That evening, after an early supper, Janine and Trudi went back to the room they shared with Lisette, hoping their cousin would fall asleep quickly so they might slip out undetected to meet their friends. But they should have known better. Though Edy had since left Switzerland to join her in Valence, Lisette was delighted to be with Janine again and fully intended to talk all night. Out it poured: a dizzying array of observations and theories, feelings and stories, jokes and poems, philosophies regarding the war and the plots of the Germans and the hope of resistance and the fate of the world and the clash of the sexes, Dostoyevsky and Schiller, and the human condition and the cretins in Vichy and the state of the theater and Hindu art and the pretentiousness of her mother-in-law and the treachery of Marshal Pétain, and the folly of faith and the absence of God and anything else on which she had definitive views.
And so, as their reunion unfolded, sensing her friend would never tire and fall asleep, Janine finally had to reveal to Lisette that she had actually planned to sneak out to spend her parting hours with Roland. It amounted to a rejection that neither woman would ever forget, and Janine mourned her choice at the same time she made it without hesitation, berating herself but helpless to do anything but swallow her shame and beg Lisette not to alert the parents once she had left. Then she folded her beautiful custom-made blue silk pajamas from Freiburg in a paper bag and crept out the door with Trudi behind her.
The six young people met on the street near the hotel and walked the Vieux Port until they found a brasserie open for moules marinières, a tricky dish for Janine to eat with only one hand, the other one being attached to Roland. With bloodred, fruity but potent concoctions called PGK—Amer Picon, grenadine, and kirsch—they toasted reunions after the war, and three times again with table wine. Breaking away on their own after dinner, Roland and Janine strolled arm in arm around the tight U-shaped harbor, where a flotilla of boats lent the illusion that in the voyage of life, anyone could set a free course and at a self-chosen hour slip back into port and return to land.
The hotel where Roland had rented a room was even more sordid than the one where Lisette was left to stew on her own. On a rickety bed in a seedy flophouse far better known to sailors and hookers, smugglers and addicts—by the light of the moon that danced through the windows—Janine and Roland hoped to seize a single precious night of their own, a time out of time at the outskirts of war. But the room was cold and dank, the radiator silent and dead. Janine’s blue silk pajamas remained in the bag as Roland drew her onto the bed, and they fumbled for buttons, caressing each other, kicking off shoes and throwing off coats. More than anything she had wanted before, she wanted now, needed now, to give herself to him. The imminence of separation haunted the moment, and she was determined to prove there was nothing she would withhold from him now. This was no time for coyness or feminine wiles, for innocence, for fear or hoarding of love she might never again be able to share. No matter what the future might hold, she needed her first experience to be with Roland. She urged him on: her lips traveled the length of his angular torso, and she kissed the glossy, welted abdominal scar that had stitched them together. She teased his desire and could not understand why Roland pulled away at precisely the moment she was most open to him, boldly decided to know him as part of herself.
But he was determined to prove his love through restraint. It was marriage he wanted, not sexual union rushed on the brink of an anguished good-bye. Roland would not let her leave with any suspicion that sex had been his main purpose, when instead his most ardent desire was to make her his wife, to sacralize what they meant to each other. He had set this inviolable rule for himself even before their train left Lyon. He told her this: it seemed morally reprehensible to him—in a squalid room, at a terrible hour—to become her first lover, only to part the very next day. The rupture of leaving would only be harder, not to mention the risk of making her pregnant. Using a condom would be crude and demeaning, he felt; it was a device to use with a prostitute, not a shield to employ with the woman he loved. And so he was chilled to imagine her nauseous and seasick, alone on the ocean, bearing his child, afraid to confess the truth to her parents, beyond the reach of his protection or even adequate medical care. All these worries lent him resolve. And so, instead, he tenderly held her, her head on his chest and the pulse of his heart. He kissed the auburn tendrils fringing her brow and smoothed her hair, he painted dreams of their future together, and he urged her at last to close her eyes and rest for a while.…
“WO SIND SIE?” A man’s voice, shouting in German, pierced her sleep. “WHERE ARE THEY?” The voice came again, louder this time. She reached for Roland.
