In the Fall They Leave, page 4
They dry their feet and put on wooden shoes and are at the wood’s edge when they hear screaming. Then gunshots, shattering glass, and the bleating and squawking of animals. For a few blind seconds, Elli can’t move. Then her sight clears. Before them, the barley field is still, the low sun bronzing everything except the smoke rising from their house and barn and sheds.
Bursts of gunshot come again, sometimes brief, sometimes lengthy. Elli lifts Janine and runs back through the woods to the stream and then upstream, slipping on stones. Finding the hollowed-out place, she heaves Janine down into it. The child, a mute sack in her arms a minute before, wrinkles her face, gathering herself. Elli drops to her knees and covers her sister’s mouth. “Non, ma petite soeur! Non! We must be quiet as fish now.”
The little girl’s face is scarlet and every muscle in her body taut, but then she goes limp. Elli is a crouched statue, listening. Over the stream’s burble she can still hear the strange clattering that must be gunfire. She grips each of her shoulders, crossing her arms over the wildness within.
It’s night when Elli finally leaves Janine deep in the playhouse under the bank, covered with grasses and branches. She’s told her not to move, not to make any sound. Above all, stay there. Elli will come back for her. With misgivings, Elli crawls through the barley field toward their farmhouse. By moonlight she can make out its shape, but the small barn, the coop, hutch, and other sheds are not there. Creeping closer, she sees that these are still burning, the wood and straw just heaps of red coals and an occasional shoot of flame.
She lies in the field awhile, her heart beating against the cool earth, but finally makes herself crawl forward again to the edge of the farmyard. Their chickens lie scattered everywhere, and the sheep and lambs in what had been their enclosure. The bodies of their rabbits are everywhere as well, two even in the front yard. In the house, piled-up furniture is still burning. She recognizes part of a chair back and the headboard of her bed. Also, a drawer from the heavy bureau that had been in her parents’ bedroom. She sees the gleam of broken crockery on the stone floor. And in the dim light of the low fire, she sees her mother’s body and Margot’s, her mother half covering the child.
“Maman,” Elli whispers, kneeling over the bodies. “Maman?”
When she looks more closely, she sees blood soaking Margot’s smock and her mother’s dress. Nearby are shards of broken wine bottles. The spilled wine looks like blood. She quietly calls her father’s name but hears only the soft working away of the fire.
Her shoes crunch broken glass in the yard and then she is running toward their neighbors’ house. But at the Sabourin farm, it’s much the same—slaughtered animals on the periphery, objects burning inside the stone house, glass and broken crockery everywhere, inside and out, and barn and sheds still burning. But there’s something more. A terrible smell she doesn’t recognize.
Each house on the way to the village, the same, and everything that can burn, in the village, is either burning or already in ash. Bodies lie in the village square, all men, it seems, their bloody clothing black in the moonlight. And again, smashed beer bottles, wine bottles, windows, plates and cups everywhere. A rocking chair, intact, moves back and forth on its runners as if someone has just risen from it. She calls her father’s name. The night breeze against her forearms is warm.
She goes closer to the pile and calls again.
Nothing. But still she stands there listening. The silence has an eerie thrum, as of distant voices.
No, not voices. Singing.
A German song she’s heard before, sung by a quartet of farmers at a harvest festival. Someone played an accordion. Afterward, applause, and tankards of beer passed to the singers.
Accompanying the voices this time is not an accordion but hoofbeats. She glances around for somewhere to hide. Except for the stone church, the village is all but flattened. She’s afraid of being trapped in the church, so she runs between mounds of burning debris, then through a pasture before throwing herself down in field grasses. The singing is closer. She doesn’t know whether to run again or to remain still. If she runs, they might see her and fire their guns. If she stays, she might be trampled by the horses trotting right over her. Only she wouldn’t be. She’d be shot like a rabbit. The pulse in her throat is so forceful she’s afraid they will hear it. Digging her fingers into the earth, she tries to stop shaking so hard. A storm is roaring through her and for a while there’s only that until pops of gunfire break through the inner thunder.
