Paris Never Leaves You

by Ellen Feldman

  They demand to know who he is. He insists on their credentials. It would be ludicrous, a comedy sketch, if it weren’t so terrifying.

  One after another, the lights are going out in the courtyard. The darkness should make it easier to hide, though she can’t imagine where.

  She hears them pushing past him, listens to the creaking of the old wooden floor as they move through the shop. She has left the door to the back room open a crack to listen. She doesn’t dare get up to close it. Carrying Vivi, taking one step at a time, she walks to the small closet. The door squeaks as she opens it, but their loud voices and heavy boots drown out the sound. As she closes the door to the closet behind her, she hears them entering the back room. There is a shelf a third of the way up the wall, another toward the top. The wood is old and fragile. For the first time she is grateful for the hunger that has ruined her figure and turned her into little more than bones. Using the first shelf as a step, carrying Vivi in one arm, she manages to climb to the top shelf. She pulls her legs up after her and puts her hand over Vivi’s mouth again.

  They are moving about the back room. One of the men mentions the bedclothes on the sofa and cot. The officer, her officer, explains they were left behind when the gendarmes arrested the inhabitants in the sweep through the area.

  Boots move, stop, move again, come to a halt in front of the closet. The knob on the door turns. The door opens. She forces herself not to move, not to try to make herself smaller. She holds her breath in the darkness. The door closes. The boots move away, across the room, into the shop. The bell over the door jingles, then goes silent. She wonders if it’s a trick. She doesn’t dare come out to see.

  Vivi tries to twist her face away from her mother’s restraining hand. Charlotte holds her tight. Her small body squirms. Charlotte’s grip is like a vise.

  A single pair of boots enters the room. Then there is silence. He must be looking around. The sound approaches the closet. The door opens. He squints into the darkness, then holds up his arms for Vivi. She hands her daughter to him.

  Still holding Vivi in one arm, he reaches up to help Charlotte down. For a moment they are pressed against each other in the cramped closet. He steps back to let her out, carries Vivi to the cot, and puts her down. Charlotte follows him, covers the child, strokes the hair back from her forehead, tells her what a good girl she has been. Vivi lies there looking up at both of them. Charlotte sees the terror begin to drain from her daughter’s eyes. Then he does something extraordinary, more extraordinary, she thinks, than interceding for them. He sits down on the side of the cot and begins to sing. Vivi doesn’t recognize the words—he is singing in German—but she knows the tune. Brahms’s lullaby. His voice is thin and a little flat, but Vivi doesn’t seem to mind. Her eyelids begin to droop. He comes to the end. Vivi’s eyes open. “Again,” she says, and her voice is childishly imperious, no longer frightened but demanding. He begins to sing again. By the time he finishes the second time, she is asleep. Who is this man?

  “Thank you,” Charlotte says for the second time that night. She is whispering, but he nods toward the shop and leads the way to the front room.

  The world is dark and silent again. They have taken the lights from the courtyard. The buses and trucks have rolled off. The quiet is eerie. It is, suddenly, a ghost neighborhood, except for the occasional clatter of running feet. She remembers her own plan of escape earlier that night and thinks it’s the sound of people fleeing, then realizes it’s probably the first wave of looters, rampaging through the abandoned apartments, taking anything of value, and some things that are not. The opportunistic greed is not unlike the bloodlust. Once people start they cannot stop.

  A police car careens down the street. The siren is silent, but the headlights rake the shop. He shoves her into the alcove in the back of the shop, behind the old leather chair. It is too late for that car, but if another comes through, all they will see is the back of a Wehrmacht uniform.

  They go on standing that way, her backed against the shelves of children’s books, him looming over her, waiting. After a time, she has no idea how long, she starts to slide away from him, but he puts a hand on her shoulder to stop her.

