Bella...A French Life

  Table of Contents

  Bella... A French Life

  Publisher

  Author’s Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Epilogue

  SONGS AND POETRY

  Also by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

  Die in Paris

  About the Author

  Contact details

  Bella... A French Life

  by

  Marilyn Z. Tomlins

  Publisher

  Raven Crest Books

  Copyright © 2013 Marilyn Z. Tomlins. All rights reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Author’s Note

  Thank you Dave Lyons of Raven Crest Books for publishing this novel.

  I also say thank you to: Louise McDermott (for always listening); Charmaine Olinsky Howard (for always encouraging); Deidre Vogtmannsberger (for that charming verdict regarding the ending which brings a smile to my face); Lynda Desgris (for telling me about the trou normand and how one eats oysters in Normandy).

  I also offer a special thank you to:

  Paula Rae Gibson who offered me the photograph of model Allison Willow for the cover of this novel.

  Chapter One

  The holidaymakers have returned home. And yesterday the wind rose. The holidaymakers going home and the wind rising mean it is the end of summer.

  I do not know what I will do to pass the time this winter.

  God, I hate winter.

  The family to the right set off first. She’s a teacher; he is a doctor. I did not tell them that I too am a physician. At least, I used to be. I would have had to tell them something about myself. Of course, this I would not have wanted to do. They would have asked, “Gave it up?” Whatever I would have replied, would have led to another question. Even to several questions. That dreadful thing that had happened to the Brissard twin would have come back to me. Not that it has ever left me. No, it is with me like an ugly mole on one’s back; you can cover it with a frilly blouse, but sure to God, one knows it is still there.

  Du Pont is the family’s surname.

  “Easy to remember,” he said.

  I am bound to see them again next summer because they have bought the house next door.

  “Paid two hundred thousand francs for it,” she boasted.

  My parents had bought this house of mine for fifteen thousand francs. The old man from whom they bought it wanted to go into an old-age home. That was in 1947. It is 1986 now.

  I was four. Marius, my brother, still had to be born.

  Oh dear! I have now revealed my age, and I planned not to mention anyone’s age.

  My name is Bella Wolff.

  I should have had a name like Françoise du Pont. This is the name of the woman who stayed next door. Her husband’s name is Martin. Martin du Pont. Nice uncomplicated names. Martin du Pont; Françoise du Pont. No one need to ask, “Where are you from?”

  My father’s name was Rodolph Wolff. He was German. A German soldier. A Wehrmacht soldier.

  My mother’s name was Henriette Desmarais. She was French. She fell in love with my father the moment she set eyes on him. He was one of the victors. She - one of the defeated.

  Hardly ever did my mother speak of what had happened to her during those years of the Second World War. Of l’occupation allemande. What I know about it I heard from others, some of them having meant well, others having enlightened me in order to harm my mother. Harm my mother more.

  As I heard, on the day the war ended, my mother’s brothers fetched her from the café where she was a waitress and dragged her to the barbershop where one of their cousins worked. They wanted the cousin to shave their sister’s head. That was what was done to French women who had slept with German soldiers. My uncles thought that by having their sister’s head shaved themselves they would save her the humiliation of having angry villagers do so. When she had not a hair left on her head, they handed her over to the angry villagers, who marched her with the other women, who had had German lovers - the horizontal collaborators - through the streets. My father had by then left - fled France with the other German soldiers. I have often wondered what went through my mother’s mind on that day, her lover gone and not there to protect her. To defend her.

  My father was an honourable German soldier. This was what he always said to me and my brother. He said that he fought his country’s enemy justly and decently; he had nothing to do with concentration camps.

  He was also an honourable man. This is what I say, because after the Germans had signed the official capitulation with the Allies and the war was over, he returned to the village and went straight to my grandfather’s house to ask for my mother’s hand. “Yes, marry the whore and afterwards you can both get out of my sight,” my grandfather told him. He marched my mother and father to the priest and the priest made them confess their sin of having indulged in sexual intercourse out of wedlock and to have produced a bastard child. I was two years old. The priest told them to go down on their knees to ask, to beg the Good Lord for His forgiveness. “To beg it will have to be because you have indeed sinned.”

  The following Saturday afternoon the priest married my mother and my father.

  My grandfather forced my mother to wear a black dress and cover her head in a black mourning veil. He himself wore a black tie. My grandmother was also dressed in black and also wore a black mourning veil. My uncles insisted that I should be present at the wedding: I, the bastard, fruit of my parents’ whoring. My Uncle Georges carried me to the church and put me down in the front pew and there I sat all alone; no one wanted to sit beside me. “She is contaminated,” Uncle Georges told the priest. I carried German germs. The germs were in my blood, in my veins and arteries, in my intestines, and in my heart and soul. I was doomed.