“My father!” she gasped. She was instantly sure that Lisette—how oddly out of character for her!—must have woken Sigmar to tell him Janine had sneaked off, and he had somehow tracked them to this hotel. Now he would be climbing the stairs. She already heard the heavy tread of his feet on the steps, and she lunged for her clothes, strewn about the floor near the bed. She was terrified of his finding her there, even while she reminded herself that no punishment he could ever devise could match the one she already faced in leaving Roland. Still, she dreaded meeting her father’s eyes, dreaded his disappointment and loss of respect, and dreaded the voyage looming ahead, trapped with him on a ship where his punitive silence would prove impenetrable. Years would go by, and still this night would burn in his mind.
From the street below, beams of headlamps flashed in the window. She heard car doors slam, German voices, sharp and demanding, and then the ominous thud of boots on the stairs. Roland’s eyes were wild. He spun in a circle, assessing the options, and then rushed to the window. As he yanked the musty curtains apart, Janine peered down and saw three black Citroëns, the preferred vehicle of the Gestapo, blocking the cobbled street before the hotel.
“That’s not your father out there. It’s the Germans!” he whispered. “They must be searching for Jews in all these stinking dives in the port! Merde, we’ve got to get you out of here now!” He turned from the window and flung open the door to the hallway. But the exit was jammed by an onrush of nightmares forcing them back: thundering boot steps, pounding fists, moaning and weeping, breaking glass and splintering wood. Roland drew her across the room, where a second window facing the bed opened onto the roof of the building next door, a drop of only a couple of feet. He threw back the shutters, opened the window, and crawled onto the roof, gingerly testing the sloped surface under his feet. Then he reached back to help Janine climb out of the room. From a sitting position, they inched higher up the slippery tiles of the roof, away from the window, to avoid being spotted.
“Stay behind me,” he told her, “and keep perfectly quiet.” He turned up her collar to keep her warm, stroked her cheek with the back of his hand, and laid a forefinger over her trembling lips, a warning to silence. But she was already speechless.
In spite of her terror, the view from the roof brought tears to her eyes with all its twinkling, ephemeral beauty: the starlight skipping over the water, the shadowed terrain of the morning moon, the glow of the searchlight brushing the clouds from the medieval watchtower at the mouth of the harbor. She saw herself riding the breezes with white-winged gulls, as they landed on sills to peek into rooms where bureaucrats slept and refugees tossed. Far in the distance, bell buoys pealed their lonely alarums over the waves that ran to Morocco. Ropes beat the masts of all the weathered boats in the harbor. An icy wind swept off the water. Janine shuddered, clung to Roland, and buried her face in the back of his coat. The travel, wine, passion, and fear had all combined to drain her completely. Despite the precariousness of their rooftop perch, she fought to try to stay awake.…
In the hazy mist where memory and history blend into each other, where what one imagines was true becomes more real to the heart than what actually was, the events of that night in Marseille were recorded. Personal history was sketched forever in memory’s colors. Even nightmares took on a truth of their own that overwhelmed dates and
facts regarding the war at that moment. That Marseille was then unoccupied—Germany almost eight months away from seizing control of France as far south as the Mediterranean coast—was a truth completely obscured for Janine by the trauma and pain of leaving Roland. Or rather, the Nazi assault that would cleave them apart from each other was translated into a dream of such terrifying immediacy that it seemed the Gestapo was already there in Marseille, doing its worst.
Out of fear or eternal remorse for having yielded to reins of prudent restraint, Janine tumbled into the web of a fiction in which choice played no part in how they passed their last hours together. She came to believe that she and Roland spent most of the night perilously suspended in air, cheating arrest on top of a roof, while cheated of time for sharing their love. This dream was the tale she felt to be true, the one she remembered, and the one that she told and retold over the years. For her, the reality would be forever distorted. As a result, for all my life before I delved deeply into the facts of the war, this story was part of the magic and romance surrounding my mother. Dazzled, I fully believed her imagined account: made brave by love, as a girl she hid on a roof at the edge of the sea in the black of night in the middle of war with the man she adored guarding her from the grip of the Nazis. This would later become the only one of her stories my researched disproved.
