A Good Death

by A Good Death (retail) (epub)

  A sly smile came over his features and he glanced down. ‘Oh, no, you couldn’t expect me to reveal the contents of confidential files to you.’

  A denunciation. Who could it have been? Someone with whom she was familiar, whom she met every day, every week in Lepech or Montfefoul?

  ‘But on what grounds? You can at least tell me the basis of your demand.’

  ‘Let me be frank. According to my information, you arrived in the region at the time of the invasion; you have a Jewish maiden name, Wolff, I believe, and,’ here he played his trump card, ‘you don’t attend mass.’

  Ariane could no longer contain herself and spoke with open irritation. ‘I came here in 1939 when I had just married someone from this region. My name is Strasbourgeois. My family comes from Alsace-Lorraine and I am Protestant. Is that sufficient to explain your strange accusations?’

  He looked as full of distaste as if she had admitted his original accusation that she was Jewish. ‘You will have to provide a file of attestations, as I said. Your parents’ marriage certificate, the religious one, of course; their baptismal certificates and those of your grandparents are the usual documents required.’

  ‘How can I?’ She was genuinely pleading now, regretting her display of annoyance. ‘My father lives in the occupied zone, in Paris; my grandparents are all dead; they came from Strasbourg, which, as you know, has been incorporated into the Reich. How can I possibly get this documentation?’

  ‘That is your business. I shall ask you to return in six weeks to see my colleague. An alternative, or supplementary, procedure is to submit yourself to examination by an agreed medical expert who will make a physical assessment of your racial type.’ He allowed his gaze to move slowly over her features: the straight dark brown hair, hazel eyes, Roman nose. ‘But you might not find that route to your advantage.’

  On the train back to Bonnemort she shuddered with humiliation. It was a Frenchman, a representative of the French state, carrying out French law, who was demanding this. She did not even have the satisfaction of feeling that she was compelled by the Nazis. However, she had already accepted that, whatever the difficulties, she had to submit to proving what she wasn’t. She would write to her father at once. Her baptismal certificate, which she had never before had to present to anyone, being an item of no interest to a secular state, must be somewhere in his house. He must have his own baptismal and marriage papers, too. But her grandparents’ … If it were not so serious, it would be laughable. But she must prevent them from looking any closer at her household and asking questions more difficult to answer.

  * * *

  Theo listened to her account with sadness. In truth, he had no idea at all of the difficulties that she had faced all the years of his absence. Later, he questioned his father-in-law about this curious episode. Pascal Wolff had had the choice of appealing to the German authorities for the documents he needed about the marriage of his wife’s parents, or paying for false ones. After a lifetime of correct behaviour, he had deliberately chosen the course of illegality, procuring false papers to prove the truth of his parents-in-law’s marriage ceremony at the Protestant temple of Strasbourg in 1864. The enormous sum demanded for the forgery indicated the importance of such documents, for lack of them meant banishment from France and a one-way ticket to the East. If her father had not arranged matters, Ariane and Suzie too would have been on one of the trains from Drancy.

  ‘Do you have any idea who might have denounced you?’

  ‘Oh, I thought of everybody. The mayor, Gargaud, was a great supporter of Vichy and was always suspicious of us; Madame Maniotte, who detested me, because of my friendship with Lucien; even Vernhes.’

  ‘Vernhes? Why would he do such a thing?’

  ‘He and Henri didn’t get on. Henri was socialist, you remember, and there were often tensions. It was probably none of these. But you lived with fear and suspicion all the time, even of the people closest to you. What do you think you could do for Suzie?’

  ‘There won’t be any news of deportees until Germany is defeated.’ He couldn’t bear to tell her of the stories that were circulating, about a work camp in southern Poland. Half the time he did not believe such tales himself. He thought, desperate people exaggerate to gain help, not realising that when horrors go beyond the bounds of credibility, their power to move is lost. ‘But perhaps I should see the child, take some details of her family. Would that be possible?’

  ‘Of course. After school perhaps. The day after tomorrow, at Papa’s house.’