  After the wedding my parents and I left immediately for Germany. We were welcomed by my father’s family. I cannot remember this, but my mother told me about it when the Brissard twin died. “If you think this is the end of the world, let me tell you that my people - your grandparents, uncles and aunts - spat at me on the day I married your father. That is what can be called the end of the world.”

  We did not remain living in Germany. We came back to France. We did not go back to the village, but we came here to Normandy, here to Sainte-Marie-sur-Brecque, and to this house, Le Presbytère, which, as planned, my parents had turned into a guest house and of which I am the owner today.

  Here, no one knew
anything about us.

  “Wolff,” the locals said on hearing our surname. “You are Jewish and German and you survived Hitler. Bravo!”

  My father did not reply and neither did my mother and when my brother was born, they baptized him in the old Catholic church, Notre Dame Sainte-Marie, which stands on the village square, and no one ever called us Jews again.

  -0-

  Chapter Two

  One of the Brissard twins name was Antony.

  He would not breathe.

  “Oh, one is enough,” groaned Mrs Brissard.

  She made a lot of noise during the birth of her two sons: André and Antony.

  “Can’t we shut her up, Doc?” Nurse Bonnec, twenty-two and only recently graduated from nursing college, whispered.

  Mr Brissard, a farmer, was sitting unconcernedly in the corridor, smoking a Gauloises and blowing grey rings into the air. If I had not known that he was the one who put this woman in the family way, I would have thought that he had wandered into the hospital by mistake.

  Antony was tiny. He was red from head to toe, and yes, all babies on birth are red from head to toe, but the redness would fade, but this had not happened as far as Antony was concerned.

  “As long as his hair’s not going to remain red,” said Mr Brissard, in from the corridor.

  He slapped his thick thighs with his fat hands.

  I wondered how Mrs Brissard could have lain down with him; I know that if he had come anywhere near me, I would have run.

  André, the first-born, took to his mother’s teat like a puppy to that of a bitch. Antony closed his tiny little mouth and when we forced his mother’s large, red, drooling nipple between his pale lips, he would not swallow.

  “Do with him what we do with lambs,” advised Mr Brissard.

  “And Mr Brissard, what exactly do you do with lambs?” I asked.

  “Doc, we let the little bugger starve, and mark my words, when he’s hungry, he’ll take the teat.”

  I struggled for two hours to feed Antony, first by holding him to his mother’s breast and next by trying to get him to drink milk from a bottle, but to no avail. He died in my arms.

  “Jesus Christ, get a priest! My child can’t die a heathen!” shouted Mr Brissard, running around his wife’s bed.

  He was suddenly concerned.

  “Get a priest!” I passed the demand on to Nurse Bonnec.

  “How do I do that and whatever for?”

  “Because my child can’t die a heathen!” shouted Mr Brissard.

  Saliva ran down his chin - his two chins.

  “But he’s dead already,” replied Nurse Bonnec, her pretty face as grey as that of the dead twin.

  “For God’s sake, Bonnec, keep your voice down, and go get a priest,” I whispered.

  “Where? How?”

  “Ask reception and if they do not know where to get one from, tell them, I tell them to go and find out.”

  Mrs Brissard, who had earlier been so adamant that one baby was enough, lay flat on her back, her legs up in the air and spread wide as if ready to receive her husband’s sperm in order to make a replacement for the dead Antony.

  “Mrs Brissard,” I said, “let us cover you.”

  Nurse Bonnec, blonde curls falling over her grey face, returned.

  “They do not know where to find a priest, and they ask whether we do not know that our country’s law on secularity also applies to hospitals.”

  “But there’s still a chapel at the hospital. I pass it every day on my way up from the parking bay. There must be a priest in there.”

  “The chapel is closed for renovation. Has been for two years.”

  “And I suppose the priests are sunning themselves on the Riviera,” came from Mr Brissard.

  “Don’t worry, sir, I will find you a priest,” I told him, complacently.

  At the front desk I told the receptionist I needed a priest and I needed him fast.

  A priest came. He was young, looked as if it had not yet been necessary for him to shave. I have no idea where the receptionist found him. He held a crucifix on a long string of wooden beads over the dead baby, said a prayer, made the sign of the cross and offered his condolences to Mr and Mrs Brissard, both of them crying.

  “What I want to know, Father, is what kind of hospital is this? My wife gives birth to two healthy boys, and what do you know, one kicks the bucket,” asked - stated - Mr Brissard.

  “I am sure, monsieur, your son is with our Heavenly Father,” replied the priest.

