by J. R. Lonie
From where she hovered across the street, she peered inside the café and saw no Germans. They must be further inside, she thought. This was her only chance. As she walked briskly across the road, she looked inside the car to see the driver snoozing in the driver’s seat under his greatcoat. If he awoke, he’d see her, so, heart in mouth, she gently nudged open the café door, desperate to soften the tinkle of the bell.
To Eleanor’s ears, it rang loudly enough to waken the dead. The elderly German in civilian clothes and his young uniformed offsider were sitting by the fireplace deeper inside the café, drunk and too intent on singing a maudlin song. Her eyes met those of the proprietor, and he beckoned sharply for her to sit at an alcove at the front. Comforted that she was expected, she did as she was told, making herself as small and insignificant as she could. The proprietor slipped a not-too-bad brandy in front of her. She was so cold and tense that she swallowed it in one gulp. Before she could ask for another, he retreated to the back of the café to the Germans. Their singing ceased. The proprietor offered them more wine. She heard one of them reply in French, as fluently as a bottle of wine might allow, that they had to leave, it was late.
As Eleanor felt for her cigarettes in the side pocket of her coat – if now wasn’t time for an extra cigarette, she may as well give them all away – she sensed something was missing from the breast pocket, and of course she’d left Sylvia’s copy of Finnegans Wake in the house of her protector. In other circumstances, she might have said, well, isn’t that a crying shame, too bad. Now she had no choice but to go back for it, though not immediately, because the uniformed officer was leaving the café. Her heart missed more than a beat as he passed her on his way to the front door. He looked exactly like the dark, doe-eyed and thoroughly Nazi soldier she’d seen exit the toilet on the train at the Gare de Lyon. That is absurd, she said to herself, this German is a lieutenant, an officer. The soldier in Paris had been an ordinary army lance corporal. She noticed that sort of detail. Really, she thought as he went outside, they did all look the same; this was just her rattled imagination at work.
In moments, the officer returned with the driver to help the old fellow to the car. Now it was the driver who looked to Eleanor to be the very image of the lance corporal on the train at the Gare de Lyon. He had the single stripe to prove it. She was seeing shadows, she realised. She had to get a grip on herself. This was her chance. She slid out of the alcove and through the side door into the night, like a thief, and walked quickly across the road to the house behind the garden where she’d found refuge. She could hardly knock on the front door, so slipped down the side, hoping to find a door at the back. Her thoughts about that book as she stumbled over something on the muddy path were un-Christian. A talisman? It was a curse and here was proof. Come what may, she had to get it back. The next moment, a hand was across her mouth and she was pressed up against the back wall of the house, a knife shoved at her terrified face.
‘It’s her, it’s her,’ said an urgent voice and it was her rescuer, called again to save her, though this time from something potentially much worse.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ demanded the man holding her fast. His hand was huge and fleshy and strong and he was big. His French was rough and difficult to comprehend. ‘You want to stay alive, lady?’ he threatened as he released his hand a little from her mouth.
‘My book,’ Eleanor gasped. ‘I left my book inside.’
‘It is her,’ the woman repeated in a French that was Loire-pure, in contrast to the man’s. He swore in whatever was his native tongue. Catalan? Eleanor couldn’t place it. Out on the street, the Gestapo boss was humming as his underlings bundled him into the back seat of the staff car. In moments, they drove away. The man released Eleanor.
The woman led her inside and through the house to the front room. The man followed close behind, his knife still in his hand. Finnegans Wake was sitting on the table where Eleanor had left it. She grabbed it and squeezed the pest of a thing back inside her pocket. ‘And that’s where it can stay,’ she said to herself.
‘Jesus,’ he muttered. ‘You’re lucky, lady.’ The Germans were beginning to slip their own agents into the escape lines, he told her. He could easily have cut her throat.
‘Do I look like a German agent?’ Eleanor retorted.
‘You’d pass very nicely with your accent,’ he said, which Eleanor thought a bit rich coming from him whose accent she was now able to place as Provençal. ‘There was supposed to be two people,’ he added. ‘Where’s the other one?’
Hettie.
