Becoming Clementine: A Novel

by Jennifer Niven

  The sink was concrete and there wasn’t any toilet, just a hole in the floor. The floor itself looked like it was moving but it was only the spiders and cockroaches. A person could dig up the dirt floor if she had something to dig with. A person could even dig with a shoe or a toothbrush or her very own hands if she was determined enough.

  I said, “It could use some pictures on the walls, but otherwise I like it fine.”

  That night, back in my own cell, I heard the tapping of a spoon against one of the pipes. It was a message in Morse code, which said the Allies were in Chartres. When I asked Millie how far this was from Paris, she said it was less than a hundred kilometers.

  The next morning, August 16, the matron came and led me away and Sergeant Bleicher was waiting, this time in a dungeon so deep down in the prison, I thought we must be in the middle of the earth. This one was even smaller and darker than the one before because it didn’t have windows. It looked like a place where you wouldn’t put a rat, but there was another dirt floor that could be dug up if someone worked hard enough.

  I was learning the layout of the prison from the girls who had been there longest. This floor was below the ground, but the cell from the day before was at ground level. If I wasn’t able to break out of cell 401, I figured the trick was to do something bad enough to get thrown into the ground-level cell, but not bad enough that they would shoot you.

  After two hours of asking me questions that I still wouldn’t answer, Sergeant Bleicher stared at me and I stared at him, and then he said, “You can’t keep this up much longer.”

  I thought, That’s what you think.

  He led me all the way back to my cell himself, and before the matron locked me in he said, “There is no point in my coming anymore. But know this—the Gestapo won’t be so easy to talk to. If you would only talk to me, I can promise you your life.” I looked at him and thought, Like the life you promised Eleanor? And then I thought: How can anyone promise anyone else their life? I’m the only one who can promise that to myself.

  I said, “Thank you,” and vanished as far into my cell as I could go, turning my back on him. I stood looking out the window, but what I was really doing was drawing a map in my mind. Every time I left my cell, I memorized the walks they took me on so that I had an idea now of which way the hallways ran and what was on each level of the prison. The Allies would be here soon, but just in case, I was planning my escape.

  On the morning of August 17, the six o’clock hour came and went without anyone opening our door. That night I slept better than I had in days. Sergeant Bleicher was a spy hunter, I was sure of it, but maybe he wasn’t going to come around anymore. Maybe he had given up.

  I lay in bed and thought, I might die here. Émile didn’t believe in heaven. He believed that you were alive and then you were dead and then there was nothing. All this time, I’d been counting on seeing Mama again, and everyone else I loved who had died and gone on ahead. That’s what Aunt Zona called it, “going on ahead.” I could just about get through anything if I knew there was something on the other side of all this.

  I closed my eyes and thought about how this day was another day that I was still alive, and for now I would have to be happy with that. And then I went over the map of Fresnes in my mind three times so that I wouldn’t forget it. Every time I went over it, I saw something new—a window without bars, a guard who didn’t pay attention, a door that wasn’t watched as carefully as others, a closet where someone could hide if they somehow got out and needed to give the slip to the people chasing them.

  I lay still another minute, and then I watched as Annika sat down by the hot air shaft and pried off the grate. She pulled up the heavy string that hung there, tied just inside, and wrapped it tight around a book, which she then dropped into the vent and started lowering. She reached inside the shaft and tapped on the pipes, a kind of code, and waited. She was answered with a tap, and she kept on lowering. I watched as she waited and then there was another tap-tap-tap, and she pulled the string back up. Something was tied to the end of it—a bar of chocolate.

  If the hot air shaft was wide enough to send books through it, it might also be wide enough for a person, especially one who hadn’t eaten in a while. I crossed over to the vent and sat down and felt around the edges. I took a bobby pin out of my hair and started chipping at the stone. It crumbled away, and then I stopped chipping and put my head through—the opening was just wide enough—to see how far down the shaft went, if it was blocked anywhere. I knew the vent eventually emptied into the yard below. From there, a person would have to get past two or three guards, depending on what day it was, and break through the fence.

  Millie said, “What do you have there, Clementine?”

  I said, “I don’t know.” Maybe a way out.

  TWENTY-NINE

  On Friday, August 18, I woke before sunrise to the sound of keys outside our door. All three of us sat up and looked at each other. It had been over a week since either Millie or Annika had been taken in, and I knew they worried about being next. The keys stopped their clinking and it was quiet, and then suddenly the door swung open and there was the matron’s unhappy face. “Roux,” she said. “You are to be ready by seven o’clock.”

  Millie said, “You’re so popular, Clementine.” To the matron she said, “You’re making the rest of us feel like the ugly ducklings at a dance.” The matron gave her a look that could scare a haint and banged the door shut so hard that it echoed for a full five seconds.

  This time the matron marched me down the stairs and through the hall and through the maze of other hallways till we walked outside into the early morning sunshine, where a police van was waiting. Inside the van were wire cages, and I was locked inside one of these. After what seemed like hours, the van came to a stop. The doors opened and the guard stood glaring at me.

