The Woman From Saint Germain

by J. R. Lonie

  ‘Come back next week,’ she suggested. ‘Things might have cooled down.’

  Eleanor saw she was wasting her time when she had none to spare. Her second chance was a café in the fifteenth arrondissement, along Garibaldi, only a couple of stops from Montparnasse. ‘Ask one of the waiters,’ Mr Teixeira had told her. She debated walking or taking the metro. What decided her was hearing hobnailed boots suddenly start running in her direction, that grating unmistakeable tocsin of the occupier up to no good. The next moment, as she turned to descend into the metro, she saw them, helmeted and armed, running onto the station’s main concourse from a line of trucks that had just pulled up. She wondered if the US and Germany were already at war and these troops were about to pick off fleeing Americans.

  The tension suited Eleanor. It made her think more clearly. She found the café without any trouble.

  ‘It’s right next to a brothel,’ Mrs Teixeira had gleefully told her.

  That was obvious enough because Eleanor saw German soldiers coming out of a nondescript double-storeyed building right next door. She went into the café, as much to avoid the Germans as the morning cold on yet another grey, mean day, but then if there weren’t three Germans in uniform at a table by the window. She had no choice. She sat. A young waiter came over, just another kid; the Germans were still hanging on to most of the French soldiers they’d interned.

  Eleanor had been so agitated by the news that morning and so determined to get herself organised that she had left her apartment forgetting to eat, and worse, to drink her morning coffee and smoke her morning cigarette. She was now giddy. She decided to try her luck and ordered the coffee she would have asked for in normal times. This café was patronised by the occupier, so they probably had a good supply of the real thing, as well as fresh milk. By the look on the boy’s face as she spoke her order, she expected to be told it was succédané de café, the bilge made from chicory and roast grain, or nothing, bad luck. But that wasn’t the problem at all. She’d said just two words, ‘café léger’. She may as well have stood on the table posed as the Statue of Liberty and sung ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee’. The kid’s face blanched, his eyes darted to the three German soldiers by the window and he scuttled in panic into the kitchen before Eleanor, exasperated, could ask for something to eat.

  While she awaited his return, she picked up the menu but nearly dropped it in shock. Sure, they had plenty to eat but at black-market prices only the occupier could afford, which she supposed was the point. She admitted to herself she could afford it too, but if she wanted to consort with the occupier, she could do so in greater comfort along Boulevard Saint Germain. Since she was still sitting there, unattended, all these musings were hypothetical. Then a large man appeared from the same door and came to her table.

  ‘Would madame care to come into the kitchen to look at what we have?’ he asked.

  ‘Madame would indeed,’ said Eleanor, her pure accent restored. But it was too late, her cover had been blown.

  ‘This place is crawling with Boches,’ the man hissed at her.

  Eleanor said she could see that for herself. ‘The United States isn’t at war with Germany,’ she added smartly. The man gave her a look he’d give to a stupid child, which Eleanor thought she deserved, but then they got down to business. Sure, he could arrange a passage but it would cost 3,000 francs.

  ‘What’s that?’ Eleanor protested, aghast. ‘The American price? I’m not a tourist. I live here.’

  She was American, the man said with at least one version of logic on his side, but worse, she was a woman. The risks were much higher. Three thousand was rock bottom, others would charge seven; and when ‘les Amis’ did declare war on the fuckers, it would be double, triple for a woman.

  ‘Take it or leave it,’ he added. He had better things to do than argue.

  Despite the large bowl of fresh eggs sitting by one of the stoves – there must have been two dozen waiting to be cooked for the ‘fuckers’ as he had so crudely put it – and despite the aroma of recently made real coffee, Eleanor decided she would leave it. He was on thin ice as it was, she told him with a viperous glance at the eggs, so how dare he use her present distress to extort money, and what had being a woman got to do with it? The man couldn’t have cared less. She’d come to him after all. The door was that way. Goodbye.

