The Girl in the Blue Beret - Bobbie Ann Mason [46]
Marshall had hardly ever paid attention to cooking, but in Paris food was so scarce it became a fixation. He watched Mme Vallon practice her art. With a small piece of chicken, a dab of saved butter, and some elaborate fussing with the pots on the wood-stove, she made a terrine, a sort of chicken Jell-O with a yellow layer at the bottom. She flavored it with bits of dried herbs.
“You need your strength for your journey,” she said, giving him a second helping.
He didn’t know when the journey would be, or how.
He offered them some francs from his escape kit. He had two thousand francs, oversized bills like pages from a book. The portrait of the woman in a helmet was Joan of Arc, he learned years later.
They would not take his money. “We do this gladly,” Mme Vallon insisted. “It is our necessity.”
“But you could buy a rabbit and some eggs,” he argued.
One evening she cooked a pot of tripe—the only item the butcher had left, she said. Marshall was revolted when he saw her scrubbing and soaking the hog’s entrails that afternoon. He ate sparingly, but M. Vallon treated the dish as a delicacy, making soft groans of appreciation.
“With more butter and some cream, this would be almost divine,” he said, but everyone knew he was pretending.
Annette nibbled. Monique did not speak at the table. Marshall hardly remembered her. A child of eight or ten?
They spoke English with him. Annette listened carefully when the adults spoke. Then she tried to offset the anxiety in their voices with her own girlish chatter. Her mother indulged her, he thought. He could see in her mother’s face what Annette would become. Mme Vallon wore her hair swept up, with long hairpins holding a pile of it. In the corner of the sitting room she sometimes brushed Annette’s hair, twirling it with her fingers. Annette’s hair was medium length, dark brown with curls framing her face. She wore no lipstick. Her clothing hung loosely on her thin frame. On Sundays she washed and ironed her blue smock for the school week. It was what the girls wore to protect their clothing, she explained, and it was a sort of uniform.
He remembered her sitting at a table, working with the buckles of her cowhide school bag, which she called her vache. She placed her books and papers inside purposefully—like a pilot packing his brain bag, he thought now.
In the morning, Mme Vallon went to the market early, and M. Vallon left soon after for his office. Marshall did not remember now where Monique had been.
“Time for your French lesson,” Annette announced.
The large apartment was cold, and Marshall was wearing three sweaters.
“Pronunciation, s’il vous plaît,” he said. “I’m lost.”
“My English teacher thinks I have a ‘bad’ accent,” she told him. “She tries to teach the way they say in England. Tomato—we say tuh-maht, they say tuh-MAHT-oe; that’s easy. But you say toe-MAY-toe. I have fear that my teacher will recognize where I am getting an American accent!”
She made him a tea of herbs, plentiful because the Germans detested herbs and had not appropriated all of them. She rubbed a piece of leftover bread with some mint and a little oil and warmed it on the stove. He had built a small fire with some chips of coal and paper so that her mother could make coffee, a substitute made of acorns—or perhaps cockleburs and birdseed. Marshall didn’t know.
“Perhaps Maman will bring an egg. I will cook it for you in this fragrant oil.”
“Mais non. You and your mother should have it.”
“No, you have half, and Maman and I share half.” She wiped the pan with a lump of bread she had saved. She smiled. “Perhaps Maman will bring some butter. And cinnamon.”
“And cornmeal.”
She didn’t understand, and when he explained she turned up her nose.
“One doesn’t eat that,” she said. “Food for the animals.”
“Then maybe she will bring some more of those delicious pig guts we had last night!”
“Les tripes! Mmm. Bonnes. Bonnes.”
They laughed.
She made him pronounce