He never felt welcome here, not because of his sister of course, but because of her husband Charles, who seemed to snub all of the Legrand family besides Giselle. And so it had been decided, even though no one ever voiced the thought, that it would be more convenient to meet at their parents’ apartment. Albeit small, it possessed a certain air of coziness and the most welcoming atmosphere, of which the Blanchards’ mansion was completely devoid, despite all of the new mistress’s desperate efforts to breathe some life into it.
Marcel wondered if Charles was back from the front, but would he actually take a separate room just for himself instead of sharing one with his wife? A motion in the window caught Marcel’s eye, and he ducked his head instinctively, even though the man in the window couldn’t possibly see him behind the tall wall.
“Merde,” Marcel cursed under his breath at his cowardice, and reluctantly returned to the crack in between the stones, observing the man. “A Boche!”
A young German, who never suspected he was being watched, positioned himself on the windowsill comfortably, leaning onto the window frame to press his booted leg into the other side, while swinging the other leg in the air carelessly. He lit a cigarette, smiling at the azure, cloudless day outside – one of the last hot summer days, no doubt – and reached for something inside the room and placed the object (a notepad or an album as far as Marcel could see) on his lap. For the first time since he had returned from the front, Marcel saw a Boche from close quarters and in such a relaxed pose. He was young too, probably of Marcel’s age, and had the same chestnut hair with bangs falling onto one eye. Even the slight build and outline of his face resembled Marcel’s slightly. The young man caught himself gulping nervously, and turned away from the unwelcome vision as if an enemy had come to his house while he had been away and stole his very life. He had in a sense; Marcel wasn’t even a Marcel anymore, but Claude Bussi, with Philippe’s late brother’s papers ready to confirm his new identity.
But what had happened to Kamille then? Marcel glued himself to the wall again, frantically searching for any signs of his sister. Realizing that he was looking on the wrong side, he got up warily and strolled along the wall, keeping as close as he could so as not to be detected by the Boche on the second floor. As soon as he turned around the corner and, not finding any visible cracks in the wall, he crossed the narrow street and looked up at where Kamille’s bedroom was.
Her window was open as well, and to Marcel’s big relief no more Boches were lounging in the window frame; only Kamille’s favorite geraniums peaked their purple heads towards the sun. Marcel doubted that the Germans would look after her pottery with such devotion, which meant that Kamille still lived in the house. Only, the bad news was that he most definitely couldn’t bring his two comrades here now. Marcel sighed, kicked a stone out of his way and turned back to fetch the boys, having no idea where to head from there.
A familiar, musty smell of old books and wood polish made Giselle smile as she stepped through the tall, heavy doors leading into the Demarche Publishing House. The concierge greeted her cordially and in a hushed tone confirmed that Monsieur Demarche was upstairs. Giselle nodded and proceeded to the vast, imposing elevator enclosed with a heavy iron cage, executed in the intricate manner of the beginning of the century. Giselle always begged Michel, for the esteemed owner of the Publishing House that bore his name was merely Michel to her, to get rid of the “ancient thing” that would break and kill somebody any day now. Michel Demarche only waved his long, elegant hand dismissively and replied in his placid tone that she, Giselle, would kill him first with her antics. Well, she might have been late quite a few times for the deadline, and did not necessarily care to submit at least a somewhat proofed manuscript, torturing the order-loving man with her typos and left out words, but she was still one of his best assets – a fact that Giselle reminded him of at every chance she got, and rather unabashedly.
As the elevator made its way to the fourth floor, Giselle recalled the very first time she had stepped through the doors of the Demarche Publishing House, which had already made its name in the literary field. A young girl with hungry eyes and dark hair, pinned from both sides, much too thin as she had spent the little money she made writing odd articles under false names for newspapers on paper and ink rolls for her typing machine. She sat across the desk, which was bigger than her parents’ dining table, from this earnest, dignified man with dark mustache and a monocle sparkling in his sharp blue eye, in this beautifully paneled office of his, trying to cover a patch on her faded dress that had been mended over and over.
“You wrote this?” Michel Demarche had asked her in the tone of a schoolmaster who had caught his student cheating during the final exam.
Giselle held his gaze firmly and nodded, trying not to look at the manuscript that lay between them on the polished, redwood surface, with the editor-in-chief’s manicured hand on top of it.
“Yes, I did.”
“All of it? By yourself?”
“Yes,” Giselle confirmed once again, forcing herself to steady her breathing.
“Hm. Fascinating.” Monsieur Demarche cleared his throat and reached for his silver cigarette case. “And… Have you studied writing somewhere?”
