Tante Chouchotte kissed me good-bye then, instructing me to meet her the next evening at Simon and Michelle’s. I must have looked surprised—Simon’s wife was an idiot, and since their marriage, even my mother dreaded seeing him if it meant entertaining Michelle—but Tante Chouchotte whispered, “He has a radio.” I’ve only been in Paris an hour, I thought, and already I’m being trusted with secrets.
I was dizzy with hunger, but I didn’t want to go downstairs and meet the other boarders yet. I hardly knew what to say to girls my age, with their mysterious, laughing confidence, so I took off my wet clothes, climbed under the covers, and stared up through the skylight at the last blue of the evening. In the morning, when I opened my window, I disturbed a pair of doves. A sudden flapping of wings greeted me, a feathery applause.
* * *
The pipes in the pension froze that winter—there was even less coal in Paris than in Caen, and for weeks we had no water at all, my toes were frostbitten, carbuncles appeared on the back of my neck—but the spring of ’44 was so beautiful, with the chestnut trees blooming, the Luxembourg full of flowers. And the boches had left Italy! The Allies were bombing targets in Normandy and Cherbourg, and Maman had written that the weeds in the garden were getting thinned—she meant the boches. The boches were starting to move out of Caen.
I still had nightmares, but not as often, and there was another girl in the pension, Marie-Claire, from the Alps, who always smiled at me in the stairwell. The other tenants reminded me of Louis’s old dancing partners—gossipy, kittenish girls who’d flirt with a boche for half a cigarette—but I liked Marie-Claire, with her rough clothes and mountain accent, a stack of books shoved under one arm.
And I liked Maître Crunelle. He had a long, grizzled face, like my father’s, and he never let on that our lessons were pointless. He’d suggested that I learn Bach’s Chaconne, a piece for which I had neither the skill nor the understanding, but I tried anyway. I would have added juggling to my audition if he’d asked.
At ten o’clock on the sixth of June, I presented myself at the conservatory. I stood onstage, relaxed my shoulders, lifted my violin, my bow, and looked up—a window behind the assembled faculty made silhouettes of them all, and I couldn’t make out their expressions. All I could see clearly was the bright, cloud-strewn Paris sky. A pigeon lifted off the windowsill, and I began.
My arms were suddenly leaden, my eyes stung. What had I been thinking? To try the Chaconne! To audition at all. I imagined Maître Crunelle, burning with shame on my behalf, and then I pictured Maman, with her hand raised, Set yourself to the task before you! But she had no idea how badly I played. She didn’t know that Oncle Henri and I had tricked her. You don’t want to make a spectacle of yourself.
I went straight to the pension when it was over and sat on the edge of the bed, as if I expected to hear from the conservatory any minute. The results would not be announced for weeks, but still, I didn’t move. I might have sat there all night if I hadn’t planned to meet Tante Chouchotte at Simon and Michelle’s that evening.
Michelle opened the door, looked at me, and sighed. “I wish you hadn’t come.” She greeted me the same way every time, as if my being there increased the risk of being caught with a radio. “This is folly, pure folly. Your brother thinks nothing of the danger he’s putting us in—of the danger to Xavier!”
Xavier, the baby, smiled placidly in his playpen. Despite her insistence that he was colicky, I’d never heard him cry, and their “small” apartment was, in fact, the entire floor of a building, lavishly appointed with Louis XIV chairs and Persian rugs.
Michelle sighed again, touching the ends of my hair. “You could be pretty if you tried, Geneviève. If you made a little effort.” Simon was opening up the grandfather clock, pulling out the radio, and he glanced over at me apologetically. The same eyes as Louis, the same high forehead and narrow nose. The same thin mustache.
Tante Chouchotte had not yet arrived, and Michelle winked at me. “Why do you suppose your aunt is late?” she asked. “A lover, maybe? This is the third time this month. She’s up to something. Some awful man in hiding, I imagine. A Jew, or a terrorist.”
There was a familiar series of taps at the door, and Michelle bent over and fiddled with the baby. I opened the door for Tante Chouchotte and Michelle looked up, wide-eyed, as if she were surprised to see her. Michelle’s shifts were impossible to make sense of. “Chouchotte,” she said warmly, but Tante Chouchotte put her finger to her lips, and sat next to Simon. His face was white with expectation, the way it had been every evening for weeks now.
