Having to pass the main entrance, which was still located in the old relais, he hoped he would not encounter M. Le Tourneau, who maintained an apartment for himself and his wife—the Le Tourneaus were childless—in the original building, as he would be leaving for the meeting of the council. Above the undressed stone lintel was fixed a bronze plaque, badly tarnished but still legible:
ALEXANDRE LE TOURNEAU
1886-1938
FILS DE HEROIQUE DE LA FRANCE
LA GRANDE GUERRE
1914-1918
Alexandre Le Tourneau, who had died the year before Père Patou had been assigned to the village parish, was the father of Gustave Le Tourneau, to whom the priest had administered extreme unction and for whom he had said the burial Mass twenty years ago. Edouard Le Tourneau, the present owner of the relais turned hotel, was the old war hero’s grandson.
The family Le Tourneau was one of the most ancient in the neighborhood. Its recorded genealogy went back to a free farmer during the reign of Louis XII. This forebear had occupied the farmhouse and cultivated the land that shortly after Le Revolution had become the relais. Although Père Patou had been curé in the village for more than half a century, he was fully aware that neither his longevity nor his cassock carried the weight that Edouard Le Tourneau’s family name did.
Without having run into the hotelier, Père Patou crossed the road. As he approached the village green, which was bordered by bushes whose rose blooms were gone but in which the oval beds of hydrangea, gladiola and buddleia were blooming in the deep colors of late summer, suddenly he heard M. Le Tourneau’s throaty rasp inside his head. “That remains to be seen, mon père.” Voices had been raised in the presbytery after the priest had scornfully refused the hotelier’s bribe of paying for the installation of an electronic apparatus that would replace the ancient mechanism in the bell tower, with its barrels and wheels and trip pins, and would dispense with weights and pulleys and rope.
Turning onto the slate walk that cut through the center of the green and formed a circle around back-to-back granite monuments, Père Patou paused to read the legends on these memorials of the two great wars of the twentieth century.
AUX ENFANTS
DE LE HAUTE-SAVOIE
MORTS
POUR LA FRANCE
1914-1918
was incised on the face of the more massive of the two. The names of eighteen men were incised on the other side of the column. Carved in the face of the less imposing stone was
1939-1945
AUX HEROS
DE LA COMMUNE
MORTS POUR
LA LIBERATION
DE LA FRANCE
On the back of this column the names of twenty men were inscribed. For the dead patriots of both wars the priest said a Kyrie, which succeeded in driving from his head the refrain “That remains to be seen, mon père.” Without being aware of it, Père Patou had been repeating M. Le Tourneau’s words half aloud.
Standing directly across the green from the HotelLe Tourneau, the one-story Hôtel de ville housed the village school and the offices of the mayor and the council. Affixed to a stone between the separate entrances to the two sides of the building was another bronze plaque, which bore the inscription
ROLAND LESCHEMELL
PIONNIER DE LA RESISTANCE
19-1-1899
13-12-1944
Roland Leschemell’s son, Gaston Leschemell, a man in his late fifties, was the present mayor of the village. Above the entrance to the school drooped the Tricolor. Hanging limp over the doorway to the village offices was the flag of Savoie, a white cross in a crimson field.
Flashing into the eye of Père Patou’s memory was the façade of this building with a single ensign, a blood-red field in whose center was a white circle in which were spread the four legs of a black spider. Even though the village lay almost forty kilometers beyond the border that had separated Vichy from occupied France, the Nazis had hauled down the Tricolor and hoisted the swastika the day after the Free French, joined by the British and Americans, had invaded Algeria.
That had been a dark time for the sword of France and the Cross of Christ. During those years of pain and humiliation, the relais had been commandeered by a unit of military police of the Wehrmacht. It had moved in on the village after the local Maquis had carried out a number of sorties, disrupting supply lines for matériel headed south to Italy and Marseilles. One of the German soldiers, a mere boy, had been a devout Catholic.