  They guided me into a building that was bright and white and elegant, all windows and cast iron. I could tell right away that something was brewing because the Germans seemed jumpy and they were everywhere, like swarms of bees. One of the guards locked me in a cell with other prisoners, all men, and went away without saying a word. The men were handcuffed and bleeding. One of them had a swollen face, his left eye closed and puffy. Another wore rags wrapped around both hands, like mittens, and blood was soaking through. They didn’t say anything to me, and something told me to let them alone.

  I’d been there maybe twenty minutes, sitting on the cold floor, my knees pulled up under me, when the cell door opened and a man was pushed inside. Blood streamed down his face from his head, and he slumped to the floor. He mumbled something to himself and it sounded like a prayer.

  Without thinking, I got to my feet and went to him. I said in French, “I don’t know if you can understand me, but I need to see if you’re okay.” I tipped his face up, and his mouth was swollen and so was his nose. His breath was ragged, and he opened his eyes and looked up at me and through me as if he couldn’t see me at all.

  In English he said, “I’ve been here three days and I haven’t eaten.” His words were faint. His accent was strange. Maybe Irish. Maybe Australian.

  I pulled out my handkerchief and said, “Open your mouth.” Then I scooped some sugar onto a cracker and fed him, just like you’d feed a baby or a bird with a broken wing. He ate this slowly, and for a minute I was afraid he wouldn’t keep it down. But he swallowed and ate some more and swallowed, and I fixed him another cracker and another, till they were almost all gone. I thought he really did look like a bird, kind of narrow and beakish and small. I fixed crackers for the other men and handed them around till the handkerchief was empty.

  I thought: Maybe you should have saved some for yourself. You don’t know how long you’re going to be here, and there you are, giving all your food away. I knew the guards had put me in here on purpose so that I could see the suffering firsthand, and so that I would be scared enough to tell them anything they wanted to know. I thought: We’ll just see about that. If I tell the truth, th
ey’ll only arrest more men like this and do horrible things to them, and I won’t let that happen, no matter what they do to me.

  The young man I’d fed sat back, his head leaning against the wall. Color was creeping into his cheeks. He said, “The Germans are in an especially bad mood today. I heard them say the police and subway workers and mail carriers are all on strike. The radio has stopped broadcasting. Resistance groups are defending themselves in the streets.” He took a long pause between each sentence, catching his breath. “The Paris Liberation Committee has called the people of the city to revolt.”

  “The Liberation?”

  “Soon.” He shut his eyes as if the eyelids were too heavy to lift. He said, “I hope I live to see it.”

  I wished I had Monsieur Brunet’s chewing gum so that I could blast us out of there. “You will,” I said, but after I said it I wished I could take back the words. He might not live to see it and these other men might not live to see it, just like Perry and Ray and Coleman hadn’t lived to see it. Just like I might not live to see it myself.

  Hours later I stood in a room with a desk and a table and a couple of straight-backed chairs. The office was hot and airless and the large windows were closed, shutting out the day. An open bottle of wine sat on the table beside a plate of hot food. I could see the steam rising off of it. For a minute, my eyes watered and my stomach growled, and the food smelled so good that I didn’t even notice the man who sat behind the desk and the girl who sat behind a typewriter. The girl looked younger than me and bored silly. She kept yawning behind her hand, and I noticed the nails were painted red, just like Millie’s, only the polish wasn’t chipped.

  The man was young too and smelled like cologne. He wore a suit and his hair was smoothed back from his face and parted in the middle. He wasn’t bad-looking, but there was something twitchy about him that reminded me of a stick insect.

  The man said, “Before we get started, perhaps you’d like to eat. He held the plate up. “Meat and gravy, enough for all of us.” He set down the plate. “But it is for you.”

  The smell shot straight up my nose and into my head so that I felt the room slide out from under me. How long had it been since I’d eaten anything but coffee and soup and bread with maggots? Only a few days. I didn’t need their food. I would rather die right there before eating it. But I thought maybe a bite or two would help me focus and keep my head clear.

  I ate four bites of the meal, and even though it wasn’t as good as Granny’s, it was the best thing I’d had in weeks. He offered me wine, and I shook my head. After the fourth bite of meat, I made myself push the plate away and said, “Thank you. It was delicious.” My head felt less spinny, my stomach less empty. In my hand, I was holding a potato, which I’d managed to slide off the plate when they weren’t looking. I poked this into my pocket.

  The door opened then and Sergeant Bleicher walked in. He nodded at the man and at the girl, and, without saying a word to me, he took a seat and lit a cigarette. The young man frowned at me and then frowned at the plate. He said, “What is your full name?”

  “Clementine Roux.”

  He asked me to spell it.

  I spelled it.

  The girl sat at her typewriter and clacked away at the keys every time the man said something or I said something. Hugo Bleicher sat smoking like a chimney, his legs crossed, his wide dough face a blank. The other man asked me silly questions, boring questions—things like where are you from, how old are you, did you go to school—because this was the way they tricked you into relaxing, into feeling at home enough to tell them what they wanted to know.

  The man said, “What is your home address in the United States?”

  I didn’t say anything to this and he asked me again. I was remembering something in my hazy, spinny brain—something I’d read about the Geneva convention, way back when, in Texas or at Harrington. Something about prisoners of war only having to answer certain questions but not others. Then I thought, I am a prisoner of war.

