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‘Coffee?’ he offered.
Sabine realised he was probably stalling, as he looked nervous enough, but she was tired, and hadn’t been sleeping much since she found out her mother was adopted. She looked down at her feet, and saw that she had put on two different shoes. She closed her eyes in embarrassment; she’d been in such a flap at the idea of coming here and finding out about her biological grandmother. She’d found it impossible to fall asleep and when she did at last, just before dawn, she woke up ten minutes before she was supposed to meet the bookseller. Hence her dishevelled appearance. ‘A coffee would be great, thank you,’ she said gratefully.
‘Milk, sugar?’
‘Just black, thanks.’
He nodded.
As Monsieur Géroux made the coffee, she looked around the shop. The dog went to make himself comfortable in the window on a cushion and she followed to give him a scratch behind his ear. His fur was a mixture between soft and wiry.
‘What’s his name – the dog?’ she called.
‘Tapis.’
She smiled. He looked a bit like an old carpet. It didn’t diminish her affection for him, which grew with every moment that he stared at her with his rum-coloured eyes, lifting a paw to invite her to carry on patting him.
When Monsieur Géroux brought the coffee, he snorted. ‘I see you have yourself another victim, Tapis,’ he said. ‘He has a bit of a fan club.’
Sabine smiled. ‘Well, I’m definitely in it now.’
Monsieur Géroux was staring at her. ‘I almost didn’t phone you,’ he admitted.
Somehow that didn’t surprise her, considering how wary he appeared at first. She was sorry for that, though, for putting him through this. But he was her only chance to find out what really happened.
‘I can imagine. I mean it. I really do appreciate you taking the time to speak to me. It can’t be easy to talk about.’
‘No,’ he admitted, with a deep sigh. ‘Other than the authorities, I don’t think I’ve ever really told anyone, apart from my wife and even then, there were parts I left out.’
‘Oh, you’re married?’
‘I was, she passed away five years ago.’
‘I’m sorry.’
He nodded. Took a sip of his coffee. ‘Thank you.’
‘I can’t imagine what it must have been like, going through the Occupation. My own grandparents – adopted grandparents,’ she corrected with a grimace, ‘barely spoke of it. But I remember how my grandmother always used to speak of the change in my grandfather, after he came home.’
Monsieur Géroux nodded. ‘A lot of the men were like that – the ones who came home, they weren’t the same people who’d gone off to war. It can’t help but change you. But then the ones left behind were hit just as hard, in other ways, and we changed too.’
He looked up at the ceiling and then made a funny sound, like a snort.
‘What?’
‘I’ll never forget the day they marched into our city, these strangers, with their uniforms and cold faces, declaring our city theirs, while the government left us to fend for ourselves. Many of our friends left, but we had nowhere to go. We were prisoners in our own homes, every freedom we had taken for granted changed, as we now answered to them. When I met Marianne, she was the only source of light for me during that time.’
Sabine blinked. Shocked.
He nodded, scrubbing his face with his hands. ‘See, that’s one of the reasons it’s hard to speak about.’ His lips trembled. ‘I liked Marianne. She was older than me, probably a good ten years, but she was full of life. The world for me had gone grey but it was like she was in colour. I was living with my mother at the time, who was very ill and my little brother, Henri…’ he closed his eyes and his lips trembled as he said his name, ‘who was a handful, rebellious… and it fell on me to take care of us all. See, my father was off fighting, one of the poor unlucky souls sent to defend one of the lesser-protected borders near the Ardennes Forest, which the Germans, to everyone’s shock, used to enter France. He was killed on the fifth day of their invasion, so we were told. So few men were there to put up a real fight. It was thought that the Germans would use the highly defended Maginot Line and that there was no other real route to France. It is a mistake that in many ways cost us the war.
‘By the time Paris was occupied in June 1940, we had grown poor – about as poor as you could be back then, without actually starving, no one had money or interest in antiquarian books back then, and we were forced to close. This was my father’s,’ he explained, waving a hand to indicate the shop, ‘before it was mine. Like many others, I was grief-stricken and hungry, and finding it hard to have anything close to hope at a better future, until I met her.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Fourteen. Too young to enlist but old enough to feel like I wanted to fight – to do something. But times were tough, I couldn’t just abandon my brother and mother to go fight, I had to try to make a living, to do my duty and carry the family, like my father would have wanted. I answered an advertisement for a kitchen-boy-cum-handyman, and that’s when I met her. Your grandmother, Marianne. She held the interview herself, in an empty building around the corner from my home that she was trying to get permission to convert into a restaurant.’
Sabine stared and then suddenly gasped in realisation. ‘She opened the restaurant during the Occupation?’
