The Invisible Woman

by Erika Robuck

  The swift boarding of the train.

  The orange scarf shoved in her own pocket as she passes the engineer.

  The Milice spilling out of the station as her train pulls away.

  The mustached man scanning the windows, looking for the women.

  Pulling back so they can’t be seen.

  Reaching in her pocket to touch her garrote for comfort.

  Fingers touching the orange scarf.

  Feeling the slip of paper folded in it.

  Pulling it out and reading it.

  mimi arrested.

  Reading the words in Estelle’s handwriting several times before they make sense.

  Eating the paper.

  Feeling it tear apart in her teeth and her saliva, scratching her throat as it slides down into the bile of her belly.

  Pressing her face to the window as they pass the cattle car, eyes searching until she finds her.

  Mimi.

  The women locking eyes.

  Mimi crying, her face bruised.

  Virginia standing, pushing out of her car while people shout at her, Danielle begging her to sit.

  Stepping out on the gangway, struggling to stay upright as the train gathers speed, leaving Mimi’s train behind.

  Fighting the urge to throw herself from the train.

  Stumbling back to the car, numb.

  Willing the ice to return to her heart.

  Feeling it pump hot and fast in spite of her.

  The train stopping in the middle of a field, travelers urged to get off and take cover because of the coming bombers.

  Virginia staying on the train while Danielle and the passengers rush out, shrieking.

  As bombers roar over, standing, clutching the ceiling bar, allowing her rage and despair to erupt.

  Screaming.

  With every engine that tears over, with every bomb that falls. Again and again.

  Screaming.

  * * *

  —

  War is black: blood on dirt, char on buildings, fuel puddles, rising smoke. After reading the paper, after watching the bombing, Virginia feels as if all the war black implodes into her heart, incinerating it, turning it to ash. In the absence of heart, the brain can take over.

  Virginia cannot turn back, neither literally nor figuratively. The only way through is forward. She has beaten her own life expectancy in the field, so she will no longer count the days and the weeks. From this moment on, time will cease until the war is over.

  Cold though it is, she forces herself to tuck the men, women, and children of Cosne away in a file folder in her mind. If she’s to continue on, there’s no other way. She imagines stamping MIA on the folder, closing it, and handing it to Vera.

  Part Three

  La Madone

  Chapter 28

  13 July 1944

  Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France

  After Mimi’s arrest, and the endless journey that miraculously continues to Chambon, Virginia is half out of her mind and desperate to be alone. She parts ways with Danielle, and is again met by Edmund, the one who looks like a young Jimmy Stewart.

  She can’t deny the fact that she resents these new people, these new faces, the new world she’s supposed to inhabit. She wants her old world back. She wants to spend the rest of this war figuring out how to rescue Mimi and Louis and every other friend she’s lost.

  With every step she takes, she feels her blood pressure rising. Edmund gives her worried glances as she curses in the dark, and by the time they arrive at Simon’s house, her temper explodes.

  “I told you to find me at least two safe houses,” she shouts. “Why am I here?”

  “I didn’t know if and when you were coming back,” says Simon.

  “I gave you my word,” says Virginia.

  “That means nothing to me. We waited. You didn’t come. Like we’ve waited for years without anyone coming.”

  “I gave you one hundred fifty thousand francs. Did that mean nothing? What the hell did you do with it?”

  Edmund steps forward. “I have an accounting of every franc spent. Food, supplies, fuel, medical.”

  Virginia snatches the paper, reading over the sloppy, boyish handwriting.

  “We’re happy to have you stay here at our farm,” says Dolmazon.

  “It’s no trouble,” says Simon.

  “No trouble to have the head of the Maquis and the head of the Resistance circuit in one house? Why not gather all the section leaders and agents you can round up to make it easier for the bastards to grab us in one swoop?”

  She crumples the paper in a ball, throws it on the floor, and strides to the window to look out into the twilight. Shadows grow. Tall trees loom. The silhouette of the mountains is new to her yet somehow familiar. Like the Pyrenees, this mountain place feels inhospitable. The air inside the house is choking her.

  She thinks of her panic while following Mimi and her son to the forest the first day she met them. If only she had the boy’s small hands to steady her. Is he at Estelle’s now? Estelle’s cousin’s farm? With the nuns? Will Mimi survive, or will another child lose another parent in this godforsaken war?

  Mimi, oh God.

  Virginia pushes out the door, slamming it behind her, and stumbles toward the blackness. Even though it scares her, even though she doesn’t know this place or these people, she walks toward it. Someone follows—Edmund, she thinks—but she holds up her hand to wave him away.

  “A moment,” she says.

  She stumbles around a stone outbuilding to a barn and leans against the side of it, staring at the stars, struggling to catch her breath. She pulls off her phony glasses, tears off her shawl, and loosens her top buttons before she continues on toward the black forest. Her breath comes quick and shallow, and she feels so dizzy she staggers. A dead tree breaks her fall. She leans against it and again looks to the sky. The moon is a sliver above like it was the night of her escape from France.

  “Los Pirineos.”

