by Simon Mawer
And then there is a sudden cry, a shout, a scurrying of footsteps and a scream beyond the spectrum of human sound, something animal that nevertheless carries within it words that are recognisable: France! Shit! Bastards! Followed by a rapid running and a single rifle shot that is loud, flat and final.
‘Communists,’ the old lady decides.
Alice peers out of the window. In the light of lamps she can see figures move, dragging something. ‘Someone’s dead.’ She looks at the old lady. ‘Communist or not, he’s dead.’ Immediately she regrets the comment, which goes against everything she has been taught, that she should say nothing of any note, that she should enter into no argument or discussion, that dullness is the best camouflage. Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés. That was the motto at the school in Beaulieu.
‘But there you are,’ the old lady continues with a patient smile, as though the young woman has missed the obvious. ‘They believe in nothing, so what does it matter?’
Alice looks away. People push past along the corridor and a German officer peers into the compartment. He is wearing a silver breastplate that she knows to be the sign of the Feldgendarmerie, mere military police, to be treated with respect but not feared in the way that some of the other units are to be feared. He catches her eye and for a moment they look at one another like beings from two entirely different habitats, a fish in the depths of a pond examining a fisherman on the bank. Then the man nods and passes on. Moments later the door slides back and a young man enters the compartment, settling opposite her in the one empty place. When he catches her eye he gives a wry smile; she ignores him and buries her head in her book, anxious not to get drawn into conversation.
The soldiers are leaving the carriages. Doors slam shut and the train, ancient and arthritic, flexes its joints and moves forward. ‘What happened?’ someone asks.
The newcomer shrugs.
‘Well, at least we didn’t have to wait long,’ one of the civil servants remarks.
‘A small inconvenience,’ the young man agrees. His smile is faint and supercilious, as though he knows more about inconveniences than anyone else.
Later the young man stands up, excuses himself and steps over legs and feet to gain the door. Perhaps he has gone to the lavatory, or to stretch his legs, or to smoke a cigarette; but she wonders. His empty seat seems as suspicious and threatening as his presence. When he returns he seems just the same: young, anonymous, indifferent. And yet she cannot rid her mind of the idea that he is watching her, smiling knowingly whenever their eyes meet, wondering who she is and what she is doing. When the ticket inspector passes there is a moment’s confusion as tickets are handed over and then identity cards. There is an awkward juggling and Alice’s card falls to the floor. She leans forward to retrieve it but the young man is quicker, picking it up from between the jumble of feet and straightening up so that his face is close to hers and she can smell some kind of soap on his skin. He is close-shaved but his chin is brushed with blue, like the blueing of tempered steel.
‘Please,’ he says, handing her the card. She takes it thankfully and returns it to her handbag. Outside the windows of their compartment a thin stain of dawn is smeared across the sky, like blood and lymph oozing from a wound. Acres of railway sidings are visible.
‘Juvisy,’ the young man says. ‘We’re almost there.’
Paris
I
Gare d’Austerlitz, early morning. The Feldgendarmerie have set up a barrage at the head of the platform with trestle tables and soldiers going through people’s luggage. Queues have formed. One or two people – officials, men in uniform, a mother with her children – are waved through but everyone else has to queue. Alice stands in line, with the crystals nudging her womb.
A story did the rounds at Beaulieu: one agent carrying his wireless set in a suitcase was faced with just such a search. Noticing a woman with a baby in her arms and two young toddlers trailing along behind her, he lifted the younger child into his arms. ‘Let me help,’ he said to the harassed mother, and, along with his newly acquired family, he was waved through the checkpoint without being searched.
No such brilliance here, only the slow plod forwards in the line until finally Alice reaches the front of the queue, puts her suitcase onto the table and opens it. She stands indifferently while the policeman sorts through her clothes, waiting for him to find the wireless valves. Her heart beats loudly – surely he can hear it – but somehow her mind seems calm, as though she is about to go on stage and she knows her lines and the tension is what she needs to play her part well.
‘What’s this?’
The racket of the mainline station is all around, enveloping her with its echoes from the roof, a stunning contrast to life in the countryside at Lussac. Even Toulouse seems a small town compared with this.
‘Those? Oh, they’re for a friend.’ She shrugs. ‘His wireless has broken and he wants to listen to Grodeutscher Rundfunk and he can’t find spares for love nor money. I managed to find something in Toulouse. I hope to goodness they’re the right ones.’ She smiles at him. He is young, as young as she, and being male means that he looks even younger because those things that happen to men – the hardening of the features, the toughening of the jaw, the rough growth of stubble – have not yet happened to him. A mere boy.
The boy turns the valves in his hand, then glances up at her and returns her smile. ‘Gut,’ he decides, then tries it in French: ‘Ça va. Vous pouvoir aller.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Allez,’ he repeats, ‘allez!’
She feels a small stir of triumph deep inside her where the crystals lie. Of course she may go. Why on earth would he wish to detain her? She smiles at him, takes up her suitcase and makes her way to the ladies’ cloakroom. In the cubicle she drops her knickers and hitches up her skirt and squats, feeling with her finger, probing inside and levering out the package of crystals. Then she opens her case and wraps them in a towel, adjusts her clothing and goes out. Benoît would have laughed.
