Sirens and Spies

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  ‘“Next time I will do exactly the same,’ my father answered quietly. Of course, we all understood why my father had agreed to fix the boot, why he had to agree—because of us, his family. My brother was very angry, though. That evening, he was sullen and would talk to no one.

  “After this, we often had German soldiers visit our shop. My father was a good cobbler. He could fix a boot so that it looked new again, and he charged reasonable prices. The word got around.”

  Miss Fitch shrugged.

  “What could we do? Other shop owners had the same problem. Some people understood. But others in our town did not approve of my father’s dealings with the Germans. Behind his back, they spoke against him, told tales that were not true. Women who had been my mother’s friends turned their faces away when she spoke to them on the street.

  “And at my school, I found that I had enemies for the first time. Before, of course, there were those who disliked me, whom I disliked. I was a reserved child, a little shy. Like you, Elsie, I did not have many close friends. This was different. Now I saw that I had real enemies, people who hated me. Not for anything I had done, oh, no! This was the hard thing. I was the same. They hated me because of my father, because their parents had spoken against my parents. It was frightening to realize suddenly that not only a schoolmate hated you but also his parents, his whole family. It made the hate big and serious, something that could never be fixed. One girl spat in my face.

  “‘Pig!’ she said, and spat. I was angry, but also ashamed and frightened.

  “‘You don’t know what you say!’ I cried. ‘These are lies you are believing!’

  “She said, ‘I know who is lying,’ and walked away.

  ‘“Pay no attention,’ my mother told me. ‘That is a stupid family. All so proud and nose-in-the-air. The mother—did you know?—takes in other people’s clothes for washing to make ends meet. Poor washerwoman, while her good-for-nothing husband spends the money to drink himself silly every Saturday night. They are jealous of us. Pay no attention.’

  “My mother was a soft-spoken woman usually. Not a gossip at all. I had never heard her say such things about anyone. But I was glad to hear them now. To fight a whole family, you need a family behind you. I was glad to see my mother stand up and fight.

  “Oh, it is strange to look back now and remember the anger of those days. Fear, yes. Everywhere fear. But beneath, hidden at the heart of the fear, there was anger. You would think, wouldn’t you?, that it would have been enough to hate the Germans. And we did! Yes! We detested them, despised them, my mother, my father, everyone. We French are a proud people. To see the German soldiers strutting down our streets, smoking in our parks, eating at our cafes, it turned our stomachs. But who dared to speak of it openly? Who could protest?

  “One small sign of protest, a wisp of a rumor, and the German eye fell upon you. Then, at night, some night when you least expected it, they would come with their guns to knock on your door. ‘You are wanted for questioning,’ they would say, most politely. ‘It won’t take long. Don’t be afraid.’ And that was that. Many who went away for questioning never came back.

  “We heard it happen on our own street, my father, my mother, my brother and I. We heard the car drive up, and the voices, then the crying. We heard the doors of the car slam shut and we heard the car drive away. Next day, we would find out who, but never, almost never, why. We were terrified. Even my brother.

  “But, deep inside, we were angry. And suspicious. Who had turned this man in? Who was the traitor? The Nazis were devils, but so great was our anger and our fear that we began to look for devils among ourselves. Every small disagreement, even petty incidents, took on large importance.

  “If the butcher ran out of meat, you might easily convince yourself that he had sold it, for higher profit, to a German customer. Perhaps, even, he had made some arrangement with the enemy. Traitor! If someone acquired, from mysterious sources, a new winter coat that normally he could not afford to buy—there! He was suspected of collaboration. Rumors! Everywhere, suspicions and rumors. Some had foundation. Many did not. Do you see how it worked? Since we could not openly hate our real enemy, we turned our anger on ourselves.”

  Miss Fitch stopped, and looked across at Elsie, as if expecting her to say something.

  “And the stranger thing was,” she went on, “that we were all, in small ways, guilty of collaborating with the Germans. How could we help it? How could my father? They lived among us, conversed with us, devised the rules and regulations by which we were forced to live. We all compromised. We traded our pride for our lives, for the lives of our families.”

