Memory and Desire

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Sylvie was among them. Yet her shining eyes, the curve of her lips, gave the impression that she was on some other road; that she was engaged on some boundless adventure of a highway heady with the scent of speed and freedom. Sylvie was coming into her own. For once, life around her, outside her, teemed with a drama greater than that of her inner imaginings. It had happened gradually. First there had been the exhilaration of crossing frontiers and taking Leo to his grandparents in Portugal. Then, before she had had a chance to miss Leo, Erich Breuer, the Austrian composer had returned from the camp where he had been interned. Without his wife. A silent, thin, ghostly shadow, he had immured himself in the coachhouse at the back of the garden refusing Sylvie and Caroline’s company. Two days later they had found him swinging from a rafter, his face a grotesque mask.

  They had stared at him for a long time, Caroline sobbing; Sylvie in fascination. So this was death, she had thought. So simple, so easy. A matter of choice and a bit of rope. Something that could be managed at any time.

  The thought freed her. It gave her energy. She embraced Caroline, unseeingly comforted her. From that moment, a change took place in the two women’s relations. Solid, sensible Caroline, - the steadfast woman who protected Sylvie, who had effectively been her mainstay since her parents’ death, who had lived with her, ministered to her during the terrible months of her pregnancy - vanished. It was Sylvie now who made all the decisions, who leapt mercurially into action and tended to a Caroline grown fragile, ineffective.

  Something else had come along to change Sylvie. And that something bore the name of Andrzej Potacki. It had been early in the war, a cold, grey, wintry day. For lack of anything to do, Sylvie had taken Leo to the Musée Grevin, the wax museum on the grand boulevard and then to the café opposite. She had been remonstrating with her son, calling him, as she did, Leo and Tadzio by turn. She had felt more than seen the young man next to her staring. Then he had approached. She saw a shock of overlong blond hair, a narrow, reckless face with a wave of a nose which tilted slightly at its tip.

  ‘Jestesz Polska?’ He asked abruptly.

  She nodded.

  ‘Ja tesch.’

  They were both Poles. He had come home with her, stayed for a few days in the house. It had happened naturally enough. He seemed to have no fixed address and his words, the rise and fall of Polish on his lips, held her rapt. It was almost as if her earlier wish to return to Poland, a wish ruptured by the war, had taken on reality in his presence. The more she looked at him, the more she thought she could see her father in him, or perhaps, a grown version of her brother. That shock of blond hair, the slim, quick, graceful movements. And the language, the soft rhythms evoking memories. Even the content of Andrzej’s talk brought something back of those distant years, the unfathomable intricacies of Polish politics, the wish, passionately felt, for a free untrammeled nation, a wish now hampered by the Germans, who through Andrzej took on for Sylvie the vivid reality of personal, not abstract, enemies. She listened to him for hours, played the piano for him, medleys of romantic longing, the pieces he told her he loved best, the pieces her father had loved best. Leo adored his pranks. Sylvie felt completely at home with him.

  After a few days, he disappeared. No excuses, no apologies. Just an easy going. Then he came back again. Always, there was a present for Leo, for herself, for Caroline. Some delicacy which was difficult to find. He was mysterious in his movements, unpredictable, but she trusted him instinctively. Let him come and go as he pleased. They had become friends. More than that. There was a kinship between them.

  With Andrzej, she was transported back to that reckless, adventurous, untroubled Sylvie of her Polish childhood. It was as if she had never left that confident place in herself, never been sent away to France. She was still romping through fields and forest with her brother, Tadzio, in a space that was full of naughtiness, but was untainted by anxiety, unhampered by any split between wish and action. There was never any question of going to bed with Andrzej, for all his playful gallantery. And the lack of that dimension gave Sylvie a different strength. Caroline, once Leo had been safely taken to Portugal, almost became the worried child Sylvie and Andrzej had to protect.

  Andrzej had not been there on the afternoon of the 9th of June when Jacques Brenner, still in soldier’s uniform, appeared at the house in Vincennes and told them in no uncertain terms that it was time now to pack up and go. Go south.

  ‘And Jacob?’ Sylvie and Caroline had asked in unison.

  Jacques had shrugged, a new terse authority in his voice. ‘He’s clever enough to find you wherever you are,’ he had said.

