The Girl from Vichy

by Andie Newton

  Barbie stood up with a jolt and straightened his uniform jacket, which had gotten ruffled while trying to kill me. A dull moan came from my mouth, words, but not really.

  ‘You did good. Lasted a very long time under such… pressure.’ Barbie tipped me back over. He padded his brow with a hanky from his pocket and looked at me as I sat upright. The room spun, and my ears rung. Then I felt something wet dribble off my earlobe, moments later blood dripped onto my shoulder.

  ‘And you…’ he said, looking Marguerite over. ‘What is that?’ He pointed to the bright, pink rash puffing over Marguerite’s chest and up her neck, a confusing look creasing in his face.

  ‘Ahh, yes,’ he said, smiling. ‘I remember you now, the allergic one. Colmar, about two years ago.’ Marguerite never said a word. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to work on you tomorrow.’

  ‘Humph!’ Claudette turned in her chair, crossing her legs at the ankles. ‘Why finish up tomorrow when we have today?’

  ‘Patience, honigbär,’ he said. ‘These things must be handled—’ he caressed my cheek with a delicate hand ‘—with finesse.’

  Barbie knocked on the door, and a guard walked in. ‘Put them in the same room,’ Barbie said. ‘Let’s have them remember each other.’

  The guard untied the both of us and then brought us to a jerking stand.

  ‘My cigarettes are gone,’ Claudette huffed. ‘Can we get Gitanes in Germany?’

  ‘Of course.’ Barbie took Claudette by the hand and kissed her passionately on the lips, tipping her back, letting her hair dangle with her jewellery, before moving his lips to her supple white neck. ‘Tomorrow, ladies,’ he said as she nibbled his ear. ‘Be ready.’

  The guard hauled us out into the corridor and then threw us into my room together, closing the door and locking it behind him. Marguerite lay on the ground where he had thrown her, too weak to move. She moaned, and I held her hand.

  ‘Adèle?’ she rasped.

  ‘Shh,’ I said. ‘Don’t speak.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, swallowing. ‘For the burns.’

  ‘No,’ I said, knowing all too well it was because of me we had gotten caught in the first place. ‘It’s my fault. All of it.’

  ‘We’re in this together.’ She took a long pause in between her words, closing her eyes. ‘Not your fault.’

  ‘Shh,’ I said again. ‘Save your energy.’

  We sat in the warm room, our thoughts as thick and stifling as the air. Every now and then we’d hear the clink of doors locking, but we’d had our day’s interrogation and had no reason to fear the noises, not now anyway, not until morning.

  ‘Tell me a story, Adèle. Something that will take my mind off the aches in my stomach and in my bones.’

  I rested her head in my lap and petted her. ‘I could tell you about the time I used another woman’s seat on the train as a footrest, made her stand in the aisle, but you already know that one.’

  ‘Yes.’ She smiled. ‘That one I know.’

  I thought for a moment, unsure what she wanted to hear.

  ‘Tell me about your father’s vineyard. Tell me how beautiful it was before the war.’

  I ran my hand over her head, wondering if I could do it—the memory of what was—with the sting of the burns on my chest and the iron-like smell of death lurking in our room.

  ‘Give it a try,’ she said. ‘For me.’

  I closed my eyes and grasped at the far reaches of my memories. ‘The vineyard.’ I sighed. ‘I remember the grapes hanging off the greenest of vines in rows that went on for kilometres, and the smell, earthy yet sweet as jam. The good years, Papa said, were when the grapes hung the lowest to the ground. And when I was young they always hung low to the ground. The Creuzier-le-Vieux was as beautiful as it smelled, with rolling hills and breezes that carried with it the scent of herbs and citrus fruit.’

  The more I talked the faster the memories flowed, and I saw myself as a young girl standing barefoot in the dirt, rows of vines on each side, playing a game of chase with Charlotte. ‘Mama would yell from the chateau when it was time for supper, but we knew when it was getting late by looking at the grape skins, which turned pink from the setting sun. There was a hill next to the vineyard that was always covered in catchfly. I’d run through them, the skirt of my dress riding a gentle breeze capped with free-falling giggles and bees bumbling up from the grass. But Charlotte never would—not through the catchfly.’

