Michèle described how the handsome young man in the snapshot was arrested with her family, how he survived (barely) Buchenwald, how he was forever changed by the war (“his head turn-ed”). Although he had died years before, he struck my imagination and I thought I had found my Frenchman.
In the scrapbook was a stenciled number cut from the clothing Michèle had been forced to wear as a prisoner. She had no tattoo. As she began to tell of the arrest and deportation, her English lapsed and her French sped up. I was having difficulty following.
After several months in prison, she and her parents, as well as Jean Carbonnet, a priest, and two English airmen who were arrested with them, were deported on the last convoy out of Paris before the city’s liberation in August, 1944. Michèle and her mother arrived at Ravensbruck, a women’s concentration camp where political prisoners were sent. It was a shock beyond imagination. Some weeks later, as punishment for their part in a protest against being forced to work in a munitions factory, they were sent to a labor camp at Koenigsberg (now Chojna, Poland). During the hard months of winter on a windy plateau, five hundred women were forced to construct an airstrip—with their hands. At first Michèle had only a cotton dress to wear. The women dug out large squares of frozen sod and heaved them onto a wagon on rails. They had to shift the rails by hand periodically to extend the track. They had no socks.
In February, 1945, as the Russians closed in, the Germans sent the ambulatory prisoners on a death march back to Ravensbruck, but Michèle hid in the infirmary with her mother, who was too sick to walk.
“The incendie!” she cried.
The runway, the heavy wagons, the sod, the cold.
I tried to piece together what she was saying. The Germans set fire to the camp and fled. The Germans left; the Red Army came.
I decided not to probe further that day. Her son, Francis, drove me around Paris and showed me the various locales that figured in his mother’s story—the Jardin des Plantes, Gare d’Austerlitz, the Colonnade on the rue de Rivoli where the Photomaton was located, and the site of the infamous Gestapo headquarters on the rue des Saussaies.
The camp at Koenigsberg was not extensively documented because there were so few survivors, but I managed to gather some more details about it and Michèle told me more a few days later.
After being rescued by the Russians—almost a year after their arrest—and spending four months in a hospital in Poland, Michèle and her mother arrived at Hotel Lutetia, the welcome center in Paris for returning deportees. Anxiously they searched the bulletin boards for word of Michèle’s father. A cheerful aide said, “Oh, we do have a Monsieur Moët. Wait here.” The aide returned with a long face of apology. “It wasn’t Monsieur Moët. It was Monsieur Chandon.”
I had never heard such a cruel twist of fate, like a mean joke.
I don’t know why she trusted me to transform her story into fiction, but it was clear that she wanted it told. What could I possibly write that would do justice to this painful past? It is never easy to write about actual people, but her resilience, her high spirits, inspired my character, Annette.
I visited Michèle several times, each time filling out more of my picture of wartime Paris and her difficult history, and we became friends. I became aware of the fun she had before the arrest—an exuberant girl ready to take risks, willing to use her schoolgirl advantage to fool the Germans, and infatuated with the “big American boys.”
In the story I wrote, I couldn’t resist inventing a romance between the character Annette and the young man she accompanied on the missions to collect aviators. I thought it gave an added dimension of sorrow—a young couple whose possibility of raising a family was lost. That wasn’t Michèle’s story, but I was writing a novel, I reasoned. On the other hand, I felt strictly bound to use exact details about the Koenigsberg airstrip. In writing about concentration camps, the imagination cannot trump reality.
Eventually, “The Girl in the Blue Beret” appeared in print, and Michèle read it avidly, quickly. I was concerned that her family might think the teenage romance in the novel was true—an embarrassment to her. “I didn’t like that part,” she admitted. But she forgave my liberties, granting that fiction goes in a different direction from a documentary.
When I did a reading at Shakespeare and Company, she was there, and the audience loved her—a real live member of the Resistance. Seeing the impish smile on her face, I imagined again the schoolgirl with a book satchel, strolling through the Bois de Vincennes with several awkward, gawky Americans in ill-fitting French garb following at a distance, trying to keep that blue beret in sight.