“Mais oui,” Giselle replied even more assertively, now wanting to put this arrogant snob and his condescending attitude in his place. “I just graduated from the Sorbonne with honors, Monsieur Demarche. I majored in Journalism, just like my father did. I learned how to read when I was four years old, and hardly remember spending a day without a book in my hands. This particular novel, even though I understand that it’s rather modern and expresses quite unorthodox ideas, was influenced by the works of Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche. Both Dostoyevsky’s and Nietzsche’s concepts of a man who has the power to evolve into a higher being than the rest of his kin only if he finds strength in himself to reject the burdensome chains of the past that stop him from such progress have always fascinated me. Outdated moral restraints, imposed by religion and social conventions that don’t have the right to exist in our progressive century are exactly the demons that my protagonist, Jean-Marc, is fighting on his path to an ultimate transcendence and an eventual deliverance from an abyss to which many of his comrades fell victims. He’s a very atypical hero, I know, but can you really blame him for his views that changed so radically in the course of the four years that he spent witnessing his comrades die in his arms? God is dead, as Nietzsche said; well, God had died for Jean-Marc on the very first day when he wandered around the field after the battle, collecting what was left of his regiment, with which he marched, sang songs, exchanged jokes, slept and ate with to then just bury them in a ditch, dug out in a foreign land. That was the day when he reevaluated life itself, and his inner self. That was when a human life lost its value for him in the old, Christian sense and became merely a notion, an obstacle on the path to survival. As for my ending, you were probably surprised by it, for it is also rather unexpected. There was no path for redemption because Jean-Marc refused the notion of redemption in its philosophical sense. It’s a concept of the past for him. You probably figured out that just like my protagonist I firmly reject the highly regarded Monsieur Dostoyevsky’s idea of undergoing the necessary suffering in order to atone for one’s sins. Therefore, Jean-Marc doesn’t regress to his past self after he returns from the front; on the contrary, he returns a stronger man, a man who relies on his mental abilities instead of his emotions, and only thus is he able to continue his life, unlike his comrade, Luc, who drinks himself to death eventually. It’s a rather nihilistic novel, I am very well aware of that. But the public has acquired a taste for nihilism lately, so I’m afraid I’m merely the voice of my cynical, post-war generation.”
Michel Demarche tilted his coiffured head with his dark, pomaded hair to one side, curiosity shining from behind his monocle for the first time instead of mistrust.
“You wrote about the war as if you’ve been to one, Mademoiselle Legrand. It feels like a man wro
te it, a tired, angry man, who’s been through hell and back.”
Giselle couldn’t suppress a grin at such a compliment, even though it was aimed to shame her into confessing that it wasn’t really her who authored the novel.
“You’re partially right, Monsieur Demarche. The war stories are my father’s; however, what the character of Jean-Marc eventually evolved into is very far from my kind-hearted Papa.”
A faint smile, just visible from under his dark mustache, turned the corners of the man’s mouth upwards at last.
“And do you believe you can produce more of such novels in the future, Mademoiselle Legrand?”
Giselle grinned, a triumphant light playing in her green eyes. “It depends on how much you’re willing to pay me.”
The elevator doors opened in front of her, and Giselle stepped onto a soft, green carpet leading towards the publisher’s office. Michel Demarche had a habit of meeting his writers, who he became close friends with over the course of several years, after his regular working hours, and therefore the whole fourth floor, where the even buzz of the typing machines usually prevailed over any other noise, was now deserted and silent. Giselle paused for a moment, hearing indistinct voices from behind the closed door of Monsieur Demarche’s office, and checked her watch, wondering if she had arrived too early.
No, it was five fifteen, all right; she was actually “fashionably late,” as she always called it in response to Michel’s discontent sighs. Shrugging, Giselle pulled the door open without knocking and raised her brow inquisitively as not only Michel himself but several other writers who she knew quite intimately almost jumped in their seats at her unexpected appearance.
“I apologize. Have I interrupted something?” The blonde tried to suppress an amused grin at the comical sight of the four grown men, unanimously letting out a sigh of relief. “Why is everyone so jittery? They declared the armistice two months ago, in case you haven’t heard. The Germans aren’t coming to get you.”
“Ah, Giselle, stop your jesting and sit down, please!” Michel Demarche patted his forehead, which seemed to have suddenly broken out in a sweat, with a stark white handkerchief with his initials embroidered in the corner. “We were discussing… some pressing matters here.”
“Oh?” Giselle took a seat in a leather chair, chivalrously offered to her by Antoine Levy, a young blond man with sad, honey-colored eyes.
Just like Giselle, Antoine had also been discovered by Michel Demarche almost ten years ago, and, just like everyone else who had stepped through the doors of Demarche’s office, he pledged his undying allegiance to the man, who, unlike many others in the industry, cared deeply for the authors under his wing.
The air inside the room was heavy with cigarette smoke, but Giselle’s suggestion to open the window was met with a collective protest.
“We don’t want to risk anyone hearing what we’re discussing here,” Michel explained, carefully selecting his words.
“Something tells me that you weren’t discussing literature,” Giselle probed, noticing how the other two men, Pascal Thierry and Gilles Le Roux, both in their early thirties, started shifting uncomfortably in their chairs. “Or our profits for the past year.”
“Giselle, can you be discreet about something I would like to suggest to you?” Michel Demarche rarely expressed amusement at hers, or anyone else’s jests, preferring to reply to them with seemingly cool irony and a stony face, which suited him much better than belly-shaking laughter. However, this time Giselle noticed that he was uncharacteristically serious.
“Of course I can.” She decided to take on a serious note as well. “You know well enough that you can fully trust me. I owe you nothing less than my very life, the way I have it now.”
