The Girl in the Blue Beret

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  “I hope this isn’t inappropriate,” he said. “I heard that a fascist youth group wore blue berets. Can that be true?”

  “They were not significant,” she said, brushing away the idea. “And the blue beret was only my school hat.”

  “I remember in the Pyrenees, the Basques wore their berets laid flat on top of their heads,” he said.

  “That’s the Basque way. I think their beret must fly off.” She laughed and removed her beret. She set it on a chair and smiled up at him, maybe remembering the day she guided a young pilot out of the train station.

  He felt at ease with her. He wanted to hold her all day. But she awed him. What would she expect of him?

  She finished the green beans and led him out to sit on the terrace with the omnipresent Bernard, who seemed to stay closer to her since last evening. Marshall sat in a wicker chair, and she sat in a chaise longue with her feet up, her hands folded.

  “I have a proposal,” she said, her smile holding a hint of mischief. “For us.”

  “What?”

  “Our hike the other day was like an excursion for schoolgirls. We need something more vigorous!”

  “Where to?” He shaded his eyes from the sun’s glare.

  “A real hike. Across the Pyrenees to Spain!”

  He was flabbergasted.

  “Mon Dieu, Annette, why would I want to do that again?”

  “We could go together.”

  “The last place on earth I’d want to take you! It was torture.”

  “It would be different now. You had to sneak over at night on smugglers’ paths, while pursued by Germans!” Her hands were moving enthusiastically, like butterflies courting.

  “It was an adventure, bien sûr!”

  “Didn’t you tell me it was a ‘breeze’?” she asked teasingly.

  “I was being macho, I guess. You know—manly.”

  “Eh oui,” she said.

  “But why would we want to go there now?”

  She rose from her chair and leaned close to him, her hand on his shoulder. “My family sent so many boys over the mountains—the aviateurs. And we didn’t know how the crossing went for them.”

  “Oh. You want to go through that?”

  “Oh, it wouldn’t be the same thing—the trails are very good now—but it is the idea of going to that place.” She ruffled his hair. “We will search for some maps. It will be a breeze.”

  “Are you serious? Could you do it? Could I?”

  “Dédée de Jongh did it more than thirty times in the war. In the dark! She was young, to be sure, but we must not surrender to age. She followed the route with the roaring river to cross, but we can follow a different way. You know about Dédée, do you not?”

  “Yes, I do.” He recalled Nicolas telling him about the Belgian woman who organized one of the first escape lines for airmen. “Won’t we need a clandestine, a passeur—one of those mountain guides?” he joked.

  She laughed. “But we don’t have to be smuggled, Marshall! The trails are good now, and well marked. We can join a hiking group. And now is the best time to go. The snows are melted. People will be out on the trails. It will be merry!”

  She sat on his knee for a moment and hugged him, then jumped up and stood facing him. Her face glowed in the late-afternoon sunlight.

  “We could go to the national park,” she said. “We could even go through Andorra. Or we could take the easiest way, down below Perpignan along the Mediterranean. You see, I have studied this matter.”

  “Will there be Coke stands?” He laughed.

  She smiled, and in the bright light he could see tiny scars on her chin, faint little zigzags. They did not interrupt her loveliness.

  “I’m glad I bought those berets,” he said. “We’ll get cold at night.”

  “Ah, bien, I did not doubt your spirit of adventure. This will be a test. And thereafter we can say with pride, ‘We did that!’ ”

  “How long have you been thinking of this?”

  “About five minutes. When you mentioned the Basques.” Her smile dissolved. “But really, those mountains have been on my mind for years. I do much hiking, but I always avoided the high mountains. All the boys we sent across …” She frowned, then touched his shoulder affectionately. “But with you, I thought suddenly—now is the time. I would like to cross the mountains with you.”

  Marshall was pacing the length of the terrace now. The Pyrenees had troubled his sleep for years, dark images of rugged heights and rocky canyons, cold and unforgiving.

