Another truck convoy arrived, depositing more deportees. Unsteady, those men shuffled into the already long line.
Henry despaired. Where in the world among all these people, in this huge city, did he think he’d find one small, lost, unhappy boy?
Henry watched all afternoon, approaching any children he saw, listening, searching their faces for any familiar features. He realized how much a nine-year-old boy could grow in a year, how much starvation could alter a person’s face. Would he recognize Pierre?
At twilight, following playground sounds of laughter and jeering, Henry entered the park behind him. It was a pretty little square of pine and gum trees, pebble walkways, and flower beds, an oasis from the noise and angst of the street outside. At its entrance was a marble statue of three figures: a small boy climbing stairs to two women in long coats and muffs, one elderly, one young. The women’s carved faces carried concern for the stone boy, who held his hat in his hand. The older lady was leaning down to rest her hand on the child’s shoulder. The younger one looked to be pulling money from her purse. At the base of the stairs was a fourth stone figure, a new mother holding an infant, carefully shielding the baby with her chiseled cloak. The work was marked: MADAME BOUCICANT 1816–1887 and MADAME DE HIRSCH 1833–1899. Henry felt his throat tighten at its symbol of need, replicated so clearly in real-life souls across the street.
The laughter came from behind the statue’s stairs. Henry had already figured out that getting too close to the children hanging around the hotel caused them to skitter away. Henry tiptoed up the stairs and sat next to the stone women, shielded from the children’s view.
“Ton tour.”
Henry peeped over and saw a game of what looked like jacks. Patsy had played it constantly when they were kids. But instead of a tiny rubber ball and little metal stars, these boys and girls were hurling up a knobby bone painted red, and scrambling to pick up a scattering of smaller bones before it hit the ground again. Two boys were facing off. They both made it through picking up pairs and triples. But one of them failed to grab four before the red bone came back down.
“Merde!” The loser handed over a stick of gum.
Henry’s mouth dropped open at the sight of little kids gambling.
The winner tried a new hustle. He presented a lumpy leather sack and poured out a huge cache of marbles. He grinned, cocky. When no one would take him on, he ridiculed the group as cowards. “Quels trouillards!”
The boy sweetened his lure with two sticks of gum as his bet and offered to loan a special shooter he’d won the day before to whomever had the guts to play him. “Regardez.” He held up a large marble, saying that it’d once belonged to an American and that the boy who lost it claimed it was good luck. He laughed with a grown man’s sarcasm. “Bonne chance pour moi!”
It sure would help the player using it, thought Henry. It was a huge end-of-day “cloud,” with red and gold swirls, a one-of-a-kind marble that glassblowers made from the day’s leftover glass scraps. Just like the marble he’d won off Clayton and carried on bombing missions for good luck, the one he’d given Pierre.
Wait a minute. Henry’s breath snagged. Good luck. Red and gold swirls. Henry couldn’t keep himself from leaning over the edge to get a closer look.
As soon as his head appeared above them, the children shrieked and scattered. The boy scrambled to shove his marbles back into his bag before darting away. But Henry was too quick for him. He pole-vaulted over the back of the statue and grabbed the hustler by his wrist. The boy still clutched the marble.
Henry snatched it and turned it over and over, looking for a tiny flaw, a little chip in one of the golden whirls. There it was. This was his marble. He was certain of it. But why wasn’t it with Pierre? “Where did you get this?” Henry nearly shouted the question.
The boy looked up at him with terrified eyes.
“Où est-ce que tu trouves ça?” Henry repeated in French. “Please. I am looking for the boy this belonged to.”
The boy shook his head, still frightened, clearly thinking Henry meant to hurt him. Henry was ashamed to be terrorizing a child. He felt like Clayton. But Henry knew that the instant he let go the hustler would bolt.
“Pierre. Il s’appelle Pierre. Do you know him?” Henry was vaguely aware of the other children peeping out from behind bushes and trees. “I won’t hurt you. I promise. Je te promets.”