In my own walks, I had noticed the many plaques honoring the Resistance on buildings around Paris, and I wondered why there was no plaque on the apartment building where Michèle’s family had sheltered aviators. As an American with typically big ideas, I inquired, although I suspected that I’d be stymied by the French bureaucracy. But it turned out to be a reasonable request, especially coming from abroad from a representative of an Allied aviator. The Moët family was long overdue for recognition, and to my amazement, a plaque was ordered. As the Second World War generation recedes, there has been in France, the same as here, a determined effort to document and remember stories from the war.
This year, National Deportation Day, the last Sunday in April, was also the anniversary of the arrest of the Moët family, April 28, 1944. Sixty-nine years had gone by. At midday a ceremony dedicated the plaque on the building in the suburb of Saint Mandé where Michèle and her family had lived during the war. The day was cold. The street was blocked off for about a hundred of her family and friends (all generations) who were gathered to honor Michèle, her brother, and their parents. I was freezing, and I was the only one wearing a hat, except for one grandmother. Michèle had brought a blue beret, but forgot and left it in the car.
The mayor of Saint Mandé, dashing in his official, ceremonial, red-white-and-blue sash, addressed the crowd, which included two women who, like Michèle, had escorted airmen.
Michèle’s eight-year-old grand-nephew, from a ladder, pulled the string that dropped the bunting and revealed the plaque. Then he read the words aloud.
Après avoir accueilli ici de nombreux aviateurs alliés en 1943 et 1944, la famille Moët à été arrêtée par la milice et remise à la Gestapo le 28 avril 1944, puis déportée. Gèrard Moët est mort à Buchenwald le 6 Mars 1945.
La ville de Saint Mandé en hommage à leur courage et à leur sacrifice. Le 28 avril 2013
(After having sheltered here numerous Allied aviators in 1943 and 1944, the Moët family was arrested by the Milice and taken to the Gestapo April 28, 1944, then deported. Gerard Moët died at Buchenwald March 6, 1945. The town of Saint Mandé in homage to their courage and to their sacrifice. April 28, 2013)
Michèle read a lengthy, carefully prepared text, telling her story movingly, insisting on an explicit, factual accounting of what had happened. Many in her family had not known the whole story before. She told it without faltering until she came to the part where she and her mother returned to France after the end of the war. Her voice broke, and then she wept when she told of finding her little brother again. When they were arrested, he had been left behind on the sidewalk with his teddy bear.
The honor of the plaque was not for her, she stressed, but for her father, who loved France enough to die for it.
Michèle had written her own story at last. She ended by quoting Primo Levi,
N’oubliez pas que cela fut, non ne l’oubliez pas.
(Never forget that this has happened, do not forget it.)
XIV
Zanies
In recent years I collaborated with flash-fiction writer Meg Pokrass on a few strange experimental pieces.
—BAM
Whale Love
Featured in the online journal The Nervous Breakdown, August 21, 2013
With Meg Pokrass
LOUISA
Louisa, who tucked up her skirts and went running every day or s
he would go mad, was confounded and smothered by the whales of Concord, like Mr. E, on whom she had a crush when she was a child and left him flowers under his window, flowers found and laughed at by Mrs. E, who had to put up with all his giggly acolytes, who arranged themselves prettily at his feet, including that lunatic Jonas Very, to whom Mr. E was always so kind even though Jonas Very was very very unpoetic and it would kill him to think so, but aside from Mr. E and stately Mr. H, whom she privately liked to call Nat, because he was so very very formal and distant, always walking along the Lexington Road with his head bent in thought, there was princely Henry, and on that spring evening she was running to meet Henry in his rowboat—Henry in his rowboat, playing his flute!—and overcome by her freedom from the whales of philosophy she did a sort of handspring in the path and accidentally felled a small dead tree.