  Miss Fitch paused again, and shook her head.

  “For us, it was a very bad exchange. I sometimes think that by the end of the war, we French had come to hate ourselves more even than we hated the Germans.”

  Elsie frowned. “But not everyone made that trade,” she said. “I read about it. You didn’t have to compromise. You could join the Resistance. You could fight secretly, make secret plans to blow things up. There were ways to fight!”

  “Oh, yes,” agreed Miss Fitch. “There were ways. I will tell you of one who chose to fight. Not a big fight. He was a small fish, a baby fish, who could not do very much to help. He was afraid, but he swallowed his fear and went to a meeting to make the very sort of plans you have just described. He crept out of the house late at night to go to these meetings, while his parents slept. They would not have let him go if they had known. They would have locked him in his room, tied him to his bed, anything to keep him away from those meetings. He was angry and headstrong, though. And very clever at climbing out of windows.”

  “Your brother!” whispered Mary.

  “Gerard. Yes. He had not been at it very long when they arrested him.

  “‘Poor Gerard,’ someone told me later. ‘He did nothing. Only came to listen, very serious, very straight in his chair. He ran some errands for us and then, poof! He was gone. It shook us up, I can tell you. But there were others, before and after him, who disappeared. It was to be expected.’”

  Miss Fitch’s voice trailed off. Her hand drifted up to her head, to the kerchief slipped cockeyed again.

  “To be expected,” she murmured, then looked at Elsie.

  “Look at me!” Mary wanted to scream at her. “I’m the one who cares!” Miss Fitch sighed and looked at Elsie.

  “That was the Resistance, you see. A few heroes and then, the others.” Elsie’s eyes snapped up.

  “What happened to him?” she asked bluntly.

  “Elsie!” cried Mary.

  “He died …”

  “Elsie! Will you stop this?” Mary was weeping, suddenly.

  “He died in a concentration camp,” Miss Fitch said.

  “Elsie!” screamed Mary. Her eyes were flooded with tears.

  “It’s all right,” said Miss Fitch. “It’s the logical question to ask.”

  “No, it isn’t!”

  “We believe he died in a camp,” Miss Fitch continued, to Elsie. “We believe he was sent to a work camp inside Germany. Many young men like him were sent to such places. My father tried to trace him, then and later. He could get no specific answers.

  “‘Your son is safe,’ he was told. ‘No need to worry. He will write when he can. Be patient.’

  “He never wrote. There was no word, ever. Only much later, we heard a story. How did it go? The older cousin of a boy who had known Gerard at school had a friend whose brother had escaped from a German camp. This friend’s brother remembered a young man named Fichet at his camp. My mother was wild when she heard this news.

  “‘You must find this person, this brother, and speak with him personally,’ she told my father. ‘It is the only chance.’

  “Toward the end of the war, my father did contact him, by letter. Never in person. ‘What did this Fichet boy look like?’ he wrote. ‘Can you tell us more about him?’

  “The friend’s brother was sick, in a French hospital, it turned ou
t. Later we heard that he had died. He could not describe Gerard, if it was he, very well. ‘What can I say?’ he wrote back. ‘We were all so dirty and sick. This person I knew only slightly, and I am not sure his name was Gerard. I am sorry.’

  “As you see,” Miss Fitch told Elsie, “we never knew exactly what happened. The times were chaotic. Communications were poor. In such disorder it was possible to lose people.”

  Elsie nodded. “Yes, I see,” she answered.

  When Mary looked up then, through her tears, through the clenched fists half shielding her face, she saw that Miss Fitch was smiling, a sad, gentle smile, at Elsie. And very faintly in Elsie’s eyes, what was it? For a second, Mary thought she saw the flash of a smile reflected.