Eleanor had wondered if they’d notice. ‘She couldn’t make it,’ she said, trying to avoid complicating fuss or explanation. In the next instant, she rebelled at such chilling callousness and bellowed it out in rage, for all the world to hear: ‘She killed herself!’
‘A yid,’ the man said; explanation, not question.
Eleanor nodded.
‘You a yid too?’ he asked, his tone aggressive.
‘Does it matter?’ Eleanor snapped.
‘No,’ replied the man, in retreat.
‘No,’ she said and left it at that.
‘Let’s move,’ he said gruffly.
Thus, Eleanor met her guide, Silvan. She understood this was not his real name but Provençal enough to account for his accent. He had watched her go into the café but then, to his consternation, watched as she had then decamped only minutes later, back to this house.
A FARMSTEAD NEAR THE RIVER ALLIER, SOUTH OF NEVERS, BURGUNDY, GERMAN-OCCUPIED FRANCE
9.15pm, Tuesday, 9th December 1941
Silvan ordered Eleanor to follow closely. The path was uneven and wet and now that the moon had set and the starlight was so faint, it was difficult to see in the shadows. She wondered if she was expected to walk the whole way to the demarcation line, which, she had worked out, was miles away. Silvan gave her no hint as they walked beyond the village, along a stone wall that skirted an open field, and in through a copse of leafless trees. She had to trust him and keep on, hoping her boots would keep her feet dry as she made her way through the watery mush of mud and decayed leaves. They came to a gate onto a narrow roadway lined with winter-bare trees. Silvan stopped and gestured her to wait, not a sound. He cocked his ear to the wind. Eleanor, with her recently developed canine hearing, was convinced she could detect the tinkle of ice crystals on the air, blown about by the wind coming down from the north. Silvan had less romantic concerns as he made an owl call with his hands around his mouth. He waited, eyes on his watch. Any immediate response was signal to turn tail immediately. The right response was silence for exactly half a minute, and then, precisely on the thirtieth second, he heard the return call. He signalled to her and they crossed the roadway and went through the gate. On the other side of a derelict wooden barn was a car whose familiar silhouette looked ominous and made her nervous. She was wondering how it had escaped the light fingers of the Nazis when the passenger door sprung open too suddenly. She recoiled, her hand to her mouth. The man who emerged stank of alcohol.
‘Hiya babe,’ he said cheerfully in Hollywood English as he opened the back door for her and swayed to the rhythms of Bacchus. She was barely settled into the back seat, which already had an occupant, when Silvan, now in the driver’s seat, roared the engine to life and put his foot down, almost leaving behind his pickled colleague, who was only halfway into the front passenger seat.
‘You are one classy broad,’ he said, turning around in disorder and mirth to look at her properly.
One match, Eleanor thought, reeling from his breath, and they’d go up like Vesuvius.
‘That’s Al,’ said Silvan, ‘your guide to Lyon.’
‘How do you do, Al?’ she replied in English, though wondered if he might be disappointed she didn’t speak like some movie gangster’s moll. He was still probably only in his early thirties; his unshaven face had once been handsome, but in his left hand was his downfall, the bottle.
‘I do very well, babe,�
�� said Al. ‘That FDR, he’s a number one swell guy.’ He took a swig from his bottle and handed it over the seat to Eleanor.
‘I’m a Republican,’ she responded, but really, who cared anymore? She felt foolish, took the bottle for a demure sip to be friendly, and gasped. This wasn’t the hooch she expected, this was fine cognac. She looked at the label. My God, how did he get it? She took another, healthier draught before handing it back. ‘Keep it,’ said Al. ‘I got plenty.’ He produced another, which he opened and drank as if it were water.
‘FDR!’ he exulted.
She wasn’t about to go that far. ‘The United States,’ she replied, and drank generously. In the spirit of the moment, she passed the bottle to her anonymous fellow passenger in the back seat, but as she did, the car swerved and some of the precious brandy spilled over him. He cursed in what sounded to Eleanor like Polish, pushed the bottle back at her in irritation, and started trying to dab the liquid from his gabardine coat and a brown paper parcel he was holding close to his chest for dear life.
