The Girl in the Blue Beret

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  She spoke slowly, her face pale in the candlelight.

  “I told you that Robert hid at our apartment once because the French police had arrested him on his way back from Perpignan. They were suspicious of his papers, but they let him get away. We were afraid someone had followed him, but he assured us that he had taken several Métro trains, crisscrossing the city, and he had walked a random route before arriving at Saint-Mandé. He was hungry and frightened.

  “But Robert was a bold person. He had a tendency to court danger, even though his emotions were in turmoil. On an earlier occasion, a terrible thing happened that haunted him dreadfully. He had escorted a group of aviateurs to Perpignan, and after they were transferred to the local convoyeur, he went on a mission to set up a new safe house in a village outside Perpignan—one of those hilltop villages, very remote. Apparently the Germans were not bothering themselves with that town. The family—a man and woman and their three children—had very modest means, but they were eager to shelter our aviateurs. Their house was conveniently set near the bottom of the hill, away from the street. Robert was satisfied, and he left to meet his ride on the main road. As he made his way in the darkness, he heard a foreign vehicle approaching. He jumped back from the road into a bank of bushes, and he wasn’t seen, but he could identify the car—a grand chauffeur-driven Horch touring car. Mon Dieu, it was likely the Gestapo. Robert saw the auto proceed into the village, and in a while he heard loud noises. He heard gunshots. He reached the main road, and in moments an old Citroën appeared, his ride to the train station at Perpignan.

  “Robert didn’t know until some time later that the Gestapo had shot the family that night—the mother, the father, and the three children. He didn’t know why.”

  “The Nazis didn’t always need an excuse,” Marshall said.

  “Someone, probably a resident in the village, had denounced the man. The family must have resisted arrest. I don’t know the whole story.”

  “For the Nazis, it might have been random,” Marshall said. “Or something to do that evening.”

  “Bien sûr. And I ask you, what kind of neighbor would willingly see his neighbors killed? How could such a person live with himself? Did he even think of the children? For Robert, the torment was all-consuming. He had been with that family only five minutes before.”

  “If I thought a massacre like that was my fault … I’d never get over it,” Marshall said. “Imagine—an entire family.”

  “It was not Robert’s fault. He learned later that the man had been involved with some other project of the Résistance.”

  “But wasn’t the Bourgogne exposed then?” Marshall asked.

  “No. Robert was confident that he had covered his own tracks because he had given no names. Oh, I don’t know.” She passed her hand over her head. “But he was ravaged by the memory of that family in that village! And he did not even see the reality. It was in his imagination. I remember how he prayed and prayed over that. ‘Why?’ he kept asking. There was a certain fragility in Robert, although he took chances. As long as he was successful in his projects, he had confidence, but when something bad happened, I think he crumpled in his emotions.”

  Annette paused, and Marshall reached for her hands, but she moved them away.

  “What was it about Robert?” he asked. “What drove him?”

  “His religion. Both good and bad, it was his religion.” Her sigh seemed to take an enormous space on the terrace.

  “His parents wanted him to be a priest, but he had self-doubts. I think he looked up to our priest, the abbé at l’église de Saint-Roch, Father Jean, so much that he could not imagine himself in so lofty a spiritual position. Father Jean was very gentle with Robert. He desired to see him become a priest, but Robert feared a hollowness. He felt unworthy.

  “Robert’s parents had said, ‘Go to the seminary! You’ll make a priest!’ ”

  Annette laughed. “I cannot imagine Robert as a priest. He was devout, yet he was so worldly! He liked to draw and go to the cinema. He liked to draw pictures of women. He showed me pictures of nude women he drew in art class! Should I have gotten mixed up with him? I ask myself. Maybe he wasn’t so good for me.

  “He confessed to Father Jean his doubts about the vow of celibacy. He said, ‘When I desire something, my reason is attacked!’ He emphasized his fantasies of women! But Father Jean had a solution for him, something for Robert to do so that he could serve usefully.