  “I would worry about you,” he said. “The Pyrenees are dangerous. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  “Pfft!” she said, flipping her fingers outward. “If I could build an airstrip with my bare hands, I could hike up a mountain!”

  “That was long ago,” he said.

  “And this is now,” she said.

  “AT YOUR AGE? You’ve got to be kidding, Dad.”

  “I’ve got new boots.”

  “Still, if the airlines won’t let you fly, then what does that say? I never knew you to be an athlete.”

  Albert had driven from Manhattan to the house in New Jersey and had arrived just as the telephone rang.

  “I’ve done nothing but walk since I got to France,” Marshall said, almost defensively.

  “What about altitude sickness?” Albert said. “Oh, sorry, I guess you’ve spent half your life at high altitudes.”

  “This is not Mount Everest,” Marshall said. “There are official hiking trails and rest stations along the way. And I won’t take the most strenuous crossing—not like I did in ’44.”

  Besides, he was going with a woman who was an experienced hiker, he told Albert.

  “Aha!”

  Genial banter moved along the edge of accusation. Marshall ignored it. Everything had to be reconsidered now, he thought. He remembered Albert and Mary in Halloween costumes. He was guiding them down the block, and the evening was growing dark. Mary cried because her witch hat kept falling off. Albert dropped his candy in the dirt and kicked it off the curb. Then, in no time at all, it seemed, they were in graduation gowns—Mary’s hat flying up like a Frisbee, Albert flapping bat wings—and then they were gone.

  Albert relayed telephone messages from two of the crew: Chick Cochran and Bobby Redburn. Cochran had heard from someone in Hootie Williams’s hometown who would be writing to Marshall in Paris.

  “That’s good,” Marshall said. All the crew was accounted for now.

  Hootie. He had thought he was free from the memory of Hootie, but Hootie kept coming back, like the soldier in the old story of Martin Guerre, an impostor who returned to a family that wasn’t his.

  IN THE WEEK of busy preparation for the hike, Annette told him nothing more about her deportation to the camps. The book seemed to be closed. “I’ve told you enough,” she said. “Now we can go forward.”

  Her resilience, her insistent good nature reasserted themselves. She seemed unburdened now. But he knew that she was willing herself to be strong. He could not look at her now without seeing, behind her mature grace, the thin girl working on the airstrip—hungry, latched to her mother, fighting snow and wind. Death all around her, bodies in the snow.

  Annette consulted guidebooks, located a hiking club, and reserved a hotel room at the edge of the mountain pass. By driving up to the pass, they could hike across the border in only a day. It would be simple, she said. He did not want to read the guidebooks. He did not want to go trekking across those mountains again, but he wanted to please her.

  He fed the animals, gathered the eggs, cleaned out the horse shed. There was more flower deadheading. Lost in the immediacy of the chores, he relaxed and was content. She would not let him help her snip the ends of green beans, because the task had to be done a certain way with the fingers, and his were too large and clumsy. He wondered at himself as he trundled a wheelbarrow of compost to a fenced-off pile. Back home, his aversion to yard work had been notorious.

  At meals, he m
arveled at the everyday calm of her life now, the ease and expertise of her hands in the kitchen. She fed him well. She was generous but not wasteful. She gave him the last stalk of asparagus. Carefully, she stored the leftovers. The bread would go to the chickens. At the end of each meal, she presented three cheeses—a wedge, a flat slice, and a small round—like treasures brought out on special occasions. Marshall was agog—gorging and lounging in a way he didn’t remember ever doing at home.

  Every day, to build up their stamina for hiking, they walked for several miles. They walked early before having coffee and again late in the day. On the terrace, Marshall read a Japrisot mystery novel from Annette’s study shelf. And he browsed through her histories. The workmen had finished the stone walk, and the courtyard was quiet, except for the bees in the ivy. Bernard began sitting at his feet when Annette was busy elsewhere. She arranged for her son and daughter to care for the animals and the garden while she was away. They did not ask suspicious questions, and Marshall suspected they would not be surprised even if their mother planned to learn deep-sea diving, or decided to go to Africa to nurse lepers.

