The Day of the Bees by Thomas Sanchez

Author:Thomas Sanchez [Sanchez, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76609-0
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-19T16:00:00+00:00

PART FIVE

Night Letters

Village of Reigne

My Darling Francisco,

Another week has come and another mysterious basket filled with rare treasures has been left on my door. Can you imagine? Who can be doing this? In any case, I am keeping everything. This time, besides the wonderful food and soap, there were even ration coupons for cloth. Cloth is what I need, and it is very hard to come by. I am making all my baby’s clothes, it is another way I can save money, for I certainly cannot afford to go to Madame Happy’s shop for miniature Coco Chanels! But even she has a limited stock and sells only what she had on hand before all these troubles began. Two years ago there were fur coats on sale in the stores. Now materials are so scarce they’re even making women’s purses out of wood and rope. The trick is to conserve. What extra items are in my basket I can take to my school and share with the children. So many of them have nothing, their fathers having been among the million or so soldiers taken prisoner in the first spring of the war. The children come to me so proudly, asking me to read the letters from their fathers that they have received. It doesn’t take me long to read these “letters,” for they are the official Correspondence of Prisoners of War, little white postcards with enough space to write a few lines, open for all to read. The messages are nearly all the same, such as: “My big boy, you must obey mommy and study hard. Your papa believes in you.” Or, “My precious girl, daddy is coming home soon and he has a pretty present for you.” This is about all they can say, or are allowed to say, painfully prosaic words to convey an aching avalanche of emotions. But emotions are one of the luxuries that everyone is learning day by day to do without. Like the signs in the store windows that say: NO MILK TODAY. The children know this means there can be NO TEARS TODAY. Everyone has to be a big boy or girl. And when I read the flimsy postcards to those eager faces watching me, I feel the tears within. In the short words I read to them a Victor Hugo novel is playing out in their minds, and they see strong Daddy, rising up valiantly among his foes and marching home. Because even though there can be no tears today, there must be bright hope for tomorrow.

These children have lost so much and that is why I give them what I can, everything out of the baskets that is not absolutely essential to me. I even break up the soap bars into pieces and wrap them as presents. How proud the children are to take these home to their mothers, who themselves have so little to make do on, what with the government distributing nice cookbooks to us women entitled: How to Cook Without Meat, or How to Cook Without Butter or Oil.

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