  ‘Catchfly,’ she said, ‘very fitting.’

  ‘It is, now that I think of it—catchfly—but that was a very long time ago. A different life.’

  ‘You miss her, don’t you?’

  ‘There’s a lot to miss.’

  ‘War changes people, Adèle. I’ve said it before. Don’t give up on her. She’s your sister.’

  I cried from Marguerite’s words, sniffling the more quiet seconds that passed with my thoughts on Charlotte. Her babies graves, the pain she must have felt, must still feel—it would make any woman delirious.

  I did miss her, and once I admitted that to myself the ache in my gut, the longing for what once was, felt more like a gaping, empty hole. And for the first time since being captured I thought about dying, sobbing over Marguerite’s body as I petted her head, thinking I’d never see my sister or my family again.

  Marguerite got very still. I thought she’d fallen asleep, her skin settling over her bones like a thin blanket, but then she spoke up.

  ‘Adèle,’ she said, taking a long pause. ‘I don’t know if I can survive more torture. I wanted to fight the war with all my bones. Now my bones are all I have left. Barbie will come back tomorrow—he said he would—and I can barely stand.’

  ‘The war will end, and we will have France back,’ I said. ‘The way it was.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’ Tears seeped from the corners of her closed eyes, making wet tracks down her face.

  ‘I know because my friend, Marguerite, told me so. She’s a résistant, you see, and she saved my life.’ Tears dripped from my chin as I caught my breath. ‘Once from a spy’s knife and again from a tomb of fallen rocks, so I feel like I can trust her.’

  ‘If only I could go back to the beginning.’ She put a hand to her face to mask the quivering. ‘I want to go back and remember—feel—the reasons why I joined the French Résistance in the first place.’

  ‘Feel,’ I repeated as I sat numb on the floor.

  ‘I miss my mother, my father. I miss Philip,’ she cried. ‘Everything has been taken from me. Everything. And it’s been so many years.’ She moved her hand so I could see her eyes. ‘Do you remember the days before the war?’

  ‘I remember Mama and Papa kissing in the garden. My sister and I cooking together in the kitchen, drinking wine.’ I paused, trying to remember how many years ago that was. ‘So many years have passed…’

  ‘That’s what I mean, Adèle. How much longer is it going to be?’ She looked angry now, trying to sit up, but her strength wouldn’t allow it. ‘Are the Germans winning? The British? We don’t know—been locked up here for months. It’s hard to stay hopeful without word of victories.’

  I thought back to the day I peeked through the dirty window of the old convent and saw the Alliance hiding arms in the crypt, the spirit that burned in my chest for the Résistance. Now the only thing that burned were the sores from Claudette’s cigarettes. ‘I think of these things too, Marguerite.’

  ‘Perhaps I was naïve,’ she said, collapsing back onto my lap, ‘thinking I could be so bold as to be remembered—that many years from now people would look back on this time, and say, remember the French Résistance—the guns the women moved?’

  ‘I’ll remember.’ I looked at her. ‘I’ll remember you.’

  She kissed my hand.

  The sun set below my caged window and the room got very grey and dark, the walls closing in, reminding us that soon we would experience another day. Marguerite fell asleep on the floor where she lay, twitching and shivering.


  27

  That night I was woken by the most unusual thing: sound. Lights rolled over the ground and I heard the shuffle of weary feet marching along the shadowed edge of the building—prisoners. The Gestapo ordered them into hatched trucks, a hundred of them from what I counted. The rest of the Gestapo and guards alike rushed around, throwing boxes they had hauled out of the prison into the back of cars before speeding away, their headlamps shining over the humps of barbed wire that ran along the prison’s perimeter.

  Marguerite lay on the floor, shivering under a soiled blanket despite the warmth of the summer night. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I whispered. ‘Movement. A lot of it.’

  The wounds on my chest had started to form pus and stuck to the fabric of my smock when I moved. Each blister held the memory of Barbie’s laugh, the way his teeth gritted when he burned me, and Claudette’s very French voice buoying the German cuss words coming from his mouth.