As inconspicuously as possible, this young man had made his way to the church to receive the Sacraments. Even though the youth, with his liquid blue eyes and beardless face, seemed too innocent to be held accountable for the crimes committed by his government, hearing his confession and granting him absolution with no heavier penance than he would have imposed on a village lad—“Penitence Légère,” was the curé’s sobriquet among his flock—and then administering to him, his mortal enemy, the saving blood and body of Christ, had tried Pére Patou’s adherence to his priestly vow to the breaking point. He had, however kept faith with God. And, though it had taken him some time to bring himself to it, after the boy-soldier had been killed in an ambush, the priest had lit a candle for him in the church and had offered a prayer for his immortal soul.
During those terrible days Père Patou had lived in constant fear that Esther would be discovered by the military police and taken away to…at the time he hadn’t known, except that it would have been contrary to her will and well-being. After the war he’d learned with retrospecttive horror that her fate would have been unimaginably worse than he’d feared. While trying not to alarm her, he’d devised tactics for the two of them that had made her virtually invisible in the village. He himself did the errands necessary to keep the rectory going. Because Esther’s features might be seen as Semitic, for the few minutes each day she had to be outside, he had her always wear a shawl or scarf over her head, covering all her face save her eyes, as though she were a veiled sister in a cloister.
It was established that she would cross the road from M. Grenier’s just before daylight, then return after dark. Moving his store of grain into the bakehouse, M. Grenier had agreed to secure Esther, who one evening had suddenly appeared at the door of the rectory, in the loft of the barn, which gradually had been turned into a livable space. Her history was shadowy, mysterious. After somehow, miraculously it seemed, having escaped from Krakow the night her grandparents, parents and two older brothers had been carried off, Esther, in one way or another, had made her way, or been led, across Czechoslovakia and Austria into Switzerland.
A few days before Marshall Pétain had surrendered France to the Nazis, 22 June 1940, she had been brought from Sion, just over the Swiss border, by a priest who seemed so ghostly in the twilight he might have been a divine messenger. Speaking grammatical but unidiomatic French, with an accent Père Patou couldn’t identify, the strange priest had said he’d been told to deliver Esther to the village curé. Immediately after leaving Esther in the hands of Père Patou, who’d been in the village less than a year, the strange priest had disappeared. Even after she’d learned some rudimentary French, never had Esther been able to provide an intelligible account of how she’d become Père Patou’s charge. And despite the inquiries he’d made throughout the diocese, Père Patou hadn’t succeeded in finding a trace of the foreign priest, or blessed spirit.
How different the stocky, club-armed, stump-shanked woman with short-cropped grizzled hair, a black mustache, and a face scored like a walnut shell, from that adolescent girl, so fleshless she looked to be on the verge of starvation, whose eyes shone in their deep sockets like wet grapes, and whose black hair was so long it appeared never to have known the blades of scissors. As Esther’s flesh had thickened and her skin had wrinkled, her voice had grown hoarse and manlike.
During l’occupation her tongue would have given her away in an instant. To this day her French was French words pronounced in an accent P?
?re Patou had difficulty understanding, more so than ever as his hearing was going. In that precarrious time he’d constantly warned Esther never to open her mouth so as to be heard by anyone he could not be sure of, as he could of the Greniers, the Constanses, the Giardis, and the Tricquets, with whose deformed son, when years later he’d become sexton, she’d constantly scrap over the rectory gardens.
Sometimes back in those days Père Patou wondered whether he was needlessly cramping the daily existence of a young woman whose life already had been grotesquely misshapen. Even while he would tell himself he should think of her as a sister who was regulated by holy orders, he realized she had to be feeling she’d been imprisoned. As it turned out, all his precautions had been justified. Not every man in the village, he came to discover, had been a loyal son of Free France, the only France, and an enemy of his country’s enemies and occupiers.
Climbing the three steps and crossing the narrow portico of the town hall, Père Patou glanced at the door to the school. How few children in the village now, compared to the number in the forties, fifties and sixties! In the seventies the young had begun leaving to find work in towns and cities for wages they could never hope to earn at home. Aging as they were, the women of the village bore fewer and fewer. It seemed quite possible the national government would soon declare the school redundant.
