The Occupation

by Deborah Swift

  ‘Oh, after Obenauer, everything else seemed a piece of cake.’

  He laughed. Then he took out a revolver and pointed it at me. ‘Better make this look good, eh? Head down there to that bench and we can sit.’

  I walked, aware of his heavy tread behind me, and sat on the bench.

  He sat beside me, the gun in his hand. I tried to ignore it, but its presence brought up the hairs on the back of my neck. ‘Look at you!’ I pointed to his stripes. ‘You’ve done well for yourself,’ I said, the words dry in my mouth. ‘How’s Ingrid?’

  He turned to face me, so close I could see the pores on his nose. ‘Don’t ask. She didn’t wait for me.’ His mouth twitched. ‘Still, good riddance. Plenty of pretty girls in France. I’ve never gone short.’

  He didn’t ask about Céline, though I could almost see the thought pass his eyes. He seemed to be struggling for words. The world seemed like a sad pretence, as if we were all playing roles in some game we didn’t understand.

  ‘It’s good to see you, Fred,’ he said, rubbing the side of his nose in his familiar habit. ‘Seems a long time since the Hotel in Cherbourg. Remember when Obenauer pinched your breakfast?’

  I found myself smiling, as if he really was my friend after all this. ‘God, yes.’

  There was a kind of sadness in his eyes. Nostalgia perhaps. I saw him control it and replace it with cheery good humour. ‘He was a bastard, wasn’t he? Wonder where he is now.’

  ‘Some high-up Nazi command, I expect. The bastards always rise high in the ranks.’ The pause made me realise I’d inadvertently insulted him. His hand moved to cradle the revolver. I tried not to fixate on it.

  I stood up, anxious to get away. ‘Well, it’s been nice to —’

  ‘Where are you staying?’ he asked, standing to bar my way. ‘Maybe we could meet for a beer. Catch up.’

  ‘Good idea,’ I said, falsely enthusiastic. ‘Where?’

  ‘The German mess at the Hotel de Ville. I’m telling you, it’s the best imported schnapps outside Germany. It’ll have to be the day after tomorrow, though. Give me twenty-four hours; I’ve a busy two nights ahead.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘What about Tuesday, shall we say eight o’clock?’

  ‘I’ll be there. Better get on now though, I’ve more houses to search.’

  ‘You working alone? Who’re you under?’

  I made up a name. ‘Hansen. Good chap. I’d better get back to him.’

  Schulz was watching me rather too closely. I had the impression I’d made some sort of mistake. I stood up and began to walk away. ‘See you later,’ I said, having no intention of ever going near him again.

  ‘Till Tuesday,’ he said. He fingered his revolver a moment before holstering it. ‘Heil Hitler!’ he said quietly. He didn’t salute.

  I let my breath out and strode purposefully away down a side street until I was out of sight of the main road. Then I stopped, pressed my hands to my knees, taking lungfuls of sea air. The whole episode had been profoundly disturbing.

  I didn’t mention Schulz when we reconvened at the apartment. All that night Antoine and Lucien argued, and various young men came and went, knocking with their peculiar password of five knocks on the apartment door. Maps of Marseille were laid out on the floor, positions of Resistance members logged and marked.

  I was the only one who wanted to leave Marseille. The group had a peculiar loyalty to the town that baffled me. And after the curfew, every hour that went by, the noose was getting tighter and the window of escape shrinking. Several times I tried to get Berenice to see reason, but she would not leave Antoine.

  I glanced at where Berenice was sleeping, on the edge of a filthy mattress, close to Antoine but not touching. Guillaume lay on his other side, long limbs thrown over the edge of the mattress as they slept, fully dressed, guns within reach. Lucien, the third man, remained on guard all night. He gestured at me to lie down and sleep, but although I lay down, I was too restless to drop off.

  Despite a dark sense of foreboding, leaving Berenice here would feel like a betrayal. If I left alone, I would always wonder what I could have done if I’d stayed. Whether I could have made a difference. Somewhere, Céline was waiting for me, at home, but the thought of her seemed so far away. I hadn’t escaped all this way only to give myself right into the hands of the Nazis at the last moment. But the encounter with Schulz had put the fear of God into me. I’d sensed the Helmuth Schulz I’d known in Cherbourg was no more. Just like the baker Fred Huber had somehow become the Resistance man Édouard Vibert.

