The Paris Orphan

by Natasha Lester

  Her camera foregrounded fat peacocks, plumage bright as a summer sky. The red flowers dancing strong and bright, reaching up to the sun shining above them. And behind that, the women. Tissue-paper skin barely covering bones; it was almost possible to see inside them. And their faces. Bereft of emotion. Dead, but given the sentence of living.

  The guard in the tower stood down, as did the handful of other guards left to face the consequences. The skeletal women didn’t cry. They barely reacted to Dan and Jennings and Sparrow and the vehicles following behind. Didn’t respond to the medics laying them on stretchers; flinched in fact, as if they would rather be left alone. And Jess knew that meant their sufferings were beyond imagining; to wish for the hell they already knew rather than the terror of the unknown was a fear too stark to contemplate.

  Jess found a female camp guard who, now that she’d been taken into custody, was willing to tell them everything.

  “We had too many women to look after them properly,” the guard said to Jess in German and Jess translated for Dan. “Each building was meant for five hundred but was filled with more than two thousand. One bunk for four women; they slept head to feet. And every day fifty died but two hundred arrived. What was I supposed to do?”

  The guard looked at them as if she expected their pity. Jess blanched but made herself ask, “Why are the women here?”

  “Some are Jews. Most are resisters,” the guard replied and Jess repeated the words to Dan as best she could through a throat tight with tears.

  “Every morning the beds were filled with dead bodies,” the guard went on, eager to have it all out now. “We woke the ones still alive at three in the morning and did the roll call to see how many we had left. It took two hours to call each name and every morning someone would fall or faint or die but even if it happened beside them, the women were not allowed to move. If they did, they would be beaten with the wooden stick.”

  They would be beaten. Not: I would beat them. The guard had devolved responsibility, just like Martha had said.

  Jess moved back outside. General Collins had been to the town on whose doorstep this abomination lay and he’d brought back with him a group of German civilians. He now made them walk through the camp, which they did, staring directly in front, seeing as little as possible. Refusing to bear witness to what had happened right beneath their unseeing gazes.

  “The Germans did not do this,” one of the civilians protested. “Our Führer would not let this happen.”

  What was there to say to such ignorance, when the evidence, so much terrible evidence, was right there? General Collins told the civilians they must bury the dead with their own hands. Two thousand bodies. Two thousand forgotten people buried by those who’d ignored their plight, watched over by a company of American soldiers and Jess, trying to find prayers that might bless the unblessed.

  How can we pray, Jess wondered, when it is our fault too? We’d heard there were camps. Why were we so slow, so unseeing, so obtuse as to not come straight to these places and free those who needed it most?

  Before they left, they learned that the people they’d found were genuinely the living dead. Unable to work or to move. More than twenty thousand women who had still been able to crawl or stumble or trudge had been sent on a death march from the camp before the Americans arrived to free them. They were the vanished, the Nacht und Nebel—the Night and Fog—mostly resistance fighters the German army had wished to render invisible. And they’d all but succeeded.

  The journey back to headquarters was long and silent.

  “I’ll sit next to Sparrow,” Jess said when they reached the jeep.

  Even though Sparrow hadn’t been sick again, he’d withdrawn far inside himself, face pale, smile gone, eyes dull. She took his hand in hers and held it, limp and spiritless.

  For the rest of the drive, Jess wondered what she would say to Bel. How she would make her believe that her camera hadn’t created the pictures, that she hadn’t zoomed in too narrowly or composed the image in such a way that it seemed worse than it actually was. That the savagery was real.

  I implore you to believe this, was how she would begin, begging Bel to let the women of the camp speak, to declare to the world that their lives had, after all, not been for naught.

  Night had cast a shroud over them well before they reached Dan’s HQ. Then it was another long drive back to the press camp, a drive Jess wasn’t sure she was up to. She was hugely grateful when Dan said, “Stay here tonight. There are some female translators and WACs around. I’m sure you can bunk in with them.”

  She nodded. “Thanks.”

  They were the only words exchanged. Dan spoke briefly to a woman exiting the mess to secure a bed for Jess. The woman smiled so brightly that Jess wanted to hold up a hand to ward her off. She told Jess to follow her and soon she was found a tent and a bedroll. But she knew she needed to shower. She had to sluice off the smell that clung to her, had to wipe away all the physical remains of the day in a way she could never erase the images and stories from her mind.

  As she set off for the ablutions, she heard a strange noise, a rending of the pall of night with a sound that was at once incendiary and keening. She kept walking, flashlight on, until the familiar smell of latrines told her she was going the right way and she found the fabric flaps that screened off a shower.

  She pushed open the flaps and the smell assaulted her first: base and foreboding. And then she saw. She dropped the flashlight instinctively, knowing she couldn’t face any more brutality.

  The sound came as she dropped to her knees—a cry so loud and so long and so excruciating that she thought at first it must have come from the man slumped in the shower stall, gun drowning in the pool of blood at his side, face smashed through by the bullet, but still unmistakable as Sparrow.

