Becoming Clementine: A Novel

by Jennifer Niven

  We set up the food on a table in front of the glass counter—beef and potatoes and salad and wine, which I knew must have cost Cleo a pretty penny on the black market. People would eat standing up and there would be a man strolling through the shop playing violin.

  When it was time for the party, I went upstairs and shut the door tight and sat on the settee and ate alone. I couldn’t risk being noticed by the Germans. When I was done eating, I leaned my head against the pillows and listened to the voices below, rising and falling. I had told Bernadette that there was a party at a friend’s, that I might stay the night. I didn’t want to be out after dark and risk being caught past curfew, and I didn’t want the Brunets to worry.

  I tried to read, but I kept hearing the voices and the music. Finally, I put the book aside and closed my eyes. An hour or so later, I heard the sound of footsteps in the hall. Before I could hide myself, a woman, plain and small, appeared in the doorway. She was dressed all in black. She said, “Bonsoir.”

  “Bonsoir.”

  The woman was small but sturdy, with short, dark hair brushed back from her face and pinned into a bun, and round spectacles like half dollars. I guessed she was near fifty years old.

  In French she said, “I hope I didn’t startle you. I am a friend of Cleo’s. I do not like parties and I do not care for Germans. May I?” She waved at a chair.

  “Of course.”

  I sat up straight and she perched on the edge of the chair, lighting a cigarette. She looked around the room, her eyes lingering on the different paintings hung on the walls.

  In English she said, “You know Hitler fancies himself an artist.” Her accent was thick but her English was perfect. “He applied to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, but was rejected. The Jews were the ones who turned him down. He hates modern art because he thinks it’s impure and degenerate. After he took power, he passed a law which said degenerate artists were not allowed to paint.” I thought about Harley telling me I couldn’t sing anymore, when singing was all I wanted to do.

  She said, “Now he destroys the art he hates and steals the art he loves.” Then she told me about how they had moved the Mona Lisa from the Louvre before Hitler made his trip to Paris in 1940, how the painting rode in an ambulance with the curator. She said, “There is a song that says a long, long time after the poets have disappeared, their music will live in the streets. At times such as this, it becomes more important for art to survive. If it can outlast a war, it means that beauty can triumph over horror, that the stories in these paintings and sculptures live on, and that life can be created from them again.”

  I tried to memorize the words as she was saying them because they were important and beautiful and true. She leaned forward toward the coffee table and stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray. She stood and smoothed her skirt and then shook my hand. In French she said, “I must get back before I am missed. Thank you for letting me interrupt your evening.”

  Two hours later, the voices began to quiet, and twenty minutes after that, Gossie and Cleo came upstairs and sat down. They looked tired and spent. Cleo was holding a wineglass. She drank it down and said, “Entertaining like this is damn hard work.”

  I asked Cleo about her friend, the woman with the spectacles. I couldn’t get her words out of my head: At times such as this, it becomes more important for art to survive.

  Cleo said, “Her name is Rose Valland. She works at the Jeu de Paume museum. She is also a captain in the French military. The Nazis are looting all the museums and private art collections in France and the Jeu de Paume is where they are sending it all. More than twenty thousand pieces of art stacked in corners and up against walls so that the Germans can have their choice of what they want. Rose is keeping track of it all—where the pieces are being sent, who they are going to. They don’t know she speaks German, and so she goes home at night and writes down everything she remembers. She has a mind like an elephant.” But she looks like a mouse, I thought. She blends in. “If pieces of art go out in a shipment by train, she lets the Resistance know so that they won’t accidentally blow up the line.”

  “What will happen to her if she’s caught?” I thought about how, after the war was over, millions of lives would be lost but these paintings would still be here.

  “She will be shot.”

  I said, “She’s very brave. Just like you.”

  Cleo said, “There are other women like her, equally as brave. There is a woman who works at night all alone, poisoning the German food supplies that pass by in freight cars on the railroads in France, and another who gathers information about the movements of Nazi troops and submarines and transmits them to Britain.”

