Perfectly Ordinary People(60)
After the longest wait – it was about one in the morning, I think – I heard the sound of footsteps crunching through the undergrowth, and then the noise of the padlock and chain being removed. It was Moustache who opened the door, and that surprised me. I don’t know why, but I’d been expecting someone different, someone younger.
‘The little one thinks you’re fit to go,’ he said. ‘Is she right?’
No ‘Hello’. No ‘How are you after a week locked in my shed?’ Just the strict minimum.
Pierre, who had woken up by then and was rubbing his eyes, said that yes he was fine now, which was something of an exaggeration. He was better . . . but he certainly wasn’t fine.
The carpenter told us to get a move on. It was a perfect night for it, he said, because it was cloudy, so no moonlight.
As before, I slung the baby over my back in the shawl, and he felt heavier this time. As we picked up our things and followed Moustache to the door, I wondered how much weight a baby could put on in a week.
He told us he wanted absolute silence. ‘Not one word. Not a groan. Not a sneeze, not a yawn.’
And then, once we’d both nodded solemnly that we understood, he headed off into the woods.
We walked for a while, following the vague glow of his lamp, and though I didn’t realise it until we got there, we were heading back to his farmhouse. When we got there, he led us around the far side of the building to where an old flatbed truck, not unlike my father’s, was waiting.
He told Pierre to climb on to the back, and I joined him in the cabin with the baby.
He turned around and we went bumping off into the forest, and I mean, quite literally, into the forest. There was no road or even a dirt track. He simply drove off into the trees.
With no moonlight, everything was pitch-black, and the only light came from the yellow headlamps of the truck, which, in those days, were pretty useless. At one point we startled a magnificent stag which, for a split second, stood its ground, staring at the headlights, before bolting off into the darkness. That seemed, for some reason, to be a good omen, and I remember turning in the hope that Pierre had seen it too, but his back was against the window and he was facing the other way.
I had so many questions I wanted to ask that man – about where we were and where we were going, and what he thought we should do once we got there. I didn’t even know where we’d be once we got over the demarcation line, and it seemed utterly ridiculous – it was utterly ridiculous – to be setting off without any plan whatsoever.
Sorry, but I’m just wondering, what exactly was the demarcation line? I’m not sure readers will know. I’m not sure I know, truth be told.
Oh, OK. It was the border where the prohibited zone ended and the rest of France began. France had been divided into two – occupied France in the north, and Zone Libre in the south. But Alsace and that whole strip down the right-hand side, which the Germans had decided to re-annex, to make part of Germany, had its own border with the rest of France, and we didn’t know how far down we’d be crossing over and whether we’d find ourselves in the occupied area at the top or the free one down south.
So I started to ask him at least that, but he hushed me. ‘I know it’s hard for you ladies,’ he said rudely. ‘But this is one occasion when you really do need to shut up.’ Above the rattle of his engine, I couldn’t see what difference my little voice made, but I did what he said and kept quiet.
After about ten minutes of slow progress, he turned his headlights off and continued to drive even more slowly through the trees. I have no idea how he managed to do that, because I honestly couldn’t see a thing. I think he must have been driving from memory. It was pretty scary, anyway, and once or twice he had to brake suddenly because we were about to crash into a tree.
One of these emergency stops upset the baby enough to make him start crying, and Moustache whispered to me that I needed to make him stop before we reached the river.
I tried giving the baby a finger to suck, but he wasn’t interested, so when Moustache complained again, I asked him what exactly he expected me to do.
‘Just feed him,’ he said. ‘It always worked with ours.’
I realised that he’d assumed I’d been breastfeeding Ansgar from the start, so I explained that I couldn’t; I told him that he wasn’t my baby.
He insisted that I needed to do something, because there was no way he could get me across that river with a crying baby. He asked me if he needed to turn around and take us all straight back to Mulhouse.
In desperation, I unbuttoned my blouse so that I could put little Ansgar to my breast and not only did he begin to suckle, but he went quiet. It felt shockingly intimate, in both a wholesome way and a weird, uncomfortable, icky way, if that makes any sense, plus it hurt far more than I’d expected . . . It was a strictly zero-calorie meal for the poor thing too, because of course I didn’t have any milk. But it worked, anyway. He didn’t make a sound after that.
Eventually, we parked up in the middle of a circle of trees and Moustache turned off the engine.
In the hope that the baby would continue to suckle and remain silent, Pierre helped me strap him to my front instead of my back, and then we followed the carpenter off into the brush.
Walking without light was really hard going. I could barely make out Pierre’s silhouette in front of me, but somehow we stumbled along and after fifteen minutes we reached a clearing. From the sound of running water I could tell that we’d reached a riverbank.