The deserted station forecourt is slick under a grey sky, the sky of Paris that she has dreamed about, imagined, feared, almost forgotten, and is lain now like a blanket over her childhood memories of the city. Walk purposefully but without hurrying. That’s what they said at Beaulieu. Always know where you are going and why. Always have a story to explain yourself. But she has no story to explain what she is doing, nothing beyond the simple fact that she wants to look, wants to see the city for the first time in years. So she crosses the road to the embankment and stands looking at the view across the river, remembering that time in London, the day after that first interview when she walked onto the Embankment beside the Hungerford Bridge with the trains rattling overhead. Then she envisaged this moment, looking out across the slow slick of the Seine from the quai, imagined the drama of her presence here. But the reality is that she is small against this great sweep of river and sky, and insignificant. Anything she might be able to do is as nothing. And yet she feels again the weight of two stones in her hands and smells the acrid stink of sparks and hears Ned’s voice: That’s all there is to it. You’ve just blown London off the map and out of history. Vaporised.
A voice behind her says, ‘Hello again.’
She turns. It’s the young man from the train, her companion since Vierzon. He has followed her. He has managed a shave and a change of shirt – she notices that – and he looks appealing enough, except that he is not appealing, that no casual encounter appeals these days, that the whole vacant city lies around her and none of it is appealing because it is a threat of unknown proportions and unperceived dimensions, and everyone within it is a possible enemy. She turns back to the view. ‘What do you want?’
‘It’s Anne-Marie, isn’t it?’
She feels a sudden emptiness inside, as though, with the crystals no longer there within her, her bowels have dissolved into a loose and insidious fluid. ‘How do you know that?’
‘Laroche. Anne-Marie Laroche. When you dropped your identity ca
rd. I’d have spoken during the journey, but with all those others around … and at the barrage I didn’t want to distract your cheerful young soldier just as he was smiling into your eyes.’
‘Are you trying to pick me up? Because if so, I’m not interested.’
He laughs. There is something familiar in his laughter – a lightness, an honesty, rather like Benoît’s. ‘I thought we might have a coffee together. Or breakfast. Have you had breakfast? We can get something near here. I happen to know the owner, and there’s a chance that I can persuade him to give us some real coffee. How about that?’ He talks fast, his words sliding easily over her request to be left alone. ‘My name’s Julius, by the way. Julius Miessen. Julius, Jules, whichever you like. I thought you looked a bit lost in the big city, and …’
‘I’m not at all lost.’
‘That’s fine then. But you can’t go far lugging that suitcase. Let me give you a hand.’ He moves to pick up her case but she pushes him aside.
‘Leave me alone!’
He steps back, smiling, holding up his hands in mock surrender. ‘I’m sorry. Only wanted to help, that’s all. Paris isn’t an easy place to be these days. You need friends. Rationing’s a nightmare and the black market has gone through the roof, but a young woman like you can have a very comfortable time.’
‘What are you talking about? Look, leave me alone, will you?’
‘Do you need a place to stay? Or I can find you work, if you like. Easy enough. You’ll make a thousand francs a day.’
‘What the devil do you mean?’
‘You know the kind of thing. Nothing you wouldn’t want to do. There are lots of men in this city who are crying out for a bit of companionship.’
‘What the hell do you think I am?’
He laughs. ‘An intelligent, respectable girl who needs a bit of cash. That’s all. Where are you from? I can usually place people but not you. Educated, though.’
‘Go away, will you? I don’t need your work and I don’t want it. Now leave me alone or I’ll call the police. Do you hear me? I’ll call the police.’ She looks round, as though there might be policemen just ready for her cry of distress; but the quai is deserted, trees blowing in the breeze, one or two cars passing down the road, cyclists going past, cyclists everywhere. Even one of those vélo-taxis, a rickshaw contraption with a skinny man pedalling and two German soldiers sitting in the back laughing.
The man shrugs. ‘Here’s my card. Miessen sounds German, doesn’t it? But don’t worry, it’s not. Dutch. Dutch father, French mother. If you’re ever hard up don’t hesitate to get in touch.’
She takes the card just to get rid of him; then picks up her suitcase and walks off along the embankment as though she had a purpose in going out of the station, as though she had somewhere to go here on the banks of the Seine between the Gare d’Austerlitz and the Gare de Lyon. At the bridge she turns and glances back. He’s standing there, watching. What does that mean? Who is this man, with his rapid talk, his knowledge of her name, his offer of work? A pimp? An agent? A man who preys on young women coming to the capital, trying to recruit them for whatever business he has going? Entertaining Germans, probably. She shivers with revulsion. The word prostitute sounds in her mind, with its hissing sibilant. She can’t go back now. He is there between her and the station, and she can only pretend that this walk across the river was what she intended all along. So she picks up her suitcase and crosses the bridge, walking on alone beneath the neutral sky and the sullen river, feeling exposed. Crows and pigeons wheel overhead like predators. The silver city lies all around her, tarnished and battered, a once beautiful artefact reduced by misuse to something you might find on a stall in the flea market, fingered by punters looking for a bargain. Downstream there is a familiar view, the hunched back and splayed legs of the cathedral squatting in the midst of the stream like a great arthropod, but even that seems tawdry, something remembered from a dream, the dream of childhood when fears could be laughed at in the light of day.
