The Girl in the Blue Beret

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  “We had the poux—I don’t … what is the word? In our hair—oh, you know what I mean. I won’t go into that.”

  “It’s all right,” he said.

  “But it was one of the good times!” she said. “On Sundays we helped each other pick out the poux from our hair. We found the greatest pleasure in this!” She smiled.

  “I’m running on, in all directions,” she said.

  They were now sitting side by side on a divan by the window. She was quiet, and he reached for her, holding her shoulders and resting his cheek against hers. She resumed.

  “Earlier at Ravensbrück the pregnant women weren’t allowed to keep their babies. The SS women, the baby-catchers, they were called, seized the newborns and drowned them by holding them upside down, their heads in a bucket—in front of the mothers. I didn’t see this. When I was there, they were allowed to keep the babies, but how could these babies survive? Some women saved their meager rations for them, or sometimes they got packages and shared the cans of milk. I knew of three babies kept hidden under the clothing of the mothers. They had no milk. One day I saw the book where the block leader listed the births in our block. And beside each name was the word Mort. But there were three names unmarked. I saw one of these babies, glimpsed it beneath a Polish woman’s rags. She was a slip of a girl, with no possible milk. Yet her baby survived as I survived with my mother, hunched under her wing.

  “That was the worst thing in the war—what the Nazis did to children.” She turned her gaze out the window. She whispered, “It takes a newborn baby a long time to drown.”

  She separated herself from him to study his stricken face. She offered an encouraging smile.

  “The day I lost my husband, almost five years ago, I was possessed with uncontrollable grief for perhaps one hour, until I recalled how wise and hard I had become. I could endure. I was afflicted with an odd sting of happiness then. I was so thankful that I had lived to have a husband and children.

  “At first, when the news came about Maurice’s accident, it was as though I were once again scrambling in the mud and the wet snow, clutching at roots, craving that awful soup. Oh, that dreadful soup girl! We called her la Vachère. The cow keeper. We were cows! She would spill soup in the snow and laugh while we scrambled to lap up the snow. And then, oh, the happiness when the Red Army arrived and found just a few of us, delirious, starving! Because the buildings had burned, we could not explain to them clearly that there had been five hundred of us, that many had died and the rest had been marched away to Ravensbrück. They had no idea what we meant by Ravensbrück.

  “There were nine of us at Koenigsberg with the Russians for about three weeks. Then they sent us on a two-day trip to a hospital in Poland. Two of the soldiers accompanied us in an uncovered camion to the train station. The landscape was ravaged, but we were happy to see that the Red Army had already routed the Germans along the way. We were arranged on some good bedding salvaged from the ruins of the German quarters, and we kept each other warm. My soul and spirit had been badly bruised. I had seen so many women die. I had seen some of my friends marched away, and I was certain they would not live. I did not see how any of them could survive the walk to Ravensbrück—eighty kilometers. Even as they left, the last straggling rows were holding each other up. I saw a Polish woman being dragged by her companions, who did not have the strength to lift her. I learned much later that a train had taken them part of the way.

  “If I had not connived to stay with my mother, I should have been on that march, since I could walk. But I could not leave her. Never.

  “At the end of the train journey, they put us in a charrette, a little wagon, and we arrived at a hospital in Poland. That was the most welcoming place I had ever seen. A group of women in nun’s dress appeared before us, and one of them, Sister Roza—she was so lovely! Our savior! The nurses there wept when they saw us. We held their hands in joy—even my mother, who managed smiles of gratitude to them. She could hardly raise her hand; she could not rise. I had fear that she would die during the journey. She was so weak, and she hardly had the strength to eat, even though we now had food. The dysentery had subsided, but with the typhus she had lost so much blood. Sister Roza bent over her with the most angelic smile. She stroked Maman’s brow and whispered gently to her, and I made her understand that this was my mother, all I had in the world. I held back my tears as this magnificent woman held her and, with the help of another nurse, gently lifted her onto a little rolling bed.