  “There may be more,” he says, but she can tell from his voice that he’s not thinking of police cars. She feels the roughness of his beard against her forehead, then his mouth moving toward hers. She tells herself to move away, but she can’t. The lurch in the pit of her stomach is too familiar, and too insistent. She is ashamed. She is shameless. She has no will, but her body does. It is fighting back to life. She feels herself sinking against him and lifts her face to his. He is unbuttoning the sweater she has taken to sleeping in, then reaching inside her nightdress. She manages to stifle her moan, but she has no control over her hands. They are undoing his tunic, pulling off the hated uniform. She begins to tremble again. It is the terror of the night, and the release, and the touch of skin. Oh, how she has missed the touch of skin. It’s that memory, the feel of Laurent’s skin, that stops her. She twists away, pulls her nightdress up over her breasts, hugs her sweater to her. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to.

  He stands looking down at her. Only his eyes are visible in the darkness. She expected anger. She sees sorrow.

  He buttons his tunic, tugs it into place, turns and starts for the door. His boots squeak on the wooden floor. His shadow ghosts through the darkness. He reaches the door. The bell shatters the silence. And something in her.

  She is across the shop. “Julian.” It is the first time she has spoken his name.

  Later, the shame will return. How could she make love to the enemy? The enemy lover. It is unconscionable. She is unconscionable. But all that will come later. She straddles him in the chair. The chair makes it worse, she will think later, but not now. Arms and legs gripping, mouth hungry, body and spirit starving from years of loneliness and fear and denial. Driven by the same loneliness and hunger and, though she doesn’t know it at the time, an even more insistent fear and shame, he rises into her. They are locked together, mouth to mouth, skin to skin, prick to cunt. By the time they finish—no, they will never finish—by the time they stop, the windows of the shop are turning gray with the dawn and a thin finger of light reveals the street littered with the detritus of last night’s raid. The sight is like a slap to her soul. She climbs off him, turns away from the sight, pulls on her nightdress, slips into her sweater, and buttons it. He is still sitting in the chair, that chair. She wants to pull him out of it and hurl him into the street. It is not only that someone might pass and see them. It is her own horror at what she has done. The words “enemy lover,” so erotically charged in the darkness, now give off a sordid stench.

  She picks the pile of his clothes up off the floor and holds them out to him. He takes them from her and stands. That’s when she sees. It had been too dark and she had been too hungry to notice before. Now, in the gray light and the cold glare of her conscience, she notices. He is not like Laurent. Laurent’s penis was smooth. Her hand curls at the memory of it. His penis has a ridge around it near the tip.

  His eyes follow hers. “As a child, I had an infection,” he explains.

  She turns away. They are strangers again. No, they are enemies again. She wants no confidences.

  She tells him to hurry. He finishes dressing and takes a step toward her. She moves away, crosses the shop to the door, and opens it. He follows her, puts his hand on the door, and closes it.

  “I do not want to lie to you. I cannot lie to you.”

  She doesn’t know what he’s talking about. They spoke no words of love. They spoke no words at all. And if he had tried to say he loved her, she would have stopped him.

  “I had no childhood infection. That is the story I keep ready for the other officers and doctors. In case they ask.”

  She doesn’t know what he’s talking about. She doesn’t want to know. She reaches for the door again. He holds it closed.

  “I am a Jew.”

  The hatred
for him rises in her again. “That’s not funny.”

  “I am serious. I am a Jew.”

  She stands staring at him. “You’re a Nazi soldier.”

  “I am a German soldier. A Jewish German soldier.”

  She shakes her head. “That’s impossible.”

  “There are thousands of us. Mostly half-Jews, but plenty of one hundred percent Jews like me.”

  “Just leave. Please,” she says, and walks away from him to the other end of the shop.

  He follows her. “I was drafted before the war. Then in 1940, the order came down that all Jews, even half-Jews and those married to Jews, must turn themselves in.”

  “In that case, why are you still in that uniform?”

  “Some did turn themselves in. I had one fortunate friend whose commanding officer said he was a good soldier and simply managed to lose his papers.”

  “Now I understand. You’re such a model soldier that you’re invaluable to the Reich?”

