Paris Never Leaves You

by Ellen Feldman

  “But they’re not.”

  The harshness of her words shames her. Again and again he has talked of the children he dreams of having someday. It is not a question of carrying on his name, he explains, though he doesn’t have to. She is coming to know him. He is one of those men whose sweetness comes out with children. He is, she suspects, fonder of them than she is. She loves Vivi, her own, but she does not revel in children in general.

  Once, late at night, talking in the room behind the shop—it is not all sex—she asked him why he never married.

  “I was engaged to marry.”

  “What happened?”

  “The Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor happened.”

  “They took your fiancée away?”

  He shook his head and smiled, not the smile that shows he was happy once and might be again but a terrible grimace. “Let us say, she absented herself. I do not blame her. I am not in a position to blame anyone. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor criminalized sexual relations and marriage between Germans and Jews. She is a good German. I am a deracinated Jew.”

  She tells herself the memory of the fiancée’s callousness makes her relent, but she knows it’s her own need. He can come at night, she says, when no one is in the shop to see him.

  Several nights a week, she locks the door at closing, then unlocks it when the city has gone dark. He is discreet slipping in, more than discreet, stealthy. Once as he is about to open the door, a man turns the corner onto the street. Julian lets go of the door and begins making his way down the street, trying the other doors, doing his best to look as if he is on official duty, checking doors to make sure they are locked for the night. A little while later, huddled in the back room, she hears the doorknob rattling again and waits for the sound of his steps in the shop. There is only silence. A moment later, someone knocks on the door. Hugging her sweater to her, she goes into the shop. The man with the unmovable face is on the other side of the glass. She tries not to recoil and points to the sign that says CLOSED. He opens the door nonetheless, sticks his terrifying face into the shop, and tells her she has forgotten to lock up for the night.

  “You’re lucky,” he says. The words, smashed by his rigid lips, come out mangled. “A boche just came down the street checking doors. Fortunately, he wasn’t one of the efficient members of the master race.”

  She thanks him and starts to close the door, but he stops her.

  “The child is in the back?” he asks.

  She nods.

  “Good. I’ll tell Madame Rey that you’re both safe. The concierge worries when you don’t come home.”

  She explains about the blackout and the Metro closings and her broken bicycle, and even while she’s speaking, she knows it’s a mistake. She owes him no explanation, especially not one this elaborate.

  After he leaves, she locks the door. A while later she hears it rattling again. This time she does not get up and go into the shop. It could be the man with the terrible face, but she knows it’s not. It’s Julian. She lies rigid until the noise stops, hating herself for her cruelty, but hating him, too, for the compromised position in which he has placed her. Only she knows he has not placed her there. She has put herself in that position of her own free will.

  The next night she goes home to the flat to sleep. The concierge is waiting for her. She has not yet begun holding her finger to her temple and murmuring about les boches. She simply observes how well little Vivi is looking and pinches her cheek. Vivi’s small fist tries to swat away her hand.

  The concierge and her friend with the grotesque face are not the only ones Charlotte fears. French men and women are still turning in their Jewish neighbors, but now other French patriots are fingering their fellow citizens for other crimes, some real, some imagined, some fabricated to settle old scores. And just as there is no denying being Jewish, there is no court for contesting these accusations. Men and women are tried behind closed doors, judged in secret, found guilty in whispers, executed in stealth. Freelancing revenge, Monsieur Grassin, her father’s friend from the Palais de Chaillot, will call it, but that chilling phrase is still in the future.

  Rumors of the coming invasion race through the city. The closer the Allies get, the more certain German defeat becomes, the more explosive the situation grows. Anti-Semitic propaganda blares louder and more violently from signs and newspapers and broadcasts. The Resistance escalates its sabotage and steps up reprisals against the occupiers and those who cooperate with them.

  One morning, walking with Vivi along the river, she sees a crowd gathered on the quay. Holding Vivi’s hand, she changes her course to give the group a wide berth. One way or another, gatherings mean trouble. But she isn’t quick enough. Before she veers away, she sees two gendarmes hauling a body from the water. His hands and feet are bound. A limestone block is tied to his neck. She does not have to go on looking to know there will be signs of torture.

