Paris Never Leaves You

by Ellen Feldman

  “What’s that?” Charlotte asked.

  “A magazine article. I thought it might interest you. It sounds a lot like the stories you tell about playing in the Luxembourg Gardens when you were little, and having an English nanny, and all that.”

  Charlotte wiped her hands, took the piece, and skimmed through it again. She felt Vivi’s eyes on her as she read. “Interesting.” She handed it back to Vivi and returned to the cutting board.

  “She sounds a lot like you, right?” Vivi insisted.

  “Her childhood sounds similar to mine, if that’s what you mean.”

  “More than that. She needed Hitler to teach her she was a Jew, too.”

  The paring knife nicked her nail but didn’t pierce the skin. “Is that a taunt?”

  Vivi shrugged. “You send me to a good school to learn reading comprehension.”

  That was a taunt, but Charlotte decided to let it go.

  “Where did you get it, anyway?”

  “Aunt Hannah. She clipped it from a magazine. She said it raises some interesting questions I ought to be thinking about. She said I’m at an age when I’m wrestling with my identity.”

  “Doesn’t sound like much of a wrestling match to me. You’re Vivienne Gabrielle Foret, French born, American bred, New York City situated, Endicott School educated, and one extremely nice girl, in my humble opinion, and lots of other people’s, too.”

  “And Jewish. You forgot Jewish.”

  “And Jewish,” Charlotte conceded and slid the garlic into the skillet.

  Nine

  As the Germans begin to suffer military reversals in Russia and North Africa, they turn crueler and more sullen. The French become more fearful but also more defiant. Paris is a tinderbox. A slight incident can turn into a confrontation, a confrontation into a bloodbath. Twenty hostages, chosen indiscriminately, are shot in exchange for one German murdered by the Resistance. Examples must be made. Though executions are no longer public, as they were in the beginning of the Occupation when nine Resistance fighters were guillotined on the grounds of La Santé Prison, posters announcing them become as chillingly common as advertisements for plays and concerts and exhibitions. The singing of “La Marseillaise,” forbidden by both the German and the Vichy regimes, can be heard more often, especially from the trucks carrying the condemned to the killing grounds. The forbidden word “boche” is whispered a little louder and more often. The rumor mill cranks up. The gendarmes snatch a three-year-old girl—Vivi’s age, Charlotte thinks when she hears the story—from the gentile family who took her in when her parents were arrested, intern her at the Pithiviers camp, and put her on a transport to the east alone, if you can call being packed into cattle cars with 999 other human beings alone. A woman in the Twentieth Arrondissement throws her two children out the window to save them from a slower, more torturous death. In some accounts of the incident, the arrondissement is different and there are three or four children. Perhaps this is embellishment or perhaps more mothers are resorting to the unthinkable. The roundups accelerate. The Germans and the gendarmes cordon off neighborhoods, block Metro entrances, and snare the inhabitants like animals in a net. Occasionally a sympathetic gentile will try to help. A policeman cautions Jewish acquaintances not to go out on a certain day for fear of being arrested on the street. A concierge tips off her Jewish residents not to stay home because the building is to be raided. Which chance do they take? A woman who lives in an apartment building that opens onto the same courtyard as the bookshop is rumored to be taking in Jewish children whose parents have been deported. Charlotte doesn’t know if the story is true and doesn’t try to find out. The less you know these days, the safer you are. But once she looks up at the flat from the courtyard and sees three pairs of eyes just above the sill, wide and staring and, it seems to her, terrified. A curtain closes quickly.

  French men, and women, fight back. Grenades fly, at a hotel appropriated by the Germans near the Havre-Caumartin Metro station, at a restaurant reserved for Wehrmacht officers, at a military patrol crossing the rue de Courcelles, at a car carrying Kriegsmarine officers. One after another, trains leaving the Gare de l’Est on their way to Germany and who knows where beyond are derailed. The general responsible for drafting Frenchmen between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two for forced labor in the Reich is assassinated. Closer to home for Charlotte, a hollowed-out copy of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, stuffed with dynamite, is left on a table in the collabo bookstore, Rive-Gauche. Destruction of books is no longer the tactic of only one side.