  Sylvie had recognized his imperative. They had left the following morning, taking the minimum of luggage and whatever food the house contained. Sylvie was not attached to her possessions. Only her clothes, the stuff of her appearances spoke to her.

  By the time they were nearing the village of Dourdan, their car numbered six passengers. They had picked up a woman and two small children, an old priest, and a man in ill-fitting farmer’s blue whose legs seemed to be giving way beneath him. His broken French soon betrayed him as a fleeing British soldier. It was through Robbie, for that was the name he gave them, that Sylvie learned of the devastation she was later to understand had been the Battle of Dunkerque, when some 300,000 French and British soldiers fell victim to the lightning attack of Hitler’s bombers. The British, who survived and had not made their way back across the Channel in fishing or row boats or anything that floated, joined the great exodus to the South. A vast migration of peoples fleeing the Führer’s troops.

  It was Robbie who, as the sky just outside the village of Dourdan darkened with the thunder of aircraft, pushed them out of the car and forcibly heaved them into a ditch by the side of the road. Bombs hit the ground with an explosive thud. The heavens rained with gunfire. Sylvie, like a small excited boy on his first trip to the cinema, was transfixed by the movement of light, the barrage of sound. She could not keep her head down.

  Caroline’s nails dug into her arm. Her sob mingled with the shrieks and screams around them. ‘We’re going to die,’ she stammered. ‘Sylvie, we’re going to die.’ The dust which clawed at her nostrils smelled of blood.

  Sylvie slapped her angrily, ‘Of course not, you goose. We’re going to live.’ The words held a triumphal bellow.

  Late that night, in the eerie hush that follows battle, their car, now windscreenless, shuddered to a halt just outside Orléans. ‘Damn,’ Sylvie swore softly. ‘We’re out of petrol.’

  ‘That’s it, then. We’ve had it,’ Caroline trembled.

  ‘Ninny,’ Sylvie rebuked her. ‘Everything will be fine. Trust me.’ She put her arm round her shivering friend. They huddled together and slept. At dawn, Sylvie announced to Caroline that she was setting off in search of petrol and food. Caroline was to stay with the others and guard the car.

  ‘Robbie should go with you,’ Caroline protested.

  ‘And help me with his formidable French?’ Sylvie looked at her in amazement for a moment and then determinedly set off.

  The queues for petrol were a mile long, a rambling snake of a line gorged with ramshackle vehicles and weary bodies. Sylvie’s patience, never notable, snapped. She marched to the front of the queue. ‘I’m with an ambulance of wounded, just outside town. Quick,’ she said the first thing that came to her mind and did so in an authoritative voice. She placed her two cans firmly on the ground and swinging her hair back, put a hand assertively on the hip of her trousers. ‘Quick,’ she repeated.

  The attendant looked at her suspiciously and then shrugging, filled her cans.

  Sylvie nodded an abrupt ‘merci’ and set off. She suddenly felt gleeful, like an actress at the climax of a successful performance. Survival, she reflected, was a question of instinct. Her instincts would serve her.

  When they finally arrived after a maze of stops and starts and detours at the Jardine house atop the hills behind Marseilles, they learned that the Germans had occupied Paris.


  Sylvie had two simultaneous thoughts. She must somehow find out if Andrzej had managed to escape south; she must discover Jacob’s whereabouts. She gazed out at the deep summer blue of the Mediterranean and played with the ring Jacob had first given her. With a superstitious certainty she knew that while that ring was on her finger, Jacob could not die.

  A few weeks after Marshal Pétain, hero of the First World War and now spokesman of defeat, had signed an armistice with the Germans, Jacob was sitting with his friend Jacques in the latter’s Paris apartment. They were musing over the events of the past weeks, plotting future possibilities. By a mixture of what he himself termed one-quarter guile and three-quarters luck, Jacob had escaped from his POW camp. Lieutenant Schrader had all too happily - and Jacob suspected in full knowledge - sipped the late-night bromide Jacob prepared for him and had slept peacefully while Jacob donned his perfect fit of a uniform. The keys to the jeep were in its pocket and with only momentary trepidation as he shouted a brusque ‘Sieg Heil’ to the guard at the camp gate, Jacob had sped into the countryside. In the darkness of a forest, he had abandoned the jeep, begged a change of clothes from a near-by farmhouse, walked, cycled, somehow stumbled his way to a still functioning French field hospital. In the chaos of retreat, no one questioned the origin of an able pair of medical hands.

