by Tracy Groot
“The rail is out from Caen to Paris,” the man said sourly, reaching for his package on the rack over the seat.
The journey was over before it began. “All the way?” Michel asked, dismayed. What now? “Surely not all the way. How far can we get?”
“Was it an Allied bombing?” a young woman with a small child asked.
“Probably the Resistance.” A middle-aged woman snatched up her basket. “Probably those thugs, the maquisards.”
“Those ‘thugs’ aid the Allies,” the young woman said indignantly. “Those ‘thugs’ risk their lives for us. Whose side are you on?”
“I am on the side of France,” the woman said, lifting her chin.
“Then I dare you to sing ‘La Marseillaise,’ you Vichy cow.”
“Don’t be a fool,” the woman hissed, indicating with a little jerk of her head to the two German soldiers at the front of the car. As if everyone on the train were not aware of them. “However proud you are of your thugs, did they get you where you wanted to go today? There is no civility left in France. No one acts rationally anymore.”
“I suppose you think Marshal Pétain is rational,” the young woman said, her face flushing, and in his heart, Michel cheered her boldness. “‘The trouble with France is you women!’” she mocked. “‘You did not produce enough babies to raise a decent army!’ First they screech at us for not staying at home to be good little mamas. Then they screech because we are not out there, making enough money to feed our families with so many men in camps. France starves because of us women.”
“Do not trouble us with truth, mademoiselle,” the man next to Michel cautioned with a sad smile. “We have not heard it for so long, you confuse us.”
The people close enough to hear this exchange leaned in, and began to add low-muttered opinions.
“She is right—Pétain and Laval are Nazi puppets. Everyone knows it now.”
“We didn’t think so in the beginning.”
“You live, you learn.”
The young woman began to gather up her bags—and hum “La Marseillaise.” She caught the hand of her child, lifted her chin, and hummed loudly and proudly. Michel’s heart began to fill, and he had to smile. He glanced about discreetly, and others smiled, too. One old man, likely a veteran of the Great War, blinked bright-blue eyes filling with tears.
The national anthem of France had been forbidden for nearly four years. To sing it in public was punishable by imprisonment, or if they thought you revolutionary enough, death. One would hear occasional snatches of it in crowded places, but it was forbidden to gather in a crowd these days unless approved. Even a wedding had to have approval, if the guest list was too long.
Michel found himself humming along. When the song was done and she looked at him, startled, he winked.
“Tiny rebellions keep the spirit alive,” he said. “Oui?”
“Oui, monsieur,” she said fervently. “God bless you, monsieur.”
“Oh, no—God bless you, mademoiselle.”
“Bless you, child,” the old man said.
“I’ll add my own as well,” said the man next to Michel. “You have made me feel an irrational bit of national pride. I feel French. Old-style French, and for that, God bless you, m’selle.”
Michel felt a wave of giddiness. Such an open exchange was beyond reckless. Collaborators were everywhere, people who would turn in their own mothers for wearing a tiny French flag or for doing as this brave young woman had done, humming the beloved national anthem.
This insidious collaboration with the spirit of the devil, this disease throughout France where common sense seemed to have fled the majority—how had it happened?
“We didn’t know what hit us,” he murmured. We lost our bearings, and then we lost hope.
And yet, Michel mused as he followed the others off the train, hope remained if a young woman could hum “La Marseillaise” on a crowded train, right under the nose of a Vichy supporter, right in the hearing of two German soldiers, who pretended not to hear so they wouldn’t have to deal with it.
“Tiny rebellions,” he mused, feeling better than he had in days. It would change once he got back to his apartment. But the little exchange on the train had been the most heartened he’d felt in a long while, and he wondered if the others close enough to hear felt the same. Today, he too felt French.
The telephone jangled, startling Michel from his thoughts.
“Hello.”
His brother’s voice greeted him. “You’re supposed to be in Paris.”
“The rail is down again.”
