“Victorine?” Dan called and Jess heard an excited gasp, followed by the tent flap opening, and then a little girl tore out and into Dan’s arms.
Jess had the camera in the perfect position to catch the moment of their embrace, Dan’s back to her, the girl’s smiling, ecstatic face full to the camera.
“You’re back!” the little girl cried.
The faces of the two nurses who’d emerged from the tent reflected everything Jess felt: that the ordinary moment of an embrace had been transformed by war into something precious. And she was so glad that she’d come back to Italy. These were the stories she could tell, the pictures she would take: of the humanity behind the guns. The compassion beyond the bloodshed, and the fact that, as a counterbalance to evil, charity, mercy and love still existed and could therefore triumph.
“I am Victorine,” the little girl announced to Jess. “What is that?” She slithered out of Dan’s arms and pointed to Jess’s camera.
“Pleased to meet you, Victorine,” Jess said. Then she switched to French, detecting the girl’s accent. “It’s my camera. Would you like to see?”
Victorine clapped her hands. “You speak like Papa,” she said, also in French, and Jess wondered who the hell her papa was and why he’d left her in such danger.
Jess squatted closer to the ground, held out the camera and pointed to the viewing lens. “You look through here,” Jess said, “and then this here,” she pointed to the lens that would capture the image, “will copy a picture of what you see when you press the button. But the picture will stay inside the camera until I go back to London and have it printed out for you. I promise I’ll bring it back next time I’m here. It’ll probably take a few weeks.”
“Everything takes a long time,” Victorine said with a sigh of resignation well beyond her years.
Jess looked up at Dan. What was a child doing in a field hospital? Was she his? She’d said her papa spoke French, and Dan was about as French as the Empire State Building. But the way Dan and the girl had greeted one another; it was as intimate as a father and child.
“Where’s Vicki?” Jess heard another voice shout and two soldiers appeared. “We got you some chocolate, Vicki,” one of them said, holding out a white packet emblazoned with the words “U.S. Army Field Ration D.”
“It’s Victorine,” the little girl said crossly. “But thank you.” She stood on tiptoes to kiss each soldier on the cheek, all the while never letting go of Dan’s hand.
“Are you boys discharged?” Dan asked them and they nodded.
“Yes, Sir. That’s why we needed our kisses,” one of them said, indicating Victorine.
“Thought we could get a ride back with you, Sir,” the other one added.
“Sure,” Dan said. “Give me five minutes.”
“Thanks, little Vicki,” one of the soldiers said. The other added, “Bye Vicki!” before they both moved off in the direction of the jeep.
“Victorine,” the girl called after them. “I’m French!” Then she turned her attention back to Jess. “Are you Dan’s friend?”
“I think so,” Jess said.
“You can be my friend, too. But Dan is my best friend.”
Dan crouched down beside Victorine. “I have to go. I’ll come back whenever I can. I promise.”
The little girl’s face crumpled. “I want you to stay.”
“What about if I show you my camera some more?” Jess said, with a smile.
Victorine nodded, her eyes tear-filled. Dan used the moment to unravel himself from the girl, who kissed his cheeks.
“Let me walk Dan back to the car and then we’ll look at the camera, okay?” Jess said, before she hurried after Dan, scrambling over the mud and slime to keep up. “Who is she?”
“You need a pair of jump boots,” he said as he walked.
“Jump boots?”
He nodded at her boots, which she’d thought, before encountering Italy, would keep her feet dry. “Paratrooper boots. Like these.” He pointed at his boots and Jess felt a serious pang of envy at the sturdy, thick, high leather boots that would indeed be perfect.
“The U.S. Army gave me a pair of brown Oxfords and I knew enough about roughing it to understand they’d be useless, so I got these.” She pointed ruefully at her own inadequate boots, which had been the most serviceable she could find in Manhattan.
Dan studied her feet. “I’ll get you a pair. They’re in demand though. No sooner has an airborne GI died and someone from infantry is claiming his boots.”