  Combustible as the city is, the German officer continues to visit the shop and bring food. He does not seem troubled by the turning tide of German fortunes, but then perhaps the tide is not turning as dramatically as the French want to think. Vivi, who has grown accustomed to his presence, tugs on his hand or trouser leg as he stands paging through books. At first Charlotte tries to stop her, but he says he enjoys her attentions. “She reminds me of my sister when she was little.” She ignores the comment. He probably doesn’t even have a sister, despite the lines he quoted from Winnie-the-Pooh. One afternoon, he takes a book from a shelf and carries it to the old leather chair. She thinks of it as the professor’s chair, but she cannot stop him from sitting in it. She’s not even sure she wants to in view of the fact that he sat there when he gave Vivi the bottle. Perhaps some part of Vivi remembers, because she climbs into his lap and curls up quietly, her head against the rough cloth of his despised uniform. Can a child that young miss a father she has never known?

  * * *

  She decides to sleep in the shop that night. She has begun to do that more and more often. She is not the only one. Half of Paris is sleeping in the wrong place these days. It has nothing to do with sex, only with survival. When the roundups started, Jewish men began leaving their families just before the curfew, though that is constantly changing, to spend the night elsewhere so they would not be at home when the gendarmes or, less often, the Germans came to arrest them. Now that they’re taking away women and children as well, whole families split up each evening and head for what they pray are different safe houses. Sometimes Charlotte thinks about the choice. Is it preferable to suffer and perhaps perish together or to hope that at least one member of the family will survive?

  She has her own reasons for sleeping in the room behind the shop. The rear wheel of her bicycle has been patched so many times it is beyond repair. With no automobiles or petrol, the Metro is packed, and since the Germans close down lines and stations at will, or is it whim, the trains are likely to land her and Vivi in some distant and unknown part of the city. The blackout makes walking treacherous. The handful of automobiles that remain must shroud their headlights with a blue material so effective that the only way a driver knows a pedestrian is there is the thud and shudder of car and body colliding. Even if she could use a flashlight to light the way, batteries are impossible to get. Besides, the flat is no more comfortable than the shop and certainly no warmer. When she and Vivi are there, they live in the kitchen, close to the stove, leaving it only to race to bed and huddle beneath the eiderdown quilts. They are not the only ones. She has heard of people shrinking their eight- and ten- and twelve-room apartments to one small barricaded chamber. The back room of the shop is like a cave, shielded from the wind by the courtyard, warmed by a furnace pipe that goes through a cramped closet under the eaves, when there is fuel for the furnace. The sofa is perfectly adequate for one person, she has a small cot for Vivi, and she doesn’t have to sit in the dark all night because of the blackout. The windows in her flat are tall, and the light escapes even when she tries to cover them with blankets. The week before, when one of the blankets slipped, the gendarmes spotted the light, and the concierge, who has a bad leg, came clomping up the stairs to reprimand her for getting the entire building in trouble. Here, she can close the door to the front of the shop, cover the single small window in back with a heavy curtain, and read in the light from a small lamp, if there is electricity. She can also put her ear a
gainst the radio and listen to the forbidden BBC. It’s propaganda, but superior to the propaganda the German Radio-Paris and the collabo Radio-Vichy broadcast. She doesn’t feel safe in the shop. Where in Paris can anyone feel safe these days? But she feels easier. Until the sounds wake her.

  At first she thinks the rustling is coming from animals in the night. Cats and dogs that have been abandoned by owners who can no longer feed them, but not yet eaten by starving city dwellers, prowl the courtyard after dark. Rats scuttle. Mice race through the shop. But as she lies there listening to the sound, she realizes it isn’t coming from the courtyard or the building. It’s more distant and more mechanical.

