by Richard Wake
The Agony of France
Richard Wake
Manor and State, LLC
Copyright © 2020 by Manor and State, LLC
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical figures, are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Contents
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part II
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Part III
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Part IV
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
REVIEW
Afterword
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Afterword
Part I
1
“Rent, don’t buy” is what they tell people about to undergo an obvious change in circumstances. But what do they tell guerrilla fighters living in the middle of a city occupied by the enemy? If the Resistance fighters were my friend Leon and I, and the city was Paris, and the enemy was the Nazis, what the concierge told us when she handed us the key to the top-floor flat in a building on Rue Ternaux was, “Two months in advance.”
“Where’s the bureau?” I asked, as we walked through the bedroom.
“What, you people unpack now?” she said. Her name was Sylvia Goren, and she had a point. She wasn’t supposed to know we were in the Resistance, but the concierges knew everything. They had the empty apartments. They kept us moving, building to building. You people. Two months in advance.
My belongings consisted of two pairs of pants, one shirt, a jacket, a tie, and a pair of dress shoes jammed into a knapsack, and I had a lot more than Leon did. Between the two of us, we might fill a single drawer and two hangers in the closet. And besides, she was right. We didn’t unpack. Even when we managed to clean the clothes we had, we folded them as neatly as possible and shoved them back into the knapsacks.
In the previous eight months, about 250 days, we had probably slept in 30 places. We sometimes played a game, trying to remember the addresses of all of them and the most notable thing that happened in each. Leon called the game “Massive Shit” because my only memory of a night on Rue Barny in Limoges — we moved a lot in Limoges, sometimes nightly — was me destroying the bathroom in such a comprehensive fashion that Leon decided to sleep on a pillow in the hallway. When Leon got a little drunk, and we were with other people, and he said, “Let’s play ‘Massive Shit,’” it made for some interesting explanations.
This was our fourth week on Rue Ternaux, in the middle of a Jewish neighborhood in the 11th arrondissement. There were more vacancies in the Jewish neighborhoods, for obvious reasons, but this building was pretty full, it seemed. We heard people — kids in the flat right below us, for instance. We couldn’t be sure, though, mostly because we had not met any of our neighbors — not formally, anyway. There had been a few nods on the stairs, but nothing more. We were fine with that, and the people with the yellow stars on their jackets seemed fine with it, too.
I didn’t need a star because I was Catholic — Alex Kovacs by birth, Alain Kerr on my newest identity card. Leon Suskind would have needed a yellow star on his jacket, but his latest papers had him as Louis St. Jacques, and as he liked to say, “I can recite the Popes backward from here to 1850, so I’m good.”
“Except for, you know,” I would say, pointing at his crotch.
“If we get to the naked portion of the proceedings, I’m screwed. Until then, I’m good.” Then he would theatrically bless himself.
The flat was typical — upper floor, south of comfortable, north of shithole. There was almost no hot water, but that wasn’t anyone’s fault except the Germans — no one had coal except for maybe once a week, when we managed to light the stove and boil some pots and fill the tub with a few inches of hot water and flip for who went first. Heads, I got a hot, quick scrub with Leon hectoring me to get finished. Tails, I ended up with a cool, leisurely soak in Leon’s filth. And then we stood there, making conversation as we drip-dried on the bathroom floor. Towels, you see, did not fit in the knapsacks.
Each place had its own special character. One in Limoges was accessed only by climbing a staircase hidden in a closet. Others were garrets with slanted, five-foot ceilings beneath the eaves of the building, normally rented to students. Except there weren’t nearly as many students anymore, so many of them either scooped up by the gendarmes and shipped out to work in German factories, or hiding from the gendarmes. The only exempt students were medical students, and that left plenty of vacant garrets.
But the place on Rue Ternaux was a regular flat — kitchen, living room, bedroom, bathroom. The idiosyncrasy of this setup was that we were the only humans living on the fifth floor. No. 51 was full of chickens that apparently had the run of the place, and who we smelled whenever there was a north wind. We were in No. 52, and No. 53 was full of rabbits in cages who we smelled whenever there was a south wind.