Jess shuddered. “I don’t know if I could wear a dead man’s boots.”
“If I died I’d rather someone who needed them had my boots than they were buried in this muck,” Dan said prosaically. “Major Henderson, the surgeon you met that night at the field hospital, has my brother Laurie’s stethoscope because it was a damn good one, too good to waste.”
He paused, stopped walking all of a sudden, and Jess heard herself ask, even though what he’d said implied its own dreadful answer, “What happened?”
Dan spoke fast, in a manner suggesting that if he didn’t say it all at once, he wouldn’t be able to. “Laurie was a doctor. On vacation in Europe, he met a French girl, fell in love, married and moved to Paris. He worked with the French Army as a surgeon in 1940, the same year—June 1940, in fact—that his wife was due to give birth. It was the worst damn time to have a baby.”
Jess remembered that the end of May was when the British Army had fled France, and that June was when Paris surrendered, when the Germans took France for themselves. It was worse than the worst damn time to have a baby.
“There was a mass exodus of people out of Paris in June, trying to keep ahead of the Germans. My sister-in-law was one of them,” Dan continued, starting to walk again, slowly. “The roads were so jammed with cars that it took days to travel a few miles, there was no water and no food and the Krauts bombed the lines of refugees. So everyone did what they could to protect their children. They gave them to convoys of French soldiers fleeing south, anyone with a vehicle. They thought they would all get to somewhere south of the Loire and it would be safe and they would be reunited.”
“Oh God,” Jess said quietly, unable to think what it would be like to hand your child over to strangers because it seemed the better choice.
“My brother was with a convoy of medics and a woman handed him two children through the window just after the Stukas had strafed a line of civilians. One was older, a boy; he’d been shot and he died soon after. The other was a tiny baby girl, about a week old.”
“Victorine,” Jess said. “But why isn’t she with your brother’s wife?”
Dan didn’t answer that question. Instead, a long stream of terrible words filled the air like mortar explosions as he told her that his brother had waited in Moulins for a fortnight, trying to find the baby’s mother as she’d said that’s where she was going. But there were too many lost children and no possible way to reunite them all. His brother hadn’t been able to give the baby to another family as nobody had enough milk for their own children. So he’d taken the child to Toulouse where his wife had gone to be with family.
“He thought he and his wife could care for the baby for a couple of weeks, then he’d go back to Moulins and try again once everything had settled down. But at his wife’s family’s home, he found…” Dan paused.
They were back at the jeep, the men he’d promised a ride to huddled into their coats in their seats. “Fucking rain,” he swore as the relentless drizzle turned into a torrent that really couldn’t make them any wetter than they already were. “Sorry.”
“If you think that’s the first time I’ve heard someone say that then you really have forgotten everything I told you in London,” she said gently.
It made the corners of his mouth turn up a little and he leaned his back against the jeep, away from the waiting men and went on, his voice low. “His wife and their baby had died in childbirth. There were no doctors left in Toulouse. His mother-in-law was ill from
grief and his father-in-law refused to so much as look at Victorine because he thought she was a changeling who had taken his daughter’s and granddaughter’s place.”
Dan stopped speaking, his jaw tight. Jess leaned back against the jeep too, next to him, but not looking at him so he could speak out into the rain, rather than to her. “The baby wouldn’t settle with anyone but Laurie. And his father-in-law had made everyone suspicious of Victorine; you’ve no idea the kinds of beliefs people in the countryside have. The final straw was when Laurie walked in on his father-in-law shaking her. He knew he had to leave or Victorine would be dead too. He got to London. As soon as the American troops rolled into Italy, he signed on as a medical officer. He brought Victorine with him.”
“But how?” Jess asked. “If they won’t let a woman go anywhere near a combat zone, I can’t imagine they’d allow a child.”
“He didn’t have a choice,” Dan said simply. “Nobody has a choice. We all do what we hope is for the best. How all this is for the best is anyone’s guess,” he added, hand gesturing to the ambulance driving in, the injured man lifted out. “He thought the hospital would be safe. That the nurses would help him look after her. Nobody, nobody,” he repeated, “understood what a field hospital on the Italian front would be like.”
