“I know what you think now, after this.” He gestures around the room as if it is all Paris under the Occupation. “But this is not the real Germany. The occupiers are not the real Germans.”
“You’re an occupier.”
She feels his head move against her shoulder as if he has been slapped.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“We could go to another country. It would not be so difficult to slip into Switzerland or Portugal.”
“It would be impossible. You’d be shot for desertion before we reached the border.”
They have both heard her use the word “we.” She has, if only for a moment, considered the plan.
He tells her he cannot imagine the future without her and Vivi. They have kept him human. They give him hope.
She does not tell him she cannot imagine the future with him. For the rest of her life, every time she looked across the table at him or turned to him in bed, she would be face-to-face with her shame. She still thinks she can outrun it.
There is nothing she can do but wait, and hope. At least no more bodies are pulled from the Seine. Perhaps the worst has passed. The vengeance has spent itself. Once the Germans are gone for good, tempers will cool. Once Paris is Paris again, the boulevards crowded with people, the shops full of goods, the restaurants serving steak and sweetbreads, escargots and champagne, the museums showing masterpieces rather than empty walls where they used to hang before they were rolled up and trucked off to châteaux and convents around the country for safekeeping or stolen by Goering and his henchmen, people will be more interested in enjoying life, the essential Parisian pastime, than in settling scores. Besides, what is she really guilty of? She never provided information or turned anyone in, she reminds herself for the tenth or hundredth time. She never dined on tournedos of beef and bottles of Saint-Émilion with German officials at Le Grand Véfour. She accepted food for her starving child and herself from a German officer, who isn’t even a real German officer, only a Jew masquerading as one. She runs through her defenses obsessively, like a madwoman intoning a meaningless chant. Unlike a madwoman, however, she knows the mantra does not make sense. She has slept with the enemy.
July turns to August. The railroad workers go on strike. The police follow. Fewer German uniforms walk the street. When they do, they no longer swagger. They are too busy keeping a sharp eye out for attacks. Barricades begin springing up. Men and women, sometimes singing, sometimes joking, sometimes cursing the boches, pile kiosks, paving stones, benches, the carcasses of dead automobiles and bicycles, even street urinals across roads and at intersections. Children climb the makeshift structures and slide down them. Mothers warn them to be careful, but only halfheartedly. How can anyone be cautious in the face of this euphoria? Charlotte passes two girls—they can’t be older than fifteen—in shorts and frilly blouses with rifles slung around their necks and feels the reproach. The city becomes accustomed to gunfire. When it breaks out, people hit the ground or hide behind statues or columns or barricades. When it ceases, they continue about their business. The sangfroid sends a message as powerful as outright resistance.
Though Julian has stopped coming to the shop while it is open, late one afternoon he arrives and begins browsing. He is trying to be unobtrusive, but the ruse is futile. German soldiers no longer browse or shop or do anything but carry out their orders and scheme for ways to get out of this alive. He lingers until the shop is empty, then tells her he will wait in the back room until she closes. She begs him to leave, but he tells her he has one more plan. He is not trying to persuade her to run away with him. This is only to save her and Vivi. She is tired of his farfetched schemes, but she cannot resist listening.
Finally she locks the door and goes to the back of the shop. Vivi is sitting in his lap while he reads to her. It’s not the first time she thinks how much her daughter is going to miss him. She refuses to speculate on what she will feel. She has more insistent worries.
With Vivi still in his lap, turning pages and talking to herself, he outlines his idea. She says it’s too dangerous. He says to the contrary, it will be the safest place for her. Just as the army kept him out of a concentration camp, this will keep her out of the clutches of the mass hysteria. The more he talks, the more certain she is that of all the schemes he has hatched, this is the most ludicrous.
“It’s impossible,” she says when he stops speaking. “I won’t do it. I can’t do it. It’s immoral.” She drops her voice on the last word. She knows she has no right to it.
Two days later, another body surfaces in the Seine. The crowd stands around watching the salvage operation with ghoulish curiosity. Charlotte is not among them, but she hears the story later.