  16

  IF MISS FITCH HAD CAUGHT Elsie’s look, she gave no sign of it. She rose suddenly to turn on a lamp. The room had grown quite dark. In the hall, Miss Fitch flicked a switch that lit the porch light over the front door outside. She spread the curtains at a living room window and looked out. Now the girls could see the snow pelting slantwise across the window. Pelting, but making no sound at all. Subtracting sound, if anything, so that the clicks of Miss Fitch’s high-heeled shoes across the hall floor, into the kitchen, stood out sharp and separate.

  Miss Fitch turned on the kitchen lights and came back to sit down.

  “Would you like something?” she asked. “Hot chocolate?”

  “Go on,” answered Elsie. The lamp light had turned her skin rosy. They all looked rosy. Mary’s cheeks were glowing. Miss Fitch was still wearing the long, transparent scarf from the trunk upstairs. It glistened in the light, palest pink, magical.

  She was magical, Mary decided, watching her. Straight and still, she sat in her chair, and her dark eyes gazed powerfully across the room, as if there were something there to be controlled or subdued by a force inside her. And if there was something there (Mary glanced quickly over her shoulder), if there was something no one but Miss Fitch could see, it was controlled, Mary was sure. Miss Fitch had strength. In the lamp light, she appeared stern, almost fierce. She was no victim, Mary realized suddenly. She was not some charity case to be sheltered and plied with soup and good intentions. She did not need Mary’s sympathy, did not want her loyal heart. These were useless offerings, silly feelings that Miss Fitch rightly brushed aside because something more important was at stake, something to do with Elsie, and with Miss Fitch herself.

  But what? Mary could not see it, and she was hurt. Angrily, she watched Elsie lean back on the couch, as if she knew this room well and felt a part of it. Angrily, she saw Miss Fitch lower her dark eyes to Elsie’s face, and hold them there, full of strength and understanding.

  “Well, go on!” Elsie’s voice shot irritably through the room. Mary jumped.

  Miss Fitch nodded. Her eyes were once more on the photograph.

  “It’s of no consequence, of course, but this picture, it is backwards,” she said. “I have just noticed it.”

  “Backwards!” Elsie leaned forward in surprise.

  “Printed in reverse, I mean. The street curves left here, not right. My family’s house was around this corner, rather than that one.” Miss Fitch pointed. “I remember clearly now. Everything here is backwards.”

  Elsie examined the photograph with a frown.

  “Well, how could they have known?” she blurted out. “I mean, the people who made this book had obviously never been to your town. It looked like any old town to them.” She sounded angry, as if Miss Fitch had accused her of making a mistake.

  “No matter,” said Miss Fitch. “I was trying only to put myself back there, as a girl walking along with my violin. I was a little arrogant in those days, I think.” She glanced at Elsie, smiling.

  “I worked so hard, you see. Nobody, I thought, worked so hard as I did. Privately, I thought very highly of myself and not so highly of other people, who were not so serious. I prided myself especially on my clear head. I knew what I wanted to do and how I would do it. I was very organized. I made a schedule and stuck to it.” Mary looked over at Elsie. She was fiddling with a button on her blouse.

  “That was before the Germans came,” Miss Fitch said. “Afterward, well, it was impossible to have plans. My music school closed up. The teachers had gone away. A year later, it reopened, but by then the trains did not run to Paris. There was a fuel shortage. People rode bicycles, or walked. I had no money to buy a bicycle. It was too far, too dangerous, for me to walk.

  “I practiced when I could at home. I was angry at this war, frustrated all the time. It interrupted my life. I had planned everything around my violin, you see: my fame, great wealth, travel.” Miss Fitch smiled at herself. “I could not imagine spending the rest of my life in that little town, among all those plain people. I wanted to get away, and then, even Paris was out of reach.

  “Life became harder, too. We could not buy good food anymore as the war went on. There was no meat, no butter. Everything was rationed, even vegetables. And we were cold in winter. No coal, little wood to burn. And the war went on and on. There were those who thought that it would never stop, that life would be like this forever.

  “We were very poor,” said Miss Fitch, “and I was still growing. I grew out of my only coat. My arms hung out the sleeves and I could not fasten it around me very well. Too tight. Too small. You can imagine how I felt, proud, serious me, to be seen in such a coat. It is hard to think highly of someone who goes about like a scarecrow, hanging out of her clothes.

