“I still think I’m making a mistake,” she said. “With all due respect to de Gaulle’s political acumen, people aren’t as forgiving as you make them out.”
“There’s only one person who can’t forgive,” he said, still looking off at the skyline.
“Look who’s talking.”
He turned to her, but his eyes were hidden behind the dark glasses. “As I keep saying, we’re two of a kind. That’s why we deserve each other.” He looked back at the skyline. “You are coming back, aren’t you?”
“Where else would I go?”
He shrugged. “You’re not as American as you pretend. You can still roll a wicked r when it comes in handy. Paris might turn out to be home after all.”
“I’m coming back.”
“Then what?”
“Then nothing. A few weeks in France aren’t going to change anything here.”
“I keep telling you, Hannah would be glad to get rid of me. She can marry Federman, or her next trainee.”
“I still doubt that, but to tell the truth, it’s not Hannah anymore. It turns out I’m too selfish for that kind of sacrifice.”
“Vivi?”
“She’s forgiven me a lot, but I don’t think she’d forgive me this. She adores Hannah. And kids are judgmental about things like marriage.”
He turned to her and took off his dark glasses. His eyes were ice blue in the hot afternoon. “She isn’t going to be a kid forever. Not even for much longer.”
“She still wouldn’t forgive me.”
“I’m not so sure. She worries about you.”
“I know, and I wish she didn’t.”
“Maybe she wouldn’t if she thought you were happier.” He smiled, the wicked grin she remembered from the photograph taken before the war. “Sorry, Charlie, but you walked straight into that.”
The first warning to go ashore sounded. He stopped smiling. “Mind if I say something you’re not going to like?”
“Yes, but that won’t stop you.”
“It wasn’t Hannah. And it isn’t Vivi. They’re excuses. It’s you. Did you ever think that it might have been better if you’d stayed in Paris? Maybe you would have had your head shaved and suffered the rest of the ugliness.” He read the horror in her face. “I’m not making light of how awful it would have been. But at least you could have hated them for it. Now the only person you have to hate is yourself. You got off scot-free, and you can’t forgive yourself for that.”
She stood looking at him. “That’s quite a bon voyage speech.”
“I figure you’re a big girl.”
“Or as Hannah says, a tough cookie.”
“Exactly. You can take it.”
The second warning to go ashore sounded. He started toward the gangway, then stopped again. A few departing visitors piled up in a logjam behind them. A man shot them a dirty look, then noticed the wheelchair and murmured an apology. Horace wheeled over to the port deck, away from the starboard side where passengers were already positioning themselves to wave good-bye. She followed.
“I just changed my mind,” he said.
“You don’t think I should go? Or you don’t want me to come back?”
“I don’t want you to bury the demons in Paris. I think you should go looking for them. And your German officer. Goddamn it, I can’t keep calling him that. What was his name?”
“Julian.” She remembered the medical degree he’d left her. “Julian Hans Bauer.”
“Go looking for Julian Hans Bauer. And yourself. Remember the moments of joy, though I bet those damn near killed you. Remember what you gave him. More to the point, think about what you withheld. You want to flagellate yourself about something, try that.”
“Are you finished?”
“For the moment.”
He started toward the gangway again. She fell into step beside him.
“Then come home,” he went on. “I’ll still be here.”
They arrived at the gangway, and the seaman standing beside it reached out to position the chair to go down it.
“I can manage,” Horace snapped, then looked at her and shook his head. “As I keep saying, two of a kind.” He turned to the seaman. “But thanks all the same.”
He started down the gangway. “Whatever you do,” he called back, “don’t fall for some smooth-talking Gauloise-smoking French lothario.”
“Not much chance of that,” she said, though she didn’t know if he heard her.
She stood watching as he disappeared in the crush of people leaving the ship. A moment later she caught sight of him at the bottom of the gangway, then lost him again.