  She turns on her side to make sure Vivi is all right. Innocent and fed, thanks to the German officer, she sleeps a deep childish sleep. Charlotte lifts her arm to look at her wristwatch, but it is too dark to make out the time. She tells herself again that the sound is only stray cats and dogs turned feral by starvation and rotates onto her other side, hoping for sleep. Sometimes she is so exhausted by the cold and hunger and struggle for survival that she falls unconscious as soon as she puts her head on the pillow. Sometimes the worry and horror of that struggle keep her up half the night.

  The sound is getting louder now, closer, and more violent. Even animals turning over trash cans or fighting or howling at the moon do not send up so much noise. She makes out the growling of trucks; then the engines go silent. She thinks of getting up and creeping to the front of the shop to see what’s going on, but she fears she will be asking for trouble. The shop is closed. No one knows they’re here.

  Some sort of heavy equipment is being dragged over pavement and cobblestones. Perhaps this is what war sounds like. If the city is going to be a battle zone, should she take Vivi and run or stay and hide?

  She decides to get out of bed after all, and quietly, moving slowly on bare feet, careful to avoid bumping into things, she makes her way through the darkness of the shop. As she gets closer to the window, she drops to her knees, crawls the last few feet, and, keeping her head down, peers out into the street. Soldiers and policemen are setting up barricades. Some are mounting machine guns. They’re all heavily armed. Do they need that much force to round up Jews?

  Again she thinks of grabbing Vivi and fleeing. She knows every street and alley of the neighborhood, and they’ve only begun putting up the barricades. She will find a way out. But again the uncertainty sets in. Are they in less danger out on the street or hiding here? She crawls back to the room behind the shop. Vivi is still asleep. She sits on the sofa and tries to think. She and Vivi have nothing to fear. Their papers are in order. She remembers the clock set to French time, the banned book written by a Jew about a Jew, the documents Simone carried as a courier when she flirted with the Germans on the train. Simone was careful not to tell her what she was up to, and she refused to ask, but that doesn’t mean the Germans are similarly uninformed. Collabos are everywhere, eager to swap information for food or cigarettes or their own skin, keen to prove their patriotism to the newly purified France by turning in the dregs of the old. Minutely detailed dossiers, kept with German precision, fill drawer after drawer of official file cabinets. Even formerly slipshod gendarmes, inspired by the example of their German masters and their own anti-Semitism, have become more efficient. And if there is no reason for an arrest, one can always be drummed up. Simone was sent to Drancy not for couriering forbidden papers, or even failing to wear a star, but for attaching her star improperly. On the other hand, she reminds herself again, no one knows she is here. The shop is closed. They will assume it’s empty. But perhaps they will assume nothing. They are thorough, these Germans.

  She makes out the noise of running boots. No, the roar of running boots. There are too many of them to distinguish individual steps. Voices are shouting in French and German. At one end of the street they’re ordering people to come out; at the other they’re warning people to stay inside. Oh, they’re methodical, all right. They will go from house to house, taking their time, making sure not to miss anyone.

  Suddenly light pours into the room. It is so intense that even the blackout curtain cannot dim it. The courtyard is bright as day. No, whiter than day. It is scalding. They must have set up searchlights. She’d thought darkness made the world more threatening, but the searing glare of illumination blinds her into helplessness. Even if she dares to lift the curtain and look into the courtyard, she will be able to make out nothing.

  Boots are running through the courtyard, and men are shouting, and people are screaming. Vivi has begun to cry. Charlotte pulls her from her cot to the sofa and holds her close beneath the covers, pleading with her not to cry, telling her everything is all right, trying to lie her into silence, not that anyone could hear the sobs of a single child in the uproar going on outside.

  They are banging on doors, the dull thud of fists, the sharper sound of rifle butts, the crash of wood splintering. Men are shouting, and women are screaming, and children are wailing. She clutches Vivi to her and prays to a God she does not believe in. Across the courtyard a scream rises to the sky, then ends suddenly with a thud. It takes her a moment to interpret the sounds. Someone has been pushed from a window, or jumped.