“He does not believe you.”
Henry turned around to see a short, middle-aged woman in a white smock and scarf. As he looked, the boy hauled off and punched him, right on his sore rib. Henry gasped. His grip loosened. The boy wrenched free.
Henry lurched for him, just missing, and belly-flopped on the pebbles.
The boy stumbled and righted himself and was about to escape.
“Arrête, mon petit,” the woman spoke gently and stepped in his path. The boy froze. She held her hand up to stop Henry from moving and spooking the child. “What is it you want from the boy?” she asked him. “Tell me and I will explain to him.”
“I am looking for a boy named Pierre who saved my life. I am an American pilot. Pierre hid me and connected me with the maquis. His mother was taken to Ravensbruck. He comes from the Vercors. The rest of his family is dead. I am afraid she might be as well. I gave him this marble.” He held it up. “That boy must know where Pierre is since he had the marble.”
“The Vercors,” the woman murmured. “God help him.” She turned to the boy and explained in French. Did he know where Pierre was?
Henry’s heart sank when the boy answered no. But he did add that Pierre had been hanging around, waiting for “an absent” to return.
Bingo. Madame Gaulloise had been right!
“Merci, chéri.” The woman pulled half a roll from her apron pocket and gave it to the boy, who grabbed it. He ran off, cramming huge bites into his mouth, trailed by the other children, like gulls chasing a bird that had caught a fish along the James River back home. The sight sickened Henry. Pierre was probably that hungry, too.
Henry pushed himself to his feet and carefully buttoned the marble in his pocket. “Thank you, madame.”
She looked him over, finally smiling slightly. “You will not find your Pierre by threatening other children.”
Henry flinched at the word threatening. “I didn’t mean to scare him,” he explained, feeling like he’d been caught in a schoolyard fight.
“These children are damaged,” the woman continued quietly as if explaining something quite obvious to the class dunce. “They are afraid. Many live on the streets as they watch and pray for parents to return. They are terrified of being caught and taken to an orphanage or something worse. They will not trust anything you say. Too many of their loved ones have disappeared, right after someone like you asked questions.”
Henry nodded. He could see it. But what should he do, then—wait outside the hotel and just hope he could collar Pierre and hang on to him until he could talk the boy into trusting him again? If the past months had affected Pierre in the same way they had this gang, Henry knew that plan had a snowball’s chance in Hades.
“Can you help me, madame?” It was obvious from her hospital smock and scarf that she was with the Lutetia’s deportation center. “Please? I’m a good worker. I could do whatever you need at the hotel until we find him or his mother.”
The woman thought a moment, then motioned for Henry to follow her to the long row of boards. They had been pushed up under the hotel’s awnings to protect them during the night. Only a few people remained reading the notices. She pulled a small pad of paper from her pocket. “What is the boy’s full name?”
“Pierre Dubois.”
“The mother’s?”
“I don’t know, madame.” Again, Henry kicked himself for not asking the priest when he had the chance.
“Hmmmm. That will make it harder.” She thought a bit before writing.
The setting sun cast a red glow on the hundreds of faces pinned there. Among them, at a child’s
eye level, she tacked her square note: Pierre Dubois, please come inside and ask for Sabine Zlatin.
“We shall see if this works. It may frighten him off at first. So you must be patient. What is your name?”
“Henry Forester, madame.”
“Come back tomorrow, Monsieur Forester. We can use you.”
“Yes, ma’am!” Hope raced through him. “What time?”
“Before the first train of deportees arrives. At six thirty. Now that victory is declared, the Allies are free to help move the absents. The Americans have been flying in thousands from Germany each day. They tell us to expect eight thousand tomorrow.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The next morning, Madame Zlatin put Henry to work disinfecting the deportees’ tattered clothes. She gave him a surgical mask and a hand-pumped spray can full of DDT. “Work quickly,” she told him. “The clothes are covered with lice that carry typhus. The disease killed thousands at the camps.”