Sparks sift down into the dry field grasses around her. A nearby clump catches fire, the patch of flame uncurling from its dark center. Soon a tongue of it will reach her sleeve. From the burned village come shouts and gunfire.
She crawls forward a few feet, pauses, then crawls forward again. To either side is only rough pasture. Papa, what should I do?
She can almost hear him saying, Stay put, don’t move a finger, but this seems an impossible task because the need to run is awful. She does move her fingers, anchoring them more deeply. But when horse soldiers lope by just several meters behind her, she has to clench her teeth and hold back a scream. How can they not see her there, in the light from the burning pasture?
Later she will think that the fire saved her, the cavalry staying to one side of it, their eyes focusing ahead, to the next house, the next village, while foot soldiers, tired of shooting at bodies and mounds of fire, leave singing.
Moving stealthily back to her farmhouse seems to take hours. There, one curtain still hangs at a window from which all the glass had been shot out. She pulls the curtain down and covers the bodies of her mother and youngest sister. Where the furniture had been piled is smoking ash now. Moonlight reveals a small wheel of cheese on the floor, partially covered by broken glass. She picks it up and ties it in her shawl. Out in the yard a humped shadow amid the carnage is just visible. The shadow doesn’t move when she approaches, so she thinks it must be dead too, whatever it is. Putting out her hand to touch it, she feels soft rabbit fur, the body warm.
Carrying both cheese and the rabbit close, she crosses the barley field and makes it into the woods. There she drops down and sleeps until something wakes her. Straining to identify the sound, she lies still, staring upward at sunlight piercing a veil of fog—or smoke—and forming rays. Soon it’s quiet again.
“Papa?” she whispers.
But it’s only the rabbit, moving about in old leaves, under a canopy of fern. Fear draining away leaves her weak. Her eyelids want to close again. But then she’s running.
Their playhouse is empty, the branches and grasses scattered, Janine’s indentation still there in the sand. The scene darkens and she has to sit down until the whirling stops. When she can focus again, she surveys the surrounding undergrowth and foliage. Nothing looks trampled.
“Janine!”
They found her. They must have. On the road when she came looking for me.
She hurries back through woods to the barley field. There’s no sound except for chirping birds and a hawk’s distant cry.
Clouds are moving in and the air feels heavier. Barley stems sway, darkening under cloud cover, then brightening again. A shape catches Elli’s eye. She plunges forward through the tall barley stems.
Janine is standing in the field, all but hidden by the barley.
Elli moves one hand before Janine’s unblinking eyes. “Janine! Can you not see me?”
It’s not like her to be so still, so mute, and this frightens Elli more than if her sister were screaming and throwing herself about. And the stiffened little body seems heavier than normal.
The soldiers?
Or did she go to the house?
Pain twists its way down through her at the latter thought. Janine, looking for her, going to the house and seeing what Elli saw. She holds on to the little girl more tightly. Yesterday at this time nothing had yet happened. Her mother and sister and father had been alive, and their animals, and the day had been a summer day, warmer than usual, and there’d been no rain clouds.
Elli’s teeth bang together as she says, “We will find someone, Janine. Someone who will help us.” An instant’s vision comes of her mother and father and Margot the way they had been just yesterday. She allows this picture for a moment, but then it hurts almost as badly as the other.
She leads Janine back to the stream and there tries to feed her some cheese, but Janine will not open her mouth. Elli wets the girl’s lips with stream water and tries again.
“Janine, please! Maman would want you to eat this. You must live. For her and for Papa too. And for me.”
She tries again, and this time the girl’s mouth opens enough for Elli to poke in a bit of cheese. “Now swallow.”
The little girl, staring straight ahead, does, and Elli cries out, again too loudly, “You can hear!” Looking at Janine more closely, she sees no bruises, no cuts, no marks of any kind. It gives her hope.
