The Paper Girl of Paris

by Jordyn Taylor

  That’s when I heard the clicking of boots behind me. My stomach turned over. Somebody must have heard me.

  I felt like a mouse in an open field with hawks circling overhead. My heart throbbed behind my eyes. My whole body pulsed with fear. Think, Adalyn. I wouldn’t make it to the end of the alley in time to get away. Panicked, I dove into the small dark space behind an abandoned automobile and stuffed the torn posters into my book bag.

  I could still hear the boots. Quiet as a shadow, I stole a glance around the hood of the car. Sure enough, a German soldier had entered the side street with two hands clasped around his rifle. Please turn back around. Please.

  “Wer ist da?” Who’s there?

  This was it. I was sure of it. He was going to find me with the ruined posters. He was going to drag me out of my hiding place and send me to prison, if he didn’t just kill me on the spot. I pictured the faces of Maman, Papa, and Chloe. Uncle Gérard and Charlotte and Simone. I would never see any of them again. I shrank back into the darkness and tucked my knees against my chest. I thought about being small enough to seep into the cracks between the bricks or the spot beneath a pebble. I didn’t move. I hardly breathed.

  His boots must have been within two meters of my hiding spot when more German voices called to him from the street. For a moment I feared they would join him in his search, but then, with a rush of relief unlike any I’d ever felt, I heard the first soldier turn on his heel and hurry back the way he came.

  I wasted no time exiting the alleyway and tossing the papers into a sewer grate, where they disappeared forever. When I got home, I kissed my parents and chatted with Chloe about school that day. I practiced piano. I didn’t say a word about what I’d done.

  Nobody had any idea.

  Chapter 4

  Adalyn

  That first time I tore down the Nazi posters, it nearly ended in disaster.

  But the next time I do it—and the next time, and the next time, and the time after that—it goes off without a hitch. The more I do it, the better I get at slipping into the shadows when nobody’s watching and quickly tearing the paper off the walls. Every time, I hear General Charles de Gaulle’s message about the flame of French resistance playing in my head. Each successful operation feels like the tiniest victory for France, even if I’m the only one who knows I’m doing it.

  It’s a Saturday, and Maman has sent me with the family’s ration cards to see what I can get from the butcher for tonight’s dinner. The Germans—or les boches, as everyone calls them—are always closing off random sections of road, so every trip out of the apartment becomes an exercise in reorienting myself to my surroundings. Each day I wander down new streets with German signs bearing down on me; I see grand boulevards devoid of all cars and hungry people queuing for rations that may or may not be there. But what’s even more harrowing, I think, is the sound of the Occupation. The silence sends chills down my spine. There’s none of the usual automobile traffic; none of the same hustle and bustle of daily life. Only feet shuffling on the pavement and fearful whispers.

  I’m nearly at the butcher’s when I see them plastered on the wall of an alleyway: a fresh batch of posters. My chest tightens and my fingertips twitch. I want to take care of them so badly, but if I don’t get in line now, there will almost certainly be nothing left for me when I get to the window. And so I take my spot at the end of the line, behind dozens of pale-faced mothers with hungry children swarming their knees.

  An hour goes by before the butcher’s window even comes into view. I have my sad ration book ready, filled with square coupons for the different food items. When I finally reach the front of the line, the butcher takes but one of my four coupons and tips a single rather skinny sausage into my basket.

  “That’s all for today, I’m afraid,” he calls to the rest of the people in line.

  The woman directly behind me lets out a short, sharp wail. I’ve been so focused on the posters this whole time, I never really took a look at her. She has four young children gathered about her waist, and her legs are bare and shivering in the late-November air. These days, it’s impossible to find silk stockings for under 300 francs.

  I place the sausage in her shopping basket.

  “You should take it,” I insist, and relief washes over her face. The wasted hour I spent in line gnaws at me, but so does the idea of taking this last meat ration when I know we have another package from Gérard stuffed with bacon, cheese, and vegetables. I’ll tell Maman there was nothing left for me.

