The Collaborators

by Reginald Hill

  ‘Stupid? I don’t think so. I’ll tell you what I do think. Delaplanche has recruited you, right? And he’s given you the kind of job you like, which is sitting around doing nothing till the great revolution comes!’

  Valois was filled with fury yet at the same time he acknowledged a sense of nostalgic pleasure at the edge of his rage. This was how it had been in the old days, the two of them in classrooms, in cafés, in the street, in the park, hurling arguments and insults at each other like love-letters tied to half bricks.

  ‘At least I’ve made a choice, an intellectual decision.’

  ‘To do what? Beat the Boche by sucking up to them?’

  ‘Bastard! Who the hell do you think you are? What have you done since it started?’

  ‘At least I got this fighting,’ said Simonian, his hand flying to the livid scar on his temple. ‘And I lost friends, good friends, true friends.’

  ‘Did you now! And what did these “good friends” do for you, tell me that?’

  ‘They died for me,’ said Simonian dully. ‘And before they died, they killed Germans for me. Can you match that, Christian?’

  Valois, by now more hurt than he cared to admit, said with an effort at casualness, ‘Well, I’m not dead, so you’ve got me there. But you don’t have to be a soldier to kill the enemy, you know. As a matter of fact, I’ve killed my Boche. Oh yes. And not just blazing away out of a trench either. I waited, and picked him out, and stood behind him, and let him have it!’

  He pretended his hand was a gun and made a child’s banging sound.

  ‘You did that?’ said Simonian incredulous.

  ‘You think I’m a liar as well as a hypocrite and a coward?’

  ‘No. Of course not. I know how honest…’

  To his dismay, Valois saw his friend was crying, not noisily but with steady tears trailing glistening spoors across his cheeks.

  ‘Jean-Paul…please…I’m sorry…I don’t mean to…’

  ‘What? Oh shit. Am I crying again? Sometimes it just happens.’

  He wiped away his tears then squatted in a corner, lit a cigarette and said seriously, ‘Let me explain what it’s like being me just now, Christian. It’s like there’s another me, the real me, the essence, walking around in my mind, like a man strolling in wooded countryside by a river on a misty day. You must forgive me if I grow poetic. I used to write poetry, remember? Surrealistic, despairing stuff. Now I live it.’

  He drew on his cigarette.

  ‘Sometimes the mist clears a little and I see people and places. Sometimes I recognize them instantly. As with you. Sometimes I know I know them, but I’m not sure how I know them. But I study them and it all comes back. But it comes back as knowledge, you see. Not as feeling. I can remember everything about Janine. Above all, I remember that she made me happy, the sight of her, the sound of her, the simple presence of her. And I remember the children too, well, Pauli anyway, but I can’t believe that they’re anything to do with me. They’re part of another, unreach-able world.

  ‘Round and round I wander in this misty landscape. Sometimes the mist swirls grey and thick and I crash into trees, and thorns tear at my skin. But I don’t mind this too much, for at these times I’m aware of a greater danger. I can hear the river rushing mightily, exploding in foam against huge, sharp rocks; I can feel its spray damp on my face; I know it is close, very close, and that a careless step in the wrong direction will plunge me in and see me carried away for ever.’

  He paused. The two men looked at each other, one face pale with horror, the other dark with despair.

  Then the darkness vanished from Jean-Paul’s features to be replaced by a serene child-like smile.

  ‘And there are times when the mist rises completely and I see everything in brilliant sunshine. Oddly enough, these moments usually occur when I’m confronted by a German in uniform and I know that what would make my happiness complete would be to kill the bastard! The trouble is I’ve got no weapon. I need a gun. Knives are for experts and too messy. I don’t want to get caught, you see. It’s not simply fear, but I reckon my life’s worth a lot more than just one German’s! So I need a gun, and I need help, a group. How do I find them? I hear talk of the Resistance and I read about acts of terrorism. I even heard an explosion the other day! But how do I join?’

  ‘Advertise?’ said Valois, grinning to signal the return to something like their normal relationship.

