First things first. Gabriel had to be taken care of. Sylvie raced the Citroën down the winding roads to Marseilles and parked behind the Hotel d’Alger, her and Jacob’s meeting place. She knew that the owner must be one of the links in Jacob’s operation. Gabriel would be safer here in the short term than with her. Old Vassier would know, would understand what needed to be done. She asked to see him alone and was shown into a dusty office which smelled of stale tobacco and musty socks. Vassier rose with the agility of a younger man from his deep leather chair. His wrinkled tortoise face was as ever contemplatively benign and betrayed nothing of his thoughts.
‘Ah, Mademoiselle Latour. Always such a pleasure for these old eyes to see you.’
Sylvie smiled briefly and then took on a business-like tone. ‘Monsieur Vassier, a young cousin of mine has been landed with me for a short time. I think he would be happier here with you than at the Midi, with all its noise,’ she lowered her eyes demurely. ‘You understand. In my position… Could you look after him for a few days?’
‘Why, of course, my dear.’ Vassier patted her hand paternally.
‘He’ll be sent for very soon,’ Sylvie added, letting the sentence hang.
Vassier passed a plump hand over his shining scalp, as if it still held a head of hair. ‘Don’t worry, my dear. Just bring him to Madame.’
Sylvie went to fetch Gabriel and when she returned Madame Vassier, a tiny bird-like woman was waiting for them in her husband’s office. ‘How lovely. A cousin of Mademoiselle Latour’s to stay with us. You shall help me with my work, won’t you…’
‘Gabriel,’ Sylvie supplied.
‘Gabriel,’ the woman finished, drawing the small boy to her. He looked after Sylvie with fearful eyes.
She smiled at him reassuringly. ‘I shall be back to see you later, Gabriel. Be good.’
Sylvie turned away. The weight of that apprehensive yet resigned glance slowed her step. Children shouldn’t look like that. Why, Gabriel was only a few years older than Leo, whose features she remembered as bold, unshadowed. Sylvie shivered. Thank God, she had listened to reason and taken Leo to the safety of his grandparents in Portugal.
But there was no time now for musing. Sylvie walked rapidly through the bustling narrow streets to a post office and hastily scribbled a message to Jacob. It was the first time she had dared to use his Poste Restante number. ‘Everyone has gone. Please come.’ She signed it S, not knowing whether what she had written was clear enough or vague enough, but trusting to Jacob. Then she went back to the Hotel du Midi and plotted.
Sylvie knew through Marseilles’ impeccable word of mouth network that most of the Jewish refugees who were rounded up in the area found their way to the notorious camp in Gurs in the Basses Pyrenees. It was rumoured that in the cold winter months thousands of them died there of starvation, of typhoid, of dysentery. But Caroline wasn’t Jewish and Caroline was her first point of concern. Could she have ended up there or in some prison? Or was she simply roaming the streets searching for Joseph. Sylvie disqualified the last possibility. Wherever she had been taken, her name would certainly exist on some official list. If there was one thing the German occupation had established in France, it was the rigidity with which lists were kept and adhered to. Lists and files and forms and documents for everything. It was what had made counterfeiting such an honourable and lucrative profession.
What she needed now was quick and certain access to files, Sylvie decided. And she thought she knew how that might be possible without recourse to that potentially dangerous personal trip to a police station.
Quickly she donned her smartest wool suit, tied her hair into a smooth knot and perched low on her brow a little rounded hat with a pert peacock feather. Then she made her way out of the hotel. Just outside the door she met Nadine of the hundred eyes and rather than the usual curt nod with which the woman addressed her, thin lips formed into an uncustomary greeting. ‘Ça va Mademoiselle Latour?’
There was something about the lilt of the voice, the slight sneer around the lips, the hint of a triumphal colour in the eyes which made Sylvie stop in her tracks. A light glimmered and then exploded for her with the clarity of a revelation. Nadine, of course. Nadine-of-the-hundred-eyes. Nadine, the informer. Nadine who had followed her to the house on the hill. Nadine who seethed with visible malice. Sylvie’s hand rose, poised for a resounding slap. And then she stopped herself, drew her shoulders back, looked at the smaller woman as if she were a pernicious slug and just about as bothersome. ‘Ça va très bien, Madame. Merci. But you, you look as if you might be sickening.’
