On the way back, as he waited with Gilbert on the Belfort station platform, the two Gestapo officers made an arrest. How the fellow had gotten that far Eidenbaugh could only imagine. His clothing was torn, and blackened with railroad soot, his face was drained, white as death, and his eyes were pink from sleepless nights—he was much too obviously a fugitive on the run. They manacled his hands behind his back and he wept silently as they marched him away.
A mad lady on a bicycle! Most certainly English! All in tweeds!
He had gone down the mountain with Gilbert. Found, hidden in an alder grove, the old truck that was sometimes made to work. Then the two of them had sputtered off to Épinal to buy provisions. When they got back to Cambras, the village was buzzing with the unusual visit. Had she been looking for him? Well, no, she hadn't said that exactly, but she had been in the house of Gilbert and had drunk many cups of tea with the old woman. Tea? There was tea in Cambras? No, the mad lady in tweeds had brought her own tea. In a box made of stiff paper. Really? Might he have a look at it? Alas, no one would expect an Américain to be interested in a miracle that petit. Where had the box got to? In the rubbish heap, perhaps? No such dishonor. Fed to Gilbert's pigs, along with other delectables stored up in a wooden barrel in the farmyard. Oh Christ. A missed communication—in his trade one of the worst disasters imaginable. That meant an emergency trip to Belfort. He was furious with himself for missing the courier, though Ulysse had told him it would happen while he was away.
When, an hour later, he put on his gloves, he found a slip of paper stuffed down the little finger.
On November 14, a memorable night in the history of the village, the Cambras maquis drove to the drop zone, then carried dry wood on their backs for half a mile after hiding the truck well off the road. They triangulated the field with woodpiles and covered them with canvas tarps when it started to rain, a cold, icy misery that fell straight down in drops heavy as pebbles. They tried sheltering under the trees but this particular mountain meadow was surrounded by deciduous forest so that one was merely splattered by raindrops hitting the bare branches rather than nailed directly atop the head. Eidenbaugh was soaked through in minutes. At 3:30 A.M. sharp they lit off the woodpiles, then stood back with ceremony and watched them blaze and smoke in the rain. But there was no sign of an airplane and by a quarter to four their bonfires were no more than smoldering piles of wet, charred wood. They couldn't return to Cambras, so they groped their way into the forest in search of dead branches, falling and bruising themselves in the sodden darkness. The wet branches were piled up on what remained of the bonfires and they tried to light them, using up most of their matches and swearing the blackest curses they could summon.
To no avail. At last, La Brebis came to the rescue. Producing an old piece of rubber tubing from a coat pocket, she siphoned off the gas from the truck, using a wine bottle meant for celebration but drained dry as they sought any available warmth on the mountainside. A bottle at a time, they soaked down the woodpiles while La Brebis, who had ingested a certain amount of gasoline in getting the siphon action under way, went off into the woods to be sick. At this point they heard the sound of airplane motors above them in the darkness—coming from the east! The equation for nighttime air supply operations was complex, involving fuel weight, load weight, air speed, distance, weather, hours of darkness, the phase of the moon, evasive flight paths, and fuel allowance for escape tactics in case of pursuit. Thus the bravery of the British pilot, circling above the socked-in meadow, was extraordinary. He must have used his last margin of safety looking for them and, should he encounter Luftwaffe night fighters on the return trip, was well on his way to ditching in the Channel. They never saw the plane, but they could hear the engines quite distinctly—he'd come down low to look for their signal. The gas-soaked wood woofed to life and roared against the downpour for only a few moments before the flame turned blue and danced pointlessly along the boughs, burning up the last of the fuel.
But that was enough. The Lancaster pilot must have seen the orange smudges beneath the clouds and signaled his dropmaster, thus the crates with parachutes attached were manhandled out the cargo doors and floated down through the darkness, one of them hanging up in the branches of a tree until Vigie scampered up and cut the shrouds. They loaded the crates into the truck, their excitement obscuring—until Gilbert attempted to start the engine—the fact that the precious gasoline had been burned up. The Vau brothers hiked back to Cambras. At midmorning there were schleuh patrols down on the road—someone else had heard the bomber—but it was raining too hard for the Germans to come up into the forest. Nonetheless, the maquisards waited most of the morning in ambush by the trail, having voted to defend the arms no matter the cost.