  My empty basket swinging at my side, I hurry back to the alleyway as fast as I can without drawing attention to myself. There it is, coming up on my right, closer and closer now. At last, I dart into the gap between buildings as swiftly as a cat.

  Uh-oh. This is not what I was expecting.

  There’s somebody else in here—a boy. And he’s doing something to one of the posters. I wonder if I should slip back out to the street, unseen. But then the boy steps back from the wall, and I see that he’s drawn an unusual symbol in chalk right on top of Hitler’s face. It’s a cross, but with two horizontal lines instead of one. My heart leaps. I need to know more. I take a step closer to him, and the boy looks up and realizes he’s not alone.

  He’s about my height, with close-cropped brown hair and thick, circular glasses. His round cheeks are flushed pink. For some reason, he doesn’t run—but he still looks apprehensive. It’s on me to make the first move, and I decide to take the risk.

  “I can’t stand them,” I say, nodding to the posters.

  “Nor can I,” he replies.

  We’re testing each other, I think. A part of me knows it’s dangerous to speak ill of the Germans to a complete stranger, but a larger part desperately needs to know what the boy was drawing.

  “Sometimes I tear them down,” I admit. “That’s what I came here to do.”

  He relaxes his stance. In fact, he looks impressed.

  “Really?” he asks. “Have you ever been caught?”

  “Only just now, I suppose.”

  The boy smiles at that, so I press on.

  “I must know . . . what is that symbol you drew there?”

  “It’s the Cross of Lorraine,” he replies. “It means I support de Gaulle.”

  “De Gaulle!” I can hardly believe it. I nearly drop my basket. “I heard his radio broadcast in June!”

  And then, as if on cue, we recite it at the exact same time:

  “Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not be extinguished, and will not be extinguished.”

  His face splits into a grin.

  “I’m Arnaud Michnik.”

  “I’m Adalyn Bonhomme.”

  We shake hands.

  Then he asks, “Hey, Adalyn, did you hear what happened the other day? At nine twenty p.m. a Jew killed a German soldier, cut him open, and ate his heart.”

  I freeze. “Excuse me?”

  “It’s a joke, I promise.”

  “It sounds unkind to Jews,” I snap.

  “Adalyn,” he implores, “I’m Jewish.”

  His smile is kind, not cruel, so I cross my arms and let him go on.

  Arnaud makes a dramatic show of clearing his throat and continues with his joke: “What I just said is impossible, you see, for three reasons. A German has no heart. A Jew eats no pork. And at nine twenty p.m., everyone is home listening to the BBC.”

  I laugh—and it’s the kind of laugh that comes out when you haven’t laughed in a very long time. A laugh that’s also relief and desperation all rolled into one. Then, looking over my shoulder to make sure no one’s coming, I go to the wall, tear down a poster, and stuff it under the cloth at the bottom of my basket.

  “That’s clever, hiding the evidence in there.”

  “No one ever suspects a young girl with her shopping.”

  I move down the alleyway with Arnaud at my side, delighted to have a partner in crime for the first time. It takes some of the pressure off to have somebody stand on lookout whil
e I yank down one poster after another. I would never have the guts to do this with Chloe; not only would I never want to put her in any kind of danger, but I also suspect she would tear down the posters and then run down the street waving them above her head victoriously.

  No sooner do I tear the last poster from the wall than I want to know when we can do it again, but I don’t know how to ask Arnaud. I don’t know if this fifteen-minute operation meant as much to him as it did to me. To meet someone outside my own family who shares my views . . . it’s like being lost at sea and finally spotting land on the horizon.

  “I want to do more of this,” I tell him point-blank.

  “Walk with me to the metro station?”

  What am I to make of that response? But I’ll do whatever it takes to keep this ship on course, so I follow him out onto the sidewalk, where we fall into step like old friends. Two German soldiers walk past us—one of them even brushes up against my shopping basket—but they don’t pay us any mind. How thrilling it is, to be hiding in plain sight!

  “You should meet my friend Luc.” He says it as casually as if he were commenting on the weather.

  “Who is Luc?”