  * * *

  She sat up at the table, on the edge of her chair, and took her cup in both hands to transfer it carefully to her lips. She seemed very young for her age, which was thirteen, the same as Sabine’s, but whereas Sabine was tall, Suzie’s small stature and unformed body seemed to belong to a child two or three years younger. She had an odd little face, almost triangular, narrowing from a wide forehead to a small chin, trimmed to a point by a sharp, upturned nose. Her fair hair and blue eyes gave her an almost Germanic appearance.

  ‘The colonel is here to ask you a few questions about your family,’ Ariane explained. ‘He is going to help us to trace them, so that we can find them as soon as the war ends.’

  Suzie looked at him so blankly that Theo felt that there was something retarded in her understanding.

  ‘There was Papa and Maman,’ she said slowly.

  Theo waited. ‘Did you have any aunts and uncles and cousins?’ he prompted. The interrogation proceeded painfully. Relatives she had, but she only knew them by their first name or family nicknames. Where they had lived was equally unclear. Uncle Iza and Aunt Lola had had a big house near Omi and Opa, but she thought they went away a long time ago. She had once met cousins Lena and Ari in Paris. They had a son called Shmuel and a baby who was very sweet.

  The only question that elicited more than the scantest response was, ‘Were there any relatives abroad, in America, for example?’

  A long time ago … Before … She used to write cards to Cousin Avery who sent her toys. He sent her a beautiful doll with long golden hair. ‘We called her Rahel, too. But terrible things happened to her. Policemen came to take her away. One day the children chased her and she lost her purse.’

  Theo was bemused. Did she mean that these things happened to her? When he had finished his questioning and Suzie was sent away, Ariane said apologetically, ‘She’s very shy.’

  ‘We haven’t much to go on.’

  ‘Her father was caught here in Paris in forty-two, not the Vel d’Hiver, when they took thousands in one day but another round-up, a month later. Papa went to Drancy to try to rescue him, but since he was German there was no hope for him. He was sent to a camp. Suzie and her mother were at Clermont Ferrand where I found them and took Suzie away. Her mother must have been expelled on 5 September 1942, when all Jews were ordered to leave the city. She was sent to Drancy on 9 October, then on to a camp. These camps seem to be in a Jewish enclave in Poland. Do you think the Russians have reached them yet?’ Theo closed his notebook. ‘When the war is over, and it can’t be long now, a few months at most, we’ll find them for her.’ He put his palm to her cheek. ‘Ariane, our flat, come and see it again. Meet me there tomorrow.’

  She shook her head, turning away from him.

  He walked to the metro at the Etoile to return to his office, feeling a slight irritation. He had gone through the drama of finding her shaven-headed on his return; he had come to an understanding of what had happened; he had apologised. What more was there to do? He could not comprehend why their reconciliation could not be real, immediate. Her behaviour was unreasonable, unlike the old Ariane. And as for the children: he had not known Suzie before the war, so it was impossible to judge whether she had always been a little simple, or whether it was the effect of her experiences. All he could say was that she was now simply odd, as if she were refusing to grow up. Sabine, too, could not be said to be behaving like a normal child. They were, all of them, traumatised creatures.
<
br />   He mentally listed what they had been through: Suzie had been separated from her parents for almost three years now, and had lived with strangers under a false name. Sabine, too, had thought she had lost her father. But both of them had been safe and well cared for, had never lacked materially. Ariane had undertaken great risks for others, communists, Jews, forced labourers, at considerable danger to herself, but she had survived. None of this was unusual in these times. Many other people had endured worse. He simply could not see what the fuss was about.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Theo and Ariane had lived together for only four months in 1939. Their apartment was the home of an aborted marriage, Theo thought, as he stood in the centre of the salon in darkness. The concierge was shuffling about opening the shutters, leaning on the grille to pin them back to the wall.