  Twenty

  As dawn touched the sky the morning after Sparrow killed himself, Jess took a jeep, stopped at the press camp to write her story and parcel up her film, and then Marty drove her to Paris. On the way, her mind played ceaselessly over the peacock, the guard, the bodies in the boxcar, the women’s eyes, and Sparrow, resplendent in his patriotic dress the night of the party in Reims. Sparrow, his bloodied head in her lap when Dan and a group of others heard her god-awful cries and found her. Dan ordering someone to lift her up and take her away. A glimpse of Dan sitting where she had sat, cradling Sparrow like a brother.

  What time I am afraid, I shall trust in Thee. The words, one of many prayers from the U.S. Army Prayer Book, words that were supposed to provide comfort to a man like Sparrow when he most needed it, echoed mercilessly in her head. Where had God been when Sparrow had needed him, when he’d made his way to the shower, when he’d felt more frightened of living than of anything else? Jess shut her eyes but the tears pressed mercilessly through her lids.

  One day and one unsleeping night back in the Hotel Scribe was enough to convince her that she couldn’t go on that way. Marty suggested a party and in her voice Jess heard the same fatigue, the same enervation, the same fracturing sound of a person pushed so close to their breaking point that anything, even a mistimed smile, might cause them to snap.

  So a party they would have the following night. She made sure the word was spread out to the hotels used by the GIs—everyone who’d been at the camp had been given several days’ leave and most had come to Paris.

  When it was time to dress, she dismissed her pinks. She was going to wear a damn normal dress—no Chanel, no Schiaparelli; she refused to wear anyone who’d run from the war. She’d wear the dress she’d been carrying in the bottom of her bag since she’d arrived in Europe, the dress she’d left in London and then in Paris for safekeeping. The dress she’d had Estella Bissette make for her before she’d left America, before she understood that war was not a noun but a wretchedness imprisoned inside a smiling face.

  She opened the wardrobe and took it out, running her hand along the skirt out of habit, the black satin pooling in her fingers. She put it on, the white bodice
covered with delicate and lovely lace, the scooped back reminding her of the Jessica May in the magazine photos she’d once been, the nipped-in waist underscoring the fact that rations were not enough to subsist on for very long, the skirt dropping like midnight into a long train that would most likely be crushed and torn by the boots of the GIs who came to the party.

  She would wear it anyway and she would smile and behind the lipstick she would hide the fact that every night when she lay down, she had to first drink enough whiskey so that the images before her eyes blurred into indistinction.

  Hemingway came, along with all the correspondents in Paris. He took up a place on the balcony among the jerry cans of fuel and waited with a bottle of whiskey for everyone to pay homage to him, which Mary Welsh was still doing. Marty rolled her eyes at Hemingway and danced with James Gavin, the divisional commander who’d caught more than her eye. Picasso and Simone de Beauvoir strolled in; Jess’s currency as a model and her past relationship with Emile—who’d thankfully given up his accreditation pass and, even though he was now living in Paris, knew well enough not to come—was enough to make sure that if she was having a party, most of one slice of Paris would hear about it and come along.

  Then came the GIs, not just from Dan’s battalion but others she and Martha had met over the past eighteen months. The tiny room was thick with bodies and she could see that was all part of the appeal, the press of flesh to flesh, a dance and a kiss and who knew where it might lead. Because they all had a reason to seek oblivion, to erase, for just one night, the awful press of knowledge that Allied victories didn’t erase the abominable things that had already been done.

  To help the mood, the gramophone played French jazz, the lights were off, the room was lit by candles, and Jess had found some vermouth, which she’d used to make a Manhattan; a Manhattan wasn’t champagne and it wasn’t schnapps and therefore it couldn’t remind her of war. But as for everything else…

  She leaned her back against the door, holding the almost empty Manhattan by the rim, the glass resting against her leg. The door behind her opened suddenly, propelling her forward, knocking the remaining liquid from her glass.

  She turned around and saw Dan.

  “Oh, it’s only you,” he said, then shook his head. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I just meant…”

  “That you’re glad it’s not someone who’ll make a fuss about being knocked over by a door and having vermouth spilt on her one fine dress.”

  “You’ve never made a fuss about anything even though you’ve had more cause than most.” There it was, a veiled reference to what they’d seen and he smiled at her but she could see it was an action rather than a sentiment. That he’d forgotten how to be happy.

  He joined her, his back against the wall too, staring at Picasso, who was asleep in the chair before Jess’s typewriter, at Hemingway and his band of admirers, at Jennings slavering over a woman who was equally slavering over him and Jess saw in his desperation that Jennings was no longer the young boy who’d managed to injure himself everywhere except the battlefield; he was now a man with a bruised soul.

  “You don’t have a drink,” she said to Dan.

  “Is it helping?” he asked, nodding at the now empty glass in her hand.

  “No.”

  “Is any of it helping?” He gestured to the room.

  She shook her head, then slipped her hand into his. She didn’t expect to find comfort there; knew that comfort was impossible but he squeezed her hand in return and didn’t take his eyes off her face. For the smallest fraction of time—a second split in two—they stood with hands clasped, eyes locked, the music scattering crotchets around them, the candles bathing their skin gold.

