The Winemaker's Wife(94)

As she pounded on the door, her dread mounted. The rows of vines that Michel had once tended were withered, dead, black against the blue sky. The only sign that anyone had been there at all was a pair of tire tracks leading toward the barn on the back side of the property, the one where they’d once stored corks and empty bottles. When no one answered at the main house, Céline bit back her sob and ran toward the barn, flinging the doors open.

Inside, there was a black car she didn’t recognize, as well as several barrels lying on their sides, clearly in various stages of being cleaned. Her heart leapt. There was someone here, seeing to the champagne production, even if the place appeared to have fallen into ruin. “Michel?” she cried, choking on the word. “Inès? Theo?”

But the man who finally emerged from a trapdoor in the floor—a new entrance to the cellars?—was a stranger. He was tall, thin, perhaps sixty years old, with a gray mustache and a thin nose. “Mademoiselle?” he ventured, blinking at Céline, who must have appeared to him to be hardly more than a child. Indeed, her hips had vanished, her breasts flattened into nothing; she was a stick with arms and legs, a spindly, withered vine.

“Who are you?” she asked, her voice hoarse with fear. “Where are Michel? Theo? Inès?”

He frowned, and there was compassion in his eyes as he said, “They are gone.”

“Dead?”

“Who are you?” the man asked, his tone gentle.

“My name is Céline Laurent. My—my husband, Theo, was the winemaker here.”

He stared at her. “Céline Laurent? But I thought you had died.” He stepped forward and touched her arm awkwardly, as if he thought she might break from more contact than that. “I’m so sorry. Madame Laurent, my name is Alphonse Berthelot. I was hired as the winemaker here in 1943, but as you can see, I am working alone and am spread very thin. I’ve done my best to keep production going.”

“Where is everyone?” she whispered.

“Your husband left before I arrived,” he said. “The rumor is that he went south.”

Of course Theo had fled. She had driven him away. She hoped he had survived, but in the end, it didn’t matter, did it? She had barely thought of him at all in the past two years. “And Michel? Michel Chauveau?”

“You don’t know?” Monsieur Berthelot frowned. “Madame, I’m very sorry to tell you that the Germans killed him, all the way back in the spring of 1943.”

Céline’s knees gave out, and she crumpled to the ground. She had known this was almost certainly the case, but having Michel’s fate confirmed still shattered her. She was hardly aware of it when Monsieur Berthelot rushed to her side and tried to help her up, but it was useless. She was a rag doll. “You are certain?”

“I’m afraid so, madame.”

“And the baby?” she whispered. “Where is the baby? David?”

For a second, the man looked confused. “Oh dear, I’d forgotten. Monsieur Godard, the attorney who hired me to oversee this place, said you gave birth just before you were taken.”

From the deep well of pity in his eyes, she already knew the answer, but she had to hear him say the words. “Where is he? Where’s my son?”

“Madame, I’m so very sorry. Monsieur Godard told me what happened. Your baby, he—he didn’t survive.”

“No,” Céline whispered. “No, you must be wrong. I would have felt it if he had died.” But the truth was, she could no longer feel anything. Survival at Auschwitz had depended on her ability to fool herself, to cling to hope, to live in her dreams rather than in the real world. She couldn’t trust her own gut anymore, because her insides had been hollowed out long ago.

She wasn’t aware that she had curled herself into a ball on the floor until the man vanished and returned sometime later with an old woman, a woman Céline didn’t recognize at first. But then the woman said her name and helped her to a sitting position, and she realized that it was Madame Foucault, the white-haired midwife from the vineyard down the hill who had delivered David more than two years earlier.

“He’s gone?” Céline whispered as Madame Foucault stroked her hair. “My David is gone?”

“You poor dear,” the old woman murmured. “It will be all right.”

“No, no it will not.” Céline took a deep breath. “What happened to him?”

Madame Foucault hesitated. “I heard that it was his lungs, my dear. He was simply too early.”

Céline began to cry again. The fault was hers, wasn’t it? If she had only been able to keep him within her womb for more time, maybe he could have survived. But then again, if she hadn’t borne him early, he would only have died in Auschwitz. He had been doomed, either way. “And Inès?” Céline asked. “Where is Inès?”

“Dead, too, I’m afraid.”

“What? How?”

Madame Foucault’s mouth stretched into a thin line of disapproval. “I heard she joined the underground, just like her husband. Foolish girl. She was in a safe house the Germans raided last July, just outside Reims.”

“Inès? Are you sure?”

“It was the talk of the town, especially after what had happened to Monsieur Chauveau.”