A Girl Called Flotsam

by John Tagholm

  ‘Why don’t you read through the letters. You have my permission.’

  ‘I think I would need Elliot to approve it as well.’ Beatrice asked for a coffee and hoped she could bring the evening to a close as soon as possible, but Simon had other ideas.

  ‘Do you think he was Joseph’s father?’

  How she wished she was having this conversation with someone else more sympathetic. ‘When were the letters you read dated?’

  ‘One was 1933 and the other 1937.’

  ‘So before and after the birth of Joseph,’ and then, to herself, noted that Joseph was a Christian name that could be French or German, or even English or American for that matter.

  ‘I thought we might go on to a bar I know not far from here in the Marais.’

  Her reply was immediate and prepared. ‘Would you mind, it’s rather late and I have a lot to do tomorrow.’

  He looked at the large dial on his wrist and showed her its face. ‘It’s ten-fifteen, nine-fifteen in England. You must have a very heavy day tomorrow.’

  ‘OK, I’m just not interested in going to a club.’

  ‘Another time, then?’

  ‘Sure, another time.’ She knew he wouldn’t give up and that she would receive calls at odd times in the coming weeks, but she considered that he might be useful again and that Odile’s letters could be vital for the film. They parted awkwardly, Beatrice not allowing even the most innocuous physical contact. After he’d gone she waited on the Pont St Louis, staring at Notre Dame, lit up like a stately liner. She intended to walk up through the Marais back to the 19th but if this was his intended route to the nightclub she was keen not to bump into him again.

  Twenty minutes later she was underneath the cloistered pavements of the Place des Vosges when he materialised by her side. He had quite clearly been watching her since she left the Île St Louis, although he said differently.

  ‘I thought you’d have to come through the Marais on your way back to your hotel and it’s my luck to run into you again. Come to the club.’

  She tried hard to remember whether she had let slip where she was staying and thought that she may have mentioned the Metro journey to see Elliot, but couldn’t be sure. He put his arm around her and so she stopped.

  ‘I told you why I didn’t want to go to the club. What more can I say? Thank you for your help, but I’ve only known you five minutes and I really am tired.’

  ‘Not too tired to walk all the way up to the nineteenth and I can’t imagine that a girl in television hasn’t had quite a few flings in her time.’

  ‘You’re right in both assumptions, Mr Honeywell, but the former decision should lead you to understand the latter.’ She was angry and walked away from him along the arcade, in and out of the shadows and she heard him shout at her back.

  ‘What’s wrong with you anyway?’

  It was Place de la République before she had recovered her composure and expelled the indignation that had ballooned inside her at his remark. She felt a victim of herself and that made his verbal assault all the more painful and she saw how, in a slightly different scenario, she might have gone to the club with him and it was this thought that made her both sad and then enormously happy to be walking alone along the Canal St Martin. Then she stopped, caught again in the cycle of repeated events, first Jean-Paul and now Simon, both making assumptions about her, that she was available no matter what she was, or who she was.

  She sat on a bench and looked at the dark water of the canal and it was Harry Wesley who came to mind, his face when she had told him she had been at dinner with Jean-Paul the night before. When she met Harry at the British Museum the day after tomorrow, would she be able to talk to him about her experience tonight? She put her head in hands in frustration.