  “Gestapo pigs,” a man on the edge of the crowd spits out. A woman standing nearby shushes him.

  Then Radio-Loge kicks in. The Gestapo cannot be responsible. The victim was a well-known collaborator. He and his wife were often seen tucking into tournedos of beef and bottles of Saint-Émilion with German officials at Le Grand Véfour, the restaurant below the flat where everyone knows Colette lives and hides her Jewish husband.

  Reprisal is in the air. Charlotte never learns how the concierge finds out. Perhaps the man with the waxy immovable face wasn’t there by chance the night he caught Julian entering the shop. Perhaps he has been watching her. She sees him in the neighborhood, a one-man vigilante group, reprimanding women who return a boche’s glance, harassing men who take or give a light for a cigarette, even scolding children who stare in fascination at the guns and uniforms, cars and trucks of the occupying forces. Or perhaps Simone has said something to someone, and the word has spread. “Après les boches,” the concierge hisses as Charlotte passes. The first time, there is no accompanying gesture. The next time, she holds her hand to her temple and pulls the trigger finger.

  Charlotte tells Julian he has to stop coming to the shop at night as well as during the day. Again he doesn’t argue with her. He knows what it is like to live in constant fear of being found out.

  A few mornings later, she arrives at the shop to find a box in front of the door. She assumes it is a delivery of books. Strange how the cultural life of the city goes on. A production of Traviata is running at the Palais de Chaillot. At an art auction at the Hôtel Drouot, a Matisse is sold for more than four hundred thousand francs, a Bonnard for more than three hundred thousand. Confiscated or stolen, people whisper to one another, but that doesn’t stop them from raising a paddle or calling out a sum. Publishing houses continue to thrive not only on current titles but on French translations of German classics and Nazi propaganda. Even the sporting life continues, though the programs at the racetrack have been reduced from four a week to two. She unlocks the door, takes Vivi into the shop, then goes back for the box. It feels too light for books. She carries it inside and opens it. Inside are three potatoes, a loaf of bread, a minuscule amount of cooking oil, and milk. On her knees, stooping over the bounty, she begins to cry. That night, she leaves the door unlocked. It has nothing to do with the food, only with his leaving it there despite the fact that she has banished him. Perhaps there is something of love between them after all.

  But that cannot be. In less tender moments on that narrow sofa, sweat-slicked from sex, guilt-riddled from pleasure, she looks at him and sees the reflection of her own weakness. They are both compromised. More than compromised, damned.

  Other times when she looks at him, she is overwhelmed with pity for his impossible situation. The torment haunts him. She hears it in his voice when he mentions his country and his compatriots. She senses it in the way his body stiffens as he slips back into the hated uniform. Once, in the darkness, he whispers to her that he is waiting for the day the Allies triumph. Only then will Germany return to sanity.
More than once he has told her that she and Vivi are his only salvation. He has lied to the world, betrayed his family, done terrible things. Only his connection to them leaves him a shred of humanity. Then she holds him and reminds him that he has rounded up no Jews, could not have saved his family, is not lying to her. She is not sure any of that is true, but she knows his pain is real, as genuine as her shame. Sometimes after he puts on that despised uniform and leaves, she looks at herself in the cracked mirror and mouths the words she swears she is not. Collabo horizontale. Is it any wonder they cling to each other?

  Then, in the early hours of June 6, what all of Paris, all of France, everyone, even Julian in secret, has been waiting for, some with hope, some with terror, happens. The Allies land on French soil. The news reaches Paris the following day. Radio-Paris reports that the Allied Forces have been repulsed almost everywhere, but no one believes the German-run station anymore, if they ever did. The Liberation is imminent. Julian confirms the prediction. He senses panic in the hospital, among the troops, from the other officers, while he, he whispers to her in the dark privacy of the back room, feels only joy, which he has to hide behind a mask of gloom and a façade of bravado. But then he is a master of the masquerade.