  Annette promised to invite Marshall for a grand family Sunday after they returned from the mountains. It would be an important occasion, she cautioned. Her mother, impatient to see him again, would come from Saint Lô. He met the daughter, Anne, briefly, the day before he and Annette planned to drive toward the mountains. He had been apprehensive about meeting Anne, for fear he would see in her the young Annette who was sent in a cattle car to Ravensbrück. There was something familiar in her eyes, but Anne had a less delicate face, straighter hair. She seemed to be the new liberated woman, with her hair cut severely short, her manner brisk.

  “Maman, I plan to take Bernard home with me,” she said. “We will come every two days, and Georges will come the other days. Don’t worry. Everything will be just as you want.”

  “Bernard, you poor thing,” Annette said, bending to hug the dog. “You would insist on going with me over the mountains if you knew. But now Anne needs you.”

  “I’m going to give his face a trim,” Anne said, ruffling the dog’s fur. “Maman, he can hardly see through that curtain.”

  “Don’t tease him, Anne.”

  53.

  THEY WOULD HIKE INTO THE MOUNTAINS ON A WELL-DEFINED trail in the general region where Marshall had crossed the border in 1944, southwest of Oloron-Sainte-Marie. Marshall never knew the exact location of his night crossing.

  They drove straight south down from Bordeaux, through an expanse of farmland and villages with gray spires and red-tile roofs. Annette’s car needed brake shoes, so Marshall had rented another car, a small Citroën 2CV. It was like driving a snail, he thought.

  They were easy driving companions, and for long stretches they were quiet, only now and then murmuring over scenery or road conditions. She praised his driving, and he congratulated himself on his new alertness at the wheel. He was starting to appreciate the pace on the small French highways—the numerous stops and detours and villages, alternating with straight stretches of earnest speeding. When they stopped for a picnic, he contemplated the leisure of it, the pleasure of the food. She was teaching him to be French. He was Julien Baudouin, grown up.

  Marshall had not counted on plunging in so deeply. Getting together with Annette turned out to be both simpler and far more complicated than he had imagined. He faced something that demanded uncommon understanding and intimacy. He was inexperienced. With Loretta he had simply turned the marriage over to her. She ran the marriage, the home, the children, while he flew away.

  OLORON-SAINTE-MARIE was an old town lodged in the foothills of the Pyrenees. An ancient church was perched on a hill within the old ramparts. As they drove down the main street a second time, having missed the turn for the hotel, Marshall noted the tabac, the boucherie, the épicerie, the boulangerie-patisserie—the essentials of a French town. A group of schoolchildren was blocking the street, protected by two guides directing traffic. Marshall recalled a flock of sheep in a road once when he was driving with Loretta and the children in Scotland. He remembered his impatience then, but now he could wait.

  They would start their hike in two days. It would be fun, not a hardship, she insisted, as they climbed to their room on the third floor of the small hotel. The wooden steps were scarred and creaky.

  “We should have had the fourth floor,” she said. “For practice. We’re mountain climbers.”

  “We can trot up and down the stairs a few times,” he suggested.

  “Oh, I forgot my little kit behind the seat,” she said when they reached the room. “It has my sewing thread, and I see you have a loose button.”

  “I’ll get it.”

  “We’ll both go. Trot, trot.”

  FROM THE WINDOW of their room they could see past the town to green forests, golden farm fields, scattered goats. The line of mountains beyond was obscured by clouds.

  “I like this view,” she said. “Maurice and I came here to Oloron-Sainte-Marie for a week one summer. I remember it was so restful.”

  Maurice had been a prisoner of war in Germany. Early in their marriage, she said, they had vowed not to dwell on the ordeal of their imprisonment. Together, they forged a life, pushing the past into oblivion.