  “Merde! Heavenly Father! My arse! He should be here and nowhere else! There is going to come a day when I’m going to need help on the farm ...”

  “Now, monsieur ... I …”

  Anxiously the priest brushed sweat from his unlined forehead.

  I felt sorry for him. I touched his nervously twitching arm.

  “Thank you, Father. You may go now.”

  “This is most unfortunate,” Mr Raisse, the hospital director, kept on saying to me.

  He and I were in the morgue, standing beside each other at the autopsy table, an overpowering odour of disinfectant rising from it. The Brissard twin’s tiny, lifeless, naked body lay on the table, ready to be cut open.

  The autopsy surgeon pulled at his white surgical gloves and a powdery dust rose up in the air.

  “If the parents insist. But why do this to the poor little blighter.”

  I closed my eyes. I had attended autopsies before, but none had been on a newborn.

  The autopsy surgeon shot me a worried glance.

  “No need for you to stay, Doc.”

  I ran up the stairs, ignoring the elevator, back to the third floor and the maternity section. Mr Brissard was showing André off to admiring relatives. Mrs Brissard, sitting with her legs hanging over the side of her bed, was drinking coffee from a goblet on which was the hospital’s name: CHU Hôpital des Chartreux. She was swallowing noisily. André was no longer naked but in a yellow suit with white buttons. Blue lambs danced on the buttons. He was asleep and I wondered how he was managing to do so because his father kept pulling his tiny bent baby legs.

  A week passed and Mrs Brissard and André had already returned to the farm, and Mr Raisse called me to his office.

  The Brissards were accusing me of negligence.

  “I tried to keep this unfortunate incident within the hospital walls.”

  He moved his thick-lens glasses down over his nose and stared at me with his short-sighted brown eyes.

  The autopsy had shown that the baby died of asphyxiation.

  “Asphyxiation?”

  My head whirled: could I have been so stupid?

  “Yes, there was a lump of phlegm in his windpipe. Of course, you could not have known. It was something which had happened during the process of birth. But the parents are going to go to the papers. Most unfortunate. Never has Chartreux Hospital had something like this happen.”

  “Mr Raisse, he died more than two hours after he was born, so it could not have been phlegm which killed him. There must have been a heart or lung anomaly.”

  I held onto his desk so that I would not topple over.

  “All the same. Unfortunate. Unfortunate. What can I say?”

  There were rumours that President Giscard d’Estaing was going to offer him the position of minister of health in Prime Minister Jacques Chirac’s government.

  “What would you like me to do, sir?”

  “What would you like to do?”

  “I am a doctor ...”

  “And a very good one too.”

  “Are you’re blaming me for the child’s death?”

  My lips had started to twitch uncontrollably.

  “The parents are upset. They want heads to fall. Mind you, they are not after money, so Chartreux Hospital would not have to pay them any compensation. But to use the word blame, well, blame’s a strong word.”

  The Paris daily France-Soir ran the story on their front page the following morning and that evening at eight o’clock Anten
ne 2 news led with the story. Anchor Léon Zitrone said that the parents wanted a police enquiry.

  Two uniformed coppers, one a captain, came to the hospital.

  The captain, a tall dark man in his forties, looked ill at ease with this task he had been given.

  “I beg your pardon, Madame … Sir…”

  Mr Raisse offered the captain his hand.

  “Let’s get this unpleasantness over with, Captain.”

  For eight months I waited for the police to complete their investigation. Mr Raisse, who had not been offered the job of Minister of Health after all, had become more and more agitated as the weeks passed, and on the day of the court hearing he, dressed in his best suit, ignored me, had not even shot a brief glance in my direction, not even once. My brother and Marion, his girlfriend, accompanied me to the courtroom in the Palais de Justice building. On our arrival there were half a dozen journalists on the avenue in front of the building. They shouted questions at me. Two press photographers snapped me when I left the court after the hearing. I was cleared of the charge of negligence, but as Mrs Brissard said, holding eight-month-old André to her generous bosom which was covered in black mourning, “His little brother is in our thoughts all the time. We can’t stop thinking of him, of our little Antony. Oh well, he’s with le Bon Dieu now at least, and should one not be thankful for small mercies?”

  Mr Raisse had not wanted me to resign while the case was still pending, but once the verdict was given, he made it clear that I would be much happier working at another hospital.

  “Not that I would request your resignation.”

  “If you really want to come and help me, who am I to turn you down,” said my mother.

  I had told her I was finished with doctoring and I was heading for the guest house to work with her.

  “Bella, you are such a good doctor. You should not throw in the towel. Believe me, I understand how you feel, but give the matter time, think about it,” advised Marius.

  He too is a doctor.

  I told him I have done my thinking.

  I left Paris.