  Back at the hotel she slumped on to her bed and kicked off her shoes. Troumeg, Traugott. The two names blurred into one and re-emerged differently, the words changing position as she had imagined before for a title sequence. But now the names had a different significance and tomorrow she would attempt to find out what, to continue her journey into the life of Joseph Troumeg, or perhaps the life of Joseph Traugott.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  At first she is unable to stand at her mother’s table because the image of her in the same position is too real, the succession too soon. In time, though, she begins to work with the tools and the metals that have been left behind and finds that when she does time disappears, mornings come and go, afternoons slip into evenings. She has one intention and as the long summer days unfold she works with purpose and the tools, precious metals and stones became familiar to her fingers and sometimes, when she has been working for many hours, her fingers appear to be her mother’s, the nails dirtied and the whorls and patterns ingrained in a way she had once observed at her mother’s side. There is an importance to this self-imposed commission which develops through the days but about which she remains silent. Routines begin to repeat themselves and her daughter now watches, her face no higher than the bench so that, in the fullness of time, her fingers too will replace those of her mother and grandmother. When she is certain that she is producing something of merit, she shows her husband who holds the ring to the light before fitting it on to her finger. The gold has been reworked from an earlier ring, part of the black bag that the sailor had given in the old town and she has now mounted one of a pair of crimson stones which she has rounded and polished. It is only when she sees the ring on her own hand that she decides to make a copy. It will not be exactly the same, but it would be a companion, which, as soon as she thinks of it, seems exactly appropriate and becomes precisely her aim.

  And the summer arrives and departs. One evening, with the smell of fish cooking on the open fire in the courtyard, she shows both rings to her husband and their child. The flames intensify the colours and when she turns the rings against the light the stones seem to absorb the intense reds and yellows.

  The next morning, before sunrise, she climbs the hill and repeats the final journey in the life of her mother to the spot where the bodies had been buried, difficult now to see except for a faint outline where the ground had been disturbed. She is still frightened of the disease and has left the child behind. At the far end of the grave, where she remembers her mother being placed, she stands and looks down at the soil, summoning her resolve. She begins to dig into the surface with a wooden spade, scooping the loosened top soil away with her hands. After a while she has created a hole deep enough to reach half way to her elbow. She rises from her knees and brushes the dust from her clothes. She takes one of the rings from the black bag and holds it to her lips, kissing the smooth stone before placing it at the bottom of the hole and covering it with spoil which she presses down with the palm of her hand, slowly and gently. Rising to her feet again she takes out the other ring and once again kisses it, placing it on the fourth finger of her right hand. As she had done before, she goes down to the sea and swims and cleans herself. Afterwards, she walks back to the town in the face of the rising sun which warms her skin and prepares her for what she has to do next.

  She sees them from a distance, father and child, playing in front of the house, chasing, turning, touching and her daughter’s laughter carries up the hill. They stop and he lifts her in the air and she embraces his neck and they wheel on the spot. He sets her down and she puts her hand in his and they walk down to the port, the swing of their arms in time with their steps. When they have disappeared, she sits on the slope and looks out to the sea. How could she ask them to return to the grey town, to leave behind a life that was natural to them both? She looks back to where her mother’s body lies under the dry earth. At first her death had made her want to flee, to return to her roots but now she knows she could not dislocate the life of her child, nor that of her husband. And, for now at least, she could not leave her mother behind. She rubs the stone of the ring and once again kisses its smoothness.

  They sit together and both husband and daughter see that she is wearing the ring a
nd she tells them what she has done and why. Does she detect in her daughter’s young eyes that she knows the true reason for having done this, so that in the future, when they leave, she will always remain connected? There is a force within her that seems beyond logic, moving against her like a current, but for now it is wiser to remain. Fate, she knows, will decide the future, as it had before. She looks at her daughter, sitting on her father’s lap, who returns a shadow of a smile and she sees that she has been right and the young girl knows what is in her heart.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  It took Beatrice less than an hour and a half to find Sebastian Traugott.

  Joseph Troumeg had been born Joseph Leval, Odile having changed her surname to disguise its Jewishness. Later, Joseph Leval, adopting the habits of his mother, had in turn changed his name to Joseph Troumeg, an anagram of ‘gourmet’. But was it more than that, a further reflection of Joseph’s playfulness with his past, the name so similar to Traugott, the surname of the man who may or may not have been his father? Beatrice had gone to sleep thinking about this equation and had woken with a continued determination to resolve it. She opened the blinds in her bedroom to reveal the glimpse of the canal between the buildings, called for coffee, set up her computer and trawled the internet for Sebastian Traugott and was immediately swamped by thousands of German connections. She had to be cleverer and tried ‘Traugott 1935’ and ‘Traugott Paris’ without luck and then, after her second cup of coffee and with the remains of a croissant scattered on the small table, decided on an even more logical approach than the computer and called the German Embassy in Paris. She was hoping that German nationals might have been registered with the embassy during that period. She spoke to an efficient information officer who promised to call her back. At ten-thirty the phone rang and the answer took her by surprise, and she froze halfway between standing and sitting.