Mme. Goren was running a side business out of the fifth floor, supplementing her income with illegal food sales out of Nos. 51 and 53, and rent collected from even-more-illegal Resistance fighters out of No. 52. Her only acknowledgement of the whole enterprise was when I saw her one day in the hallway. She was closing the door to No. 53 and carrying a dead rabbit in a cloth sack. She was also carrying a wooden stick that she had likely used to club the animal to death.
“You know, it’s true,” she said.
“What’s true?”
“They really do?”
“They really do what?”
“They really do fuck like rabbits,” she said. “I almost have more than I know what to do with. Here.” She handed me the sack and then went back into No. 53, presumably to swing her club a second time. Leon and I ate well, at
least that night.
We took turns sleeping on the living room sofa, which was battered and had a broken leg, and still might have been more comfortable than the bed. We were in a down period — the Resistance business seemed to be like that, days or weeks of insane intensity followed by days or weeks of physical and emotional collapse. That’s where we were in the cycle — sleeping ridiculous numbers of hours, leaving the flat pretty much only to redeem our ration tickets for whatever scraps of food might be available that day, and more importantly, using a combination of ration tickets and barter to maximize our alcohol supply. Sleep, eat, drink, repeat.
I was on the couch after Leon and I had split about two ounces of some nondescript meat that we fried in a speck of lard, two turnips, an apple, and a bottle of Bordeaux. Sleep came easily, weeks removed from our last operation. You could almost convince yourself during the down times that you might survive after all, especially if it was a Bordeaux night. The terror in your dreams, after a while, subsided. I hadn’t been awakened by the vision of a Gestapo officer armed with electrodes attached to a battery in over a week. I had seen and done some terrible shit, but that was the nightmare that always woke me up, even though I had never experienced the electrodes being attached to my nipples or, worse, my balls.
I was deeply asleep. That much, I remembered. The dream, though, was gone. All there was, when I thought about it later, was Leon shaking me awake and me mumbling something and him putting his hand over my mouth and saying, “Shhh. Listen.”
Someone was pounding on the front door of the building — loud, insistent thumps. A car pulled up, doors opened and slammed shut. I tried to hear if they were talking, and if they were speaking in German, but there was nothing. Not that it was necessary. Of course it was the Germans. I went over to the window, partly to peek out from an angle to the side and partly to illuminate my watch. It was 3:45 a.m. And it was most definitely the Germans, the Gestapo — three cars, black Citroens, with four uniforms and two officers in black trench coats.
Leon and I looked at each other. If they were coming for us, we were dead — there was no attic, no fire escape, no set of back stairs. It was the flaw of the place, but it was so much more comfortable that what we were used to that, well, we just settled in and took our chances.
I looked at him. Leon was naked. All I said was, “Pants.”
“But there’s nowhere to run, so why—”
“Because maybe they’ll come to the door with questions about something else. If that’s it, your papers are good. There’s no reason for you to give yourself away.”
He walked as lightly as he could back to the bedroom and got dressed. I peeked out of the window. The pounding stopped. Mme. Goren opened the door. She said something that I didn’t hear, and the Germans replied not with words but with a rush past her and inside. I couldn’t hear them for a few seconds, maybe 20 seconds, and then I could, dozens of heavy steps on the stairs. Then more pounding. It sounded as if they were banging on the door directly below our flat.
Then it was just a riot of sounds, the voices all muffled by the floor between us. You couldn’t hear words, but you could sense emotions. An even male voice. A defiant female voice. Two wailing children. There was that, and then there was the opening and closing of doors, likely closet doors, and the slamming of what sounded like drawers in a bureau. Then, not even 10 minutes later, there was a repeat of the heavy steps on the wooden stairs — this time in the opposite direction, though, and accompanied by the crying of the two children.
Out the window, Leon and I watched them come out — husband, wife, two little boys, two small suitcases between them. The husband was shoved into the back of one of the cars, the wife and kids into the back of another, the luggage into the third. And then they drove off. Mme. Goren watched from the top of the front steps.
I looked at my watch again. It was 3:58.
2
We waited, I don’t know, maybe five minutes. Then we walked down to Mme. Goren. If it had been a burglary, or some other kind of commonplace disturbance, you would have imagined the halls full of the building’s residents, talking about what they might have seen and heard. But this was a different kind of commonplace — in buildings like this, in neighborhoods like this — and no one was in the hallways. No one was comparing notes about what had just happened. From the stairs, I could look down the hallway on each floor from the landing. I didn’t see an open door, not even a crack.
