The Beekeeper's Promise (Page 16)
After the Germans invaded Poland in the autumn, she’d received word that her husband had escaped to join Polish forces in England to continue the fight from there. He’d written that she and the baby should stay safe in Paris until he could come and get them once the war was over.
But when Paris fell, Mireille had urged her to come to the mill house. ‘We’ll go together. My parents will shelter you and Blanche there.’
‘But then Herschel won’t know where to come and look for us,’ Esther had protested, clutching Blanche to her so tightly that the baby started to cry.
‘Better that he eventually finds you both alive and well than that he has to look for you in the debris of a bombed-out basement,’ Mireille had argued. ‘Come, Esther, bring what you can for Blanche. A friend of mine has a car; he’ll squeeze you in. But we have to leave now!’
When she recounted this part of her story, Mireille began to cry. Eliane held her tight, smoothing her hair. ‘If I hadn’t made her leave, she might still be alive,’ choked Mireille.
Still holding her and rocking her gently, Eliane said, ‘Or she might have been killed in Paris by a bomb. Or, if she’d survived, she and Blanche might well have been rounded up and deported as soon as the Germans arrived. We’ve all heard the reports – people disappear off to these “work camps” and are never heard of again. Those camps would be no place for a mother with a small child. You can’t blame yourself, ma soeur.’
When, at last, she’d managed to calm her sobs, Mireille continued with her story.
The day’s car journey they’d envisaged had rapidly turned into a drawn-out nightmare. The roads south from Paris were packed with a slow-moving tide of refugees on foot, on bicycles and in horse-drawn wagons filled with their personal belongings, blocking the way for the cars that tried, impatiently, to get past even though there was no space ahead, just more and more people.
The car Mireille and Esther were in crawled onwards at a walking pace. But they were thankful, at least, that the vehicle offered some protection from the milling throng that pressed around them, as well as from the heat of the June sun.
And then they began to have to manoeuvre the car around other vehicles that had been dumped in the middle of the road when they’d run out of fuel, there being no more to be found anywhere along the route. In the end, inevitably, their car also ran empty and they had to abandon it. Mireille’s friend, the car’s owner, said he would walk back to a garage they’d passed a few kilometres previously, where it had looked as if there might be a chance of some fuel. ‘You two take the baby and start to walk. Orléans isn’t too much further. When you get there, see if you can find a room for the night in the main square – there are cafés and hotels there. I’ll come and find you once I’ve got the car on the road again.’
And so Mireille and Esther, carrying Blanche, had joined the slow-moving flood of people making their terrified, weary way south.
‘Did you find somewhere to stay in Orléans?’ asked Eliane.
Mireille shook her head. ‘No chance. Everywhere was full. People were barricading their doors against looters and chasing refugees out of their gardens where they were scavenging for something to eat. It was as if a swarm of locusts had swept through the countryside before us, taking everything, and that’s how the locals saw us too. We slept that night under a hedge, holding the baby between us to keep her warm. Esther tried to feed her, but her milk was drying up and anyway Blanche is already being weaned on to solids so she was hungry for more. We begged a little bread from another family the next morning and soaked it in some water for her. But otherwise there was nothing to eat – the locusts had got there first.’
Their mother Lisette brought in a bowl of chicken broth on a tray, balancing Blanche on her other hip. The baby was already looking a little better-nourished, having been fed sips of goat’s milk and some of the broth too.
‘Eat, Mireille,’ Lisette ordered. ‘We need to get you back on your feet so that you can help look after this pretty little one, don’t we, my sweet?’ She placed a kiss on top of the baby’s dark curls.
After she’d sipped the broth and managed to swallow a bite or two of bread, Mireille went on with her story.
They’d rejoined the frightened and weary procession and continued on their way southwards and westwards, reasoning that it would be better to keep moving forwards, towards the hoped-for safety of Coulliac, than to wait there, where there was nothing to eat and no shelter, in the hope that their friend would turn up with the car again.