“A woman!” one observer shouts as they haul the body, hands and feet bound, a limestone block tied to her neck, onto the quay. Unlike the men, whose clothing had been torn but not stripped from them, the woman has been left in only her underwear. Before the gendarmes cover the body, the crowd reads the words that have been carved into her back. The corpse is bloated and its skin shriveled from the time in the water, but the words are still legible.
Collabo horizontale.
At first Charlotte refuses to believe the rumors about the woman’s body, but all around her people are repeating them. Then Monsieur Grassin, her father’s old friend, turns up in the shop and tells her it is not a rumor but a mistake.
“A splinter group got carried away. It was bound to happen sooner or later. Too many people going off on their own.” Then she hears the phrase that will finally persuade her. “Freelancing revenge.”
She shivers.
“That’s why I’m here. Strictly between us, I’ve heard your name mentioned. I know there’s no truth to it,” he goes on quickly, holding her eyes as he speaks, forcing her to participate in the lie. If they don’t share the lie, his conscience will not let him fulfill his promise to her father. He is part of the Resistance. He cannot save a collabo. “But I don’t want to see any more mistakes made. It would be better if you and the child left Paris.”
She starts to list the difficulties as she has for herself, but he cuts her off. He has made arrangements with a comrade. She and Vivi are to be at a café on the Place Pigalle at two the next afternoon. She is to carry a copy of Flaubert’s Salammbô. The young man will have a volume of Louise Colet’s poetry. He smiles. “The secret signs of the intellectuals.” They will start for the south immediately.
She repeats that her bicycle no longer has a rear wheel. He tells her the man will have a bicycle for her. With a basket for the child. There is a farm they can reach easily before dark. “It will be dangerous,” he adds. “You’d think the boches would give up now that they know they’re beaten, but they are too rigid to change course. And too inhuman. Instead they become only more vicious. Like trapped animals. Nonetheless, it will be less dangerous for you and the child than remaining here.”
He tells her all this quickly. He is obviously eager to get away. She follows him to the door and asks about her father. He says he has not had word for some time.
“But he would want you to leave. He did.”
She thanks him and doesn’t add that her father fled the Germans. She’s running from her own countrymen. She thinks of the concierge. And countrywomen.
The next morning she packs a satchel with a few articles of clothing for her and Vivi and the last of the food Julian has brought. She has not seen him since he came to the shop three days earlier with his most recent harebrained scheme, but even if she had, she would not have told him she was leaving. She cannot tell a German officer, even one who is not a real German officer, even one she has come to trust, that she’s being spirited out of the city by members of the Resistance. Besides, she wants no good-byes.
The afternoon is warm with an overcast sky. Rain is in the air, but it has not yet begun to fall. She takes that as a good omen. That’s what she has come to, reading her fortune in the weather. As she approaches the café, she sees two bicycles c
hained to a post. One has a large basket strapped behind the seat. Holding Vivi with one hand and clutching her copy of Salammbô ostentatiously in the other, she weaves through the outdoor tables and steps inside. Her eyes take a moment to adjust to the dim interior. Two men sit at one table, a man and a woman at another. No one is sitting alone. No one has a book. Then she spots it. A book lies on one of the empty tables. She takes a step closer to read the print on the spine. Fleurs du midi by Louise Colet. Perhaps he has gone to the WC. Only she knows he has not. In a situation like this, a man does not go to the WC. She glances around the café. The waiter is watching her. He starts for the table with the book. “At least,” he murmurs as he picks up the volume and begins mopping the table, “it wasn’t the filthy gendarmes. These days the boches have to do their own dirty work.” The rag goes around and around on the zinc surface. The spill disappears before she can tell whether it is wine or blood.
Still holding Vivi by one hand with her copy of Flaubert in the other, she makes her way out of the café and hesitates beside the bicycles. Nothing is stopping her from leaving the city on her own. Except the chain that secures both bicycles to the post.
That evening she is about to lock up the shop when Julian slips in. He tells her about the woman’s body that was pulled from the Seine.