  Then her other hand reached out to run one finger ever so lightly along the line of his jaw, to feel the stubble there, stubble she’d seen most days since she’d been in Europe, stubble she’d never really noticed because everything was about the war and the fighting and the dying. Nothing was ever about them. But this moment was. Two people, hearts flayed by the cruelties they’d seen, stopped in a moment of rare beauty.

  He leaned down and whispered in her ear, his breath hot against her skin, “Can we ask them to leave?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  She clapped her hands and declared that the party was over, that they should all retire to the bar downstairs so she could get her beauty sleep. Nobody except Martha noticed that Dan didn’t leave with the rest of them.

  Once the last person had gone and the door was shut, Jess and Dan remained where they were, backs against the wall, hands no longer joined because she’d had to let go of him to kiss everyone goodbye. The candles flickered in the breeze wafting in from the balcony, then Dan turned to her.

  This time, it was his finger that reached out and traced a line down her neck, over her right collarbone and then her left. She could hear the sound of her breath, anything but calm now, and saw the pulse in his throat beat faster.

  She stepped closer, the air between them alight with everything that hadn’t happened since they’d last stood this close together in a ballroom, when he’d told her, with the touch of his thumb, that he wanted her.

  “Are you sure about this?” he asked softly.

  “Yes,” she said. “Don’t you feel a need to make the pictures stop, just for an hour or two?”

  “Yes,” he said too, cupping her cheeks and drawing her in.

  And Jess at last kissed Dan.

  They kissed and they kissed, his hands sliding up her back, hers wrapped around his neck. After a long and luxurious time in which they both reveled in the sensation of finally doing what they’d wanted to do in the ballroom at Lieu de Rêves, Dan moved his lips to her throat, tasting the skin with the tip of his tongue, kissing the hollow between her collarbones, then the sharp points of her shoulders and she could feel the apologies and regrets over everything that hadn’t been his fault but that he wished her never to have seen—and him too—over the past two years press into her skin. Her arms tightened.

  “We need a bed,” she said and he nodded and took her hand and followed her across the room.

  They didn’t quite make it to the bed, though, because one of the candles illuminated Dan’s face, catching it unarmed and she had to stop and stroke his cheek, to try to, with the tips of her fingers, redraw it into the face of a young man who knew only hopes and dreams and joy. She kept her eyes on him as she unbuttoned his shirt and he smiled at her and this time she saw the emotion that should always accompany the action and she was glad.

  Then she let her fingers roam across the hard muscles of his chest, let her lips taste the skin there. She felt his heart beating hard against her mouth, his dog tags shiver, heard the quick gasp of breath as her fingers found the top of his hipbones.

  She turned around so he could unfasten her dress. Once he’d done so, he slipped his hands into the open back and ran them down her spine, touching her skin so gently, so lightly that she closed her eyes, adoring the sensation of being held in a reverent way.

  At last, he moved the dress over her hips, where it fell to the floor. He brought his hands around to drift over her stomach, traveling up to her breasts in a slow and glorious dance. Finally he touched one nipple and then the other, lingering, touch firmer now, taking his time. Then he began to kiss her neck, her shoulder, the top of her back and she spun around because she couldn’t stand it anymore.

  Her mouth found his and he moved his hands down to her panties, slipping them off, before lifting her, legs wrapped around him, and carrying her to the bed, where he laid her down.

  “You have too many clothes on,” she whispered.

  “I can fix that,” he whispered back, shucking everything off.

  The candles still shone and she hadn’t drawn the drapes so she could see by the moonlight that he was as aroused as she. She reached out for him, wanting him beside her, wanting her hands and mouth on him. She kissed his chest; she could lie there and kiss that chest forever, she t
hought, but he had other ideas and he slipped a hand between her legs, which made her inhale sharply and say, “Mmmm, you can do that again.”

  He smiled again and he almost sounded like the old Dan when he said, “Good to see you’re as unabashed in bed as you are everywhere else.”

  She laughed. “Would you prefer I didn’t tell you what feels good?”

  “No. Tell me. Because this is all about feeling good.” His fingers found her breast again.

  “Well, perhaps your mouth could follow where your hand is leading,” she said.

  “Jess.” He spoke her name in a voice thick with desire and that was it; as if they both agreed they couldn’t wait any longer.

  She straddled him, sliding him inside her, leaning forward to kiss him and she heard him say her name again, urgently, and then she couldn’t think anymore as she moved against him, gasping as a kind of pleasure she’d never known slid through her entire body.

  * * *

  Afterward, Dan lay on his back, head on the pillow, and Jess lay across the bed, head resting against his chest. He lit two cigarettes, passing one to her. She exhaled blue smoke into the room, which caught the light from the street.

  “Doesn’t it seem like nighttime is too bright in the city now?” she asked. “I’ve become so used to blackout curtains and no street lighting, to the dark of being out in the field, that this feels like some kind of strange eternal day.”

  “It’s the first time I’ve been here since the blackout was lifted,” Dan said. “And last night I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t work out why at first. I thought it might be the noise.”

  “It’s hardly quiet out in the field.”

  “I know. It was the light. And you’re right; it feels like everything outside is on fire. Or else as if…”