‘Shoulda drunk it, pal,’ Al said in a French that carried the same Hollywood flavour as his English and sounded just as ridiculous. Eleanor couldn’t help laughing when really they were travelling at such a breakneck speed she should be reciting the 23rd Psalm as fervently as she could. At least Al wasn’t at the wheel. As they sped along back roadways, with no headlights, she comforted herself with the cognac. Silvan must know where he’s going. Her fellow escapee huddled in the far corner of the seat as if she were carrying the plague. Too bad for him, she thought and sipped the nectar that chance had placed in her hands. How long they drove, she didn’t notice. She felt free of any responsibility for anything and only came back to ground as the car turned a corner through some gates and came to a startling stop. Immediately, the door opened. She was bundled out of the seat by two men and brusquely pushed away. She held on to the bottle for dear life.
As the two men took over the car and drove off, Al and Silvan beckoned Eleanor and her fussy companion in through the door of a large barn. Inside, she smelt a rich fug of warm cows and their ripe ordure. Their large friendly eyes shone in the dim light from a lantern attached to a rafter, where they fed in stalls at the other end, domestic and reassuring. Silvan gestured for her and the thin Pole to wait. He and Al disappeared into the darker recesses of the building.
Through the mulled light, other people began to manifest. Wrapped in shabby clothes, silent, solitary and pensive, they leant against the stalls. The scene, Eleanor thought, was timeless, like a painting. Nearest her was a willowy, shaven-headed young man in rough dungarees, hands in his pockets to keep them warm. He smiled at her, saying nothing, keeping his purpose and identity to himself.
Another car pulled up outside. In through the door came two elderly ladies who looked as old as the pyramids, and God knows, what on earth were they doing here? Eleanor said good evening to them. They confided in hushed voices that they were sisters returning home after visiting another sister in Paris, such were the minor travails of the times. She opened her cigarettes to them but each declined. As she herself resisted the urge to smoke and closed the case, a generously proportioned gentleman, who had arrived before her, slid over to her as if he were a skater on ice. He had a gleaming face that spoke of living well at the expense of others.
‘Madame,’ he said with barely restrained extravagance and brushed hay and dust from a wooden box so that she might sit, his eyes fixed on her cigarette case.
Eleanor thanked him but said she was happy to stand and possibly he might keep his voice down.
He was ‘Szegedy Tibor from Budapest,’ he said in quite good English. He’d jumped to the right conclusion about Eleanor’s nationality and purpose. Amused by his performance, she flipped open her cigarettes. He gathered one up with as much reverence as a priest the host at Mass – or, more like, an actor playing a priest with the host at Mass. She lit it for him.
‘Ah,’ he purred and savoured the pleasure as if it were the finest hashish to be had this side of the Levant. Eleanor wondered if this charming rogue’s nom de guerre was the only Hungarian he could speak.
Her face stiffened. The maybe-Hungarian was aghast. Had he offended her? He begged forgiveness.
‘I didn’t know we’d be travelling steerage,’ Eleanor snapped.
Her attention was not on the poor Hungarian but on the latest arrival, who came through the door like a dark cloud on a sunny day, the very same malfrat maudit elf who had stolen her cigarettes on the train.
He saw her, stared a moment in puzzlement. Then he realised. Of all the bad luck. He gave her an aggressive clenched fist and a sullen look to go with it. He didn’t like the rich on principle. The first chance he got, he’d steal from her again. Successfully this time.
In other circumstances, Eleanor would have slapped his insolent face. She was about to retreat to the cow stalls and their more cordial company when Al appeared.
‘The Boches are after an American dame with a book,’ he said to her. Eleanor could hardly believe her ears. He saw her face of dismay.
‘You gotta lie with your face better, lady,’ he said with a chuckle. Even funnier was the Germans wasting time over a stupid book.
‘How do you know?’ she asked, flabbergasted.
He shook his head. Stupid question. Of course they’d know, just as they knew what time the patrols set out, which parts of the line were to be hit harder that night than others, why they moved from barn to house to church, whom to pay off, which German-lovers to keep away from.
‘If it’s that important, hide it better and keep your mouth shut’ is all he said.
