I was in hospital a year. When I came out the war was done, and the Germans were gone. But the village was still—”
Pause. Blink.
“—like this.”
Pause. Blink.
“I lived,” she continued matter-of-factly. “Others too. Men who’d crawled out of the burning barns after being shot; men who were in the fields or gone to neighboring towns that day; a few children who hid in the ruins or escaped the gunfire.” There was something struggling to surface in her eyes—she looked as though she were rising slowly back to the present from the island of time that was June tenth, 1944. She looked at me for the first time as if she actually saw me. Saw Charlie St. Clair in her red skirt and cork sandals, standing in the wreckage of all the ghosts.
Finn turned back. “Why do you come here?” He gestured at the empty smoke-stained buildings around us. “Why do you stay?”
“It is my home,” Madame Rouffanche said. “It is still my home, and I am its living witness. You are not the first people to come here, looking . . . It is easier to find me than nothing at all. So tell me who you are seeking. I will tell you if they lived.” Her eyes were pitying, bottomless. “And I will tell you if they died.”
For a long moment no one spoke. We stood like a trinity in that terrible place, a soft breeze ruffling Finn’s hair and rippling the hem of Madame Rouffanche’s coat. Then I reached into my pocketbook and took out the worn photograph of Rose. I put it into Madame Rouffanche’s lined hands.
I prayed then. I prayed so hard.
She peered at the photograph, holding it closer to her old eyes. “Ahhhh . . . ,” she said quietly, recognition flowering in her eyes. “Hélène.”
“Hélène?” Finn said it sharply, before I could.
“Hélène Joubert, she said her name was when she came here to have her baby. A widow, very young. I think we all guessed, but . . .” A shrug. “A lovely girl. No one cared. She left her baby with the Hyvernaud family while she went to work in Limoges. She was back every weekend on the tram, Madame Hyvernaud said.” A smile. “Hélène. A pretty name, but we never called her that. She said she’d been Rose as a child, for her pink cheeks, so we called her that. La belle Rose.”
Something in me started to shriek.
“Please,” I begged, and my voice cracked. “Tell me she wasn’t here. Tell me she was in Limoges. Tell me she wasn’t here.”
A long silence from Madame Rouffanche. She looked at the photograph, Rose’s laughing face, and I saw her sinking again—back down to the endless loop of JunetenthJunetenthJunetenth. “Inside the church,” she said, “there were three windows high in the wall—I went to the middle one, the biggest, and pulled up the stool the priest used to light the candles. I heaved myself up, and flung myself out. I fell about ten feet.”
Almost exactly the same words she had used telling it the first time, I realized in my daze of horror. How many times had she told this story to people like me, people looking for loved ones, that her tale had hardened into such a rigid sequence, the same words in the same order? Was that how she kept herself sane while she raked over her memories every day for our benefit? “Madame, please—”
She was walking again, back the way we’d come, her steps uneven and mindless. I ran to keep up. “A woman tried to follow me out the window.” Pause. Blink. Then the tale changed, as we came back to the dark broken window where Madame Rouffanche had jumped three years ago. “When I looked up—” She looked up now, and my eyes flew to follow hers. I saw what she described. I saw what she’d seen. “I’d been followed by a woman, who was holding out her baby to me from the window.”
I saw a blond head, pale arms reaching down from that window. Here.
“I took the child—it was screaming in fear.”
I saw the wailing bundle, the waving fists.
“The woman jumped, falling down next to me. She seized her baby from me and turned to run.”
I saw the slim figure jump, graceful even in terror. I saw her white dress against the grass as she gathered herself up, grass stained and bloodstained, snatching the screaming bundle in her arms and darting toward safety—