The Girl in the Blue Beret - Bobbie Ann Mason [113]
He followed her around, trailing in the wake of her story. She made elaborate dishes that required both precision and intuition. She seemed to do this automatically, as if cooking were only a background accompaniment to her voice. She whipped eggs for a quiche Lorraine. She pitted cherries for clafoutis. She minced parsley.
They were in her garden, in bright sunlight. She was showing him how to deadhead a flower bed. Holding a handful of dead flowers, Annette stood beside a bank of zinnias, the palette of colors virtually jumping against the dull landscape of the work camp she was describing.
“At Ravensbrück, we were digging potatoes. It seemed to me that the jardiniers were experimenting with some esoteric principles of ‘biodynamic’ gardening. I learned more about this later. At the time it was of little interest.”
She laughed and flipped a dead flower into a bucket. She snipped some more flower heads and continued. “The Nazis wanted purity in their lives. They wanted pure food, pure art, pure blood. Hitler would not eat animals. That was the only good idea he had! Oh! Also he liked dogs. The Nazis used animal manure only in a certain way that they thought natural and compatible. In the garden, they set us to labor—to grow food for them, nothing for us. We did not know where we were or how much of eternity we would be there.”
Letting the dead flowers fall, she grasped his arm and lowered her head.
“What I hated most about the German soldiers and officers was the way they could be perfectly polite in one moment and coldly brutal in the next, as if that were the rule. They followed rules. Now you will be correct. Now you will be violent. The French love rules, but of course we mean the rule of civilization, not of barbarity. The Nazis behaved as if barbarity could follow rules, and that therefore it could be normal. That’s the difference. Or, that’s what I used to think, but …”
She let go of his arm.
“Marshall, I know I shouldn’t hate the Germans. But even now when I’m in the presence of someone German I feel a little cold shiver. I’m ashamed to say that.”
“How can you feel ashamed after what you’ve been through?”
“Think, Marshall. Their barbarity called forth our own savagery. There is atrocity everywhere. The blame is not just on Germany. It’s on all of us.”
“I see.”
“But I’m going on with opinions. It exhausts me—the weight of my opinions. My mother is telling me, urgently—she told me when I was in Saint Lô last week—that I must conquer my refusal; that I must assemble some scrapbooks and begin to visit the schools. People are beginning to do that—as Odile is doing. Maman says if I don’t go out to be a witness, the young people are never going to know how it was.”
LATE IN THE AFTERNOON they rested indoors, in the bedroom. She closed the shutters, muffling the outdoor sounds. The workmen had returned to the courtyard to lay a stone walk between the house and the former carriage house, where she stowed her car. Their voices were unintelligible, punctuated by occasional curses or loud bursts of laughter. The room had large, ornate furnishings and portraits of ancestors, and fresh flowers.
“I haven’t been in a French home since the war,” Marshall said, then remembered Iffy and Jim. He had forgotten all about them.
“That armoire was in the Paris apartment when you were there,” she said, pointing to a somber, heavy piece of furniture opposite the bed.
“It’s big enough to hide a couple of flyboys,” he said.
“Indeed. That’s why it’s called an ‘homme debout.’ A man standing!”
“I just realized why French doors are double doors,” he said, thumping his forehead. “To move the giant furniture.”
She laughed. “I tell you horror stories, and I expect you to make me laugh.”
“I do my best.”
STILL ENCLOSED IN EACH OTHER, they lay on her soft, lavender-scented sheets. It was too warm, but he didn’t want to let her go, and she did not move to release him. Quietly, she resumed the telling, parceling