  I pressed my hands into my eyes. I was so tired, yet I daren’t sleep. The air was oppressive, like clouds massing before a storm. The hours ticked by. Common sense told me that if I stayed, I would die.

  Yet still I didn’t leave.

  As dawn broke, I went to the window. ‘Forgive me, Céline,’ I whispered.

  My eye was caught by a movement at the other end of the street. German Wehrmacht. I glanced the other way. A cordon of policemen at the other end of the street. Shit. They were here already.

  CHAPTER 31

  ‘Germans!’ The room erupted into action.

  Berenice was still groggy but leapt to her feet and wrapped her coat tighter as Antoine took a look out of the window. Already the soldiers had moved another block down the street, bullying an old couple and some dark-clad refugees ahead of them.

  ‘We need to get out of here,’ Guillaume said. ‘If they find our weapons, we’ll be dead men. Just take the revolvers and the pistols. Anything small you can carry.’

  I grabbed a revolver, and fumbling in haste, I loaded it.

  ‘Make a run for it,’ Lucien said. ‘Head for the épicerie on the corner of Magdalene.’

  We knocked on every door as we leapt down the stairs, shouting in French, ‘Hurry, get out, Nazi search party!’

  Doors opened and closed. But others were already alerted and there was a mad scramble to get out and down the stairs. Ahead of us, a dark-haired woman, who I guessed was Jewish, threw her suitcase to the bottom of the stairs before hurtling after it.

  A glance right and left showed the street littered with people dragging out their belongings. Bedding tied into bundles. Perambulators with wailing babies.

  The first wave of evicted people passed, heading down towards the harbour, with two German soldiers, rifles at the ready, right behind them. We dodged back into the lobby.

  As soon as they passed, Antoine dived out of the doorway. I took Berenice’s arm and we pelted after them. There was a shout in German as we went, but we ducked away. Antoine skidded to a stop and turned into a narrow funnel of a street.

  We went round the back, to a yard and into an empty grocery shop, the épicerie with a boarded-up shopfront.

  Lucien and Guillaume crowded in after us. The cold-store window, which stank of damp and plaster, looked out onto the main boulevard of the Rue de la Magdalene. Guillaume stationed himself there and pointed a gun out of this narrow aperture.

  Moments later he turned back, eyes wide. ‘We can’t fight them. It’s a whole platoon.’

  I put my eye to the crack between the wood and the door. The crump, crump of marching feet. In the distance, there was the slamming of doors, shouts, and cries. A thump and a thud on the boarded-up window right next to my shoulder. I imagined soldiers battering it with their rifles. We kept silent.

  The noise of machine-gun fire. My stomach clenched. Through the sliver of light I saw a German had fallen, and his friend had dodged behind a tabac booth and was searching for the source of the gunfire.

  It wasn’t from our men, but clearly someone else had taken a shot at them.

  More gunfire, and this time I heard German voices outside the back of the shop.

  I saw Berenice whip round, then the back door crashed open fast as a boot kicked it open.

  Guillaume, angry as a hornet, turned from his post and fired.

  The Nazi fell.

  We were too stunned to react. Though
ts blundered round my head. If he didn’t come out, they’d come in.

  ‘Run,’ I shouted to Guillaume.

  A shadow by the cold-store window. Something black flew in through the opening. I saw it was a grenade the instant before the world lit up in neon. An almighty explosion rocked the ground and shattered the glass window. Guillaume was thrown like a rag doll into a heap on the ground.

  ‘Guillaume?’ My ears rang from the explosion. I put my gun down on the floor and joined Antoine, who was crouched over him.

  Blood was everywhere. Guillaume’s arm was a bloody stump, his chest a mass of blood and bone. His unmoving eyes stared out at us in surprise.

  ‘We can’t do anything,’ I said. ‘Let’s go!’

  Through the smoke, the empty window was dark with Germans climbing in.

  ‘Maman!’ Antoine grasped Berenice by the arm and dragged her out through the back door.

  Lucien and I dived after them; shots ricocheted on the wall behind me.

