Waiting for Anya

Watching them walk away down the mountain Papa had told him the story of Widow Horcada’s daughter – Florence she was called. Jo thought he remembered seeing her in church once when he was little but he couldn’t be sure. She’d gone off to Paris Papa told him, run off some said, and got herself married. No one knew who to because she’d never brought him back to Lescun. ‘So that was the husband,’ said Papa. ‘Well I never.’

‘Where’s Widow Horcada’s daughter?’ Jo had asked.

‘Dead,’ said Papa. ‘Dead in childbirth I heard, and that must be the child. Poor little mite.’ Papa had kept the dead flowers all summer long on the shelf above his bed but they never spoke of the visitors again.

‘Foolhardy,’ said Widow Horcada, putting the knitting down on her lap. ‘Plain foolhardy, that’s what it was. I just don’t understand what came over you, Benjamin. Stay as long as it takes I said. Do what you have to do and I’ll help you all I can. We agreed, didn’t we? You promised you’d go out only at night. You promised me, didn’t you? And what do you do? You go out for a walk in broad daylight. A walk! And what do you bring back? Not berries, not herbs, not mushrooms, but an orphan bear cub. I ask you Benjamin, haven’t we got troubles enough?’ She leaned forward in her chair, her crooked finger pointing. ‘And that boy you met, what happens now, eh? You tell me that. What happens when he runs home and tells them all down in the village? Well, I’ll tell you. Someone will put two and two together and they’ll know the old widow’s son-in-law is back. They don’t forget a face you know, especially not your face. They may be country folk, Benjamin, but they’re not stupid.’

The man left the table and crouched down in front of her taking both her hands in his. ‘Believe me, Grandmère,’ he said, ‘the boy won’t say anything. I can always tell an honest face.’ He smiled up at her. ‘I know I’m not all you wanted in a son-in-law but I tell you true, you’re all I could ever have wanted in a mother-in-law.’

‘Go on with you,’ she said trying to push him away, but he held on to her hands.

‘No I mean it. You’re brave and you’re good and I couldn’t have done any of it without you. You know that.’

‘I don’t know anything,’ she said, ‘not any more I don’t. Maybe you’re right about that boy, maybe he won’t say anything. Let’s just pray to God you’re right.’

‘Your God or mine?’ said the man laughing.

‘Why not both?’ the widow said, ‘just in case one of us is barking up the wrong tree.’ She reached out and touched his face. ‘You’re all I’ve got left now Benjamin, you and little Anya – if she’s still alive.’

‘Course she is,’ said the man. ‘How many times do I have to tell you?’

‘You’ve been telling me for two years now,’ said the widow.

‘Two years, ten years,’ he said, ‘however long it takes. She’ll come. And when she does we’ll be waiting for her just like I promised her. She knows where to come and she’ll be here, you’ll see. She could walk in here tonight.’

Widow Horcada sighed and looked up at the window. ‘It’s getting dark,’ she said, starting up from her chair, ‘I’d better see to the animals.’ And then she saw him.

Jo felt the logs give under his feet. He tried to hold on to the window ledge but his fingers were cold and would not grip as they should. For a fleeting moment he saw their faces staring up at him and then he was falling in an avalanche of logs that sent him tumbling down on to the cobbled stone of the yard. He kicked frantically and pushed the logs away. Then he was on his feet and running before he heard the back door open. He dared not turn round and look. For the second time that day Jo found himself running down the slopes, but this time there was a misty darkness to hide him and he could afford to stop from time to time to regain his breath. Rouf ran on ahead of him and was waiting for him on his sack by the front doorstep. Jo had to step over him to open the door. Rouf yawned hugely and put his head on his paws. Clearly for him it had been no more than an ordinary day.

For some weeks after this the village was diverted, its spirits lifted by stories of the great bear hunt, stories that eclipsed even the grim news of the war, of more German victories everywhere. They heard about the world outside through newspapers that few people believed because they were controlled by the Germans, but also through Radio London and what you heard there had to be believed. There was no consolation to be gleaned from either source, so they talked of the bear hunt to forget the war and for a time they could do so.