“It was a mistake,” she says.
“That is cold comfort to the woman.” He glances across the shop at Vivi. “Or to her children, if she had any.” He reiterates his latest plan.
“All right,” she says.
* * *
It takes only a single word on her papers. Julian fills in juif in the appropriate space. He also brings a yellow star.
“Are you sure there won’t be any more transports?” she asks again as she sews the star onto her dress.
“The rail lines have been bombed. Besides, they don’t care about Jews anymore. They’re too busy saving their own skins.” He gives her a terrible smile. He has lost the one he used to bring out for special occasions. “Trying to save our own skins,” he corrects himself.
* * *
Despite the August heat, she puts a coat over her dress. A few days earlier, two Wehrmacht guards were assassinated in broad daylight. The only thing more dangerous than a German soldier alone on the streets these days would be a German officer harrying a woman with a star who is carrying a child. A well-meaning bystander might try to rescue her.
He manages to get his hands on a car, not a jeep but a closed automobile. They set out early through a strange kind of rain. Ashes float down, soft as snow, but darker and fouler smelling. When the Germans marched in, the French government burned its papers. Now the Allies are arriving, and the Germans are setting fire to all traces of their thousand-year Reich.
They don’t speak. He is busy navigating the streets, on the lookout for barricades, trying to avoid crowds of angry or celebratory Parisians, worrying about German checkpoints. Now that she’s on her way, she’s sure the scheme will end in disaster.
They manage to get across the Seine but grind to a crawl near Sacré-Coeur. No automobiles clog the roads, but the crowds spilling out into the streets slow them. Finally they reach Aubervilliers, where German guards stop them. Charlotte glances down to make sure her coat is buttoned over the star and hugs Vivi to her. Julian and one of the guards talk in low voices. She doesn’t hear what they say, but she can tell by the guard’s salacious laugh as he waves them on that he takes her for what she is.
“I’m sorry,” Julian says. “It was the only way to get through.”
She doesn’t answer.
As he is about to turn onto the rue Édouard Renard, he spots the barricade. Paving stones, benches, lampposts, a kiosk, tires that must have been stolen from a German truck, a bed, several mattresses, and other objects rise six feet into the air and block the width of the street. A mob spots the automobile and begins running toward it. He throws the gears into reverse and shoots back down the street they have just come up. It takes them another forty minutes to find a way through.
They smell Drancy before they see it, the stench of filth and excrement and disease. In an attempt to mitigate against the last, he has managed to get his hands on a vial of typhus vaccine at the hospital. At least she and Vivi will not have to worry about dying of natural causes.
The vast rectangle of connected barracks, each rising five or six stories high, open at one end to reveal a muddy central yard, looms into sight. From a distance, the complex doesn’t look much worse than dilapidated apartment buildings for the working poor, dirty, in disrepair, but not deadly. As they get closer, she sees the barbed wire around the perimeter; closer still, the mounted machine guns. They face in, rather than out. Searchlights squat like huge ungainly animals, not illuminated now, but surely blinding when turned on at night. Crowds of men, women, and children shuffle through the muck of the open courtyard or merely stand, staring numbly at nothing. This is her safe haven.
He pulls the car to the side of the road, kills the engine, and turns to her. She feels him looking at her but goes on staring straight ahead. He reaches for her hand. She pulls it away. He moves his hand toward Vivi. She tries to squirm out of her mother’s lap to get to him, but Charlotte holds her tight.
“You’re right,” he says. “Someone might be watching.”
He climbs out of the car and comes around to the passenger side. An observer would think he was pulling her out, but his touch is more gentle than that.
The sentry at the gate watches them approach. The dog, tethered by a short leash, pricks up its ears but doesn’t growl. Perhaps it, too, senses the war is lost. When they reach the guardhouse, Julian holds out her altered papers. The guard doesn’t bother to glance at them. She has opened her coat. He sees the star.
He scowls, first at her, then at Julian. He might be annoyed at having to stuff one more prisoner, two if you count Vivi, into that crowded swamp of pestilence, though it’s no longer bursting at the seams as it was at the height of the roundups. Or he might be disgusted by Julian’s zealousness at this late date.