  “It was like after the horror movie ends and the lights come on. We French have a way of going on; the past is past. There had to be a forgiveness. Maurice and I, we never told each other the whole truth. My feeling is that there was more. He may have thought the same of me. Maybe we should have spoken more. But now I am telling you.”

  “He didn’t get to know a side of you that I knew—the schoolgirl with the leather book satchel.”

  “That time was ours,” she said, busying herself with his loose button. “That is what you have given me again. And with you it is bearable.”

  In a few minutes she came to him at the window, her thread extended between the shirt in her left hand and the needle in her right.

  “I need more light,” she said.

  She finished the button decisively, then sat down on the bed and kicked off her shoes. She sat cross-legged against the pillows and tugged at her bare feet. She was like a young gymnast, he thought.

  “You’re staring at me,” she said.

  “Every movement you make is extraordinary,” he said. “Annette, how did you manage to come out of the camp with your good nature intact?”

  She brought her knees up and hugged them.

  “At Koenigsberg many women kept their spirits alive by making things, writing, sewing little things, dolls. It was all clandestine, of course, but as long as we could express ourselves with our hands, we still knew we were women.”

  “You were very strong.”

  She shrugged. “I was always the optimist,” she said, adjusting the pillow behind her. “Speak about your wife. Was she pretty? Were you proud of her?”

  To his surprise, he was glad to talk about Loretta. Framing her in a way that brought her to life for Annette helped him to see her more clearly himself. It occurred to him that his marriage had been similar to Annette’s—two people agreeing not to reveal the worst of themselves, being strong for each other. He was glad to have this thought.

  “I couldn’t have had with my wife what I have with you. She could never have understood. I feel bad about that.”

  “You will feel guilt over your wife for a long time,” she said. “That is most ordinary—even when there is no reason.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “Grandchildren,” Annette said. “It is very sad to me, Marshall, that you have no grandchildren.”

  LATER, THEY WALKED OUTSIDE. They found a long stairway up to a high promenade leading to the medieval church at the top of the hill. From the promenade they could see the mountains, a natural fortress rearing along the border between France and Spain. Marshall thought he could see snow but decided it was only the glitter of the afternoon light.

  “It is beautiful,” she said.r />
  “Yes, from a distance.” He shaded his eyes and stared toward Spain.

  “Are you sure you want to go?” she asked him.

  “I’m willing to go—with you.”

  “But do you want to go?”

  No, he didn’t, but he didn’t say so. He just pointed and said, “It is beautiful.”

  54.

  MARSHALL WAS BECOMING ACCUSTOMED TO WINE IN THE evening. He liked red wine better than white. Annette had taken a brief nap, and she seemed refreshed, quick-witted, and positive. Her throat was soft, her voice a murmur punctuated with sharp little pings of enthusiasm.

  They were drinking aperitifs at a small table in a faintly lighted corner of the hotel terrace. They had ordered their dinner, and she had selected the wine. A thick hedge sheltered them from the side street, and they had a view of the waning moon over the dark, silhouetted hillside to the south. Specters of the mountains lay in the back of his mind.

  “Tell me more about Robert,” he said. The abruptness of his question surprised him, and he regretted asking when he saw the pain on her face.

  “I can’t help wondering,” he said apologetically. “He is such a grand figure in my imagination.”

  “Robert. Robert. Robert.” Her hands flew up as if to hold a headache. “He is such a trouble to me.”

  “To everyone, it seems,” he said.

  “I knew the real Robert,” she said. “Your Caroline may never understand this history, but I know it well.”

  “Maybe she should hear it from you.”

  Annette sipped her drink. She said, “One of his other daughters came to me once, pleading for information about him. She passed the night with me. She had come on the train from Paris, and we stayed up until late. She was troubled because she had seen him in the hospital. I did not know how I could help her. I was trembling. I could not visit the past for so long.”

  “Can you speak of him now?”

  She nodded slightly. “You may remember him enough to know that he was gentil, and sincere, and passionate about his work for the Bourgogne.”