  Rose Valland was just one person, just as Cleo Breedlove was one person, and so was the woman who poisoned the food supplies, and the one who reported information about the German troops, and so was Delphine Babin and so was Gossie and so was I. But when it came down to it, I thought we were all fighting together.

  Cleo said, “In war, you do what needs to be done.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  By Sunday, August 6, the day after the party, the BBC reported that the Allies had captured the Belgian towns of Namur and Charleroi, as well as Mortain, France. Turkey had cut off commercial and diplomatic relations with Germany. South African troops had reached the outskirts of Florence, Italy. United States naval carriers had bombed the Japanese in Iwo Jima and Chichi Jima. And the Allied forces had cut off the Breton peninsula. Every day, there were more rumors that the Liberation was almost here, and this seemed to make the Germans even more determined to round up all of the Jews and members of the Resistance they could capture and send them to prison or to the camps.

  It was just after six thirty in the evening when I started back to Monsieur Brunet’s from Cleo’s. I left later than I meant to, and this made me walk faster and look over my shoulder again and again.

  It must have been eight o’clock by the time I turned onto Rue de la Néva and counted the steps—twenty-five—past Gestapo headquarters and up the stairs and into the house, which sat like something forgotten. The door creaked open as if it had been waiting for a very long time, as if we hadn’t all been going in and out, in and out, this week. It was unlocked, and this was how I knew that Monsieur Brunet and his family were gone.

  I stood on the step, trying to decide whether to go inside. I’d just decided to turn and walk away, fast as I could, when a group of Nazi officers came ambling up the street. I pushed the door open and then shut it again behind me. The house was quiet, but not just quiet—there was nothing alive in it. I knew what this felt like because of the still, sad way Mama’s house had felt after she died. It was as if the air was let out of it. But it was also the feeling of the air being heavy, as if it had nothing to do but settle in on itself and grow even heavier because no one was there to breathe it. My eyes went to the table in the entryway, just by the parlor, where there would have been a message if someone had left one. The table was as blank as the house.

  Everything I owned was in my bag, the one Delphine had given me, the one that was slung over my shoulder right now. I knew from Émile and his team and from Monsieur Brunet that you always left a room as if you might never go back to it, just in case something happened. My mind spun, trying to remember if I’d left anything behind in my room upstairs, anything at all, even a hairpin or a lipstick. I stood in the hallway and went over the entire room in my mind.

  Instead of going back out the front door, where the Gestapo might see me, I walked through the hallway on tiptoe, trying not to make a sound, and through the kitchen to Monsieur Brunet’s office. The door hung open, and papers, maps, books were scattered across the desk and the floor, as if someone had come in and turned it upside down. I sorted through his things to see if there was anything I should take, anything that needed hiding from the Germans.

  Then I started moving through the downstairs, putting things into my bag because you never knew—I might need them. Candles, a lump of coal, buttons
with hidden compartments, a matchbox camera, cigarette pistols, and, from the bathroom, a box of bobby pins that were actually knives, just like I’d suggested. Things had been tossed here and there—I found the pack of chewing gum under the hall table—searched and gone through, but all his inventions were thrown aside because the Germans hadn’t figured them out.

  As I closed up my bag, I saw something shiny on the floor beneath the sink. I dropped to my knees and wrapped my hand around it, whatever it was. I pulled it out and there in my palm was the sweetest perfume bottle, made of violet-colored glass, with an atomizer attached to the top of it. I held the bottle to my nose. CS gas.

  Then I backed out of the room, leaving the office door open just as I’d found it, and walked through the kitchen to the back door. There were vegetables on the counter, beside the pot Bernadette used on the fire. Radishes and carrots were stacked in a messy pile, the dirt still covering them. I paused, hand on the knob, and without moving the curtain, peered through a corner of the window, toward the Gestapo headquarters. I looked and I listened, and I couldn’t see or hear anything.

