The Girl You Left Behind

my
     shoulder. ‘Sophie –’
    I shrugged her off. ‘Don’t
     Sophie me. You have no idea what you have all done. You think you know everything about
     Liliane Béthune. Well, you know nothing. NOTHING!’ I was crying now, tears of
     rage. ‘You are all so quick to judge, but just as quick to take what she offers
     when it suits you.’
    The mayor walked towards me. ‘Sophie,
     we should talk.’
    ‘Oh. You will talk to me now! For
     weeks you have looked at me as if I were a bad smell because Monsieur Suel supposedly
     believes me to be a traitor and a whore. Me! Who risked everything to bring your
     daughter food. You would all believe him rather than me! Well, perhaps I do not want to
     talk to you, Monsieur. Knowing what I know, perhaps I would rather talk to Liliane
     Béthune!’
    I was raging now. I felt unhinged, a
     madwoman, as if I gave off sparks. I looked at their stupid faces, their open mouths,
     and I shook the restraining hand from my shoulder.
    ‘Where do you think the
Journal
     des Occupés
came from? Do you think the birds dropped it? Do you think it
     came by magic carpet?’
    Hélène began to bundle me out now.
     ‘I don’t care! Who do they think was helping them? Liliane helped you! All
     of you! Even when you were shitting in her bread, she was helping you!’
    I was in the hallway.
     Hélène’s face was white, the mayor behind her, pushing me forwards, away
     from them.
    ‘What?’ I protested. ‘Does
     the truth make you too uncomfortable? Am I forbidden to speak?’
    ‘Sit down, Sophie. For God’s
     sake, just sit down and shut up.’
    ‘I don’t know this town any
     more. How can you all stand there and yell at her? Even if she had slept with the
     Germans, how can you treat another human being so? They spat on her, Hélène,
     didn’t you see? They spat all over her. As if she were not human.’
    ‘I am very sorry for Madame
     Béthune,’ the mayor said quietly. ‘But I am not here to discuss her. I
     came to talk to you.’
    ‘I have nothing to say to you,’
     I said, wiping at my face with my palms.
    The mayor took a deep breath. ‘Sophie.
     I have news of your husband.’
    It took me a moment to register what he had
     said.
    He sat down heavily on the stairs beside me.
     Hélène still held my hand.
    ‘It’s not good news, I’m
     afraid. When the last prisoners came through this morning, one dropped a message as he
     passed the post office. A scrap of paper. My clerk picked it up. It says that
     Édouard Lefèvre was among five men sent to the reprisal camp at Ardennes last
     month. I’m so sorry, Sophie.’

8
    Édouard Lefèvre, imprisoned, had
     been charged with handing a fist-sized piece of bread to a prisoner. He had fought back
     fiercely when beaten for it. I almost laughed when I heard: how typical of
     Édouard.
    But my laughter was short-lived. Every piece
     of information that came my way served to increase my fears. The reprisal camp where he
     was held was said to be one of the worst: the men slept two hundred to a shed on bare
     boards; they lived on watery soup with a few husks of barley and the occasional dead
     mouse. They were sent to work stone-breaking or building railways, forced to carry heavy
     iron girders on their shoulders for miles. Those who dropped from exhaustion were
     punished, beaten or denied rations. Disease was rife and men were shot for the pettiest
     misdemeanours.
    I took it all in and each of these images
     haunted my dreams. ‘He will be all right, won’t he?’ I said to the
     mayor.
    He patted my hand. ‘We will all pray
     for him,’ he said. He sighed deeply as he stood to leave, and his sigh was like a
     death sentence.
    The mayor visited most days after the
     parading of Liliane Béthune. As the truth about her filtered around the town, she
     became slowly redrawn in the collective imagination. Lips no longer pursed automatically
     at the mention of her name. Someone scrawled the word
     ‘
héroïne
’ on the marketsquare in chalk
     under cover of darkness, and although it was swiftly removed, we all knew to whom it
     referred. A few precious things that had been looted from her house when she was first
     arrested mysteriously found their way back.
    Of course, there were those who, like
     Mesdames Louvier and Durant, would not have believed well of her if she had been seen
     throttling Germans with her bare hands. But there were some vague admissions of regret
     in our little bar, small kindnesses