  “Maman and I had our own room. The most luxurious chalet at Grenoble would not have surpassed this little room. It was bright and warm and clean. There was warm water. There were towels. We could wash ourselves! There was a little desk with writing materials. Of all the things in the room, that little desk seemed the most civilizing! Possibly we could write letters, I thought wildly. Oh, would the war ever be over?

  “The Germans had been living in one wing of this hospital, and when one of them was sick, they called upon the nurses to help them. I thought Sister Roza must have witnessed so many incidents of cruelty that I wondered how close she came to surrendering her faith. The Polish people had seen so much suffering. When the Germans retreated, and our little band of skeletons arrived, she learned that the Nazi barbarity was even more widespread than she had thought. She threw herself into helping us.

  “She had fear that my mother would not survive, but she nursed her devotedly. She slept in the basement in a little cell. To have nothing during the war must have seemed natural to convent sisters. I did not see the sisters take much nourishment, but they always brought it to us. There were three sisters, a doctor, and two younger nurses, novices. Me, I had lost my faith, but with the example of Sister Roza I was tempted to try to retrieve it. Then I realized I had faith only in the individual, people like Sister Roza and so many courageous women at Koenigsberg—pulling the plow in the mud, sharing their food, sheltering each other. Some people could do this. Others, as you might expect, reduced themselves—I was going to say they became animals, but that is unfair to animals. Animals don’t share, unless it’s a mother animal with her young, but animals have a great dignity—a sense of self, I want to say. They do not betray their nature. They do not practice self-deceptions. Humans have a great capacity for the diabolical. Oh, Marshall, the Nazis invented so many unimaginable crimes. You see I have had time to think all this through!

  “We had to speak German there, but Sister Roza had some notions of French from her school days, and she had a worn Polish-French dictionary—a treasure!

  “ ‘Where is Ravensbrück?’ she wanted to know. ‘You had friends there? Are they there still?’

  “We could hardly explain. After Sister Roza said, ‘I have a brother in a labor camp and I have not heard from him in several months,’ we refrained from revealing the horrors of our camp. We wanted to erase it from our minds for her sake.

  “In April, Sister Maria rushed in with news that the Russians had the Germans in retreat from the Oder River.

  “ ‘It may be possible soon to write a letter,’ Sister Roza said.

  “Maman was rallying. Her cheeks had regained some color and were filling out. She weighed nothing. Sister Roza brought us clean rags to use for our menstruation.

  “ ‘We haven’t done this,’ I said. I stopped. We did not have our règles. None of us did. I did not want to tell Sister Roza a hundredth part of what had happened.

  “Sister Roza smiled as she tucked the rags into a cabinet. ‘For when you need them,’ she said.

  “And then one day I found a blotch of blood issue from me. It was only a small bit. I told Maman, and she rejoiced. I think she ate with better appetite then, and she was sitting up more easily. She still wasn’t walking.

  “I was increvable! If I had not been in fine health at the start and so young, perhaps I could not have lasted. I was so fortunate. I do not know why I was so lucky and others were not. I was quite ill, but the doctor there gave me a drug that helped. I think it must have been
penicillin, which was new then. The injections were very painful, but pain was nothing to me anymore. It was a miracle. In two weeks I was recovered from the typhus. I was gaining weight, and I was feeling almost rested. I would not have come through so quickly if I had not been determined to live for my mother. I could not bear the possibility that she would lose me. Of course I could not bear the possibility that I would lose her, and I think her principal feeling was that she wanted to live so that I would not be abandoned.

  “For a long while after we were back in Paris, we still shared the same bed. We always awoke in the night and clutched each other, and we would moan reassurances. Eventually it was my mother who pushed me to be independent again. At first I was uncertain, but she said, ‘Annette, we have been through this and it will always be there. I will always be there, in your heart, even after I’m gone. Just keep me there. You don’t have to remain a child. Go, go.’

