Not Like The Rest
'Pas comme les autres…' She'd heard it said, of course, Maria considered, thinking, once again, back to the night before. The lieutenant had played the piano in the café, far better than Monsieur Leclerc to her mind, and she'd wished she could have joined the young soldiers gathered round to listen. Obviously, he wasn't Rene, but Maria was captivated all the same.
She knew what everyone thought, that all the feminine smiles and glances she threw his way would have no effect, and had to admit it hurt, to be dismissed and ignored in a way that almost never happened around men, but she still liked to cling to some hope that it was just shyness, or a bad experience in the past, that someday, he'd see that women weren't so bad…or maybe just her.
Once, he'd had cause to catch her in his arms, holding her surprisingly strongly and smelling of foreign cigarettes and cognac, warm wool and engine oil. It was one of the happiest moments of her life, and it confused Maria that she should have felt it with one of the 'enemy'. She should hate him, if he wanted to, he could have her shot, with no more than a click of his fingers, but she couldn't.
Maria would listen, attentively, to his conversations with Rene, alternating hanging on his every word and hurt by the barely concealed flirtation in his voice. How any man could be drawn to another was something she struggled to understand, and her priest would no doubt say such a man was going straight to Hell, but if there was one thing her other activities with men over the years had taught her, it was that preferences in such matters were seldom straightforward.
There were those that were still deeply in love with their wives and sweethearts far away, for whom she was nothing more than a moment's pleasure, a respite from the dangers they faced, those who would take all they could get, and those who merely liked to watch, and were happy to pay for the privilege. She smiled then, wondering if they ever guessed that she thought of the young lieutenant sometimes (Rene too, of course), when she was working, to help put on the show…probably not. Men always liked to think they were the only ones to make the woman they were with feel that way.
She'd never met a man like him, and he'd never (unfortunately) had need of her services – not that he'd ever have needed to pay for them. Listening to conversations about the paintings with Rene, and to a lesser extent with the other Germans, Maria had picked up that the lieutenant was not really a soldier (although he really suited that uniform, very well), but an artist. His talents these days appeared to be limited to producing forgeries of the Fallen Madonna, but Maria understood such ambitions, having buried her own deep inside. When she was a little girl, occasionally the nuns would show the works of Monet and Cezanne, and she would marvel at the line and colour used, and dream of one day creating her own.
For an impoverished young girl in rural France though, such things were likely to remain dreams, certainly now. She'd lost her parents at a young age, and having left the orphanage found only a limited number of options available to her, which as it happened, she could do rather well. It didn't stop her imagining though, how life could be, if only one man was free to marry as he wished, or another could be made to understand that women had their charms, peasant or not.
Maria sighed then, and leaned on the bar. They'd be opening soon. Maybe he'd be in tonight, and while she knew she may well be wasting her time, thought of the perfume the Colonel had paid with last time. Maybe that would do the trick…