  ‘That’s what I’m doing, I think,’ said Simonian, returning his grin. ‘I may be ideologically shaky, but I can take orders. And I’m ready to kill. Tell him that.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Valois still smiling.

  ‘Of course you don’t. And it occurs to me that Maître Delaplanche won’t want to know either, not while I’m sharing a flat with his little Mister Clean. So, thank you, friend. This apartment looks very nice. Very nice indeed. I think after all we will take it. As long as there’s a bar within two minutes’ walk.’

  Valois glanced at his watch.

  ‘Let’s find out,’ he said.

  5

  Winter slowly turned to spring and Parisians observed, most with pleasure, some with surprise, all the old ‘firsts’ - the first crocus, the first chestnut blossom, the first swallow.

  Towards the end of May, Maurice Melchior saw his first yellow star.

  He was sitting outside the Deux Magots feeling at one with this sunlit world. Everything was going well. As Miche the Butcher’s factor he was prosperous; as Yerevan’s housemate, he moved in the most fashionable circles. As for the Boche, he’d come to the conclusion that if he didn’t bother them, they wouldn’t bother him.

  Then an old woman with a yellow star sewn to the breast of her threadbare coat walked by.

  It was like a shadow crossing the sun. He forgot it almost instantly till five minutes later he saw another on a middle-aged man.

  Hastily paying his bill, he jumped up and followed, overtaking him just beyond the church of Saint Germain.

  ‘Excuse me, monsieur,’ he said, but did not need to complete his question. Across the middle of the star was printed Juif.

  ‘You haven’t heard the new ordinance?’ said the man, observing him keenly. ‘You must be one of the clever ones who didn’t register. Won’t do you any good, monsieur. I didn’t register either till one of my friendly neighbours sent a note to the Rue des Saussaies.’

  With a harsh laugh the man walked on.

  It was nothing to do with him, Melchior assured himself. It was just another bit of Boche bureaucracy. But whatever his mind said his stomach was telling him that everything had changed; police registers, notices in shop windows, these were flea-bites. But labelling people in the streets: this was the beginning of the plague the fleas carried.

  But he was safe. Unregistered, anonymous…well, relatively…then he thought of Serge. He wasn’t anonymous, far from it, and if there was one thing these Huns really hated it was an arty Yid! His first thought was purely selfish. If they went after Serge, they’d certainly grab him too. The safe thing to do was avoid the villa at Auteil like the plague and keep his head down till the first frenzy of pogrom was past.

  And then a wave of shame swept over him. To abandon his friend, his lover, like this made him no better than the Germans.

  He must at least warn Serge and try to convince him of the danger.

  Half an hour later he was turning his key in the villa door.

  In the hallway he halted. There were two suitcases on the hall floor. They were his. Ribot was standing half-way up the stairs. She didn’t speak but nodded towards the door of Yerevan’s study.

  Melchior marched in. Yerevan was seated behind his white-topped desk with its modish tubular steel legs.

  ‘Maurice,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you’ve come. There’s trouble, I’m afraid. This new SS chief, Oberg, seems to have orders to come to grips with the Jewish question. I gather new measures are proposed.’

  ‘I’ve seen one of them,’ said Mauric
e indignantly. ‘Yellow stars. That’s what I was coming to warn you about.’

  ‘I’m glad you see how dangerous this could be,’ said Yerevan. ‘I didn’t want to worry you before, but in fact I’ve been fending off enquiries about you for some time now. I’ve done what I can but I can do no more. You’d best lie low for a while.’

  ’I’d best lie low? What about you?’ Melchior asked in bewilderment.

  ‘Me? Why should I lie low?’ replied Yerevan, his dark handsome face wreathed in an actor’s puzzlement. ‘I have my work to do, Maurice, my debt to art to repay.’

  This was either very great courage or very great crap. Melchior’s mind assessed the alternatives, and did not need a long debate.

  ‘What do you mean, Serge?’ he demanded. ‘You’re as Jewish as I am! And I’ll tell you something. If you dump me and I get picked up, I won’t be as modest about your sacrifice in repaying your debt to art as you seem to be!’

  He was ashamed of the threat as soon as he made it, but Yerevan was looking puzzled not threatened.