  The voice of the Spanish guide who led her is loud enough that it’s in her ear.

  Flashes like photographs come to her of the climb, of her bloody leg stump, of the frostbite beginning in the toes of her good foot, of the trouble breathing in the thin, thin air. Of opening her eyes on the other side only to have a gun pointed at her face. She shakes her head to clear the vision, but when she opens her eyes, there’s still a gun pointed at her face.

  It’s a German Luger.

  “You have three seconds to tell me who you are before I put a bullet through your forehead,” he says in his raspy voice.

  The words are uttered lightly, almost as if he’s joking, though she’s quite sure he isn’t. In spite of the provenance of the gun, he’s a Frenchman. For a brief, savage moment, she thinks, Do it. End me. But her survival instinct isn’t obedient to her exhaustion.

  “La Madone,” she says.

  She wants to take back the words the moment they fall from her lips.

  The man’s teeth flash white in the night, and he spins the Luger—cowboy-style—around his finger and slips it into his belt.

  “Finally,” he says. “It’s a good thing you spoke quickly. Otherwise, I’d be in a fresh grave for killing you. Do you know how long we’ve been waiting for you? Follow me.”

  He starts walking to the forest, but she calls to him to stop.

  “Wait, who are you? And why should I trust you?”

  He turns back around to face her, grinning. With his dimpled chin, he has a face like a young Cary Grant.

  “My apologies,” he says. “I’m a Maquis commander. Code Name Bob.”

  “Don’t you need to tell Simon where we’re going?” she says.

  “What is he, my mother?”

  She laughs. It surprises her, the way laughter does in these circumstances. It make
s her feel sane.

  “Come,” says Bob. “If he gets upset, I’ll tell him you had to use the outhouse for a good, long while.”

  She puts on her glasses and gives him a reproving look but falls into step with him.

  “I see you’re a clown,” she says.

  “If you don’t have your sense of humor in situations like this, you’ve got nothing.”

  “Wise words from one so young.”

  “I’m very old under this twenty-four-year-old skin. At least as old as the disguise you’re wearing.”

  She doesn’t reply, but follows him through deep forest paths, their boots crushing the pine, bringing the sweet, earthy smell to their noses. Up and down the rocky outcroppings they climb. He never slows his pace but simply, silently offers his arm to help her along twisted paths, his rough hands to help her up and down boulders. The last bit of path is steep, and he reaches back for her hand again, still holding it as she reaches the top. She gasps when she sees the sight below them.

  Here, nestled in this rugged mountain forest, under an extraordinary night sky, is a perfect patchwork quilt of fields. Beautiful, soft, hidden, protected drop fields. The moon wanes, but Virginia can imagine what this will look like once it’s full. The whole placid scene before her soothes her nerves and clears her head.

  “Will these do for drops?” Bob says.

  She nods.

  “I’m sorry we didn’t find you a place to sleep,” he says. “But we had other priorities. We’ve never had a drop. We have nothing. It makes us single-minded.”

  “No, I understand. You’ve done well.”

  Though she could stand here all night under the stars, in the pines, breathing the sweet air, she knows she should get back to the others. She motions her head for him to lead but can’t stop looking back over her shoulder. It’s hard to believe such peace and serenity still exist in the world.

  Chapter 29

  It’s strange slipping into another new life. New safe houses. New terrain. New code phrases. New contacts. Since Virginia’s arrival she hasn’t seen Danielle Le Forestier. The little life she made with Estelle and Mimi is utterly gone. The life she had with the Lopinats could be a century ago. Everything before that feels like a dream.

  She’s already learning the rhythms of Chambon, the days anchored around the sound of the little engine that puffs up the mountain, arriving in the evening, when the light makes shadows of the travelers ushered off and hurried to the Hôtel May. The night that makes ghosts of them, while they’re whisked away to haunt the cellars and barns and rooms of the farmers’ modest dwellings.

  To always remember her friend, Virginia wears the orange scarf that brought her news of Mimi’s capture around her neck. It feels like hands squeezing her throat, but it’s a good reminder of how near to danger she always is. And it is dangerous. Though she hasn’t seen MP Haas since her arrival, he could still be in the hospital. In addition to that, the rutted roads are well traveled by Nazi lorries shuttling the wounded up the mountain and transporting the healed back down to return to the fighting. It’s dizzying watching the flap of swastikas on the same streets where Jewish children from all over Europe, with forged Protestant identity papers, walk to and from boarding schools and day schools and scouting excursions, their only outward protection the little French Christian songs they’ve been taught. If she thinks about it too much, if she watches it too closely, it makes it hard for her to breathe. So, she looks away and tends to the things that she came here to do.

  Edmund has found Virginia much-needed lodgings away from Simon. Aside from their incompatible personalities, as commanders and leaders, Virginia and Simon shouldn’t stay together. The house where she’ll reside until Edmund can find her a place of her own belongs to his cousin Léa. As they walk the long dirt driveway, seeing her limp, Edmund offers to take a suitcase. She gives him her clothing valise.