At the first hint of dawn, when Roland kissed her awake and out of her dream, Janine was confused to find herself curled up beside him in bed. His voice was urgent as he roused her to return to her own hotel room before her parents discovered her missing. They rushed back together with the rosy halo of the rising sun just peeping above the pink limestone hills surrounding the city, fishermen checking over their tackle, and wraithlike cats sliding through alleys and pawing through garbage to pick out their breakfasts. Janine clung to Roland in tearful embrace on the street, but to her astonished relief, he firmly rejected any farewell.
“Non, ma chérie, pas encore,” he insisted again, and he promised to meet her at the Lipari’s pier.
Quietly, she slipped inside the hotel, and Roland detoured past the quickening quay, heading back to his room for a few hours’ rest. It was then he noticed a vendor unpacking her flowers at a stall on the street, and he stood and stared for that one extra second that encouraged the woman to entreat him to buy.
“Fresh mimosas! A gift of the springtime!” she sang out the words, lifting a bunch of the golden-tipped stems of fertile Provence and waving them toward him with a hearty grin. Like Persephone’s herald, mimosa came into flower at the end of winter, proof that the earth had not been forgotten. “Give her mimosas, and your girl is sure to remember you always,” the vendor suggested, inclining her head to inhale their sunny perfume. “Mimosas, you know, they stand for remembrance.”
The quai de la Joliette, with its capacious piers for large ships plying the Mediterranean Sea, was slightly northwest of the narrow Vieux Port and built at the edge of the Panier district, whose wanton streets sang sirens’ songs to incoming sailors. Compared to the picturesque confines of the central Vieux Port, jammed with pleasure craft and small fishing vessels, Joliette provided the harbor with muscular piers for the serious shipping of cargo and people. Here Roland came to wait for Janine, his arms full of mimosas, and in his pocket, the letter he’d written three nights before in his room in Lyon, pledging to find her after the war. Their moment of parting would be too public and painful for everything he needed to tell her, so he had written it out—a contract of sorts.
The wharf was swarming with people, those departing and those to be left, with the ship’s crew and porters and official inspectors checking papers and baggage, and rescue workers from the Joint and HICEM to help ensure that all those entitled could board. There were disputes and tears, fracases over glitches in papers, missing stamps of approval, questionable visas, names inexplicably dropped from authorized lists. And of course there was the usual frenzy, as families were split in the mayhem, struggling to hold on to each other as well as their baggage in the surging crowds that converged toward the ship. In the pandemonium, Roland finally found Janine, lagging behind the rest of her family, lugging her suitcase. He had dressed in a white shirt and tie and his suit and his long overcoat in order to make an impression on Sigmar, in case the chance arose to be introduced. But if Sigmar and Alice noticed him or witnessed his meeting Janine and their ardent farewell, they didn’t let on but rather left them alone for some minutes.
“Mimosas stand for remembrance.” Roland murmured the street vendor’s promise into her hair as he gave her the flowers, pointillist puffs of bright yellow blossoms with leaves like dark feathers. He slipped his letter into her pocket and urged her to wait to read it until the ship was at sea. When he opened his arms and clasped her to him, she was weeping too fiercely even to speak. He lifted her chin, wiped her tears, and tried to breathe hope and courage into her spirit with one hard, enduring kiss.
“J’attendrai, ma chérie,” he told her, attempting to smile. “Le jour et la nuit, tu sais. J’attendrai ton retour. Toujours. I love you always.” Oblivious of all the noise and turmoil, they held each other against the void of letting go. But before Janine could answer, Norbert appeared at her elbow. It was time to board, and Sigmar was chafing. The two young men hugged one another. Then Roland cupped Janine’s face between his hands to memorize every dear feature, and with one last searing kiss, he entrusted her into the arms of her brother to be led away in sobs to the gangplank.