“All the way?”
“Apparently. We hadn’t even left the depot.”
“You sound cheerful.” François sounded suspicious.
“Yes, well, an amazing thing happened today. A tiny rebellion, in which I took part.”
“You rebel in ways great and wide, little brother. Tiny is not your style.”
“Today I hummed ‘La Marseillaise’ with a young woman on a crowded train.”
François laughed in delight. “You fool!”
“Yes. It was exhilarating. I thought the feeling would leave when I came home but it did not. I feel wonderful. I feel like champagne.”
“Did she know she sang with one of the greatest Resistance leaders in France?”
Michel put stockinged feet on the desk. “We didn’t sing; we hummed. They’ll have to add another clause to the law. But it was far more than that, François. It was what I felt from those around me. I felt hope. I haven’t felt it in so long, I think I’d forgotten what it was. I felt, in this tiny collective rebellion, that a far greater rebellion lay just below the surface. I can hardly describe it, it was—a gathering of strength. From each other, from angels, I don’t know where it came from, but I felt it, and I know others did, too. You should have heard what the man next to me said—such unhidden truth, spoken in the same air Nazis breathed. I could have danced with him.”
“Dancing is forbidden,” François said dryly.
“Be quiet. I am at the brink: François, I felt for the first time in a long time a return to common sense. That young woman reminded us of who we are. There was a scent of freedom all over the place—above us, around us, it came through the floorboards—as if humming ‘La Marseillaise’ summoned a holy presence. She will never know what she did for the heart of this worn-out old man.”
“You’re thirty-eight.”
“Today, I feel it again.”
“Well, brace yourself, Brother—before I’m done, you’ll feel younger yet. If anything, it’ll scare the daylights out of you.”
“Tell me full on. Today I am expansive and brave.”
“I have a plan to infiltrate the German brothel in Bénouville.”
“With what?”
“A German, of course.”
For the first time, the champagne bubbles went still. Michel took his feet off the desk. “François, if this line . . .”
“I have it checked daily, Michel. It is safe.”
“Then what are you saying . . . ?”
“I’m saying it is not too late to gather information on the bridges for the Allies. You told me Madame Vion says one of the prostitutes is sympathetic. My plan is perfect.”
Michel rose. “It makes me sick to hear you say this over an open line.”
“It is not open. I check it daily, dear heart. Do not worry.”
He knew the illusion would not last. He did not expect illusion’s truncation to come through his own brother. The last of the freedom trailed away, and he was home again. Back to the real world, and what he did in that world.
“François,” he said carefully. “Listen to me. This is not a game. Whatever—”
“Be expansive and brave, my brother, and in two weeks I shall deliver to you Lohengrin himself. It will take that long to heal the poor man’s head. He was bleeding and didn’t even know.”
He gripped the telephone. “You are all the family I have left.”
“Is this m
y own brother? Michel. I have been proud of you for so very long. I have come up with a plan that lets me hope, one day, you will be proud of me.”
“I am begging you—stay out of it! You have no idea what you’re about. Think of Marie. You would be tortured and shot, but your own sweet Marie—she would suffer as Jasmine did. They make examples of the women to weaken the men, and believe me, it works. She was tortured to death. Can you . . . can you comprehend those words? She died in my arms.”
Jasmine had made a mistake, and they never learned what it was. Was she denounced? By whom? How did she slip, what had she done to bring about her arrest? They never learned. She whispered one thing before she died, and that with a broken smile: “I didn’t talk.” Jasmine was the best agent Flame had. She’d worked for the Resistance cell in Caen for three years.
The invasion was coming; everyone knew it. But the closer France got to the whiff of freedom he had on the train, the worse things got. He’d seen plenty of brutality in the past four years, and yes, he could understand the use of some torture to procure vital information to win a war; but what they did to Jasmine wasn’t war. What they did to Jasmine was alien.