The radio crackled softly to life, the man from Radio Libre began the personal announcements—coded messages for the Resistance—and stopped: “D-day has come!” he said. “D-day is here.” The British and Americans were in Caen, they were all over the coast of Normandy.
“Oh!” Simon whispered. “Oh, God.” And then we were all weeping and laughing, even Michelle. “Praise God,” I said, and Tante Chouchotte shook her head, laughing, said God had nothing to do with it, the ones to thank were Churchill and Eisenhower. Michelle said, “I knew it, I felt it would be today,” which was of course ridiculous, but no one minded. We could thank God, Michelle could say whatever came into her head, Simon could sit on the couch, chuckling, crying, and no one minded a thing. It was simply good to be together, to be alive in this world.
It was nearly curfew by the time we finished listening to the radio and had collected ourselves enough to think about heading home. “Stay,” Michelle offered. “There’s plenty of room.” She made up beds for me and Tante Chouchotte and loaned us both nightgowns, as if all her gossip about Tante Chouchotte and her criticism of me had been nothing more than a passing fit.
In the morning, we went together to the town hall and the post office to see if there was any news from home. We knew it would take days for a message to reach us, but we couldn’t help ourselves.
Though the boches were everywhere, patrolling the streets, I kept hearing Churchill’s voice: he had come on the radio the night before to announce that the maneuvers had gone well, and casualties were limited. I imagined Maman going out into the street in Caen to greet the Allied soldiers. I wanted to ask her a thousand questions.
A week passed. Two. Every day, we went to the town hall and the post office, and every day, nothing. Lines of people like us waited for news, but the phones to the coast were down, the trains stopped. People arrived on foot and bicycle from Bayeux and Lisieux; they said there was fighting in the streets, and looting, that the bombs had not let up. All their news was old by the time they reached Paris.
I wasn’t afraid. The boches had been heading out of Caen before D-day, so it wouldn’t be too bad there. No, not fear—this was something different—a tension, an alertness.
By the third week, Tante Chouchotte had begun to snap at me, like my mother. Simon barely spoke to any of us anymore, and Michelle was herself again, restored. She burst into tears one day outside the post office. “What will become of them, Simon? Your mother, the little girls? Your grandmother? How will they manage? What if the Allies . . .” She lowered her voice: “What if they’re not as well behaved as the Germans? Just think! A house full of women like that, with only one man to protect them!”
Her stupidity was like a circus trick, a thing barely to be believed.
“Simon!” Michelle insisted. “What will happen? With all those soldiers?” She was dismissive of Maman, paid no attention to my sisters or Grandmère, but her eyes brightened at the possibility of disaster. Of the Allies raping Yvonne and Françoise.
I didn’t go back to my room, where my violin sat untouched. I couldn’t stand those sloping walls anymore, with their riotous cabbage roses, or the noisy doves in the window. I went to the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont—into such darkness, silence. What light came through the stained-glass windows was the light of sunset, as if the day had collapsed into itself, and I was hours closer to seeing Maman. I could breathe. Time didn’t stretch ou
t painfully here, only to snap back like a rubber band against my heart, a sudden welt of fear. The church was still, quiet, holding its centuries of prayers and releasing them, a steady inhalation and exhalation of all human longing. Maman’s prayers were here, too, I thought—the prayers of everyone who had ever lived—and I drank in the cool, dank air, as if I could draw Maman’s faith into my own body.
The hospital in Caen would be overflowing with wounded soldiers; Maman would have taken Yvonne and Françoise to volunteer with her, and the three of them would be washing linens, cleaning basins, bandaging wounds. All that blood, and neither Yvonne nor Françoise would utter a cry.