THE WHALE OF WALDEN
In his sturdy personal cabin within sight of the great pond, Henry wrote and wrote daily in his journal, of all the comings and goings of warblers and chipmunks and geese, but he never dared to record his sightings of the great heavy fabulous creature that surfaced from time to time, white in the night, with a spout of Walden water so forceful it reached the shore and he felt the spray and heard the thrashing, and he knew there was only one—stranded, grown to giant size over the years, without a mate. … or perhaps with one, a little minnow who failed to grow and was fated to trundle the bottom of the pond—wherever that was, as it was so deep the bottom had not been found.
WALDEN BY NIGHT
The moon crept up daintily through the trees, highlighting the white birches and extending a broad pale shimmer across the surface of the pond, as Louisa let Henry row her through the night, while he jabbered about nighthawks and unknown thrumming insects—the insect orchestra being so loud as to drown out some of his words—but she thought he said, “There is a secret out here, and I want you to see it, to thrill to it, but you must never tell it to anyone,” and being a truthful and earnest girl, she made the promise and also, in a moral quandary, felt both abashed and quaky, trembling to the sound of his voice, the slosh of his rowing, but then suddenly he let out a stifled cry, the boat rolled and rocked, and the water heaved high, and a great white shape jumped in front of her, moonlit and slick, and a fountain blew to the sky and Henry cried, “Don’t tell, don’t tell!”
TWICE-TOLD TALES
Louisa never told, not exactly, but she was haunted by troubling visions and on her morning runs she avoided Walden and instead ran through the woods from Hillside to the Old North Bridge and often saw Nat and his bride in their garden, and once she saw them in a shocking embrace on their porch, her bonnet askew and his chest bared and one day she ran into Mr. H, or Nat, as she had heard Mrs. Sophia address him, on the path where he was muttering along, and he invited her for tea with him and his wife, so on the day of the tea she brought them a sketch, which was not so good as her sister May would have done but it came from her heart and it was not telling the secret to portray a fanciful image of a spouting whale and anyway who would know it was secretly established in a local pond? And Nat H seemed so pleased with the sketch, and Mrs. Sophia declared that she would etch a whale onto the window glass with her diamond, and Louisa was delighted, for Nat and Sophia behaved like children, children who were allowed to get into each other’s clothes.
THE TALE TOLD
The book in the Boston bookshop was not prominently displayed, and Louisa would not have noticed it except for the word “whale” on its cover. It was not her cup of tea. She would not read about a mad sea captain obsessed with punishing a whale. That sounded absurd. But Nat knew this author. Nat must have given him the idea of the whale. Her knees buckled. She had betrayed Henry. She felt as though she had opened Pandora’s trunk. Now that the whale had been revealed, it would wreak mayhem throughout the world. It would overwhelm prose, curtail sentences. She gasped, staccato breaths. You can’t fight a whale.
WHALE PRINCE, M. DICK
Romancing the big whale prince M. Dick, Nina the Hussy-Seagull feels, is not effortless; she imagines him blowing her a swan-bubble of air as she leans on the current, which is her crutch maybe, so feels like a mute starfish, dumb star of fish, a bit anxious but hey, lighter at least, emerging for her fantasy groom, M. Dick—probably bi-sexual or at least carrying the taste for the adorable Pequod and crunchy Ahab and other bobbing objects of water, especially that sarcastic beast, Ishmael, passively mocking Nina just home from the second water-bounce gull-orgy, gold-green seaweed shapes in her hair, a mammal smell or shell or Ahab’s hamburger-leg in M. Dick’s cavernous mouth jiggling at her lusty bird-heart again, it is M. Dick, prince of mammals, his cold, rudderless lips.