That would be hard on M. du Praz, the school master. Barely would his pension suffice to keep body and soul together. In fact, his body would fare better than his soul. For M. Giardi asked M. du Praz only sous for the little apartment adjoining his house, built for his mother-in-law, who had died seven years ago. And the farmers’ wives saw to it that the schoolmaster, like the cure, was provided with bread and cheese, vegetables and fruit, and every so often a leg or shoulder of lamb. M. Giardi kept M. du Praz supplied with wine, as he did Père Patou, who like the schoolmaster at times enjoyed a bit too much of the gift.
As for M. du Praz’s soul, it was too old and worn to tolerate a move to another village as schoolmaster, in the unlikely event he should be invited to serve elsewhere. So long had M. du Praz been in place that it seemed certain he would never leave the village before his body, separated from his soul for eternity, would be carted off by M. Pelletier, the undertaker.
Père Patou was aware his situation was not dissimilar to the schoolmaster’s. For every wedding, baptism and confirmation he performed, he said two Masses for the dead. No more than three or four children at a time attended his catechism classes, which, he confessed to himself with shame, was a relief. He was having trouble catching the words carried by shrill young voices, and he had even more difficulty keeping these modern children in order. It grieved the priest that for more than a decade not a single young man from the village had taken holy orders. Only one young woman had chosen to put on the veil.
Like M. Praz, Père Patou would never be appointed to serve in another village. And he would no more relish the prospect of such an uprooting and transplanting than would the schoolmaster. More fortunate than M. du Praz, however, he did have a place of refuge, grieved as he’d be were it necessary for him to resort to it. Yet should the council side with M Le Tourneau and decree that the bells be silenced between midnight and eight a. m., Père Patou would have to resign himself to enter the house for aged priests, a red brick building that looked like a prison, in Lyon. What then would become of Esther?
From the evening of her arrival in the village, the priest had prayed for Esther’s soul, its eternal destiny. Now that she and he, after all these years together, were approaching the end of their earthly lives, he’d increased the attention he devoted to her in his daily prayers. While sometimes he did smart and chafe under her petty tyranny, he knew that she was a pure woman, grateful to him for receiving her and preserving her when the Nazis were in the village. And there was no gainsaying the dedication with which she cared for his needs.
As fervently as he wished that Esther would become a daughter of Mother Church, Père Patou had forborne attempting to convert her. In that she, born a Jew by the will of the Almighty, was the only non-Catholic in the village and was beholden to the diocese for her food and shelter, he felt that to press her would be to take advantage of her. And, to tell the truth, though he didn’t consider himself any more cowardly than the next man, he went a little in awe of Esther, not merely because she ordered his domestic life and bullied him, but also on account of the mysterious way in which she had been delivered to him.
Besides, even had she signaled a willingness to re-ceive instruction in the faith, Père Patou foresaw difficulties that amounted almost to impossibility. Though Esther was by no means stupid, was in some ways quite clever, her mind, he judged, was simple. So entirely was it taken up with meat and vegetables and herbs and wine and bread and cheese and sweets and dishes and cups and saucers and mugs and utensils and pots and pans and linens and and cotton and leather and polish and washtubs and soap and water and brooms and mops and dustbins and garbage and trash and compost and commodes that he had to doubt whether any room was left for the most elementary explanations of things, let alone for doctrine and religious belief.
Virtually illiterate as she was in French—Père Patou had no idea whether she could read and write in Polish or in whatever the Jewish language she’d learned to speak might be—Esther couldn’t possibly be taught the catechism, could she? Nor could she memorize the responses and the Angelus Dimini nuntiavit Mariae. And yet Père Patou believed that his failure to attempt to secure Esther in the faith was a sin of omission for a priest. Regularly he confessed it to Père Girard.