I slipped into a pew near the altar, knelt, and lay my head on my hands. Dear God, please watch over the souls of Papa and Louis, please watch over Maman and Yvonne and Françoise, please watch over Tante Chouchotte, please help her to believe, and please watch over Simon and the baby. Please watch over all the dead and all the living, and help us to receive Your love, to know that we are blessed because You are with us—but my prayers streamed over and around my actual thoughts: I wanted my mother to be thinking of me, to be pleased with me. I wanted someone—a boy, like Louis, who’d served in the cavalry—to slip into the pew beside me and shower me with praise. But for what? I was just tired. Hungry. I wanted chocolate more than anything. A boy with a bar of chocolate and a letter from Maman: My darling Geneviève, I am so proud of you. It was a sin to think of myself when the hospitals were full of wounded soldiers, but my ribs were sore, my belly small and tight. I wanted chocolate, a towering cake with chocolate ganache between the layers. My wedding cake, I thought, when all of this is over. Yes, a wedding! I’d wear a silk dress with tiny buttons down the back and a groom would feed me cake. A groom just like Louis. After the Battle of France, my groom would have escaped from a POW camp and joined the Maquis. I’d meet him here, where he’d have fled because—? He had typhoid fever. He’d been fighting the boches, he’d killed dozens of men, and now he was too sick. I would cool him with holy water, hold his head in my lap.
Forgive me my wickedness and my selfishness, forgive me my unbelief. But my groom thanked me over and over: I had saved his life, and I was so beautiful, in my dress with the tiny buttons.
It seemed as if I’d been kneeling for hours. It must be suppertime; I should go back to the pension and get a bowl of soup now. I would pray better tomorrow.
But when I pushed open the church doors, it was only midafternoon, the air hot and still. I paused on the church steps, and the sun-bleached flanks of the Panthéon burned my eyes. I didn’t belong here. I pictured Maman before the war, feeding the chickens and the rabbits, weeding the garden. She’d come inside when she was done, her knees covered with dirt, and prepare our goûter. A square of dark chocolate tucked in a piece of bread. Useless thoughts. Better to take advantage of the sunshine and walk down to the river.
Without thinking, I crossed the Pont Royal and found myself in the Tuileries. I’d only been to the Tuileries once before. They were too close to the Forbidden Zone, boches marching up and down the broad, sandy avenues, singing their val de ri, val de ra; but today the gardens were deserted except for a few soldiers on patrol, a few old men reading l’Action Française, their white hair lifting in the breeze. I sat down on a bench and gave myself over to the afternoon heat until, suddenly, I was so relieved I burst out laughing: the family wasn’t in Caen at all. Of course not! If the fighting and looting were as bad as people were saying, they would have gone to stay with Tante Alice in the countryside. She had chickens, vegetables, everything they needed. It was only a two-day walk to Tante Alice’s. Three, maybe, with Grandmère in tow.
Even if it wasn’t quite suppertime yet, I would ask for a bowl of soup. Because they were all safe, Maman, the little girls, everyone! I crossed the Pont Royal back toward the Left Bank, gazing down at the green, rippling water, at a pair of lovers resting against the railing, passing a cigarette back and forth. A chocolate cake, I thought, a dress with tiny buttons down the back.
On the far side of the river, a solitary, elegantly dressed man leaned over the railing, his head bobbing as if he were speaking to someone down below—it was Simon, in his blue suit, and he wasn’t talking to anyone, he was weeping. I turned away, too embarrassed to walk past him. He might as well have been naked. Why was he here, on the Pont Royal, crying in the middle of the afternoon? What terrible thing had happened?
I glanced at him again—he seemed so thin, so broken—and then a pair of soldiers walked past him, laughing, and he pushed himself away from the railing. It wasn’t Simon at all. The suit wasn’t even the same shade of blue as his. I flushed, furious with myself. Of course they hadn’t gone to Tante Alice’s. Maman would never have left the wounded men. Fear is a form of selfishness.
The light over the city had grown thinner and softer, and when I entered the pension, I smelled the faint, bitter odor of turnips, but Madame Charpentier brushed me aside, said I’d wait for my soup like everyone else. This wasn’t a restaurant, after all! I nodded, climbed the narrow, dusty stairs to my room, and there, on my bed, was a square white envelope addressed to me, and though it wasn’t Maman’s handwriting—it didn’t belong to anyone I knew—my heart sped up, stabbing itself, and I couldn’t open the envelope, my hands were too clumsy, the paper too thick and clean—
Chère Mademoiselle Delasalle,
I have the honor of informing you that your preliminary audition to the National Conservatory on the sixth of June, 1944, was successful—
My throat burned. If Maman really wanted to, she could have managed to send us a message. Other people had received letters, passed from one person to the next on the road to Paris, which was how we knew the bombing of the coast had not let up. But Maman was always late, always the last to show up. Any message from her would arrive after everyone else had gotten word.