  “Please do not make fun of me. I am trying to explain. I have to tell someone.”

  Not me, she wants to scream but knows she has no right to, not after the act she committed in that chair, perhaps not since before that.

  “I had another colleague who followed the order, went to his commanding officer, and told him he was a Jew.”

  “And was he forgiven, too?”

  “His commanding officer took out his service revolver and shot him in the head. After that I decided the wisest thing to do was ignore the order and go on as I was, but even more carefully. My commanding officer at the time was not a model of Germanic efficiency. He drank too much. Somehow, several papers in my file disappeared. And one new one appeared. It is called an Ahnenpass. That is an ancestors’ passport that the Nazis dreamed up. It proves Aryan heritage. Mine is a very good forgery. If you are important enough, the Führer takes care of the matter himself. He declared Field Marshal Erhard Milch, who is half Jewish, an Aryan. But I am too insignificant for that. After I took care of the matter of my papers, I came up with the story of the childhood infection.”

  “Do you really expect me to believe this?”

  He stands inches away, holding her gaze. “It is all true.”

  “So you just went on serving in Hitler’s army, helping to kill other Jews.”

  “I have killed no Jews.”

  “What about the professor?”

  “What about you and the child tonight?”

  “My daughter and I aren’t Jewish.”

  He shook his head. “I trust you with my secret, but you still do not trust me,” he said again.

  “I don’t know if I trust you or not. How can I trust a Nazi soldier—”

  “I told you, I am not a Nazi.”

  “—a German soldier who says he is a Jew? All I know is that I’m not a Jew.”

  “But your sister, Madame Halevy.”

  “Simone isn’t my sister.”

  He backs up, sits on the tall three-legged stool, and begins to laugh. It’s a nervous ragged sound, closer to hysteria than mirth. “Now do you believe that I am not a Nazi? I cannot even tell a Jew from a gentile.”

  She goes on staring at him. She is finally beginning to believe him. “But I still don’t understand how you can go through with it.”

  “How I can go through with it? Think about it. In the Third Reich, where is the safest place for a Jew? If I were not in the Wehrmacht, I would be in a camp.” She watches his face change. He is no longer laughing. “Like my parents and sister. If they are still alive.”

  She doesn’t know if she blames him or pities him, hates him or loves him. All she knows is there is enough shame to go around.

  Ten

  She scrawled her initials on the mock-up of a book jacket, put it in her out-box, and stood. The office was silent. On the desks in the large common area beyond her cubicle, the secretaries’ typewriters dozed under their black plastic covers. Around the perimeter, the offices and cubicles were dark. She rarely got to stay late at the office, but tonight she’d taken advantage of the fact that it was Friday and Vivi had a sleepover at Alice’s with two other girls. She liked being the last one in the office, not only the feeling of accomplishment that came with cleaning up her desk but the eerie solitude. She’d had similar sensations some nights in the shop on the rue Toullier. She couldn’t be certain she was alone. Someone might be lurking back in advertising or publicity. A cleaning woman could be working her way toward the editorial offices. Nonetheless, the sensation of being on a desert island surrounded by a sea of books was heady. Everywhere she looked, there were boxes of new books smelling of ink and hope, and shelves of old award winners and bestsellers radiating dignity and success, and stacks of galleys waiting nervously to be sent out to reviewers. It was a world of infinite adventure, experienced at a safe and painless distance.

  She put a manuscript in her briefcase, slipped into her coat, and started down the hall toward the elevators. The light was on in Horace’s office. It hadn’t been visible from her cubicle, but she’d been right. She wasn’t alone. She wondered if he’d been waiting for her, then decided that was ridiculous. The man ran a publishing house. He had work to do.

  “People who are trying to sneak past the boss shouldn’t wear high heels that click like goddamn castanets.”

  She stopped in the door to his office. “I’m not trying to sneak past the boss. I’m showing off for burning the midnight oil.”

  “In that case, get yourself in here.”

  She stepped into the room, slipped out of her coat, put it on one of the chairs in front of his desk, and sat in the other.