Henry pumped the plunger of that can until he thought his arm would fall off. He refilled it a dozen times, wreathing himself in clouds of dank, chemical smells. And still there were clothes tossed out across tables needing to be deloused. Every time he finished, nurses came carrying more bundles. Henry began to feel like Sisyphus in the Camus book that Madame Gaulloise had given him. Sisyphus, according to mythology, was condemned by the Greek gods to spend eternity pushing a boulder up a mountain only to have it roll back down again. Henry found the hopelessness of Sisyphus’s labor, his inability to change his fate, incredibly annoying. He couldn’t figure why it had been so important to Madame Gaulloise that he read it.
At noon, his head banging from the DDT fumes, Henry begged for a break.
The nurses nodded but asked him to hurry. As soon as the deportees had showered, they needed to put their clothes back on. Stripped of their possessions over and over again by the Nazis, these clothes were all the deportees had left. If there were new clothes to be found, the government promised to give them first to the million returning French POW soldiers.
Outside, Henry found the same chaos as before. He waded through the crowd to the board. The note for Pierre was still there. He scanned the street. Nothing.
He re-entered the hotel through the front door, under a carving of a great ship framed with smiling cherubs holding huge bunches of grapes, and squeezed past families begging to speak to officials. He found Madame Zlatin in the hotel’s massive kitchens. She was explaining how much of the stew and pureed potatoes each deportee should receive. The sicker ones, those who weighed forty-eight kilograms or less, about a hundred pounds, could only eat broth, she said.
Henry marveled at how many pots were full and boiling. “Wow, madame, where did you come up with all this?”
“The deportees are given the highest priority for food.” With a wry smile she added, “Much of this comes courtesy of the Reich. During the occupation, Hitler’s Abwehr, his counterintelligence, was housed here. His officers demanded the same grandeur the hotel had offered guests before the war—caviar, champagne, cabaret performances. But when the battle for Paris began, the Nazis left the cold rooms stocked to the rafters with lamb and pork, cheeses and wines.” She shrugged. “So we make good use of it.”
Henry asked if she had heard anything about Pierre.
“No, monsieur. Patience.”
“Patience-smatience,” Henry muttered to himself as he went back to work.
When twilight fell, Henry fled the Lutetia. He’d had enough of its sad sights for the day. He was relieved that he’d had no flashbacks sparked by what he was witnessing. Lilly’s voice came to him. Sometimes you get back on your feet better when you’re helping someone else stand in the process. Maybe so. Seeing other people fight to survive, to walk away from the agonies they’d endured, was definitely prodding him to do likewise. Realizing that he was not the only one confronting personal demons also helped Henry to feel a little less like a freak. Plus, having a purpose—finding Pierre—gave him direction. He was beginning to feel like an effective human being again. But he realized his redemption hinged completely on finding Pierre.
Henry went to the notice boards. The note to Pierre was still pinned in the same spot. Henry searched the park. It was empty, the little gang gone, perhaps hiding from him. The only people there were a few deportees who had slipped out of the hotel. They sat on the park benches, gazing up at the flowering trees, smiling, free. Henry knew they were supposed to stay inside as the staff nursed them back to health. But he sure wasn’t going to tell on them.
The next day passed in the same manner. And the next three. Henry must have asked Madame Zlatin a dozen times a day if she’d heard anything. “No, monsieur, nothing yet,” she always answered gently. Finally, she told Henry to trust her. “There are many of us watching for Pierre and his mother. We will not forget. The absents do not forget either. They read our notes, looking to help us know the fate of those who are lost. Even amid the sorrows of thousands, we all know that we must restore the world one child at a time.”
She glided away. “Now that is one kind lady,” Henry murmured. “Just like Ma.” The nurse folding towels near him looked up, thinking he was talking to her.
“Elle est gentille.” He repeated that Madame was kind.