  As she scuttled along the sidewalk to the metro and began to calm down, she wondered why she was fussing about pennies when the alternative was worse. She nearly turned around to eat humble pie, impelled by her brush with what might have been a ravishing breakfast, but stubborn pride stopped her. She’d find a cheaper, more honourable alternative near the American Cathedral, where she was now headed. ‘Even if I starve to death on the way,’ she muttered to herself. Of course she wouldn’t, but that wasn’t the point.

  Approaching the station main hall, Eleanor smelt fresh bread on the air. The pavements and shops had lost their usual charms as life sagged along, heaving every now and then for breath. The senses had become dull, except hearing and smell, which had grown acute, the former because of the instinct to survive and the latter because people, while not starving, were constantly hungry. Noses could now sniff out fresh coffee or bread a block away, the coffee inducing resentment because it was probably going down a German gullet. But Germans or no Germans on the station concourse, she would faint if she didn’t eat something, and this bread, even if it was half sawdust, was irresistible.

  Inside, she saw a queue into the only boulangerie that was open, accounting for the crowd, not that it had something worth queuing for. She joined the silent line, which was moving fast enough for her impatient frame of mind. She looked around for evidence of the German troops she’d seen enter the station earlier but the place seemed occupier-free.

  A girl appeared, so small and thin it made her eyes seem larger and sadder than they were. She hovered rather than join the queue, eyes moving from person to person to see who would look back, the weak link in a chain of hard-heartedness. Eleanor refused to engage with the child’s moral blackmail, her own hunger making her obdurate, but of course she felt guilty. She said to herself that she’d wait and see if the girl was still there when she came out. The queue slowed, then stopped. She tried to look over the people in front of her to see what the hold-up was. When she looked back, standing immediately behind her was an elderly woman in a shawl who had not been there before.

  Eleanor, hard-hearted against the girl, gave way without a second thought to the woman. And so did they all. The woman, with a face from the Pale to which Parisians had become familiar, was a foreign Jew. But since the round-ups of foreign Jews in May and August, their precariousness made them even more obvious, when that was the last thing they needed. The woman went straight to the front, where she bought her ration of fresh bread. The baker threw in an extra loaf. She secured her purchases in a hand-sewn cloth bag, turned and left with her head down, her eyes avoiding any contact with her benefactors, not a word to them, nor to the baker.

  ‘See?’ someone muttered. ‘Typical Jews. No thanks. Just take, take.’

  But Eleanor understood. She had seen it on the woman’s face: her humiliation at her current predicament. She’d seen the same thing on black faces in the American South, and it cut into her Christian sense of justice in a way the girl’s attempt at moral blackmail could never do.

  Only her hunger kept her glued to the queue, and once she had her bread and was out the door, she pulled away a large chunk to eat. If it was partly sawdust, it still tasted delicious and only later would she feel it heavy on her stomach. In mid-chew, there was the large-eyed girl staring at her, and with bad grace, Eleanor slapped a piece of bread into the child’s hand. ‘That’s it, girlie,’ she said. The kid wasn’t a Jew and she didn’t look malnourished, Eleanor told her annoying conscience.

  AMERICAN CATHEDRAL, AVENUE GEORGE V, PARIS VIII

  Later that morning, Monday, 8th December 1941

  The parish hall and the dean’s garden
were abuzz with Episcopalian purpose although Eleanor could feel the panicky edge to the chatter amid the coming and going. In all the talk of who had sons in the navy or the army and if anyone knew anyone in Hawaii, which may as well have been on the moon it was so far away, only one topic of conversation really preoccupied them.

  Flight.

  Some had been over to the Kommandantur, which was besieged by refugees desperate for an Ausweis, a permit, to get into Vichy, but the Germans had closed the border even to French with permits. So the talk was about how to cross the demarcation line illegally and who knew such and such, who might know such and such, who might take them across and how much. Eleanor told them of her experience. The 3,000 she’d been quoted seemed stiff to the others, which made her feel justified until she discovered they were talking from no experience at all. But at least, under the topsy-turvy nonsense of rules and regulations, even though crossing into Vichy would be illegal, Americans with their Paris residency permits would be legal once they got there. Another arrived to report that the American bank branches were still open and operating normally. Yet another reported they’d been told on excellent authority that the Spanish and Portuguese consuls in Lyon and Toulouse were still issuing visas to people with valid passports plus the requisite visas for entry into third countries. This news was golden for Eleanor. She, who had foreseen the need to keep a packed valise in case of internment, had not seen any need to maintain current Spanish and Portuguese visas in her passport, showing her just how skewed her thinking, or lack of it, had been.

