The Woman From Saint Germain

by J. R. Lonie

  ‘You told me you don’t have any money.’

  ‘I said I could not afford something, not I did not have any money,’ he said. ‘You bought me food. Now I buy you food.’

  ‘You can’t speak a word of French. You don’t have any ration cards.’

  ‘Fine,’ he said, sitting down to help himself. ‘Go. Do not eat.’

  She was furious. The contribution of this or that specific complaint or hurt was immaterial. He drove her insane and now it was made worse because she was completely in the wrong. She wanted to drop her valise on his head.

  ‘The police in the railway station,’ she said accusingly, ‘they’re looking for a young man and an American woman.’

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘You must be surprised I did not steal it,’ he said, pointing at her rucksack as she slipped it from her back.

  She set her valise down. ‘Did you hear what I said? They’re looking for us.’

  ‘Why are you surprised? I am not surprised.’ He sliced more sausage and bread off with the knife he’d taken from the German soldier. ‘Now you are a criminal, you need to behave like one,’ he said, handing her the food, which she ate, slaking her hunger instead of her resentments.

  ‘Good?’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ she conceded with bad grace.

  ‘They look for an American woman, but you must act as if it is not you but some other American woman.’

  ‘And you must act as if the police are looking for another young man?’

  He picked up his kitten. ‘But I am a young man with a cat,’ he said. He then handed it to her. ‘You are a woman with a cat. Who in their right mind would escape carrying a cat?’

  ‘Now you mention that,’ she said sourly, holding the poor creature as she might a hand grenade. He poured the milk into a glass, retrieved the kitten before she did it harm and set it down before the glass.

  ‘The whole glass?’ she said, dismayed.

  ‘Be patient,’ he said quietly as he watched the cat sip delicately from the top. When it had finished its portion, he handed the glass to her. She hesitated.

  ‘Drink,’ he said. ‘Milk is good for you.’

  She, whose normal use for milk was to keep her skin young and supple, drank, cat saliva and all. Then, having consumed half the cat’s leavings, she handed the glass to him.

  ‘There,’ she said, feeling she’d triumphed over humiliation whether he drank or not, but of course he drank. Only now did she wonder why on earth she had not bought any food. Yes, the station had been crawling with police. Yes, they were looking for her. But the thought had not crossed her mind, even though she was hungry and had been in three cafés. She was obtuse to the point of stupidity, she realised. If she continued like this, she wouldn’t reach Providence. She wouldn’t even get to the Spanish border.

  ‘People are kind,’ he said. ‘I do not need ration cards.’

  ‘You pay double without ration cards,’ she said. ‘Triple.’ True, but really, he was right, yet again. Without their Good Samaritans, where would they be?

  ‘We will go on a freight train,’ he said when she’d reported her failure at the cafés.

  Eleanor noticed the ‘we’ as much as the conveyance. Both dismayed her. She knew what this was. Freight hopping. Hobos did it. But they were hobos, were they not? The bites she had felt after sleeping in that lumpy chair were proof.

  ‘The wife,’ she said, ‘she works as a cleaner on the railways.’

  They awaited her return. The woman wanted nothing to do with their idea. The money Eleanor offered changed her mind.

  ‘You Jews, you know how money talks, eh?’ she said as a matter of fact.

  ‘I suppose we do,’ said Eleanor. If only the little shit understood French.

  CONFLUENCE, LYON II

  After 8pm, Thursday, 11th December 1941

  Their hostess led them on foot across the city between the two rivers, then down the Rhône quay. She went ahead with Eleanor, not saying much beyond ‘This way’ or ‘We go here’ or ‘That way’. Henk followed some way behind. They were just three among the many railway workers leaving or heading for their shifts who traipsed along the same footpaths through the foul night air, shoulders hunched against the chill. The excitement of the previous day’s actions – ‘Red Riots’ the Vichy propaganda sheets had called them – was gone, although the gendarmes were still about, harassing people at random with identification checks. After leaving the Rhône quay, they walked past the abattoir and its deadly smells and along a street with the marshalling yards around the Gare des Marchandises on the other side. Shunters shouted as they assembled boxcars like boys with a train set. Comrade though she was, the woman was helping them for cash, so Eleanor felt able to make some demands. They wanted to go to Pau, she said.