  ‘What are you saying, Maurice? That I’m a Jew? How very odd.’

  Now Melchior was dumbfounded.

  ‘But you are,’ he stuttered. ‘You can’t deny it.’

  ‘Of course not. Simple denial would hardly be enough. No, you need the papers to prove it. See!’

  From his inner pocket he produced a long envelope.

  ‘I’ve just been down to the Rue des Saussaies to make sure there is no future misunderstanding. I saw your old friend, Colonel Fiebelkorn, as it happens. He was most courteous and even provided me with a little certificate to show that my papers have been examined and authenticated.’

  ‘Authenticated? As what?’

  ‘As proof that I am second generation French and that my family, Armenian in origin it is true, have been members of the Eastern Orthodox Church as far back as records can take us. Who knows? Perhaps if you’d been just a little less flamboyant, dear boy, we might have been able to prove you were second cousin to the Holy Father! But it’s too late, I fear. So take a holiday, Maurice, lie low, that’s my advice. Good luck. Don’t forget to leave your key, will you?’

  For once made speechless by rage, Melchior hurled the key at the smiling film director and had the pleasure of seeing him duck. Then he strode out, grabbed his cases and a moment later was standing in the warm sunlight.

  He made no conscious decision as to where he was going, but his homing instinct was strong. An hour later, with only a vague recollection of a crowded, sweaty journey in the métro, the weight of his cases brought him to a halt and to awareness. He saw he was in the Rue des Coutures-Saint-Gervais. Just ahead, it intersected with the Rue de Thorigny. He was nearly home.

  How pleasantly familiar and everyday things looked. A woman passed pushing a pram; an old man scuttled furtively by, clutching to his chest three carrots in a string bag; against a big double door directly opposite the intersection, some small boys urged on by an even smaller girl were playing a ball game; everything was lemony in the early evening sunlight, so calm, so ordinary.

  One of the boys looked up from his game, saw him, and crossed the street to block his path before he reached the corner. It was Pauli Simonian. They hadn’t met since that ghastly day in the métro.

  ‘Hello, Pauli,’ he said. ‘Visiting your grandmother?’

  He recalled vaguely that the family had moved out when the missing husband returned. His own visits here had been intermittent since he moved in with Serge.

  ‘Yes, monsieur. Bubbah said if I saw you while I was playing to give you a message.’

  He had been edging slowly past the boy, but now he stopped and returned. The steady unblinking brown eyes still disturbed him.

  ‘Yes?’ he said irritably.

  ‘Bubbah says, there’s a man, a German soldier, she says. He’s waiting to see you.’

  Melchior backed away from the corner in horror. He grasped the boy’s shoulder for support as well as emphasis.

  ‘Thanks, Pauli. I’m running up a big debt to you. And thank your grandmother too.’

  He turned on his heel and walked swiftly back the way he had come.

  Behind him, Pauli watched his departure with an expressionless face. Then there was the sound of discord from the playing children. He turned round. One of the boys had pushed Céci so that she fell into the gutter.

  ‘Come on, Simonian! Your stupid sister’s spoiling our game!’

  Clenching his fists, Pauli ran towards them.

  In the flat, Janine sat silently watching her mother-in-law sewing a yellow star on to her outdoor coat. She’d come ready to pour out her own woes, but when Sophie had told her the meaning of her task, she’d been unable to begin.

  ‘Textile coupons, is it?’ said Sophie, triumphantly. ‘Not so quick, I say to myself. First go and see exactly what this thing is they want to pin on us. So I did, and when I saw it, I thought, that old piece of curtain I bought for the kitchen but never liked, that’s the very colour! Why should I give good coupons for something I don’t want, eh?’

  ‘Why should you have to wear such a thing at all?’ demanded Janine fiercely.

  ‘Rules,’ said the old woman calmly. ‘There, how does that look?’

  She held up the old coat on which the star with the word Juif picked out in black thread glowed like an exotic decoration.

  ‘Boche rules!’ exploded Janine. ‘God, how right the Resistance are to shoot them.’

