by Robin Wells
I signed out for the day and hurried to the back door. My heart soared when I saw a woman with hair the color of sunshine. “Yvette!” I hugged her tight. Her clothing smelled like smoke. “What are you doing here?”
She clung to me. “Waiting for you.”
“This is no place to wait!”
“I have nowhere to go. My . . . my mother . . . and my grandfather . . .” She collapsed into sobs. “All gone, Amélie. They are gone. And I—I fear the Nazis are looking for me, too, and I have n-no papers . . .”
I held her close and let her sob into my neck. I, too, cried. “Come inside,” I said at length.
I pulled her through the doorway and into the corridor, then into a closet where we stored the cleaning supplies.
“Tell me what happened.”
She drew a deep breath, and began. “It was the middle of the night at the farmhouse. I awoke to the sound of the door being crashed.”
“The Wehrmacht?”
She nodded.
“Were they trying to get your father?”
“Non.” Her voice was low. “They already have him.”
“Oh, Yvette!”
“They came and took him three months ago. And I think they were watching us afterward. And . . . well, you know, of course, we were working for the Resistance.”
I remembered how our fathers had dug an extra cellar and hidden the crude radio in the attic. I nodded.
“A few weeks ago, a British fighter plane crash-landed a couple of miles away.” She drew a breath. “We helped smuggle the surviving airmen to the coast.”
“And the Nazis discovered this?”
“Not right away. Two weeks later, the airmen were caught near Brittany—just when they were nearly free. One of them talked, and apparently he described me.” Her lower jaw trembled, the way it had when she was a child and learned her grand-mère had died. “I heard the Nazis question my grand-père. They asked where I was. I wish now that I had just gone downstairs, but I climbed out onto the roof and into the branch of a tree, as Grand-père had instructed me to in an emergency. I dropped to the ground, ran to the large oak by the fence, and climbed to the middle branches. I stayed there, hidden.” She shivered.
“They thought I was in the attic. It was too dark to find me, so they set fire to the house. But first they shot my grand-père and my mother.” She buried her face in her hands. “I heard the shots. Oh, Amélie, the guilt is killing me! I wish I, too, had died.”
“Oh, no,” I said, hugging her and rubbing her back. “No. Your mother and your grandfather and your father—they wouldn’t have wanted that. You know they wouldn’t! You did exactly the right thing, exactly what your grandfather had told you to do.”
“Yes, but I was the one the airman described, the one who led them to us. It is my fault.”
“You cannot think that way.”
“I cannot help it. I—I flirted with him.”
“So? That is not a crime. You probably lifted his spirits.”
“Oh, I feel so guilty! And now . . . now I don’t know what to do. The Nazis think I am dead. If they discover I am not, they will kill me.”
“It’s going to be all right,” I said.
“No, it’s not! My family is gone, and I have no papers. A person cannot roam Paris or even eat without papers. And I cannot apply for new papers without the Nazis discovering I am alive.”
“You need a new identity.” I had forged signatures on official papers at Mme Dupard’s; I knew it could be done. “We will handle it.”
She turned pleading eyes to me. “Can you contact Pierre? I don’t dare go near a police prefecture without papers—the police are always stopping and asking to see them!—but I know he will help me.”
I considered the situation. Joshua or Mme Dupard would be more likely to know how to get false papers, but I couldn’t do anything that might compromise them. I certainly couldn’t bring either of them to the attention of my brother. Besides, I was sure Pierre would do all he could to help Yvette.
“Yes,” I said. “I will go get Pierre. Wait here while I change out of my uniform.”
I first took Yvette to Hildie’s home. As I expected, Hildie protested, but I reminded her of the Nazi edict about women living alone.
Fortunately, Pierre was at the police prefecture when I arrived. He immediately grabbed his coat and came with me. The prospect of seeing Yvette set his face aglow. He loves her, I thought. I had trouble keeping up with him, he walked so fast. I breathlessly explained the situation to him as we walked.
He embraced Yvette like a long-lost lover, then sent Hildie on an errand. We all settled at the kitchen table. His eyes never left Yvette’s face. “I know a way to get you new papers,” he told her. “Amélie and I will say you are our sister.”
“What?” Yvette and I said the word together.
“I believe it will work.” He leaned forward. “An officer in our arrondissement had to get new papers for his cousin after he lost them. He found a magistrate who agreed to issue the papers if the cousin brought two witnesses who could testify as to his identity. He quizzed them separately about personal matters—the color of the kitchen in the house he grew up in, for example, or the meal their mother prepared when he was sick. When the answers matched up, he was satisfied that the man was who he said he was.”
“We can do that!” I exclaimed. “Yvette knows everything about our home!”
“But . . . won’t they look up your family records and see there is no accounting of me?” Yvette asked.
Pierre lifted his shoulders. “The Germans say that French records are notoriously incomplete, misfiled, or full of mistakes. They will accept a notarized paper from a magistrate. We will simply say you lost your papers on the Métro.”
