The Weaver's War

Chapter One: The Cellar on the Hill

The loom had a heartbeat, and Renée Durande knew it better than her own.

Four beats of the treadles, the shuttle flying left, the batten thumping the weft home. Four beats, shuttle right, thump. She had learned the rhythm at nine years old on her father's bench, her legs too short to reach the pedals, and now, at thirty-six, her body performed it while her mind wandered elsewhere. This morning it wandered to the ration book in the tin on the shelf, to the fourteen days remaining in June, and to the fact that the coal merchant on the rue Dumenge had told her, apologetically, that there would be no coal at all this year, not for anyone, not even for people who paid.

The cellar smelled of damp stone and machine oil. It was cool in summer and murderous in winter, and it had been the humblest room of the Durande workshop back when there had been a Durande workshop — four looms upstairs on the second floor, three journeymen, a woman who did nothing but wind bobbins, and light pouring through the tall windows that the silk weavers of the Croix-Rousse had built into every building on the hill so that a man could see the color of a thread at four in the afternoon in February.

Now the upstairs rooms stood empty except for one loom under a dust sheet, and Renée worked in the cellar, because in the cellar you could not be seen from the street.

The cloth coming off the beam was ugly. There was no other word for it. Coarse rayon-and-cotton blend, gray as dishwater, destined for German bedding or German lining or God knew what. The requisition office allotted her the yarn and set the quota — thirty-two meters a fortnight — and paid her in a currency that bought less every month. Her father would have wept to see it. He had woven brocade for the great houses of Lyon, silk shot with silver thread for a bishop's vestment once, and he had believed, with the flat certainty of a man who had never doubted anything, that a well-made cloth was a form of prayer.

Renée thought of that, sometimes, when she put her foot down on the treadle. Then she thought about bread.

She worked until the church bell of Saint-Polycarpe struck eleven, then stopped, flexed her hands, and climbed the twenty-two stone steps to the ground floor. Paul was on the landing where she had left him, sitting on a folded blanket with a slate on his knees, drawing something with a chalk stub.

"What is it?" she asked.

"A boat."

"It has wheels."

"It's a boat that goes on land," Paul said. "So it can go anywhere." He said it patiently, as though explaining to someone slow. He was seven and small for it, with his father's black hair and a chest that whistled when he breathed too hard. He had been born blue and the midwife — Hélène, from the third floor, who had delivered half the children on the street — had held him upside down and rubbed him with a rough towel until he screamed, and Renée had loved her from that hour onward without ever quite saying so.

"Breathe for me," Renée said.

Paul sighed theatrically and took a breath. She listened. There was a faint dry rustle at the top of it, like a mouse in straw, but nothing worse.

"You'll go to school tomorrow."

"It's Saturday tomorrow."

"Monday, then. Come and eat."

Lunch was a soup of leeks and one potato, thickened with a spoonful of flour, and a quarter of the day's bread each. The bread was the color of wet cardboard and smelled faintly of sawdust, because that was what they put in it now. Paul ate it without complaint, which was somehow worse than complaining. Renée could remember the boy at three, spitting out a crust because it was too hard. He no longer remembered that there had ever been bread worth refusing.

At one o'clock there was a knock, three light taps, and Hélène Brissot let herself in with the corner of her apron folded up into a pouch.

"Peas," she announced. "Also I have news, but the peas first."

She tipped them onto the table: two dozen fat pods, still warm from the roof. Hélène Brissot was sixty-eight, wide in the hips and narrow in the shoulders, with white hair she wound into a knot at the back of her head and pinned so tightly it looked painful. She had a rooftop of clay pots and old bathtubs up there, four floors above the street, in which she grew things that had no business growing in a city — beans, tomatoes, sorrel, and now peas. She said her knees hated the ladder. She climbed it twice a day anyway.

"What news?" Renée said.

"They have arrested the son of the Trouvé family. The one who works at the tram depot."

"What for?"

"For nothing. For being nineteen." Hélène sat, took a pod, and split it with her thumbnail. "They took him at six this morning. His mother was in the street in her nightgown. They'll send him to Germany with the others."