Esther’s limitations, along with her tragic history, did, however, allow Père Patou a hope he resolutely held out for her. It was supported by his mindfulness that Pape Grêgoire le Grand was plunged into such sorrow at the thought that Trajan, the most virtuous of pagans, was to be denied eternity with the Divine Father in Heaven that he prayed and wept continually for the Roman emperor’s posthumous redemption. God, for whom time with a finished past does not exist, just as the future is not yet to come—which makes the human concept of progress an absurdity—finally was moved by St. Gregory’s pleas. So that Trajan’s soul might be released from Limbo and enter Purgatory, the way to the Heavenly Paradise, at the instant of his death, which was a past event for the world but not for God, God performed, unseeable to the eye of man, an extraordinary baptism of fire.
In his prayers to Almighty God and to the Holy Mother for Her intercession, Père Patou petitioned that consideration be given to Esther’s essential goodness, as well as to her simplicity and ignorance. He pleaded that the persecution of her people, including her own family, who after all were God’s chosen, her miraculous preservation through the angel-of–mercy priest, which might be taken as a sign that a special grace was intended for Esther, and her long service to one of God’s vicars—that all these matters be taken into account.
Praying that she not be denied entrance to the Celestial Paradise and that she not be kept from the eternal Light and Love of the Father Who had created her, he besought God to make use of His omnipotent compassion, or was it His compassionate omnipotence? No, it was omnipotence and compassion in one, for both were infinite attributes of the Deity. Once, Père Patou remembered, when he’d taken a few drops too many of M. Giardi’s wine, he’d half-joked with God by asking, if my housekeeper is not in Heaven, who then will take care of me—an angel with a deep voice and mustache?
As he entered the door to the village offices, PèrePatou sighed heavily. While he was gratified not to have encountered M. Le Tourneau on the way, he found himself wondering why he hadn’t come across any of the other councilmen or M. Leschemell or M. Burnier on their way to the meeting. Remembering having heard the bells strike nine, he glanced at his watch. Seven past the hour. Nine fifteen was the time M. Burnier had told him to appear, he was certain. Deciding to try to relieve himself one more time before the council would assemble, he headed f
or the toilet at the end of the corridor. On the way he saw that the door of the meeting room was closed. While standing at the pissoir, again he ran over in his mind the likely position each councilman would take on “the matter of the bells.”
Since yesterday afternoon, when M. Burier had surprised him by requesting in the name of M. Leschemell that he attend the meeting of the council, Père Patou had wearied his brain by dwelling on the eventuality. The arithmetic was always the same. With certainty he knew he could depend on the loyalty of M. Constans, a substantial and widely respected farmer, who kept sheep and cultivated land that had been in his family’s possession for generations. Also of M. Giardi, the vintner, whose roots in the soil of Haute-Savoie were deep and strong, and whose wine was pressed from grapes he tended and harvested with his brother. Almost as certain was Mlle. Châtaigne, the village midwife, who with less and less occasion to practice her occupation, concocted and dispensed tonics and elixirs. Whispers had reached Père Patou’s ear that she also cured by casting spells and for a few sous would call down curses and maledictions. But since she was one of the few who attended Mass daily and always showed deference to her priest, he was disinclined to credit such rumor.
On the opposing side, of course, would be M. Le Tourneau, who had stopped touching his hat to the curé when he passed him on the high street. Because he was the instigator and self-evidently an interested party, it was most unfortunate that he was a member of the council. Joining him, with little doubt, would be M. Renard, who dressed in an English-cut suit, spent many an evening in the cocktail lounge of the Hotel Le Tourneau, mixing with outsiders and foreign guests. M. Renard prospered by cutting limestone in the quarry on his land and selling it to builders, who carried if off in huge trucks. And virtually sure to take a position on the side of what was being called progress was M. Basin. He rented his land, along with the modern machinery he’d bought—not just big tractors, but also a monstrous gasoline-powered harvester and binder in one—to tenant farmers. He was also cutting and selling for lumber the great oaks and walnuts and beeches in the woods he owned on this side of the ravine, through which the Rhone flowed out from Lac Léman at Genève.