‘A situation like that shows people in their true colours,’ Mireille commented as she paused to take a sip of water from a glass beside her bed. ‘Some people behaved with the most extraordinary compassion and generosity, like the family who’d shared their bread with us that morning. But others displayed selfishness, envy and malice. I suppose they were terrified, as we all were, and just desperate to survive.’
They’d been on a stretch of road somewhere around Tours, Mireille thought, although she’d lost track of the distance they’d covered, with progress so slow and so haphazard. They’d tried taking by-roads, which weren’t quite as crowded, but ended up losing their bearings and so had found the main arterial road once again, where it ran alongside a railway line. ‘Someone said they thought it was the main line to Bordeaux, so we knew we were heading in the right direction,’ said Mireille.
The midday sun had been beating down and they had sat in the shade of a plane tree to rest and give Blanche some shelter. She had been crying with hunger for more than an hour now. Esther had tried again to feed her, but the baby just grew angrier and more frustrated as she attempted, unsuccessfully, to suckle at her mother’s breast. Exhausted, Esther had handed Blanche to Mireille and done up the buttons of her blouse. ‘Here, see if you can calm her down a little. I’ll go and ask around in case anyone can spare something for her to eat.’
Esther had limped back into the road and Mireille had begun to sing to Blanche, rocking her.
And then there had been a shrill, high-pitched scream. Mireille had looked up, bewildered, to see who was making the noise and for what reason. The scream went on and on. As if in slow motion, she saw that all the other refugees on the road were also looking around, equally bewildered, trying to pinpoint the source of the noise.
Then, one by one, they raised their faces to the sky. ‘Like a field of sunflowers – that was what I thought in that moment,’ said Mireille, unable to suppress a sob. She took a deep breath and then went on. ‘It was an aeroplane. A German one. It made that terrible screaming sound as it dived. And then the noise became something worse. A rattling hail of bullets and screams and groans from people standing in the road. A woman just in front of me looked into my eyes and saw that I was gazing, in horror, at the blood that was spreading across the front of her dress. It was only when she looked down and saw it herself that she folded in half and fell at my feet. I turned and held Blanche tight between me and the trunk of the tree, with my back to the road. The pilot came back twice more, and each time there was that horrible screaming sound as he dived again and then the sound of the guns. I couldn’t breathe until the noise of the plane had gone completely. And when I did breathe, I could smell the dust. And then the blood.’
Mireille’s eyes were dry as she recounted the final part of her story – because the sight she’d seen when she’d turned around was too terrible for mere tears. Her voice, as she went on with her telling, had become a hard monotone.
‘I stumbled over the people who’d walked past me just moments before, slipping in their blood, which covered the road. Most of them didn’t move, but one or two reached out, begging for help. But I knew there were others who could try to help them and I had to find Esther. I called her name again and again. I was holding Blanche tight but she cried inconsolably, as if she already knew her mother was gone. Then I saw a piece of the blouse that Esther was wearing. It was the same blouse that she’d just re-buttoned in those moments before the attack, and yet that now seemed such an age ago. The blouse wasn’t white now, though. It was soaked with blood. Her blood. From her wounds. Where the bullets had hit her in the chest.’
Mireille stopped there, unable to find any more words. But Lisette and Eliane needed no further explanation. They could read the shock and trauma written across Mireille’s face, in the way her normally strong features had collapsed and dissolved into an expression of complete helplessness, and in the pain that was lodged deep in her dark eyes.
Lisette passed the now-sleeping baby gently to Eliane and gathered Mireille into her arms. ‘Hush now, hush now,’ Lisette soothed, as she rocked her daughter, weeping the tears that Mireille could not.
Abi: 2017
From the window of my attic bedroom in the mill house, I can see the moonlight playing through the branches of the willow tree, its leaves cascading like silvered tears into the deep pool below the weir. I pull the shutters to, although they don’t close properly as the iron catch is broken, hanging loose where the screws are missing, letting moths and mosquitoes slip through. Thank goodness for the netting draped over my bed, which protects me in the night, letting me sleep deeply as their wings whirr harmlessly in the background.