by Paul Watkins
When America entered the war in December 1941, I was surprised at how little I felt. The event should perhaps have simplified my thoughts about the violence that was going on around me. It should have swept from my mind all doubts about the outcome of the conflict. But it didn’t. Maybe I had begun to believe what was written in that fake identity card which Tombeau had given to me—that I was no longer American. But it wasn’t as simple as that. I was caught up, as many people were, in the small details of life from day to day. I couldn’t stand back far enough to see the bigger picture.
Later on, when Germans were shot on train platforms or knifed while they were taking a piss in some restaurant urinal or beaten over the head and thrown in the river, the Germans did what they always did—rounded up hundreds of people, who were then tortured by the Milice or the Gestapo in chambers beneath the Rue des Saussaies. Even when the Resistance blew up the German-language bookshop on the Place de la Sorbonne, and the street was filled with glass and smoke and thousands of pages of torn-apart books, these efforts seemed hopeless to me. I had been dealing with the German authorities for several years now. I knew that they would pay back every strike against them with such efficient heavy-handedness that they would make the original act of violence look pathetically small. They would do this until not one Frenchman was left alive in France. They would not quit, if only to avoid the shame of quitting.
* * *
THAT ALL CHANGED IN early February 1943, with the fall of Stalingrad. The German army had been cut off and over one hundred thousand troops surrendered. This had been the Sixth Army, the same one that marched in a victory parade down the Champs-Elysées after the fall of France and the same one to which Behr was to have been transferred. At Christmastime, there had been a broadcast from troops in all the various places where the Germans were fighting, including Stalingrad. I remembered that part of the broadcast, and now that I was speaking a little German, I even understood what they were saying.
“Attention. Attention,” said the radio announcer. “I am calling Stalingrad.”
“This is Stalingrad,” came the scratchy reply. “The Front on the Volga.”
Afterwards, I heard rumors that the broadcast had been faked, and that the last German messages out of Stalingrad had ceased a week before. While the fake broadcast had claimed a victory, stories circulated across the whisper-dampened tabletops of the Dimitri that Germans were being killed in Stalingrad at the rate of one every seven seconds.
For the first time, people began to speak seriously of the Germans losing the war.
The acts of sabotage that took place all around Paris had not convinced me. But Stalingrad did. The whole unimaginable slaughter of it made even the German reprisals against the French Resistance seem like nothing. I understood, finally, that they could be defeated. That they would be. From now on, it was only a matter of time.
I started to notice a change in the appearance of the German soldiers in Paris, particularly among the lower ranks. Most of them no longer wore the heavy jackboots. Instead, they had ankleboots now, and these were often made of rough and mottled leather. They tucked their trouser legs into canvas gaiters. The clothing changed, too. You could tell that the quality of wool was going down. Particularly in bright sunlight, the dyeing of their field gray wool tunics seemed patchy, as if the wool had been recycled. I noticed a lot more young-looking soldiers, and a lot more older ones, too. But maybe none of that mattered, because they were still carrying the same Mauser rifles and the same Schmeisser burp guns, and the officers still had the same pistol holsters on their belts.
For us, the greatest change of all was that the market for trade in modernist paintings had begun to dry up. Apparently, Hitler himself had heard about collections of unapproved art being compiled by high-ranking German army officials, such as Foreign Minister Ribbentrop. The existence of abstract, constructionist and Expressionist works had been tolerated until now because it was assumed that they were only being used as trade items. But in late July 1943, as a response to the collecting, the SS took a number of paintings by Miró, Ernst, Léger, Picabia and Klee, among others, and burned them in the garden of the Jeu de Paume.
Business tailed off sharply. Tombeau urged us to sell paintings to Dietrich for gold bullion. He said the Resistance needed the money. But Pankratov and I refused, despite Fleury’s reasoning that it was time we started looking out for ourselves a little. I told Tombeau I wasn’t taking these kinds of risks for gold. With Pankratov supporting me, Tombeau and Fleury had no choice but to agree.