She made her way along the deck toward the bow of the ship and took a position at the rail. When she looked down at the pier, he was across from her. He wasn’t smiling or waving; he was just sitting there watching her.
Suddenly Vivi was at her side with several rolls of colored streamers. She began hurling them to her friends on the pier. All around them, passengers were tossing paper ribbons, and people on shore were trying to catch them, and the summer afternoon vibrated with a rainbow of tangled lines. Charlotte took a roll from Vivi, raised it above her head, and flung. It streaked across the water and down to the pier, where Horace reached out a long powerful arm and caught it.
The horn sounded again, and the tugs began nudging the ship out of the slip. She and Horace went on holding either end as the distance between the deck and the pier widened. Gradually, one after another, the ribbons around them were snapping. She felt the streamer that stretched between them break. She went on holding one end. Across from her on the pier, he was holding the other.
A Note on Sources and Acknowledgments
Though memoirs by and books about the women who fought in the Resistance or spied for the Allies during World War II abound, their sisters who were not blessed, or cursed, with their unholy courage have attracted less attention. It is those legions of more ordinary women who aroused my curiosity and inspired this novel. Three books proved invaluable in researching it. When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940–1944 by Ronald C. Rosbottom is an exhaustively researched and wonderfully lively account of day-to-day existence under the Occupation, including a perceptive consideration of the nuances of collaboration. Shortly after starting the research for this novel, I came across, thanks to the open stacks of the New York Society Library, a volume called Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers and its companion, Lives of Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, both by Bryan Mark Rigg. At first I thought the titles must be a play on words or a provocation, especially since most of the historians I spoke to had never heard of the thousands of Jews and part-Jews who served in the Third Reich’s military. The stories of those men expanded and deepened what I had originally conceived as a novel about identity and survivor guilt.
In addition to those books and countless histories of the Occupation, many diaries kept by girls and young women painted more vivid and personal pictures of what it was like for Jews and gentiles alike to live under the German thumb. To mention only a few of the best: Diary in Duo by Benoîte and Flora Groult; The Journal of Hélène Berr; Rue Ordener, Rue Labat by Sarah Kofman; Maman, What Are We Called Now? by Jacqueline Mesnil-Amar; and one by a woman who did serve in the Resistance and paid mightily for it, Résistance: A Woman’s Journal of Struggle and Defiance in Occupied France by Agnès Humbert.
In addition to these books and memoirs, many people provided professional and personal support. I am grateful to the staff of the New York Society Library for their expert help and unfailing good humor, and for the Frederick Lewis Allen Room of the New York Public Library, which provides a safe haven for research and writing. I am also indebted to Judy Link, JoAnn Kay, André Bernard, Ed Gallagher, and, for encouragement above and beyond the call of duty, Laurie Blackburn. Richard Snow and Fred Allen once again kept the literary and historical egg off my face. Liza Bennett contributed more to this book than she knows. My thanks also to Emma Sweeney, ace agent and good friend, and to Marga
ret Sutherland Brown and Hannah Brattesani at the Emma Sweeney Agency, to the entire team at St. Martin’s Press, and especially to Elisabeth Dyssegaard, who is not only a superb editor but a gracious and generous woman.
PARIS NEVER LEAVES YOU
by Ellen Feldman
• An Interview with Ellen Feldman
• Books Set in Bookshops
• Reading Group Questions
An Interview with Ellen Feldman
Many of your previous books dealt with real characters, such as Anne Frank. Where did the fictional Charlotte and her moral dilemma come from?
Charlotte came from her moral dilemma. Most books about the women of World War II feature those who displayed enviable, or hard to fathom, courage—women who spied for the Allies or worked in the Resistance or risked their lives covering the action. I stand in awe of those figures. But as I read those accounts, I kept wondering, what did women who were not blessed, or cursed, with such guts do, what would I do if faced with choices between what is conventionally thought of as right and wrong, moral and immoral? It is, I suppose, the eternal question of the bystander. Charlotte is, if not my answer to it, then my exploration of it.