Elli has been to Liège on market days but knows, from the still-rising smoke in that direction, that they cannot go there now. Her mother’s sister, their aunt Louise, lives near Louvain to the west, but Elli has never been there. Nor does she know how far it is. The town is near Brussels, her mother once said, where the king and queen live. In a picture book, its grand cobbled square and buildings looked like fairy-tale castles.
Papa, what should I do?
She listens for his voice, but there is only the wind now, high in the trees, and leaves making their water-sound.
She ties Janine’s shawl more tightly around her shoulders. “I think we will try to find Aunt Louise. We will follow the sun westward and surely there will be someone to help us along the way. All right?”
Janine is staring at the stream water, the same shallow spread of amber as the day before, the same quiet music.
“Come!”
The little girl doesn’t move.
“Janine, I can’t carry you all that way. You’re too heavy. You’re a big girl now, and we must go.”
Still, Janine will not move. Elli picks her up, settles her weight on her hipbone, and begins walking. Janine’s shoes catch on undergrowth and fall off. Elli has to stop again and again. Finally, she puts them in the shawl tied around her waist, picks Janine up again, and goes on, the little girl’s head tucked under Elli’s chin, her thumb in her mouth.
Field gives way to field, most separated by hedgerows or streamlets. By late afternoon Elli comes to a narrow road that leads past burned cottages and houses. Janine’s eyes are closed, and Elli has to keep hefting the little girl up. She seems far heavier now. The low rays of the sun are in Elli’s eyes, and the countryside all around is settling into its dusty golden light. Her back aches. Her head aches. Every so often she stops to listen.
In an orchard she picks windfall apples and fills her shawl. Nearby farm buildings have been burned, though a shed remains partly upright. She is afraid to peer into it, but the rose-colored horizon and first evening star hanging above it tell her she must. Inside, there are only hay-strewn floorboards, a wooden wheelbarrow, one side gouged by bullets, and a metal bucket lying on its side. It, too, has been shot at, but the holes are near the top. After putting some straw in the wheelbarrow, she places Janine in it and covers her with her shawl. Then she takes the bucket into the farmyard. Treading between bodies of chickens and ducks, she tries not to look at them. At the well, she hesitates, but the water, when drawn, smells pure.
Janine frets in the wheelbarrow; she wants Elli instead. So they lie behind it, straw heaped over them. Long after Janine falls asleep, Elli is still awake, listening to crickets and frogs and occasional explosive bursts somewhere that shake their way through the earth and make the top of the shed waver a little, against the distant stars. If they come, she tells herself, she will take Janine out into the orchard, and they’ll hide behind the widest tree. But if they set fire to the orchard, they will have to run somewhere. She stays awake as long as she can, listening, until dozing gives way to true sleep.
At first light she piles more straw in the wheelbarrow, puts Janine in it, and sets off again after finding a sack of grain in the shed and scattering it for the two hens who wakened her, clucking. As the day clouds up, a mist begins falling. By midday it’s a straight-down rain that soaks Elli’s hair, the straw in the wheelbarrow, Janine, and their shawls. The wheelbarrow’s metal wheel squeaks and makes a wavering trail in the road’s mud. She walks on, Janine’s face to one side on the wet straw, her thumb in her mouth, her eyes closed.
Holy Mary, Mother of God…
The prayer comes unbidden but she rejects it. Mary did not help. The candle did not help.
Sometime later she lowers the handles of the wheelbarrow and stoops alongside it, shivering, her head lowered in the rain. Above her, Janine is silent. When a hand touches her shoulder, Elli is instantly awake but unable to say a word.
Shrecklichkeit
Are we holding them off?”
For the past week Marie-Thérèse has been hearing mortar shelling at night and often throughout the day, percussive blasts much like thunder, from the direction of the fortified cities of Liège, Namur, and Mons—to the east, southeast, and south.
The gardener finishes filling the pigeons’ water trays. “They take revenge.”
“But why? Everyone was saying they’d come through peacefully.”
“Resistance.”
“Ours, you mean?”
He makes his customary gesture when agitated, his right hand slashing the air horizontally, and says no more.