  ‘Why there?’ she asked. ‘It’s winter.’

  Eleanor agreed but could hardly say so. ‘My son says it’s safer from the Germans.’

  ‘Your son?’ said the woman sceptically and with a smirk. Eleanor couldn’t remember what lie she’d told about why they were together or if she’d said anything at all. Too bad. She didn’t care and let it pass. So did the woman, who advised they’d be better going to Perpinyà and then over the demarcation line.

  ‘Demarcation line?’ Eleanor asked. What demarcation line? She thought she’d only recently crossed it. And Perpinyà? Where was that?

  ‘The French call it Perpignan,’ replied the woman with some heat. ‘My country is Catalunya, divided between fascist France and fascist Spain.’

  Eleanor fell silent. In her ignorance, she’d stepped into a minefield of history. The woman was seething so much that Eleanor wondered if she might leave them to their own devices, or worse. But she kept walking, and Eleanor stuck as close as she could. The woman leant over to her, as if to share a confidence. ‘In Barcelona, there’s an American Jewish organisation,’ she whispered. ‘They’ll help you.’

  ‘What about the Francoists?’ Eleanor asked with studied innocence. She thought it ironic that so many Jews were desperate to enter a country that had expelled all its Jews hundreds of years ago and whose government was in power thanks to Hitler.

  ‘Scum,’ spat the woman, clearly from hard experience. ‘All Francoists are scum. Money talks with them.’ She rubbed her fingers in contempt.

  Eleanor, under different circumstances, would have smiled. This was the pot calling the kettle if not black, then grey.

  ‘At least they’re cheap,’ the woman added. ‘In Portugal, the fascist scum, they’re even cheaper. You should go there as soon as you can.’

  ‘Papers!’

  The word most feared, especially from the mouth of a surly gendarme.

  Two stood athwart the footpath, flashlights in hand. With her valise, which Eleanor figured advertised her journey, and her carte d’identité, which showed she was from Paris, not to mention an American, she was in trouble. Yet her anxiety was for Henk behind them. Cross the damn street, she said to him in her mind as if it were a transmitter. She produced her papers. I’m not that American woman, she said to herself, over and over.

  ‘Paris?’

  ‘Hurry up,’ the woman snarled at the gendarme’s surly question, thrusting her own ID into his hands over the top of Eleanor’s. ‘I got to get my sister-in-law to the Paris train and then I got to get to work. Ain’t you got nothing better to do? We’re just ordinary people, you know.’

  A gamble. Eleanor was aghast. The woman’s accent was strong. The gendarmes didn’t differentiate. The Spanish in France were all Republicans. Reds. What if they met truculence with truculence? You want to make trouble for yourself, sister?

  ‘Calm yourself, lady,’ he said. ‘We’re just carrying out orders.’ He handed back both sets of papers. She and Eleanor continued, Eleanor fighting the urge to look behind.

  Henk had thought of slipping across the street but this would have done for him, even in the dark. He approached the gendarmes. ‘No insolence,’ Eleanor had warned him in case of such
an event. This had infuriated him. She had nothing to tell him about surviving and the memory of her saying that, it got him worked up in an instant.

  ‘Papers, have your papers ready.’

  He produced them. Did they say his mother was American? He’d never bothered to ask. He thought not, but too late now. The gendarme shone his flashlight on them, then on Henk’s face. The kitten moved inside his coat. He shifted his beret, which he’d removed so they could see his face, and held it across his chest, all the time wondering if his beating heart was comforting or alarming his cat. She moved again. The gendarme handed back his papers. He took them. ‘Don’t say a damn thing,’ she of all people had cautioned him.

  ‘Merci,’ he muttered in a good attempt at resignation and moved on as he slipped his beret back onto his head. Out of the corner of his eye, across the street in the shadows, he noticed two more gendarmes into whose arms he would have fallen. He’d known it, he’d sensed it. Isn’t that what his platoon, his lieutenant, would have done? What they did in Norway to catch the resistance?