  Isolated acts of sabotage spring up like mushrooms after the rain. Railroad tracks are dynamited, telephone and telegraph lines cut. The Germans repair the damage. The Resistance repeats it. In retribution, or perhaps only in fear, the Germans accelerate their arrests, roundups, hostage taking, and executions.

  Even casual observers and those determined to stay out of trouble begin to notice something. The German presence in the city is shrinking. Truckloads of able-bodied men, and those who are barely that, lumber past the populace, headed for the front. Julian remains at the hospital, but there is no saying for how long. Even the high-ranking official whose son he saved cannot help him now. The gray mice in their drab shabby uniforms hurry to trucks and trains carrying suitcases. When one of them drops her bag and it springs open revealing several silk scarves, a fashionable hat, and a china tea service spilling out of the newspaper it has been wrapped in, a crowd begins to gather, and the mouse runs, leaving the suitcase with her war spoils behind. An official trying to hustle a painting into a waiting automobile is set upon by a crowd who wrests it from him. As the story spreads, the picture becomes more valuable and the artist better known with each retelling. By the end, people who have never seen the painting and don’t know its size are swearing it was Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. The German official was trying to make off with a piece of France’s patrimony.

  To prove to the Parisians that it is still a force to be reckoned with, the Wehrmacht stages a parade of uniformed men, vehicles, and artillery down the avenue de l’Opéra—the last German parade in Paris, though no one knows it at the time—but its forces are so depleted that the first lines of troops must loop back and march down the avenue a second time in an attempt to fool the Parisians.

  Julian veers between optimism and despair. Much as he looks forward to Germany becoming Germany again, as he puts it, he knows he is in for a bad time. His countrymen, starved, bombed, brutalized, and humiliated, will blame the entire army for their defeat. His coreligionists will condemn him for his betrayal.

  On Bastille Day, Charlotte comes down from her apartment to find the concierge’s loge draped in blue, red, and white. “Vive la France,” she says with a grin. Her finger comes up to her temple and the grin turns into a snarl. “Après les boches,” she hisses.

  Charlotte hurries past and comes out into a carnival of blue, red, and white. Buildings are draped in the colors; people wear them, women’s scarves and men’s ties and children’s shirts and pinafores. She thinks of going back to her flat to change her clothes and Vivi’s—they are as French as their neighbors—but she doesn’t want to pass the concierge again. No, it’s more than that. She doesn’t feel she has a right to the colors, not anymore. Like Julian, she swerves between joy and hopelessness.

  At the corner, an accordionist is playing “La Marseillaise.” A crowd has surrounded him. Tears stream down faces as they sing. At the next corner, another accordionist and another crowd, and so on as she and Vivi make their way toward the shop. In the Place Maubert, near the Sorbonne, a crowd of hundreds, perhaps thousands, is singing and waving flags. Had they been hiding them since the Germans marched in? Had they made them overnight? It is almost enough to make her forget her fear. Further on, at the Porte de Vanves, Hitler is being burned in effigy. The terror returns. She hates the Führer as much as her neighbors, but she also recognizes the dark underbelly of the euphoria. Celebration will turn to vengeance. She knows that as certainly as she knows her own guilt.

  A few days later, two more bodies are fished from the Seine, hands and feet bound, a limestone block weighing each of them down. The sickening irony is that the stones are not heavy enough to keep the bodies below the surface for long. Within days, sometimes within hours, they float to the surface. It occurs to Charlotte, and she’s not the only one, that perhaps the blocks are not meant to prevent the bodies from bobbing up like macabre harbingers of France’s future. Perhaps the good French men and women who are evening the score are impatient. They cannot wait a year or even a month for their handiwork to be discovered. They want to parade their vengeance now.

  Mentally Charlotte prepares her defense. She has transgressed, but she has not collaborated, not really. She did not turn in Jews, or provide information to the authorities, or betray anyone but herself. She is to be blamed but not condemned. The excuses are similar to the ones she trucks out to console Julian, and, she knows, just as bogus.