It all happened so quickly that Nadine wasn’t sure she had heard Sylvie properly, had seen the raised hand. Wasn’t sure that Sylvie knew. Nadine wanted her to know, wanted her to realise that Nadine was the stronger. Wanted to gloat. Watching Sylvie’s receding form, sensuous even in its briskness, apparently carefree as she made her way down the street, Nadine felt her hard earned triumph trickling through her fingers. She sped after Sylvie. She couldn’t contain herself any longer.
‘Now you see Mademoiselle Latour… Kowalska,’ beady eyes gleamed at Sylvie from a pinched equine face, ‘you may be able to put things over on a lot of people, but not on Nadine.’ Vindictiveness settled over her dark features. ‘Those dirty Jews of yours have had it now. And your own days may be numbered,’ Nadine sneered.
‘You had better start counting your own, you informing vermin, you and all your repulsive kin,’ Sylvie lashed out and then, with an icy withering glance, strode away.
Nadine looked after her in smug satisfaction. Now that contemptuous bitch would mind her manners, would know who held the reins of power.
But Nadine’s satisfaction didn’t last long. That very evening, half-an-hour before she was due to perform, Sylvie left the Hotel du Midi. None of Madame Castelnau’s entreaties could make her stay. When the poor woman remonstrated with her, demanded reasons, Sylvie simply said, ‘Ask your daughter-in-law. Ask her.’
Madame Castelnau didn’t need to ask. She understood everything in a flash without digging for details. She finished Sylvie’s slap for her. It was a resounding one. It left Nadine, at least temporarily, cowed.
Meanwhile, Sylvie, with the help of a tousled street urchin, carried her bags to the Hotel d’Alger. She needed to be out of the public gaze for a while to put her rescue of Caroline and Katherine into effect. That afternoon she had gone to the Villa Pastré to see her new friend, the Contesse. She had been to this remarkable residence with its grand vaulted veranda and its acres of parkland just outside Marseilles in Montredon several times before. The Contesse Pastré held open house for stray artists and writers who had fled the occupation to find refuge in the free city of Marseilles. And she did so with panache and a liberal generosity.
Sylvie had first been brought there by an artist friend. The atmosphere, despite the scent of the sea, had reminded her of Paris days which now seemed long past. And the Contesse, who was part Russian by origin, had been drawn to the gifted and beautiful young performer she considered her fellow Slav. She had asked Sylvie to return whenever it pleased her to do so.
Sylvie had done so today because she sensed that the Contesse, with her innumerable contacts in high places, would know exactly which senior official could help her discover Caroline’s whereabouts. She had not been wrong. The Contesse had offered to intervene personally. Now all Sylvie had to do was wait. It was the task which was most difficult for her.
She refused to sing at the Hotel d’Algers, despite Vassier’s entreaties. She filled the waiting hours by trying to bring a light into Gabriel’s eyes. It became something of a mission. If she could do that, she thought superstitiously, Caroline would be saved. She fed the little boy the precious chocolates admirers had given her. She took him for walks by the sea, named boats for him, telling him one would carry him to a new and distant world where there was chocolate every day. She stroked his hair and cuddled him, thinking he needed human warmth. He was always gracious, polite, grateful,
but his eyes never gave up their haunted look as if they were eternally fixed on a scene he couldn’t divulge. She took to reading him to sleep at nights from a tattered copy of The Count of Monte Cristo she had found in the hotel. She acted out whole scenes for him to make up for his scanty French. It was during one of these scenes, on their seventh night together, that Gabriel laughed. A pure childish carefree laugh. She hugged him. That night she slept with him cradled in her arms.
The next day a note arrived for Sylvie with a single word written on it. Gurs. So now she knew the worst. She waited three more days in the hope that some word might come from Jacob. During those days, she found out everything she could about Gurs. Vassiers was a great help as were other friends.
A plan began to take shape. In order to execute it, she needed a high ranking military letter on Caroline’s behalf. Sylvie made use of the underground network she had become familiar with over the last years, this time pulling the strings herself. The letter on its stolen stationery and with its forged signature was obtained. But still no word from Jacob.
