“Oh, Bérénice, do you know what hurts the most? The fact that I feel safe with him. Yes, with him. My body ceased to exist a long time ago, and so I’m not concerned about what he does with this lifeless mass, how he satisfies his lust without any shame . . . But whenever he holds me in his arms . . .”
Bérénice would not listen to any more. She leaped up, pulling Amanda with her. She put her hands on her shoulders.
“Just remember, silly girl, that man isn’t doing this to help you, he’s doing it for what he can get out of you.”
Amanda embraced Bérénice, and the two of them stood in silence for several minutes.
“I’m going to save my daughter . . .”
24
The women’s hut was packed with new arrivals. They slept two or even three to a bunk bed. At night the inmates left the door open so that fresh air could get in; their breathing lay stagnant in the corners and prevented the scarce oxygen circulating. Amanda had begun her countdown: there were exactly seven days to go before her plan to save her daughter could be put into action. In this vital week she had to calculate every second, every minute, with absolute precision.
On Sunday night, which marked the start of the week that she would save her daughter, everything was quiet. But shortly before dawn, Bérénice shook Amanda out of her drowsy sleep and took her by the arm. Lacking the strength to resist, Amanda allowed herself to be led stumbling out of the hut toward the outhouse. A feeble light at the far end of its solid walls was all they had to guide them.
The outhouse was a kind of fortress. Not even the kitchen or the guards’ quarters were as well built, maybe because this was the best way to limit the stench and prevent any spread of disease. In the center, a cement wall with holes and wooden boards across it presided over the place where the abandoned ones could carry out their bodily functions.
For Amanda, the smells no longer registered, whereas for Bérénice, despite her having been far longer in the camp, the stench still made her wince. The outhouse was the only part of the camp the guards didn’t dare enter, convinced that just by inhaling that foul air they would become infected.
Bérénice cast her eagle eye over the room to make sure they were alone. In one corner she spied a woman on her knees, lost in the gloom.
“She won’t survive another day here,” she said.
Amanda waited patiently to hear the secret Bérénice wanted to share. Glancing at the slumped body of the woman in the corner, she knew instinctively that if she were kept behind the fences for another month, she would end up like her.
“This weekend half of the guards will be on leave to visit their families. I heard they’ve been given two weeks.” Bérénice wanted Amanda to pay her full attention, and not go on staring at the dying woman. “You’re the only one who can help us.”
Amanda could not understand how. She worked in the kitchen and some nights met Bertrand in the storage shed. He never took her to the guards’ bunkhouse or a watchtower.
“Bertrand must know who’s leaving, and if they’re expecting reinforcements.”
“But the women cleaners can find that out much more easily than me. How do you think I can get that information?”
“What’s most important is to know whether reinforcements are coming or not. What I’m asking of you is very simple.”
“Do you really think Bertrand will tell me? What interest could I have in that?”
“You’ll find a way to convince him.”
“Bérénice, if Bertrand suspects . . .”
“He won’t suspect a thing if you don’t want him to. Your daughter’s life, and that of many men, depends on it. The men who are going to help us get away from the Boches.”
Amanda stared at her disconsolately. The Germans have taken over everywhere, they’ve eliminated borders, crushed everything and everyone in their way. We’ll never be able to get away from them. That’s what she wanted to tell her friend, but in the end, she said nothing. Bérénice possibly understood, but said nothing either.
“I’ll see what I can do, but I can’t promise anything.”
When they were back inside the hut, Amanda thought she had to try to help the woman abandoned in the outhouse. She would run to her and save her from her humiliation. She was about to go out again when Bérénice stopped her.
“Leave her; if you get too close you’ll only end up sick. Remember that many people’s lives depend on you, not just your daughter’s. Are you going to put Lina’s salvation at risk?”
There were only six days left before her daughter would be free. Amanda counted them as she prayed silently, fearful lest a storm, an uprising, or the arrival of the Germans should spoil her plan. Every night she went over in her mind each possible thing that could go wrong and how to avoid it. The transfer to Drancy might be suddenly pushed forward; they might separate the women from their children; they might transfer Bertrand; Bérénice’s husband might organize a revolt or a mass escape . . .
She prayed for none of these possibilities to materialize. Nothing can occur before Saturday. Nothing.
On Monday night, Lina was waiting restlessly in bed for her when Amanda returned exhausted from her encounter with Bertrand. She avoided her daughter’s gaze, as if the girl could perceive her sense of shame.
“Gilberte is convinced they’re going to kill us all.”
“Don’t pay attention to her; what does she know?” Amanda said, sitting beside Lina, but far enough away for her not to notice the traces of her degradation, the smell of Bertrand clinging to her skin.
“Her mother also works in the kitchen.”
Amanda reacted as if her daughter were accusing her. You ought to know it, you work in the kitchen, but instead of finding out what’s going on in the camp or what’s going to happen to us, you waste your time in the arms of that filthy guard. Inside her head, she could hear the reproving voices of Lina, Hilde, and Claire.
“Lina, trust me. They’re not going to kill anyone.”