  What went on in those subsequent weeks, he preferred not to remember, certainly not to talk about.

  When it was clear to Jacob that the French army was now poised to become an army of collaboration, he deftly disappeared again, and made his way back to Paris, a Paris which had the strange emptiness of a ghost town, where Nazi boots thudded through desolate streets and swastikas flew from the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower.

  He had been grateful to find their house at Vincennes empty, bearing only the marks of a relatively orderly departure.

  Jacques, however, was at home. He had ostentatiously popped a cork as soon as Jacob entered.

  ‘I was saving this last bottle for your arrival.’ He lifted his long-stemmed glass into the light and looked lovingly at its mellow tones. ‘From now on all the champagne will go to the Germans,’ he said ruefully.

  Jacob sipped, hugged his friend, smiled. ‘Seeing you I might almost be lulled into thinking nothing had changed.’ His eyes clouded over, ‘But, of course, everything has changed.’

  ‘Yes, everything,’ Jacques laughed wryly. ‘At last, at long long last, I have a sense of purpose.’

  Jacob looked quizzically at his friend.

  ‘Come with me this afternoon. A small group of us are meeting at the Musée de l’Homme.’

  Jacques, a lover of mystery, refused to say anymore.

  In a dusty back room of the Musée de l’Homme, a handful of men sat talking quietly. Their pallor, their greying temples and erect carriage immediately spoke to Jacob of the senior orders of the civil service. Suspicious glances were followed by a few hushed words from Jacques. They then welcomed him with polite nods.

  The oldest of the men rose. In subdued tones, which nonetheless commanded their full attention, he spoke. ‘There are only a few of us here today. That is how it must be. But I know that across the country other men, other women are meeting, will meet, in mind if not in body. What we have to defend is more precious than our lives, our homes and the soul of France: it is a spiritual freedom, our very image of the world, of life. Our tasks now are not yet clearly defined: but if we are vigilant, we will see them as they present themselves to us. Whatever our daily jobs, our first goal must be to make things difficult for the occupying power, to create networks of subversion, of resistance and in due course to defeat them.’

  He sat down. The hush in the room was broken by discreet voices, suggestions. Jacob found himself contributing. He indicated the need for blank identity cards, official stamps, papers. So many were fleeing, would have to flee. British soldiers. Refugees from the east.

  They nodded. Names were mentioned. Possible contacts. Empty flats. The need for caution.

  The group dispersed, singly, inconspicuously.

  Jacob, catching Jacques’s nod, left the Musée before him. He walked through streets depleted of cars, deviated into a courtyard when he saw a group of Gestapo approaching, made his way by a roundabout route to the café in front of Jacques’s apartment. It was one of the few to have reopened since the Occupation. As he sat staring into the street, he noticed a large car pull up in front of the apartment. A woman emerged. He blinked, looked again. With a sense of unreality, he leapt from his chair and dashed from the café.

  ‘Mathilde,’ he only spoke her name softly when he stood directly behind her. Something in her carriage, in the severe cut of her red cross uniform made him refrain from throwing his arms around her.

  ‘Jacob, I hoped I might find you here,’ she said in the low formal tones of someone addressing a distant acquaintance. But her dark eyes danced.

  Only when they had reached the safety of Jacques’s flat did they embrace. And Jacob only released her when he found that the embrace, despite himself, was becoming something more than the expression of a reunion between long parted friends.

  The Princesse’s mobile features took on a roguish expression. ‘So, mon ami, I find you alive in all ways.’

  ‘In all ways,’ Jacob echoing her, smiled a little wistfully.

  ‘And Sylvie, too, I have learned is safe and well and little Leo is in the arms of his grandmother.’

  Jacob’s astonishment was written on his face.

  She laughed. ‘Don’t look so surprised, my friend. Yes, I know things. I have friends in many places. Sometimes one’s position is an advantage. That is why I have come.’

