Memory and Desire

by Lisa Appignanesi

  After the war, when Sylvie tried to tell people of how she had stolen Caroline from the arms of the camp, they looked at her in disbelief, as if she were concocting a tall-tale. They couldn’t imagine that it had been quite that easy; but then neither could they imagine the horror of even those camps.

  The war, with its daily heroisms and daily atrocities, strained the bounds of peacetime belief.

  Jacob arrived in Marseilles at the turn of the year, just after the Germans had taken over the whole of France. He had been prevented from coming sooner. Sylvie’s message had reached him late. His first instinct was to go to her. But he had weighed up his desire to see her, to comfort her against other commitments. The latter had won. As had his sure sense that to see her at that moment, would endanger them both and implicate others.

  As the Allies began to make dents into the German war machine, retaliatory measures in the occupied zones grew ever fiercer. Police vigilance increased and acts against the Jewish population and resisters multiplied. For some time now, Jacob had been worried about the safety of the house on the hill and Sylvie’s too frequent visits there. He had already decided, before receiving Sylvie’s note, that the house had outlived its use. The present group of inhabitants would be the last. But he had been too late.

  Jacob quickly ascertained that the group had been removed to Gurs. He had spent several weeks there working as a doctor during the winter when the typhoid epidemic was at its height. Over a thousand of its sixteen thousand inmates had died of disease or starvation. He knew that it was possible to get people out: he had done it before. But it would be too risky for him to go back there again. He set about making contacts with other medical personnel and the Red Cross. Three days after Sylvie had left Gurs with Caroline, two men were smuggled out of the camp in a Red Cross ambulance. One of them was Joseph Rittner. Jacob did not learn until later that he had been recaptured crossing the Pyrenees. He did learn that there was no one in the camp by the name of Caroline Berger.

  Now he had come to Marseilles to say goodbye to Sylvie. The German occupation of the Southern Zone dictated new strategies. It was imperative for him to go underground: the moment for armed resistance had come. Any future contact with Sylvie could only endanger her and the success of any operations he was involved in. He knew that his very love for her made her his Achilles heel. Yet he wanted desperately to see her, to hold her if only for one more time.

  Jacob, however, had not sufficiently prepared himself for Sylvie’s state, for the difficulty of a meeting which was in reality a parting. Never compliant, Sylvie was now vehement. When he slipped into her room in the Hotel d’Algers late on that chill January night, she flew at him in a storm of irascibility.

  ‘You, where have you been? I haven’t seen you for months. I wrote to you.’

  A torrent of abuse covered him. From within it, he watched her, marvelled at the savagery of her eyes, at her beauty. He tried to take hold of her, cover her words with a kiss. But she pummelled his chest, drew away.

  ‘No,’ she said fiercely. ‘I need to talk to you. Do you know what they’ve done to Caroline. She’s a ruin. She can hardly speak. They killed her baby. She, she, that woman,’ Sylvie spluttered, ‘that Nadine of the hundred eyes. She killed her. It’s all her fault. I want you to help me get her. Stamp out those putrid little informers.’

  ‘Calm yourself, Sylvie,’ Jacob’s voice was soft. ‘We’re not fighting a war against individuals. It’s the force of the Nazis we have to break.’

  Sylvie looked at him coldly. ‘The Nazis have been very polite to me. Very correct. Nadine, on the other hand…’ she made a murderous gesture. ‘She deserves to be wiped out. And if you don’t help, I shall do it myself.’

  ‘Sylvie,’ he shook her, gripped her shoulder. ‘Sylvie, listen to me. I’ve come to say goodbye. I may not see you for some time.’

  ‘You haven’t seen me for some time as it is,’ she countered him caustically.

  Jacob shrugged, his eyes sad. ‘I’d hoped…’

  She cut him off, ‘Where are you going?’.

  ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘You’re going to fight, aren’t you. And you’re leaving me here. What am I supposed to do? Do with little Gabriel, with Caroline? And what’s become of Joseph?’

  ‘He’s out now,’ Jacob tried to take her hand, but she drew away again.

  ‘I want to come with you,’ she said suddenly, her expression adamant. ‘I’ll have a gun. I’ll be able to kill.’

  ‘You know that’s not possible, Sylvie.’