I looked at Maître Crunelle’s letter again and felt nothing, only a tiredness so deep I crawled under the covers with my clothes on.
When I awoke, I had missed supper. Carrot soup or turnip. Nothing to fill a stomach. It was almost curfew, too late to go to Simon and Michelle’s to hear the radio. They would think I had gotten into trouble. Done something, gone somewhere we weren’t allowed. I could just make it to Tante Chouchotte’s in time to reassure her, but there was no way to get word to Simon. Simon, who was so gentle and quiet and never asked for anything.
Out on the street, everyone was hurrying to shelter, bicycles speeding through the fading light, boches on every corner. But Tante Chouchotte wasn’t home. Madame Silva, the little Portuguese concierge, unlocked the door to Tante Chouchotte’s room and shook her head mournfully. “I never know where your aunt spends the night.”
I lay down on Tante Chouchotte’s bed, gazing out over the piles of books and ashtrays; at her students’ exams scattered on the floor beside the small round table where she ate and worked. The curtains were partly open, and a pale moon hung in the still-blue sky. I pulled the velvet coverlet up to my nose and breathed in the smell of Tante Chouchotte’s cigarettes and men’s cologne.
Would it have been such a sin, really, to marry Louis? I closed my eyes, gave myself over to the thought of a dress made of silk jacquard. Maman and I would sew it together. She would be the way she was at the beginning of the war, when I’d run to her bed at the sound of a siren. She used to lift the covers and slide over for me. Sleeping with me was like sleeping with a colt, she said: my spindly legs and hooves—my cold nose!—but she laughed when she said it, and pulled me into the warm crook of her arm.
I awoke to the sight of Tante Chouchotte looming over me and I sat up with a start: “Where were you?”
“Looking for you!” Tante Chouchotte pulled out her tobacco and rolling papers. “We were worried to death.”
“Sorry—”
“Don’t be an idiot,” she said, softly, and she sat down beside me and stroked my forehead. Her hand was as large and strong as Maman’s, but cooler, smelling of the nigh
t air, of cigarettes. “What happened to you?”
“I passed my audition. I thought the notice was a letter from Maman.”
Tante Chouchotte gave a small, sad laugh but she didn’t speak, her cigarette turning to ash. “Well,” she said at last, “let’s celebrate your success.” She reached under her bed, scattering the ashes, pulled out a bag, and opened it. The smell of pepper and fat filled the room: at the bottom of the bag lay a saucisson. The end had been gnawed off, but it was a fat one, its powdery casing as white as the moon.
“Eat,” Tante Chouchotte said, but I had already taken it. I was biting into the little pockets of fat, my face drenched with tears.
“There,” said Tante Chouchotte, rolling herself a fresh cigarette, and then it came to me, sickeningly, that the saucisson might have been intended for Tante Chouchotte’s lover. I stopped eating. “Was this—?” I began. “Did you mean this for someone else?”
Tante Chouchotte’s eyes widened. “No,” she said. “What an idea! I got it for later, for”—she laughed—“an emergency. If things get even worse. But the rats keep getting into it.” She stared at me for a moment. “Whatever I’ve done—whoever I’ve helped and wherever I found this—it isn’t something to discuss, do you understand?”
I blushed, and then I took another bite. The fat coated my teeth, and suddenly I felt that I had never been happier; I held the saucisson out for Tante Chouchotte. When we had eaten almost all of it, Tante Chouchotte smiled, flashing her gold tooth. “Let’s go to bed. We can finish this little bit in the morning. I promised Simon I’d find you and meet up with him early. He’ll be pleased about your audition.”
Tante Chouchotte lay close behind me, the smell of saucisson on our hands, our breath, the sheets, as if the war were already over, and we could eat freely for the rest of our lives.
We overslept and when we awoke, Tante Chouchotte jumped out of bed and handed me my clothes. No time to wash up or use the toilet, she said. Simon would be sick with worry if we were late.
News of Our Loved Ones Page 3