At school Jo had become quite the hero and that was not entirely to his liking. If Jo had learned one lesson at school it was that it was better to keep a low profile – that way you kept out of trouble. But now he was thrust suddenly into the limelight. He had admirers and therefore enemies too. Even his best friend, Laurent, seemed to look at him differently. Only Monsieur Audap, his teacher, was quite unimpressed by the whole thing. Strict as he was, severe even at times, Monsieur Audap was scrupulously fair, and was liked and respected for it. A retiring man, he said very little, but what he did say was always worth listening to.

The day after Armand Jollet put up the bearskin on the wall of his grocer’s shop for all the world to admire, Monsieur Audap spent the entire morning telling the children all about the mountain bears, about where they lived and how they lived. After hibernation, he said, in the Spring when their body fat was low and they had young to feed, then they would dare anything to find food enough to provide for themselves and for their cubs. Bears, he said, never came close to people unless they had to. They knew of their cruelty, of their voracious appetite for killing and of their greed. Bears, he said, were neither stupid nor suicidal. This one must have been starving to have risked such an attack. Almost certainly, said Monsieur Audap, she had cubs to feed – usually there were two, maybe just one. They’d be dead by now, of course. They needed their mother’s milk for at least three or four months. Jo looked down at his desk so that his eyes would not betray him.

As time passed though the bear talk both in and out of school became less frequent and less triumphalist; and once again news of the war, of unending, depressing defeats began to preoccupy the village. But to many of the children, to Jo too, the war was still an unreal thing. In over two years of war they had not seen a single German soldier, no planes, no tanks, nothing. The war was in the talk and they heard plenty of that; and talk almost always meant argument. What should they do? Should they save what could be saved? Should they accept the finality of defeat and join Maréchal Pétain, or should they fight on with the English and join the French colonel, whose name Jo could never remember but who had broadcast from London that the war was not over, that the Germans could be beaten, must be beaten and would be beaten? And all the while they waited for the prisoners-of-war to come home and they didn’t. They waited for the Germans to come and they didn’t.

‘I just want it over with, Jo,’ Maman said. ‘I want your father home. I don’t care what it takes. I want it like it was before.’ And although Grandpère did not often argue with her openly, Jo knew what he thought. ‘That Colonel in London, that De Gaulle, he’s our only hope I tell you,’ Grandpère had told him. ‘Him and the English. I don’t like the English, never have done, but at least they’re fighting the Germans and anyone who is fighting them is a friend of France, that’s how I see it. And I should know, Jo, I fought them before, remember? We beat them then and we’ll beat them again. We’ve got to. There’ll be nothing left for you or for any of us if we don’t.’ What Jo thought about the war and about the occupation seemed to depend on whether he had just talked to Maman or to Grandpère: he could never make up his mind.

Jo thought often of Papa as he sat on his rock watching the sheep. He had missed him at first, the loudness of him about the house and the smell of him when he came in from work; but now as time passed he was enjoying his new role as the man about the house. He enjoyed sitting in Papa’s chair at the kitchen table and doing Papa’s work about the farm. But whether it was the war or whether it was Papa competing for his thoughts, Jo’s mind was always drawn back to the bear cub and the man he’d met in the woods on the day of the bear hunt. He had to know who he was, what he was hiding from and why he was waiting for Anya. Every passing day only intensified his longing to go back up to the Widow Horcada’s farm to find out what was going on and to see the bear cub again. But there was always work to be done, farm work, school work. It was difficult to get away – that was what he told himself anyway.

Grandpère took the sheep to the high pastures that summer. Jo was still too young, Maman said, to do it on his own and she didn’t want him missing any more school. ‘You only get your learning once,’ she said, and besides she needed him at home – there was the bracken to cut and to turn, or the hay to make; and at weekends there were the supplies to be taken up to Grandpère in the mountains and the cheeses brought back to be salted, stored and sold. The work was long and hard, but if Jo was honest with himself – and as time passed he had to be – he knew the work was an excuse. The fact was that he could not summon up the courage to go back to Widow Horcada’s farm. Every time he had seen her coming he’d hidden from her; and the one time he couldn’t avoid her, when she’d come into the grocer’s shop, he’d run out without buying what he went in there for. He hadn’t even dared to look her in the eye to see if she recognised him as the boy peering in through her window that evening.