  ‘Bullets kill people,’ said Sophie. ‘That can’t be right. But how can a piece of yellow cloth harm me?’

  ‘You obviously thought it might harm Monsieur Melchior,’ said Janine, rather irritated by what seemed to her an unjustified complacency. ‘Otherwise you wouldn’t have asked Pauli to warn him about the soldier who’s waiting.’

  ‘Monsieur Melchior has broken their rules,’ said Sophie sternly. ‘He is a lost soul, I think, but one of our own, so I will help him. But it is his own fault, certainly not that young man’s sitting on the landing up there. He seems a nice boy. I gave him some tea and he was very polite. He showed me a photo of his family. His mother looked a very respectable sort of woman. I’m sure she too would show kindness to a French boy away from home.’

  Janine took a deep breath. This seemed like a good cue.

  She said, ‘Bubbah Sophie, I wonder…I mean, I hope…’

  She hesitated. It was hopeless. She couldn’t do it.

  Sophie Simonian folded the coat up so the star didn’t show and laid it beside her chair.

  ‘I wondered when you would at last talk to me about my son,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Janine, mistaking her tone. ‘I didn’t mean to…’

  ‘Don’t worry!’ interrupted Sophie. ‘I’m not being offended! I admire you for not coming rushing to me to weep about how changed he was in the first couple of weeks. You’ve given it time and that’s good, that’s right. Also, though, you should admire me, a Jewish mother, for keeping her mouth shut all these months! Women have won medals for less. My Iakov would never have believed it!’

  She laughed as she spoke and Janine smiled with her. Suddenly it became easy, or at least easier.

  ‘I’ve been wanting to talk to you for weeks,’ she said. ‘But there are times when, well, he seemed to be almost his old self again. I thought, it’s just been the shock of the war, and being wounded, and being away from home all that time. But always he drifts off again…’

  ‘Drifts off?’

  ‘Yes. It’s as if everything close around him fades away and he slips off into somewhere else. I don’t mean he goes into a trance or anything, though there are times when he just sits and stares at nothing for an hour or more. No, it’s as if he starts seeing things in a different way, as if everything’s there still, but it adds up to something different. Including me and the children.’

  Sophie nodded.

  ‘I’ve seen that too, though I would not have explained it in the same way. Last week when he was visi
ting me, we were talking about the old times. I kept on going further and further back, it’s an old woman’s privilege - not that I am so old, but I don’t mind the privileges! - and I was talking about the days of my girlhood in Russia and suddenly Jean-Paul said, “You shouldn’t have run! It was wrong to run.” I asked him what he meant. He was staring at me in a very intense way. I sometimes see the same look in young Pauli, only not frightening like this was. “You should have stayed and fought them. Killed the bastards. Running’s for cowards!” Well I grew angry then and told him if he was going to call his father a coward, a man who’d received a medal from the Marshal’s own hand, then he need not come to visit me any more. That quickly brought him to his senses and he said he was very sorry, it was not what he meant. I believe him, but I think what he meant was perhaps worse, because he was talking about himself.’

  Janine thought about this, then nodded.

  ‘There is a lot of hate in him,’ she said. ‘I can feel it sometimes when we’re out and we see some Germans. It’s as if he needs it, as if it feeds him somehow. Does that sound stupid to you, Bubbah?’

  The old woman shook her head sadly and said, ‘No. Such a need, such a drive has always been in him, even as a child. He turned away from religion I think, because it was not pure enough, too much emotion, too much giving yourself. In the same way when he was wounded in the head, his mind closed off the section with you in it. That got rid of another weak part in him.’

  ‘Weak? You think our love was weak?’

  ‘The memory of happiness can weaken a man in extremis, I think,’ said Sophie seriously. ‘Perhaps he needed to turn to his strength as he lay near to death. And his strength comes from something stern and strong and unremitting, like hate.’

  She sighed deeply and said, ‘Listen to me, I am a silly old woman trying to talk like a wise old rabbi in the schul. Let me stick to what I know. Does he still love you? I mean, make love to you?’

  Janine was taken aback. They’d never talked so frankly as this before. But there was no point in coyness.