Just before noon, as the rain turned to snow, four of the Cam-bras women appeared at the edge of the field, pushing bicycles. They had traveled all morning, trading the heavy metal petrol cans back and forth, exposing two extra people to risk in order to make better time.
The entry into Cambras was triumphal. The entire population stood out in the wet snow and applauded l'Américain, les Anglaises, and themselves.
Four days later, his Limelight message was broadcast, setting the first attack on the night of November 25. Seven days! That was no time at all, but he did what he could. Which meant preparing for the operation—doing the necessary intelligence background—and training his maquis in the new equipment simultaneously. To that point, he had followed the Triangle camp teachings meticulously. His instructors and briefers had shown him that the path through danger lay in knowledge of the situation, caution, objectivity, secrecy, planning, and, above all, scrupulous attention to detail. But suddenly he was at war, so he found himself improvising, doing six things at once, making decisions quickly, in the heat of the moment. All the wrong things. But something was up, he could feel it in the air—they all could—and he was carried along in the rhythm of it. There were Lancasters overhead every night, the Épinal searchlights crisscrossed the sky, and the schleuh patrols were everywhere on the roads. Rumors reached them of stepped-up questioning in the basement of the Épinal Mairie—the town hall, now a Gestapo interrogation center.
The new guns were a matter of great excitement to the Cambras maquis. The Mark II Sten, properly a machine carbine, was the special operations weapon of the clandestine war. It was simple: a few tubular components that screwed together quickly once you filed the burrs off the threads. It was light, six pounds, essentially a skeletal steel frame carrying the most elemental bolt-and-spring firing mechanism. And it was fast, putting out rounds in a staccato spray. “Beau Dieu!” Gilbert gasped after he had riddled a tree stump with one magazine-consuming burst.
The Stens were less exciting to Eidenbaugh. It came to him, in an idle moment, that the weapon was manufactured by the same armaments industry that produced the Purdey shotgun—a masterpiece. But the reality of the war called for hundreds of thousands of simple death machines to be placed in willing hands. The OSS, in a perfection of that logic, manufactured the Liberator, a single-shot pistol with one bullet and cartoon instructions overcoming literacy and language barriers, then spread thousands of them throughout occupied Europe. It was the perfect assassination weapon, meant for the man or woman whose anger had outdistanced caution to the point where he or she would kill up close.
For Eidenbaugh, the Sten was the least prepossessing of his available tools. It was, for instance, cheaply made—costing around $12.50 to produce. The primitive firing mechanism tended to jam, thus the thirty-two-round magazine was better loaded with thirty rounds of 9 mm parabellum (ball) ammunition to reduce pressure on the magazine spring. In this instance, a special filling device was to be used, but these had not been included in their arms shipment and they had to improvise.
And it was “short.” That is, the fixed sight was set for a hundred yards. Infantry war tended toward engagement at the extremity of the rifle's efficiency—about a thousand yards, three fifths of a mile. With the Sten, however, you operated at the length of a football field and could see the enemy quite clearly. In essence, a streetfighting weapon. The implicit message was clear to Eidenbaugh: if, as guerrillas, you had the misfortune to engage the enemy on his own terms, the best you could do was to get close enough to burn him badly before he killed you—which he would, simply drawing back out of your range to give himself total advantage.
He had no intention to engage. Their target—identified in code by the courier—was the railroad yards at Bruyères, about fifteen miles from Épinal. Sablé had a cousin who worked in the roundhouse and, on the Tuesday before the attack, it was La Brebis and not the cousin's wife who, at noontime, brought him his lunch of soup and bread. Eidenbaugh found a vantage point on a hill overlooking the yards and watched her ride in on her bicycle, napkin-covered bowl in the crook of her right arm, half a baguette balanced across the top of the bowl. The German sentry waved her through. Later, Eidenbaugh was ecstatic to learn there were fourteen locomotives in the roundhouse. He would, he knew, get them all.
It didn't, on the night of November 25, sound like very much. A single, muffled whumpf in the roundhouse and some dirty smoke that dribbled from a broken window. That was all. But it would be three months at least before these particular locomotives went anywhere. Eidenbaugh and Vigie watched it happen from the vantage point, then retreated casually, by bicycle, back to the village.