  Suddenly I stiffened. Something had moved behind me. I looked at my hand on the doorknob, and I thought: Turn it. Just go. The sound had come from the front hall.

  A voice said, “Ich weiß, Sie sind es.”

  I turned the doorknob, but it wouldn’t budge. I turned it again. Nothing. Then I saw the keyhole and remembered that you had to unlock it from the inside. The key. Where was the key?

  There were footsteps in the hallway. The voice said, “Bonsoir? Hello? You cannot run.”

  I searched the ledge above the doorframe, the mat on the floor, the counter nearby, the windowsill. A potted plant sat on the counter, beside the sink. I’d seen Bernadette reach inside this before. I felt in the dirt, in the space between the plant and the pot. I lifted the plant so that it came out, dirt and all, and at the bottom I saw the thin gold key. I was just sliding it into the keyhole when a voice behind me said, “You cannot run.”

  He lunged for me with his bare hands, and I tried to push him away. He wrapped his hands around my throat and began to squeeze. I tried to kick him, but he moved his lower body away and then he slammed me up against the door. The breath went out of me so that it felt like I was cut off from my lungs and could only breathe from the throat upward. I gasped, and this only made him squeeze harder. I thought: Breathe. Don’t panic. Don’t black out. I closed my eyes, so he would think I was about to swoon, and at the same time I reached into my bag and felt around, pulling out the first thing I could grab.

  I lifted the perfume bottle and sprayed it into his face. He staggered back, coughing violently, eyes closed, and I covered my mouth and nose with a dish rag so that I wouldn’t breathe the mist in myself. The thing about most tear gas was that the immediate effects of it wore off in minutes, but CS gas was more toxic. The man fell to the floor, the skin of his face and hands as red as if he’d burned them. He wheezed like a bellows and tried to grab at me, even though he couldn’t see where I was.

  From a hook on the wall, I grabbed Bernadette’s apron and ripped it in two. I tied his feet and his hands in a constrictor knot, which I’d learned from Johnny Clay. It was the tightest knot you could tie. If you did it right, the only way to break it was to cut it with a knife.

  Then I turned the key in the lock and threw the door open. I stepped onto the landing, which was covered on all sides, with a door that led to the left, away from the Gestapo and down an alley that ran behind. I slipped through the yard and into the alley and, without even looking to see if anyone was watching me, I started running away from the Brunets’, away from the Germans. I ran until I got to the Arc de Triomphe, and then I went down into the ground to see if the Metro was working, but the station was as shut up and quiet as the house had been.

  I came back up, this time glancing about me to see if anyone might be following me. When I didn’t see anybody who looked strange or German or official, I began walking right down the Champs-Elysées. The streets were quiet. Everyone seemed to be inside, off the sidewalks, out of the cafés. What time was it?

  I walked fast as I could, as if I were late for a dinner date, all the way past the end of the Champs-Elysées, right past the Jeu de Paume and the Louvre. I kept one eye on the Eiffel Tower. When the Champs-Elysées ran out, I walked along the Seine. The sky was dark now and the streets were thinning faster as people disappeared into doorways and behind gates, doors slamming shut behind them. I slipped off my shoes because they were too heavy. They would make noise on the pavement.

  My heart sped up and so did my feet. I didn’t want to be caught in the streets after dark or after curfew. But which way was Cleo Breedlove’s apartment? Was I still too west of it? Was I east enough yet? I couldn’t get my bearings or seem to remember the way. As soon as I could, I crossed the Seine on one of the bridges that linked the Right Bank of Paris with the Left Bank. The part of my brain that was still ten years old said, “Haints can’t cross over running water,” which was something I’d learned from Granny. This made me feel better, as if the Germans were ghosts and not real.

  I saw a restaurant I’d passed once with Gossie. I saw a market I recognized. Then, rising up like a mountain, I could see the Palais du Luxembourg. I started for it, veering off just before I got there, onto a neat little square where narrow streets collided.