  The Princesse paused, foresaw his next question, told him Violette was safely ensconced in Switzerland. She too hoped to be returning there soon. Then she assessed him. He was leaner, his face etched with new lines, a new grimness in his eyes. She knew what they hid. She had seen it herself: the harrowing explosions, the maimed bodies, the fear, the deaths. And now the helplessness of defeat; the realisation of what for years they had most dreaded: a Nazi victory and all that it implied.

  She knew she could trust him implicitly, that he would carefully consider what she proposed. Yet she didn’t know how to begin: it was a matter they had never broached together.

  ‘Jacob,’ she plunged. ‘I imagine that you are now thinking of going South, rejoining Sylvie.’

  Jacob nodded.

  She cleared her throat, ‘I think it might be better if you didn’t. Safer. There will be laws soon. Like there are in Germany. Laws against…,’ she stumbled and Jacob finished her thought for her.

  ‘Laws against the Jews. Foreskin laws.’

  The Princesse flushed a little. Nodded. ‘They will come, I know. It could endanger you, Sylvie…’

  Suddenly Jacob laughed. The corners of his eyes crinkled with a mirth that had become uncustomary. He took the Princesse’s hand, pulled her along with him. ‘You see,’ he said, taking something from a drawer which seemed to contain nothing other than socks. ‘I have considered the possibility.’

  She gazed at what he handed her, read the identity card, ‘Jules Lemaître.’ The Princesse smiled, ‘He is not unlike you.’ Then, with an air of mystery, she dug into her shoulder bag. ‘Here is another possibility. Voila, M. Marcel Derain.’

  Jacob met her eyes. Then, with a sudden sense of the conspiratorial playfulness which had characterised their meetings in an epoch which now seemed an eternity ago, Jacob lifted her in his arms and twirled her round the room. ‘Which shall it be, Madame la Princesse?’

  ‘Well,’ she said with a pertness which sat oddly with the severity of her uniform, ‘You were once both my master and my Jules, so Jules Lemaître, let it be.’

  Jacob nodded, serious again. ‘And I knew him, worked with him, saw him die. There is no family to speak of.’

  They were silent for a moment, each remembering their dead. Then, they talked, quickly, intently, with the knowledge that time wa
s short. The Princesse told him of a doctor in Montpelier who had set up a clandestine organisation which placed Jewish refugee children in remote villages; Jacob might want to work with him. He had only to name her. She had a plan for a link to Switzerland. Money would help. It was available. He listened carefully, told her of Jacques’s group, gave her the keys to his house, the consultancy: they might come in useful.

  She rose. ‘Tomorrow morning a friend of mine, the Secretary to the American ambassador, leaves for Bordeaux, in an official car. It could be arranged that you accompany him South.’ The efficiency of her tones masked her fear for him.

  ‘Mathilde,’ Jacob took both her hands in his, kissed them. ‘You are formidable.’

  She shrugged, ‘We all need to be formidable these days, eh mon ami?’ They embraced, each realising but hiding from themselves the knowledge that it might be for the last time.

  While Jacob was making his way across the demarcation line into unoccupied France, Sylvie was trailing her way through the narrow winding streets of the old Marseilles harbour area. Sylvie liked the Vieux Port with its congested, cobbled lanes, its dealers in dope and vice and petty crookery of all descriptions. She liked the grubby, sun-tanned children, the lithe youths and dark-eyed secretive girls. She liked the louche, overdressed men, the skimpily clad prostitutes and sailors. The sense of a dense, human mass in ceaseless activity, the knowledge of a black market which now burgeoned and thrived suited her. What suited her less was the constant presence of police, who had all too quickly shown themselves to be servants of their German masters..

  But what Sylvie liked least of all was the funereal atmosphere of the house on the hill. With Dr and Madame Jardine gone, the gathered refugees spoke in muted voices, exuded fear and an aura of impending catastrophe. It had all grown worse in the last week, ever since those ridiculous anti-semitic demonstrations here and in Toulouse. She worried about Jacob, wished he would return and somehow sort them out. Caroline was proving useless. The mood of the house seemed to suit her, as if she too had become a hapless Jewish refugee waiting for doom. For the moment, only Joseph Rittner demonstrated any spunk. He organized the day’s activities, made sure the vegetable gardens were tended, reassured the group that their papers would soon be arriving, that they could soon leave, somehow. At least Caroline listened to him, followed him with loyal doggy eyes wherever he went.