Jess risked a glance at him, remembering the horror of last month. The thickness of the blood beneath her shoes, the latrines walled with a teetering pile of sodden blankets, the proximity of the shells. It was incomprehensible. “So your brother was the man she calls Papa? She doesn’t know about her real parents?”
“She doesn’t.”
With the cover of rain, almost impossible to see through, Jess couldn’t be sure how Dan felt at that moment but his stance suggested a remoteness that made her heart crack a little. How old was he? Twenty-five at most. In charge of how many men? Knowing that whatever he ordered them to do could kill them. And a child to protect too. She understood now why he could shoot a man and not look as if he felt anything; he had so many people to care about and to keep alive that he couldn’t afford to expend any visible emotion on an enemy. Which didn’t mean he didn’t feel it though.
She waited for what he would say next, sensing by the tension dripping off him more thickly than the rain that it wouldn’t be good.
“A shell landed on the operating tent in September. Laurie was killed.”
Jess instinctively reached out a hand to touch his arm. “So now she’s yours?”
“Yes,” he said simply.
“Victorine means victory,” she said when she thought she could speak.
Dan nodded. “And nobody will dare to send her away. She’s our lucky charm. Almost a deity.” He drew in a breath. “The boys bring her chocolate. They believe that if she kisses them on the cheek before they go out to fight, they’ll survive. The boys who don’t believe it are always the ones who get shot. I can’t explain it. But it’s what happens. No one in the upper reaches of the army wants to send away something the men believe in. So they turn a blind eye. The nurses look after her for me. I owe them a whole goddamn lot.”
Jess couldn’t believe she’d assumed he’d wanted to drive her to the hospital so he could charm one of the nurses. He clearly had no time and no energy to be charming anyone. “I’ll go and show Victorine my camera,” Jess said. “And you’d better watch out,” she added mischievously, wanting him to leave to face the enemy with lightness rather than sadness, “you might find that I’m her best friend by the time you return.”
* * *
Over the next week, Jess settled into life as a photojournalist. She propped her typewriter on a small table she’d found that would also double nicely as a shelter to roll under should the Germans start bombing the hospital again and she sat there every day, wearing everything she owned, layered in double socks, trousers, shirt, jacket, overcoat, scarf. It still wasn’t enough to keep out the cold, nor was the oil stove enough to warm the tent; it was only when she stepped outside that she realized it was actually a couple of degrees warmer inside—freezing, instead of several degrees below. The stories she collected were about Victorine, who was a small sun bringing light and warmth to a place otherwise bereft of those things.
Each day, she and Victorine visited the convalescent tent to sit with the men and, each day as they entered, like today, someone would call out for her. “Vicki?”
Victorine spun around crossly and stalked, as much as a four-year-old could stalk, into the ward. “You are one of Dan’s men,” she pronounced to the man who’d called her name. “My name is Victorine.”
“Sorry, Miss,” the soldier apologized, and Jess realized it was Private Jennings, the man who’d wanted his face in Vogue.
“Captain May,” he nodded at Jess.
“You have a dirty arm,” Victorine scolded him.
“What happened?” Jess asked, remembering that he was a new replacement and here he was, already in the hospital, his face pale against his shock of red hair, his leanness all the more childlike against the hospital blankets.
Jennings flushed. “Hurt my head,” he mumbled and Jess could see that he had a row of stitches holding together a split eyebrow.
“Somehow he managed to trip over and crack his head on a long Tom,” a nurse said sardonically and when Jennings’ cheeks colored so red he looked as if he might explode, Jess again had the impression of enduring innocence, a wholesomeness worth preserving.
“Look!” Victorine cried, pointing to the patch of clay on Jennings’ arm. “The mud is shaped like a…”
Puppy. Bird. Fairy. Rabbit, Jess waited for Victorine to say, imagining it was like the game she’d played as a child when she’d lain on her back on a sandy beach before a Tahitian storm watching clouds coalesce into giants’ faces and unicorns.