  He leaned over, opened the bottom drawer of his desk, took out a bottle of scotch and two glasses, and put them on the blotter. “My late mentor and partner, Simon Gibbon, kept a silver tray with cut crystal decanters of bourbon, rye, scotch, and gin on a breakfront in his office.”

  “Those must have been the days when publishing was a gentlemen’s profession.”

  “I resent that.”

  He poured a couple of fingers of scotch into each glass, handed her one, and gave her a smile she’d never seen before. No, that wasn’t true. She’d seen it on that tall, rangy publishing wunderkind in the picture in Publishers Weekly, the one from before the war. It was wickedly boyish.

  “I just got the damnedest call.”

  She waited.

  “Aren’t you going to ask from whom about what?”

  “If I ask, you’ll just make me work harder to pull it out of you. I figure silence will do the trick.”

  “No one likes a smart aleck. From Newsweek. They got wind of the fact that we bought The Red Trapeze after it was banned in England and turned down all over town.”

  “Gee, I wonder how they found out.”

  “You have a Machiavellian mind.”

  “I work for the prince himself. Which eager reporter did you mention it to, in the strictest confidence, of course?”

  “A writer in the ‘culture’ department, if you’ll excuse the expression. They’re going to run a couple of columns on the publication. How we got our hands on the smuggled French edition. Whether we think it will go all the way to the Supreme Court. What makes it so shocking. We’re going to beat the censorship bastards and sell a couple of hundred thousand, make that a million, copies in the bargain. This calls for a celebration.”

  She started to say that he hadn’t won yet, but he was in such a good mood she didn’t want to ruin it. She lifted her glass toward him. “We are celebrating.”

  “Hell, this isn’t a celebration, just an evening occurrence. At least it is for me.”

  “Take Hannah out to dinner.”

  “Hannah is already engaged for dinner. Her regular Friday session with young Federman.”

  “Young Federman?”

  “You must have seen him coming and going in the house. Dashing young chap with a head of romantic, or so Hannah tells me, dark curls. She’s his training analyst. Makes her sound like a pair of wheels on t
he back of a bike, if you ask me.”

  “Okay, I’ll take you out to dinner. Where would you like to go?”

  “‘21,’ and you can’t afford it. I know how much I pay you. Besides, I don’t want to go out for dinner. I go out for dinner with writers several times a week. Even the glow of ‘21’ dims after you’ve spent enough nights there listening to unappreciated writers, or writers who think they’re not sufficiently appreciated, cry in their martinis.”

  “Then what do you want to do?”

  “Go for a ride.”

  “Is your car downstairs?”

  “For Christ’s sake, Charlie, where’s your imagination? I’m not talking about a ride in that hearse behind that sullen driver.”

  “The New York City subway system? A hansom cab? The bumper cars at Coney Island?”

  “You’re getting closer.”

  “I give up.”

  He sat looking at her for a beat, then another. She was beginning to feel uncomfortable. He lifted his glass and finished it in a single gulp. Later she’d realize that was for courage. He put the glass down, gripped the wheels of his chair, backed away from his desk, pivoted, and came around until he was beside her chair.

  “Hop on.”

  “What?”

  “I said hop on. I’m going to take you for a spin.”

  “Where?”

  “Right here. The hallowed halls of G&F. Where great literature will not be cowed by small minds.”

  She went on staring at him. “Are you serious?” she asked finally.

  His face was immobile, all cold stare and challenge, except for his mouth. A tic so small it was almost imperceptible pulled at the side. “To coin a perfectly new cliché, I have never been more serious in my life.”

  She went on looking at him. The invitation was absurd. But a refusal of it would be insulting. As if she were afraid of him. Worse still, as if she found his condition offensive. She remembered the conversation she’d overheard on the stairs the night Vivi lighted the menorah. You’re lousy at hiding disgust, he’d shouted at Hannah. She leaned forward, put her glass on the desk, and stood, then went on standing because she wasn’t sure what to do next.