard day for them to be
     alone.’
    ‘You look after everyone, don’t
     you?’
    ‘It is no crime to be a good
     neighbour.’
    ‘The basket of logs I had delivered
     for your own use. I know you took them to the mayor’s house.’
    ‘His daughter is sick. She needs the
     extra warmth more than we