“Oui,” the nurse agreed, “la Dame d’Izieu est très gentille.”
“I meant Madame Zlatin.”
Another nurse explained. “We call her the Lady of Izieu because of the children.”
“Children?”
“She hid forty-four Jewish children in the countryside near Izieu. One of her neighbors reported her to the Gestapo. They captured the children and sent them to Auschwitz. All of them were gassed to death. Madame escaped the raid because she was away trying to find other hiding places for them. Her husband was taken. His fate is unknown. She has put his picture on the wall with the others. She waits to learn.”
Henry hung his head. Forty-four children. Sweet Jesus. Every story he heard put him in his place. He could find the patience to wait for Pierre to appear. At least he knew Pierre was alive.
Walking to the Hotel Scribe that evening, Henry purposefully turned up streets where he heard happy conversation. As he wandered, Henry felt compelled to reach out and touch the artistic decorations the French had chiseled into the stone of their buildings—tangible reminders that humans could produce beauty as well as devastation. He was particularly struck by a pair of marble doves roosting in the stone frame of a window that was pockmarked with bullet holes fanning out in a spiderweb of cracks—scars from the street fighting to liberate Paris.
He crossed the Boulevard Saint Germain to a cobblestone square with a medieval church in its center. The square was rimmed in cafés. One in particular was packed with people and raucous with arguments, jokes, singing, and glass-clinking toasts. Its tables spilled out under a dark green awning marked CAFÉ DES DEUX MAGOTS. Henry scratched his head—did that mean “the two maggots?” Well, he thought, he’d eaten snails with the maquis, and they’d been surprisingly tasty.
Henry thought about going in, but a group of women, enthusiastically shouting responses to a speaker deep in their circle, caught his attention. All Henry could see was a fist raised in the air above the other women’s heads and a female voice calling, “Maintenant nous pouvons voter!” Now we women can vote!
“Bravo! Vive la France!”
“Nous-laisserons nous jamais réduire au silence de nouveau?” Will we allow ourselves to be silenced?
“Non!”
“Êtes-vous prêtes à toutes travailler ensemble?” Are you all ready to work together?
“Oui!”
The female voice went on to say that their work with the Resistance had shown women to be equal to men. Women deserved equal pay and female delegates in the new legislature. Vote for women candidates! she shouted.
Listening, Henry could just imagine the comments his high school buddies would make: “Now why would the gals want to worry their pretty little
heads over men’s business?” Unlike the French, American women had been voting for decades. But Henry knew of only one woman ever elected to Congress. It’d be pretty amazing if the French actually voted in a few.
Boy, Patsy would love this, thought Henry. She hated having to package her thoughts into the ladylike manners the state of Virginia demanded. She was always getting herself in trouble at school for speaking her mind and questioning teachers. Her heroine was the outspoken Eleanor Roosevelt, even though half the country made fun of FDR’s first lady, claiming she was unattractive and bossy.
A one-sheet newspaper was passed through the crowd. Titled Femmes Françaises, the paper had recipes for rutabagas and patterns for making children’s shoes. But it also called for women to demonstrate against black marketers and for fairer rationing.
As the crowd broke up, Henry saw the back of the speaker. She wore a man’s leather jacket and an odd skirt shaped like a lampshade that was made of panels of different materials, even silk scarves. She’d obviously had to make do with what she could scrounge. She also had on roller skates. That was clever, too, thought Henry, if she needed to cover a lot of ground quick, although going over cobblestones in those would be pretty teeth-rattling.
Henry wondered whether Pierre was clad in such a mishmash as well. He sighed, no longer distracted, and turned toward the river.
Suddenly from behind him came a whirrrrrrrrrrrr of metal wheels clattering over the stones. Before he could move out of the way, a hand grabbed Henry’s elbow. The out-of-control speed of the roller skates hurled both him and the skater to the ground. With a curse, Henry landed face-first. The hand jerked him back and rolled him over.
A Troubled Peace Page 13