Time and again he had looked up the hillside towards her farmhouse and had seen the Widow Horcada out in her fields, making her hay, milking her cow or driving her pigs, but there’d been no sign of anyone else. He was beginning to think he had imagined the whole thing.

Then one blustery Autumn day, after the sheep had come down from the pastures and he was spreading out the bracken for their bedding in the barn, he saw Widow Horcada scurrying past, black scarf over her head, flowers in her hand. He knew she’d be making for the churchyard to put flowers on her husband’s grave. She’d stop to do her shopping on the way back, she always did. Jo knew he had a clear half hour to get up there and back: he could do it if he hurried. She’d never see him, not if he was careful. Rouf tried to come with him as he always did. He shut him in the barn and shouted to Maman that he wouldn’t be long.

He kept under the cover of the trees as long as he could. From there he could see without being seen. Her pigs were foraging in the field below the house and the cow was lying curled asleep in the middle of them. There was no one about. He threw caution to the wind because he had to – there was no time for anything else. He hared across the field until he reached the safety of the barn wall where he knew he could not be seen from the house. He ran around the back of the barn and into the courtyard behind. There was no sound except for the contented grunting of rooting pigs. He was creeping past the barn door when he heard something shuffling around inside. The bear cub, it must be the bear cub.

He looked about him and then opened the door slowly. Like all the barns it was long and low and dark, with bracken on the floor and hay in the wooden rack that ran the length of the wall. But there was no bear cub, and no other animals either. Yet he was sure he’d heard something, quite sure. He pushed the door wide open so as to throw as much light as possible down the barn. There was one small dirty window at the far end, and the shutters were banging open and shut, first one and then the other. Jo peered into the darkness. He would go no further. He could see well enough from the doorway. He was turning to go when he trod on something. He bent down and picked up a shoe, a child’s shoe. The strap was broken. He thought little of it at first. He would have dropped it and left had he not heard the breathing – a regular wheezing breathing.

It came quite definitely from the hayrack about halfway down the barn. Jo took a few steps towards it and the breathing stopped. He thought of the bear cub and of the hibernation Monsieur Audap had told them about, but he thought that it couldn’t be the bear cub because it wasn’t winter yet and anyway a bear cub would hardly be sleeping in a hayrack – but then perhaps it would. He took a few more tentative steps forward and peered into the hay. The breathing began again a little further on and quite suddenly he found himself not looking at hay at all but at two eyes that stared back at him unblinking and terrified. Jo could do nothing for a moment but stare back into them. They were not the eyes of a bear for the face that went with them was pale and thin under a fringe of dark hair.

Jo backed away slowly, swallowing his fear. He had the presence of mind to close the door quietly and it was just as well he did for across the yard Widow Horcada was bent over, holding a bucket under an outdoor tap. She had her back to him and was humming quietly to herself. For a few moments he stood looking at her disbelieving. How could she be back so soon? It wasn’t possible. Yet there she was in front of him. She had only to turn round. It was just a few steps to the corner of the barn and safety. He’d make it if he could move silently. Without taking his eyes off her he began to inch his way along the wall.

He knew he should have looked where he was going. He told himself so as the fork he blundered into clattered to the ground. Jo looked at the Widow Horcada, the bucket fell out of her hand as the black shawl swung round. Jo dropped the shoe, stumbled over the fork and ran and ran. He rounded the corner of the barn, but there he was stopped in his tracks, for up the hill, a large basket in one hand, a stick in the other, came Widow Horcada. She looked up, saw him and shouted at him. He could not hear what she was saying. Jo turned again and ran back into the yard – it was the only way he could go. She was there too and coming towards him. He looked now from one to the other. Fear crept up his spine like a warm cat and he felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. Never in all his life had he felt like screaming until this moment. He wanted to but he could not. And then one of them spoke, the one striding across the yard towards him.

‘It’s me.’ It was a man’s voice. ‘It’s me.’ And he pulled the shawl off his head. The red beard was longer than Jo remembered but it was the same man. ‘Don’t you remember me?’ he said.

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