by Will Belford
‘Oh sir!’ cried Yvette, stepping back, ‘I can’t possibly…’
The captain grabbed her arm, and pulling her close, slapped her viciously on the cheek.
‘If you want this job,’ he hissed, ‘get on your knees now, you little French bitch!’
~ ~ ~
A few minutes later the captain buttoned his flies and rang the bell on his desk. The door opened and the Unteroffizier came in.
‘Show Alouette here to the maintenance room and introduce her to Madame Fevrier will you? And tell Madame Boucher to report to me immediately. Alles klar?’
‘Sir!’ said the officer.
‘As for you, cheri,’ said the captain, ‘I’ll expect to see you here at the same time tomorrow, is that clear?’
Yvette ground her teeth and gagged at the taste of the man’s semen in her throat.
‘Yes Captain,’ she said, ‘quite clear.’
‘Gut. Until tomorrow then,’ said the captain, and directing himself to the Unteroffizier he waved a hand.
‘Dismissed!’
The officer led Yvette back out and across the courtyard to a portcullis that guarded the corridor into the prison proper. A guard stood beside the chain that raised and lowered the heavy iron gate.
‘This girl is the new cleaner. Take her to the maintenance room and tell Madame Fevrier to show her around. And send Madame Boucher to the Captain.’
The soldier saluted and hauled on the chain, and Yvette took her first step down the dark tunnel that led into the heart of the gaol. As she left the sunlight she hawked and spat the last of the German’s seed onto the cold cobbles.
‘Excuse moi,’ she said to the guard, giving him her best smile, ‘I have a cold.’
Chapter Fourteen
In a draughty Paris studio on the Left Bank, the artist’s model pulled the fur coat around her nakedness and stretched. Her hips and lower back were on fire after contorting herself into position on a chaise-longue for the last two hours. She rubbed her hands together and shivered into the fur as the circulation returned to her aching joints.
Behind his easel, Bernard Thiebaud lowered his brush and studied his work. A few more hours would do it, and then he would have to let Hortense go, it was getting too cold to continue. Despite a few unseasonably hot days the autumn winds had already begun to strip the leaves from the trees, and, with its cracked windows, the temperature in the studio was well below what a nude body could be expected to stand for long.
It was a pity, as Hortense was a magnificent example of French beauty, and his favourite nude by far. Tall and curvaceous, with long blonde hair, she was an exceptional subject. He had painted her no less than nine times, and sold the last one to a German officer for a tidy sum, but it would be nothing short of cruel to force her to continue in this temperature. Not that he was even slightly interested in her body or her bodily comfort. He was thinking of the rendezvous he had tonight with the delectable young Pierre. It was amazing what depraved things a sixteen-year-old boy would agree to when he was hungry enough Bernard reflected, dabbing his brush into a delicate shade of pink on his paint board. All-in-all this German occupation was turning out rather well he thought, applying a final stroke.
‘Nearly finished my dear,’ said Bernard, washing his brush, ‘can you do another session tomorrow?’
‘Non, it is too cold for any more,’ said Hortense, throwing on a dressing gown, ‘what will you paint instead of me now, cheri?’
‘I’m thinking of giving painting a break,’ said Bernard, ‘now that the Germans are running Paris the market has slowed, and I have one or two other interests to pursue.’
Bernard’s other interests consisted of cycling to his brother Raymond’s farm fifteen miles south of Paris, and bringing in as much produce as he could conceal under a load of hay in the farmer’s horse and cart. Fresh vegetables and milk could be sold for a small fortune on the black market, and these sorts of bulk goods that spoiled easily were not the domain of the black market gangs that had sprung up, who preferred tobacco and liquor, so there was a gap in the market.
As a reasonably well-known painter, Bernard knew plenty of people who had money and were prepared to spend it to prevent themselves from starving. Industrialists, bankers, merchants, they had all bought his art before the war, now they bought his brother’s produce, and there was sometimes little difference between the price his paintings had fetched before the war, and what he could expect for a shoulder of pork now. He and Raymond were doing well, and now he was looking to cultivate a new contact he had made through his after-dark companions at a club in Pigalle.