Yes, but how did Charlotte, the particular character in the novel, come into being?
I find all my characters, even the historical figures—because of course they’re not the real historical figures, only my understanding and representation of them—come into being the same way. When I begin a book, I have in mind a vague character defined mainly by name and circumstances, the individual’s history, and where I want her or him to go, though the latter rarely is where that character ends up going. Only as I get deeper into the story does the character begin to take on a reality of her or his own. Frequently the people on the page refuse to do things I’d intended to have them do. They make it clear, as the writing goes on, that a particular action or emotion is not in keeping with who they have become.
You list some of the sources you relied upon in researching Paris Never Leaves You. Do you have a particular method for delving into the past?
I begin by reading general histories of the period, then go on to personal memoirs, magazines and newspapers, and archival material if there is any. I love getting lost in libraries, and I love the thrill of coming across a little-known or even previously unknown letter or diary entry or scrap of paper that brings the character or period to life. In a more general sense, even the ads in old newspapers and magazines can untether you from the present and pull you back to another time. Once, while reading an old magazine, I came across an ad for a sweater I thought would make a perfect Christmas gift for my husband. Only when I started to jot down the information did I realize that the magazine was from 1945, the store no longer existed, and the sweater I was so eager to buy had probably been eaten by moths decades ago.
Are some eras more difficult to research than others?
For some aspects of Paris Never Leaves You I had to do almost no research. Several years ago I worked in a New York City publishing house. While by that time the business had changed considerably from the 1950s, human nature hadn’t.
Does the research ever change your original conception of a book?
Absolutely. In Paris Never Leaves You, I had started out thinking about what Charlotte would do in certain situations and how she would live with the repercussions of her actions for the rest of her life. In other words, I was interested in survivor guilt, though I didn’t use the term to myself at the time because I think starting a novel with a high-falutin philosophical or psychological concept is the kiss of death for a good story. The library where I do most of my work has open stacks. One day as I was looking for another book about France under the Occupation I came across two volumes called Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers and Lives of Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers by Bryan Mark Rigg. I was so astonished I sat on the floor of the history stacks and began reading. What I found there not only altered but deepened and expanded the story I had set out to tell. Suddenly, I had the beginnings of a character I’d never dreamed of, more survivor guilt than I’d bargained for, and the additional issue of identity and how we perceive it.
At what point in the research do you begin writing? Where do you work? When do you work?
After a certain amount of time, and it differs with each book, I can’t keep the characters and the ideas in any longer. They’re shouting to get out of my head and onto the page. That’s the point—and I’ve heard many writers use this image—at which I leave the research room, close the door behind me, and walk into the writing room. Closing the door is essential because in fiction characters and story always trump history, and you don’t want the former to get lost in the latter. But there is a caveat. I sometimes have to go back to the research because, before I start the writing, I often have no idea what I’m looking for when I’m reading. Sometimes a stray fact that seemed irrelevant when I came across it inspires a scene or makes a character take a different course. So while the two processes are separate, they are also intertwined.
I do the actual writing in the writers rooms of two libraries: The New York Society Library, which is a subscription library on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and New York City’s oldest library, and the New York Public Library. Both have silent oases for writers that I am fortunate to have access to. The walk to the library each morning gives me time to think about what I’m going to write that day, as does an early run around the Reservoir in Central Park; the walk home in the evening allows time to decompress, or, all too often, the eureka realization that the scene I spent the day writing simply doesn’t work and has to be either completely rethought or tossed out.
Are you currently at work on another book?
I am always at work on another book. The idea for the current work in progress sprang from two sentences about a character I came across in my research for Paris Never Leaves You, but that’s all I can say about her now.