Now Roland dashed back down the pier toward a stand where he’d noticed rowboats for rent. Paying for one, he rowed toward the Lipari’s side, fighting the wind, and was able to spot Janine’s brown coat at the railing, where refugees pressed for a parting glimpse of the crumbling continent they were leaving behind.
“Moumoutte!” Roland called from below to get her attention. “Chérie! Janine!” He stood up in the boat, incongruous in his white shirt and tie and overcoat, waving to her and calling her name. She gaped down at the water, overcome by a torrent of laughter and tears.
“Sit down!” she cried. “Mon Dieu, I’m afraid you’ll tip over!” Through her smile, she blanched to consider all the more terrible things that might happen to him in the time she was gone, without her even learning about it.
“Excuse me, mademoiselle, perhaps you would like me to take a picture?” The man beside her was holding a camera. Many months later, when he was finally able to give her the snapshot, her fellow passenger would pen his own caption in French on the back: “seul sur la mer,” alone on the sea. That photograph, though small and blurry, tucked in her wallet, would forever preserve her last view of her lover, thin and grave.
It was past three o’clock when the Lipari pushed away from the quay, with the sun already floating toward the horizon. Roland was sitting alone in the rowboat, blowing kisses and waving to her. As the Lipari moved out past the jetty toward the cold open sea, Janine buried her face in the sweet mimosas and knew she could not stand to watch them wither and die. So she broke off a single stem for her buttonhole, and then, leaning over the railing in tears, dropped the flowers stalk by stalk into the water, as if marking a path to find her way back. The bright flowers spun on the waves that carried them toward Roland’s little boat, but his oars couldn’t keep pace, and the Lipari carelessly left him behind. It was, Janine realized, exactly the way she’d imagined it that previous autumn, after she had nursed him to health. Her golden lover was drifting away, but instead of waiting alone on the banks of a river, now she was moving in the other direction. Until all that was left was a tiny, bobbing pinpoint of love, gold as the dots of mimosa that flickered around him, she stood there and watched, her thoughts riding the vow of their favorite song.
J’attendrai. I shall wait. Always.
FOURTEEN
DARKNESS ON THE FACE OF THE DEEP
ON MARCH 13, 1942, seven vessels sailed from the port of Marseille, but the daily listing in the city’s commercial newspaper, Le Sémaphore, reported the destination of on
ly six. For the seventh, the Lipari, discretion seemed vital. A French steamship built in 1921 and registered in the port of Le Havre, it had 105 first-class, 39 second-class, and 84 third-class passenger cabins, in addition to refrigerated cargo compartments down in the hold. But on March 13, in place of fish or bananas, of wine, wheat, or dates, the Lipari’s cargo walked on board and consisted of almost five hundred Jews, a fact no one was eager to advertise because their survival hung in the balance. For them, there was danger involved in just raising the anchor and getting away, and still more in the prospect of drawing the interest of German submarines presumed to be prowling Mediterranean waters.
The destination the Lipari withheld from the public: Casablanca. There the refugees would transfer to a Portuguese freighter from Lisbon, chartered to take them across the Atlantic. The trip would prove longer and sail closer to the brink of disaster than any who embarked that day could have imagined. But for each, this escape was miraculous, the result of arduous negotiations and detailed arrangements handled on a case-by-case basis by rescue organizations working through Lisbon, Marseille, and New York. Indeed, the full extent of their good fortune was yet to be known, for these passengers would be among the very last Jews to slip out of France. Thousands of other desperate refugees who made their way toward Marseille seeking escape would soon find themselves trapped. In the region of lavender fields and sunlit towns whose names conjure dreams of art or vacation—Arles, Aix-en-Provence, Saint Rémy, and Cassis—they waited, hungry and fearful, in makeshift camps that were French holding bins for transports to Nazi death camps in Poland.
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