  “Someone who thinks the same way as you and me.”

  “Why should I meet him?”

  We’ve already made it to the entrance of the metro. He pulls me to the side to avoid the current of passengers.

  “I shouldn’t give you any more details. Just talk to him, okay?”

  “Okay.” My heart races as I run through my schedule. Monday, I know we’re seeing the LaRoches. “I could talk to him on Tuesday, after school lets out.”

  “Tuesday.” He nods. “There is an old shoe store on the boulevard Saint-Michel, right near the southern tip of the Luxembourg Gardens. It has a purple awning—you can’t miss it. Wait on the bench outside at half past five, and he’ll come and get you. He’ll ask you if you made it there okay. Tell him, ‘The trains ran smoothly.’ Then he’ll take you inside.”

  “‘The trains ran smoothly’? Arnaud, what does that mean?”

  “Just say it. Trust me. I have to go—it was nice meeting you, Adalyn.”

  “Arnaud, wait. . . .”

  But he pecks me on the cheek and disappears down the steps of the metro, leaving me shivering and alone on the sidewalk. It all happens so fast that by the time I get home and tell Maman that the butcher ran out of meat, a part of me is wondering if perhaps I imagined the whole thing.

  At school on Tuesday, I can barely focus. I say the same four words over and over again in my head, so I’ll be primed for this afternoon: The trains ran smoothly. The trains ran smoothly. The trains ran smoothly. It must be some kind of password—but what for? When I meet Chloe at our usual spot after the final bell, I tell her Marie and Monique LaRoche are practically forcing me to come shopping with them for some new jewelry. As I predicted when I concocted this lie, Chloe seems relieved she was spared, and says she’ll see me at home.

  You can’t trust the metro these days. The Germans have been closing down stations without warning, making it impossible to know if you’ll ever get to where you’re going. I don’t even know who this mysterious Luc is, but for some reason, the thought of missing my appointment with him makes my stomach turn over, so I complete the cold hour-long journey on foot. By the time the purple awning comes into view, my eyes are watering and my nose is almost certainly the color of a ripe tomato.

  I take a seat on the bench outside, wondering which direction Luc is going to come from. I don’t even know what he looks like, or how old he is. Only now does it occur to me that I might have wandered into some kind of Nazi trap to catch the people defacing their posters, but I can’t bring myself to get up and leave. I barely know Arnaud, and yet I’m certain I can trust him. I pull my jacket tighter around my body and hunch my shoulders up to my ears. Now that I’ve stopped moving, the cold air is making me tremble.

  Or am I just nervous?

  I steal a glance at my watch. It’s twenty minutes past five. Any minute now . . .

  A bell tinkles overhead, and the door of the shop swings open. This is it. Stay calm. A middle-aged woman in a long brown fur coat exits the shop and adjusts her scarf. She looks at me for a moment, but then her eyes keep sliding toward the street beyond. She sets off without a word, her shopping bag dangling from her elbow.

  A false alarm.

  By now, my heart is hammering inside my chest. In two minutes, it will officially be half past five. It’s too nerve-racking to keep jerking my head left and right, so I fix my eyes on the second hand of my watch as it counts down the final minute. It’s so quiet outside, I can actually hear it. Tick. Tick. Tick.

  The bell tinkles again. Probably another oblivious shopper.

  “Did you make it here okay?”

  My breath catches in my throat, and I look up into the dark brown eyes of a boy around my age. He’s dressed in a school uniform, but there’s something about him that’s more rugged than I’m used to. His messy black hair falls down into his eyes and curls beneath his ears. Every angle of his face is defined, geometric. It takes me a second to remember I’m supposed to speak now.

  “The trains ran smoothly.”

  He smiles approvingly, and I think I may slide right off the bench. He opens the door of the shop and motions for me to come inside, and gently I get to my feet, praying I’ve done everything correctly so far.