Her daughter was waiting for an explanation, something more than an empty promise. She refused to believe that the only thing her mother had done since they left Berlin was to weep over Viera’s absence and write a few letters on faded sheets of paper.
“Gilberte says . . .”
“That’s enough of Gilberte!” Amanda exploded, with controlled fury. Only loud enough for the two of them to hear, Lina jumped regardless, now even more worried about her mother’s reaction. This was the first time Lina had noticed so much as a spark of anger in this subdued woman who had always lived beneath the wings of a man who listened to the weak, irregular beats of other people’s hearts.
“They’re going to make us walk through the night to a train station. Then they’ll put us in a cattle truck and we’ll travel for days until we reach a concentration camp. And there they’ll separate us. It won’t be like here, Mama. There it’ll be run by Germans, and they will know exactly who we are. Gilberte described all the details . . .”
Amanda closed her eyes for a moment. How could she convince her daughter that she would be safe, that she would grow up far from her, like Viera. Not on an island, but with friendly people, people who would give her more love and protection than she could. She felt a burning sensation deep in her throat, as if a tangle of thorns were traveling down her esophagus and had begun to perforate the lining of her stomach. Her eyes grew moist with tears; her lips started to quiver.
“Somebody escapes every day. They get over the fence, and the French guards don’t care. Gilberte says . . .”
“Escaping wouldn’t help, Lina,” said Amanda firmly. “We will always be hunted. We need to do something more than that.”
“What more, Mama? What more . . . to disappear?”
Disheartened, Lina got up and went over to the window. The clouds were even lower than usual; it was impossible to see the moon or stars. No escape there, either.
She walked slowly back to their bed. Amanda was waiting for her, and hugged her tenderly. Frau Meye
r was watching them from her bunk, a vacant expression on her face.
“Mama, do you know what the worst part is?” Now Lina’s eyes were brimming with tears.
“What is it, my love?” Amanda tried to gather her strength to comfort her. Such a young child talking of all this pain, of trains heading nowhere, of separation and death.
“I no longer remember Papa.”
She leaned gently against her mother, as if asking permission to hug her again.
“Your father has not abandoned us,” said Amanda. She looked for the suitcase under the bed and carefully took out a photograph.
“But I’ve forgotten his face, his eyes . . . I no longer remember his voice.”
“Papa is here,” said Amanda, holding out their family photograph. “And also out there,” she whispered, pointing to the window. She kissed her on the brow. “He’s watching over you from one of those stars . . .”
“There aren’t any stars, Mama,” Lina interrupted her, photograph in hand. “There are no stars here.”
25
Every day, the path from the hut to the kitchen was a dreadful struggle, away from Lina’s warm embrace, Bérénice’s watchful eyes, Frau Meyer’s sleeplessness; past the blank gaze of the guards and the unseasonably frigid morning. Until she reached the kitchen door with its rusty bolts that she had to force open as splinters of wood penetrated beneath her fingernails. She would sit shivering in a corner, her eyes fixed on the window, beyond that on the wire fences, and beyond that the void. On the horizon was what looked like an endless forest where she imagined herself wandering with Lina while shooting stars flashed overhead. It was only when someone else came into the kitchen and started banging a pan full of dirty water that Amanda snapped out of her daydreams.
Tuesday morning Gilberte’s mother lay sobbing on the kitchen floor, in the midst of all the garbage. A guard came in, slamming the door behind him. He grabbed her hair and dragged her up like a dead animal. She got to her feet without a word of complaint and stumbled after him as quickly as she could. She straightened her damp, faded dress clumsily, and Amanda saw her raise a shaking hand to her stomach.
Safe in her corner, Amanda suddenly realized that in fact all the women who worked in the kitchen had been chosen by one or sometimes two of the guards. All of them were young, some were still pretty. She had to admit that, to her relief, Bertrand had never treated her cruelly. She preferred to think of him as her guardian, her savior. She had been lucky, she thought, and she ought to feel grateful. She gave a reluctant smile, the corners of her pale lips lifting slightly.
Any outside news that reached them in the camp was fragmentary and out-of-date. It was hard to follow, because it was circulated by word of mouth and inevitably grew distorted until it became almost mythical. One rumor had it that the Germans were falling back; another, even more of a fantasy, that the Resistance had taken Paris. These rumors grew by the day, and every part of the camp could have a different version. One hut said the British had crossed the Channel and reached the Pas de Calais. The other, that France had gotten rid of all its Jews by deporting them to Poland, and now the Germans, having achieved their plan of racial cleansing, were about to begin the retreat, three years after the war began.
Bérénice roamed the camp with her inscrutable smile, keeping an eye on everything. Amanda was intrigued by the way she managed to elude the guards. She stole food from the kitchen every day, and succeeded in forcing the girl who cleaned the officers’ quarters to smuggle out whatever newspapers she could, no matter when they were from. The guards often saw her coming out of the kitchen, her pockets stuffed with bread, but turned their backs on her and looked the other way. They didn’t want to get involved or show any weakness faced with the wife of one of the prisoners’ leaders, someone who could settle scores with them when the war was over, or even in only a few days’ time. Some of them had already been threatened, so it was preferable not to run any risk.