And so it was that Pierre and I went with Yvette down to the magistrate’s office the following week. We swore that she was our sister. We were each separately questioned about our childhood—where the linens were stored, our mother’s maiden name, the names of pets, our father’s job. We all answered the same. It was a piece of cake, since we had known each other since childhood, and since Yvette had spent so much time at our house. Yvette was photographed and issued papers.
“And now, I need a job,” Yvette said. “I want something where I can help the Résistance.”
Pierre stopped walking and turned toward her. “No. There is no sense in putting yourself at useless risk.”
Yvette lifted her shoulders. “To live is to be at risk. To be of service to France is not useless.”
Oh, she had such a bold way of speaking!
“You do not want to get on the bad side of the Nazis,” Pierre said.
“I would not, if I didn’t get caught.”
“But you are likely to get caught. They are smart. They are everywhere. And they are winning this war.”
“We must not let them win!” I said.
“You both are very naive. What you must not do is to put yourselves in harm’s way.” Pierre’s eyes were steely as he looked from Yvette to me and back again. “Have we not all lost too many loved ones already?”
Yvette fell silent, but I knew her. Pierre’s argument would not have changed her mind.
“Are there any jobs at your hotel?” she asked me.
“I don’t think so, but I will ask.”
I would not ask the hotel personnel, I decided. I would ask Mme Dupard.
—
“She understands German and English, as well as French,” I said several nights later. I had sent word to Mme Dupard, and received a message to meet M. Henri at the back of a patisserie near the Sorbonne. He had brought a heavyset woman with him. “Yvette could make a valuable asset.”
M. Henri looked at me closely. “Have you told her you are working with us?”
“No.”
“You must not, un
der any circumstances. You must not say anything to your brother, either.”
“Of course not. He works for the police.”
“Exactly. And you know who the police work for.”
“But Pierre also speaks German and English,” I said. “He, too, could be an asset.”
This was met with silence.
“You will be tempted to talk to them, especially to Yvette,” the woman said. “You will think you can trust her, but you must not say anything. To speak would be to compromise the entire operation at the Hotel Palais. I know how hard it is to keep a secret from a friend who is as close as a sister, but you must.”
“Yes, yes, of course. I will say nothing. But Yvette has already worked for the Résistance. She is loyal to the cause.”
“More loyal to the cause than she is to your brother?” the woman asked.
“I think she would understand the importance of keeping the two loyalties separate.”
M. Henri looked at his compatriot. I had a feeling they had already discussed this. “We will approach her via a stranger. You are never to discuss this with her. It is best for you not to know if she works for the cause or not. And, of course, she is not to know that you do, either.”
“I understand.”
17
AMÉLIE
1942
The following week, Yvette got a job working as a waitress in a restaurant. I did not know if M. Henri had helped her secure the position or not. She continued to live with Hildie, who charged her rent.
We mourned each other’s parents nearly as much as our own. The first few months she was in Paris, Yvette was in the hard, raw stages of grief; she never went through a period of numbness, as I had. Instead, her douleur turned almost immediately to anger, an anger that demanded action.
The Germans were a clear target of hatred. “The Boches act as if waitresses are invisible,” she said one evening, when I had stopped by her place of work to walk with her back to Hildie’s. “They think we are too dumb to know their language.”
I did not ask why she did not let them know she understood what they were saying. I hoped it meant she was working for the Resistance again.
“What sorts of things do they say?” I asked instead.
She lifted her shoulders. “Rude things, sexual things. Often about me.”
I nodded. I endured the same, but with her voluptuous body, she must receive ten times as many comments. “How do you keep from blushing?”
“I wear rouge. It looks like I am always blushing, so they cannot tell a real one from the phony.”
I laughed.
She looked at me directly. “They also say things about meetings and plans. It is amazing, the information they convey without giving a single thought that I am right there.” She drew a drag from a cigarette and angled a cagey look at me. “I imagine you have the same situation at the hotel.”
I couldn’t tell if she was trying to draft me into service, or trying to get me to confess that I, too, was working for the Résistance. In either case, I would not bite at the bait. “They are not really around when I am working.” I decided to turn to a topic that had been bothering me. “Are you worried about Pierre? I fear he is becoming a Nazi himself.”
“Oh, no,” she said quickly. “No, you are wrong.”
“He works for the police, and they are Nazi puppets. And he was quite adamant that you and I should not have anything to do with the Resistance.”
“He was only trying to protect us.”
I took it further. “I know that you and Pierre are getting very close.”
“There are boundaries to our closeness. Well, maybe not physically.” She giggled.
“Yvette!”
“Well, he and I are lovers—you might as well know.”
Under other circumstances, I would have wanted details—but considering that this was my brother, I did not pry.
