by Lily Graham
Mattaus examined her, and when he confirmed it, she spent the rest of the evening sobbing.
They called women like her traitors and whores. They spat at the ones who had children by German officers: people kicked them, and pinched, and they promised that when this war finally came to an end, women like her would be the first ones they killed.
It didn’t matter that she had fallen for Mattaus, that he was different, that he hadn’t wanted this war. No one would ever believe her. But what would happen to her baby? How would it be treated – as a pariah? Raised to hate itself for nothing it had done wrong? She’d seen how women in the street eyed the babies of Nazi soldiers, when they were taken out by their fathers, as if they would throw them under a bus.
Mattaus rocked her against his chest, and made soothing noises. For Mattaus this was the best thing that had happened to him since Mireille had first climbed into his bed – he was going to be a father, and, if she let him, a husband. For Mireille it was another example of how something that should have been a happy, almost everyday moment, had become tainted and reshaped due to the infernal war.
They got married in secret. In a small church, with a priest they paid in food.
The holy man didn’t hide his disdain, but it didn’t matter to Mattaus or Mireille what he thought. They knew what they had, but she was terrified of how she would tell her father.
Mattaus suggested that they break the news to him that night and she agreed.
Her father sank into a chair at the news, his face seeming to age in an instant. He looked tired, and thin, and old. Just the day before he had lost several teeth which had become rotten from his time in jail. But this seemed the hardest news to bear even so.
His eyes were shocked. ‘Pregnant by a Nazi.’
Mireille closed her eyes. ‘Papa, I’m sorry.’
Dupont shook his head. ‘No. Don’t.’ His face was angry, twisted in pain. She had never seen him look so defeated, so broken as he did now. She felt her stomach drop – she hated that she had caused it.
Tears leaked down her cheeks. ‘I tried not to fall for him,’ she said, her voice small.
Her father closed his eyes. After a while he shook his head and said, ‘I told him to stay – it is my fault. You were left alone with him, what else did I think would happen?’
‘No, Papa, that was a good decision, he is a good man.’
Dupont grunted.
Mattaus was silent, didn’t flinch when her father insulted him. ‘I will look after your daughter, I promise. I love her.’
Dupont didn’t say anything. Just sat and shook his head, his face full of pain as he repeated, ‘Pregnant.’
Chapter Twenty-Four
1962
‘So that was why he sent me away,’ breathed Valerie. The cafe had grown quiet – they were two of the last to leave – yet still they sat, still they drank, as Madame Joubert, her mother’s oldest, dearest friend, told her everything her grandfather had tried desperately for her never to know. Because she owed it to her friend, and the love that had saved her own life.
‘Yes.’
‘Dupont blamed himself?’
‘Yes. I think he wanted to like Mattaus, and before he went to prison, he might have, but after spending several months in a Nazi-run jail, he came out hating them all even more than before. But he was not alone; a lot of them were like that. It was understandable – trust me, as a Jewish woman, I am the first to shout out my hatred of the Nazis, but some took it too far. Especially when it came to the children who had German fathers. People saw them as something that needed to be brought as much pain as they had endured. These children were ridiculed, stigmatised and ostracised. Even to this day. There are some who were never accepted by the rest of their families, who grew up with deep psychological scars as a result. Dupont is many things, but he loved his daughter, and he loved you – and when she died, he made the decision, however hard it must have been, to send you away so that you wouldn’t have to endure the prejudice. I think it’s what he wished he could have had the courage to do with Mireille – to send her to the countryside when the Germans invaded. I think with you he thought he would have a second chance to get it right, even if it broke his heart.’
When Valerie went home that night she thought of all that Madame Joubert had told her. She tried to make sense of her own prejudices, her own beliefs, and to match these somehow against those of her mother’s, and indeed her father’s. Could she understand how a woman in her mother’s situation would have fallen for a man like Mattaus Fredericks? Yes, was the honest answer. Like her mother, loyalty was a key part of her heart, her make-up, and she could well understand how, after risking his own life to save her friend’s, she could also have fallen for him. The revelation brought with it something new to the discovery of who her father was – it eased the wellspring of shame that had curled itself tight around her chest at finding out that he had been a Nazi soldier. She knew, however, that she couldn’t know all that was in his heart. She couldn’t be sure that on every score he was a good man, as Madame Joubert had told her there had been a time that he had believed in what the party stood for. But she supposed it was the person who came through in the end that mattered to her most – the kind of person who did what was right no matter the cost, even if that meant turning traitor to his country and its rules. In many ways he was, she realised, the person she needed most to understand.
Rain battered the window as she slipped inside the bedcovers – sleep would be a long time in coming that night, once again.
In the morning she found that Dupont had made her another cup of tea, and she smiled as she looked down at it. At some point, she thought, I am really going to have to teach him how to make the stuff properly.
He caught her looking at him a few times that morning as she thought of him, and the decision he’d made to send her away. She was beginning to understand, she realised, how he would have believed it was the right decision. Part of her felt something then that she hadn’t expected to feel for him all those months ago when she first arrived at the bookshop. It was pity.