I used the free time to do some of my own pieces, the first I’d made in years. I did a sketch of Fleury one morning as he was sitting in his chair at the warehouse, reading the Sunday paper by the light of a candle.
Fleury didn’t care for sitting still. “I didn’t realize this was so difficult,” he said.
“It’s just difficult for you,” I told him.
I did a drawing of the candy-striped German sentry box at the Quai d’Orsay. I drew the line of vélo-taxis outside Les Halles. There were hardly any motorized taxis now. Instead, they were small, two-wheeled carriages pulled along by bicyclists. I did a series of drawings of German soldiers relaxing in the Tuileries. The one I liked best was of a general who had fallen asleep on a bench, while his deputy stood by, shading the man with an umbrella. The deputy grinned at me as I made the sketch, knowing how silly he looked with that umbrella. It felt good to be working for myself again, even just to be staring at the canvas, the way I often did before I began a painting, knowing that the painting would come from me, not cribbed from the mind of a stranger.
* * *
IN THE MIDDLE OF the night, I heard the car brakes squeak again. I knew from the sound that the car had stopped right outside our building.
I went to the window and had to lean out dangerously far to see the car and the two men who banged on the door until Madame La Roche came to open it.
At that moment, I knew that everyone on the Rue Descalzi was awake and holding their breath. Without thinking, I put on my clothes and my shoes. I fetched my coat from the peg behind the door and then I sat on my bed, hands sweating. It was easier than lying down and trying to pretend they weren’t coming for me.
I heard the whirring of the elevator. Heard it stop. Start again. The men bundled someone out into their car.
I put my hands to my face and felt the sting of salty liquid on my cheeks. “Oh, my God,” I said to myself. “Oh, that was close.” I got off the bed, my knees gone shaky, and hung up my coat on the peg.
That was when I heard the elevator start again.
I stayed frozen by the door, waiting for the machine to stop, but it kept going, right up to my floor. I felt bile splash into my throat as the accordion door creaked open. I saw the shadows of the men in a gap between my door and the floorboards. There was some muttering and then a knock on my door.
I lifted my coat off the peg. The weight of it was suddenly almost too much for me. I didn’t make them knock twice. I opened the door, and saw the two men in knee-length leather coats, one black, one brown. Under their coats they wore drab gray civilian suits. The man in the black coat held out his hand and in the palm was a bronze oval disc, on which were the words Staatliche Kriminalpolizei. Under the words was a serial number. They didn’t seem surprised to find me already dressed.
“You have thirty seconds to be ready,” said the man in the brown coat. In his hand, he carried a thing like a small looped pair of tongs.
“I don’t need thirty seconds,” I said, and stepped out into the hall.
They didn’t speak to me as we rode down to the level of the street. As we slid from floor to floor, I thought about the others in their rooms and the relief they must be feeling that they were left alone. This was the first time in my life that I got so scared I had to stop myself from throwing up.
I had forgotten about the other person. Under the circumstances, I was not surprised to find Fleury waiting in the backseat, while the driver of the
car stood outside, in his shirtsleeves, smoking a cigarette. A gun in a shoulder holster was bunched under his armpit. There was nothing to say. We had both lived through this nightmare so many times in our heads that both of us now felt locked inside the same bad dream.
The man in the brown coat sat between me and Fleury. The man in black sat in the front with the driver. We set off through the empty streets. The headlights of the car had been hooded so that the beams were reduced to horizontal slits, appearing solid in the misty air.
The man who sat between Fleury and me still held the strange pair of tongs.
“What?” I asked, but then my tongue got stuck to the roof of my mouth and I had to start again. “What is that?”
“Hold out your hand,” he said.
I did.
He clamped the tongs onto my wrist. Then he turned his fist slightly.
Pain shot up my arm and halfway down my back. I realized he could have broken my wrist with hardly any pressure at all.