  “Father Jean had recruited a group of students from the Lycée Henri-IV, near the Sorbonne, some khâgneux—students who were preparing for higher learning. They were desperate to avoid the work-service in Germany and they were filled with anger. That was such a difficult situation for many young men. Robert’s father wanted to send him to hide with an uncle in Lyon, but Robert did not want to hide. He wanted to be active.

  “The abbé sent him with those students to the Bourgogne network, so that’s how Robert began to escort aviateurs.

  “When he first joined the Bourgogne, his parents did not ask questions, but they allowed him to have supplies from their épicerie to help people like my family who were trying to feed a great many very large Americans!”

  She paused and smiled at Marshall as the waiter poured the wine.

  She went on. “Father Jean was an extraordinary man. Not many priests would take such risks. Priests were such likely suspects. They knew the secrets of the confessional! But even though the Germans were watching them, there were a few courageous priests.”

  “Was it because the Germans had their eye on your priest that you were arrested?” Marshall asked.

  “Oh, no, Father Jean came to warn us. He had already warned my father at his office. Papa rushed home because he could not bear to stay away while we were in danger. Robert was there too. Our fear caused us to cluster instead of scatter. Of course that was a great mistake, but to the last moment we could not truly conceive the danger that was befalling us. How could we grasp that our world—everything we knew—was ending?”

  She sipped her wine. “We were betrayed by someone who gossiped—a waiter at a café. He knew us and he made a careless remark to the wrong person. You never knew whom you could trust. The collabos were despicable!” She quavered. “There’s nothing more to be said about that.” She paused and drank from her glass. “Father Jean had lovely brown eyes and a ringing voice like the church bells. I can hear it now. When I go along the rue Saint-Honoré, I stop at the church where he was abbé, but there is no remembrance of him there, nothing on the walls. I notice that, and I wonder if Robert would be better if Father Jean had survived.”

  She was quiet then, as though she were finished.

  Marshall tried to pull his thoughts together. He said, “I hadn’t realized how precarious the Bourgogne network was, how much it depended on trust.”

  “Yes, of course. You knew this.”

  “I never really thought about it.”

  “It was not necessary for you to know our difficulties or the real dangers you faced. There were Résistance agents arrested right here in Oloron-Sainte-Marie in the spring of 1944, when you crossed the mountains. But the Bourgogne was very successful, very tightly organized.”

  Marshall asked, “The guy who ran the thing—did you know him?”

  “Georges Broussine—yes. In fact we knew him, and the abbé, but we were not supposed to know anyone else. Georges had a genius for building a network of trust. When the Comète line was infiltrated, the Bourgogne had to take over, and that is why you had to wait so long in Paris. There were so many pilots waiting it was hard to find enough safe houses for them.” She smiled and shook her head. “Today Georges is reserved—perhaps too much so. Few knew of him then, and few know now what he did in the war. He trained in London with the Free French, you know. And he parachuted into France with radio equipment to start the Bourgogne. He made many escapades!”

  Marshall wanted to ask if she had named her son after Broussine, but the waiter interrupted then, and after some ex
changes over a con-fit of some kind, she resumed.

  “When my mother and I returned from Poland, we were anxious to find Robert. Why did he not search for us? As soon as Maman felt well enough, she went to see him. I did not go. I did not know what I would say to him, and I sensed that he would feel the same toward me. We were both in a state of shock, I believe, and each of us in our own way had retreated. My mother had at Koenigsberg exhausted herself in her protection of me, and when she was so sick I had exhausted myself in my care for her. ‘Why does he not come to see us?’ she would say, agitated. He would not even speak to us on the telephone.

  “Anyway, she was strong enough of spirit to go to see him first. She returned in tears. ‘He used to call me tante,’ she said. ‘They have destroyed him.’ He told her a little about Papa, only a little. Robert was apologetic and tormented with guilt. He had the guilt to be the survivor.

  “Robert said to Maman, ‘The avis, the posters on the streets, promised to shoot the men who aided the Allies. Why didn’t they just shoot us upon arrest? It would have been better.’