Eidenbaugh went in alone, with the graveyard shift. They were the brave ones, for they were the ones who would suffer German suspicion after the sabotage. These interrogations would not, Eidenbaugh knew, be of the most severe category, for no occupying power can easily afford to sacrifice skilled railroad workers. The men gathered around him as they trudged into the railyard. To them he was a weapon, a weapon against those they loathed beyond words, and they protected him accordingly. He wasted no time in the roundhouse, simply formed the malleable plastique explosive into a collar around the heavy steel and wedged a time pencil into the claylike mass. Then he tied up the two roundhouse workers with heavy cord and moved them behind a wall. He snuck out the back way, through a well-used dog tunnel in the wire fence. The whole business took less than twenty minutes.
For a mere thud of an explosion and a little smoke. The yard sirens went off almost as an afterthought, the firemen appeared, the French police followed, a few German officers ran about—but there was little to be done. One fireman, reducing the water pressure to the volume of a garden hose, soaked down the area for ten minutes while a yard supervisor nailed a board across the single broken window. A pursuit unit showed up, and the German shepherds went right for the dog tunnel in the fence, picked up a scent that led to the edge of an empty hill above the yards, accepted their biscuits and pats, peed, and went home. A Gestapo Sturmbannführer took the rope that had bound the workers as evidence and put it in a leather pouch with a tag stating time, place, and date. Then they all stood around for an hour smoking and talking—bored, more than anything else. It was so insignificant.
Apoplectic rage was reserved for the German transport officer, who had chosen that night to occupy a French feather bed rather than a German army cot and thus arrived late. He was the only one there who understood what had happened, for it was, after all, rather technical. It had to do with the way locomotives are turned around in a railroad yard.
In the center of the roundhouse was what the French called a plaque tournant, simply a large iron turntable with a piece of track on it that allowed the crew to turn a locomotive around and send it back out into the yard once it had been serviced. In the interim, locomotives rested in a semicircle around the turntable, which could meet underlying track by being rotated. What the saboteur had done was to blow up the midpoint of the plaque tournant. The damage to the electrical system was meaningless—any electrician could wire around that in an hour. However, the explosion had also damaged the central mechanism of the plaque, a large iron casting, and that would have to be reforged. With French and German foundries pressed beyond extremity by demands of the war, replacement would take at least three months. Thus, for that period, fourteen locomotives weren't going anywhere—the plaque had been blown in a position directly perpendicular to the outgoing service track.
The transport officer stared at the mess and said scheiss through clenched teeth. The gap was less than fifteen feet. It might as well have been fifteen miles. His transportation mathematics were, by necessity, quite efficient. Each locomotive pulled sixty freight cars and, in a three-month period, could be expected to make nine round trips to the coastal defense lines in the west and north. He multiplied by fourteen out-of-service locomotives and came up with something more than seven thousand lost carloads. And this sort of thing, he assumed, would happen throughout the French rail system.
The transport officer wasn't such a bad fellow. In all likelihood he would have appreciated, once restored to his more reflective self, the words of the saboteur's British briefing officer as he reviewed the plaque tournant procedure: “For want of a nail, dear boy, and all that sort of thing.”
In the winter of 1944, on a night when the mountain was still and silent, when snow hung thick on the pine boughs and white fields shone blue in the moonlight, Khristo Stoianev went to war. As they'd meant him to do.
The priest who had released him from a cell in the Santé prison had barely spoken, but the intent of the action was self-evident. He was free. Free to fight the common enemy. The time and place he must choose for himself. Khristo sometimes thought about the priest: a small, stooped man, unremarkable, invisible. A perfect emissary for Voluta, his church, and NOV, the Polish Nationalist organization. Khristo knew that someone had kept track of him, had known he was in the Santé, but that was no surprise. His training and experience gave him, when the time was right, a certain value, and the NOV priests would be aware of that value. Priests made excellent intelligence officers, he knew; the Vatican was said to have the world's finest intelligence service, calling on the accumulated experience of seven centuries. Father Voluta—it seemed a strange idea. But Ilya had claimed it to be so, and Ilya knew things.