Charlotte steps through the gate. She hears it clang shut behind her. She doesn’t turn around. The last thing she wants is to remember him.
* * *
Four days later the camp is liberated. By then she has no papers, only a number in a ledger, but not, thank heavens, on her arm. That happened only in the east, she will learn later.
The situation in the camp is as chaotic as it is on the streets. Jewish resistance fighters, French officials, Allied representatives, men and women from relief organizations brave the filth and contagion and misery to try to sort out matters and people. Prisoners churn through physical examinations, fill out questionnaires, not always truthfully, and squirm through interviews. Charlotte sits in a makeshift office with Vivi on her lap while a well-meaning but overworked American woman fires questions at her. She never says she is Jewish. She never says she is not. The woman makes her own assumptions.
Taken with the young widow who speaks flawless English and with the child, the first she has seen in the camp who is not one of the army of small scabby skeletons who break her heart but repulse her senses, she asks Charlotte if she knows anyone in the States who might be willing to sponsor her.
The name comes to her out of nowhere. She hasn’t thought of him in years. Why would she? She met him only once when her father brought him home for dinner. She was at the Sorbonne then, and he was a successful American editor, older, but still young enough to flirt with her, politely, innocently, flatteringly. He’d turned her head, for a few hours.
She tells the woman of a man in New York. His name is Horace Field. The woman asks if she knows where to reach him. She says she doesn’t. Then that comes back to her, too. He is an editor at a publishing house called Simon Gibbon Books.
The woman smiles. She is a voracious reader. “These days it’s called Gibbon & Field.”
Thirteen
Once again she didn’t say she was a Jew, but she didn’t say
she wasn’t. Like the social worker in Paris, the rabbi in Bogotá assumed.
She’d agonized over the letter, or rather over whether to answer the letter, for weeks. A reply was asking for trouble. The less connection she and Vivi had to their past, the safer they were. She’d never heard of people hunting collabos around the globe as they did Nazis, but exposure was always possible, and some French didn’t mind eating their revenge cold. Still, didn’t she owe him something? She kept remembering a photograph she’d seen in a French newspaper shortly after the Liberation. A stream of German prisoners was being marched out of the Hotel Meurice with their hands in the air. Men and women and children danced around them, grinning, jeering, spitting. She was sure she recognized Julian toward the back of the group, though she remembered enough women sitting in darkened cinemas during the Occupation, spotting husbands and sons in newsreels, to doubt her eyes. Nonetheless, according to the letter from the rabbi in Bogotá, Julian’s fears about his fate in a Germany returned to what he had believed would be sanity had turned out to be warranted. German gentiles had no interest in helping a Jew. Hadn’t Jews been the cause of the war from which they’d suffered so much? Jews had no desire to help a traitor, a Jew who’d murdered Jews, a fake Nazi who was worse than the real thing because he should have known better. Nonetheless, he had managed to make his way to Colombia, no thanks to the various agencies set up to help Jewish refugees. She remembered her own interview with the American woman, and her guilt ratcheted up another notch. It had taken him years, but he had finally found a country that would take him in. Now he wanted to work in a hospital, to try to atone for his sins was the way the rabbi put it, but the Jewish community in Bogotá was suspicious. South America was full of Nazis touting their anti-Nazi past. Some of them were even masquerading as Jews. Again she felt the words as an accusation. What Jew would risk going to a former Wehrmacht officer for medical treatment? The name Mengele was whispered ominously. That was why the rabbi was writing to Madame Foret. What could she tell him about Dr. Bauer’s behavior in Paris? Had he persecuted Jews? Had he been responsible for Jewish deaths? I have no authority, he’d said as they’d dragged the professor out of the shop. Or had he tried to save Jewish lives? She saw the orange sitting on the counter beside the cash register, glowing as if lit from within. She saw herself huddled on the shelf in the cramped closet, her hand over Vivi’s mouth.
Paris Never Leaves You Page 16