  Out. Panting for breath. A frantic look up and down.

  The street was crammed with police and soldiers and frightened refugees.

  ‘Édouard, here!’ Berenice cried.

  Antoine and Berenice had been caught by the second wave of Wehrmacht and were being herded down towards the quay.

  There, rows of gendarmes in black capes and hats were waiting to check their papers.

  ‘Get out of here,’ I said to Lucien. Within seconds he had melted into the crowd.

  The explosion had made my mind sharp. The desk ahead with its row of gendarmes seemed cut out, as if it were a scene in an old-fashioned stereoscope. I walked briskly after Antoine and Berenice. Berenice had the false papers Sebastien had given her, but it would be the end for Antoine. He’d get arrested for certain when he couldn’t produce his papers.

  And then it would be the end for Berenice. They couldn’t arrest him, not without her reaction giving her away. She’d never leave him. A row of buses stood nearby, engines idling. I glanced to the other side of the street, towards the canvas-topped trucks and the Germans in heavy greatcoats surrounding a queue of the poorest, the thinnest, the most ragged. The police were shoving them aboard the trucks. I guessed these were the transport for the camps.

  A call from behind me: ‘Schnell!’

  It made me startle and turn.

  I’d been so fixed on what was ahead I hadn’t heard them. Two more soldiers came up behind me, neither of them more than seventeen years old, bright-eyed with battle fever, faces pink with excitement. One of them jabbed a rifle into my back. I fell in beside Berenice.

  She gripped my arm momentarily, her fingers digging into my wrist. Then she let go. We didn’t look at each other, but that grip pained me; it was her goodbye.

  A homburg-hatted old man, just ahead of Berenice, shifted restlessly from foot to foot as the gendarme scrutinised his papers. From the angry gesticulation at the table, it was clear they did not meet their requirements.

  The gendarme summoned a soldier who was watching the proceedings. There were a few more moments of protest from the man in the hat before the soldier swung the butt of his rifle into the old man’s groin. The man folded in half, his legs buckled and he fell, his hat rolling away. One of the young men behind me ran over and kicked him in the face with obvious relish before two soldiers dragged him across the street like a refuse sack and hoisted him into the truck.

  Nobody reacted. Everyone looked away. But I could feel the fear seep like water in the silence.

  Antoine had stepped behind Berenice to make her go first. I saw her turn, dread etched in her eyes, and a wordless exchange passed between them. The hem of her coat trembled, though her face betrayed nothing.

  That’s it, I thought. Don’t arouse their suspicion.

  She clung to Antoine’s arm, but he pushed her forward. I guessed he wanted to give her a chance before his inevitable arrest.

  ‘Papers, and be quick,’ the gendarme said.

  Berenice placed her false papers on the table. The gendarme, a man whose manner reeked of impatience, said, ‘Marie Corbet?’

  ‘Oui.’

  In the harbour ahead, a ship hooted its horn. The noise made everyone startle. We’d all forgotten that normal life was carrying on.

  Now. Whilst they were distracted. ‘Excuse me,’ I tapped Antoine on the back. ‘You dropped these.’ I thrust my papers towards him.

  His eyes widened. I shoved my pass into his hand.

  The gendarme stamped her pass and gestured Berenice off towards the buses. ‘Next.’

  Antoine leaned over to put my papers on the table. His empty fists opened and closed like two beating hearts.

  ‘Henri Corbet, farmer.’ He glanced to where Berenice was hovering, waiting. ‘This is who? Your mother?’

  ‘Yes,’ Berenice interrupted. ‘My son. His beard has grown, hein?’

  The gendarme squinted at my picture and frowned.

  A bead of sweat formed on my lip. I licked it away. The gendarme looked from Antoine to Berenice. The family resemblance was clear.

  The stamp came down on his pass. ‘Get on that bus over there. Next.’

  I’d unobtrusively moved myself further back in the queue. Antoine and Berenice had climbed aboard the bus, and Berenice’s anguished white face watched me through the blur of the window. Moments later, the bus shunted into gear and drove off, leaving a pall of exhaust fumes behind it. I was now behind a French family, complete with ageing widowed grandmother.