  After the last car sped away a cool breeze blew through the window, and I felt a burst of fresh air on my face. I took it in, holding the air in my lungs, trying to remember what France smelled like—not the smell of diesel, and prisoners’ sweat and blood, iron and metal, but the drifts of lilac and jasmine coming from the flower carts and the yeasty warm smell of baguettes baking in ovens. I sank down onto the floor with Marguerite.

  That morning I waited for the clink of keys at my door, the dread of the guard’s footsteps coming down the corridor, but the whole prison was silent. Hours passed; I sat with my back against the wall, an anxious feeling brewing in my gut, telling me that what I had seen and heard last night wasn’t just a prisoner transfer, but something else entirely. I put the back of my hand to the wall, made a fist, and thought about knocking.

  Marguerite stared at me from the ground, her eyes a glassy brown. ‘Do it,’ she said, as if she knew what I was thinking.

  We shared our walls with many prisoners, but nobody ever made a noise. If you did, they’d shoot you in the courtyard. I’d seen it from my window many times. Women who had shouted out the windows to their children below on the street, begging for signs of life that their résistant-mother was still alive, and men who had whispered secret messages about the guards, planning sabotages even though they only had their hands to fight with—gone in a matter of bullets.

  ‘Go on, Catchfly,’ she said, her cheek against the floor. ‘Do it.’ We both knew I had nothing to lose, not now, not since Barbie took an interest in us. I held my breath and then knocked two times. The sound echoed like metal ricocheting off metal.

  My heart banged in my chest from having broken the cardinal rule of Montluc. A moment passed, maybe even a few seconds of complete silence, before I heard the most amazing, breath-drawing noise in the world: a knock back.

  Another knock followed another, low and slow growing into a steady, banging beat. Marguerite lifted her head, her arms quaking as she tried to move her body from the floor, listening to the sounds—knocking, followed by people shouting their names and where they were from.

  I wept uncontrollably from the sound of their voices. ‘The guards left—the Germans—’

  Something even more extraordinary happened, so extraordinary had I not seen it with my own eyes I wouldn’t have believed it. Out my barred window off in the distance, among the pure white clouds and baby blue morning sky, a plane flew straight for us. The walls shook like an earthquake from the ground and from the ceiling as it passed directly over the prison, the rumbling pulsating the marrow in my bones. A blasting cheer erupted from the prisoners at the sight of an American star painted on its flank.

  Marguerite smiled, settling back onto the ground, exhausted by lifting her own weight. ‘Marguerite,’ I said, holding her hand. ‘We made it.’

  More planes rumbled overhead, and I swear the walls were going to crumble to the ground. Prisoners stuck their arms out the windows, waving at a rush of armed résistants storming Montluc’s gates, dressed in black with guns slung over their shoulders, fists in the air, shouting words of a victory.

  Doors unlocked, people ran down the corridors, searching for their loved ones in other cells. I stumbled out of my room, people running this way and that, my vision very blurry and grey from having stood so quickly. I heard my name, but many women were named Adèle. Then I heard ‘Catchfly’ yelled in the same breath, and I started to cry.

  ‘I’m here!’ I screamed with all my might, holding on to the stones in the wall as my sight returned, creeping down the corridor. ‘Luc!’

  I felt his arms around me before I saw his face. ‘I thought I’d never find you.’ He held my face, wiping tears away as prisoners ran through the corridor shouting about freedom.

  ‘We have France back?’ I felt as if I were in a dream, hearing what I wanted to hear and seeing Luc again. ‘Is this real? Are you real?’

  His eyes shined. ‘The Résistance has taken control of the city. We stormed the prison as soon as we could.’ We hugged again, my legs buckling, surrendering to his embrace, before going back for Marguerite.

  I staggered into the cell. With all the noise, the sweet racket of victory rattling the walls, our barred little cell seemed as quiet as a closed box, stifling, reeking of exhaustion and sadness but also glory. Everything we had fought for, everything we wanted had come. I bent down to where her body lay, and her eyes fluttered, the slightest bit of life fading along with her breath.

  ‘Don’t wait for me.’ Marguerite swallowed, her lips dry and cracking white. ‘I can’t come.’