  Somehow the thought made me sit a little taller. Just wait till I tell Johnny Clay, I thought. I thought it as if I knew where he was, as if I could tell him tomorrow. And then I remembered that he wasn’t anywhere right now and I might never see him again.

  I said, “I’m not required to answer that question,” which was what the Geneva convention said you should say.

  “But you will answer it.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You will tell me who you are working with here.”

  “I have nothing to say.”

  “Do you know a woman named Cleopatra Breedlove?”

  I didn’t flinch, not even a little. “No.” My throat had gone so dry I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to say anything else. I stared at the man without blinking, praying he wouldn’t look close enough to see the sweat that was starting to gather on my upper lip and forehead.

  The questions came faster then, like rifle fire. “Are you working for the OSS?” “Are you working with the SOE?” “How long have you been involved with the Resistance?” “What is your real name?” He paced the room back and forth, sometimes sitting down, and then popping up again to pace some more.

  I finally stopped saying, “I know nothing.” “I have nothing to say.” “I don’t have to answer that.” And I just sat there looking at him and not saying anything. Hugo Bleicher coughed into his hand.

  The man said, “It will be easier on you if you answer me.”

  I blinked at him, and that was when he slapped me hard across the face. My head went light and my eyes stung with tears. I tried fast to think of everything I’d learned in the WASP about survival training. The girl stopped typing and yawned again, not even bothering to cover her mouth.

  I reached my hand up to feel my lip, at the split in the middle, when he grabbed me by the shoulders, up out of the chair, and pushed me against the wall. He held me there and said, “Tell me your real name.”

  “My name is Clementine Roux.” I thought: Go away, Velva Jean. Run as fast as you can. Let me take care of this. I am Clementine Roux. I am Clementine Roux.

  He put his hand to my throat and lifted me up the wall till my feet were hanging just off the floor. The room started to blur. His hand crushed my neck so that I couldn’t swallow or breathe.

  The man said, “Tell me your name. All we want is your name. Tell us this, and we will let you go.” Beyond him, Hugo Bleicher examined his nails and the girl picked threads off her dress.

  I could hear my breath—shallow, rasping, fighting for air. I said, “My name is Clementine Roux.” My voice was just a croak, faint and distant. My husband was Pierre and when he died I stayed in France because the war was on and I couldn’t leave. Besides, where else would I go? He was the only man I ever loved, and this was his home. It’s the place that reminds me of him. He would have wanted me to stay and fight for the country he loved. Pierre was a pilot. He died in an accident. He flew into the side of a mountain. He was too young. We’d only been married a year. He wrote me a song before he died, but I never heard him sing it…. In my mind, I could see the crash site, could smell the smoke, could feel my young married heart break when they told me what had happened, that he was dead, when the letter came for me after he was already buried, the last letter he’d written me, the one with the words to the song.

  The man let go of my neck and when he did, I fell onto the floor, all the while remembering to hold on to the potato, to make sure it stayed in my pocket.

  I heard something from outside and it was the sound of gunfire and shouting in German and in French, and I thought: That’s why the windows are closed. You don’t want to hear what’s going on out there, and you don’t want us to hear it either. I looked at Sergeant Bleicher and smiled.

  The other man said, “Get up.”

  I said, “I can’t. I’ve hurt my leg.” This was a lie, but I thought it would give me more time. I wanted a minute, just a minute, to catch my breath.

  He kicked me in the back, once, twice,
and pain shot through me, changing colors—it was blue then red then a hot, bright yellow. My eyes started burning like I was going to cry, but I wouldn’t cry because I was on the other side of crying, in a place where there was only pain and anger. His boot came down on my shoulder, pressing me against the floor so that I felt as if I might go through it, down into the dungeons below, down into the earth. He pressed harder and harder until I was sure I’d feel the bone snap, but instead of crying I stared up at him without blinking.

  Suddenly he lifted his boot off me and walked to the table and poured himself a glass of wine from the bottle that sat there, opened and waiting. He took a drink and set the glass down. I wished I had the pills with me, the ones Émile had given me, and that I’d kept the L pill, the lethal one, so I could pour it into his wine when he wasn’t looking.

  He said to Sergeant Bleicher, “See that she doesn’t sleep.”

  They kept me awake all night. The minute my eyes drooped, I was splashed with water or made to walk about the room or slapped across the face. They brought a bucket of water in at one point and they held my head under until all the breath was gone out of my lungs. I stopped fighting and my mind drifted off and I thought: It can’t get worse. What else can they do to me? Death can’t be any worse than this, even if there won’t be a heaven to go to.

  At the thought of never seeing Johnny Clay or Mama again, I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t because my head was underwater, held there by a man I didn’t know, and my mind had gone foggy. I wondered what any of it meant—driving or flying or Ty or the WASP or Butch Dawkins writing me songs. What did it matter how many songs he wrote me if this was all it added up to? What did it matter if Émile loved me or didn’t love me or never kissed me again? If it all ended the same for everybody, whether you were Velva Jean Hart or Clementine Roux, then why bother fighting?