‘But it’s not important,’ she replied, as if she was making an excuse. That was the truth, though it was too difficult to explain and, really, she couldn’t be bothered. She would toss it into the nearest river if it caused any more trouble. But Al was keen to see a book that was fussing the Germans so much. Reluctantly, she produced it. He opened the first page and read aloud the first line, which in his eccentric English made her laugh. That was quite something given her snappish mood.
‘Hah,’ he said, handing it back. ‘It’s in secret code, that’s why.’ He made a motion to button his lip and he winked.
‘That’s the best explanation I’ve heard,’ said Eleanor, resisting the urge to plant Mr James Joyce into the nearest cow pat.
Silvan appeared and led her into a makeshift photography studio, one of the cow stalls, whose walls were covered in burlap. Inside was the only bright light she’d seen since June 1940. She had to hold a hand up to her eyes until they adjusted.
‘Your documents for the other side,’ explained Silvan, who stood at the other end of the camera. ‘Al will give them to you tomorrow morning.’
‘I don’t need new documents for Vichy,’ she said. ‘I’ve got my passport and my Paris identity card.’
‘What’s it to be, lady, an American middle-aged woman on the run with a book the Nazis want or Madame Eugenie de Lisle, a widow, going home to Toulouse?’ he said irritably.
Vanity rebelled against both choices, at least as Silvan described them. She admitted the logic of his argument, however. ‘Real still, doll,’ said Al so close that she almost gagged on his alcoholic breath. Silvan took her photograph. She saw her fellow escapee in his gabardine coat was next, so got out of the way. Al had to tell him to let go of the parcel but he didn’t understand a word of French, and when Al came over and forcibly pulled it away, the man held on to it and wouldn’t budge.
‘Another secret code, eh, pal?’ said Al, losing his humour. He showed him where to hold it so it wasn’t in the photograph. Then she saw it was the turn of the young thief, and if he didn’t look as innocent as a child as he looked at the camera. Of all the cheek!
The cat’s head was poking out below the kid’s collar. ‘Ditch the kitty,’ said Al in French. But Stalin did nothing so Al pushed it back inside his coat.
‘What’s his name going to be?’ Eleanor asked Silvan. ‘Al Cap
one?’
‘Stalin,’ the boy answered. ‘Joseph Stalin.’
‘Hah,’ Eleanor exclaimed because she’d hit the bullseye. Hadn’t she placed him as some insurrectionist? Like face, like nature.
‘Stop fooling around and look at the camera, kid,’ said Silvan.
‘What?’ asked Stalin in exact French. ‘I do not understand.’
‘Look at the camera, Joe,’ Eleanor said, thinking his question was because of Silvan’s thick accent. ‘Think of it as a firing squad,’ she added. He got the drift of her French and muttered under his breath. Something about this young man, she thought, was not right. His French was sparse, accented and rehearsed.
Once the photographs were taken, Silvan stripped away the burlap; another man removed the light and the camera. Al led in a cow, although he stumbled as he threw in the hay, which he fell into and laughed like a kid having fun. His clothes and hair had straw sticking out of them but he was unbothered. He took another draught from his bottle of cognac and shooed Eleanor and her companions of the road like a gaggle of geese towards a smaller room, which housed the barn’s machinery and smelt of oil and gasoline. Outside, through the grimy window, pale light from the stars bathed the landscape. Inside were two young queens, earlier arrivals, who were bored and in need of entertainment. One whistled saucily when he saw Eleanor’s young thief.
‘Shut up, Darlene,’ Al said as if this were regular behaviour, which it was. ‘They’re just bumming a lift to the other side,’ he explained to Stalin. ‘Don’t take no notice of them.’ Stalin’s French wasn’t up to punk talk, which Eleanor thought was surprising in a punk. He retreated into a permanent scowl. The little cat’s head poked through the top of his coat.
‘Hey, Mac,’ said Darlene, ‘what’s the kitty’s name?’ Stalin took not the slightest notice.
‘Jesus,’ said Darlene’s companion, whose name was Luc, ‘why ask the cat’s name? Ask his name.’