  “I remember that I was wearing that coat the first day Hans came to our shop,” Miss Fitch said. “I remember that it snowed. I came home late in the snow.”

  “Snow?” asked Mary.

  “How strange,” Elsie added softly, glancing toward the windows.

  “Not so strange,” Miss Fitch said. “Why strange?” she murmured. “Unusual, perhaps. Yes, and very beautiful that evening, a fine white veil of snow coming down over all our little town. I remember it so well. I remember …”

  “Yes,” whispered Mary. “I can imagine.” And suddenly, she really could. She was forgetting her anger now, forgetting to be hurt. She was forgetting everything and becoming a part of Miss Fitch’s story.

  “I remember … I remember …”

  Then Elsie was imagining it, too, for Miss Fitch had a way of speaking that lured people behind her words, even cautious people who have ever an eye on themselves.

  Now, as Miss Fitch talked on, both Elsie and Mary saw clearly the person whom she was describing: a proud girl in a rough coat, standing on the sidewalk in the photograph. They could see her dig her fists into her pockets and hunch against the cold. They could see her bare legs, and the snow beginning to fall, thick and heavy, just as it was falling now, outside, on Grove Street.

  Only, in Mary’s and Elsie’s imaginations, the snow fell on the roofs of the shops in the photograph; on the doorsteps of the houses; on the heads of the shoppers rushing to finish a day’s meager marketing; on the shiny black boots of a German soldier who stepped, with menacing precision, up the sidewalk.

  Was it then that the sound of Miss Fitch’s voice faded in their ears? Later neither sister could remember exactly when Miss Fitch had swept them out of themselves into that other, wartime world. Later, Elsie did not like to admit that it had happened.

  “I didn’t forget to call Mother,” she told Mary, after Mrs. Potter had phoned hours later to ask where on earth they were,

  “And I didn’t forget about the snowstorm, either,” she sniffed. “I knew it was getting bad out there. I just didn’t want to interrupt Miss Fitch.”

  But Elsie had forgotten, and Mary with her. They had forgotten because suddenly they were there, right there, in the photograph.

  They stood in the street beside Renee Fichet and turned their faces to the sky to catch perfect snowflakes on their tongues. They rubbed their cold knees with their cold hands, as Renee rubbed hers. They watched a German soldier go by out of the corners of their eyes, and when he had passed
, they walked with Renee up the street, around the corner, to a narrow two-story house where the front door rang a bell when it opened and a man glanced up from the shoe in his lap.

  “You’re late,” he said. “Your mother is worried. Come in and lock the door. We’ll have no more customers now the snow has started.”

  17

  “IS THAT RENEE?”

  “Yes, Mama. It’s me.” She did not take off her coat, for the shop was cold. The little stove in the corner was unlit for lack of coal.

  When she had locked the door, Renee put her hands into her pockets again and went to stand before the front window. Outside, snow fell into the darkening street. It was not a lasting snow. By next morning, it would be visible only as a raw dampness on roofs and sidewalks. Snow came infrequently to that small French town, and when it came it did not stay long. To Renee, now eighteen, it was enough of a rarity to stand still and watch.

  “Look,” she told her father. “It’s so pretty. The windows are getting eyebrows.”

  But he did not look up. Outside, the hunched and bundled form of a woman passed by close to the window, and disappeared down the street.

  “People are leaving tracks,” Renee reported. “You can see who has come in, who has gone out and not returned. M. Perrin has closed early, like us. I see his footprints going home.”

  M. Perrin ran a small bakery across the street. His home was elsewhere in town.

  “But, of course, he has nothing to sell,” answered her father briefly.

  “Mme. DeGrelle’s dog has been out,” Renee said. She liked the street this way, the neatness of its shapes under the thin snowfall. She liked the tracks that told such clear stories of comings and goings.

  “There,” she said. “I see his little pawprints heading for the corner. Then, back they come, tip-tap. He didn’t like this weather very much, I think.”