Renée said nothing. She shelled peas. There was a particular quiet that fell in a room when Germany was mentioned in front of her, and everybody on the rue des Pierres Plantées knew to leave it alone.

Michel had gone in October. The Service du Travail Obligatoire had not been so grandly named yet; then it was still a lottery dressed up as patriotism, the relève, so many French workers to Germany for so many French prisoners returned. Michel Durande, thirty-nine, master weaver, was told to report to the Perrache station with one suitcase. He had shaved that morning with unusual care. At the door he had put his hand flat on the top of Paul's head, as if measuring him, and said, "Grow, but not too much." To Sophie he had said nothing at all, only held her, and Sophie had stood stiff as a doorpost in his arms and then wept for two days afterward in the coal cellar where she thought nobody could hear.

To Renée he had said: "Keep the looms."

Two postcards had come since. Both printed forms, both with sentences blacked out by a censor's brush. The first said he was well and the food was sufficient and Stuttgart was a large city. The second said he was well and asked whether the chestnut tree in the courtyard had flowered. There was no chestnut tree in the courtyard. Renée had turned that card over for an hour before understanding that he was telling her the cards were being read and that nothing in them was true.

"You're squeezing that pod to death," Hélène said.

"Sorry."

"Where is your girl?"

"At the canteen. She finishes at three."

Hélène made a noise in her throat. She had opinions about the canteen. Renée had heard them.

"It's a bread ration," Renée said. "Two hundred grams a day extra and a hot meal she doesn't eat at my table. You show me another job in Lyon that pays that to a girl of fourteen."

"I didn't say a word."

"You said it in your throat."

Hélène laughed — a surprisingly young laugh — and swept the shells into her apron for the compost bucket. At the door she paused. "She's not happy there, Renée."

"None of us are happy anywhere."

"That," said Hélène, "is exactly the trouble with this country now." And she went up.

Sophie came home at twenty past three, which meant she had walked the long way, and she came in with her jaw set in the particular way that meant something had happened and she was not going to say what.

She was fourteen and a half and had shot up seven centimeters that spring, so that all her sleeves ended too soon. Her hair was the brown of wet sand, her father's straight brows over her mother's gray eyes, and she moved through the apartment like weather.

"There's soup," Renée said.

"I ate at the canteen."

"Then sit with me."

Sophie sat. She smelled of grease and steam and, underneath it, of the cheap carbolic soap they made the girls use. She picked at the edge of the oilcloth.

"One of them put his hand on me today," she said.

Renée's own hands stopped.

"Where."

"On my waist. When I was carrying the tureen. He didn't — it wasn't —" Sophie made an impatient gesture. "It was nothing. He laughed. His friends laughed. Madame Ferrand told me to keep walking."

"And did you?"

"What else was I going to do?" Sophie's voice cracked upward. "They eat our meat. They eat butter. Did you know that? There's butter in that kitchen, real butter in a crock, and Madame Ferrand weighs it out for their potatoes, and Paul has never in his life —" She stopped, breathing hard.

Renée got up, went around the table, and put her arms around her daughter's shoulders from behind. Sophie sat rigid for a moment, then let her head tip back against her mother's stomach.

"Two more months," Renée said. "By September I'll have the Boucher contract and we won't need the extra bread and you'll never go back there."

"You said that in March."

"In March I meant it too."

Sophie pulled away, gently, and stood. "I'm going to see Aline tonight. Her mother said I could stay for supper."

"Be back by curfew."

"I'm always back by curfew."

That much, at least, was true. Renée watched her go up the stairs two at a time and did not know — would not know for eleven more days — that there was no supper at Aline's, that there had never been a supper at Aline's, and that her daughter had been carrying folded paper across the city in the lining of her coat since the first week of June.

That evening Renée went back down to the cellar and wove another two meters of gray cloth for the German army, and the shuttle went left and right, left and right, and the hill above her filled up with the smell of other people's thin suppers.