She took a mental inventory: the furniture from the main reception room had been removed, the curtains taken down, the provisions crammed into the shed where the gardener kept his tools (oh, the large hams smoked in ash, the jars of clarified butter, the salted butter, the fine, pure pork fat, the thick streaky sausages!). All her possessions, all her treasures… The wine had been lying buried in the cellar since the day the English army had left Dunkerque. The piano was locked; Gaston's hunting rifle was in an impregnable hiding place. Everything was in order. There was nothing to do but wait for the conquerors. Pale and silent, with a delicate, trembling hand, she half closed the shutters, as you would in a room where someone had died, and went out, followed by Lucile.
Lucile was a young woman-beautiful, blonde, with dark eyes, but a quiet, modest demeanour and "a faraway expression," for which Madame Angellier reproached her. She'd been acceptable because of her family connections and dowry (she was the daughter of an important landowner in the area). However, Lucile's father had gone on to make some bad investments, lost his fortune and mortgaged his land; the marriage was, therefore, not the most successful; she hadn't had any children, after all.
The two women went into the dining room where the table was set. It was just after twelve o'clock, but only according to the clocks on the church and town hall, which they were obliged to set to German time; every French home set their clocks back by sixty minutes as a point of honour; every Frenchwoman would scornfully say, "At our house, we don't live by German time." This practice left great voids at various points of the day when there was nothing to do. Now, for example, a deadly gap loomed between the end of Mass and the beginning of Sunday lunch. They didn't read. If Madame Angellier saw Lucile with a book in her hands, she would look at her, surprised, and say reproachfully, "What's this? Are you reading?" She had a soft, refined voice, as faint as the echo of a harp: "Don't you have anything else to do?" No one was working: it was Easter Sunday.
They didn't speak. Between these two women, every topic of conversation was a thorn bush they only approached with caution: if they reached out a hand, they risked getting hurt. Every word Madame Angellier heard brought back the memory of some loss, some family story, some former pain Lucile knew nothing about. She would reply with reluctance, then stop to look at her daughter-in-law in sad surprise, as if she were thinking, "How strange that her husband is a German prisoner of war and yet she can still breathe, move, speak, laugh…" She could barely admit that the problem between them was Gaston. Lucile's tone was never what it should be. Sometimes she seemed too sad: was she talking about someone who was dead? Surely her duty as a Frenchwoman, as a wife, was to bear separation courageously, as she, Madame Angellier, had done between 1914 and 1918, just after-or not so long after-her own marriage. But whenever Lucile murmured words of consolation, of hope, her thoughts were similarly bitter: "Ah, you can tell she never really loved him; I've always suspected it. Now I can tell, I'm sure of it… That tone is unmistakable. She's cold and indifferent. She wants for nothing, while my son, my poor child…" She imagined the prisoner-of-war camp, the barbed wire, the guards, the sentries. Tears would well up in her eyes and she would say in a broken voice, "We mustn't speak of him…" Then she would take a clean handkerchief from her bag, always there in case anyone made her think of Gaston or the misfortunes of France, and delicately dab at her eyes with the same gesture she would use to remove a drop of ink with some blotting paper.
And so, silent and still, next to the cold fireplace, the two women stood and waited.
2
The Germans had moved into their lodgings and were getting to know the village. The officers walked about alone or in pairs, heads held high, boots striking the paving stones. The ordinary soldiers stayed in groups; they had nothing to do, so they paced up and down the only street or gathered in the square near the old crucifix. When one of them stopped, all the others did too, forming a long line of green uniforms that made it impossible for the villagers to get by. Faced with this obstacle, they simply pulled their caps even further down over their eyes, turned away and used the small winding lanes to return to the fields.
The local policeman, under the surveillance of two non-commissioned officers, was putting up posters on the walls and main buildings. These posters were of various types. Some depicted a smiling German soldier with fair hair and perfect teeth giving out jam sandwiches to a group of French children gathered around him under the caption, "Abandoned citizens, trust in the soldiers of the Third Reich!" Other posters used drawings or caricatures to illustrate world domination by the English and the detestable tyranny of the Jews. But most of them began with the word Verboten-Forbidden. It was forbidden to walk down the street between nine o'clock in the evening and five o'clock in the morning; forbidden to keep any firearms; forbidden to "aid, abet or shelter" escaped prisoners, English soldiers, or citizens of countries which were enemies of Germany; forbidden to listen to foreign radio stations; forbidden to refuse German currency. And beneath each poster was the same warning in black lettering, underlined twice: on pain of death.
Meanwhile, Mass was over and the shops were opening for business. In the spring of 1941, there was still no shortage of goods in the provinces: people had secreted away such hoards of fabric, shoes and provisions that they were now rather inclined to sell them. The Germans were not difficult and were prepared to be palmed off with junk: women's corsets from the last war, ankle boots from 1900, linen decorated with little flags and embroidered Eiffel Towers (originally intended for the English)-they'd buy anything. They inspired in the inhabitants of the occupied countries fear, respect, aversion and the amusing desire to fleece them, to take advantage of them, to get hold of their money.
"It's our money anyway… they stole it from us," thought the grocer as he gave a soldier from the invading army his most charming smile and a pound of wormy prunes at double the price they were worth.
The soldier examined the goods sceptically. It was obvious he suspected fraud but, intimidated by the grocer's impenetrable expression, he said nothing. The regiment had previously been stationed in a small town in the north that had been destroyed and pillaged; there had been no supplies for a long time. But in this rich province of central France, the soldier once more found things to covet. His eyes lit up with desire in front of displays full of reminders of comfortable civilian life: pine furniture, ready-to-wear suits, children's toys, little pink dresses. Their expressions serious and dreamy, the troops marched from one shop to the other, jingling the money in their pockets. Behind the soldiers' backs, or above their heads, the French sent little signals to one another from their open windows-they raised their eyes to heaven, shook their heads, smiled, made faint grimaces of scorn or defiance, an entire language of gestures to show that they needed God's help during such terrible times (but that even God…!), that they intended to remain free, free in spirit in any case (if not in actions then at least in words), that these Germans weren't really very clever since they believed favours were done for them willingly, whereas the French knew they were obliged to because, after all, the Germans were the masters. "Our masters," said the women who looked at the enemy with a mixture of desire and hatred. (The enemy? Of course. But they were also men, and young…) The French took special pleasure in cheating them. "They think we like them, but we know we just want to get passes, petrol, permits," thought those women who had already met the occupying forces in Paris or the larger provincial cities, while the naive country girls shyly lowered their eyes when the Germans looked at them.