  Someone wondered if they shouldn’t be careful talking so openly, mightn’t the Germans be listening so they could nab Americans as they fled? But who among those coming and going that morning were not parishioners? ‘Wallis is the only one who’d blab,’ said one caustic tongue. For a brief moment, they were able to laugh, if ruefully, because Wallis Simpson and her king were now basking in the Bahamian sun, although, as another said, they were probably no longer going on about how Hitler and the Nazis were the ant’s pants.

  Then if Eleanor didn’t see coming through the door, of all people, Hettie Rosen.

  ‘Miss Rosen!’ she exclaimed in surprise.

  ‘Ah, Miss Clarke. Miss Beach said I might find you here. You have to give me some money, Miss Clarke,’ said Hettie, and although it was in Hettie’s usual peremptory manner, as she might command ‘Fire!’ when directing an execution squad, Eleanor could see the fear behind her lack of charm.

  Hettie had been to her Swiss bank that morning to discover her accounts suddenly barred to her.

  ‘They can’t do that,’ Eleanor said. ‘You’re an American.’

  ‘I told them that,’ Hettie said. ‘But they said I wasn’t.’

  And that, as it turned out, was the truth. Hettie hadn’t been an American citizen since 1920, when she married a Frenchman she’d met on a trip to the newly minted socialist paradise in Russia. The travel she’d done since had been on a French passport. She, the great internationalist, had thought nothing of it; a passport was just a matter of convenience and if you were born in America, you were American.

  Eleanor was flabbergasted, not about the passport; she had escaped the pitfalls of marrying foreigners overseas only by what at the time she thought was a great misfortune but which was a skin-of-the-teeth blessing in disguise. What amazed her was that Hettie had been married at all. Who, dear God, even a communist, could have put up with her? It turned out, as Hettie explained, he hadn’t, because they parted soon enough but had never divorced. The German and Vichy Ordnungs against Jews, particularly naturalised French Jews, which she was, did thus apply to her. Since June, as her bank now realised, what had been hers was now under the control of the Nazis. Unless she could be an American again, she could lose the lot.

  ‘Wait here,’ said Eleanor, who knew better than Hettie what was really at stake. She found Mr Epherson, a lawyer who was a stayer because he was married to a Frenchwoman. Indeed, he did know something. Hettie could have her citizenship returned in the United States in person by a simple declaration of allegiance, although Mr Epherson said he wasn’t up on the latest changes about whether her husband had to have been continually in the States too.

  ‘What? “Continually”, meaning “since the marriage”?’ Eleanor asked, incredulous. Mr Epherson said that had been the case but he wasn’t sure now.

  ‘But she can also do it in Vichy at the embassy,’ he added helpfully. He thought in that case, the whereabouts of the husband wasn’t important.

  ‘That’s some comfort,’ said Eleanor. But getting from Paris to the US was no longer a matter of slipping over to the Cunard Line office, so it was a cold sort of comfort.

  ‘So,’ she said, trying to make it clear to herself, ‘in order to regain her birthright, Miss Rosen, Madame Whoever-she-is, has to escape across the demarcation line to the American embassy at Vichy and declare herself a citizen of the country she was born in so she’s no longer a French Jew but a neutral one.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mr Epherson said. ‘An American, thus free of the restrictions.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Eleanor. ‘And once she’s done that, she can return to Nazi-occupied Paris, where she can reclaim access to her own money. Is that the situation, Mr Epherson?’