  Another door crashes. It is so close it must be the boulangerie next door. She has told herself they won’t bother with shops at this hour. That is why they come before dawn, to catch people at home, barely awake, still undressed, vulnerable. She reassures herself that a boulangerie is different. The workers will already be at their jobs. She can see her watch in the glare from the courtyard. It says five o’clock. That means it’s four o’clock here. She has become such a coward that she keeps her watch as well as the clock in the shop set to German time.

  In the courtyard, the high-pitched scream of a child makes her clutch Vivi closer. It stops suddenly. A woman begins to wail. Again Charlotte interprets the sequence.

  The banging has moved closer. They are at the door to the bookshop. If she doesn’t open it, they will shatter the glass and force their way in. She clutches Vivi to her. Once again her mind races back and forth between the options. The closet in the corner under the eave, the one warmed by the furnace pipe, is barely noticeable. But barely is not good enough. They will see it. If she and Vivi are found hiding, that will mean they have something to hide. Perhaps it is better to cooperate. She will open the door, they will storm in and demand her papers, she will produce them, and they will move on to the next flat or shop. But it does not work that way. In the years since they marched in, she has witnessed her share of confrontations and roundups. She has seen the intoxicating effects. The more they shout and bully, kick and club, the more they want to. It is bloodlust. It cannot be stopped, only spent.

  Suddenly the banging on the door ceases. The shouting in the courtyard continues, but the front of the shop has gone quiet. Even Vivi has stopped crying and is listening.

  Charlotte puts her on her cot, places her finger over her lips to warn her to be quiet, and creeps again to the front of the shop. Through the glass, she sees the back of a Wehrmacht officer and three gendarmes facing him. Even without seeing his face she knows the officer is her officer. She can’t hear what he’s saying, but she can see the way the gendarmes are listening. They nod, look from one to another, nod again, and move off.

  The officer goes on standing in front of the shop. Another group of gendarmes approaches. Whatever he tells them works again. They move on. This end of the street has quieted. Even the noise in the courtyard is dying. Now the racket comes from the buses parked beyond the barricades. People are screaming and crying and begging. She moves closer to the door. The officer is still blockading it. As she crouches there watching him, he takes a few steps into the street. It is littered with the shards of lives, torn from hands in rage, dropped in terror—hats and shoes, a woman’s handbag, a framed photograph, a string bag of food. He bends, picks up a child’s teddy bear, brushes it off, stands holding it for a moment, then crosses to the other side of the street
and props it against the building. He comes back and knocks softly on the door. “Madame Foret,” he whispers.

  She stands, makes her way to the door, and opens it a crack. He slips in and closes it behind him.

  “How did you know I was here?” she whispers.

  “Vivi tells me her secrets. She says you often spend the night here. When I heard about the roundup…” His voice trails off.

  “Thank you.”

  “Are your papers any good?”

  “Do you mean are they in order?”

  “I mean are they good forgeries.”

  “They’re not forgeries.”

  He stands staring at her. “You still do not trust me.”

  Before she can answer, she hears boots crunching toward them in the street again. This time the shouting is in German. This is Wehrmacht or Gestapo, not gendarmes.

  “Go to the back,” he whispers. “And keep Vivi quiet.” He slips out the door and closes it behind him.

  In the back room, Vivi is sitting up on her cot, her eyes wide, the whites shining with fear. She starts to ask what’s happening. Charlotte shushes her and takes her on her lap. She starts to ask again, her voice rising. Charlotte puts her hand over her daughter’s mouth. “It’s a game,” she whispers in her ear.

  Vivi shakes her head and tries to pull away. Charlotte holds her tighter. “It’s hide-and-seek,” she whispers.

  Vivi knows it is not a game, but she also knows her mother means business. She stops wriggling. Charlotte hears the bell over the door. He has let them in. You still don’t trust me, he’d said. She was beginning to, but now she wonders.

  She sits listening to the voices in German. The men he has let in—she can’t tell how many; at least two, she thinks from the conversation—say they have to search the premises. He tells them he already has. “There’s no one here,” he insists. “It’s a shop, closed for the night.”