Her patience exhausted, Sylvie decided to set out on her own.
Armed with her store of petrol coupons, she drove the large Citroën as quickly as she dared through a rain-drenched landscape, under skies which turned a colder steely-grey the closer she drew to the foothills of the Pyrenees. She spent the night in a small village. Beside the old empty hotel, a swollen brook rushed angrily over worn stones. In the morning everything was swathed in chill cloud. Sylvie drew her coat round her and inched her way toward the village of Gurs. The roads were narrow and winding and she could see no more than a few feet ahead of her. She had hoped to get to Gurs early. She stumbled on the camp, rather than found it, closer to noon, by which time a pale wintry sun emerged to give her a sense of her whereabouts.
At a threatening signal from an armed guard Sylvie drew up at the camp gates. She took a deep calming breath and stepped out of the car. With her flowing golden hair, her fine loosely cut black cashmere coat, and the silk stockings she did nothing to hide, she looked like nothing so much as a starlet who had strayed on her way to a glamorous party. She approached the guard. ‘I have come to see Monsieur le Commandant,’ she said in a voice which left no doubt that the meeting had been prearranged.
The man looked at her curiously, altered his menacing stance, and said, ‘Monsieur le Commandant is not here.’
‘But that can’t be,’ Sylvie trilled. ‘I have come especially to see him. I have a message,’ she lowered her voice to a whisper, ‘a personal message from Vichy’.
The guard stared at her in consternation. Sylvie could see his mixture of disbelief and apprehension: she might just be telling the truth. She talked on, capitalising on the apprehension, confusing him with her insistence. ‘It is imperative that I speak to him. The matter is urgent. Fetch his deputy.’ She put all the force of her personality into her voice, tapped her high-heeled foot impatiently on the ground. The guard eyed her, then gestured to his double at the other side of the gate, simultaneously asking Sylvie for her papers. She whisked them in front of him authoritatively, then stepped back as he turned to murmur to his mate.
As she waited, Sylvie identified the smell that had besieged her nostrils despite the cold. The reek of human excrement. And something else. The stale foul odour of human bodies closely cramped together. It turned her stomach. As she breathed it in for fifteen, then twenty, then thirty pacing minutes, that smell became for Sylvie irrevocably the smell of death. By the time a young soldier at last came to fetch her, her fear, her nausea had been transformed into a luminous anger. It sharpened her performance, gave it the edge of truth.
The slight grey man who confronted her on the other side of a cheap functional desk in the small bare room was immediately at a disadvantage. In the grim atmosphere of the camp, Sylvie with her perfect skin, her animal grace, radiated health, evoked a world of natural power. Her air of command, her directness, erased any possibility of ambivalence or suspicion.
‘There has been a mistake,’ she said as soon as the barest formalities of introduction had been made. ‘My cousin, Caroline Berger, has been brought here by mistake. I have come to fetch her.’
‘That is not possible, Mademoiselle. We have our information, our orders.’
Sylvie pinned him with a contemptuous glance, drew herself up to her full height. ‘Ah, but you see, it is altogether possible. As your Commandant would know, if he were here.’ She paused for a moment, and then, as if she had suddenly decided that she could honour this man with her confidence, she sat down and looked beseechingly into his eyes with the conspiratorial seductiveness of a young girl.
‘You see, it’s a delicate matter. My cousin had a liaison,’ she lowered her voice to a whisper so that the soldier in attendance wouldn’t hear and she stumbled over the offending word, ‘a liaison with … with a high-ranking officer. She came South to have the baby. I don’t know how she stumbled into the arms of the police, found herself amongst Jews, but I know, I can understand that she wouldn’t defend herself. Divulge her secret. Break her trust with General…’ Sylvie stopped. She fumbled in her bag. ‘You see he wants her back, and the baby.’ She flashed her letter before him.
The man examined her letter slowly and then looked again at Sylvie. Her air of calm expectation seemed to convince him. But still he hesitated. He was not a brave man. This whole thing was not in the rules. And rules governed his existence. He cleared his throat, avoided Sylvie’s direct gaze. ‘Monsieur le Commandant will be back at five. It would be better to wait for him,’ He rose, averted his face. ‘You can sit in the next room.’