Books Set in Bookshops
When I started writing Paris Never Leaves You, I had no idea that Charlotte was going to run a bookshop in Paris during the Occupation. I did know that once she arrived in New York, she would go to work somewhere in the fashion industry, either in a designer’s studio or shop or on a magazine. I’m not sure why I chose that career for her. Probably because in my childhood I’d heard of and later read about women who’d fled Europe for the States and ended up in that field, if they worked outside the home at all. But though the Charlotte who began to take shape as I wrote cared about fashion—she is, after all, a Frenchwoman— her real passion was for books. The better I got to know her, the clearer it became that when she arrived in New York City, she would get a job in publishing, as I had when I was young in the city. From there it followed, or preceded, that she would work in a bookshop while in Paris. Perhaps I was inspired by the stories of the various bookshops and publishing houses that survived under the Occupation. Perhaps I was influenced by other books I’d read about bookshops. The following is a brief list of some of my favorites.
The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald is not only my favorite book about a bookshop, it is one of my favorite books of all time. In 1959, in the seaside town of Hardborough in East Anglia, there is no fish-and-chips shop, no launderette, no cinema except on alternate Saturday nights, and certainly no bookshop—until Florence Green, an unremarkable local widow, decides to use her small inheritance to open one. Purchasing a small property known as the Old House that turns out to have a leaking roof, a flooding cellar, and a possible ghost, Florence nonetheless manages to make a success of the undertaking, thereby enraging less prosperous shopkeepers in the town and arousing the envy and ire of another local woman, who considers herself the arbiter of all things cultural in Hardborough. A piercing look at small-town social ambitions, vicious rivalries, and woman’s cruelty to woman, this slim but powerful novel breaks my heart every time I read it, and as with so many books I love, I have reread it at various stages of my life, always hoping against hope it will end differently.
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Perhaps I’m cheating when I include The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett in books about bookshops. This perfect gem of a novella begins not in a bookshop but in the City of Westminster traveling library, which every Wednesday parks just outside the palace grounds. In my mind, however, libraries, in which I’ve been hiding out since childhood, are solid buildings where silence and decorum reign. This small van crammed with a motley collection of odd volumes is more informal and louche. One Wednesday the Queen enters the van to apologize for the din her barking dogs have set up and feels it is her royal duty to take out a book, though books have always been “something she left to other people.” Soon one book leads to another, as books have a habit of doing, and the Queen undergoes a transformation that builds to a delicious denouement in this enchanting novella that resonates far beyond its sly, hilarious story to explore the power, delights, and dangers of reading.
The Bookseller of Kabul begins when the author, Åsne Seierstad, wanders into the shop of a man who loves books with such passion that each time a new regime demolishes his store he rebuilds it. But the man who reveres books reveals himself to be a tyrant who destroys souls. When Seierstad moves in with the bookseller and his family, sleeping on their floor, sharing their communal meals, venturing out in the hated and suffocating burka, and enduring their hardships in this broken, war-torn country, she discovers a fiercely hierarchical society that degrades and crushes not only women but the less powerful of both sexes. As head of the extended family, the booklover rules with a hard heart and an iron hand. The Bookseller of Kabul is an unflinching account, impossible to look away from, of the power of books to open minds and of the cruelty and destructiveness of minds determined to remain closed.
The Big Sleep has only two scenes set in bookshops, but both are so shrewdly drawn and drolly realized that it’s hard not to include the novel when thinking about fictional bookshops. Since this is Raymond Chandler territory, both stores are meticulously observed. One has wall-to-wall blue carpeting, blue leather easy chairs, and finely tooled leather volumes, most behind glass, that are clearly intended for decoration rather than reading. The other is a small, unprepossessing store crammed with books from floor to ceiling. The two women who mind the disparate bookshops are even more of a contrast. The first, an ash blonde who knows nothing about books, wears “a tight black dress” and walks “with a certain something [Marlowe] hadn’t often seen in bookstores,” while the second is a small dark woman with a finely drawn face, a knowledge of first editions, and a gift for observation that Marlowe, the narrator, says would make her a good cop. “I hope not,” she answers.
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