The Girl You Left Behind Read Free Page A

rations of meat and
     flour, and bread made from grit and bran so poor we would not use it to feed
     livestock.’
    He was in the back hallway, his heels
     echoing on the flagstones. He hesitated, then walked through to the bar and barked an
     order. A soldier appeared from nowhere and handed him a lamp.
    ‘We have no milk to feed our babies,
     our children weep with hunger, we become ill from lack of nutrition. And still you come
     here in the middle of the night to terrify two women and brutalize an innocent boy, to
     beat us and threaten us, because you heard a rumour from an immoral man that we were
feasting
?’
    My hands were shaking. He saw the baby
     squirm, and Irealized I was so tense that I was holding it too
     tightly. I stepped back, adjusted the shawl, crooned to it. Then I lifted my head. I
     could not hide the bitterness and anger in my voice.
    ‘Search our home, then, Kommandant.
     Turn it upside down and destroy what little has not already been destroyed. Search all
     the outbuildings too, those that your men have not already stripped for their own wants.
     When you find this mythical pig, I hope your men dine well on it.’
    I held his gaze for just a moment longer
     than he might have expected. Through the window I could make out my sister wiping
     Aurélien’s wounds with her skirts, trying to stem the blood. Three German
     soldiers stood over them.
    My eyes were used to the dark now, and I saw
     that the
Kommandant
was wrong-footed. His men, their eyes uncertain, were
     waiting for him to give the orders. He could instruct them to strip our house to the
     beams and arrest us all to pay for my extraordinary outburst. But I knew he was thinking
     of Suel, whether he might have been misled. He did not look the kind of man to relish
     the possibility of being seen to be wrong.
    When Édouard and I used to play poker,
     he had laughed and said I was an impossible opponent as my face never revealed my true
     feelings. I told myself to remember those words now: this was the most important game I
     would ever play. We stared at each other, the
Kommandant
and I. I felt,
     briefly, the whole world still around us: I could hear the distant rumble of the guns at
     the Front, my sister’s coughing, the scrabbling of our poor, scrawny hens
     disturbed in their coop. It faded until just he and I facedone
     another, each gambling on the truth. I swear I could hear my very heart beating.
    ‘What is this?’
    ‘What?’
    He held up the lamp, and it was dimly
     illuminated in pale gold light: the portrait Édouard had painted of me when we were
     first married. There I was, in that first year, my hair thick and lustrous around my
     shoulders, my skin clear and blooming, gazing out with the self-possession of the
     adored. I had brought it down from its hiding place several weeks before, telling my
     sister I was damned if the Germans would decide what I should look at in my own
     home.
    He lifted the lamp a little higher so that
     he could see it more clearly.
Do not put it there, Sophie,
Hélène had
     warned.
It will invite trouble.
    When he finally turned to me, it was as if
     he had had to tear his eyes from it. He looked at my face, then back at the painting.
     ‘My husband painted it.’ I don’t know why I felt the need to tell him
     that.
    Perhaps it was the certainty of my righteous
     indignation. Perhaps it was the obvious difference between the girl in the picture and
     the girl who stood before him. Perhaps it was the weeping blonde child who stood at my
     feet. It is possible that even
Kommandants
, two years into this occupation,
     have become weary of harassing us for petty misdemeanours.
    He looked at the painting a moment longer,
     then at his feet.
    ‘I think we have made ourselves clear,
     Madame. Our conversation is not finished. But I will not disturb you further
     tonight.’
    He caught the flash of surprise on my face,
     barely suppressed, and I saw that it satisfied something in him. It was