But there was still a part of her that couldn’t believe what Madame Joubert had said… that he’d loved her. Perhaps he had in his own way, but wasn’t it also likely that he wanted to send her somewhere far away, so that he could be spared the pain of looking at her, of always being reminded of where she’d come from?
When she and Madame Joubert had left Les Deux Magots the night before, they had walked along the Seine, each in their own way not ready to leave just yet. Night had fallen and they could hear the soft call of birdsong, and the thrum of a guitar coming from one of the riverboats.
The lights along the riverbank cast golden ribbons along the water, and they reflected in Valerie’s green eyes as she turned to Madame Joubert, a frown between them. They were speaking about the day Valerie had been taken out of Paris, and Madame Joubert had shaken her head, her red curls glowing chestnut in the night air. ‘It was just after the war ended,’ insisted the older woman as Valerie frowned, protesting, ‘But I remember it during the war. I’m sure I do. The way we ran… the taste of our fear. Amélie picked me up, and on one of the streets there were all these soldiers. Amélie was afraid of them, I could tell. It had to still be during the war, when she came to take me with her.’
Madame Joubert snuggled into her thick woollen scarf as she sighed. ‘No. It was after the war – the soldiers you saw were our own. She feared for you because of them. It was a panicky time, and it wasn’t clear what was going to happen to the children of the people they had assembled for what was called “the purge”. The city wanted to rid itself of every last reminder of the Occupation. To punish all those people who had collaborated with the Germans – the women who had slept with them, the men who had done business with them. The hunger for retribution against these people who, in the hearts and minds of many of the Parisians who had to suffer while some of their own seemed to benefit, was great. Dupont worried what this might mean for
you – would these children be rounded up and taken away to some camp? Sent to an orphanage? Even if you weren’t taken away, the other reality that was sure to befall you growing up here was that you would never be seen as one of us, that you would always be treated as an outsider…’
Madame Joubert told her then the story of a young boy she had heard of who had killed himself the year he turned thirteen. His father had been German, and he was teased mercilessly every day, until one day he just couldn’t bear it any more and he threw himself off a bridge. Another young man went looking for his German family after the treatment he’d suffered as the child of one of these unfortunate matches. ‘I don’t know what it’s like on the other side – if the children of the allies were treated any better in Germany. If I have learnt anything about human nature during this time, I suspect not. But I can tell you that your grandfather believed that the war you had to face would be after the Occupation, and on the streets of Paris, as you tried and failed to justify your existence to people who were deeply wounded and angry that such a thing had ever been allowed to occur. That’s why he sent you to live with Amélie. He wanted to spare you the pain of ever feeling that you didn’t belong…’
‘Except that there were times I felt that way anyway. I always knew that I didn’t fit. That there was something that didn’t add up.’
Madame Joubert nodded. ‘I know.’
Valerie looked at Madame Joubert, and shook her head. ‘But it’s true – I was spared that hatred, that suffering. I felt like an outsider sometimes, but it wasn’t due to anyone’s cruelty. I’ve had a good life, filled with love, kindness, friendship.’
Madame Joubert’s shoulders started to shake at this, and Valerie realised that Dupont wasn’t the only one who would have been seeking absolution for the decision to send her to be raised by Amélie. She touched Madame Joubert’s shoulder.
‘I can see that I wouldn’t have had that here – it would have been a wedge between me and the world.’
Growing up, Amélie had been aunt and mother to her. She’d known love and kindness. She’d never been made to feel the way some of the other children like her had no doubt been made to feel.
Valerie suspected that her grandfather’s decision to give her away, and the reasons behind it, would take a lifetime to process. It was easy to say now, when one wasn’t at war and not subjected to its power to test you on every level, to put your will for survival above your ideals, what you would have done.
They had drifted off towards the block of apartments on the Rue des Oiseaux after midnight. The older woman’s arm was around her shoulders, and when they had said goodnight, Valerie felt for just a moment that she could see that girl, the woman who had been part of the resistance, fierce and loyal to a fault, a young Clotilde, as she slipped up the stairs to her apartment on the right.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The phone rang in the bookshop, and Valerie answered: ‘Gribouiller.’
In the background Dupont shouted, looking up from the accounts, a gnarled, cigarette-stained finger stabbing a page full of figures, a large calculator at his side, ‘If that is Timothe Babin, tell him from me that he is shameless to try to call you, and get you to do it in secret. I won’t do it. I will not order any more of that blasted Fleming’s books. I don’t care if there is to be a new film. Or if it will star that Scotsman. That, in my opinion, only makes it worse.’
‘Is that your grandfather screaming in the background?’ came Freddy’s voice.
Valerie grinned. She shoved a pencil behind her ear, and asked, ‘Define screaming?’
The line crackled slightly. ‘Um, they can hear it all the way in East Berlin, and they’ve said they’ve got enough problems, so they’ve asked me to tell him to turn it down.’