We pulled up outside 54 Avenue d’Iéna.
“We are friends of Mr. Dietrich,” said Fleury, out of breath with worry, but still trying to cram some measure of authority into his voice.
“Apparently not any more,” said the man who sat between us.
We were brought up the white steps, past two guards in black uniforms with submachine guns. I saw the SS lightning bolts on their collars. We went inside. There was a large foyer with a desk on which were three telephones. At the desk sat Grimm, staring at the phones as if daring them to ring. We were made to sign our names in a book. Then Fleury and I were led toward a staircase that ran up the right side of the wall and curved at the top. Before we reached it, however, a door was opened and we were ushered down a narrow stone staircase, which spiraled into the earth, like the path of all my nightmares, trodden down with repetition.
At the bottom of the stairs was another door, painted cream color and made of steel. It was opened and we were led into a room with a brick red linoleum floor and low ceilings, from which hung very strong unshielded lightbulbs, as well as a series of iron railings that were suspended horizontally about a foot below the level of the ceiling. The walls were dull white and made of a substance like pasteboard. The place smelled of disinfectant. In the middle of the room stood Dietrich, and behind him, as if trying to hide, was Touchard. Touchard was holding the first original piece of work we had given to Dietrich as an exchange. It was the drawing of the kneeling angel by Gianfrancesco Penni.
I realized that we were in the torture chamber. I’d heard so many rumors about this place that I had begun to wonder if it really did exist. I was surprised at the bareness of it. At how clean it appeared to be, and at the way these pasty walls seemed to drink the sound out of our voices.
Fleury was shaking. He looked as if he might collapse. His head hung down, as if he lacked the strength to raise it.
Touchard peered out from behind Dietrich’s broad shoulders. He looked as frightened as we must have.
Dietrich stepped to one side. “Tell them,” he ordered.
Touchard was left standing with the Penni drawing, holding it against his chest as if to use it as a shield. “It’s a fake,” he said. He glanced at Fleury. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered. “We just found out.”
Fleury raised his head sharply. “That’s an original!” He held out his hand, like a man introducing a distinguished guest who has just entered a room. “That is a Gianfrancesco Penni.”
“Fake!” bellowed Dietrich and his shout left no echo in the room. “What the hell kind of game do you think you’re playing?” He began to pace up and down in front of us, hands knotted into fists at his side. “Are you trying to make me look foolish? Is that it?”
“Of course not,” said Fleury.
“This is your doing,” continued Dietrich, twisting his head, almost cobralike, to glare into Fleury’s eyes. “This is your fault.” Now Dietrich stepped over to me.
I had just noticed the impressions of hands pressed into the soft, sound-drinking asbestos walls. For a moment, I couldn’t understand how they had gotten there. Then I realized that these marks must be from the people who had been tortured here. I began to shake. It seemed to me these walls had swallowed so many terrible sounds that some residue of the horror still remained, threaded in the fibers of asbestos, which might at any moment be released in a deafening chorus of screams. I felt a kind of resignation settling in me, heavy and thick, as if my heart had stopped and blood was already clotting in my veins.
“It’s not you I blame,” Dietrich told me. “No, you’re not the expert. He is.” Dietrich’s arm shot out, finger pointing at Fleury. He returned to Fleury. “I want those paintings back. The ones I gave you for this piece of junk.” Then his rage overtook him again. He snatched the drawing out of Touchard’s hands and tore it to pieces.
A dry rush of air passed down my throat.
Dietrich threw the pieces of the sketch into the air and let them flutter down around Fleury’s head.
“You don’t know what you’ve done,” said Fleury.
“It’s you who doesn’t know,” shouted Dietrich. “I swear, if you ever, ever, bring me another fake, I will show you what misery happens here. You owe me, Mr. Fleury. I saved your life and in return you have insulted me and I will not let that go away. I will not forget it. There will be a reckoning between us.” Spit was flying from his mouth. His neck bulged against the clean white collar of his shirt.