  ‘Sebastian Traugott was a cultural attaché at the embassy here between 1932 and 1938 when he returned to Germany. He was killed in 1940.’

  There were so many questions that Beatrice wanted to ask that at first her response was silence. ‘Where was he from?’ she asked finally and learned that he has been born in Freiberg, close to the French border in southern Germany. Her mind ran quickly now, registering the improbability of a German official having a relationship with a Jewish women during that time and so she asked if there were any other Sebastian Traugotts listed. No, this was the only one, she was told. ‘Do you have a photo of this Sebastian Traugott?’ she asked, staring out of the window. The answer was yes and five minutes later she received an email on her computer with an attachment which, when she opened it, bridged almost eighty years and answered one question conclusively. Sebastian Traugott was a handsome man in the style of his times, his dark hair slicked down, his tie neat in his collar, his eyes looking off to the left and his face unmistakeably that of the young Joseph Troumeg. Beatrice could scarcely believe the similarity and the shock of seeing the black and white photograph and recognising the familiar features made tears gather behind her eyes to drop slowly on to the keyboard. She was stunned into inaction, unsure of what to do next and she absentmindedly ran her fingers over the wet keys.

  One big question had been answered but many others gathered and hustled just behind, clamouring for attention. The first to emerge had an immediate answer. At some point Joseph must have realised, or been told, of his mother’s relationship with a German. This must have been forbidden on so many levels that Beatrice found it hard to measure the consequences. Well, one was clear, for it produced a fissure between mother and child which would last a lifetime. And yet, at some future stage, Joseph changed his surname to a version close to that of his father. Why? The hotel room seem to press in on her and she left to walk along the canal and smell the tang of the water and imagine the same scene during the war, when the city was full of fear and hatred. The recollection was black and white, the canal a working waterway and she stopped and saw a sequence from her film, as she had done in Marseille, then and now moving from monochrome to colour, the face of Sebastian Traugott, the father, becoming that of Joseph Troumeg, the son. Lurking behind these images, though, loomed a more sinister face which happened to be beautiful as well as shocking, that of a woman with a shaved head and bewildered and frightened eyes, the face of Odile Levy, now Leval.

  When Beatrice returned to the hotel room, she found the copy of Marguerite’s photograph of Odile and first with her hand and then with a simple mask of white paper, tried to picture what she would look like without hair. She traced the line of where she imagined the dome of her head would be and then with nail scissors cut out the shape, a white skull cap. And then, for some unaccountable reason, she threw the scissors across the room, stood up and swore, ugly words that came out of her unbidden. She picked up the cushions on her bed and hurled them at the wall, snatched her key and left the room and slammed the door. She returned to the canal, walking quickly and without thought, moving northwards. Ahead of her a train rattled noisily over a rusting bridge and people strolled arm in arm and she broke into a run, as close to the side of the canal as she dared, getting faster, not really seeing what was around her, faster still, her feet slapping on the grey cobbles, beyond the moored boats until, exhausted, she stopped in the shade of a concrete flyover. She was bent over panting, her hands on her knees and she stayed like this until her breathing became normal and her heart stopped beating against her chest. When she raised her head she was surrounded by grafitti, vivid crimsons and electric blues, the face and body of woman outlined in black, thrusting her breasts towards the canal, pushing her body, in skin-tight shorts, to one side so that the shape of her was unmistakeably revealed. The image seemed to shout at her, but she could hear nothing and she covered her ears with her hands and tucked her elbows to the sides of her face.

