Perhaps, at last, an attempt at ending our war.

2.

We didn’t see Tomas until over a fortnight after the dance at La Mauvaise Réputation. That was partly because of Mother-still half crazy with insomnia and migraines-and partly because we sensed that something had changed. We all sensed it; Cassis, hiding behind his comic books, Reine in her new, blank silence, even myself. Oh, we longed for him. All three of us did-love is not something that you can turn off like a tap, and we were already trying in our way to excuse what he had done, what he had abetted.

But the ghost of old Gustave Beauchamp swam beneath us like the menacing shadow of a sea monster. It touched everything. We played with Paul almost in the way we had before Tomas, but our games were halfhearted, pushing us to fake exuberance to hide the fact that the life had gone out of them. We swam in the river, ran in the woods, climbed trees with more energy than ever before, but behind it all we knew we were waiting, aching and itching with impatience, for him to come. I think we all believed he might be able to make it better, even then.

I certainly thought so. He was always so sure, so arrogantly self-confident. I imagined him with his cigarette hanging from his lips and his cap pushed back, the sun in his eyes and that smile lighting his face, that smile which lit the world…

But Thursday came and went, and we saw nothing of Tomas. Cassis looked for him at school, but there was no sign of him in any of his usual places. Hauer, Schwartz and Heinemann were also strangely absent, almost as if they were avoiding contact. Another Thursday came and went. We pretended not to notice, did not even mention his name to one another, though we may have whispered it in our dreams, going through the motions of life without him as if we didn’t care whether we saw him again or not. I became almost frenzied now in my hunt for Old Mother. I checked the traps I had laid ten or twenty times a day, and was always setting new ones. I stole food from the cellar in order to make new and tempting baits for her. I swam out to the Treasure Stone and sat there for hours with my rod, watching the gracious arc of the line as it dipped into the water and listening to the sounds of the river at my feet.

Raphaël called to see Mother again. Business at the café was poor. Someone had painted COLLABORATOR on the back wall in red paint, and someone had thrown stones at his windows one night, so that now they had to be boarded up. I watched from behind the door as he spoke in a low urgent voice to Mother.

“It isn’t my fault, Mirabelle,” he said. “You have to believe that. I wasn’t responsible.”

My mother made a noncommittal sound between her teeth.

“You can’t argue with the Germans,” said Raphaël. “You have to treat them as you would any other customer. It isn’t as if I was the only one…”

Mother shrugged. “In this village, perhaps you are,” she said indifferently.

“How can you say that? You were pleased enough yourself at one time-”

Mother lunged forward. Raphaël took a hasty step back, rattling the plates on the dresser. Her voice was low and furious.

“Shut up, you fool,” she said. “That’s over, do you hear? Over. And if I even suspect you’ve said a word to anyone-”

Raphaël’s face was sallow with fear, but he tried for bluster.

“I’m not having anyone calling me a fool-” he began in a shaking voice.

“I’ll call you a fool and your mother a whore if I want to!” My mother’s voice was hard and shrill. “You’re a fool and a coward, Raphaël Crespin, and we both know it.” She was standing so close to him that I could hardly see his face, though I could still see his hands splayed out either side of her as if in entreaty. “But if you or anyone talks about this-God help you, if my children get to hear anything because of you”-I could hear her breathing, harsh as dead leaves in the tiny kitchen-“then I’ll kill you,” whispered my mother, and Raphaël must have believed her, because his face was white as curd when he left the house, his hands shaking so badly he jammed them into his pockets.

“Anyone messes with my children, and I’ll kill the bastards,” spat my mother in his wake, and I saw him wince as if her words were poison. “Kill the bastards,” repeated my mother, even though Raphaël was almost down to the gate by then, half-running, head lowered as if against a strong wind.

They were words that would return to haunt us.

She was in vicious humor all day. Paul caught the lash of her tongue when he came to ask Cassis to play. Mother, who had been silently brewing trouble since Raphaël’s visit, launched such a fierce and unprovoked attack upon him that he was able only to stare at her, his mouth working, his voice locked into an agonizing stutter. “I’m so-so-so-so I’m so-so-so-”

“Talk properly, you cretin!” screamed my mother in her glassy voice, and for a second I thought I saw Paul’s mild eyes light with something almost savage, then he turned without uttering a word and fled jerkily toward the Loire, his voice returning as he did and ululating behind him in a series of weird, desperate trills as he ran.

“Good riddance!” shouted my mother after him, slamming the door.

“You shouldn’t have said that,” I said stonily to her back. “It isn’t Paul’s fault he stammers.”

My mother turned to look at me, her eyes like agates. “You would side with him,” she said in a flat voice. “If it was the choice between me and a Nazi, you’d side with the Nazi.”

3.

It was then that the letters began to arrive. Three of them, scribbled on thin blue-lined notepaper and pushed under the door. I found her in the act of picking one up, and she crammed it into the pocket of her apron, almost screaming at me to get into the kitchen, I wasn’t fit to be seen, get that soap and scrub, scrub. There was a shrill note in her voice that reminded me of the orange bag, and I made myself scarce, but I remembered the note and later, when I found it pasted into the album between a recipe for boudin noir and a magazine cutting on how to remove boot polish stains, I recognized it at once.

We now what you’ve bean doing, it read in small, shaky letters. Weve bean watchen you and we now wat to do with colaboraters. Underneath she has written in bold red letters: learn to spell, ha ha! but her words look overlarge, over-red, as if she is trying too hard to appear unconcerned. Certainly she never spoke to us of the notes, though in retrospect I realize that her abrupt changes of mood might have been related to their secret arrival. Another suggests that the writer knew something about our meetings with Tomas.

Weve sene your kids with him so dont try to deny it. We now wat your game is. You think youre so good better than the rest of us well youre nothing but a Boch whoar and your kids are seling stuff to the germans. Wat do you think of that.

The writing might belong to anyone. Certainly the script is uneducated, the spelling atrocious, but it might have been written by anyone in the village. My mother began to behave even more erratically than usual, shutting herself in the farmhouse for most of the day and watching any passersby with a suspicion verging on paranoia.

The third letter is the worst. I suppose there were no more, though she might simply have decided not to keep them, but I think this is the last.

You dont deserve to live, it says. Nazi whoar and your stuckup kids. Bet you didnt now theyre selling us to the germans. Ask them wear all the stuff coms from. They keep it in a place theyve got in the woods. They get it of a man calld Lybnits I think hes calld. You now him. And we now you.

One night someone painted a scarlet C on our front door, and NAZI WHOAR across the side of the chicken hut, though we painted over it before anyone could see what had been written. And October dragged on.