Others, certainly, had been set free from French prisons as the German tank columns neared Paris and the fall of France was imminent. Like Khristo, they had been jailed because they were dangerous. Now, for the same reason, they were released. It was one of the first ways a defeated country could fight back. That the French had let him go at the behest of the Poles surprised him not at all. The two conquered nations were old friends, sharing a taste for romanticism and idealism that had got them every sort of misery for a hundred years. But they shared also a near pathological conviction—that romanticism and idealism would in time be triumphant—which made for a battered old friendship but a durable one.
Khristo walked quietly from the bedroom of the old house that had been his refuge, the polished wood floor cold on his bare feet, and dressed from a large closet in the adjoining alcove. Thick wool socks, corduroy trousers suitable for working dogs in the field—a gentleman's roughwear—wool sweater, and an old coat, shapeless but warm. Good high boots that laced up tight. From a peg on the inside of the closet door he took a Hungarian machine pistol—Gepisztoly M43—on a leather strap. It had cost four chickens, three dozen eggs, and a bottle of brandy, but it made them comfortable to have a weapon in the house. He smiled as he handled it; Sophie had oiled the cheap wooden stock as though it belonged to a fine gun kept on an estate. But then, Sophie had altered the corduroy trousers so that he could wear them, had knitted the sweater and the socks—unraveling fashionable items from better days in order to do so—and, come to that, had polished the floor as well. All her life she had done these things and saw no reason to stop just because of the war. Perhaps the war was all the more reason to do them.
He took four loaded magazines from the closet shelf and put two in each pocket of the coat, then tiptoed down the hall to Sophie's bedroom to say good-bye. Her bed was empty, a heavy comforter folded neatly at the foot. Next door, where Marguerite slept, it was the same. He listened and, very faintly, heard the sound of plates and silverware in the kitchen on the first floor. Years of service, he realized, had schooled the sisters in the preparation of breakfast without waking the house.
Prison had changed him.
He came to understand that on his first day of freedom. The Nikko Petrov papers were no longer of use, so he walked restlessly about the streets of the city—frantic knots of people on one block, deserted silence on the next—as it waited to see what Occupation might bring. Eventually, he found a young man approximately his height and size and strong-armed him in a doorway, taking his passport. He bought glue in a papeterie, then found a café, pried his photograph from the Nansen document and made himself a French passport. The franking marks across the corner of the picture did not quite match, but one had to look carefully to see that. He ordered a steak, ate it so fast he barely noticed the taste, then left the café with the steak knife in his pocket. A few blocks away he found a mont de piété—“mountain of piety,” as the French ironically termed their pawnshops—held a knife to the pawnbroker's throat, and stole a small French pistol. He could have bought it, he had money from the priest, but he knew that money meant survival and he intended to survive. Nearby, he saw a finely dressed gentleman getting into a car, held him at bay with the pistol, and drove away in the car, a five-year-old Simca Huit, dark blue, with nearly a full tank of gas. For as long as he was able, he drove south and west. Away from the advancing Germans, headed for the coast or, perhaps, Spain. He would accept whatever the fates offered.
But the farther south he drove, the worse the nightmare. The roads were clogged with people and their possessions, cars had been pushed into the fields when they would no longer run, abandoned cats and dogs were everywhere. He saw a woman pushing a baby carriage with a grandfather clock in it, he saw unburied dead by the side of the road, bloated and flyblown in the early summer heat. The anarchy of flight was exacerbated by Stuka bombing runs on the refugee columns so that people had to run for the ditches and, here and there, a tower of smoke rose into the sky from a burning car.
The Germans had learned the tactic in Spain, refined it in Poland: clogged roads made reinforcement and supply impossible—tanks would simply not drive over their own people, at least not in this part of Europe. So the Stukas' objective was to sow panic and terror among the fleeing civilians, and they buzzed low along the roads for a long while before they used their machine guns or dropped a bomb.