“One of the silver pineapples nobody lets me touch,” Victorine grumbled, as if it were wrong that nobody would let her touch a grenade. “See,” Victorine continued, “it has lines across it. And the funny bit on top.”
Jess met Jennings’ eye and saw in them a shock she imagined was mirrored in her own. Then she took the photograph of the little girl tracing the mud on a man’s arm that she’d compared to a deadly weapon, such were the limitations of what she’d been exposed to in her short life.
“Doesn’t matter how you got to hospital,” Jess said to Jennings, hoping to make him feel better, and herself too. “Now you’ll be in the pages of Vogue.”
Jennings grinned and whooped.
After that, Jess took Victorine back to her tent where Victorine had, without asking, been staying in Jess’s bed since Jess arrived. Jess lay down next to Victorine and began to tell her the fairytale Le Petit Poucet, but she made the tiny thumb-sized boy into a little girl who defeats the ogre at the end instead.
Later that night, as nurses came in and out, always exhausted, always cold, always wet, always with bloodstains on their bodies because having a shower in the middle of an Italian winter was a feat of hardihood that most hadn’t the energy for, Jess continued to write her story, in between heating cocoa in empty plasma cans on the stove. She wrote about Dan, the oh so young major who had not only a company but a little girl to think of, both of which he did without question, without resentment, with true valor of the kind, Jess realized, she’d never before witnessed.
When she’d finished, she unrolled the paper from the typewriter and reread her words. It was good, she thought, and it told a story no one else would ever tell: that of the cost exacted by war on a four-year-old child. But she had to show it to Dan. She couldn’t send it to Bel without making sure he was okay with it.
Victorine was sound asleep as Jess set her body against the wind and propelled herself through the rain to the receiving tent. Luckily she arrived during a lull; no ambulances were arriving, no bodies were lying on stretchers waiting to be attended to, and Anne, whose smile was always large as if to compensate for her diminutive stature, had a tin of Nescafé in her hand.
“I was just thinking it
’d be nice to have someone to talk to,” Anne said, shaking the tin at Jess.
“Oh, yes please,” Jess said gratefully.
Anne made her a coffee and Jess leaned back against the desk to drink it.
“I don’t know if it’s just my imagination but it tastes so much better in a mug than a plasma can.” Jess wriggled her toes, wishing the hot liquid would somehow find its way down to her feet, which she hadn’t felt properly for a couple of days. “How long until spring?” she asked ruefully.
“I thought you were going back to cozy London next week,” Anne said. “Think of me when you’re having a shower.”
“I’m not allowed to stay longer than my orders. The PROs in London like to keep me in their sights.”
“I’m teasing,” Anne said with a smile. “You go back and tell your story. I’ve seen you talking to the nurses, writing down what they do and recording it all with your camera. If I wrote a letter to my momma and told her what it was like here, she’d laugh. Nobody will laugh at your pictures.”
“So you won’t mind if I come back and take up a bed in your quarters again as soon as they let me?”
“Not a bit.” Anne took Jess’s empty cup from her and refilled it.
“How do I see Dan if I need to?”
Anne groaned. “That man could thread all the hearts he’s won onto a string and it’d reach New York. Don’t tell me he can add another one to his chain?”
Jess laughed. “My heart is safe in my chest. He does seem popular though.”
“Popular is an understatement. Most of the nurses would follow him into battle if it meant spending another minute with him. Glad you’ve got more sense.”
“Why? Is he…” Jess stopped. Did she want to know the answer to her question: Is he not worth their hearts?
“Oh no, he’s as good a man as he is good-looking. Says he made major because everyone else was dead and they didn’t have a choice, but a couple of months ago he went out into no-man’s-land and brought back a boy who’d been injured out there; they could hear his groans between shell bursts. Nothing makes a company more panicky than hearing one of their own, injured and alone. He saved that GI’s life.”
The Paris Orphan Page 7