He had been so strong in the beginning. He wasn’t strong anymore. He had flashes of the young woman on the train, humming “La Marseillaise” with her boy. The thought of that brave young woman in Nazi hands made him weak. They knew how to get to the men, as if the devil spoke in their ears.
How could he describe such barbaric cruelty to a man as good and innocent as François? He didn’t want the images in François’s head any more than he wanted them in his own. Yet not to speak of it betrayed Jasmine. Not to tell it shamed the living for covering up Nazi atrocity. And if it prevented his brother’s involvement, he’d tell it in detail.
The telephone cord tethered him; he could not pace. “Listen to me. Must I tell it? I will tell it.” Submerged images surfaced, dizzying him. He could smell the untended wounds, he could hear tortured, labored breath. He could feel her in his arms. She was so small, a window broken in place, one nudge and all would shatter. He held her as long as he could. He made her last moments on earth safe. “They pulled out her teeth. They broke her fingers. They burned her, François; between her toes they lit pieces of cloth—”
“Michel, the invasion comes,” his brother cut in gently. “You said the Allies need to know about the bridges. We must give them what they need.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing! Stay out of it!”
“I have a plan. It is a good plan. You will see, Michel.”
Michel sank into the chair, fingers sinking into his hair. “François, you have not seen the beast.”
“Two weeks, my brave little brother. Give me two weeks. You will see.”
Several clicks, and the connection disengaged. Michel replaced the receiver. Back to his world, and what he did in that world.
Colette LaPonsie had a boyfriend. Brigitte Durand did not. Colette believed Claudio could keep her safe. Brigitte didn’t care if Claudio was Milice, the French equivalent of the German Gestapo—Brigitte knew who was in charge of France, and it wasn’t the French. Not that the Milice couldn’t make miserable the lives of their fellow French. Sometimes they out-Germaned the Germans.
“Where is Claudio?” Brigitte asked, suddenly aware she hadn’t seen him in a few days.
“In Paris. On business for the oberkommandant.” Colette could make a Milice thug sound like a respected diplomat. She was hemming the frayed edge of a kitchen towel. She bit off the thread and smoothed the towel on her lap, as satisfied with her work as she was with her man.
What sort of man would allow his girlfriend to sleep with other men?
Jean-Paul wouldn’t have believed she was doing it, for one. Then he’d have killed every man who touched her, German or not.
You told me to survive, Jean-Paul. She had, but Jean-Paul had not.
He died in the spring of 1940 at the Maginot Line, the place that was to stop the Germans from getting so far. She found out in July of that year, on a hot sultry day when she stood in front of a list taped to a building in Paris. He had occupied her heart, and now he occupied a grave. So this German occupation was nothing to her. It was hunger, it was fear, it was loss of freedom, and it was so very cold, but she saw his name and the world became a different place. The bullet that took Jean-Paul’s life did not end one fate; it ended two.
She was hungry. In Paris, alone, and hungry.
The food had had a strange rallying effect. Strange in that, once it brightened and revived, it also filled her with shame for the act that obtained it. Yet days later when the brightness left and hunger came again, no shame remained, only some primitive desperation, and she showed up at the same place she had met the German soldier, at the bench along the Seine near the Notre Dame bridge. He was there, for the bridge was his, and once off duty he came to her again. He didn’t say a word. Not that he had any French. He stood with his gray overcoat fluttering in the November breeze, and had the grace, as he had before, to stare at the flowing Seine until she stood and followed him to where he was billeted, at a home on the rue d’Apennine.
The soldier whispered things in German. When it was over, and she waited, eyes out the window, for a handful of francs, she slipped down the staircase and out the kitchen door, past the disgusted glare of the old woman who owned the house.
Paris had fallen. Jean-Paul was dead. And she slept with a German for food. One of those things she never could have conceived, but all three? Three belonged to someone she did not know. Three were a different fate.
“What are those?” Colette asked of the books in Brigitte’s lap.