  She tries to beat back the fear as she goes about her life, taking care of Vivi, running the shop, walking the boulevards with her head up and a smile on her face, because she, too, is French, and soon she, like the rest of her country, will be free. Only she knows she won’t. The nightmare is over. Long live the nightmare.

  One night she comes home to find the concierge lying in wait for her. She is smiling again, that mocking death’s-head grin Charlotte has come to hate, but she doesn’t raise her hand to her temple or murmur about les boches. She merely hands Charlotte an envelope and stands waiting for her to open it. Charlotte will not give her the satisfaction. Holding the envelope in one hand, Vivi’s small fist in the other, she climbs the stairs. Only when she has closed the door to the flat behind her does she pry open the flap.

  The photographs are murky. She has to carry them to the stream of setting July sun pouring through the window to make them out. Vivi follows and reaches up to take whatever her mother is holding. She does not want to be left out. But Charlotte has already glimpsed the first picture. She pushes her daughter’s hand away. “No!” she snaps.

  Vivi begins to whine. Charlotte barely hears her. She stands staring at the photograph on top. In it, a group of men stalks a woman down a country road. A sign is dimly visible in the distance. She tilts the picture to get more light on it. The sign says RENNES with an arrow. She can’t read the number of kilometers, but it doesn’t matter. This is clearly recently liberated territory. She slides the top picture off the pile. The second photograph shows the men grabbing the woman. In the third the woman is sprawled in the road, while two of the men hold down her legs, spread to allow the camera to capture the view up her skirt. In the fourth, another man is pulling off her dress. Charlotte turns to the last photograph. The woman’s naked body is hunched on the dirt road, her ankles bound by her panties, her wrists by her brassiere, her head burrowing into the ground, her rump raised. A large black swastika is scrawled on her back, a smaller one on each buttock.

  Charlotte tears up the photographs, but the images are seared into her brain. She thinks of fleeing. Surely she’ll be able to slip away in the chaos, especially since, unlike at the beginning of the Occupation when everyone was leaving Paris, refugees are flooding in, hoping for a safe haven. Radio-Loge insists that the Germans will not destroy the city as they leave, and the Al
lies will not bomb it in preparation for their arrival. Paris is, after all, Paris. But how can she leave? The trains are barely running. She doesn’t even have a bicycle. And where will she go? A cousin of Laurent’s has written from Avignon to say his parents died in the massive bombing in May. She hasn’t had word of her father, and now that the Germans have taken over the Italian-occupied zone where he was the last she’d heard, she is more worried than ever.

  Two weeks after Bastille Day, she arrives at the store to find another box. This one is heavy enough to be books. She unlocks the shop, drags the box inside, and settles Vivi in the children’s alcove with a picture book and a dog-eared doll. There is enough to do that she doesn’t get to the box for some time. Worn with use and reuse—shortages of everything—it opens easily. She turns back the flaps. The box does not contain books. Inside is only a limestone block. No, wait, there is something else. Beside it lies a smaller limestone block. An adult’s limestone block and a child’s limestone block. For a moment she thinks she is going to throw up. Though the nausea passes, the fear remains. Surely they wouldn’t kill a child. Unless they thought she was a little Fritz. The timing is impossible for that, but people out for revenge don’t check birth certificates.

  She doesn’t mention the delivery to Julian, or the concierge’s threats, or the photographs. He cannot help. He is the problem. Besides, she doesn’t have to tell him what’s going on. He knows. He knows better than she does. She hears rumors. He has access to information. Reports still come in, files are still kept, though the Germans no longer pay attention. They are too busy trying to save their own skins. But not Julian. He is determined to save them. Perhaps he is trying to assuage his guilt for his own survival. Perhaps he is simply a decent man. Or perhaps, and she pushes the thought from her mind, he loves her. He begins coming up with ideas, each more outlandish than the last.

  One night in the back room, he outlines a plan to take her and Vivi with him when he is evacuated. It will be difficult but not impossible, he explains.