  “That was the wisest thing she did for me. It is the truest mother love to trust her child to be free. I think the independence she forced on me restored me—more than anything else after our return. I felt that whatever happened I could manage. Anything.

  “Sister Roza was older than my mother. Maybe she has gone to her rest by now. She was a large woman, rather gaunt. I could tell that she might have filled out her frame during better times. But she was strong, and she could lift my mother. She had a kind face. The headdress she wore was flattering. She was pretty, I thought. Her skin was so white and soft. With her powerful hands, she massaged us, for the circulation. One of our companions, called Jacqueline, from Fresnes, had racking pains in her bones, like growing pains, and Sister Roza massaged her thin legs, sometimes in the middle of the night.

  “Then on a beautiful spring day the news came that the Russians had reached the heart of Berlin. Hitler had been defeated. Perhaps he was dead. We hoped he was dead. Even the nuns prayed that he was dead.

  “ ‘France! We will have France!’ we cried.

  “I held Maman and said, ‘Hitler is no more, Hitler is no more.’

  “She smiled and fell back peacefully on her bed. ‘A darkness has lifted from the world,’ Maman said.

  “ ‘Vive la France!’ I cried, the exuberant schoolgirl again. We cried and held each other, and then Sister Roza brought out a cake she had been saving. The occupants of the hospital gathered in a large room that had a piano—brought by the Germans, requisitioned from someone’s home. By then we had been joined by several refugees of varying states of debility. We were all improving, and most of us were able to circulate. They had rolling chairs for Maman and for two of the other women.

  “Vive la France! We made some decorations. We made a flag for Poland and one for France. The nuns sang hymns, their heads lifted to the heavens. One of us French could play the piano, and so the Frenchwomen burst into ‘La Marseillaise,’ with joie de vivre. We made the nuns weep with the sentiment of it. It was a joyous time! We even tried to dance. But of course you know it was terrible for the Polish people after the Russians came. But the nuns celebrated with us.

  “But since then, I have wondered many times about the old camp at Koenigsberg, which is now in East Germany. I ask myself, would anyone ever know what had happened there?”

  51.

  HE COULD STILL HEAR HER VOICE AS HE DROVE THE RENTED Citroën down small country roads. He meandered along the lay of the land, with no compass headings, no map check. He was flowing aimlessly through the countryside. He circled and wound through vineyards and villages. It was a soft, gray day.

  Not far from a military base, he parked on a side road while trios of fighters screamed overhead, mad birds against a gray sky. He stayed a long time and watched for more.

  Then, at a small café in a village twenty kilometers south of Angoulême, he studied the Michelin map of the Charentes and drank an express. He had been drinking a great deal of coffee. The strong European coffee agreed with him, sharpened him. The waiter, a small middle-aged man in horn-rimmed glasses, glanced his way.

  “C’est tout? Anything more, monsieur?”

  “Non, merci.”

  He had to think. He couldn’t think. In his mind, Annette was the young girl again. He saw the gentle outlines of her innocent face, her spirited teasing, her panache. The horrors she described had been inflicted on that young girl. As she related her sufferings, he became the young guy she had risked her life for. He had known so little then. There were only faint whispers, averted eyes. He had been ignorant. Maybe he had never learned anything truly important until these last few days.

  He was in the car again, driving.

  A girl in a summer dress digging sod in the snow, hacking out stumps, shivering with ragged, hungry women. The blasts of icy wind cut through them. They chopped through ice and slogged through mud, making a bed for an airstrip. Annette and her mother, balled together like a pair of socks tunneled into each other. Crowds of shriveled women like flocks of chickens scratching in dirt.

  Monique and her doll; Annette and her mother. Mother and child roulé en boule, the mother almost dead but refusing to die, the daughter refusing to abandon her mother. So many women packed together—filthy, debilitated women dragging one another on the Death March. The Russian soldiers offering a cow, in kindness.