“There are boundaries to closeness between anyone and everyone these days—even lovers. Even the dearest and oldest of friends.” Yvette’s eyes were somber. “It is safer for others not to know certain things. It frees the mind from worry.”
“Yes.”
“We must protect those we love by not telling them too much.”
“Yes, you are so right.” My heart lightened; I had a comrade-in-arms.
“It can be hard, though, not talking about things that are so important.”
“It can be very hard,” I agreed.
“Compared to the other hardships of war, however, it is a light burden to bear.”
—
Having Yvette back in Paris brightened my life considerably, especially as she regained much of her old optimism and energy. Yvette and I did our laundry together on Sunday afternoons at Hildie’s—we had to boil water and scrub our clothes in the sink on a washboard, and it was much more pleasant to have company during the tiresome task. As we worked, Yvette told me more than I wanted to hear about her love life with Pierre.
“Please,” I finally said, putting my hands over my ears. “I do not want to know all of this about my brother.”
“Oh, you are such a prude!”
“You are both in love. You should just get married.”
“We want to.”
“He has asked you?”
She nodded.
I clapped my hands together. At first I had been very conflicted about Yvette’s romantic involvement with my brother, but they obviously adored each other. “Was he terribly romantic about it?”
“Oh, not at all. He was very matter-of-fact. He said, ‘I want us to marry, but your papers say we are brother and sister.’”
“Oh, mon Dieu!” It was a ramification that had not even crossed my mind when we had testified to get her new papers. Apparently none of us had had the foresight to think it through.
“If it weren’t so annoying, it would be quite comical. Everyone Pierre works with thinks I am his sister, because that is how he introduced me when I first came to Paris. So now it is necessary that we act like siblings in public, because police are everywhere, and we never know who knows whom from different prefectures.”
What a situation! I shook my head and laughed. “Anyone who sees you together would think you are a pair of perverts, the way you look at each other.”
She dunked a white slip into the bucket of clear water. “What is funny is that some of his friends have asked me out.”
“Oh, no! What do you say?”
“That I have a fiancé in the south of France.”
“Where do you and Pierre meet?”
“Here, when Hildie is out. She does her shopping in the mornings.”
“I will be sure to never come visit then!”
Yvette sighed dreamily. “I wish we could go out dancing, but that is not what brothers and sisters do.”
“No. Pierre has never taken me dancing.”
We giggled as we used to. It was so good to laugh together again.
“Just think—if Pierre and I marry when the war is over, you and I will be sisters for real.”
“According to your papers, we already are.”
“Yes, the same papers that are preventing it.” She wrung out her slip. “Oh, this whole war is so troublesome. So many, many lies and secrets!”
“Yes.”
We looked at each other for a long moment. Each of us, I am sure, was thinking of all that we wanted to say but could not.
“What is happening with you and Joshua? Romantically, I mean.”
“Not much.” Not nearly as much as I wanted. “A few hugs, a few kisses—that is all he will allow.”
“So what do you do when you meet?”
“We are not together very often or for very long. Mostly, we talk. He tells me what is happening in the Jewish community. Yvette, he has heard horrible, unspeakable thin
gs about the Nazi camps.”
“I have heard rumors, as well. Pierre says it can’t be true.”
“Perhaps he doesn’t want to believe it’s true, since the police enforce the Nazi laws.”
“Pierre is just trying to earn a living. He is hoping to get a promotion.” She soaped a white blouse and rubbed it on the washboard. “If he is promoted, he would be able to transfer to another arrondissement, perhaps even to Neuilly-sur-Seine. If that happens, hopefully we can live together.”
“Neuilly! Joshua told me he is doing some work there.”
“Oh, really?”
Too late, I realized I should not have spoken. “Forget I said anything.”
“It is already forgotten.” Yvette smiled at me. “If Pierre and I move to Neuilly, you will have to move with us.”
“No, no, no,” I said, shaking my head. “I would not want to live with lovebirds. I could not bear to hear your shrieks of passion in the night.”
Yvette laughed. “We would find a place with very thick walls.”
“They do not make walls thick enough! No, I will stay in Paris and visit you on the weekends.”
18
AMÉLIE
1942
I heard the Jews are all going to have to wear stars on the left side of their coats,” said a maid about ten years older than me, a woman named Mathilde with reddish hair and a sharp nose. It was late May, and we were seated at a table in the employee dining room with a group of fellow hotel workers, eating our soup.
“I heard that, too. They’ll be yellow with black outlines, with the word ‘Juif’ in black letters,” said Geraldine, a laundress with dark brown hair. “And they’ll be as big as the palm of their hand.”
“Are they supposed to make them themselves?” asked a doorman.
“No. They’re supposed to report to their local police prefecture according to the first letter of their last name and to surrender one textile point.”
“They have to pay to get a star?” I asked, incredulous.
“Yes.” Mathilde dipped her spoon in the thin broth. “But then, they can afford it. The Jews have all the money.”
