“No.” Kamille found her voice at last, but apart from that one word couldn’t bring herself to say anything else.
“Gott im Himmel, your bags, Madame!” he exclaimed, only now noticing Kamille’s shaking hands and probably deciding that they shook because of the weight she carried and not due to her utmost terror, which covered her back with perspiration under her dark woolen suit. “Allow me to help you. You mustn’t exert yourself like that!”
Ignoring her weak protests, the soldier, in his field gray uniform, shouted something to his comrades who were smoking next to their military car, which had probably arrived while Kamille was busy talking to the baker’s widow, and proceeded across the street in his long, resolute strides. Kamille and Violette trailed behind him with Kamille’s arm draped tightly around her daughter’s shoulders.
“Where to, Madame?”
Little Violette, breaking all the rules of not only not talking to strangers but to the Germans even more so, chimed out their address in a heartbeat, receiving her mother’s disdainful glare and pursed lips soon after.
“He doesn’t look scary,” the girl whispered in her defense, as Kamille’s grip on her shoulder became tighter.
As if in confirmation of her words, the German turned around and beamed at the girl, giving her a little wink. He was indeed very young, barely twenty years old, Kamille thought. That, however, didn’t change the fact that he was an enemy, and a feared enemy as it had recently been proven. Only after the soldier lowered the bags on the front porch of Kamille’s house, clicked his heels, bowed respectfully and left, did she release the breath that she hadn’t realized she’d been holding the entire time.
Marcel shifted in his seat uncomfortably. Philippe, a giant of a man, towered over his stooped frame, boring his coal black eyes into Marcel for a good several minutes. Marcel caught himself thinking (heavens only knew why such thoughts even appeared in his mind!) that the infamous communist – the first one he had seen in person – reminded him of Ernest Hemingway; only a young version, without a mustache, but with the same outstanding temperament. While all Marcel hoped for was to just secure some temporary papers so he could go back to Paris without arousing German suspicion, Philippe presented him with an almost third-degree interrogation, demanding answers to questions which Marcel had never even considered.
“Why did you join the army in the first place, boy?”
Why did he just call him a boy, Marcel wondered, when they were of the same age? Despite the hard, piercing glare, stubborn, chiseled jaw and interrogatory posture, Philippe was hardly older than twenty-five. However, the communist’s power of intimidation could no doubt match that of a whole battalion of Germans, Marcel caught himself thinking again.
“I was conscripted…” he responded somewhat apologetically and felt the heat color his cheeks for some unexplainable reason as if the whole war was his fault.
“I was conscripted, too. It doesn’t mean that I put on my smartest suit and went marching to certain death just because our rotten, capitalist government told me so,” Philippe concluded sternly.
Marcel lowered his hazel eyes, feeling even more embarrassed. Philippe spoke with a soft, but powerful and magnetic voice, so that Marcel found it difficult not to fall under its hypnotic influence.
“Do you know who started this war, boy?”
Marcel lifted his head towards his interrogator, somewhat surprised. “The Germans?”
The snort which Philippe offered instead of a verbal reply clearly indicated that the communist found such a response quite ridiculous.
“The profiteers, boy. The profiteers, who right after the Great War started stuffing their pockets with everything they could get their hands on. You are far too young to remember the war, I suppose?”
“I’m twenty,” he replied quietly, lowering his gaze again.
“That’s what I thought. I grew up during the Great War, and I very well remember how we hardly survived the last two winters here on the farm, my parents and I, with no coal to fuel the stove, with all the livestock long gone, with threadbare clothes on our back. My older brother was killed in the war, my little brother and my little sister caught scarlet fever and died, because we had no means to take them to the city in time, and no doctor agreed to come to our farm in the middle of winter. But do you know which part about all this fascinates me the most? How our lot forgot our sufferings as soon as the armistice had been signed, and jumped on the opportunity to live high at any possible expense. And what did our government do? Not only supported such ideas but, more than that, decided that after the war they were entitled to the biggest piece of the pie and took whatever was left of Germany before the Allies could grab the rest of it. No wonder a blood-thirsty dictator was born out of it. I would have been quite mad at us if I were in that fellow Adolf’s place, too. And all this,” he made a gesture around them, “all this war, the new sufferings, the new occupation is solely due to our greed. If our government listened to our Party, if they supported our comrades in Germany like our leaders advised them to, if they treated them like brothers, all this could have been avoided. Communism would have won in Germany, and there wouldn’t be any more wars between us. But no. We had to be greedy, and look where it led us. So, my question remains: why did you go fighting for this capitalist regime which is the very reason why this bloody, cursed war broke out?”
“I went to fight for France, not for the regime.” Marcel took on a defensive tone, visibly offended by Philippe’s words.
“Until France becomes a communist state, you will always fight for the regime first, boy.” Philippe finally moved the chair and sat across the table from Marcel, interlacing his long fingers. Marcel noticed how large his hands were, and yet much more graceful that he would have expected from a farmer. “What do you know about the main postulates of Marx and Engels?”