  I looked at her questionably, but then fell breathlessly next to her when I realized what she meant. She sounded so sure of herself, unafraid, and matter-of-fact, but I wasn’t ready for her to go. I wasn’t ready. I caressed her face, not knowing what to do to stop her from dying, looking over her body as if I could, and then muttering a tearful request I knew she couldn’t honour, ‘Don’t leave me.’ She got still, more still than she had ever been, and then limp. Undeniably limp, her body sinking heavily onto the floor.

  ‘No—’ My hands shook, her name coming from my mouth in unrecognizable guttural groans when I realized she was gone—truly gone—taking her hand and pressing it to my cheek. The day we met on the train, the look on her face when I hit my own hand with the brass hanger, the light in her eyes when she pulled me from the rocky tomb—all I had left of her now. In many ways I felt as though half of me lay on the ground dead with her—a part of my life that didn’t exist anymore. My only comfort was knowing she had heard the chants of victory before she died.

  ‘Be with your patriot,’ I said, closing her eyelids, ‘be with your Philip.’

  *

  We buried Marguerite next to her lover. She would have wanted it that way. Then we made the slow journey to Vichy in a borrowed car. Advancing armies, tanks and military trucks moving east through France were a welcome sight, leaving in their wake a sense of hope and renewed spirit among us all as we crept through the congested roads.

  For a moment I thought I smelled chamomile in the air, then as we approached what was left of the vineyards in Creuzier-le-Vieux, I realized it was the rotten tinge of shrunken grapes still clinging to crumbling vines. But when we stopped at the top of the hill behind Mama’s chateau, all I could smell was the catchfly, which was in full bloom rolling down the hill next to Papa’s estate. We stood at a distance as Mama and Papa walked out onto the patio to see who we were, Papa holding on to Mama as if she might fall. He talked to her, pointing toward Luc and me, and she put a hand to her chest.

  Luc reached for my hand just as Charlotte walked out of the kitchen and onto the patio. She had an apron on as if she had been cooking, and her hair was pulled back with a loose ribbon, that dingy poodle I had saved so long ago now fluffy and white and right on her heels.

  Charlotte put a hand to her forehead. ‘Adèle!’ She ran toward me only to stop at the base of the hill, nothing but the pink flowing petals of the catchfly between us.

  A warm breeze swept through P
apa’s vines, carrying with it the memories of what our lives were like before the war; the sound of our voices laughing in the vineyard, our feet bare and cool from the black soil. ‘War changes people,’ I heard. ‘Don’t give up on her.’

  Tears spilled over my cheeks, her name but a breath on my lips. ‘Charlotte.’

  And she ran through the French catchfly, up the hill and into my open arms.

  Author’s Note

  This story and its characters were inspired by two women who fought their country’s enemies with courage, creativity and relentless perseverance. The first was Élise Rivet, Mother Superior of Notre Dame de la Compassion in Lyon, who hid weapons and ammunition in her convent’s crypt for the French Résistance. The other was Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, who had amassed 3,000 agents across France and created the Alliance, one of the largest and most effective organized spy networks in all of history. Élise Rivet was arrested for her crimes and died at Ravensbrück just weeks before the war ended. Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, after evading capture multiple times, survived the war.

  I decided to write this book after finding Marie-Madeleine Fourcade’s out-of-print memoir in a used bookstore in 2013. I was amazed by her story, the Alliance, and the role of women in the French Resistance. As far as setting, I have always been intrigued by the political divisiveness inside the Free Zone, where politics not only divided the people as much as the country, but also entire families. Marshal Philippe Pétain, the leader of the Vichy regime, was France’s WWI hero and many people looked up to him, if not trusted him completely. Knowing this, while drafting the outline for this story, there were a few questions I had that drove the narrative: Once the collaborationist policies of the Vichy regime became clear, how hard was it for those who supported Philippe Pétain to admit they were wrong? More so, what would it take to bring a family back together? Would the wronged be willing to forgive?

  The Girl from Vichy was my way of exploring the complexities of Vichy, with the Milice and with the French police, and giving readers a story that highlighted a different aspect of the war.