For the first time, Fleury looked Dietrich in the eye. Suddenly, he did not seem afraid. Instead, he looked as if he had gone away far inside himself, where nothing could touch him, and only the shell of his body stood there now, hollowly speaking these words. “You may have your paintings back,” he said. “You may always have your paintings back, if there is any doubt.”
When Dietrich heard this, he seemed to lose some of his anger. “Well, that’s good,” he said. “That’s a step in the right direction.” He walked over to the far wall, as if trying to extinguish the last reservoirs of his anger. Carelessly, he fitted his hand into one of the handprints on the wall. “You can go now,” he said, without turning around.
Touchard stepped toward Fleury. “Monsieur,” he said, “I beg you to believe that this was not…”
“Touchard!” shouted Dietrich.
Touchard shuddered and fell silent.
Back out in the street, it was still very dark. The cool air chilled my sweat. I hadn’t realized how hot it had been down in that room. The car that had brought us was gone. I went back inside and persuaded Grimm to write us passes to get home, since neither Fleury nor I had brought our Sonderausweise with us, and we didn’t want to get arrested for breaking curfew without permission.
On the way back, I wanted to burrow in the ground some place and hide. “It’s all right,” I said, more to myself than to Fleury, who paced in silence beside me. “It was just a foul-up. Just a temporary setback.” I didn’t believe any of what I was saying. I was hoping that Fleury would take up the chant and we would convince ourselves with lie upon lie, the way we had done in the old days.
We were passing a set of shoulder-high black iron railings that fenced in the front of a large house at the end of the Avenue d’Iéna.
Fleury turned suddenly and took hold of the tops of two railings, which were forged in the shape of blunted spearheads. He tried to shake the railings, heaving his body savagely against them. He swung his body back and forth, growling and thrashing, until he had run out of strength. Then he staggered back into the street.
“Fleury,” I said quietly.
“Get away!” He glared at me as if he no longer knew who I was. Then he ran off down the road.
I didn’t try to follow. There could be no reasoning with him now. I wandered home in a daze, returning again and again in my thoughts to the emptiness of the room in which we had met Dietrich. It was as if the emptiness itself created pain.
* * *
AT SIX IN THE morning, I was woken by the rattle
of a key in the latch.
I rolled out of bed and hit the floor. Not again, I was thinking. I started to crawl under the bed, confused by half-sleep and helplessness.
“Monsieur Halifax!” It was Madame La Roche. She stood with a bucket and a broom, silhouetted in the doorway.
I got to my feet, still shaky in my knees.
“They took you away,” she said, astonished to find me here. “And Monsieur Fleury, too. I thought you were both gone. I had come to clean out your room.”
“Is Fleury all right?” I asked. “Have you seen him?”
“He is here,” replied Madame La Roche. “He is himself.” She dropped the broom and bucket, which fell with a clatter. She marched into the apartment and wrapped her arms around me. “My poor boy,” she said.
I put my arms around her and squeezed gently. It was like hugging a giant ripe plum.
“Poor boy,” she said again.
At that moment, I heard a sigh, like the swoop of a bird’s wing. When I looked up, I saw that the open doorway was filled with people. Everyone from my floor had gathered to welcome me back. There was Madame Lindgren, the dance instructor, with her slept-on red hair flowing down over her shoulders like molten lava. And Monsieur Finel, the Postillon bicycle man, his naked, hairy legs planted in a worn-out pair of workboots. And the Charbonniers and their son Hubert. They were all smiling at me, as if I had been gone for years.
I walked over to them and they put their arms around me and slapped me on the back and kissed me on both cheeks.
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you. Thank you.”
* * *
LATER THAT MORNING, I knocked on Fleury’s door.
He emerged in his smoking jacket. “Have you been embraced by Madame La Roche?” he asked.
“I believe I have,” I replied.