  ‘Why not? Other women do.’

  He ignored her words. ‘I’ll see that the little boy is taken care of. If you need help, Vassier is reliable.’

  ‘You’ll see to this. You’ll see to that,’ she taunted him. ‘Well, you can see to taking me with you. See to exterminating that verminous Nadine.’

  His dark eyes burned into her. Yes, it was true, other women fought. But if Sylvie were with him, if anything should happen to her, or him, then he knew the secrecy of any operation was at risk. He stiffened his shoulders, his face grim.

  ‘Here,’ he reached into the pocket of the coat he hadn’t yet taken off and drew out a large wad of money. ‘You might need this.’

  She threw the money at him. ‘I’m not your whore,’ she said tersely.

  He shrugged, turned to go.

  Sylvie watched him open the door. It was like an event in slow motion, the movement of his back, his arm, his fingers, detailed, time-stopped.

  ‘Jacob,’ she called after him softly. ‘Jacob.’

  He turned back to her.

  She ran to him, planted a hot girlish kiss on his lips. ‘Take care,’ she said.

  ‘You too,’ he stroked her hair once. They looked into each others eyes intently.

  She was too proud to ask him to stay.

  The next day Sylvie accepted an offer she had long put off from the Provençal, an elegant hotel which seemed to grow out of the steep rock wall on the other side of the harbour.

  Caroline and Gabriel would stay under the watchful eye of old Vassier. If Sylvie couldn’t join Jacob, she would fight her own war.

  Caroline was still in a mute daze. Nothing Sylvie could do could shake her from it, no stroking or cajoling or talk of happier days when the war would be at an end. She had formed a strange silent bond with the boy, however, and in quiet ways, they took care of each other. Two victims, Sylvie thought, her heart going out to them.

  When she had made her arrangements at the Provençal, Sylvie confronted Caroline, ‘You’re in charge of Gabriel now. I’m going back to work.’

  Caroline didn’t answer.

  Suddenly her silence infuriated Sylvie, made her feel paralysed, insubstantial. ‘None of us have our own children these days,’ she raged at her. ‘None of us.’

  Caroline shuddered but made no reply.

  Sylvie’s anger instantly subsided. She walked across the dingy hotel room and tried to put her arm around her friend. ‘Soon, soon the war will be over and Joseph will come back and you can have another baby,’ she repeated what she had said innumerable times before.

  This time Caroline murmured, ‘You should have let me die. Let me die where Katherine died.’ She sank back into a threadbare armchair and stared into the middle distance. She hated herself, hated that ugly guilty face that confronted her in the mirror when she washed, a face that was not Katherine’s. Katherine’s pinched little face in death had not been her own either. She had not complained. Simply shrivelled like a leaf and faded away. Caroline had held on to her tiny weightless form for two days until one of the guards grabbed it away.

  It made no sense. None of it made any sense. This life, the camp, the others she had heard of, Katherine’s death. Why? Why was she still alive? How could she still be alive? She had no right. Without Katherine. Without Joseph. She tried to focus on Sylvie. She was no use to her either. No use to anyone. ‘You don’t understand, Sylvie,’ she said faintly, as if she were talking to
herself. ‘I don’t want to live, don’t want to survive. Not in this kind of world.’

  ‘Yes, you do,’ Sylvie replied stubbornly. ‘Joseph will come back. Jacob said he was out. He’ll come back and you’ll have another child and everything will be fine.’

  Caroline trembled. Joseph would never forgive her for letting Katherine die. She remembered those vile guards and how they had torn them apart, separated them, flung Katherine into her arms, pushed Joseph brutally away so that he stumbled. She remembered the sadistic gleam in their eyes as she had shouted and cried. Suddenly a hatred equal to that she felt for herself found its way onto the features of those men.

  She looked at Sylvie, tuned into that voice, still talking - cajoling and angry by turn.

  ‘This is no time for philosophy,’ Sylvie was saying curtly. ‘It’s time for action. We’re going to take our revenge. We’re going to make her pay, that informing bitch who was responsible for having you rounded up, for little Katherine’s death. Make her pay slowly.’ Her features burned with a vengeful wrath Caroline dimly recognized. It was like the anger that had smouldered there when, as girls, they had planned in intricate detail the pain they would inflict on the nun who had persecuted them. Caroline sat up a little straighter. She didn’t remember Sylvie mentioning a woman before. But perhaps she had. It was often hard to tune into Sylvie’s voice.