La Fleur was one of the less prestigious dance halls that doubled as a brothel, and the manager, Madame Legrand had been one of the first to approach the German command in Paris with a request to provide ‘clean women of a class suitable for a German officer.’ The German commanders in Paris were obviously practical men: rather than trying to suppress prostitution, they had set about regulating it, and were keen to control the supply and keep the choicest girls for themselves. Raymond’s farm produced far more food than he could distribute himself, especially milk, which had to be moved on quickly, and the woman Bernard had spoken with in the club assured him she had dozens of mothers beseeching him for milk for their children.
‘If you can supply me with as little as ten litres of milk per day,’ she had said, ‘I can make it worth your while.’
Tomorrow he would make his first delivery, and he chuckled to himself at the prospect of how he would be paid. The Madame had a particularly nice boy in her rooms, firm of ass, yet soft of cheek, the hair just starting to sprout between his legs. Bernard felt himself growing hard at his mind’s-eye vision of the splendid boy. His thoughts moved to the two other models he had suggested find work at Madame Legrand’s establishment. Predictably they had fitted right into the chorus line and were now making a tidy sum for Sophie Legrand working what she euphemistically called the ‘night-shift’ in the upstairs rooms. Sophie was suitably grateful, and that was a favour he would call in when the time came.
‘Hortense?’ he asked the model, now dressing before him, ‘I’ve been meaning to introduce you to a friend of mine. She runs a club in Pigalle called La Fleur. Sophie Legrande is her name, she can find you some work to replace modelling. I’m going to see her tomorrow, do you want to come?’
Hortense shrugged, ‘Certainly I will need something, I am not sure how I will pay the rent this month, let alone afford food, these black market prices are pure extortion!’
‘Outrageous isn’t it?’ said Bernard, thinking of the money from the stores he’d brought in only days before, ‘people profiting at others’ expense, it’s a disgrace for France. Tomorrow then?’
‘Oui, tomorrow,’ said Hortense resignedly.
Chapter Fifteen
The prison was old and small. The original building had been designed as a cavalry barracks centuries before, and what had been an extensive stable had been converted into cells by the simple expedient of bricking up the walls of each stall to the ceiling and installing bars across the front. It could only hold a hundred or so prisoners, and at present it was not even half-full. The Germans were so confident in their domination that they hadn’t troubled to replace the French warders, but had merely placed a handful of German guards to oversee the place, and taken over the front half of the building for their local administration.
The tunnel Yvette traversed led to a room with a barred corridor running through its centre, with gates in each side and a barred door at the end. On the right was a rough concrete shower room with three faucets at head height where prisoners were washed and occasionally shaved; on the left, a man in a blue uniform sat at a desk studying a sheaf of papers and making annotations in the margin.
The German soldier walked Yvette straight through and opened the barred door into another courtyard, where a tall, thin warder with a handlebar moustache was supervising some prisoners exercising.
‘Achtung! Di
e neues raumpflegerin,’ yelled the soldier, then turned and went back the way he came.
‘You’re a new cleaner?’ asked the warder. Yvette curtseyed in reply.
‘First I’ve heard about it.’ He shrugged, ‘I’m Sergeant Gallien, in charge of the prisoners here. Your duties are as follows: every evening at 5pm, while the prisoners are eating, you will sweep out and mop the stable floor and the cells. When you have finished that you will sweep out and mop the mess hall. The whole should not take you more than three hours. Is that clear?’
‘Yes sir,’ said Yvette, ‘but where are the mops and brooms?’
‘Madame Fevrier will show you all of that,’ said Gallien, ‘she’s been here for twenty years. You’ll find her through that door over there. Oh and another thing, it’s pretty clear to me why the Germans have chosen you to replace Madame Boucher, who did an excellent job. You may be young and pretty, but if I were you I’d take care not to find myself alone with any of the Germans. You understand that my men and I cannot intervene if anything untoward happens?’
