Read Online Ignorance by Michèle Roberts - Free Book Online Page B

brother’s pages as he turned them. All undesirables should be rounded up and put into camps. For the duration. While we decided what to do with them. For the sake of France and her purity and her strength. Creepy-crawlies, said my brother vaguely: you just pour boiling water on to them. I kept my head down over my plate. The word soup still meant soup, just about. The word Maurice still meant reliable; true gold.
    It wasn’t yet dark, but the blackout needed putting up in good time. I swallowed the last of my soup. My father clattered down his spoon. Dishwater, he said to my mother. She snorted. What d’you expect! I got up. Maurice said: I’ll give you a hand with the shutters. Down we went.
    Sawdust felted the floor of the shop. It looked soft. I wanted softness. I wanted Maurice to stroke my cheek and stop me worrying.
    He explained rapidly in a low voice. You could say, another form of contraband. Just a package to smuggle out.
    I said: but why d’you want to get involved with these people? How come you know them?
    Maurice raised his eyebrows. He stuck his hands into his pockets, clinked his loose change: they’re human beings in need of help and so I’m going to provide it.
    I pressed on: why our shed? We’re not the only people living close to them.
    Maurice sighed. He said: I knew where you kept the key. I’ve carried stuff in and out of there often enough. I left the door open so that they could find somewhere to piss outside.
    We padlocked the big shutters at the front. At the back, the shutters were smaller. I watched Maurice’s hands twist out the bolts, push them into place. Curly black hairs protruded from his cuffs, curled over his wrists. His fingers worked deftly, quickly.
    But my mother’s bound to discover them, I said: next time she goes to the shed to fetch something.
    Fetch it yourself then, Maurice said.
    I shivered. My stomach shook. My mouth shook. I already understood some of what was happening from the titbits of information Maurice gleaned at work and brought back. I didn’t want to think about the situation too much, because it made me feel so hopeless, so helpless. What was the point of getting upset? But Maurice said: forewarned is forearmed! So, thanks to Maurice, I did know the Germans needed a large labour-force back in Germany, for the war effort. They’d been asking for French volunteers, and in return releasing French prisoners of war. The supply of volunteers having dried up, they’d decided to conscript. They would conscript where they liked. They were planning to take Frenchmen: fair enough they should take Jews too. First of all they were taking the foreign Jews, who didn’t belong in France anyway. Those without citizenship were gradually being rounded up and deported to Germany to be resettled there. I felt sorry for the Jews, having to start again in a new country and work in factories, but I felt just as sorry for the Frenchmen who’d be taken away to labour camps. What could I do? French families all around us had already lost sons and husbands in the fighting; the families coped heroically. Soon they’d lose more. We couldn’t stop the Germans organising things in their own way. We weren’t in charge. We had to survive. People who made even small gestures of resistance got punished. A young woman down in the bottom of town who had embroidered a V for Victory on her blouse had been arrested and taken away to prison in Rennes for three months. Madame Nérin reported to my mother that a big crowd of her neighbours had gathered to see her go. The same neighbours welcomed her back. They hailed her as a heroine but I thought her foolish. She wouldn’t have done it if she’d had children and had to consider them.
    Maurice, however, I discovered, was thinking about the Jews and what he could do for them. Once we’d put the shutters up and come back inside the shop to pull the blackout curtains he