Mme. Goren always had good coffee. Once, when I asked her where she got it, she sniffed. “What, do you think I raise these goddamn rabbits for my health?” She was always willing to share. This day, her hands shook as she spooned the coffee into the maker.
“It’s like they took me,” she kept saying, half in a mumble. “Oh, shit.”
She had spilled a spoonful of the precious ground coffee on the counter. Leon took the spoon from her. “Here, let me,” he said, sweeping with his hand, gathering the spillage, and finishing the process. The old lady sat on one of her battered kitchen chairs. Actually, she slumped more than sat.
“Who were they?” I said.
“Oh…” And then she started crying — long, wet sobs. I crouched down and put an arm around her, more out of reflex than anything. It wasn’t as if we had become particularly close in the previous couple of weeks. I mean, I didn’t even know her first name.
Then she stopped crying, almost as quickly as she’d started. It was as if she had had an internal conversation of some sort, commanding herself to be stronger. Leon brought us each a cup of the coffee, and we all sat. And then she started without any further prompting. It just poured out of her, a slow ooze to start, then like a fire hose.
“Adam and Naomi Rothman,” she said. “Ben and Sam are the boys. Adam is the son of Myrna. She was my best friend growing up.
“My parents managed the building when we were children. I’ve lived here my whole life. Myrna was my age — two weeks apart. We did everything together as little girls, and then as young married women. Our parents were gone, and we just stayed. I got married, she got married, we stayed put. I lost my husband in the war, the Marne, right at the start. She was luckier. Her husband made it home. But then she got the flu. It was the cruelest thing — her husband survived, and he came home to find her dying.”
“Alex’s mother, same—” Leon said.
“So you know.” She grabbed my hand.
“Max brought up Adam and his brother — with an assist from me, I have to say,” she said. “I gave them their snack after school. I did their wash. I talked Adam through his first crush — that little Sophie Minsky. I always thought she was a little whore. And when his father died, and he and Naomi moved in, it just seemed so natural. It was like it was meant to be. I had no one, nothing but this building and them.”
She started crying again, heaving. But like the first time, it passed quickly, as if the switch for the lights had been flipped.
“This is the third time,” she said. “The Steins on the third floor two years ago, the Millers last year.”
“Where were they?” I said.
“Your flat,” she said. “And it’s always the same — always before dawn, the same pounding on the door, the same little suitcases, never the big ones. I almost never sleep past 4 a.m. anymore. It’s like an internal alarm clock now and I can’t shut it off — not a bell ringing in my head, just that heavy pounding. Thump, thump, thump. It wakes me every day.”
We all sipped at our coffee. The rhyme and reason for how they picked who they picked had never made any sense to me. There were other Jews in the building, certainly, but only the Rothmans were chosen for a ride in the black Citroens this time, just as only the Steins and only the Millers the other times. Why?
“Why not just bring a lorry and clean out the building, if that was the goal?” I said. “I mean, why just the Rothmans?”
Leon looked at Mme. Goren, and they nodded, sharing some unspoken wisdom.
He said, “But that’s the point �
� the pounding in the night, the pounding in Mme. Goren’s dream. The truth is they probably don’t have the manpower to deal with every Jew in the city at one time. And by doing it this way — it’s very smart, and it’s very cruel. The point is the pounding, the thumps in the night. The point is the terror.”
We sipped our coffee some more. It was just on the verge of going cold. Normally, I would have angled for a second cup, but this was not a morning for angling. After a silent minute, Mme. Goren stood. She rinsed the cups in the sink and then walked over to the hook on the kitchen wall that held the big metal ring containing keys to all the flats in the building. Whenever you saw her in the building, you heard her first, the keys jangling in the right front pocket of her housecoat. They were heavy, and the pocket was stretched and misshapen even when it was empty.
“I’ll walk up with you,” she said. “I have to make a package.”
“What?” I said.
“Soap, underclothes, I don’t know.”
“So you know where they are?”
“Probably Drancy,” she said. “That’s where I’ll look.”