  There was no escape. I’d no papers, and no gun, but I had the Gestapo tag. I had to try something.

  I stepped out from the queue, pulled myself upright. ‘Achtung! Weiterfahren!’ I gestured at the people in the queue towards the desk.

  Immediately I was surrounded by German officers. A perspiring soldier with a jutting chin loomed over me. ‘What is this?’

  I aimed for an air of relaxation, gave a lazy salute. ‘Heil Hitler! Siegfried Huber. Gestapo.’ I flashed the tag from my pocket. ‘General Schulz wants these people moving more quickly, or we won’t get this arrondissement cleared by the end of the day.’ I prayed my rapid German would buy me some time. ‘I suggest we move this bigger queue into two smaller ones, and set up another table over there.’ I began to gesture to the crowd, ‘Schnell! Links fahren!’ I turned to the sweating soldier with the big chin. ‘Do you speak French? It’s a shambles. Get them to move to the left.’ I pointed at one of the other men. ‘You. Go and fetch another table.’

  My natural German and feigned air of authority must have worked, because the men took my orders and began to organise the queue into two separate groups. I continued to direct the men, acting like a supervisor, then followed them over as they set up the table and persuaded one of the gendarmes to stand behind it.

  A hand on my back.

  ‘Siegfried Huber.’

  I startled and turned at the familiar voice.

  Schulz kept his hand on my shoulder, pinning it in place. ‘Except you’re not just Huber, are you? You are Édouard Vibert. Member of the French Resistance and a traitor who killed one of our best men.’ Schulz’s voice was soft. ‘And now you are supposedly Gestapo.’

  I saw the sweating soldier watching us. He must have fetched Schulz.

  ‘I knew who you were all along,’ Schulz said sadly. ‘The real Gestapo have been searching for you for weeks. I followed the story with particular interest, was always a little proud that I knew you, this wolf in sheep’s clothing, but I never actually thought we’d meet again. You wouldn’t have had a drink with me, would you? I would have waited in vain.’

  ‘In another time and place, I would have gladly bought you a drink, Helmuth. I only did what you would have done in my place.’

  ‘No. I would not betray my countrymen so easily.’ He gave a rueful smile. ‘You always thought me a bit stupid. No, don’t deny it. But now you are the stupid one. You will be charged with desertion and killing a fellow officer.’

  The trial was what I expected. Shor
t, brutal and uncompromising. I was to be made an example to any other Nazi who thought of disobeying orders. With several others I was loaded into a truck and driven under armed guard for several hours. To my surprise, we arrived on the outskirts of Paris. In the distance, the familiar skyline beckoned me. We were told our execution was to take place at 6am the next day, and the SS officers shepherded us towards a small disused chapel — a single room about twelve feet long, empty of pews or furniture. Just inside the door was a heap of open coffins, constructed out of cheap boxwood and stained brown with blood.

  ‘Where are we?’ I asked one of the other men.

  ‘Saint-Valérien park just outside Paris.’

  I smiled then. It was the very place Berenice had taken us to after we ran from the Bois de Boulogne.

  It seemed odd to have come full circle. I hoped Berenice and Antoine had got out of Marseille. Seven of us were put in there to await our deaths. I didn’t know what they’d done. Maybe some were members of the French Resistance. Maybe some were German deserters like me. None of us spoke. We each had our own thoughts and respected the other men. One wept quietly in the corner; one prayed, his hands clasped together in that futile begging gesture you see in medieval paintings. One man spent his time scratching his name into the walls for posterity with a button, wearing out the cuff of his shirt.

  I sat and thought back, realising that my time on Jersey with Céline had been my heaven, and that if there was nothing after this life, then I had had plenty of joy. My death would be quick, unlike those sent to work to death in Nazi work camps, or Jews slaughtered like cattle. My thoughts went to my parents and to Horst. All of them thinking they were good German citizens, and yet something about their ideas had gone awry, and I couldn’t explain it in any way that made sense.

  I watched the man praying with envy. I had no easy God to believe in. There was only life. I remembered the Arbeiterjugend oaths that we had to take when we were children at school, the ones that said we should die for our country. We didn’t know what it meant then. And I still had no idea. What was my country?