“Yes, that…” The publisher lit a cigarette, his brows getting knitted together once again in deep thought. “I want you to think twice and even thrice about the suggestion that I’m about to voice, because that frivolous, beautiful life of yours might change, If you agree with my, I must say, rather daring proposal.”
“For God’s sake, Michel! You have intrigued me enough; speak already!”
Monsieur Demarche squirmed in his chair a little longer, obviously searching for the right words to begin.
“What do you think of the policy of the collaboration, Giselle?”
The blonde shrugged, smiling at the obvious answer. “What do I think? Probably what everybody else thinks. I am relieved that they don’t bomb us anymore, but if they picked up and left tomorrow, let’s just say I wouldn’t cry.”
“Right, right.” Michel Demarche nodded his approval. “And what do you think of Général de Gaulle’s call?”
“Général de Gaulle’s call?” Now Giselle was really at a loss. She remembered the name of the decorated officer of the Great War, but for the life of her couldn’t come up with anything having to do with him or his recent mysterious “call.”
“Didn’t you hear his speech?” Antoine inquired in disbelief.
“What speech?”
“On BBC, they still repeat it sometimes. Every morning at 8.15,” the writer went on to explain.
“Antoine, my morning starts at 10.30 at its earliest.” Giselle shot him a glare.
“Well, that explains it,” Michel muttered while the other men chuckled quietly. “In short, Général de Gaulle proclaimed Maréchal Pétain a traitor of la République, and called to all the French patriots to raise their voices and resist.”
“Resist as in…” Giselle motioned her hands demanding further explanation. “Take up machine guns and try to shoot as many Boches as possible? Our troops tried it; didn’t succeed that much.”
“Resist as in refuse to give up on our freedom and reject the collaboration.” Demarche ignored her previous sarcastic remark. “In any way possible.”
“And how would we do that?” Giselle laughed. “We’re writers only! What can we possibly do? Write a satirical play about them?”
“No. A satirical play wouldn’t be staged, so that would be a waste of everyone’s time.” Demarche patiently fenced off another jab from his blonde, sharp-tongued novelist. “What we can do is start printing a weekly newspaper, in which we would not only tarnish the Vichy government’s cowardly decision to submit to Hitler and his henchmen, but also call for everyone, who thinks alike, to unite and follow the Général’s call. We, like no one else, would be able to unite our people as they will be passing the newspaper from one to another until the whole nation will turn on the aggressors, and liberate France from every last one of them.”
Giselle sat quietly for some time under the awaiting gaze of her colleagues, pondering her options. “And where are you going to print it, Michel? Not on one of your book presses, most certainly. The Gestapo will be here in no time.”
“No, of course not. We have an old, portable printing press in the basement. We haven’t used it in ages, but I’m quite confident that with some oil on its gears it might actually still be in working condition. It’s not big by any means, but big enough to print several hundred copies on it. All that is needed from you four is to submit one article each week. It doesn’t have to be lengthy or too political; on the contrary, the clearer you make it for the ordinary man in the street, the better. Just write about current day affairs, of what bothers you personally, about your fears and concerns. Be truthful and sincere, that’s all I ask of you.”
“What if we get caught?”
“We’ll be using aliases, of course, and I’ll be the only one who puts the newspaper together. After all, I started with that some thirty years ago,” Demarche recalled with a rare dreamy smile. “You aren’t risking much. I’ll be working the press one night a week, alone. After all, the Germans don’t care where you spend the night after the curfew as long as you’re indoors. So, I’ll just stay after work on certain days like I do now.”
“But what if we do get caught?” Giselle insisted.
“In that case, they’ll most likely arrest us and send us to jail,” Demarc
he replied calmly, and then added in the same leveled tone, “or shoot us.”
“Fair enough.” Giselle slapped her knee eagerly as if those last words of his were the only thing lacking for her decision to be made. “Count me in!”
9
Kamille’s hand tightened around the handle of her bag with dried dates and some preserves that she managed to get at the grocer’s today as she hurried towards the front porch of the school, noticing little Violette sitting there with her face hidden in her lap. Madame Marceau, Violette’s teacher, sat next to the girl speaking in a soothing voice with her, and failed to notice Kamille approach.
“Violette, chéri, Maman is here.” Kamille announced her arrival trying to sound cheerful. The girl, however, raised her tear-stained face to her only to lower it back onto her folded arms.
Madame Marceau rose, sighing. She was a young woman just a few years Kamille’s senior, yet she already looked weary beyond her age. Her deep, almond-shaped brown eyes were shadowed with dark circles and her beautiful olive skin, of which Kamille was always secretly envious, had taken on a grayish tone, obviously due to the new amount of work that was imposed on her in recent months.
Reluctant to leave children to play without supervision in the streets as they usually did, French parents had unanimously decided to put them up for summer schools, away from mischief and antics that could get them in trouble with the new occupants of the city. Needless to say, Madame Marceau, just like many female teachers, had to embrace a double and sometimes triple workload, as their male counterparts were all, for the most part, gone, locked away in one of the German stalags.
The Indigo Rebels: A French Resistance novel Page 8