They were convinced it was unwise to challenge Bérénice and her husband. They did not give them any obvious preference, but allowed them discreet access to places forbidden to the others. There was a Resistance network in that region, perhaps in the whole of France, and the guards had to live with the fear that they could be denounced or have their families attacked. On several occasions when they mistreated one of the prisoners, they had been horrified to hear a phrase that made their blood run cold, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”
The freedom Bérénice enjoyed to come and go around the huts irritated the other women. She was the only one who could get near the male prisoners, supply them with food, and even give them stale news—which at that time was the most precious contraband of all. She was also the person who conveyed what was going on between the men’s and women’s huts: a death, an illness, an anniversary remembered. She gave them such precise, elaborate descriptions that Amanda came to suspect that Bérénice invented them all to help the other women survive and keep them from despair.
Amanda considered herself lucky to have the protection and even the complicity of the most powerful woman in the hut. And that closeness allowed her to perceive a restlessness that went far beyond the normal routine in the camp. Something is in the air, I can sense it, something big. With Bérénice nothing was left to chance; every movement was calculated, every approach had a purpose; she didn’t risk the slightest false move. Amanda trusted her, but couldn’t help being worried: even though she was almost sure that Bérénice’s plans wouldn’t get in the way of hers, the fear that they might kept her constantly on edge.
Once in the middle of the night, when one of the women began to shout, tearing off the rags she was wearing and rolling around naked on the beaten earth floor, Bérénice, who was a light sleeper, was the first to react and get up. Running over to her, she slapped her hard until she calmed down. The other women watched how coldly and determinedly Bérénice acted, whereas they didn’t even have the strength to sit up in their bunks.
“If you don’t keep quiet, I’ll make sure you choke to death if need be,” she shouted in her ear, throttling her with her hand. “I’m not going to allow the French guards to come and punish us because of your behavior. Pick up that rag of a dress, calm down, and go back to bed. Right now!”
The woman did as she was told, even though she was still shivering. Covered in dust, eyes downcast and feeling humiliated, she went back to her bed and lay down, her face to the wall. Bérénice dusted off her own dress and quickly surveyed the hut. Those who had been looking on curiously avoided her gaze. In a few seconds, calm had been restored.
What a courageous woman; if only I was as strong as her, Amanda thought. For the first time, she saw the veins standing out in her friend’s hands. To her, Bérénice was essentially a kind person, with a still intact soul, a combatant whose sole aim was to defend herself and those dear to her. The most unlikely legends had sprung up around her: that she had killed a German soldier; that she had left her daughter in a Spanish orphanage; that she had taken revenge on more than one collaborator. Some of the women even said she had a hidden pistol and was eager to get her hands on ammunition. The first bullet she fired would be at any guard who dared venture into the women’s hut, as she had once threatened. For them it was forbidden territory, and she made it clear she intended to keep it that way. Rather than fear, the women felt respect for her. To the guards, she was untouchable.
Bérénice had decided not to share Amanda’s plan with her husband. It was a silent, well-conceived idea, and she was determined to support her to the hilt. It was also her way of staying in control of the possible consequences. Everything would be all right. One little girl more or less would not upset the camp’s routine.
Whatever Bérénice is up to, Amanda prayed, please let it happen after Saturday.
26
On Tuesday they were awakened by noises outside the hut. They ran to the main yard, where a group of women were clinging to the fence, shouting. Some of them were weeping; others curs
ing the French guards.
Lina squeezed her mother’s hand. Maybe, she thought, the moment to escape had arrived. They could run and hide in the nearest church. She would pray at the foot of the altar the way Father Marcel had taught her. “God will not abandon us,” she muttered, and Amanda heard her. Without another word, they crept to the corner where the women’s hut joined the men’s. There were no guards to be seen. “Now’s the moment,” said Lina. “There are no guards or Germans. We’re free, Mama!”
Lina closed her eyes tightly and began a silent prayer. She allowed herself to be dragged along by her mother as she pushed her way through the frantic crowd. I promise you, God, that every night I’ll say two Our Fathers and four Hail Marys, she begged.
Amanda suddenly looked away, then hugged her daughter to her, trying to cover her eyes. The bloody body of one of the male prisoners was lying in the middle of the yard.
“There’s no point escaping. What for? To end up torn to pieces like him?” said one of the women standing by the body.
The man’s face was a mass of bruises and dried blood. His top lip had been torn off. He was barefoot, and the soles of his feet were red raw. Two men came over, lifted him, and took him away to their hut. His arms dangled down, his head brushing against the ground.
Struggling free of her mother, Lina watched all this without so much as blinking.
“He’s dead,” she said.
“No, Lina, he’s alive and he’ll recover. In here, we all have to learn how to survive.”
At a distance from the crowd she could spot the figure of Bérénice, who was also looking for her, and waved for her to come over. Telling Lina to return to their hut, she followed her friend toward the kitchen. Bérénice whispered to her: “They’re going to change the guards. There’ve been too many escapes in recent days, and they don’t want any more problems with the Germans. They’ve lost control of the camp and want to punish us. You’ll have to hurry.”
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