  Once out of sight of the gendarmes, the woman left Eleanor with Henk in the shadow of a stone wall by a small copse of leafless trees clinging to life in this desert of coal dust. They watched as she walked across the tracks towards the signal box.

  ‘They’re comrades,’ she explained before she left. As soon as she was out of hearing, Eleanor berated Henk for not having crossed the road to avoid the gendarmes. He forced himself to put her right so he could call her an idiot, which she was.

  ‘I will decide what is safe,’ he said, ‘not you.’

  She bristled but mostly because he was right. She didn’t like being chastised and certainly not by him.

  Soon the woman returned. The gendarmes had made a sweep of the yards some twenty minutes before but were now withdrawn except for those on the streets. As far as her comrades had heard, it was just intimidation; they were not really searching for anyone in particular, though they had caught a few Jews trying to hop the freight trains. Half the time, they found them squirrelled in laden boxcars that were headed north, into German hands.

  ‘Dumb yids,’ she said with a laugh. ‘You want to escape, you travel in the empty trains. They’re the ones headed south.’ This barb, Eleanor thought, was probably for her benefit but she translated it all for Henk with great pleasure.

  ‘You cross where I did,’ the woman pointed. ‘Go past the signal box. Count one, two, three trains. The fourth is all the way to Pau. You’ll know it’s the right one because it’ll be empty. The ones heading north are full of our wheat, our wine, our labour.’

  She was working herself up again. Eleanor wondered if this was the right time and place for a propaganda speech.

  ‘Find yourself a boxcar,’ the woman said. ‘They’re kept unlocked.’

  ‘What about the guard?’ Eleanor asked.

  ‘They’re human,’ said the woman, ‘got families to feed.’ She said they had twenty minutes before the train departed, so they better get going.

  Henk thanked her. Eleanor decided she’d handed over enough money already and while, yes, the woman had saved her trouble with the gendarmes, there was no need to tip above the amount she’d agreed with her husband. She could see the woman’s expectation. Eleanor turned away. The woman gave her a cynical look when she saw she wasn’t getting any more. ‘Jews,’ she muttered and left.

  ‘Nice to see your comrades are so supportive,’ Eleanor said.

  ‘Come,’ he said. He knew she was goading him again. This was still just an adventure for her, he thought with contempt.

  They went through the gateway onto the tracks. Henk didn’t like what he saw. The moon was on the wane and barely visible through the sooty air, but the dust itself reflected the light – people didn’t understand this – and they would be silhouetted like wooden figures at target practice.

  ‘I go first,’ he said. ‘Once I am at the signal box, you follow.’

  She watched him walk at a steady pace across the tracks, though lost sight of him quickly, which made her anxious. She waited a few moments, then followed, also at a steady pace. Part of her was terrified; part of her, the writer, observed her own self, wondering if this were merely just a story she was making up from the safety of Rue de Montfaucon. She was snapped out of her reverie by Henk hissing at her to follow and to avoid the light thrown from the signal box. He went ahead to the first freight train. She followed. ‘Keep going,’ he told her. ‘Don’t crouch, don’t look like you’re trying to escape. Look like you’re doing a job, you’re supposed to be there.’

  ‘My valise,’ she said in a moment of panic.

  ‘You do not listen,’ he replied, irritated. ‘It does not matter, being a woman either, just act as if you’re meant to be here with your valise.’

  He slipped between two boxcars of the first train, peeked out to make sure no gendarmes were in front of them, then went to the second train, the third and then the fourth. There, he went over to the space between two cars on the side of the train facing away from the signal box. She followed. He cautioned her to wait as he walked purposefully alongside the train, away from the guard’s van. She kept him in sight and when he waved, she joined him. By then, he’d hauled back the door of one of the cars. He clambered up, put out his hand for Eleanor. I’ll never get up, she thought. He told her where to place her feet, and though it was an effort, she made it. He pulled the door across. Although some slats were loose, the light outside wasn’t strong enough to make any difference. She handed him the flashlight she’d kept in the valise as part of her survival kit in case of the German round-up.