  “Robert told her he had been tortured at the rue des Saussaies in Paris before he was sent to Buchenwald. Fragile though he was, he would endure torture rather than reveal any of the safe houses or betray anyone in the network. He wouldn’t tell Maman what the Gestapo did to him, but I knew that they beat their prisoners with a whip made of woven rattan. The heavy stone walls muffled the sounds. I wasn’t tortured when I was there, but I know about the instruments of torture. On the fifth floor where they made the interrogations, there was a bathtub like a coffin, with a lid.”

  She hid her face in her hands for a moment, then went on. “Maman was terrified that I might be tortured, and I was terrified that she would be, but we knew so little. We knew not to betray Robert or the priest or Papa.”

  “Or Broussine,” Marshall said.

  “Bien sûr.” She lowered her voice.

  “After Maman’s visit, I went to see Robert myself. His mother allowed me in, but she regarded me up and down with disapproval. I was still a student, and my clothes were modest. I was glad Madame Lebeau survived the war with her dignity intact, but I felt right away that she was not good for Robert. Robert appeared in loose garments, not what one would wear on the street, but I did not think he was an invalid. He was pale—and shockingly thin.

  “ ‘Can you tell me anything?’ I asked him, after we made some confused greetings. We were both ashamed and filled with pain. I was happy his mother was not in the room.

  “He shook his head.

  “ ‘Was my father with you?’

  “He gazed at his feet. ‘I lost him,’ he mumbled. ‘I did not see the end.’

  “ ‘Robert,’ I said. ‘Look at me. Remember what we shared.’

  “He turned his head away. I saw the drawings he was making and wondered what his mother thought. I tried not to look at them. There was one that was lurid, and grotesque, and horrible, but also erotic. It was a nightmare. I did not have to ask more. Robert lifted his sleeve and showed me the small black number tattooed on his arm. I put my hand on it and squeezed his arm. I laid my head on his chest.

  “ ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I have nothing.’

  “That’s what I remember, ‘I have nothing.’ He seemed to mean, ‘I am nothing and so I have nothing for you.’ I remember that it seemed not a rejection of me but a rejection of himself. It broke my heart.”

  Annette looked away, toward the hedge, and cleared her throat.

  “I saw him again at his parents’ épicerie several months later. We sat and talked in the back room. Robert was not in full health, and his spirit remained low. He was drawing in a sketchbook, and I could see that he was drawing more frightful images like the shadows of hell. His mother interrupted us. ‘Robert is going to take over the épicerie very soon,’ she said with pride.

  “ ‘I will sell rutabagas,’ Robert said.

  “ ‘No, you will never sell rutabagas!’ his mother said. ‘No one in France will ever eat a rutabaga again.’

  “He was indifferent. He bent over his sketchbook.

  “ ‘Rutabagas are for pigs!’ his mother said with scorn. ‘Rutabagas tear out the insides.’ She clenched her abdomen and said she still had trouble.

  “Robert had a half smile playing on his face. ‘I am useless,’ he said to me.

  “ ‘Robert is going to marry Hortense,’ his mother said. ‘Hortense is the daughter of Monsieur “the Hat King.” He has his shop on the rue de Vaugirard. The most chic chapeaux!’

  “Robert grunted, as if it did not matter to him whether he be married or not. Or with whom. I did not see how he could marry with anyone, in his bad state of mind. But his mother insisted on the marriage with mademoiselle the daughter of the Hat King. Oh, how his mother complained about the rutabagas she had to endure in the war! But I know she managed to eat well; it was at the camps that the rutabaga reigned supreme. It was her son who was entitled to denigrate the rutabaga.”

  Annette’s elaborate gestures as she mocked Robert’s mother would have amused Marshall, but he saw that for Annette the scene was present and alive in her imagination.

  She continued. “At the insistence of his mother, I have no doubt, he married this Hortense and proceeded to reproduce like a rabbit! The poor wife—all those children, one after the other, and at the same time Robert fathered an equal number with the mistress! Just think. If he couldn’t be a priest, was he working overtime, such to say, in his secular operation?”