  It was bitterly cold. He could see his breath, his words steaming gently in front of him. Coal was impossible to obtain. Most people cooked on wood-burning stoves, although wood was not easily available either. Madame Brugiotti was wearing all her clothes: ankle socks, a sagging black dress, a cardigan, a coat, a shawl. She flapped through the rooms, pulling her wrappings around her full bosom.

  ‘Are you thinking of moving in?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ He looked round helplessly.

  ‘It won’t be easy, that’s certain. People who’ve been here all through the war, they’ve got their System D all worked out. They know how to cope. But to begin now, when it’s as bad as it’s ever been …’

  ‘It’ll have to be cleaned,’ he said to Madame Brugiotti. ‘Can you organise that for me?’

  He had concluded that only by making a start on the flat himself could he persuade her to come back to him. Now, faced with the difficulties of setting up home in the chaos of liberated Paris, he saw the flat more as an intermediary between them than as a place to live.

  It was an achievement to gain Ariane’s agreement to meet him there one Sunday morning. She shivered as he unlocked the door, and moved with palpable reluctance into the hall. In the salon were signs that Madame Brugiotti had begun work: the floor had been swept, the windows and panelling washed.

  Ariane went at once to the window and looked out at the bare trees in the avenue, only then turning to assess the room. She lifted the corner of a dust cover to see what was hidden underneath. He opened the next set of double doors into their bedroom. To his surprise the bed had been prepared, the square pillows in starched white cases lay on the coverlet. Behind him he heard her footsteps as she followed him into the room. She halted at the sight of the bed.

  ‘Ariane.’

  They stood, apart, looking around the room. His eyes came to rest on the bed, voyeur of their former selves making love, impelled by the threat of war. He glanced at his wife. Her face was set, with no sign of the past understanding, passionate and instinctive, that they used to share. He put his arms around her.

  ‘Kiss me,’ he said. She shifted her gaze to his face, leaned forward and kissed his cheek, affectionate, absent.

  He was trying to evoke the memory of that night in Normandy, the erotic intensity of which had grown in the nostalgia of exile. He took her head in his hands to tilt it up to him. There was no response as his tongue separated her lips. He had been more than willing, that first time in Normandy that she was refusing to remember, when she had led the way. He persevered in his attempt to resuscitate the past.

  ‘Ariane, forget the Occupation. Write it off. Make love to me now.’

  He pulled off her hat, flinging it into a corner of the room, releasing the short curls that now covered her head. He began to unbutton her coat, but halted when he looked from the work of his fingers to her face.

  ‘Theo, I’m sorry … It’s been horrible. It’s my fault, I should have told you …’

  ‘No, no. It was my fault. Anyway it doesn’t matter now. That’s the past. Now, kiss me.’

  This time she did, throwing off, with an effort, whatever it was that had oppressed her. ‘Yes, yes, yes.’

  He was pushing her coat off her shoulders and embracing her at the same time. She pulled at his tie and wrenched at the stud that held his collar in order to open his shirt. The removal of their clothes was a clumsy operation, as if they had never made love before and were unfamiliar and uncertain. Once in bed he yelped at the touch of her icy hands, kissing her to generate heat under the covers that made a tent over the ridgepole of his back as he moved over her, to warm her and remind her of their past.

  It still worked. They still worked together, whatever else they could not yet settle, and when Theo pushed off the weight of the blankets, now too hot, and allowed the cold air to chill the sweat on his back, he felt a profound satisfaction of at last achieving the place that he had wanted to be ever since he left. He fell briefly asleep. When he awoke Ariane’s eyes were open and she was watching him. Sleepily he put out a hand to stroke the soft olive skin of her breast and turned to lodge himself the length of her body. His mind reached into the future, occupying and peopling it with Ariane, Sabine, a new family.

  ‘When shall we move in?’

  ‘When the war ends,’ she said.

  ‘No, much sooner than that.’

  ‘I long for it to be over, for everything to be over. I feel as if this is time out, waiting for victory, rather like the phoney war at the beginning when we were waiting for defeat.’

  ‘It won’t be any different, Ariane. Don’t expect things suddenly to improve: food in the shops, divisions healed. It’ll take a long time.’