“Not much, I’m afraid.” Marcel cursed himself once again as he detected bashful notes slipping into his barely audible whisper. The man who was sitting across from him had such a strong presence about him that Marcel couldn’t help feeling timid and inadequate under his confident, powerful gaze. “I’m a history student, and I know more about politics of Ancient Rome than about current events in the country…”
Another snort followed, this time more amused than condescending.
“Do you want to go to a meeting with me tonight? My comrades and I are gathering in the forest nearby. There’s a hunter’s lodge there which is almost impossible to find unless you know exactly where you’re going. You’re not in a rush, as I understand?”
Marcel shook his head. What rush could Philippe possibly be talking about when Marcel had no place to go, and if Philippe refused to help him he would find himself alone and stranded again with only one option: head back to Paris, only to be caught by Germans at the first checkpoint.
“It’s all decided then. You’ll go with me and listen to what we’re planning on doing. And if after that you find that our ideas don’t suit your taste, I’ll send you on your way with my deceased brother’s papers. Putting the picture from your current military papers into his passport would be a five minute matter. Agreed?”
Marcel nodded eagerly, for the first time in a long time, a light, hopeful smile playing on his lips.
3
Life in Paris had returned to normal after merely a month of former refugees arriving back to their homes, and little by little getting used to the presence of their new uniform-clad guests. The same neighbors who used to shout their assurances about “the most certain victory of our glorious French army” in front of the newsstand near Giselle’s favorite café just a few weeks ago had returned to their respective apartments, taken the boards off the windows and replied to all of Giselle’s taunts about “the glorious French army’s success” by pursing their lips.
Giselle bit her tongue quite a few times, silently chiding herself for her sarcasm directed towards her fellow French folk, but couldn’t help making more scornful remarks to yet anot
her matron’s statement (expressed in a hushed tone of course, so that “those gentlemen” wouldn’t overhear them by chance) that the loss of the army was most certainly not due to the fact that their soldiers were simply unprepared, but due to the government’s failure to provide weapons, machinery, decent commanding officers, or diplomacy on a high scale. In the course of the several weeks after the beginning of the occupation, Giselle heard the most ridiculous excuses that the mothers – and it was mostly mothers who expressed them – brought up in order to justify their sons’ shortcomings in the field, which had resulted in this very occupation.
“I know my Gaston; he would singlehandedly fight off those Boches! It’s because they had no ammunition that their battalion had to give themselves up – he wrote to me describing it all in detail.”
“It was not even that!” Another one would puff her rouged cheeks and wave the other woman off. “Their commanders were no good; ordered them to surrender as soon as they saw the Boches marching towards the town. My Gerome yearned to fight; they wouldn’t let him!”
“It all would have been well avoided if only our President knew anything about diplomacy. There wouldn’t be any war at all if he only knew how to peacefully arrange the matters to everyone’s liking,” the third one would state.
Giselle watched these sorts of debates almost daily under the striped green awning of Monsieur Richard’s café, sipping her mocha and hiding her face from the sun. However, she could never keep quiet for too long and soon started amusing herself with word-fencing with women.
“And the idea that our army was simply too lazy and overfed after the former victory in the Great War never crossed your minds, I suppose?” she would murmur with a sly grin, but loudly enough for the women to immediately turn their heads to the insolent renegade, gasping all at once as if she had just offended each and every one of them personally.
“Aren’t you ashamed of saying such things?!” they would start shouting indignantly. “Our sons, fighting there for our freedom and honor, losing their lives at those brutes’ hands—”
“Shhh, or those ‘brutes’ will overhear you and kill you too, the savages that they are.” Giselle would snicker and motion her blonde head towards the Germans sitting nearby and chatting amicably among themselves while enjoying the sun and their freshly-brewed coffee, for which Monsieur Richard charged them three times more than his fellow Frenchmen, according to the unspoken law that most of the vendors had adopted. “The sad truth, which I’m quite sure you don’t want to admit to yourselves because it is a rather bitter pill to swallow – don’t get me wrong, I agree wholeheartedly with you on this matter – the sad truth is that we dropped our guard a little too soon and falsely assumed that if we were lucky enough to beat our wurst-loving neighbors with the help of the Tommies and the Yanks, they wouldn’t come back with a vengeance. More than that, not only had we decided to casually chop quite a big strip off their lands without any regard to their sentiments on this account, we also came up with a brilliant idea to slam them with the reparations, which, as a result, propelled their inflation to a point where the sun doesn’t shine. So here we are, sitting pretty on all that money, sharing investments with the Yanks who also slammed them with the same reparations, drowning in caviar and champagne after shaking hands over yet another successful business deal. Buying yachts and summer houses in the Riviera, throwing all that money at each other in the casinos at night, signing more business deals with the Yanks during the day – and all the while our above mentioned wurst-loving neighbors watching us and getting a little upset on account of such arrangements. You see where I’m heading with this yet? And so, they’re getting more and more upset, we’re getting more and more careless and fat, until one day they finally slam their fist on the table and say that they have had enough. We snort in response, roll our eyes and tell the Tommy Prime Minister to deal with them. He waves his little paper in the air, everyone’s patting themselves on the back about how we ‘solved the conflict without a single shot fired,’ and return to our deal signings and champagne drinking. And then one day during the lunch break we suddenly see their tanks on our border, and all of our wonderful boys who have been enjoying themselves these past twenty years, while our wurst-loving neighbors were actually preparing for war, try to stop them. I sincerely can’t quite take it in, ladies, why exactly you’re so surprised about the outcome? I personally would have been surprised if we did fight them off!”