Valerie laughed. ‘What can I do for you, Mr Lea-Sparrow?’
‘We-ll…’ Which resulted in a rather dirty few minutes, and Valerie turning rather pink in her chair.
‘Fred-dy, people could be listening. When are you coming home?’
‘It might be sooner than you think…’
‘Really? How soon?’ she exclaimed, her slumped shoulders straightening.
‘Very.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Look up.’
She frowned, then looked up and yelped in glee. There he was. She made a mental note to check the payphone outside every time Freddy called from now on.
He laughed, and said into the mouthpiece, ‘I don’t think this will ever get old…’
But she didn’t hear him – she was already running across the street, dodging a passing car, which honked its hooter at her, a flurry of curse words following her as she ran into his arms.
When she raced back inside the shop a few minutes later to ask if she could take her lunch early, breathless and happy, her long blonde hair streaming behind her, Dupont just snorted and sent her off with the words: ‘Thank God, now at least I can stop making that horrible muck to get you to cheer up. Go – go.’
She left with a chuckle, taking her jacket with her, and together she and Freddy set off arm in arm for his apartment. They bought a bottle of wine on the way, as well as some fresh baguettes from the bakery on the corner, and some cheese that smelt so bad in his tiny bar fridge that later they would regret it, and had a picnic in bed after a more intimate greeting altogether.
‘I think I have corrupted you,’ Freddy said, smiling with one side of his face.
She laughed, her green eyes alight. ‘Amélie said that when we were just kids. I remember it exactly – it was, “that boy will bring you no end of trouble”. She was right, too. Lots of trouble.’ She giggled.
He grinned and shrugged a bare shoulder.
As they picked their way through their small feast, Valerie popping a small chunk of baguette in her mouth and chewing, she told him what Madame Joubert had revealed to her about her mother.
Freddy leant his dark tousled head against the headboard and took a drag of the cigarette he’d lit. He was unshaven, and the five o’clock stubble made him look older. ‘So they fell in love?’ he said. ‘Well, it’s understandable, I suppose, when you’re put through something like that – the fear she had with that officer stalking her, and this other man coming to her defence, the way he kept trying to help her… who wouldn’t, really?’
It was one of the things she’d come to love most about him, she realised: how fair he was. How he never saw things in black or white.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I was having a hard time with it – with her falling for him – even though I understand why it happened, even though he did seem to be good…’ She pulled a face. ‘I can’t help but wish that she hadn’t.’
He looked at her. ‘But then you wouldn’t be here, Val. Nope, sorry, but I’m kind of grateful that she fell into his bed. Nazi or not.’
She laughed. She wished she could see it the way he did, so without judgement. She knew it was something she would need to process, work her way through. Even she had her own prejudices, the result of the aftermath of the war, and this would mean unpicking these from the person who was her father, the man who had once been a Nazi, and the shame of knowing that part of her history, as a result of all that she’d learnt, was now on the ‘wrong’ side – had been responsible for some of the worst acts of humanity, however much of a good man her father seemed.
Chapter Twenty-Six
1963
Valerie found the diary by accident not long into the new year. She’d been thumbing through Dupont’s somewhat sticky collection of cookbooks on the kitchen shelf, when she saw a leather tip poking out between a book about Provençal dinners and another on French family classics. She pulled it out, sensing it misplacement, only to open the small leather-bound book and find herself staring at her mother’s neat, slanted handwriting. Her breath caught in her throat. There, recorded in her mother’s own hand, were her first moments in this world.
The day she arrived: 12 March 1942. Her weight: 3.5 kilograms.
But it was the first line that jumped out at her, making her close the book, her heart jackhammering in her chest.
Valerie Fredericks.
She put a hand on her chest, as she gasped in realisation. Her surname was German.
That afternoon, while she tidied up the shelves, her mind kept jolting at the new discovery, like a record that kept skipping. Fredericks. My surname is Fredericks. Her fingers shook, and she craved the feel of a cigarette between them, the release that it gave as she sucked the toxins deep into her lungs, drowning out the weight of all her thoughts.
Why had the discovery sent her reeling? she wondered. She had known that her mother had married him – wouldn’t it make sense that she had his surname? It did, but it had still come as a shock, just another one of those things she hadn’t known about who she was. Why couldn’t her aunt and uncle – Dupont, even – have just told her when she was little? Even if she could understand the decision to have her raised elsewhere, why did so much of her past need to be kept a secret from her?
Later that night, she went to Madame Joubert’s apartment. The older woman opened the door wearing a patterned blue kimono, her bright red curls striking against the fabric, a small frown between her eyes at having a visitor so late at night – but it cleared when she saw it was Valerie. ‘Chérie?’
Valerie showed her the diary. ‘I found this. It belonged to my mother. Can I come in?’
Madame Joubert’s eyes widened. ‘Of course, chérie. Are you all right?’
‘I’m not sure,’ said Valerie honestly.
Light was coming from a small lamp in the corner of the living room. Valerie was ushered to a seat on the green velvet sofa and offered a drink.
