Victorine by Catherine Texier

Author:Catherine Texier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307429919
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

September 8, 1940

5:00 p.m.

THREE MONTHS EARLIER—it was on one of those late June evenings that are especially long on the Atlantic Coast around Saint John’s day, when the sun lingers on the horizon until after ten—she had taken a blanket with her and walked to the ocean because she couldn’t sleep. It was a couple of days after the armistice had been signed, the day de Gaulle had made his speech from London calling for resistance. Over the low roofs of the village houses the sky was still fully lit, a tender apricot. When she arrived at the beach the tide was pulling away. The dories rolled sideways. At eleven a pink glow was still illuminating the west. The night sky hovered overhead, hesitant, a dark fog of a sky, taking its time. She waited until the darkness engulfed the day, and wrapped herself in the blanket. After a while the coolness and the humidity penetrated her to the bones. For her aging body the hard-packed sand was painfully uncomfortable, and she tossed for hours, watching the cold disk of the moon rise up in the inky sky. To feel warmer, she gathered her knees in her arms and rocked a little inside the blanket, like a child.

At daybreak, a fisherman found her curled up in the blanket, her back to the reeds, her gray hair knotted with sand. She woke up with a start and sat up, embarrassed, picking bits of grass off her jacket and her hair. She recognized him; he had helped carry firewood into her house last winter. He squatted next to her and touched her shoulder, concerned that she might be sick, or worse . . .

You shouldn’t stay out like this, Madame, he said, helping her up.

It will be a long time until she can spend a night on the beach again. Now that Germany has won, Hitler will try to suck the whole of Europe into the war. Everything is uncertain. The Boches are patrolling the shore day and night. It seems as though the years of peace since the previous war have been but a glimpse of time. In ’14, she had decided to be a war “godmother.” She remembers the packages of food she would send to the front, the books she carefully picked for the recruits, the gloves and scarves she knitted for them, the cheery postcards she sent her “godsons” to keep their morale up. Now, at seventy-four, she doesn’t think she’d have the energy to do it again for another generation of soldiers. She doesn’t believe in war anymore. So many million men died on both sides. And for what? To start all over again twenty years later?

The newspaper clippings stashed in her notebook are from Le Courrier de Saïgon and L’Indochine Française. She carefully unfolds the brittle, yellowed paper for fear it might rip. Boxed advertisements recommend newly opened shops: “Boucherie Parisienne Régnier, Quai de Saigon, across from the market” and “Madame Lejeune, seamstress, is pleased to announce the opening of her dressmaking and mending workshop near the new market.

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