  ‘It seems so,’ said Mr Epherson but added that as a French Jew, Miss Rosen had not needed a residency permit for Paris, unlike other Americans, so the moment she became an American again, she’d be in occupied France illegally and when she came back to Paris, she would need to apply for one. ‘Which the Nazis won’t approve,’ he added helplessly, ‘especially as she’s Jewish.’ Eleanor looked out to the garden where Hettie was smoking impatiently and looking for her. There was only one thing for it and no time to waste. She hurried outside.

  ‘Miss Rosen, you simply cannot stay here,’ she said. Hettie thought she meant the cathedral, jumping to the wrong conclusion, which, Eleanor thought, was at least in character. Once they sorted out that confusion, she told Hettie to forget about her bank account, worry only about getting out alive. Her legal situation was ridiculously complicated. She had to get her passport back in Vichy, get the hell out of France via Spain, and then she could deal with those damnable Swiss back in New York.

  Eleanor gave Hettie the cash she had on her, which was way more than she usually carried, because she was expecting to pay for a passage to the unoccupied zone. She told Hettie to come to Shakespeare and Company around two o’clock, when she and Sylvia might have the names of possible passeurs and when she would be able to give her more money. Hettie nodded, got up and left, but without a word, and although Eleanor called out to remind her to meet her at the bookshop, Hettie kept on without a backward glance or any acknowledgment. Oh God, Eleanor suddenly thought, I’m going to have to take her with me. A journey with Hettie even on the metro between two stops was one journey too much. Her heart sank.

  Having given away her money and heard Hettie’s scarifying tale of what had awaited her at her bank, Eleanor went as fast as she could to her own, which at least was French, and there she armed herself with a letter of credit. She took from her safety deposit box all her American dollars, some of which she would need to give to Hettie, and withdrew enough francs to see her through to the Spanish border, this at her bank manager’s suggestion.

  SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY, 12 RUE DE L’ODÉON, PARIS VI

  Early afternoon, Monday, 8th December 1941

  ‘All the crossings are hot, lady,’ explained Maxim, a twenty-year-old student and acquaintance of Adrienne’s through her doctor. At least Eleanor’s escape was no longer an ‘if’ but a ‘when’. Maxim’s contact didn’t mind taking women across the demarcation line and his price, 1,000 francs, was reasonable given the number of people, including Germans, it would pay to look the other way. If she wanted a guide to take her to the Spanish frontier, that would be double. Across the frontier, triple.

  Eleanor replied she could make her own way south from Lyon and make an entirely legal and above-bo
ard crossing at Cerbère, on the Mediterranean.

  ‘Lucky you,’ said Maxim, though where she crossed into Spain wasn’t his concern. Was it one passage or two?

  ‘Two,’ she replied, bowing to the inevitable, if with a heavy heart. She glanced at her watch. Two-thirty exactly. Hettie was half an hour late.

  ‘Show me the route,’ Eleanor asked, but Maxim said the less she knew the better.

  ‘Just buy a return ticket for Nevers on the line to Clermont-Ferrand,’ Maxim instructed.

  ‘But if I’m going via Perpignan, isn’t Lyon better?’ Eleanor asked, though France outside Paris was only a vague set of names on an even vaguer map.

  ‘Yes, but you’re not going by one of the legal crossing points,’ Maxim replied patiently. ‘It doesn’t matter where you cross.’

  ‘I think he knows what he’s doing, dear,’ Sylvia said sweetly in English.

  ‘From there you take a bus to this village,’ he continued, pointing to a village on his little map. There she was to wait in a café called the Excelsior. Someone would come for her around nine that evening. They would bring her in a party across the line and lead them to Lyon.

  ‘Do not carry a valise,’ Maxim cautioned. She could send that on ahead of her. Luggage didn’t need a permit to travel across the demarcation line. She should at most carry a rucksack. The less American she looked, the better.

  ‘How will your guide know it’s me in this café?’ Eleanor said, her excitement advertising her origins all too clearly.

  ‘I’m sure he won’t have any trouble identifying you, dear,’ said Sylvia, ‘but neither will the Germans if you don’t stay calm.’

  The bell over the door tinkled as it opened.

  ‘I hope that’s Hettie,’ Eleanor said. They had left the door unlocked for her. But it wasn’t.