“If you had somebody in the army, my dear, you wouldn’t be saying such unpatriotic things!”
“Oh, but I do have someone in the army. My little brother Marcel.” Giselle grinned at the women’s surprised faces and added, “and knowing him I had actually thought of writing to his superiors asking them not to give him a weapon of any kind because that clueless brat would only end up shooting himself in the leg. I highly doubt that the rest of our ‘brave boys,’ without any kind of army training, differed from him so much. So, stop gossiping about why this happened, and accept the situation already. They’re here, and judging by how comfortable they’re acting, they’re here to stay for quite a while. I heard they will even return all of our brave boys back to France soon, so get on with your lives instead of indulging in empty discussions that won’t change anything anyway.”
The women eyed her silently until one of them murmured before turning away and leaving, “It’s because of people like you that we lost.”
Giselle only laughed in response, shamelessly throwing her head backward under the Germans’ inquiring glances, and lifted her cup in the air, sending a charming smile in Monsieur Richard’s direction.
“One more and I’ll head home, my friend. I think I have enough material to write about for today.”
The sun was heading leisurely towards the horizon, making Giselle squint from the blinding light that reflected off the silver roofs. She lifted Coco off her lap, who growled her discontent at her slumber being disrupted, and padded to the window to drop the heavy, light-blocking drapes which she had used during the recent air-raids. The air-raids had stopped weeks ago, but Giselle opted to keep the shades so she could use them to block the sun from peeking directly into her room and bothering her while she was trying to write.
Sun-warmed wooden floors creaked mildly under her bare feet while she proceeded to turn on the lights in her spacious living room, in the corner of which she preferred to work. Even though Giselle had quite a grand study with extravagantly designed panels and a redwood desk that would garner any writer’s envy, she rarely – if ever – paid the room a visit, using it mostly as a library. The living room with its French windows adorned by the white chiffon drapes, always brightly lit and commodious as Giselle didn’t want to overburden it with furniture and kept it quite minimalistic, breathed the inspiration into her as soon as she moved her padded, light-beige chair to the table and put the first sheet of paper into the typing machine.
Even the table at which she worked was purchased for sharing a cup of coffee with a friend on a lazy afternoon; however, as soon as Giselle gave up on her mahogany desk, finding both the study and the innocent piece of furniture too dark and depressing for work, she moved her typing machine to the living room without thinking twice. The second light-beige chair was moved to the wall, and another table was purchased for drinking coffee and receiving guests, who had by now learned not to approach the other “working” table. Giselle had a habit of organizing her manuscripts in a certain way, separating each chapter by placing them in different stacks, and was known for immediately throwing fits if someone only touched a single sheet of paper. She didn’t take too kindly to anyone reading her unfinished manuscripts either, and people who proved themselves to be too nosy for Giselle’s taste were banned from entering her apartment for life. However, Giselle could afford to be picky about her acquaintances; as soon as she had bargained a deal for a hundred thousand francs for her latest novel two years ago the flow of people who were more than eager to befriend her had multiplied in a geometr
ical progression, much to her displeasure: Giselle wasn’t quite a people person.
A loud knock on the door made her grunt in annoyance, as she detested being interrupted in the middle of work more than anything in the world. Trying to pacify Coco, who had burst into loud barking just as she always did at the sign of any “intruder,” Giselle went to open the door while grumbling, “I know poppet, I know. I hate unannounced guests as much as you do, believe me. That’s why I prefer your company to theirs any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.”
Holding the dog under her arm, Giselle unlocked the door and lifted her eyes in surprise at the young German on the other side, who clicked his heels sharply and saluted her with such fervor as if he thought she were an army general. Giselle couldn’t help but chortle in amusement.
“How can I be of service, young man?”
He was indeed very young, barely twenty years old, with eager blue eyes and light coloring.
“SS Unterscharführer Otto Reisinger, at your service, Madame.” He clicked his heels once again and winced slightly at the loud disapproving barking from Coco, who made it difficult for him to be heard. “Allow me to come in?”
“Come in here? Are you a little lost in our beautiful city?” She motioned her head toward the suitcases near his immaculately polished boots. “I regret to inform you, but it’s a private residence, not a hotel. Neither do I remember placing an advertisement in a paper about renting a room.”
He nodded a little embarrassingly, as if having forgotten something, and quickly extracted a folded piece of paper from his pocket which he handed to Giselle with a slight bow, all the while eyeing the dog suspiciously. Coco bared her little teeth at the unexpected guest, clearly indicating that she meant business protecting her territory. The German clasped his hands behind his back wisely, away from the snapping animal, right after handing the paper to her owner.
The Indigo Rebels: A French Resistance novel Page 3