This effort was aided, on the ground, by German agents who spread horror stories and rumors among the civilian population. Khristo came upon such a man at dusk on the first night, holding the terrified attention of a small group of refugees by the roadside with stories of German atrocities. Khristo stopped the car and stood at the edge of the crowd and listened to him, a master storyteller who didn't miss a detail: the screams, the blood, the horror. He was a heavy, blunt-featured man who clearly enjoyed his work and was adept at it. When Khristo could no longer bear the looks on the faces of the listeners, he pushed his way through the crowd and took the man by the scruff of the neck. “This man is trying to frighten you,” he said. “Don't you see that?” They stared at him, paralyzed, not understanding anything at all. In disgust, Khristo marched the man behind a tree and chopped his pistol's trigger guard across the bridge of the man's nose. The man yelped and ran away across the field, bleeding all over himself. But when Khristo turned back to the crowd he saw that they too had run away. He had frightened them, had only made it worse.
On the second day, somewhere on the N52 where it ran along the Loire between Blois and Tours, the car began to stall. All day it had crept along, in first and second gears, stopping and starting, locked in the stream of cars and bicycles and people on foot. By now, the Simca was full—and heavy: a mother and daughter, the latter having somehow injured her knee, a wounded French artilleryman who sang to keep their spirits up, and an old woman with a small, frightened dog that whined continually. His passengers got out of the car and sat in a resigned group among the roadside weeds while he opened the hood. The smell of singed metal from the engine reminded him of the flight from Madrid, only here no little man on a bicycle showed up to help. Perhaps it wants water, he thought, treating it more like a horse than a car. Someone volunteered a bottle and he slithered down the bank to the edge of the Loire, holding the bottle against the gravel and letting water trickle in. It was peaceful by the river; cicadas whirred in the heat, a small breeze stirred the air.
“Ah, monsieur, thank God you have come.”
He turned toward the voice and discovered the woman he would come to know as Sophie. She looked to be in her middle fifties, with anxious eyes and a broad, placid face. She wore a “good” dress, black with white polka dots, sweated through in circles beneath the arms. He must have looked puzzled, for she elaborated: “We have been praying very hard, you see.”
“Oh?”
“Please,” she said urgently, “there's little time.”
Around the curve of the river he found another woman, similar to the first though perhaps somewhat younger—he took them to be sisters—and an old man in a formal white suit laid back against the grassy bank. His tie was undone and his face was the color of paper. The younger woman was fanning him with his hat. Khristo knelt by his side and placed two fingers against the pulse in his neck. The beat was faint and very fast and the man was comatose, an occasional flutter of the eyelids the only sign of life.
“I'm afraid I can do nothing,” he said. “This man is dying, he needs to be in hospital.”
The elder sister answered a little impatiently. “We know he is dying. But he must receive unction, you see, the last rites, so that his soul may rest peacefully in heaven.”
Khristo scratched his head. The women reminded him of nuns, innocent and strong-willed at once. “I am not a priest, madame. I'm sorry.”
The elder sister nodded. “That we can see. But my sister and I are Protestant, and we do not know the proper ceremony for these matters.”
He turned back toward the man. “I cannot say it in French,” he said.
“No matter,” the elder sister replied. “God hears all languages.” Then, as a slightly horrified afterthought: “You are Catholic, of course.”
“Of course,” he said.
He was Bulgarian Eastern Orthodox—closer to Catholicism than a Protestant, in theory, but the rites were different and the customs not at all the same. From his training he knew that European Catholics expected “Hail Mary” and “Our Father” and an Act of Contrition. What he was able to offer, however, were predsmurtna molitva, prayers for the dying. There should have been soborovat, elders, present to pray a dying man into the next world, but God would have to forgive this requirement. As for the prayers themselves, they were supposed to be improvisational, in whatever form was appropriate to those present. He therefore leaned close to the man—whispering so quietly that the sisters could not hear him—and asked God to ease his entry into heaven, to forgive him his sins, and to unite him with those he'd loved in this life who had preceded him. Finally, returning to the Catholic tradition, he anointed the man with river water in place of holy oil, touching his face in the sign of the cross and saying, in French, “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” The man's lips were cold as snow, and Khristo suppressed a shiver. “Go to God,” he added, then stood, indicating that the ritual was concluded.
Both sisters were weeping silently, dabbing at their eyes with small white handkerchiefs. “Poor Monsieur Dreu.” The younger sister spoke for the first time. “His heart …”
“It is the war,” the other sister said.