“A Baedeker’s and a French-English dictionary. I’ve decided to be a travel book writer when this is over.” She held up a piece of notepaper. “This is the first page of my book. I start out with Ireland.”
“How can you write a travel book about a place you’ve never been?”
Brigitte shook her head at Colette’s utter lack of imagination. She held up the Baedeker’s. “This is misrepresentative. It tells of the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland, but says nothing of the patrolling angels.”
“What angels?” Colette scoffed.
“The German officer told me. The expressive one. To speak of the Cliffs of Moher but to say nothing of the angels that press you down before you get to the edge . . .” She lowered her voice to ghost-story stealth. “It’s an ordinary day, right? And you’re an ordinary tourist. You start for the cliffs, little suspecting what you are about to encounter. You approach . . . and suddenly sense a phenomenon of caution in the air. Then it is dread, and then—impending calamity. You creep toward the edge . . . and then you feel the actual weight of the beings themselves. You are pressed down and filled with a holy sickness to stay alive. Thus you are preserved, not by what your eyes can see but by what your soul can feel . . . the Angels of Moher.” She held Colette’s transfixed gaze a moment longer. Then, hushed: “This is not in Baedeker’s. Who would go for the cliffs? I’d go for the phenomenon of caution.”
Colette stared at Brigitte as she sometimes did, with a softened look on the verge of beguilement. It seemed that Colette sat on a fence, and Brigitte always felt the urge to give her the tiniest push and she would topple backward into a far more habitable place—a place, Brigitte fancied, she truly wanted to be. Brigitte long awaited Colette’s conversion to humanity.
Colette came out of her daze with more self-consciousness than usual, and contempt fast replaced interest. “You are stupid, Brigitte.” She gathered the hemmed towel and the sewing things and shoved them in her basket. “It’s your turn to wait in line for eggs today. And if you take any more to the château, I’ll make myself an omelet and eat the entire thing.”
Colette rose with her basket and left the sitting room.
Brigitte called after her, “You are hopeless, Colette. You have no imagination.”
“You’re the hopeless one. That German officer was killed by the Resistance l
ast week. So much for ‘expressive.’” Colette slammed the sitting room door, rattling a few pictures on the wall. The venom was high today; she must have been close to conversion.
Brigitte regarded the books. So Colette noticed the missing eggs? Colette was a counter. If Simone or Marie-Josette received potatoes or beans for payment, every potato and bean was inventoried with German precision and doled out between the four of them. Colette once broke two beans in half to make sure all was scrupulously equal. Brigitte would have understood her better, and liked her better, if she’d just danced the two beans in the air, out of reach of the others, and then popped them in her mouth.
Maybe it was wrong for Brigitte to take eggs from the others. She had taken the four precious eggs to the Château de Bénouville, the maternity hospital up the road, run by Madame Léa Vion. She brought them not for the women or children, but for the downed Allied airmen Madame Vion hid on her property. She’d left them on the step of the little stone chapel by the river, the place it was rumored Madame hid the pilots. She also left a note: For the Friends of France. From a Grateful Patriot.
Brigitte had discovered Madame’s secret one day while walking the château grounds, the closest thing Bénouville had to a forest. A few acres of towering trees and bushes and flowers gave grand illusion; no German occupation existed within its silent green realm. At least, not until Brigitte came across the startled British evader. She knew him for British the moment she set eyes on him, and she instantly knew she had to act as if she’d never seen him—Germans were everywhere, and informants, besides. One could be pruning a tree for all she knew. So she gave him a wink and a tiny nod and strolled on, neither slowing nor increasing her pace.
The rumor was true, as she’d hoped it was. Brigitte never told the girls, not with a Milice about. She let Colette think she brought the eggs for Madame Vion, but what did she care about the madame? She’d snubbed Brigitte once in the village. The snub came as a surprise, knowing they were both French, both against the Germans—though the madame would never believe it—and both hungry.