  The sky was dark. The buildings were dark. The streets were black. I started off down one of the narrow streets, and when I realized it was the wrong one, I headed back to the square. I tried not to think about the Luftwaffe, so close by at the palace. I turned down another street, and just as I was thinking it was the wrong one, just as I felt the panic rise in my chest, I saw a little corner with a doorway cut into a building that was shaped like a wedge of cheese.

  It was black all around me now as I ran for the shop, which was as closed and dark as the other buildings. The curtains were still open, though, which meant it was okay, that I could go up there if someone would just let me in. A face appeared in the window, a hand reaching to pull the curtain. I thought, Look down, look down. I could hear something coming—a car rattling over cobblestones. The only people who drove at night in Paris were the Germans. If they turned on the street, they would see me standing there and I knew they would stop and question me and then who knew what they would do.

  Look down, look down.

  Rattle, rattle, thump. The blast of a horn.

  The curtain was drawing closed, but then the face in the window looked down at me. The curtain hung there, in the middle of the glass, half-open, half-shut, and the face blew a ring of smoke and started to smile but stopped at the rattling, thumping sound of the tires and the engine as the car or truck or tank, whatever it was, turned down the street toward us. I pressed myself into the doorway, trying to disappear into the frame, into the dark wood. I could see the dim blue of the headlights coming for me. I tried to will myself invisible, to become a part of the door, of the darkness. I felt my body go light. I felt my head start to spin like a propeller. Suddenly, the door flew open and I was yanked inside, and then the door slammed closed on the darkness, on the street, on the Germans.

  A voice said in French, “Do you want to get yourself killed?” Outside the truck roared past, the sound of Germans shouting at one another and firing their rifles into the night. I sat where I’d fallen, on the cold stone floor, limp as a rag doll, and Émile crouched down beside me. He reached out and tugged at one of the waves in my hair till it was smooth and flat in his fingers. In the dark I saw the corners of his mouth turn up. “Clementine Roux,” he said in English. “What have you done?”

  TWENTY-THREE

  It was three hours before I learned where Émile had been. First we sat with Gossie and Cleo and the airmen—two Jewish boys, one from New York and one from California. I watched Émile while he talked to the others, easy, smiling, his very best self. His face was smooth, as if he’d just had a shave, and he was dressed in different clothes th
an the last time I’d seen him. He smiled and laughed and was almost charming, and I sat not smiling because I’d been waiting for two weeks for him to come back for me, not knowing if I’d ever see him again. There was no sign of Ray or Barzo.

  When the clock struck one, the pilots turned in first, and then Cleo got up, gathering her peacock shawl around her. In the doorway, she turned back to the room. She said, “Gossie? They may want to catch up.”

  Gossie leaned forward, stubbing out her cigarette. She said, “Mary Lou, you can bunk in with me. Let Émile have the sofa.” She stood, unfolding herself like a broad paper fan, scratching her calf with the toe of her other foot. Émile stood too, like a gentleman. For some reason this made me even madder.

  I said, “Thanks, Gossie.” But I sat right where I was, legs tucked under me. I sat and Émile stood and neither one of us moved.

  Gossie smirked at me and said, “Night, kids.”

  She lumbered off and Émile sat down again, next to me this time, on the other end of the sofa. He said, “I cannot get used to your hair.”

  I looked at him without saying anything and concentrated on drawing myself up and in, trying to sit as far away from him on that sofa as I could get. I was so far away I was practically sitting on the arm.

  He said, “It suits you.”

  “Does it?”

  He said, “Not a bit.” Without thinking, I kicked him, just as I would have Johnny Clay. I wanted to kick him good and hard, but he grabbed my foot and held it and my skin went hot all over. He said, “But it’s still very becoming.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was fooling or not. He rubbed the top of my foot, and I snapped it away, tucking it in with the other one. I said, “I didn’t think you were coming back.”

  “I said I was going to.”

  “Where were you?”

  “I went to see my wives and children.”

  He was joking and this only made me madder. “And how many do you have?”