With her walking cane, she poked at the grass growing up around the ruins. “Voilà,” she said. “No one could ever explain this.”
Finn bent down and parted the grass. There was a small cross forged of iron next to a carved stone chiseled with words in English: H+L, Journey Without End.
Part 6
The Var
I see my path, but I don’t know where it leads. Not knowing where I’m going is what inspires me to travel it.
—Rosalia de Castro
Eighteen
Bellerive, the Var, France
January 1945
The war ground to an inglorious end. Of course there were victory celebrations—homecoming parties for soldiers and fighters who’d been in hiding, dancing in the streets, toasts with the wine and champagne people had concealed from the Germans, feasts of food that was no longer scarce. But there were also more somber events—memorials and Masses for the fallen, marches of shame for collaborators and for women who had taken up with the Nazis.
Lisette struggled to find a sort of peace. After the Var had been liberated by the Allies, she acknowledged the joyous celebrations that erupted through the village, but her world had come apart.
When she and Hank heard the fighting on that August morning, he’d ordered her to run for her life. She’d rushed to find her parents. She had left them innocently having morning coffee, and had returned to find that they had been killed when the town bridge was hit. Survivors told her the first strike was sudden, and there was no time for her parents to panic or suffer, but she sometimes wondered if they said that just to soothe her. Cradling each of them in her arms for the last time, stroking their dusty, lifeless faces, she had felt as though the earth beneath her feet had fallen away.
Needing Hank more than ever, she’d returned to the stone hut, only to find it collapsed into a pile of rubble, circled by foxes and crows. There was no sign of him. She became obsessed with finding him. She spent hours, days, and weeks, working her hands bloody as she sorted through the collapsed pile, but he was gone. Had he escaped? Tried to join the fighting? Had the Allied invaders rescued him? She remembered something he’d once said to her: “The first person through the wall always gets hurt.” Had he tried to be first through the wall?
She collected a few precious artifacts—his chute envelope and some gear, the Mass card, broken glass from their champagne bottle. The discoveries only raised more questions and lowered her hopes, and the loss felt like a kind of insanity.
When tanks manned by American soldiers in battle dress rumbled through the streets, the people of Bellerive went mad with the joy of liberation. Lisette asked every man she saw if he knew Henry Watkins, a paratrooper, but she received nothing in return except propositions. No one had heard of him and they looked at her as if she’d gone crazy. And every night, she prayed on her knees to a God who did not seem to be listening.
The men of the town—husbands, sons, brothers—came in from hiding or from forced labor in Germany, and the drinking and celebration took a dark turn. As they took stock of the death and devastation caused by the Germans and collaborators, and dealt with the trauma and shame of occupation, riots broke out.
Didier seemed to have no grasp of reality. As the Germans fled like a pack of scalded dogs, he carefully folded away the uniform he’d worn as an officer in the Milice. “I shall miss this,” he said to Lisette, his voice slurred from an early morning bottle of wine. “It’s very well made, is it not? Perhaps I’ll take it to Cabret, the tailor, and have him remake it without the insignia.”
Gérard Cabret was a hero of the resistance who had recently opened a tailor shop in the village. He now had a wife and a baby son, Michel. “Surely you’re joking,” Lisette said to Didier. “Cabret wouldn’t touch that jacket with a barge pole.”
“You think you know everything. I should expose you as the whore you are. I fucked you for years with no results, and now you’re suddenly with child? Who is the father of that brat in your belly, eh?”
He is twice the man you will ever be, she wanted to say. “Your accusations will hurt you, not me,” she calmly replied. “Your reputation is already in tatters. What will people say if you accuse me of infidelity?”
“Then maybe I’ll beat it out of you,” he said, rolling up his sleeves.
She stood, not even blinking as she faced him down. “Lay a hand on me, and I’ll go straight to the village council,” she said.
The threat froze him in his tracks. She knew he lived in fear of reprisals from the people he’d betrayed during his time in the Milice.
Ultimately, she didn’t have to make good on her threat. One night without warning, Didier was taken while drinking his nightly bottle of wine, tied to a post, blindfolded, and shot. She watched this with a sense of dull shock and fully expected them to come for her next, but it turned out that her work for the resistance was well known. The returning maquisards honored her, and there was a marriage proposal from Jean-Luc d’Estérel, the boy she’d loved a lifetime ago.
She gave him a sad smile and a gentle no. There was no one for her but Hank. Even if she never saw him again, it would forever be Hank for her. Her one great love had come and gone.
She grieved with an intensity that cut like a knife. She kept her sanity by writing letters to Hank and sending them to Vermont in America, but they came back stamped undeliverable. The one thing that kept her moving through each moment was the baby. She talked to her unborn child about Hank as she erected a small iron cross at the remains of the hut, next to the stone he had carved for her. As her belly grew, she yearned to confess the truth about her baby’s father—that he was an American hero who fell from the sky.
But if she revealed that, she and the baby would find themselves homeless and starving, like so many women and children in the aftermath of the war. Her only claim on Sauveterre was the fact that the child was assumed to be Didier’s only heir. Despite his shameful actions, he was the ancestral lord of Sauveterre. The baby would inherit the mas one day. Perhaps in time, Sauveterre would be prosperous again, and old hurts would be forgotten.
She hid away her letters to Hank, knowing she had to let go of the dream that they might meet again. She couldn’t bring herself to destroy the letters, for they contained her heart. As she was putting the box high on an attic shelf, she came across Toselli’s camera and several rolls of undeveloped film. Her heart broke all over again, because she knew the pictures documented her time with Hank. She put the rolls away, because the hurt was too raw. One day in the future, she would develop the film. One day, she would show them to her child.
There was still a roll of film in the camera. She’d loaded it the morning of the Allied invasion and had taken a few pictures, never imagining the devastation that would take place that day. She had no heart for taking pictures, not anymore. For the sake of the baby, she tried to find that passion once again. She found Hank’s cloth pathfinder badge—one of the few mementos she’d found in the rubble—and pinned it to the shoulder of her dress, hoping and praying the child was his. Then she studied herself in a mirror and focused her camera. A young woman with a pain as old as time in her eyes, her belly rounded like the cheek of a ripe pear.
The next time I take your picture, little one, she thought, you will be in my arms.
Part 7
Switchback
I suddenly understood that photography can fix eternity in a moment.
—Henri Cartier-Bresson, French photographer
Nineteen
Julie and her friends decided there was only one way to deal with the languid heat of August. They stuffed their totes with towels, sunscreen, and water bottles and headed to the beach. As always, she felt a little fluttery thrill when they met up with André and his brothers at their favorite spot, a white sand crescent bordered by cliffs and outcroppings, perfect for making daring plunges.
The guys had brought a rope to put up a new swing. They chose a flat area shaded by an overhanging tree that seemed to grow straight out of the rock.
“Somebody will have to climb out on the branch and secure the rope,” Martine said.
“I’ll do it,” Julie volunteered.
“What if you fall?”
“Then I’ll land in the water.”