“Was he your husband?” Khristo asked.
“No,” the elder answered. “Our employer. For many years. He was as a father to us.”
“What will you do?”
They simply wept. Finally Sophie, the elder sister, said, “Monsieur Dreu intended that we should go to the little house—we would have been safe there. We tried, but we could not make way. Everyone wants to go west. Monsieur Dreu tried to drive the car, all the way from Bordeaux, but the strain on him, the planes, the people on the road …”
Something in her voice, in the inflection of petite maison, caught his attention. “Little house?”
“In the mountains, to the east, toward Strasbourg. There is no road there, you see, and no people. Just an old man who chops the wood.”
“Charlot,” the younger sister offered.
“Yes. Charlot.”
“How would you live?” he asked.
“Well, there is every sort of food, in tins. Monsieur Dreu always saw to that. ‘One must be prepared for eventualities,' he used to say. ‘Some day there will be turmoil,' he said, ‘another revolution.' He said it every summer, when we all went up there to clean the house and air the linen. Monsieur Dreu had great faith in air, especially the air one finds in the mountains. ‘Breathe in!' he would say.” Both sisters smiled sadly at the memory.
East, he thought. No one was going east—perhaps if they took the country lanes between the north-south highways. No road. Tinned food. In his mind, the words narrowed to a single concept: sanctuary. But there was his own group to consider; he would not simply toss them from the Simca. “Have you an automobile?” he asked.
“Oh yes. Up on the road, a very grand automobile. A Daimler, it is called. Can you drive such a car?” Sophie stared at him with anxious eyes.
He nodded yes.
The younger sister cleared her throat, the knuckles of her reddened hands showed white as she twisted the handkerchief. “Are you a gentleman, monsieur?”
“Oh yes,” he said. “Very much so.”
“Thank God,” she whispered.
He went up onto the road and inspected the great black Daimler, polished and shimmering in the midday sun. The gas gauge indicated the tank was a little less than half full, but he knew they would have to take their chances with fuel, no matter what, and if his own money didn't hold out, he was certain Monsieur Dreu had provided amply for the run to his mountain retreat.
And if he had any question at all about the change of plan, a visit to his fellow refugees, gathered about the Simca, answered it for him. At the direction of the old lady with the dog, they had pooled their money, purchased a pair of draft horses from a nearby farm, and were in the process of harnessing the animals to the car's bumper. Khristo explained that he would be leaving them and gave the car keys to the old lady, who now assumed command of the vehicle. They all wished him well, embracing him and shaking his hand. As he walked back toward the river, the artilleryman called out, “Vive la France!” and Khristo turned and saluted him.
At the river, he waited patiently with Sophie and Marguerite and, as the sun went down, the old man died peacefully. Using the Daimler's tire iron and their hands, they scratched out a shallow grave by the river and laid him to rest. Khristo found a piece of board by the roadside and carved an inscription with the knife stolen from a Paris café:
Antonin Dreu
1869-1940
The sisters had cared for Monsieur Dreu for more than thirty years, thus Khristo, as his replacement, found himself pampered to an extraordinary degree. The old man had been the last of a long line of grain négociants in the city of Bordeaux and the family had acquired significant wealth over time. Dreu himself had been, according to Sophie, something of an eccentric: at times a Theosophist, a vegetarian, a socialist, a follower of Ouspenskian mysticism, a devotee of tarot, the Ouija board, and, especially, séances. He “spoke” to his departed mother at least once a month, claiming to receive business direction from her. Whatever the source of his commercial wisdom, he had prospered in good times and bad. He had never married, though Khristo had a strong suspicion that he had been the lover of both his servants. Dreu had also believed that a great social upheaval would overtake Europe, and to this end had obtained the little house in the southern Vosges mountains, a long way from anything, and stocked it with food, firewood, and kerosene for the lamps.
Thus in the first months of Occupation Khristo had lived on canned Polish hams, tinned Vienna sausage and brussels sprouts, and aged wheels of Haute-Savoie cheese. The well-stocked wine cellar, he knew from his time at Heininger, was exceptional, and the three of them often got tipsy around the fire in the evenings.