Alone in the bleak cubicle, Sylvie suddenly grew frightened. The wait seemed interminable. From the window she could see row upon row of identical barracks. Somewhere in one of those squalid structures, were Caroline, Katherine. She had to move, had to go to them before her nerves gave way. Her high heels clacking, she strode past a soldier, murmured, ‘I need some air.’ At a glance from his superior, the soldier followed her.
Sylvie walked. Walked past grim barracks, peered in to see grey, huddled forms, empty apprehensive eyes. She saw a group of men, straggling prisoners, being marched, their shoulders hunched, their limbs too weak for their bodies. She saw a man fall, felt the thud of a soldier’s rifle as it hit those gangling legs. She stifled her cry, forced herself to walk on. It was cold. A wet wind enveloped her bringing with it that high rancid smell. She shivered. There were women now. Women and small children forming a haggard queue. In their shakey blueish hands, they held tin bowls. As Sylvie neared the front of the line, she saw a thin gruel poured into those bowls from a large pot. The woman at the front of the queue dropped her bowl with a clatter. Liquid disappeared into stony ground.
‘Clumsy fool, you’ll go without now,’ a raucous voice shouted. The woman walked blindly on, unhearing, undeflected by the sound. Someone shoved the dropped vessel into her hands. She held it to her, unseeingly cradled it to her breast.
Sylvie gazed at that stooped, slow-moving form: wispy hair flecked a grey which was also the colour of the lined face, blank dark eyes. She stopped short, swallowed hard. And then with a determined gesture, she walked towards the woman, took her arm. When the guard tried to stop her, she hissed at him. ‘Don’t touch me. Take me to the Commandant straight away. Look, just look at what you have done to my cousin.’ She put her arm more firmly round Caroline, forcing those automaton gestures into swifter movement. Caroline did not seem to recognize her, looked blindly through her.
‘Katherine. Where’s Katherine?’ Sylvie murmured. There was no answer from her friend. And with a sudden swift realisation, Sylvie knew. Knew with a terrifying certainty that there was a hole in Caroline’s arms where Katherine should have been. In that moment, the full horror of that pervasive smell twisted her bowels and her heart. She dragged Caroline forward, past those grim barracks, those desolate faces.
As they neared the HQ, a man came towards them deliberately. ‘And where might y
ou be going Mademoiselle?’
Sylvie looked at him, looked at the stripes on his jacket coldly. ‘I am coming to see you. And then I am taking my cousin home immediately,’ she said in blunt indignant tones. ‘You can see the state that she’s in. And all because of you, because of your stupid mistake.’ She turned on him a face of citizenly outrage. The emotion was genuine. ‘I shall complain. Complain in the highest quarters, Monsieur. Madame la Contesse d’Espinailles will complain as well.
He was about to interrupt her, but she pressed on. ‘And when we find out why my cousin’s baby, why the General’s baby has disappeared…’ she let the sentence hang, its threat unspoken.
The Commandant stared at her. Angry, adamant eyes outfaced him. ‘Mademoiselle,’ he murmured in what were now placatory tones, ‘I do not round people up. I simply run this camp.’
‘In that case,’ Sylvie gave him a contemptuous glance, ‘you will kindly see us out of this camp instantly.’
Only when they were a good five miles away from the camp, did Sylvie pull up at the side of the road. Not a single word had yet passed Caroline’s lips. She took her friend in her arms. Caroline’s body was rigid. Sylvie realised there was nothing she could say to erase the weight of that dead baby which lay like a canyon between them.
‘I’m taking you home, Caroline.’ Sylvie stroked the dirty, wispy hair. ‘Home.’
‘You should have left me there.’ A cracked unrecognizable voice emerged from her friend’s dry lips.
Sylvie pressed her closer.
‘Left me there to die.’ Caroline muttered.
Silence covered them.
Sylvie drove on. And in the silence of that bleak late October afternoon she was suddenly filled with a pure, intense loathing. It floated over everything she had seen at Gurs and with a venemous insistence settled itself on the figure of Nadine. Nadine of the hundred eyes became all enemies to Sylvie. All enemies incorporated into a single vicious entity. She had saved Caroline and now she would wreak vengeance on the despicable creature who was responsible for all her friend’s misery.
Memory and Desire Page 27