  She hadn’t told him everything. She balked at some of her memories. She spoke of the “depravity,” as if one ugly word could sum it up, but she wouldn’t say more. He had to fill in the blanks. Rape? Mutilation? She mentioned the young women at Ravensbrück who were called “rabbits.” Nazi doctors carved up these women’s legs to study gangrene. She described the Walzkommando—a giant roller for smoothing roadbeds. Women who were being punished had to pull it until they collapsed. What she wouldn’t say about the colossal chimney behind the kitchen at Ravensbrück made him cringe. She dismissed that strange burnt odor greeting new arrivals. She had not told him the worst.

  He wanted to scream, hit, crush—something. His own past was splintered by her tale. It was falling into a new design. He wanted to see his long-dead mother again. He wanted to apologize to Loretta, to make up for all the slights and indiscretions, anything he had ever done wrong. He wanted to tell his children all his memories of the war, and all of Annette’s. His breathing was like the labored gasping of a rickety antique machine. He couldn’t fill his lungs. Highway markers danced in the periphery of his vision as if fractured by raindrops.

  A team of red-clad bicyclists passed him, rushing and melting together like a swarm of birds. He thought of bombers forming up. As an obtuse youth, he had crashed into a strange land. And thinking only of himself, he had fled the scene, alone.

  Annette.

  She had saved his precious hide. And her reward was the hell of Ravensbrück and Koenigsberg.

  He pulled over to the side of the road, his body shaking. He parked beside a vast vineyard. The grapevines—spindly, twisted trunks held by posts and wire supports—were disciplined like soldiers in straight rows. He examined the vines, the way their tendrils wrapped around the wires and even around themselves. Some of the tendrils waved in the air, seeking a hold.

  If Mary or Albert asked him how his summer in France was going, where would he begin?

  Starting up again, he was scarcely aware of the car or the road. Annette would meet him later at the train station in Angoulême, in her small blue Renault. He was returning the rental car.

  She had borne two children; she had grandchildren.

  She was beautiful.

  He writhed in sympathetic pain. The women, crowded and cold and starved.

  The sky was clearing, and clouds were drifting in from the Atlantic—white puffs, the kind of cloud that was so satisfying to see from above. An infinite, rolling field of white.

  AT THE TRAIN STATION, he sat in the car, the engine off. He listened to the whistle of an approaching train. It was her idea that he return the rental and use her car, but she hadn’t insisted.

  Her voice was still echoing in his mind—her fervor
in telling him things she had stored up for so long, the pitch of her voice rising as a memory overcame her. She trusted him enough to tell him more than she had ever told anyone else. It was a special honor, an obligation he couldn’t calculate.

  He thought about the nurses at the Polish hospital, and he pictured the piano that the Germans had stolen from someone’s home.

  52.

  MARSHALL HAD HESITATED ABOUT GIVING HER THE BLUE BERET. But after they returned from the train station, he fetched the berets from his bag upstairs, carrying them behind his back as he entered the kitchen, where she was snipping the ends from thin green beans.

  “Something for comic relief,” he said, handing her the blue beret.

  She stared at it for a moment, then laughed with pleasure. She wiped her hands on her apron and set the beret on her head, pulling it down to one side. He followed her into the sitting room, where there was a large mirror above a sideboard. She adjusted the beret to a jauntier angle.

  “Oh, if only I had had my beret at Koenigsberg! I had the red socks I was wearing when we were arrested. But soon they were thin and faded.”

  “I bought myself a beret too, like the one I had in ’44.” He slapped on his black one, and she reached up to position it for him.

  “That’s better,” she said, touching the back of her hand gently to his temple.

  “Julien Baudouin,” he said, saluting their images in the mirror. “Stonemason, from Blois. Or was I a bricklayer?”

  “I’d recognize you anywhere.”

  They stared into the mirror together and laughed at themselves.