  ‘Yes, you’ll see,’ Sylvie now aware that she had her friend’s attention took her hand and clasped it firmly. ‘We’ll take our revenge. Very soon now. I promise you.’

  The sudden return pressure of Caroline’s fingers gave her renewed energy. Yes, she thought, there was nothing like vengeance to give one a taste for life.

  Sylvie proceeded carefully. This time she was taking no chances. No longer could she afford to underestimate Nadine of the hundred eyes and her ilk.

  After the Nazi occupation, Marseilles was a changed city. The teeming life of the streets thinned out. People avoided each others’ eyes. They might confront those of a grey-uniformed German or a black-shirted Gestapo officer or, as the months went by, the even more dreaded gaze of the hated Milice, whose brutality became legendary. It was better to be unseen and unseeing.

  Sylvie followed this rule of invisibility. Except when she was on stage, where her light burned more strongly than ever. The clientele of the Provençal was different from that of the Hotel du Midi. It was an upper class establishment and as the year rolled on it increasingly became the haunt of German officers and their French collaborators. Sylvie changed her style and her repertoire. Before the war she had seduced her audiences into a kind of warm complicity.

  Now, sheathed in her own glittering beauty, she radiated an electric contempt. She had learned some old German cabaret songs and a cold sexuality emanated from her as she barked and crooned the words of a foreign language. An impassive hetera, a white goddess for whom her audience of lovers were mere playthings, she generated a brilliant white heat. The Germans adored her. They besieged her with requests, with presents, with invitations. She accepted nothing. One young Gestapo officer was particularly insistent. There was something about his flat high-cheekboned face, his lash of blond hair, his steel blue eyes, smouldering and icy by turn, which excited her. She took to sitting at his crowded table between sets. Oberstleutnant Wilhelm Berring talked to her of poetry, of music, of distant mountains, but behind the words, there was an intractable force, willing her, seducing, coercing. Sylvie aware of that will was drawn to it. And drawn to challenging it. For the moment she gave nothing but the dramatic allure of her presence. And its cachet in that club where she was the supreme object of desire.

  With his cunning tortoise eyes Vassier warned her. ‘Some of our people do not like women who befriend the Occupiers.’

  ‘Befriend?’ Sylvie laughed shrilly and then grew serious. ‘I have my reasons. Tell your people. My record hasn’t been so bad. I should be trusted.’

  ‘You’re playing with fire, Sylvie,’ Vassier shook his head. ‘What would your man think?’

  ‘He has nothing to do with it,’ Sylvie was adamant. ‘In any case, I can be of use to you. I can overhear things, use my ears.’

  ‘In a night club?’ Vassier was sceptical.

  ‘You’ll see. Men talk, they boast…’

  He shrugged, ‘Be careful, Sylvie, you’re in the lion’s den.’

  Sylvie was as good as her word. She had a little German. She started to listen, mingle more with the clientele, sit at a variety of tables. Often she had no knowledge of what use what she heard might be, but she had a sure instinct for significance. She reported to Vassier. Once or twice Vassier beamed. He patted her, ‘I was wrong about you, ma petite.’

  They were not major matters Sylvie reported, no intelligence about troop movements or deportations. But in a world where newspapers and radios lied and all useful information was secret, Sylvie could be instrumental. Sometimes it was a word dropped about a raid the Milice were about to perform. Another time, it was a drunken self-aggrandizing narrative about some maquis who had been picked up and what had been done to them. Little scraps of matter which were pieced together by those who had access to larger pictures.

  It was not what Sylvie saw as her main task.

  She had begun her plan of vengeance on Nadine of the hundred eyes. It had to be a long intricate process which filled the woman’s days with misery, so that she suffered acutely, woke each day bathed in sweat. With avid detail, she concocted her scheme, excited Caroline into participation and then reported back on each step. Caroline lived for these reports. Gabriel, her only other link with the present, was gone. The boy had been spirited away one night on a journey which would take him to Switzerland. Not even the chocolates Sylvie stuffed in his pockets could lift the gloom which covered all of them. Now Caroline did nothing but repetitiously clean and tidy her room and gaze out of her window onto the past. Only Sylvie’s vengeful fire warmed her.