‘Oui,’ said Yvette, looking down, ‘I understand,’ raging internally at the indignity the captain had put her through. Sergeant Gallien turned and she noticed that he hobbled as he moved towards the guardroom. He was certainly old enough to have served in the Great War, was that an old wound he was carrying?
Madame Fevrier was a small and bowed woman, seemingly in her 60s, who had obviously had a hard life. Her desiccated face was like a wrinkled leather purse, and wisps of grey hair clung to her cheeks. She sat on a stool beside a rudimentary stove on which a kettle was warming. All around her in the tiny room were brooms, mops, buckets and rags. There was barely room for two people. Yvette noticed a row of pegs along one wall with a key hanging from each peg. They were labelled: Guardroom, Office, Kitchen, Courtyard, Storeroom.
‘Ah, the new girl,’ said Madame Fevrier in a wavering voice, ‘what a sudden decision by the Commandant! These Germans, they have no real sense of order, despite their fondness for shouting commands. Madame Boucher has been here nearly five years and then one day, gone! Just like that. So how do you come to be here my dear?’ she asked with a warm smile.
Yvette was about to trot out her weak cover story when she hesitated. She had no obvious reason to trust this woman, and to do so could be to risk her neck, but she knew she couldn’t possibly get Joe out by herself. She was going to need an ally, and perhaps this woman was it?
‘Oh a friend suggested I apply and the captain said yes. I was as surprised as anyone. But Sergeant Gallien out there tells me you’ve been here for twenty years Madame,’ said Yvette, ‘can you tell me how you come to be here so long?’
‘Ah, it’s twenty-two years actually,’ she said with a sigh, taking two battered tin cups from beneath the stove, ‘1918 it was that I came to work here, at the end of the last war. The place was full of Germans then too, but they were in the cells that time around. I’ve been here longer than Sergeant Gallien even, and he was given the posting when they demobilised the army. Coffee?’
Yvette accepted a cup of the thin, bitter brew and sipped at it.
‘It sounds ridiculous now my dear, but I came here for love, of all things.’
‘Love?, said Yvette incredulously.
‘That’s right. Love. When the Germans invaded France the last time, I was living in Douai, which of course ended up behind the German lines for four years. I was just a girl then, and things were hard. There was little to eat and by the winter of 1917 we were starving, but a particular German who was garrisoned in the town used to take pity on me. Whenever I left the ration queue empty-handed he would materialise beside me as I walked home and give me something, a piece of bread, a bit of sausage, sometimes a few potatoes, and it was through his kindness that my family managed to stay alive. Of course I never mentioned him to my parents or my little brother, they would have nothing to do with les Boches. Anyway, one thing led to another and I began to fall in love with this German, who, while not particularly handsome, was a considerate, gallant and polite man.
‘We began an affair and he had even suggested that when the war ended I should go to Germany with him. Then suddenly the war did end, but not the way he’d expected. Many of the German officers simply packed up and left. It was chaos. You’d have expected the Germans to run away, and some did, but most were too afraid of being shot as deserters. I told Wolfgang to leave, but he said it was his duty to stay with his men, when the French soldiers arrived, he was captured and taken here. So I followed.’
‘He and a hundred other Germans languished in this place for a year after the war, and this was when I applied for a job here so I could see Wolfgang. I think the Government had forgotten they were here, and in early 1919 a prisoner was brought in who we later discovered had typhoid. When the Germans started getting sick I appealed to the local authorities, but they said their hands were tied, and until an order came from Paris they could do nothing about releasing them.’
‘Wolfgang lasted longer than most, but eventually he too succumbed. I buried him myself out there in the prisoners’ graveyard. I knew he came from Leipzig, but I had no idea who his family was or how to find them, his last name was Langer, which is a common name there I believe. It was terribly sad, an awful death. Anyway, I have stayed here since, tending his grave and looking after the prisoners, to try and prevent the same thing happening again. And now we have another war and the Germans are back, only this time it is Frenchmen who are imprisoned here. Who could have believed that France could fall so easily after all the sacrifices only twenty years ago? All those young men.’