What he wouldn’t tell her she soon learns from the newspapers. Whole villages leveled. Civilians killed. Livestock either stolen or killed. Barns and houses and cottages burned. For any resistance the invaders encountered, civilians were made to pay with their lives whether or not they had anything to do with it. The invading Germans, the newspaper articles state, were afraid of franc-tireurs—sharpshooters, snipers. At the first shout of They’re shooting! machine guns were turned upon villagers. Incendiary bombs thrown into houses and cottages. And men dragged away, women and children too, and then everyone shot. These were not random shootings and bombings by panicked soldiers, according to the articles, but rather a campaign of terror designed to undermine the country’s will. The plan, it was said, had a name: schrecklichkeit—“frightfulness.”
It horrifies her yet she cannot quite believe it. Possibly the newspapers are exaggerating in order to inflame nationalistic passion and the will to fight. But in the days following the invasion, Brussels begins filling with refugees from the countryside—mothers with children and babies, old men, old women, but few younger men in the slow processions. Sometimes there are farm carts and goats and chickens in crates and wheelbarrows and handcarts with belongings in them amid the refugees trudging along on foot, carrying bundles, their expressions impassive until one of them is questioned by a reporter or townsperson. Then tears, sometimes, even weeping, and words garbled by emotion. At times, though, a refugee will manage to tell the most terrible story in a dispassionate and dignified voice. Story after story, and each one corroborating the next, and these stories making their way into newsprint day after day. The few young men among the refugees often ask how they can join the Belgian fighters. Where do I need to go? Direct me, please.
But it isn’t until Marie-Thérèse begins hearing the stories firsthand in the wards that she’s convinced.
There is Madame Kendahl, with burned hands, forearms, feet, and legs. Her hair has been singed off, and her scalp needs to be dressed as well. It’s the first time Marie-Thérèse has ever seen such severe burns, the skin completely gone in places and the underlying tissue seeping fluids. When she first observed that, her stomach writhed with shock, but with Julia’s help, she was able to dress the oozing flesh and give Madame Kendahl the replacement fluids she needed. Before the pain medication and sedative took effect, the woman told them what had happened. Soldiers shot her son and pushed her back into her burning house and closed the door. When she tried to leave, thinking they’d gone, they shot at her. They were drunk, she said. They were not like proper soldiers at all, and their aim was bad. There was a little cistern in a back room and she hid there until the following day. The pain was so terrible by then she could only lie in a bloodied pond, amid the bodies of her ducks. By the grace of God, someone found her and got her to the clinic, she didn’t know how because she was unconscious most of the time, thanks be to God. Maybe an angel.
In the next days, Marie-Thérèse tries to find words to calm, if not cheer, the burned woman. “Madame, do you see the sparrow right by your window? See? On that branch?”
The woman doesn’t bother turning her bandaged head. Her only interests are in retelling her story and sipping the broth Marie-Thérèse spoon-feeds her. If she likes it, she’ll shut her eyes after the first taste, savoring it.
The gruesome burns still have the power to shock, and while dressing them Marie-Thérèse always recalls her mother’s words about wounds and death. Yet does this work differ so very much from dancing in a ballet such as Swan Lake? Or Coppelia? In both, death plays a major part, but death transmuted into art and so…transcended? While here she’s in the essence, the bedrock of life itself. It doesn’t seem right to love one and disdain the other, does it? In time the shock of dressing the burns eases, and she begins looking forward to sitting with the woman and describing what her new cottage will be like, right down to the curtains and tablecloths. If Madame Kendahl dies, the words will hardly matter. And if she lives, well, new curtains and tablecloths are possible, no? The words themselves become a kind of dressing.
But then, her potato debacle, as she will later refer to it. Monsieur Pierre Durée is a farmer in his seventies, his frame narrow and still lumped with muscle. He too has been burned out, he narrowly escaping with his life. His burns, however, are not as severe as Madame Kendahl’s, and so Marie-Thérèse approaches his bed with some confidence. While dressing his forearms and hands, she tells him that he’ll be healed in time to harvest his potatoes.