On the far embankment bicycles clatter past like an army of insects, locusts swarming having stripped the landscape bare. An army lorry overtakes them, hooting. There are German soldiers in the back. One of them catches her eye and gives a jaunty little wave. She shrugs and turns away, crossing the road in the wake of the lorry, dodging through the bicycles. Where should she go now? A train rattles past somewhere nearby. She can hear it but not see it: a métro line out of sight below the bridge. But where is the station? The train emerges from beneath the embankment and climbs onto the next bridge to cross back over the river. How to get on to it? She feels angry and incompetent, a refugee adrift in the big city frightened by the attentions of a strange man, forced against her will to make this detour.
‘Just over there, dear,’ a woman replies when asked. It’s obvious now, the sign obvious, the occasional pedestrian going down to the platform obvious. Also obvious is a black Citroën parked near the entrance with two men standing beside it, smoking and watching people pass by. Belted raincoats and trilby hats, but you can’t pretend it is anything other than a uniform. Don’t panic. Keep calm. Breathe deeply and walk slowly but with purpose.
As she approaches they stop a man and demand to see his papers, then order him to open the bag he is carrying.
Walk confidently. Don’t catch their collective eye. Ignore them as you would ignore anything that doesn’t concern you. But they watch her. She can feel their eyes touching her legs and thighs, patting her backside. Stuff you, she thinks, and strides past looking the other way, sick with fear.
The métro station is a refuge, somewhere the anonymous congregate within the milieu of this strange city that is a simulacrum of the Paris that she knew. There is a poster showing a young man looking out from a dark doorway towards a bright and hopeful horizon. IF YOU WANT TO GET AHEAD, it says, COME TO WORK IN GERMANY. She waits, her suitcase beside her, for the next train going south to place d’Italie, back the way she has come, back on track, confusion conquered for the moment.
When the train arrives the carriages are packed. She edges in among the passengers and pushes down the car, stepping over legs and feet, apologising as she goes. Someone offers her his seat – ‘Je vous en prie, Mam’selle,’ he says, smiling – and she turns to see that grey-green uniform, those black and silver badges of rank: a German officer, a Hauptmann. Should she refuse him or accept? Is the spirit of resistance to shun the occupiers? She knows how to behave in Lussac, or Agen or Toulouse, but here in Paris?
The train swings onto the bridge and rattles across the river. ‘Thank you,’ she says, and sits primly with her knees together and her eyes straight ahead, conscious all the time of his standing over her, watching. No one else looks at her, though. No one cares. Just a girl, une gonzesse, being eyed by a Frisé. She is safe; for the moment, beneath the appreciative gaze of a German officer and circumscribed by the indifference of the city, she is safe.
II
The house is in a run-down street near the place d’Italie, an area of narrow, sloping lanes and crowded cottages. The pavé glistens with rain. On the corner is a small café and next to it what was once a print shop but is now a shuttered shell, the owners departed, leaving behind nothing more than the ghost of their presence, their name on the shop sign: Imprimerie Bertrand. Paris is a city inhabited by ghosts. Ghosts of young men, ghosts of Jews, ghosts of communists and socialists. A poster advertises thousands of francs’ reward for anyone giving information about a wanted ‘terrorist’, but a long strip has been torn out of it so that the face is no longer there. Is she a terrorist? Presumably she is. She places her suitcase down on the pavement outside number 45, rings the bell and waits, conscious that people might be watching, conscious that she is exposed there on the street without a decent cover story. What if there is no one at home? What will she do then? But after a while there is the sound of someone shuffling around inside and a man’s voice calling out, ‘Who is it?’
Alice speaks softly and urgently, leaning towa
rds the door. ‘I’m looking for Béatrice. I’m a friend.’
An old man opens the door a few inches so that he can peer through the crack. He is wearing a blue boiler suit and a black beret. His lips are sunken, as though he has not yet put his teeth in, and wisps of white hair poke out from beneath the beret. In the shadows behind him hovers a woman of similar age. ‘I’ve come from Ricard,’ Alice says. ‘Is Béatrice here?’
‘No, she’s not.’
‘She’s at work?’
The man glances over his shoulder at the woman as though for guidance. ‘She’s gone away.’ He tries to close the door but Alice holds it open.
‘Ricard sent me. Please let me come in.’
‘I said she’s gone away.’
‘You can’t leave me standing here on the pavement. I’ve nowhere else to go.’
As he relents and opens the door further, she seizes the opportunity to push past into the narrow hallway. There’s a smell of drains, the claustrophobic stink of fear and deprivation. Unbidden she goes into the front room, thankful to be off the street and out of the view of strangers. Lace curtains blur the view of the houses opposite. There’s heavy flock wallpaper and a large dresser occupying one entire wall. A holy picture – the sacred heart of Jesus – offers the narrow room its blessing. On the other wall is a framed photograph of Marshal Pétain.