Yvette looked at the woman. She had tears in her eyes.
‘Forgive me,’ muttered Madame Fevrier, ‘you must think me a sentimental old fool, telling you all these ancient stories.’
‘Not at all,’ said Yvette, and decided to risk everything on a single throw of the dice.
‘There is an Australian here,’ she said quietly.
‘You mean the Englishman with the strange accent they brought in two days ago? How do you know about him?’ asked Madame Fevrier, her eyebrows lifting in surprise.
‘Madame Fevrier,’ said Yvette, looking her directly in the eye, ‘you don’t know me, yet you have trusted me with your story. Can I trust you with mine?’
‘Why of course my dear,’ said the woman, putting down her cup.
‘I will be entrusting you with my life as well, and that of my lover.’
‘Lover eh? This Englishman is your lover?’
‘Oui, and I am carrying his child,’ said Yvette, hoping it was true.
‘Sacre Bleu!’ said Madame Fevrier, ‘tell me everything child.’
~ ~ ~
A dream about riding his horse across the plains back in South Australia morphed into another, one in which he re-lived the moment when he had burst through the door of the house in Roubaix to find Yvette being raped by one of his own men. Or at least he’d thought it was one of his own men. Summerville had turned out to be a German, a spy who had murdered before and had now stolen and destroyed the only thing that had mattered to Joe: the love he had for Yvette. In this dream though, instead of charging Schmidt and forcing him to run, Joe found himself unable to move, bound there helpless as the foul man had his way, and laughed at his weakness.
The grille of the cell clanged open and Joe woke abruptly. A French warder came in carrying a tray of food while the other stood outside.
‘Mangé,’ said the guard, placing the tray on the bunk, and closed the door behind him. Joe looked at the bowl of gruel, cup of water and the piece of black bread on the tray.
‘Could be my last meal,’ he thought to himself bitterly, ‘better enjoy it.’
He dunked the rock-hard bread in the gruel and began to chew. Ten minutes later the door clanged open again. This time the guard gestured at him to step outside into the corridor. It was not his execution, only exercise, although why they bothered he couldn’t understand.
>
‘Can’t you let me out of here?’ he asked the warder in French as they walked between the barred cells, ‘I’m a soldier, not a criminal like these people.’ Joe gestured at the miserable Frenchmen sitting on their bunks. Most of them, Joe had gathered from listening to the conversations around him, were petty thieves arrested by the French police, smugglers trading contraband with England who had been captured by the German coastguard, and the odd black-marketeer who hadn’t paid his bribes. Joe was the only soldier in there, and he wondered why he hadn’t been transferred to a prison camp.
‘It is more than my job is worth,’ said the warder, ‘and besides, you will no doubt be moved to a camp eventually. It’s a question of transport I gather, but I hear Hitler has postponed his invasion of England, so the men sent here for that will no doubt be sent somewhere else now. And good riddance to them.’
‘Postponed you say?’ asked Joe, ‘for how long?’
The warder shrugged and pursed his lips.
‘I am just telling you what I hear in the tavern from the sailors m’sieu, it could all be rubbish of course. What difference does it make? The British are not about to sail over and liberate us, eh?’
It makes a huge difference thought Joe. His chances of escaping and getting back to England were next to nil while the whole area was swarming with invasion troops, but if they re-deployed them somewhere else? Plus, once the British realised the invasion was off they would start serious offensive operations. The Commandos would be out in force on the French coast, and while he had little chance of meeting up with any of them, it gave him some small encouragement to think that they might be nearby.
Out in the welcome open air, he did some star jumps to loosen up, then sprinted from one side of the courtyard to the other, dropping for thirty push-ups at each end. Three hundred push-ups later he was sitting against the wall getting his breath back, when the door to the cleaner’s room opened and Yvette stepped out with the old lady who swept the place every day.