  ‘And a supply of fresh batteries,’ she said in an effort to regain some of the considerable face she had already lost. ‘Use sparingly.’

  Henk flashed the light around their accommodation but immediately turned it off when he saw loosened slats along one side at the top. He cursed. Too late to change now. Eleanor saw bare wooden floors, no windows; if it had been cleaned in a year, she’d have been surprised. But really, she kicked herself mentally, what was she expecting? A Pullman?

  ‘How will we sleep?’ she asked plaintively.

  ‘Use your rucksack for your head,’ Henk told her, ‘and lie on your back.’ Then she remembered the cognac Al had given her, still in her rucksack, still over half full. She brought it out.

  ‘This might help,’ she said and handed it to him. When he drank, she noticed, it wasn’t a slug, it was barely a sip.

  ‘You can have more than that,’ she said, wondering if inside all that truculence was a gentler soul. His next sip was healthier.

  Outside, the crunch of footsteps along the gravel. Voices. They were hushed and they were German. Henk went to lean his weight against the door to stop it being opened but was a second too late and he nearly fell through the opening as whoever it was outside hauled the door back.

  ‘Scheiße,’ said one of the voices in great surprise to see a figure in the open doorway staring down at them.

  ‘Hau ab, Arschloch,’ Henk snapped in Wehrmacht German – piss off, arsehole – and they scattered in terror, crying to each other to run. Watching them flee, he realised that even in swearing, their German had been High and pure; they were probably Germans who hadn’t been Jewish until the Nazis made them so. Nuremberg Jews, just like him. He had no room for sentiment. They had to look out for themselves, as he was. He saw Eleanor’s face in the fleeting light as he pushed the door closed.

  ‘You have complaint?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ she replied.

  ‘Good,’ he said.

  A whistle screeched into the night and before they could steady themselves, the locomotive heaved itself forward, sending a ricochet of movement back through the cars as each lurched and then stopped and then lurched again. Eleanor fell forward. The cat jumped. He picked it up to comfort it.

  ‘You’ll get used to it,’ Henk said wearily.

  TRAIN SOUTH FROM LYON

  Late night, Thursday, 11th December 19
41

  The cognac contented Eleanor for a little while and she dozed to the easy rhythm of the wheels clack-clacking over the joints in the track. Soon, however, Dr Morpheus deserted her and she found herself wide awake. The judder of the wheels along the track was prising apart every joint in her body, as if she were on a medieval torture rack. She’d have sung like a canary if there’d been anyone to sing to and if the song opened a pathway to the paradise of a seat, even a wooden one. She sat with her rucksack against the wall. This improved nothing. Then sitting on top of her valise, leaning against the wall. The valise kept falling over. It was all she could do not to haul back the door and escape – frying pan into a possible fire, to be sure, but unknown perils were more alluring than known discomforts. Henk was fast asleep on his back. Naturally, she noted resentfully. His cat slept a while, visited her once and twice; she felt its nose inspecting her nose and ears at one stage when she was prone. Then she could tell it was relieving itself in a corner. It crossed her mind to strangle the little pest, but he would strangle her if she did that.

  Now and then, the train stopped and she, who thought she’d been wide awake, woke. A glance at her watch confirmed she’d slept through some three hours of the torture, but really, she had dreamt it. Her body ached. Henk woke. He hauled open the door and pissed out into the night.

  Right, she thought. She stopped him closing the door, slipped her feet over the edge and jumped down before he could stop her.

  ‘Hurry,’ he said. Of course she would damn well hurry. She didn’t need him to tell her. She squatted by the tracks, modesty and dignity forgotten. After she returned, she asked him to remove the cat’s contribution to their insanitary conditions before he shut the door. When he came back, they kept the door open and sat at the lip, dangling their legs out as though they were children. Their only company was the soughing of the locomotive at the front of the train.

  ‘Where are we?’ she wondered.

  ‘Nowhere,’ he said. ‘It is good to be nowhere.’