The Girl You Left Behind

shown to Édith, in the arrival at Le Coq Rouge
     of outgrown clothes or odd pieces of food. Liliane had apparently been sent to a holding
     camp at some distance south of our town. She was lucky, the mayor confided, not to have
     been shot immediately. He suspected it was only special pleading by one of the officers
     that had saved her from a swift execution. ‘But there’s no point in trying
     to intervene, Sophie,’ he said. ‘She was caught spying for the French, and I
     don’t suppose she’ll be saved for long.’
    As for me, I was no longer
persona non
     grata
. Not that I particularly cared. I found it hard to feel the same about my
     neighbours. Édith stayed glued to my side, like a pale shadow. She ate little and
     asked after her mother constantly. I told her truthfully that I didn’t know what
     would happen to Liliane, but that she, Édith, would be safe with us. I had taken to
     sleeping with her in my old room, to stop her shrieking nightmares waking the two
     younger ones. In the evenings, she would creep down to the fourth stair, the nearest
     point from which she could see into the kitchen, and we would find her there late at
     night when we had finished clearing the kitchen, fast asleep with her thin arms holding
     her knees.
    My fears for her mother mixed with my fears
     for my husband. I spent my days in a silent vortex of worry and exhaustion. Little news
     came into the town, and none went out. Somewhere out there he might be starving, lying
     sick with fever or being beaten. The mayor received official news of three deaths, two
     at the Front, one at a camp near Mons, and heard there was an outbreak of typhoid near
     Lille. I took each of these snippets personally.
    Perversely, Hélène seemed to
     thrive in this atmosphere of grim foreboding. I think that watching me crumble had made
     her believe that the worst must have happened. If Édouard, with all his strength
     and vitality, faced death, there could be no hope for Jean-Michel, a gentle, bookish
     man. He could not have survived, her reasoning went, so she might as well get on with
     it. She seemed to grow in strength, urging me to get up when she found me in secret
     tears in the beer cellar, forcing me to eat, or singing lullabies to Édith, Mimi
     and Jean in a strange, jaunty tone. I was grateful for her strength. I lay at night with
     my arms around another woman’s child and wished I never had to think again.
    Late in January, Louisa died. That we had
     all known it was coming did not make it any easier. Overnight, the mayor and his wife
     seemed to age ten years. ‘I tell myself it is a blessing that she will not have to
     see the world as it is,’ he said to me, and I nodded. Neither of us believed
     it.
    The funeral was to take place five days
     later. I decided it was not fair to take the children, so I told Hélène she
     should go for me; I would take the little ones to the woods behind the old fire station.
     Given the severity of the cold,the Germans had granted the villagers
     two hours a day in which to forage in local woods for kindling. I wasn’t convinced
     that we would find much: under cover of darkness the trees had long been stripped of any
     useful branches. But I needed to be away from the town, away from grief and fear and the
     constant scrutiny of either the Germans or my neighbours.
    It was a crisp, silent afternoon, and the
     sun shone weakly through the skeletal silhouettes of those trees that remained,
     seemingly too exhausted to rise more than a few feet from the horizon. It was easy to
     look at our landscape, as I did that afternoon, and wonder if the very world was coming
     to an end. I walked, conducting a silent conversation with my husband, as I often did,
     these days.
Be strong, Édouard. Hold on. Just stay alive and I know we will be
     together again.
Édith and Mimi walked in silence at first, flanking me,
     their feet crunching on the icy leaves, but then, as we reached the woods, some childish
     impulse overtook them and I stopped briefly to watch as they ran towards a rotting
     tree-trunk, jumping on and off it, holding hands and giggling. Their shoes would be
     scuffed, and their skirts muddied, but I would not deny them that simple
     consolation.
    I stooped and put a few handfuls of twigs
     into my basket, hoping their voices might drown the constant hum of dread in my mind.
     And then, as I straightened, I saw him: in the clearing, a gun to his shoulder, talking
     to one of