HUSSY-SEAGULL IN MODERN TIMES
Nina, the Hussy-Seagull of Russia, fully possessed by the devil-spirit of twelve-step-averse sailor, Ahab, and repelled by the savage cannibalistic disabled Queequeg, an extraordinary harpooner, battled her own afflicted brain, which was pecked with chronic anxiety and soul-sickness, dreamt of many handsome seagulls but of only one misplaced, poetic whale, M. Dick, commuting to Walden Pond from Moscow for freedom—orgies over water—guiltlessly dumping her capricious lover, Jonathan Livingston, a mean-bird who acted out and found relief by dirtying the nearly-bald head of daytime television actor Ahab Trigorin (known for ungainly character roles and public displays in bare trees) while the hussy-seagull could not watch, she squawked sorrowfully and flagrantly flirted with many birds in different flock arrangements, performed deck-duty very well with the Roomba, or at least did some of the dishes by webbed-leg to reduce energy usage, so in a dream or a real day, Nina flapped upward to the top of the Pequod’s crow’s-nest, ready to plummet and land on the first under-dressed whale who swam by, but she was inevitably seduced and raped by a Russian “soul of the world” with a flight-fixation, thus ruining the fragile seagull’s sense of balance and rendering her mute.
NINA OF WALDEN
When frustrated, water-logged M. Dick the whale of Walden discovered Nina the Hussy-Seagull with morning sickness, lying prone upon the Rock of Walden, the great gentle whale burped in his mouth a bit—which scared three nearby fishermen to death—and seeking relief, M. Dick popped his vacuum-sealed cave a crack, uttering forth a cloud which covered Walden with Dick’s famous blend of breath reminiscent of organic oak bark and chocolate-nib laced with hints of cat-food breath (alcoholic content both mellow yet dangerously high), producing a sweet, organic after-flow vintage ambergris and immediately curing the sorrowful seagull of everything and injecting the hussy-bird with the creative desire to be not only a whalewife, but to settle there forever on the shores of Walden with her long-lived lover, the indomitable Dick. They would drink fermented pond-water and plant a garden. She would make the ground speak beans.
WHAT WE SQUAWK ABOUT WHEN WE SQUAWK ABOUT WHALE-LOVE
“Helluva tourist draw,” the casino mogul mused. Adventurous nighttime rides, honeymoon special, cozy fiberglass jet-boats.
Legend bubbled that the whale surfaced when a love-sick seagull performed a swooping dance in the moonlight. One of the location scouts had observed through a telephoto lens a seagull hovering above Walden—a lone seagull sporting what appeared to be a necklace with an albatross pendant, and a tattoo that said “Call me Fish Meal.”
No one in the forensics lab recognized the line, and with no whale to show for six months of sonar, immersed sub and bubble-bath ultrasound, the developers proceeded briskly with their plans for Sunrise over Walden Waters retirement condos, built on the site of an old ruin where an odd, gloomy man had once scribbled some words not worth beans anymore.
And yet the ghostly ambergris vapors of M. Dick will haunt the shores of Walden Waters (a name chosen because it was more poetic than Walden Pond), and the residents will complain of seagull shit on the balconies and a foul sweet smell rising from the waters at dawn.
Talking through Hats
Featured in Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art, Winter 2015
With Meg Pokrass
TV Voice: It’s time for “Talking through Hats” with your host, Geoffrey Chase.
Chase: Good evening and welcome to this week’s edition of “Talking through Hats,” in which our guest critics opine and cogitate, jaw and argue while they probe and dissect, worry and flay a Poem. They Pick A Poem Apart, academically scrubbing it, much as if they were in a classroom and forced by an irritable English teacher to Find the Meaning—much as if it were a Christmas pudding with a hidden coin. Here on our show we ask the question: are these coins counterfeit?
Let us meet tonight’s guests. The lady in the blue hat is the distinguished editor of the anthology, “Feminists and the Forgotten Others.” The lady in the yellow hat is a veterinary receptionist.
Welcome, ladies in hats.
(Head nods and half-smiles.)
Tonight’s poem was sent in by a viewer in Boise, Idaho, Ms. Lily Larkin. Ms. Larkin is a maintenance engineer for the waste treatment plant of Boise, and in her spare time she adores knitting and kayaking. Allow me to read her poem.
She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways
She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love;
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
—Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be
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