  Annette did not laugh at her bitter witticism. Her head sank slightly, and her voice lowered.

  “About ten years after the war, I met a man who knew Robert at Buchenwald. I met him at the school where I was training apprentice teachers. Philippe and I had a long talk. He said he knew Robert well, but he did not remember the priest or my father. ‘Oh, Annette,’ he said, when we had gotten to know each other, ‘Robert was the most admired young man in the block. He was thoughtful of everyone. He gave up his food. He wrote little passages of scripture and sent them around for people to share. Uplifting quotations. He helped everyone through.’

  “I could hardly believe this to be true. I thought about Philippe’s words for a long while.”

  “You thought perhaps Philippe had the wrong guy?” Marshall asked.

  “I wondered. But then I thought perhaps it was as if Robert had become the priest he hadn’t believed he could be. This is how I interpreted Philippe’s words. This was how Robert survived, I decided. He sacrificed, and the act of sacrifice filled him with strength.”

  “And then when he came back, he collapsed?”

  She nodded. “He may have believed that my father and the abbé had sacrificed themselves for him at the camp. That would have given him guilt. But it was normal for Father Jean to offer spiritual comfort, and he would have given Robert his food. Many of the older ones gave their food to the young ones. I know this was so. Father Jean would have done this. My father would have also. In fact, my father’s heart was not strong, and he would have not lived anyway under those circumstances. It was normal for the old to help the young.”

  “Did you see Robert again?” Marshall asked.

  “I kept in touch with him a little over the years. Eventually, he was able to tell me about my father.”

  She bent her head for a moment. “I can’t.… There’s nothing to say.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “From time to time I went to the épicerie. Sometimes Robert’s wife was there, and she always seemed tired. She wore an apron—and no hat! She certainly didn’t impress one as the chic and privileged daughter of Monsieur the Hat King.”

  “Do you know where Robert is now?” Marshall asked. “Caroline seemed to think he was in a mental hospital.”

  “He spent some time in an institution, it is true. But it was a sanatorium, not a psychiatric hospital. About ten years ago he disappeared for a year, and his family was ready to consider him dead. But then he returned. And since then
he has had the tendency to disappear for long periods. It is a good thing he provided that épicerie in Saint-Mandé to this Caroline. I do not know why he gave it to her and not to one of the sons, a legitimate one. But Robert always had some kind of obscure reasoning in the back of his mind.” She sighed. “Or do I know him at all?”

  The waiter brought their food then. Annette straightened her back, looked directly at Marshall, and smiled. “I’ve talked too much!” she said. “Let us enjoy our dinner.”

  55.

  UPSTAIRS IN THEIR ROOM, THEY STOOD BY THE WINDOW LOOKING at the moonlit street. Marshall was not sleepy, and he anticipated that the moonlight, if not thoughts of Robert Lebeau, would keep him awake. Annette seemed wide awake too.

  “Robert always worked hard,” she said. “He worked intently on anything he did. His gentillesse, his sensitive character—his sensibility was perhaps his weakness. He couldn’t achieve a balance with the torment. Maybe he couldn’t refuse it as I did.”

  Annette rubbed the fabric of the curtain between her fingers, as if to feel the essence of the material. She said, “No one ever knew how I loved him, except Maman. She knew everything. I loved his hair, and the quiver in his upper lip when he smiled.”

  She turned away from the window. The light in the room was dim, and her small frame seemed to fade into the shadows.

  “I believe his disappearances are his way of regathering his strength,” she said. “I remember that when I used to go out with him to meet a group of aviateurs at the train, or to escort some of them to a safe house somewhere, if we passed a church and we had time, Robert would always go inside. It was a way of focusing his will, reconstituting himself. It was humble; he was a servant. Maybe his disappearances are periods of retreat, another way of being like the priest he couldn’t be.

  “I believed in the church too, before the war, but it left me. Perhaps it left Robert also. I often wonder where he is. Sometimes I can imagine him in one of the spots that we went, our own little bowers, or escape places when we went out on our missions.”