  Slowly she was aware of the sound of cars above her and she walked back into the sunlight and realised that she had come as far as the Périférique circling Paris in an endless loop. With this roaring soundtrack she slumped on to a bench and shut her eyes and waited until she understood what had happened. She heard a pair of ducks land noisily in front of her and a siren arrive and disappear above and then a dog bark on the opposite bank. It was several minutes, or was it more, before she opened her eyes and then stood and began the long walk back. By now she knew she wasn’t angry on behalf of Odile Levy, nor in sympathy for her son, Joseph Levy, born Leval, probably of Sebastian Traugott and now named Joseph Troumeg but Beatrice Emily Palmenter whose history remained unexplored because no one had the remotest interest in the events that had produced her, to search and consider the forces that had shaped who she was, who was interested enough to give up something of themselves for her. She felt alone and knew that, if she had no one to blame but herself, she had no one to tell her this either.

  Back in the hotel room, Odile with her white cap looked back at her and Beatrice resumed where she’d left off, lightly shading in the paper dome to produce a crude image of the woman with her head shaved. She then photographed it from various angles, adjusting the overlay, until she had a passable digital image. She then packed carefully, folding her few clothes into her small bag, laying her computer on top. She washed her face and applied some make up, brushed her hair and when she was ready to leave, sat on the bed and called the Imperial War Museum in London and via the press office and an archivist of the photographic collection, arranged a viewing for later in the day. She shut the door, paid and walked to the Gare du Nord and boarded Eurostar for London, a day sooner than she had planned. She slept most of the journey, an easy untroubled sleep and having gained an hour along the way, had a good part of the afternoon left when she walked under the great guns fronting the Museum. She had not only regained her composure but donned the professional cloak which had brought her so much success. She did so with a different purpose, however and one which she had only just begun to perceive. She had been quite specific to the picture archivist and although there were seve
ral hundred images waiting for her to view, the task was manageable. She had the detachment for what lay ahead, at least she thought so when she started. She placed her camera on the bench to the right of the computer and began to look at the black and white photographs, every so often picking up the camera and holding it near the screen. Not all the women were naked, but many were, stripped of their dignity, hopelessly vulnerable. The faces that surrounded them, French men and women, were ugly and taunting, some pointing, some in the act of slapping or punching. In one, a woman sat wearing a beautifully tailored jacket and skirt, looking down at the ground, her head perfectly shaved. In another, a woman naked from the waist, twisted away from the grasping, pinching hands that chased her, a line of blood dripping from her nose. After a while Beatrice could see that the women were a symbol of collaboration, that they carried the blame for everyone who had not resisted the occupiers, or who had gone as far as to help. Of these there were many, although it was the women they chose to blame, humiliate and kill, to distract attention from themselves. Wounding the prostitute, or the woman who had slept with the enemy to feed her children, was better than beating yourself. The more she looked at the women, pushed, pulled, pointed at, spat at, manhandled and shamed, the more she realised the haunting fact that most of the women with their heads shaved were beautiful.

  It was late in the afternoon before Beatrice stumbled on the picture she wanted but, in many ways, hoped she’d never find. At first she almost missed it, because the figure was not the main focus of the photograph which showed a woman in the process of having her head shaved, with two women who had gone through the process standing to one side. One of them brought Beatrice’s eyes to a standstill. There she was, the long face, the high forehead, the tall woman who was unmistakeably Odile Leval. Beatrice had no need even to compare the image with the one on the camera although when she did it was clear they were one and the same person. There was no shame in Odile’s face and she was looking beyond the shaving that was taking place in front of her, not so much in defiance but as though her mind was elsewhere, or that she was searching for someone in the distance. The look touched a chord in Beatrice and for the second time that day she wept at the sheer sadness of the picture of the woman who she felt she could reach out across time and touch.