  Sylvie had started by writing little anonymous notes to Nadine. Insidious schoolgirl notes of the kind which read, ‘Your moment is coming, you scum.’ ‘There is not much longer now.’ Notes calculated to torment and instill fear. Soon the notes grew longer and more elaborate, detailing the tortures which would be inflicted on Nadine. They would compose these notes together, spend long afternoons, cutting and pasting words from newspapers into intricate messages.

  Sylvie also paid young boys to harass Nadine, make cat calls and then when Nadine turned, to shout out, ‘Oooo - a hag.’ Sylvie was pleased with herself. She had seen Nadine on a number of occasions in the street and she looked dreadful. An ugly frightened woman who could not walk without looking over her shoulder.

  Then Sylvie decided the time had come for the climactic act in her little drama. She anticipated it with a cruel relish.

  To bring it to fruition she needed the connivance of one of her Germans. She chose Oberstlieutnant Wilhelm Berring. She suspected he would rise to the task, if the stakes were high enough.

  He had often invited her to have dinner with him on her night off and now at last she accepted. They went to Marseilles’ most exclusive restaurant and she was amazed again at the plenty available in German quarters when in the markets, for the French, there were shortages of everything. When their meal was at an end and they were sipping a Courvoisier, she let him take her hand and stroke it. He was at once romantically reverent before the supreme pedestal of his exalted goddess and insistent. Mademoiselle Latour must give up her other admirers. He would make it worth her while. There was this lovely apartment. It could be hers. He looked at her meaningfully, let his eyes skim her neck, her bosom.

  Sylvie’s laugh tinkled, ‘You are so generous, Herr Berring. But you know it is out of the question. I am not free. Not free to be with you,’ she played lingeringly over the words, drew a single nail slowly over the back of his hand. ‘Even this. Even tonight is dangerous to me.’ She met his gaze and then suddenly pulled back, looking with deliberate casualness over her shoulder.

  ‘W
hy? How can it be dangerous? Is there a man?’ Fingers gripped her arm.

  Sylvie shook them off lightly. ‘No,’ she crooned softly. ‘Not a man. That would be easier, perhaps,’ she laughed, a cold, low, electric laugh, challenging him. ‘No. Not a man. A woman.’ She shivered, as if a chill wind had suddenly crept over her. ‘A woman who watches me. A woman who hates Germans. Who hates me. Who thinks I am sinning against humanity by even speaking to you.’ Sylvie watched his face, saw the rush of anger, the tension of control. ‘And so I have to be careful,’ she continued in what was almost a whisper. ‘Have to make sure I don’t overstep the mark of simply earning my keep by singing. Or else I may wake up one morning to find myself in a pool of blood.’ She passed her tongue over her lips as if tasting that blood, as if tasting him. She laughed again. ‘So you see, mein lieber Herr, something keeps me back from that apartment you so charmingly describe. And what may happen within it.’

  ‘Who is this woman? If she is all that stands between us, then…’ he took a walnut from the table and crushed it with one deliberate gesture in his fist. He smiled, a little whimsically. ‘Tell me Mademoiselle Latour, who is she?’

  ‘Ah no, it is not so simple.’ Sylvie looked with poignant melancholy into the distance. ‘She may be a single woman, but there is an organisation behind her, a powerful organisation.’ She dropped her second bit of bait, letting the word maquis hang unspoken. ‘You could not possibly contend with that.’

  The negative enraged him, ‘Could not,’ he repeated. ‘There is nothing that we could not, I could not,’ his eyes rested on her, ‘For you.’

  Sylvie lowered her eyelids, thoughtfully traced the lines of the tablecloth with a delicate finger.

  ‘Who is she?’ Berring closed his hand over hers. His voice grew low. ‘Speak her name and you will be free. Free for me.’

  Sylvie hesitated, as if the act of naming, its implicit betrayal came to her with difficulty. She played with the ruby on her throat, brought it to her lips, let it fall back heavily between her breasts. The grip on her hand hardened. ‘Tell me,’ there was an urgency in Berring’s tone. ‘I will make sure that any harm she has done you is amply repaid.’