  The store is small and dark and smells strongly of leather and shoe polish. There is a man at the counter who doesn’t look up when I enter. If Arnaud tried to choose the most random place in Paris for a covert meeting, then he succeeded. Without saying a word, the black-haired boy leads me on a winding path between the shelves, until finally we emerge in a tiny corner at the far end of the shop. He fishes a key out of the pocket of his blazer and uses it to unlock the door in front of us.

  I follow him into an austere space about the size of my bedroom. There are a half dozen mismatched spindly chairs, a table, and a stack of boxes against the wall to my left. A single light bulb hangs from the ceiling. There’s another door in the center of the far wall.

  The boy turns the key in the lock behind us.

  “You can go ahead and take a seat.”

  I mimic him in dragging one of the chairs into the middle of the room, and then we sit down facing each other, about a meter of space between us.

  He looks me plainly in the eye.

  “I’m Luc,” he says.

  “Adalyn,” I reply.

  “I heard you met my friend Arnaud.”

  “Yes, on Saturday. He said I should meet you.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “No. Only that you think the same way I do.”

  Luc makes himself comfortable, propping an elbow on the back of his chair and crossing his legs. He asks, “What do you suppose he meant by that?”

  “I don’t know what he meant, exactly.” I’m still sitting rigid as a board in my seat, and I have to remind myself to exhale. Then I take another breath. “The only thing I know for certain is the feeling I get when I wake up and see the Nazi flag hanging over our city . . . and the women queuing for rations that aren’t there . . . and the soldiers snapping up everything there is to buy in our shops.”

  “And what feeling is that, Adalyn?”

  Luc is so good-looking, it’s hard to maintain eye contact, but I mustn’t seem nervous. If he decides I’m not right for this—if he casts me out of this world I’ve only just discovered—I don’t know how I’ll be able to go on. It’ll feel like being shaken awake from the most wonderful dream and knowing I’ll never be able to return.

  “It’s like there’s a fire burning inside me, and if I don’t do something to fight back, it might consume me. That’s why I tear down their posters. I have to do something. How can I not?”

  I’m breathing heavily now, and I suddenly realize I’m sitting on the edge of my seat. What is Luc thinking? Instead of responding, he’s just surveying me, tilting his head this
way and that as though he’s examining a painting.

  “You look familiar,” he says at last. “Do you live around here?”

  “No. My family lives up in the Ninth Arrondissement. Near the opera house.”

  He raises his eyebrows.

  “Nice neighborhood. Expensive, though.”

  I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to that, so I look down and fidget with my bracelet. Oh no—now I’ve drawn his attention to the silver Cartier bangle Maman gave me for my birthday last year. When I turn my gaze back to Luc, a look of understanding is spreading across his face.

  “You’re in all those fashion magazines. They’re always printing your picture in the society pages,” he says. “My grandmother reads them all the time and leaves them lying around the house. She loves to see what the women are wearing. That’s where I’ve seen you before, isn’t it?”

  I brace myself for the note of judgment to work its way into his eyes, but it never does.

  “My mother takes me along to all sorts of parties,” I confess.

  Luc raises an eyebrow. “Does she know that you’re destroying Nazi propaganda in your spare time?”

  “No,” I reply quickly. “Nobody does, except for you and Arnaud.”

  He leans forward and rests his elbows on top of his knees, narrowing the space between us in one swift movement.

  “Can I trust you, Adalyn?”

  I will myself to stare into his eyes.

  “Yes.”

  For a few agonizing seconds, he simply looks back at me. And then he stands up.

  Oh no. Is it over? Am I being dismissed without ever learning why I was here to begin with? Our entire meeting flashes before my eyes, but nothing jumps out as the point where it all went wrong.

  Then, right as I expect him to pull out the key and usher me back into the store, Luc goes to the stack of boxes instead. He opens the lid, pulls out a large envelope, and returns to his seat.

  “Arnaud was right. I do think the same way you do,” he says softly. The shadows cast by the light bulb make the lines of his face even more distinct, and for a moment, I have the unusual urge to lay my hand against his cheek. He continues. “I’ve been looking for trustworthy people like you and me—people who want to resist. We need to get our message out to as many people as we can.”