  He was fully awake now and climbed out of bed to find his cigarettes. Ariane lifted the covers to welcome his return, shrunken and shivering.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I don’t expect it. It’s a goal. When we’re there, I may feel that everything else was worth it after all, and not just a terrible waste and sadness.’

  ‘It can never be worth it, but the purpose will be vindicated.’ He remembered his feeling of self-satisfaction on his drive to Bonnemort in September, the justified son, before he knew that Henri was dead.

  ‘You don’t understand. You were so clear about what you had to do and you did it. There are people who still think that resistance was wrong.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I went to see Madame Maniotte.’

  ‘You see what Lucien had to live with. He had to hide what he was doing from her. And nothing that has happened since his death has changed her mind.’

  ‘She said Henri was arrested at the same time as Lucien in forty-three …’

  ‘No, it was a bit later.’

  ‘… and you got him out.’

  ‘I expect she can’t forgive me for that. I can’t blame her. Two are taken and one is saved. It was so random, unjust. Not that Henri reached the end, either.’

  ‘She was very bitter. She implied that you were somehow able to have Henri released.’

  Ariane detached herself from him. ‘She knew, or at least she guessed, what we were doing, she blames me for involving Lucien and at the same time accuses me of collaboration.’

  ‘There are some who did both,’ said Theo, as if to explain Madame Maniotte’s inconsistency. ‘Tell me, how did you get Henri out?’

  ‘I collaborated. I paid.’ Ariane was shouting. ‘I would have done almost anything for Henri to be free. If I’d had to sleep with the head of the Gendarmerie in Racines, I’d have done it.’

  * * *

  The risks were always with them. The young men fleeing from compulsory labour service would turn up without credentials. It was impossible to tell if they were genuine or agents provocateurs paid by the police, or worse, the Germans. Henri was cautious. At that stage, he only took boys from the locality who came with a recommendation. He moved his group between several sites, would not let them develop a routine, making it harder for the Germans to find them, and distributed the burden of feeding them between the villages. He found Mr Nikola, the Russian, to train the men and keep them busy.

  The infiltrators, who were e
vidently in the pay of the Sicherheitsdienst, didn’t enter Group Rainbow, but an allied one, based about thirty kilometres away, called Afrique, which formed part of the regional organisation run by Lucien Maniotte. This they had managed to work out later. At the time the first they knew of the danger they were in was an attack by the Germans on Afrique’s camp in the forests. Two boys had been killed, at least twenty arrested and a mere half dozen had succeeded in stumbling away into the woods to hide until the Germans withdrew. To make matters worse, the camp had been a central training point and papers listing other Maquis groups in the region had been seized. They never knew if the papers alone were enough to betray the organisation and its leader, or whether any of the prisoners talked. Henri always said they could not be blamed if they did. Everyone knew torture worked and why. All you could hope for was time to take cover.

  A week later he came into the schoolroom at Bonnemort where she was teaching the girls, and led her down to the garden.

  ‘The doctor was arrested yesterday at the clinic. The SD came for him.’

  ‘Oh, God.’ However much you prepare yourself, however well you know the risk, you can only go on by thinking it won’t happen. And when it does, it’s as bad as if it came as a total surprise. ‘Where have they taken him?’

  ‘No news.’

  ‘Henri, be careful. Go away to the Correze or the Tarn for a month or two.’

  ‘No need for that. The farm … The harvest… Micheline …’

  A week later he was arrested in the cafe of Lepech Perdrissou with a dozen other men. The news was telephoned through to them at Bonnemort by the wife of the proprietor, whose husband had also been taken.

  The first questions: Who took them? Where did they go? The answers, the gendarmes, to Racines, were a relief. Ariane was cheered that Henri had not been sought by name, but simply seized as part of a general round-up. Micheline saw nothing to reassure her. She did not weep; her stoicism was a rehearsal of her reaction a year later when Henri was killed. She went about her work with a dull endurance, doing twice as much as before.