  “Léa’s husband is a German prisoner of war,” says Edmund. “She looks after the farm and their two young children.”

  Virginia stops walking.

  “Must every safe house have children?” she says.

  “I’m afraid so. Aside from villager children, every home in the region has at least one copy of the Old Testament, if you know what I mean.”

  At least one Jewish child in every house.

  Extraordinary.

  Her observations support Edmund’s assertion. Children are everywhere. In town, out of town. In fields, forests, and shops. In lines behind elderly men and women, proceeding along the streets.

  “We teach them Christian prayers and take them to Temple Protestant for show, but they keep their holidays in secret. We only wish to protect them, not to erase their heritage.”

  “It’s miraculous what you all do here,” she says.

  “It’s what God asks of us. There’s no other way.”

  If only that were true for the whole world, they would never have gotten to this. There is so much darkness, but seeing this living, breathing, thriving antidote to inhumanity is restoring her faith. They resume their walk, and Edmund continues educating her on her new contacts.

  “I picked this safe house because it’s centrally located and, more important, the maquisard staying here will be respectful of you, and help you in any way you need it.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  Simon’s open disdain for her, as a woman, and his general skepticism, are tiresome, and she’s only been here a week. He has a military background and bristled when she told him how to divide up the boys for training. He told her plainly he doesn’t believe she’ll ever be able to get them weapons in this mountain region. She was so frustrated with him the last time they spoke that she said he didn’t deserve them anyway.

  “With me, Bob, and the man I’m about to introduce you to,” says Edmund, “you’ll have a core team. We can go between you, Simon, and the other Maquis forces, so you don’t have to put up with them.”

  “They’re going to need to swallow their pride and learn how to work with me.”

  He gives her a look that shows he doesn’t know if that will ever happen.

  “You’ll like Léa,” says Edmund, changing the subject. “She’s housed countless refugees and Maquis. With the little food we have, she’s a creative cook. She never asks questions, and her only rules are that no guns or swearing are allowed inside her house.”

  “No swearing?” Virginia says. “I don’t know about this.”

  “I know it will be hard for you, but please, think of the children.”

  Remembering her profanity-laced arrival, she gives Edmund a grin. He blushes. Seeing the color in his large ears—his sweet, simple innocence—makes her affection rise. In the short time she’s known him, he’s already becoming dear to her, like a little brother to tease and boss. She finds that she’s more at ease interacting with and recruiting young men for her network. The fact that they are single and unattached makes them good soldiers, though they are startlingly young. Most of the Maquis here are under twenty years of age, on the run since they turned seventeen, the age the Nazis conscript for compulsory work service. She’s trying to keep all the boys straight in her mind by imagining the Hollywood actors who could play them in movies.

  Like Cosne, her objective is to arm the Maquis so they can protect the region and conduct sabotage. Unlike Cosne, D-Day has already come, so as soon as she gets the weapons in their hands, they can get to work. There are greater numbers of Maquis in hiding here; they’ve been pushed to this remote location at the end of the line. Because it will take a while for the Allied forces to make it this far, these fighters might even be able to liberate the region themselves, including the city of Le Puy. It’s the largest city nearby with a Nazi garrison.

  Around a turn, the small stone house appears. Tidy barns fan out from it. Wildflowers wave in welcome along the walkways. Hens peck around the yard. In the distance, a wo
man urges a goat herd into their pen, while a young man rides a little boy on his shoulders like an airplane, a small girl laughing and chasing behind them. When the young man catches sight of Edmund, he calls out to him, places the boy on the ground, and he and the children come to greet them. The woman watches with her hand shielding her eyes from the sun as the children jump into Cousin Edmund’s arms. When he puts them down, they stare at Virginia only for a moment before their mother calls them back to her.

  Smart woman, Virginia thinks.

  “Bonjour,” says Edmund. “I have someone I know you’d like to meet.”

  “Diane?” the young man says.

  He’s soft-spoken and has heavily lashed, dark eyes. He looks like a very young Laurence Olivier.

  “What a relief not to be called la Madone,” she says.

  “Edmund mentioned you don’t like that name.”

  “Boys who can take orders—how refreshing.”

  He extends his hand. “Code name Dédé.”

  “Ah, and one smart enough to use a code name,” she says, giving Edmund a stern look. “Good to meet you, Dédé.”

  “Dédé heads a Maquis group,” says Edmund. “He used to be a passeur, but we need him here now.”

  “A passeur?”

  “A guide. For the Old Testaments who need to be shelved in other places.”

  “I understand,” says Virginia. “That’s hard, brave work.”

  Dédé lowers his eyes.

  “Dédé lives with my cousin,” Edmund continues. “He helps around the farm when he isn’t busy with us.”

  “So, you never sleep, either?” says Virginia.

  “Never,” Dédé says with a grin.

  “Dédé can get you anything you need from the village shops,” says Edmund. “Everyone loves him.”

  “Not the boches,” says Dédé.

  “No,” says Edmund. “He may look gentle as a fawn, but he’s ferocious as a lion.”

  “That’s exactly what I like to hear,” says Virginia.