As time passed he ventured out, walking many miles to a tiny hamlet—itself a mile or so from any road—populated by the sort of mountain people who have been interbreeding for too many generations. He became known as Dreu's nephew, Christophe, and was simply accepted as another eccentric from up there.
When their tins of food at last ran out, they bought a rooster and several hens, a milk cow, enough seed for a large garden, and replaced staples as necessary at the little village. Khristo journeyed only once into Épinal, the nearest town of any size, to buy a weapon on the black market and to see the Germans for himself. In the sparse, occasional gossip of the mountain village he heard little of résistance, so bided his time and turned his attention to matters of daily existence.
By the end of 1941, Khristo and the two sisters had fallen into a rhythm of rural obligations: wood had to be chopped, weeds pulled, animals fed, vegetables canned. The roof needed repair, a root cellar had to be built, once you had chickens you needed a chicken house and then—local predators were abundant—a strong fence. Given the absence of ready-made materials, improvisation was the order of the day and every new project demanded endless ingenuity. Such demands constituted, for Khristo, a kind of paradise. By turning his hand to unending chores he gradually cured his spirit of the black despair that had descended on it in the Santé prison.
Down below, in mountain villages and valley towns, the war subsided to the numbing routine of Occupation. Twice, in 1942, he left the mountain and contrived to make contact with maquis units but in both instances he found himself confronted with the political realities of the early résistance. The active groups in the region were dedicated communists, fighting both to defeat the Germans and to obtain political power for themselves. They were suspicious of him—he turned aside their ideological questions, and could find no way to be forthcoming about his past. When further meetings were suggested, in remote areas, he did not attend.
But by the fall of 1942 he had determined to put his caution aside and join the fighting no matter the danger. His conscience gnawed at him, and the peaceful joys of his existence turned bitter. He fabricated a history that could not, he thought, be vetted by the maquis organizations and prepared himself to withstand hostile interrogation.
The fabrication was, however, not to be tested. He spent the late fall and early winter in bed; a yellow blush tinged his cheekbones, his kidneys throbbed with pain, and his physical energy simply drained away. The two sisters cared for him as best they could, he would emerge from bouts of fever to find Sophie wiping the perspiration from his body with a damp cloth. He was, during the worst moments, delirious, joining a spirit world where every age of his life returned to him in vivid form and color and he called out to childhood friends and NKVD officers as they floated brightly past his vision. He was again a waiter in Paris, wept at Aleksandra's absence, rowed his father across the Dunav, and hung his head in shame in the Vidin schoolhouse.
“Who is May?” Sophie asked tenderly when he woke to reality on a winter afternoon.
He whispered that he did not know.
On another occasion—a week later or perhaps a month, he had lost track of time—he came to his senses to discover both sisters huddled against the bedroom wall, their eyes wide with fright. What had he said? Had he confessed to phantom deeds, or real ones? With all his meager strength he turned himself toward them and held out his hands, pleading silently for forgiveness.
He recovered slowly. It was June before he could properly strip the udder on the milk cow. Rebuilding a sawhorse, he counted twenty hammer strokes before a nail was thoroughly driven. He had all his life taken physical strength for granted and was appalled at how slowly it returned to him. At times he feared he would never again be the same.
Then, in the late autumn of 1943, they had a visitor, a boy from the village down below. After a whispered conference, he was invited in and fed lavishly. The food and wine made him loquacious. He had come to enlist the services of Christophe for the Cambras maquis, he said. Everyone could do something, even Christophe. There were Sten magazines to be loaded, bicycle wheels to be repaired. He spoke grandly of one Lucien, who would lead them to glory in forays against the hated Germans. Christophe might well be allowed, after sufficient service, to fire one of the formidable Stens.
Khristo only pretended to mull it over. There was a debt to be paid, to a French priest, more particularly to those whose sacrifices had enabled him to appear at the Santé, and Khristo meant to repay it by service in the one trade he knew. Thus, on a clear night in December, he ate fresh bread and warm milk in the kitchen, accepted the tearful embraces of Sophie and Marguerite, and, long before dawn, walked out across the fields with the machine pistol slung over his shoulder. His boots crunched the hard crust of snow and he marched in time, the brilliant moonlight casting a soldier's shadow before him.